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Nine Years Ago I Thought Mitt Romney Was A Dick

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Mainly because he was taking shots at my hero, President Barack Obama, during the 2012 election. Now I’m telling myself realizing that Romney wasn’t actually so bad, and that this country is much worse off because there are no more classic, candidly-spoken “classic” Republicans. Center-stage-wise, all we have in this regard is Nikki Haley and Chris Christie.

Payne Laments Long, Butt-Punishing Films

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Alexander Payne at Middleburg Film Festival on 10.21: “You want your movie to be as short as possible. There are too many damn long movies these days…if your movie’s three and a half hours at least let it be the shortest possible version of a three half hour movie…like The Godfather Part II [and] The Seven Samurai are super tight three and a half hour movies and they go by like that. So there’s no ipso facto judgment about length.”

I’m not saying the director of The Holdovers was specifically refererring to Killers of the Flower Moon when he said the above, but is there anyone on the planet earth who didn’t immediately presume that he was referring to Martin Scorsese‘s elephantine murder saga?

The truth is that relatively few three-hour-plus movies are regarded as painfully slow. Most of them work on their own sprawling terms.

I wouldn’t have said a word if Michael Mann‘s 170-minute Heat had been 10 minutes longer…hell, a half-hour longer! There’s a certain endless splendor to Sidney Lumet‘s Prince Of The City, which runs 167 minutes….it could have easily run 15 or 20 minutes more withut diminishment. The 227-minute Lawrence of Arabia is pure butter, pure icing, pure symphony…it never lags or drags, Ditto the 197-minute Spartacus.

Some three-hour-plus films, however, contain drop-out moments — plot triggers that encourage a sudden lack of interest or prompt viewers to space out or otherwise disengage.

For me, the drop-out moment in Killers of the Flower Moon begins at roughly the half-hour mark…I’m sorry but when I realized I was more or less stuck with Leonardo DiCaprio‘s dumb-as-a-fencepost Ernest Burkhart and Robert DeNiro‘s drawling, tedious and endlessly repetitive King Hale…when I realized I would be hanging with these fucking dolts for the next three hours I fell into an increasingly deep depression. Not during the first viewing, mind (I was moderately engaged or at least respectful of the film when I saw it in Cannes) but when I saw it for a second time last Thursday night.

Part One of Gone With The Wind is fairly riveting — the drop-out moment comes when Scarlett O’Hara marries Frank Kennedy, or roughly 35 minutes into Part Two. It’s all downhill from then on.

The Barry Lyndon drop-out moment comes when Ryan O’Neal blows pipe smoke into the face of Marisa Berenson. It marks the beginning of Lyndon‘s “dead zone,” which I explained in detail nearly seven years ago.

The drop-out moment in the 212-minute Ben-Hur comes after Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) vanquishes the evil Messala (Stephen Boyd) in the climactic chariot race. Ben-Hur is basically a betrayal-and-revenge movie, and once Judah’s revenge has been achieved there is no more movie. Nobody cares about Judah’s sisters being cleansed of leprosy or Judah being purged of his anger and bitterness by the blood of the crucified Jesus Christ. It doesn’t fucking matter!…nobody cares!…the post-chariot-race stuff is pure denouement.

Put another way, life is hard no matter how you slice it, and, to quote John Lennon, “there aren’t no Jesus gonna come down from the sky.”

Clueless Midwestern Yokel Fashion Statement

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That white-ish, elephant-collar jacket adorned with primitive paintings of divebombing bluebirds and whatnot…that plus the douchey whitewall buzzcut, the troglodyte stubble ‘stache and nascent beard, the open-collar white shirt and those godawful brown pants.

Life is nothing if not style choices, and when you wear a light brown double–breasted suit jacket for an SNL hosting gig, you’ve pretty much confirmed that you’ll never, ever “get it.” Amiable aw-shucks personality aside, your future is mapped out, bro…you’ve pretty much cancelled your own ticket.

Posted on 9.7.16:

Oscar Poker: “Fair Play,” “The Burial”, Chappell-IDF-Hamas

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“Jeff and Sasha delve into two newish streaming films — Chloe Domont‘s Fair Play (Netflix), a story about a financial-realm power couple (Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich) whose relationship falls apart when the woman is promoted over the dude, and Maggie Betz‘s The Burial (Amazon), a fact-based story about a scrappy lawyer, Willie Gary (Jamie Foxx), taking on a powerful corporation. It costars Tommy Lee Jones.

We also kick up the Killers of the Flower Moon dust, and particularly explore the potential Oscar fate of Lily Gladstone.

Here’s the link.

Chappelle Has Stepped In It

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If you have compassionate feelings about the current plight of God knows how many tens of thousands of Gaza residents and the likelihood that many of them will be killed when Israeli troops finally invade…if you recognize that the number of hardcore Hamas cadres who murdered 1400 Jews on 10.7 and who absolutely have to pay the price for this genocide…when you allow that these fanatics almost certainly represent a modest fraction of the total Gaza population…there has to be some way of saying “don’t slaughter innocent Gaza residents” without sounding like an anti-Semite…there has to be some way to do this.

This is apparently what Dave Chappelle tried to say in Boston the other night, but he’s being attacked for anti-Semitism regardless.

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Destroy All Haters

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I have never forgotten the pain that I felt 15 years ago when an ex-girlfriend told me I wasn’t as slim as I had been a year or two earlier, and that I needed to drop around 10 pounds.

Nothing hurts like this. It’s agony — it cripples your very soul. Which is why there can be no forgiving Emily Blunt for what she said 11 years ago about that fat waitress. Apologies are meaningless at this stage. She needs to be cancelled permanently. Kidding.