Only in New York City can you negotiate the price of a large Good & Plenty. “$3.50,” the newsstand guy said. “They charged me $3.00 last week!…right here!”, I indignantly replied. Newsstand guy: “S’allright.” HE: “What?” Newsstand guy: “Three is good.”

“And so here we find ourselves staring into the diarrhea splatter toilet bowl of modern entertainment for the last time in 2022.”

Nice location scouting on someone’s part. Unless they somehow erased the apes and tapirs from the original 2001 footage and replaced them with dolls and little girls. Either way, excellent work on Greta Gerwig‘s part.

“You’re a dilletante, a womanizer, unstable, theatrical, neurotic…”

I’m presuming this post won’t last long (attorneys will be swooping down) but given that millions of Avatar 2 viewers are watching this Oppenheimer teaser today, I don’t see what’s so ignoble about posting it here. The cat is out of the bag….let it run free.

Of all the Oppenheimer stars and costars, the only one I object to is Benny Safdie. Hollywood Elsewhere believes that performances by Benny Safdie need to be stopped, almost as much as EEAAO‘s path to Oscar glory needs to be stopped.

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Emily Blunt as Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves (aka Paul Newman‘sd role in Fat Man and Little Boy), Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, Rami Malek as Mystery Man #1, Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence, Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush. Not to mention Kenneth Branagh, Jason Clarke, Josh Peck Gary Oldman (as Harry S. Truman), Alex Wolff, Tony Goldwyn and Casey Affleck.

The bottom line, thank God, is that woke-minded or woke-angled content has proven time and again to be a commercial non-starter. Industry realists are facing the fact that the sacralizing of race, gender and sexuality isn’t a great business model, and that Joe and Jane Popcorn don’t give a toss either way.

The unfortunate aspect is that proponents of advancing #MeToo consciousness and the relentless insertion of DEI and Vito Russo quotas into everything remain convinced that the moral-social goal counter-balances (and perhaps even outweighs) the financial. They believe they’re serving God’s revolutionary agenda, and if you know anything about human nature you know that it’s very difficult to convince moral zealots that they’re on a fool’s errand.

Translation: Just as Hollywood’s John Wayne faction (anti-pinko patriotism) and the enforcement of hiring blacklists persisted throughout the 1950s, the current woke plague will probably continue into the mid 2020s. Even this rudimentary assessment will probably seem needlessly complex to Joe and Jane Popcorn. HE recognizes that J & J generally prefer to define and quantify Hollywood issues with short primitive sentences. I get it.

Herewith is a 12.15.22 press release sent out on behalf of GLAAD, and it’s basically a complaint about how too many in the industry are failing to pass GLAAD’s Vito Russo Test on LGBTQ representation. Here it is verbatim:

GLAAD 10TH ANNUAL STUDIO RESPONSIBILITY INDEX: PERCENTAGE OF LGBTQ-INCLUSIVE FILMS DROPS, AS DOES RACIAL DIVERSITY AND SCREEN TIME

This report found a transgender character in major studio film for the first time in five years, though there was a decrease in percentage of LGBTQ characters of color, LGBTQ women, and zero LGBTQ characters living with disabilities or HIV

All seven studios receive “Insufficient,” “Poor,” or “Failing” grades as GLAAD includes new evaluation of public advocacy on LGBTQ issues, employee resources, and political giving from studios and parent companies.

Only nine films released in 2021 by major studios passed GLAAD’s Vito Russo Test on LGBTQ representation.

Los Angeles, CA – Thursday, December 15, 2022 — GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization, today released its tenth annual Studio Responsibility Index, a study that maps the quantity, quality, and diversity of LGBTQ characters in films released by the seven film studio distributors that had the highest theatrical grosses from films released in the 2021 calendar year (January 1, 2021 – December 31, 2021) as reported by the box office database Box Office Mojo. These studios are Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, United Artists Releasing, Universal Pictures, The Walt Disney Studios and Warner Bros.

For the full report, visit www.glaad.org/sri.

The same John Sturges western, 62 years old now and presumably somewhat darker because it’s been remastered for 4K. That’s all that 4K does since the naked eye can’t usually detect strong differences between 4K (3840 × 2160 pixel resolution) and 1080p. It brings in deeper shadows and whatnot. So all you’re left with is a darker image. I own a “good enough”, presumably less dark Bluray version, and that’s more than satisfactory.

Directed, written and produced by Zach Braff, A Good Person (UA Releasing, 3.24) seems to be about feelings, grief recovery, virtue-signalling…all that good stuff.

It’s the saga of a mousey young woman named Allison (Florence Pugh) struggling to recover from fatal-car-accident trauma and the heavy guilt that goes with that. Allison survived but a young POC male, apparently the son of Morgan Freeman, bought the farm. Allison is apparently part of a large extended family that is partly BIPOC, partly white-ass.

The copy line on the poster, however, is fatal: “Sometimes we find hope where we least expect it.”

Every time I watch Barry Lyndon‘s fist fight scene, my respect for the film and especially director Stanley Kubrick plummets slightly. The combatants, of course, are the quick and agile Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) and the brawny, red-bearded Corporal Toole (the late Pat Roach), but Kubrick’s instincts as a fight choreographer were atrocious.

Where did Kubrick-the-perfectionist get the idea that the fight would be even half-interesting if O’Neal ducked every wild air-punch thrown by Roach? Roach seems to have been told to fight like a drunken buffoon — to fight like the stupidest, most uncoordinated bare-knuckled boxer in English history and thereby miss O’Neal by several inches each and every time. If Roach had only managed to land a single jaw-blow…if only he’d managed to slug O’Neal once or twice in the chest or the rib cage. But no.