I feel so depleted after last night’s Producer’s Guild nightmare. I tried to stay awake for the climactic announcement and failed. I was dreading the likelihood of EEAAO taking the Daryl F. Zanuck award. and I was asking myself, ‘Do I really want to watch the watch the live-death moment?”. Two minutes later I was out like a light. I woke up at 5:45 am, turned on the iPhone…thud.

This is when you get to see who some people really are deep down. The EEAAO fans who are gloating or cackling and taking pleasure in my expressions of sorrow.

From Peter Glenvile‘s Becket (’64)…King Henry II (Peter O’Toole) is bare-chested and kneeling in a rear, cellar-like space of Canterbury cathedral, right next to the tomb of Thomas Becket (Richard Burton). He looks over at four leather-hooded Saxon fellows, who are getting ready to whip the King as part of a ceremony of penance:

HENRY: “Look at them lurking there…gloating.”

Where would the movie realm be right now if Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert had never dreamt and maneuvered their way into a certain A24 orbit that has strangely transformed itself into a Millennial consciousness brand that is darkening many more brows than just my own?

Hard to say but boy, my heart is not only bleeding right now but staining the wood floors and certainly the carpets. And for some reason a lyric from a mediocre Jimmy Webb song is filling my head…”I don’t think that I can take it ‘cause it took so long to bake it, and we’ll never have that recipe again.” The bad guys are winning!

There are few events presently unfolding on the global stage that deliver more in the way of moral clarity than Ukrainians fighting tooth and nail against the rank evil of Vladimir Putin. If you can’t or won’t put aside peripheral matters and grasp which side is with the angels in this conflict, I don’t know what to say to you. Except that a certain moral fiber or awareness is clearly missing deep down — that your sense of humanity is minus an essential component.

Either you understand that Everything Everywhere All At Once represents not just an aesthetic pestilence but a terrible forced banality…a film that’s a good deal less about verse-jumping and spiritual dreamscapes and a lot more about pulp Marvelism and the relentless drumbeat of identity politics (Asian + queer), or you don’t. Or you do get this and you don’t care, in which case we’re all fucked anyway.

We all understand, sadly, that a certain either-or mindset, born of a certain malevolent social-media logic, has settled into award-season consciousness.

Last year at this time a fundamental shift of allegiance among the Academy middle-grounders happened…a moment when it became clear that a weird 1920s western about repressed queer desire and a refusal to bathe and an anthrax murder scenario just couldn’t be the Best Picture standard bearer, and that a generally decent but underwhelming family fable about singing, destiny and deafness had to replace it…my God, what a totally myopic, solitary confinement prison–cell choice that was!

But it happened, sadly, and what were we left with at the end? Nothing…nothing but a feeling of being surrounded and enveloped by mediocre minds (i.e., the degraded identity-politics principles that flooded the delta when SAG became SAG-AFTRA).

And this year and right now, we’re back in that same dank prison cell with a choice between a multiversian IRS audit-meets-queer politics Marvel film that has stymied and suffocated people of taste and perspective in every corner of the globe and certainly among the storied 45-plus community…a choice between a film by the makers of a metaphysical fart movie called Swiss Army Man and a smart, crafty, populist-pleasure machine that saved the film industry’s ass (in the view of no less a personage than Steven Spielberg).

God help us but the SAG-AFTRA philistines have apparently decided to choose, for the fifth time since the 2017 Oscar ceremony, identity politics symbolism over other considerations…again. Moonlight, Parasite, Nomadland, CODA, EEAAO.

Talk about The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant or The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Or, you know, anything using the word bitter.

…holding their Best Picture Oscars and taking a stab at earnest and eloquent, which will almost certainly come out impromptu and awkward. Maybe they’ll mention Swiss Army Man and slip in a reference to flatulence?

Five and 1/3 years ago I passed along a brief personal tale about sexual molestation. It happened in New Orleans when I was 19 and blind drunk. Suffice to say that I woke up in a French Quarter hotel room with a heavy-set 50 year-old dude in New Orleans. That’s as far as I’m going to go, detail-wise, but I’m 99% sure nothing happened. And if it did, I don’t want to think about it.

Yesterday I was having lunch with an ex-girlfriend from 40-odd years ago and her husband, plus a friend of theirs. The three of them were roaring along with conversation at a fairly high speed, and I was trying to jump into the chatter like a 1930s hobo hopping on a freight train, but they were going too fast. Every so often I’d hear a word or a phrase and would try to jump on…”hey, hold on, guys, slow down…I’ve got an observational nugget here! Wait, wait!…okay.”

I began to lose track of time but there I continued to be, running alongside the freight train and starting to feel winded and then a tad despairing.

So eventually I figured, “What the hell…the next observational nugget will have to be a conversation stopper…I won’t even look to precisely add to the topic of the moment…I’ll just drop something into the conversation like a hand grenade.” Hence the drunken New Orleans thing.

All to say I might not have inserted this sordid tale if I could’ve figured some way to jump on the train, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t fast or fleet-of-mind enough.

There’s an anarchist that lives inside me. He takes orders from the rationalist and the humanist, but he has a voice and sometimes gives me great ideas for column topics and is very much the free-thinker, but there are some stories that should probably not be shared during a nice lunch.

Last posted on 12.21.19: “Sometime in the late winter or early spring of ’83 I flew from New York to Los Angeles for a job interview, and during the visit I went out to Universal studios to poke around. I wound up climbing a chain-link fence and walking onto a sound stage where, lo and behold, Scarface was being shot. The huge set contained a portion of Tony Montana‘s Miami mansion — the upstairs office, the red-carpeted foyer and staircase, a portion of the white-painted exterior with royal palm trees outside.

Hanging on a wall near the base of the staircase was a fairly large (at least six or seven feet tall) oil portrait of Al Pacino‘s Tony and Michelle Pfeiffer‘s Elvira Hancock. I’m no authority on oil portraits, but it looked like an absolutely first-rate effort. Someone had taken the time to make it look like a serious artist (one who knew from color and shadow and subtle gradations) had worked on it. In the film the painting is seen for maybe 1.5 seconds, if that.

I’ve long wondered what happened to this grand portrait. Did Brian DePalma or [the late] producer Marty Bregman make off with it? Online you can buy cheap knockoff versions with bullet holes, but the real thing was quite impressive.

The real-deal, full-size portrait presented a somewhat darker image that the one you see here.

Obviously Peter Weir‘s direction, Earl W. Wallace and William Kelley‘s screenplay and John Seale‘s cinematography, coupled with Lucas Haas and Harrison Ford‘s performances. But the most active ingredient is Maurice Jarre‘s score. That’s what really siezes and brings you in.

Jarre, who passed in 2009 at age 84, was unquestionably pantheon-level. I know that Doctor Zhivago is generally regarded as sappy and that we’re not allowed to praise it too strongly, but Jarre’s music for David lean’s 1965 film melts me down every time I hear. Not to mention his scores for Lawrence of Arabia, The Train (’64), Grand Prix (’66), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), The Year of Living Dangerously (’82 w/ Vangelis), Witness (’85), The Mosquito Coast (’86), Fatal Attraction (’87), Gorillas in the Mist (’88), Dead Poets Society (’89), and Ghost (’90)

For me at least.

From Brett Easton Ellis’s recollection of seeing The Shining for the very first time on 5.23.80, at the Westwood Village: