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The performances we tend to remember and celebrate are always about recognizable feelings shaped by people who know from timing, emphasis, discipline…the art of emotional channeling. But different folks come at this in different ways. Among the current Best Supporting Actress nominees, four are similar and one is slightly different.

Fences‘ Viola Davis, Moonlight‘s Naomie Harris, Lion‘s Nicole Kidman and Manchester By The Sea‘s Michelle Williams are skilled actresses channelling the emotions of four exceptionally well-written characters. Hidden Figures Octavia Spencer, on the other hand, is a shrewd, spunky, spiritually attuned woman who knows how to shade or accentuate her natural manner and personality just so to bring out the contours of a fresh character.

In other words Davis, Harris, Kidman and Williams “act” to achieve a certain carefully refined end while Spencer is more of a natural presence who’s gifted and skillful enough to have made the right adjustments. The other four are like instruments — Spencer is more of a river or a force.

Octavia Spencer as NASA mathematician Dorothy Vaughan in Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures.

Popular actors and actresses are bringers of dependable vibes. The transition from popularity to stardom is basically about those vibes becoming well known, trusted and embraced en masse. I don’t know exactly when this started to happen with Octavia Spencer, but I know it’s happening right now. She’s become our best friend, our neighbor, a lady with heartstrings, someone you want along for the ride but at the same time a tough cookie. Plus she has the kindest eyes my own have ever beheld.

Just don’t forget the tough cookie part. Something about Spencer says “Sure, I’ll listen and probably hear what you’re saying ’cause I’m a generous empathy type plus you look like a nice fella, but don’t pull any fast ones when my head is turned or I’ll come down on your ass.”

Most of us decided we not only liked the water in Octavia’s well but wanted to keep a few bottles in the fridge after seeing her in Tate Taylor‘s The Help. Spencer won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Manny Jackson, the too-long-taken-for-granted maid. I’ve long presumed that Spencer won because of the shit-pie sequence, but more precisely because she allowed us to fully feel what Minny had gone through with her employer, played by Bryce Dallas Howard.

Kong: Skull Island (Warner Bros., 3.10) opens in three and a half weeks. The junket whores are seeing it this weekend. The idea behind Jordan Vogt-Roberts‘ film seems to be “play up the meta, use a fair amount of humor, revel in the fantasy by over-amping it, we’re making a cartoon,” etc.

The Vietnam War-era story, written by Dan Gilroy and Max Borenstein and based on a story by Gilroy and John Gatins, should be called Apocalypse Kong. Catchier title, says it all, promise of combat fireball action, etc.

A friend asked me for a thought or two about themes and myths that have long buttressed the King Kong legend. My first response was to say that Kong has always been the primal other who cannot and should not be tamed. But the “dark jungle beast with a romantic-sexual obsession” gets mentioned more than anything else.

In the 1933 version King Kong was the hulking muscular beast with strangely human white eyeballs who, along with the natives of Skull Island, was intensely attracted to pretty Anglo-Saxon blondes. One in particular, yes (i.e., Fay Wray), but are you gonna tell me Kong wouldn’t have been equally hot for Jean Harlow or, if he had lived in the 1940s, Lana Turner?

When Kong gently stripped Wray’s dress off and then sniffed his fingers after touching her…well, c’mon. Even I knew what was going on when I first saw King Kong at age eight or nine.

As Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) remarked in the original film, “Yeah, blondes are scarce around here.”

Last November I pointed to parallels between Donald Trump‘s obvious mental instability (aka malignant narcissism) and the plot of Fletcher Knebel‘s “Night of Camp David.” The 1965 novel, which was judged a disappointment soon after release, is about a first-term Senator and soon-to-be vice president who comes to believe that the President has become mentally unhinged and needs to somehow be relieved of his duties.

If — I say “if” — someone were to adapt Knebel’s book into a film (for which the best destination would probably be HBO), it would have to rewritten into something far less rational and measured. Behavior that was understood 50-odd years ago to be that of a “stark raving” madman is regarded today as all too familiar. 

Lying Donald is detached from reality on such a continuing, day-by-day basis that terms like “cuckoo President” or “Oval Office resident two or three cards shy of a full deck” aren’t shocking anymore.  Executive branch insanity has become normalized.

It would be important to adapt Knebel’s novel within 18 months if not sooner because God knows what may happen. Reality is moving a lot faster these days, and everyone is constantly readjusting to new mind-bending behaviors.

From Andrew Sullivan‘s recent New York piece, “The Madness of King Donald”:

“[We have begun] to get a glimpse of what it must be like to live in an autocracy of some kind. Every day in countries unfortunate enough to be ruled by a lone dictator, people are constantly subjected to the Supreme Leader’s presence, in their homes, in their workplaces, as they walk down the street. Big Brother never leaves you alone. His face bears down on you on every flickering screen. He begins to permeate your psyche and soul; he dominates every news cycle and issues pronouncements — each one shocking and destabilizing — round the clock. He delights in constantly provoking and surprising you, so that his monstrous ego can be perennially fed.

From Wikipage: “Stephen Miller (born 1985/1986) is a senior advisor to President Donald Trump. Prior to his current appointment, he was the communications director for then-Alabama senator, Attorney General Jeff Sessions (terrific), as well as press secretary for Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (even better). Miller grew up in a liberal-leaning Jewish family in Santa Monica, California. Though his parents were Democrats, Miller became a conservative after reading Guns, Crime, and Freedom, a book by National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre.”

This radical militant asshat is only two or three years older than Jett.

Joe Scarbororugh: “This is like something out of Star Wars!” In other words, Miller’s “the President will not be questioned” line sounds a bit like something Emperor Palpatine could have said to Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi.

Yeah, I know — I get up later than the rest of the country. Yes, many people in Paris, Berlin, Rome and Prague are either preparing dinner or about to order it right now, and New Yorkers are about to head out to lunch. Californians are always late to the table — we have to accept that. But I just listened to a full version of Cynthia Erivo and John Legend‘s God Only Knows cover, an abridged version of which was performed at last night’s Grammys. Why not, right?

Sidenote: I was eating in the early evening at Kung Pao (Fairfax and Santa Monica), and everybody and I mean everybody (the place was filled) was staring with child-like wonder, fascination and delight at the Grammy telecast. I for one have found the Grammys distasteful going back to the ’80s if not before. Mainly because they’ve always seemed to primarily be about “me, me, me, me, me, me, me and my wardrobe, my hair person, the lighting, the adoration” first and foremost, and the music a distant second if that. Not always but largely.

Last Monday I dropped off four shirts at Eco Friendly Cleaners (127 West Canon Perdido Street, Santa Barbara) with plans to retrieve them a couple of days later. I didn’t get around to it until yesterday, but when I got there at 4:50 pm I discovered they had shuttered 20 minutes earlier. What dry cleaning establishment closes on a Saturday at 4:30 pm? I realized in a flash that I was probably shit out of luck. It’s now 10:50 am, I’m driving back to WeHo at noon or 1 pm, and so far they haven’t responded to my calls and emails begging them to please cut me a break and let me pick up my shirts before heading home.

I called their business line, I wrote them emails, I asked the business owner next door if he knew the Eco proprietors’ last names so I could call them at home…nothing worked.

It’s obviously my fault that I didn’t pick up the shirts before they closed. The Eco Cleaner guys are in no way to to blame — this is on me. But again, who closes on a Saturday at 4:30 pm? And isn’t Eco Cleaners supposed to be a service business? Isn’t it the duty of the good merchant to turn the other cheek and do what he/she can to help the customer? Thank you, Eco Cleaners, for ignoring my pleas. Now I have to shell out at least $60 or $70 bucks to have UPS or Fed Ex pick up the shirts, etc. If I was the owner of Eco Cleaners, I would’ve done the right thing and driven down to the store this morning to help a customer out. But that’s me.

“You never see the real person when you fall for someone; you see a self-flattering illusion, and this is triply true with celebrity crushes. That I ever believed Johnny Depp’s spin is a testament to the tenacity of my inner teenager. So now that he has ticked off the ‘become a parody of yourself’, ‘have an acrimonious divorce’ and ‘blow your cash on stupid shit’ boxes, we can all look forward to the ‘dodgy plastic surgery’ and ‘massively obese’ phases, following in the footsteps of Mickey Rourke, Marlon Brando and many others. Maybe celebrities are just too indulged now, or maybe we know too much about them — which is why I’m increasingly thinking that the safest celebrity to have a crush on is a dead one.” — from Hadley Freeman’s 2.11 Guardian piece about her disengagement from Captain Fatass Over.

From 2.10 Washington Post op-ed piece by Kathleen Parker, titled “Trump’s Two-Year Presidency”: “Good news: In two years, we’ll have a new president. Bad news: If we make it that long.

“My ‘good’ prediction is based on the Law of the Pendulum. Enough Americans, including most independent voters, will be so ready to shed Donald Trump and his little shop of horrors that the 2018 midterm elections are all but certain to be a landslide — no, make that a mudslide — sweep of the House and Senate. If Republicans took both houses in a groundswell of the people’s rejection of Obamacare, Democrats will take them back in a tsunami of protest.

“Once ensconced, it would take a Democratic majority approximately 30 seconds to begin impeachment proceedings selecting from an accumulating pile of lies, overreach and just plain sloppiness. That is, assuming Trump hasn’t already been shown the exit.

“Or that he hasn’t declared martial law (all those anarchists, you know) and effectively silenced dissent. We’re already well on our way to the latter via Trump’s incessant attacks on the media — ‘among the most dishonest human beings on earth’ — and press secretary Sean Spicer’s rabid-chihuahua, daily press briefings. (Note to Sean: Whatever he’s promised you, it’s not worth becoming Melissa McCarthy’s punching bag. But really, don’t stop.)

Posted on 9.17.16: “In the words of John F. Kennedy, I do not shrink from the occasional responsibility of shitting on a teen-angst dramedy — I welcome it. I was frowning and throwing my hands in the air and exhaling and checking my watch less than five minutes in. Okay, Edge became somewhat more tolerable during the last third, which is when neurotic characters in movies of this sort begin to fold and weep as they lay their emotional cards on the table. But God, that first hour. And the cliches! It poked and prodded and put me through long stretches of hell.

“As noted, Edge isn’t all torture and yes, director-writer Kelly Fremon Craig is a cut above in some respects, but with James L. Brooks producing, I wanted a kind of angsty-teen-girl Bottle Rocket. Instead I got a misery flick. Mine, I mean, more than Hailee Stenfeld‘s because of prolonged exposure to the enraged, obnoxious, take-no-prisoners personality of her character, Nadine, whom Craig probably based upon aspects of herself.

“The neurotic, obstinate and nearly friendless Nadine is suffering because (a) she’s an old soul and a secret genius (as was I during my high school years) and her classmates are too shallow to get her. Her father died some years back from a heart attack, and her frizzy-haired mom (Kyra Sedgwick) is ineffectual. On top of which Nadine’s resentment of older smooth-cat brother Darian (Everybody Wants Some‘s Blake Jenner) turns to seething hate when he falls in love with her lifelong best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) and vice versa.

A little more than 11 years ago I wrote a piece about how three or four well-reviewed, high-toned, emotionally engaging films didn’t appear, from my November ’05 perspective, to be on their way to attracting what seemed to me like just commercial desserts.

As it turned out two films that I mentioned — Craig Brewer‘s Hustle & Flow (which ended up making $22 million and change) and Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes ($32 million) — did reasonably okay, or at least enough so that no one called them shortfallers. But they didn’t really connect, or not like they should have. You should’ve been there when Hustle & Flow first played at Sundance — it was huge. And when In Her Shoes played the ’05 Toronto Film Festival…wow.

But everything falls away in the end. Who out there has streamed Hustle & Flow or In Her Shoes over the last decade? Even I haven’t, and I can’t really explain why, not even to myself. Hanson died last September, and whatever happened to Brewer? His last feature was a 2011 Footloose remake. Everything disintegrates, particles exploding into space.

Posted on 11.2.05:
An impassioned, extremely well-made film with a sincere emotional current (i.e., one that actually makes you feel something with an application of professional finesse rather than hokey button-pushing) opens after being acclaimed by critics or film festival audiences or both…and what happens?

The public doesn’t respond with much enthusiasm. The movie opens in third or fourth or fifth place, or it opens okay but not as strongly as it should have, and then it’s dead by the second or third weekend, if not sooner.

From Maureen Dowd’s 2.11 N.Y.Times column, “Trump’s Gold Lining”: “Donald Trump has indeed already made some of America Great Again. Just not the aspects he intended. He has breathed new zest into a wide range of things: feminism, liberalism, student activism, newspapers, cable news, protesters, bartenders, shrinks, Twitter, the A.C.L.U., S.N.L., town halls, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Hannah Arendt, Stephen Colbert, Nordstrom, the Federalist Papers, separation of powers, division of church and state, athletes and coaches taking political stands and Frederick Douglass.

“As Trump blusters about repealing Obamacare, many Americans have come to appreciate the benefits of the law more. Lena Dunham credited the ‘soul-crushing pain and devastation and hopelessness‘ of Trump with helping her get a svelte new figure. Trump may even have pierced the millennial malaise, as we see more millennials showing interest in running for office.

“Every time our daft new president tweets about the ‘failing’ New York Times, our digital subscriptions and stock price jump, driven by readers eager for help negotiating the disorienting Trumpeana Oceana Upside Down dimension rife with gaslighting, trolling, leaking, lying and conflicts.

“Similarly, whenever Trump rants about Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of him and tweets that Saturday Night Live is ‘not funny,’ ‘always a complete hit job’ and ‘really bad television!,’ the show’s ratings go up. They’re now at a 20-year high.