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Torpedo Slams Into Hull

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Kamala Harris! What a wounded showhorse of a vice-president, not to mention the target of a devastating profile that will almost certainly make things worse all around. The N.Y. Times reporter, Astead W. Herndon, is a sharp-minded dude of color who doesn’t miss a trick, and he clearly has issues with her.

Five words: Herndon’s portrait is not flattering.

Kamala is basically seen as mostly a recipient of good luck and fortunate timing — a beneficiary of racial-political largesse, a diversity hire with nothing especially dynamic under the hood, a blah and brittle vp with no defining visionary issue apart from the usual incremental wonky talking points, and no personal charisma or rhetorical pizazz. A soporific, eyes-glazed-over spouter of “word salads.” A testy, defensive tactician whom no one outside of one key demographic and identity group — black females — really likes.

Plus she’s an absolutely dreadful public speaker with a weak, whiny voice and no sense of musical rhythm in her phrasings. Plus she’s quite short (5’2”) — the word is actually elfin. Plus there’s no ignoring the fact that aside from that one moment when she attacked Joe Biden over busing, Kamala never began to connect as a presidential candidate in ‘19 and early ‘20. Plus she sheds senior staffers left and right. Plus there’s that cackle. Plus she reportedly devotes huge blocks of time to her hair. (Okay, that’s a cheap shot.)

She’s basically a drip-drip, slow-motion, can’t-sell-it implosion who terrifies many democrats and is obviously an easy target for righties.

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Great Acrimonious Interview

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Most question-and-answer transcripts are sufficient but nothing to write home about. Some are underwhelming; most are just okay.

David Marchese’s N.Y. Times interview with Pigeon Tunnel director Errol Morris is a very rare bird. An interviewer and an interview subject who fence with each other and throw darts and suspicion and actually argue with each other….it’s terrific! Please read it.

Morris’s doc is a richly visual, beautifully scored, endlessly fascinating film about the late and great John le Carre…an enveloping and rather dazzling exploration of an amazing fellow…”open” but dodgy at times.

Is Evans’ Sharp, Sandpaper Voice Enough?

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The name of the 50 year-old screenwriter of Pain Hustlers (Netflix, 10.27) is Wells Tower — now that is a fucking name you can write home about!

Not so much Pain Hustlers itself. Based on a true story, it’s about “a high school dropout named Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) who lands a job with a failing pharmaceutical company in Central Florida, where she soon finds herself at the center of a criminal conspiracy. Costarring Chris Evans, Andy García, Catherine O’Hara, Jay Duplass, Brian d’Arcy James, Chloe Coleman.

Mind Boggled, Mouth Hanging Open

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I know nothing, of course, but dead babies on gurneys? Some of them beheaded? This happened? How could anyone do this to children en masse?

“Two Dimensional and Complaint-Driven”

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“When I think about what makes a good story — a tale that traces out a plot and a path from A to B — the answers don’t always square with the parts of movies I love best.

“I’m not super hot on Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, but the scenes in which Lenny conducts are magnificent and powerful, like being thrown into the middle of a sonic storm. The rest — the tortured-genius, bad-wife-guy intrigue — sometimes felt like homework. I often found myself thinking, ‘Let’s get back to the music.'” — from “When Did the Plot Become the Only Way to Judge a Movie?,” 10.8 N.Y. Times piece by Beatrice Loayza.

A recent Maestro conversation:

HE: “Emma Kiely’s Collider review of Maestro is totally in the tank for Carey Mulligan and that’s fine, but Kiely doesn’t even flirt with the possibility that Maestro might feel like weak tea to some. What is this review side-stepping? What about Cooper’s film that Kiely is being less than fully truthful about?”

Brooklyn Guy: “It’s the story of a marriage and a life between two people, one of whom just happens to be, in the view of many, one of the best composers and conductors of all time. [But the film suggests that] what Bernstein was doing with his life is just a coincidence. And yet without that, why should we even care about the marriage?

“In Michael Mann‘s Ferrari, the central couple (heterosexual) are business partners and that’s a crucial difference. There’s an actual conflict there. In Maestro the argument is over infidelity and drug use…nothing else. Bernstein’s politics? Nonexistent. Hers too. So it’s two-dimensional and complaint-driven, and yet it still manages to subscribe to a ‘great man’ theory of history.

HE: “Since Telluride I’ve been hearing that Mulligan’s big explosion-of-rage scene (while the Thanksgiving Day floats are moving past the apartment windows) is the keeper.”

Brooklyn Guy: “That’s about right.’

HE: “‘Non-existent’ politics alludes to the absence of the Tom Wolfe-chronicled Black Panther party (“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s“).

Brooklyn Guy: “A filmmaker could go either way with that, either try to make an ass of Bernstein and yuck it up at Black people eating canapés that Tom Wolfe thought they were better suited to serve (do you think it’s a coincidence that Wolfe dressed like a plantation owner?) or they could give the Bernstein’s credit for making an effort but they go neither way.”

HE: “Wolfe’s Gatsby-esque garb was a throwback to the 1920s…he presented himself as half of a wisacre and half of a genteel Southern lad from Richmond.”

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Hamas Horrors Will Intensify

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Posted on 10.8.23: “Surely the Palestinian militants — principally Hamas in Gaza but also Hezbollah to the north — understand that launching an all-out war with Israel will end in rockets and ruin. Backed by the U.S., Bibi is about to unload Israel’s full military might big-time. The Hamas attacks, in short, will prove a suicide move, so why trigger their own self-destruction? Furious and illogical rage. Rage so infernal and absolute that it makes no sense.”

Where’s The Lesbian Stuff?

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HE: I like the synthesized organ but where’s the lesbian stuff?
Friendo: It’s gotta be there. That’s the whole point of the story. I never saw the musical.
HE: I just watched the trailer, and there’s no pop-out lesbo material. Holding of hands, endearing looks…that’s about it.
Friendo: You can’t just blunder into assumptions. You have to ask someone who knows.
HE: My eyes are not assumptions.

Directed by Blitz Bazawule and based on the 2005 stage musical of the same name, The Color Purple opens on 12.25.

“Addressing Bisexuality, Gender Non Conformance and Performativity through The Color Purple by Alice Walker,” by Chantrell M. Lewis.

“Though in the musical the sexual relationship between Shug and Celie is slightly censored, the connection is still very evident in the approach taken by the actresses. Text from the novel indicates that the two women make love.”

HE rimshot: My general visual impression is that a lot of the cinematography seems rather under-lighted and shadowed.

Didn’t Mind Friedkin’s Final Film

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…and I was surprised to discover that I immediately felt a certain compassion for Keifer Sutherland‘s Lieutenant Commander Phillip Queeg. He seemed far less certain of himself than Humphrey Bogart‘s 1954 version, who behaves in a far more high-strung and looney-toonish way at times.

Right away I said to myself, “Sutherland is not playing a bad guy…he’s playing a focused Navy lifer who’s afraid of losing face by way of slipping on a banana peel.”

And I really liked Tom Riley‘s performance as Lieutenant Willis Keith — a far more interesting performance (wittier, twitchier, faster on his feet) than the one given by Robert Francis in the Edward Dmytryk original.

I felt constantly repelled by those clunky, thick-soled black shiny shoes that all the Navy guys wear in this film. Jesus, they look awful.