In the wake of something traumatic or extra-ghastly, like what happened last night in Las Vegas, few things give me a greater feeling of relief and even solace than watching Russian car crashes on YouTube. I rarely laugh out loud at comedies, but I’ll laugh my ass off at the rank stupidity and bone-dumb recklessness in these clips. My mantra while doing so: “I could so avoid these situations, I’m so much smarter than these morons, and way more skillful behind the wheel.” Wonderful therapy, shiatsu massage, peace in the valley.

From “The First White President,” an Atlantic essay written by Ta-Nehisi Coates: “To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.

“The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a ‘piece of ass.’ The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (‘When you’re a star, they let you do it’), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House.

“But that is the point of white supremacy — to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.”

Devastating, horrific and indescribably sad, obviously, but not a surprising or even an unfamiliar domestic spectacle. 58 dead and probably climbing. Orlando, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, San Ysidro — last night’s Las Vegas massacre was the latest chapter (installment?) in an ongoing, slowly-unfolding nightmare brought to all Americans by the NRA, the legislators who’ve blocked any and all attempts to restrict the sale of automatic weapons, by gun freaks, by that whole diseased and reprehensible culture.

Fringe nutters like Stephen Paddock are unfortunately part of our American landscape, but how many of last night’s victims would be okay this morning if Paddock didn’t have an easily purchasable automatic arsenal? If he was restricted to single-shot weapons? Mass carnage is what automatic rifles are fundamentally about, and last night’s tragedy — why mince words? — is essentially on the political right, on conservative gun nuts.

Australia saved itself from this pattern of horror after a mass shooting occured in ’96, and here we are 20 years hence, soaked in gore and grief and probably fated to stay that way because of hinterland macho types and their obsessive, twisted need for their totems.

Nobody needs automatic weapons except for sick fucks who might one day use them.

Nicholas Kristof’s N.Y. Times piece spells it out, but we all know the restrictions by heart — universal background checks, prevent loose cannons from buying weapons of any kind, limit gun purchases to any one person over a certain period, etc.

The following is a re-wording of an HE piece posted on 7.26.15 and 3.7.12. I’m inspired to re-post after last night’s screening of a Lolita DCP at the Aero Theatre, as part of a general tribute to former Kubrick producer James B. Harris.:

Back in the early ’90s, a boxy version of Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita was issued on Criterion CAV laser disc. By this I mean a version that was partly presented in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio with occasional 1.66 croppings from time to time.

Dr. Strangelove was also presented this way (1.37/1.66) on an early Columbia-TriStar Home Video DVD, before the 1.85 fascists muscled their way in and started cleavering everything.

Yes, I’m happy that the current Lolita Bluray is cropped at 1.66, but boy, would I love to get hold of a high-def version of that 1992 Criterion laser disc. You think Kubrick didn’t sign off on the boxy Lolita? Of course he did.

Criterion presumably still has access to the original Lolita elements that they created their laser-disc version from. If they were to somehow wangle rights from Warner Home Video and offer a 4K-scanned version of this long-gone version (i.e., varying 1.37 plus 1.66 aspect ratios), I would buy it in a New York minute, and so would a lot of other physical-media freaks, I’m guessing. Or they could offer a streaming version on Filmstruck. Either way it would definitely sell.

I realize that relatively few people out there believe that “boxy is beautiful,” and that an alternating 1.33 and 1.66 version of Lolita means little or nothing to them, but I never bought this disc and never saw it anywhere, not once. And it’s killing me that today’s general fascist mindset (i.e., almost all non-Scope ’50s and ’60s films must conform to the 16 x 9 aspect ratio of high-def screens) makes it all but certain that this version of Lolita will never be exhibited or offered ever again. Unless Criterion changes its mind and makes the effort. I for one would be enormously grateful.

In the spring of ’18 or roughly 7 months hence, Trevor Paglen‘s Orbital Reflector, a 100 foot-long satellite that will have absolutely no purpose other than to inspire people to look up and watch as it passes overhead, will be launched into orbit. Well, not precisely — a condensed package will be launched, and then it will unfold and inflate into its full diamond-like shape at a height of 350 miles. Orbital Reflector will last in orbit for roughly two months, and then will gradually descend and burn up in the atmosphere.

Be honest — when was the last time you laid outside on your back after 10 pm and just watched the night sky for more than a minute or two? I used to do this from time to time in my druggy days. The cosmic altogether would just sink into your system after a while. I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t done this since I stayed in Independence, a little town adjacent to the Sierra Nevada mountains where the air is unpolluted for the most part and the night vistas are always sharp and clear. When was the last time U.S. citizens did this en masse? After Sputnik was launched in 1957? I’ll definitely be watching for Orbital Reflector several times during its 60-day lifespan.

Consider portions of Scott Mendelsohn’s Forbes analysis of how American Made, the Tom Cruise ’80s drug-smuggling drama, performed this weekend with Joe and Jane Popcorn. It made just over $17 million, although it got edged out by Clarabelle, the Killer Clown.

Excerpt #1: American Made, Mendelsohn writes, “had nothing to sell except Tom Cruise in a leading role.” In other words, the movie itself — a lively, better-than-decent, true-life saga of an airline pilot who got rich from hauling Columbian cartel cocaine but also landed in a heap of trouble — isn’t sellable. Why? Because it doesn’t have any brand recognition elements to attract the lowest-common-denominator dumbshits.

What kind of stinking bullshit is that? I’ll tell you what kind it is. The kind of stinking bullshit assumption that studio suits, agents and marketing executives throw at each other 24/7.

By the same token if Cruise were to star in a Michael Mann remake of The Bridge on the River Kwai, these same assholes would say “we have nothing to sell except Cruise in a leading role.” Okay, with a wooden bridge being blown up at the end, they might add, but what is that compared to the kind of eye-popping spectacle delivered by any Batman, Wonder Woman or Black Panther flick? You sickening scuzballs, I would reply — please hold still while I spit in your face.

Excerpt #2: American Made‘s $17 million represents Cruise’s “lowest wide weekend debut since the 12.21.12 debut of Jack Reacher,” which started out with $15 million but finished up with a modest but not bad $80 million. I saw and really admired Jack Reacher, and a lot of people obviously agreed with me. And yet Mendelsohn is describing it in losing terms.

Mendelsohn is also calling this weekend’s $17 million haul Cruise’s “second-lowest wide-release debut” since Jerry Maguire back in December of 1996.” Cameron Crowe‘s sports-agent drama earned $17,084,296 after opening on 12.13.96, but in 2017 terms that comes to $26,446,000 so there goes that fucking analogy. Mendelsohn acknowledges the inflation factor later in the piece, except he claims that $17,084,296 in 1996 dollars equals $34 million today.

Excerpt #3: “The mid-1990’s was a time when a well-liked Tom Cruise movie could leg it to $125 million domestic from a $15 to $20 million debut because the movie business as a whole was much less frontloaded,” Mendelsohn states. “So now instead of legging it to $100 million, a well-received, well-reviewed movie like American Made will be thrilled to crawl to $60m from a $16.5m debut.”

That’s an accurate read. Audiences are much, much dumber and more distracted today. And Cruise’s rep was more stellar and gleaming back then — for the last 17 years he’s carved a rep as the energizer bunny of action films who can never be rich enough, who won’t stop and who refuses to let age slow him down even slightly.

Excerpt #4: American Made is “Cruise’s first starring vehicle since Valkyrie that isn’t a franchise-friendly, sci-fi or hard-action extravaganza.” On top of which it’s “one of Cruise’s lowest-grossing movies in 21 years partially because it’s his first old-school star vehicle in a generation.” Translation: He’s not an energizer bunny this time — “never holds a gun, never runs and if anything spends much of the movie being played and/or in over his head.” The fact that the 55-year-old Cruise is playing a guy in his early to mid 40s with a hot-blonde wife in her early 30s doesn’t seem to cut much ice.

Except #5: So is American Made‘s $17 million opener and projected $60 million total “a disappointment,” Mendelsohn asks, “or is it a validation of Cruise’s star power when Brad Pitt‘s Allied opens with just $12.7 million, Adam Sandler is at Netflix and the likes of Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey and Harrison Ford haven’t had a hit theatrical star vehicle (outside of sequels to their former franchises) in ages?” He seems to agree that $60 million plus whatever it does overseas will be regarded as a modestly successful haul” unless it performs like Oblivion, the second Jack Reacher or The Mummy and only manifests a 2.4 multiplier, which would result in a domestic tally $40 million or thereabouts…bust.

But God, that first statement — “American Made has nothing to sell except Tom Cruise in a leading role” — burns my ass! It’s another reminder that multiplex and big-studio-release-wise, we’re living on a planet of ape-like retards — a mass audience that processes everything like a drooling ADD dumbass and thereby refuses to patronize a film that doesn’t have big, easily recognizable dumbshit elements to sell. It’s the way of the megaplex world today. The cretins are running the asylum.

Apart from his Anchorman character being named Ron Burgundy, there was a reason that Will Ferrell (with the collusion of director Adam McKay) wore a maroon-burgundy suit in that 2004 film. He was explaining that only clueless doofuses wear suits like this. Last night Ryan Gosling wore a maroon-burgundy suit during his opening bit on Saturday Night Live, but with an ironic, double-back-flip, post-Anchorman attitude. He was saying “this used to be the suit of doofuses but now I’m wearing one, so it’s cool now.” But he cancelled that out by wearing the ugliest v-necked sweater ever made or seen in the history of the American textile industry. Beyond-Cosby ugly. Impossible-to-give-away-to-bums ugly. Astonishing.

I’ve never seen William Wellman‘s Wings (’27), and so today’s discovery of this sepia-toned tracking shot was quite the knockout. Notice that each couple is conveying a different situation — the soldier and the well-dressed debutante, the gigolo and the older woman, the lesbian lovers, the cautious couple (younger woman, military guy) involved in a clandestine affair, the bickering couple (woman throwing a drink in man’s face) and finally the flyboys and their champagne. 

After a week of playing on 21 screens and earning $673K, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘s Battle of the Sexes opened yesterday on 1213 screens and upped the tally to $1,773,158, or $907 per screen. Surely some HE readers have had a looksee by now. Please weigh in and say whether you liked it more or less than I did, or whether you were more or less on the same page.

From 9.22 HE review: “During my one-and-only Telluride viewing I never once said to myself ‘this isn’t working’ or ‘why isn’t this better?’ I was engaged in the true story as far as it went. I never felt bored or irked. Okay, perhaps a little let down when I began to realize that it wouldn’t be delivering any big knockout moments and that it was basically an acceptable, competently made sports drama with five or six good scenes. But I was always ‘with’ it. No checking the watch, no bathroom breaks.

“I wasn’t knocked out by Emma Stone‘s performance as tennis great Billie Jean King, but neither was I disappointed. I believed her; she’s fine. Ditto Steve Carell‘s performance as the occasionally clownish, gambling-addicted Bobby Riggs. Honestly? The performance that touched me the most was Austin Stowell‘s as Billie Jean’s husband, Larry, who shows grace and kindness as he realizes that his marriage is on the downslope due to his wife’s emerging sexuality, and that there’s nothing to be done about it.

Right now the iron is hot and strikable for Kate McKinnon, and if she’s smart she’ll snag a dramatic role in a high-end, well-reviewed prestige drama of some kind. That will plant her flag and kick things up to a higher level. If she continues to be the SNL funny lady who makes unsubtle dumbshit movies on the side, she’ll be done in three or four years. She has to make her mark as a serious actress. Last November’s performance of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” told me she has the gravitas.

Director-producer George Englund has died at age 91. The only half-decent film he directed was The Ugly American (’63), which starred Marlon Brando as a naive and somewhat arrogant Ambassador to “Sarkhan” (Thailand crossed with South Vietnam) during a politically tumultuous period. It costarred Eiji Okada, the good-looking guy who played Emmanuelle Riva‘s lover in Hiroshima mon amour and also costarred in Woman in the Dunes.

The Ugly American, which had almost nothing to do plot-wise with Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s 1958 best-seller, is not a great film but a reasonably good one, and it foresaw, of course, the misguided U.S. policies toward resentful Vietnamese patriots that would lead to so much horror and death for so many years.

Englund’s well-written book about Brando, “The Way It’s Never Been Done Before,” was published 13 years ago. It mentions a late-night soiree Englund shared with Brando in 1955, and which concluded with the two of them shooting the shit in a Santa Monica parking lot. Their conversation was interrupted by a cop, who wanted to know if they were up to something randy:

The bottom-line reason why Donald Trump didn’t react with particular haste or try all that hard to get vitally needed supplies to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico is easy to discern. He’s an America-First President, which basically means he’s the President of White American Bumblefuck Nation. He was elected to try and halt or at least slow the multicultural political tide by Making America White Again, and so it follows that when a Caribbean island of Hispanic Americans are struggling to find food and drinking water in the wake of a natural disaster, Trump and his minions are going to drag their feet when it comes to emergency measures. It’s that simple, that horrendous. The man is either a sociopathic racist or…you know, a racist sociopath.

From Paul Krugman‘s 9.29 N.Y. Times column, “Trump’s Deadly Narcissism“: “When Hurricane Maria struck, more than a week ago, it knocked out power to the whole of Puerto Rico, and it will be months before the electricity comes back. Lack of power can be deadly in itself, but what’s even worse is that, thanks largely to the blackout, much of the population still lacks access to drinkable water.

“How many will die because hospitals can’t function, or because of diseases spread by unsafe water? Nobody knows. But the situation is terrible, and time is not on Puerto Rico’s side: The longer this goes on, the worse the humanitarian crisis will get. Surely, then, you’d expect bringing in and distributing aid to be the U.S. government’s top priority. After all, we’re talking about the lives of three and a half million of our fellow citizens — more than the population of Iowa or metro San Diego.

“So have we seen the kind of full-court, all-out relief effort such a catastrophe demands? No.