Against my better judgment I offered to take Jody to an IMAX 3D showing of Avatar: The Way of Water. This evening, I mean. Not at HE’s preferred venue (Loews Lincoln Square, which has a full-sized IMAX screen) but at a cheeseball Cinemark gladiator plex in Milford (fake IMAX, crawling with families).

I suspected that Cinemark would subject viewers to the same 20 to 25 minutes of trailers that AMC does, but I wasn’t sure. So I asked an overweight Millennial ticket-taker (bad complexion, awful tennis-ball haircut) how long the “interminable trailer crap” would run for, and the little wuss became upset at the c-word and walked away. He went over to the manager (male, 40ish, balding) and asked him to deal with me because he felt unsafe speaking to a customer who hates watching trailers and uses mildly vulgar terminology.

I didn’t like the OMTT because I hate overly sensitive Millennials as a rule. All he had to do was spit out the trailer running time — i.e., 25 minutes. Alas, behaving like a man was beyond his ability. We exchanged dirty looks.

After I’d been informed by the manager that the trailer bombardment would indeed run 25 minutes, I walked toward the popcorn counter. Mr. Sensitive Weight Problem came over, pointing and shouting “don’t you ever talk that way to me again! I’ll have you thrown out!”

What? I didn’t vocally reply but I went into a brief theatrical simulation of being scared. “Okay, that’s it…throw him out!”, the fat ticket-taker barked at a security guard.

The guard was older, calmer. “You got a ticket?” I showed him my dinky toilet-paper pass for IMAX theatre #8. “Okay,” he said. “The theatre’s right over there.” But I don’t want to be in the theatre right now, I replied, as I hate watching bombastic trailers. “Okay, but just step away to the side until the fat ticket-taker calms down,” he said.

All right, the guard didn’t actually say “until the fat ticket-taker calms down” but that’s what he meant. I nodded and strolled away.

The bottom line is that Millennials don’t always act like professionals. Their sensitive feelings are what matter the most. Which is why I’m not a fan.

She likes strong, dominant men and you’re too smooth and mushy to qualify. She’s sexier and better looking than you — it would be one thing if you were gym-toned with big broad shoulders to match her large breasts, but you’re not. Plus she’s much more powerful than you (economically, fame-wise) and she’ll soon be punishing you for these shortcomings — trust me. Plus she’ll eventually humiliate you when a more suitable lover comes along. And you’ll never really recover from this. You’ve fucked yourself. If only you’d stayed with Debbie Reynolds…

Born in 1929, legendary TV journalist and probing celebrity interviewer Barbara Walters (aka “Baba Wawa”) has passed at age 93. She bagged so many big-deal, on-camera interviews during her half-century-plus career (many U.S. Presidents, Fidel Castro, Barack Obama, Katharine Hepburn, Monica Lewinsky, Warren Beatty, Vaclav Havel, Boris Yeltsin) that there’s no room to list them all. Not to mention the satirical stamp of Gilda Radner. Not to mention Walters launching of The View in ‘97. Respect for a major influencer & feminist pathfinder.

I’ve only just discovered a YouTube clip of the A&P musical dance sequence that closes Noah Baumbach‘s White Noise. It’s the only portion of the film that really and truly works.

I’ve written about this twice over the preceding two and a half months, but it can’t hurt to re-post. It’s titled “White Noise Finale That Could’ve Been.”

Posted on 10.1.22: “The common consensus is that whatever you may think of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, a dryly farcical ‘80s period drama set in an Ohio college town, the final sequence — an ambitiously choreographed dance sequence featuring shoppers at an A & P supermarket — is the highlight.

“The sequence affirms the film’s basic theme about nearly everyone turning to all kinds of distractions (including food) to avoid contemplating their own mortality.

“Though brilliantly staged, the dance number is undercut by Baumbach’s decision to use it as a closing credits backdrop. Here’s how I put it to a friend:

“The LCD Soundsystem ‘New Body Rhumba’ finale could have been great if Baumbach hadn’t decided to overlay it with closing credits. I almost shouted out loud ‘Oh no!! He’s blowing it!!’

“I’m saying this because once the credits begin we instantly disengage as we tell ourselves okay, the movie’s over so the aisle–dancing is just a colorful bit, a spirit-picker-upper…whatever.’

“If Baumbach hadn’t given us permission to disengage, the dancing could have been wild and mind-blowing in a surreal Luis Bunuel-meets-Pedro Almodovar way. It could have been a mad slash across a wet-paint canvas…a Gene Kelly consumer-orgy crescendo.

“And then it could have segued into a closing credit crawl. Alas…”