The best part of this announcement about the firearm suicide of Brian Laundrie, the likely killer of Gabby Petito, is a tacked-on PSA announcement. It says “if you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, you are not alone…individuals seeking assistance can contact these agencies,” etc. Someone, the statement implies, who is struggling because he killed his girlfriend and feels badly about it?

“The common factor in all of these examples is the very obvious attempt to undermine and reverse the very traits that made these characters so compelling in the first place…pessimism and passivity, bitterness and resentment, despair and defeatism…all of these characters have been twisted and warped into obscene parodies of themselves, tarnishing not just who they are now but who they once were.” — The Critical Drinker, posted on 11.23.21.

I caught Oliver Stone‘s JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass (Showtime app, currently streaming) a week and a half ago. The reason I’ve waited is due (and I’m sorry to say this) to a very slight sense of disappointment.

Most of the film is fascinating, and I have no argument with any of the “what if?” speculations. Nor do I doubt that Jack Kennedy died as a result of some kind of conspiracy. But one of the most bothersome aspects of the whole alleged conspiracy thing isn’t addressed. Not really.

I was expecting that the 118-minute doc would address the fact that the best visual record of JFK’s murder — the 8mm Abraham Zapruder film — doesn’t show a back-of-the-head blowout, which is what all the conspiracy theorists been telling us for years.

Nor does it explain how, when and by whom the Zapruder film was allegedly altered. Nor does it consider the viewpoint of Life magazine editor Richard Stolley, who saw the raw Zapruder film in Dallas before anyone had a chance to fuck with it.

“It’s not just the Parkland doctors who saw the gaping hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull,” a Stone colleague told me last summer. “It’s also in the declassified files of the HSCA; there are also just as many witnesses [who saw the same] during the Bethesda autopsy.

“That is what the film focuses on — the declassified files made possible by the Assassination Records Review Board. Which the mainstream media ignored.”

Here’s how I put it last July: “I’ve been all in on the JFK assassination particulars for decades. But I’m skeptical about the occipital head wound thing. I’m reluctant to accept that so many people could’ve worked so hard to alter the head wound and the Zapruder footage of same, and yet none had a single tearful deathbed confession moment…not one?

HE comment: I’ve watched many, many interview videos with those Parkland doctors, particularly around the time of the 50th anniversary (i.e., 2013), and not a single interviewer or moderator followed up with an obvious follow-up question, to wit:

“Nobody’s challenging the accuracy of your first-hand observations,” they should have been asked, “but how do you explain the bizarre lack of ANY visual evidence in the Zapruder and Nix films…why is visual evidence that shows a rear-of-the-head blow-out…why is this supposed evidence completely missing in the Zapruder and Nix films? How do you explain this?”

If only Ahmaud Arbery had gone to a pedicurist a day or two before he was killed by those vigilant neighborhood defenders…

Early in episode #1 of Peter Jackson‘s epic-length Get Back doc (Disney+, 11.25), we see the Beatles starting to settle into rehearsals at Twickenham Studios.

After initial hellos and small talk, a rough version of John Lennon‘s “Don’t Let Me Down” is being fiddled and fumbled with and sung partly off-key.

The camera soon captures a creepy looking Hare Krishna guy sitting against a nearby wall — shaved head, dour expression, staring at the boys with dead eyes. One look and you’re thinking “Jesus, is that Charles Manson‘s younger brother? Is he on meds?” Hare Krishna guys have always creeped me out.

Anyway the first laugh arrives a few seconds later when Lennon quips “who’s that little old man?” — his first line in A Hard Day’s Night. George explains that the grim-faced baldie is a friend. His name is Shyamsunder Das,

This is why I’ve always loved Lennon. His irreverence is so sparkling and tireless. “Who’s that little old man?” is his way of saying “who’s that somber-faced wanker with the Indian clothing and cheap sneakers?

Second impression: All through it Yoko Ono just sits there next to John, doing nothing, a black hole…doesn’t she understand that during a rehearsal you have to either be playing and singing and contributing in some way or else you’re just sucking up energy?

Third impression: 20 minutes into episode #1 and it feels fascinating, intimate, chill. And at the same time very out-takey, very fly-on-the-wall, very this-and-that. Definitely a lack of narrative tension, and yet it’s an agreeable hang…enjoying it, settling in, interesting vibes, lots of cigarette smoking (George!). Paul smokes a cigar.

When I was 13 or 14 my mother told me I’d experienced a traumatic birth. I thought little of this at the time, but I’ve since considered the possibility that it may have had something to do with my personality as I got older and came into myself.

The chief obstetrician who was scheduled to manage the birth was late for some reason, so the nurses told my mother to sit up and thereby delay the natural birth process. When the doctor finally arrived it was difficult to get me out. They had to use forceps or a suction device or something. When I finally emerged I looked all mangled up, or so the legend goes. When my father first saw me, he put his hands to his face and said “oh, no!”

During my first 18 months my mother overfed me and turned me into a fat (bordering on obese) baby. So first I was a freaked-out baby, and then an ugly baby, and then a Jabba baby. But I finally slimmed down and turned out okay, looks-wise.

Anyway a child psychologist warned my mom that the traumatic birth may have affected me emotionally and psychologically. He also said she should keep the traumatic birth story under wraps. I don’t have any memory of my birth, of course, and I never felt maladjusted or wounded as a child. I was highly energetic and creative and rambunctious, but that seemed par for the course. I developed low-self-esteem issues, but that was normal for a child of an alcoholic. One way or another, through accident or design, parents always manage to fuck their kids up — that’s the bottom line.

Then again most kids tend to be resilient. And if you have the locomotive gene, things tend to work out. I turned out just fine. 49 and I’m still throwing opinions around, looking to stir things up, nourishing a lust for life, wearing Italian lace-ups and high-thread-count T-shirts, riding the rumblehog, about to visit the new granddaughter, etc.

Beckerjustice.com: “Psychologists believe children who had difficult births are more likely to be angry, aggressive and anxious compared to children who had easy births.”

Russian lookalikes for Margot Robbie (Anastasia Prichinina) and Scarlett Johansson (Ekaterina Shumskaya). I’m imagining commercial possibilities.

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Give Adam McKay‘s Don’t Look Up a chance. I wasn’t Scott Mantz-ing when I called it “a crazy-ass Covid and climate-change comic allegory…a ballsy Strangelove-like satire that feels like an extended, gargantuan, improv-y, effects-laden SNL super-skit about massive self-delusion & self-destruction…really out there, righteously wackazoid, hits the mark a few times. As broad apocalyptic satires go, you certainly can’t say it doesn’t swing for the fences.”

Sunset at Calamigos Ranch — Latigo Canyon Road (near Kanan Dume Rd.) in deep Malibu — snapped a couple of hours ago by Tatiana.

A handicapper friend assures me that Penelope Cruz, star of Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers — a film that is 15 times better than House of Gucci, 10 times better than Spencer and far more emotionally rewarding than Being The Ricardos — is almost certainly good for a Best Actress nomination.

I hope so. I would certainly think so. I realize Cruz might not win for reasons having nothing to do with quality of delivery. But she needs to be nominated, at least.

I’ve seen the Almodovar twice and I know Cruz’s performance is the shit this year. She’s the absolute queen of her category. No other lead female performance comes close to plucking the emotional chords that she owns the patent on. She’s given the best female performance of the year. Don’t debate it, no question, put it to bed.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has Penelope in 2nd place as we speak. Feinberg Frontrunners: Kristen Stewart (Spencer); Penélope Cruz (Parallel Mothers); Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos); Lady Gaga (House of Gucci) and Olivia Colman (The Lost Daughter).

I realize that in the myopic and strangely calculating award-season culture that we live in that some people are insisting otherwise…that Penelope is in the rear somewhere. They’re saying that Nicole Kidman (Ricardos) or Kristen Stewart (Spencer) or Lady Gaga (Gucci) are somehow better or at least more likely to win, partly because they’re backed by some heavy-hitter agencies and expensive campaigns.

Which is why I suspect that the best Cruz can expect is a Best Actress nomination. Because Oscar races are not so much about merit as muscle and power and primal audience longings and identifications. If it were my call I would give Cruz the Oscar now but she at least needs to become one of the five…c’mon.

I know that Pedro’s film doesn’t open until 12.24 but the big critics groups will begin voting soon. Somehow or some way the award-season heat has to start building in Cruz’s favor. I hope she gets there — her performances ‘is obviously much better than Kidman’s, Gaga’s and KStew’s — but she might not make it. I can feel it — she’s just not in the conversation the way the others are.

Repeating: Cruz’s Parallel performance is somewhere between 5 and 10 and 15 times better than all the other performances put together. It’s one of the finest efforts of her career, and yet if you talk to certain people her name is barely in the conversation. (David Poland actually believes that Licorice Pizza’s Alana Haim is one of the top three contenders.) As we speak Cruz is regarded as a peripheral player, and she’s not — she’s the top.

Big-city residents will be able to catch the first commercial showings of House of Gucci tomorrow night; the moderately satisfying Ridley Scott film will open everywhere on Wednesday, 11.24 — one day before Thanksgiving.

For those who missed or didn’t bother to read my 185-word review, posted on 11.10.21:

Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci (UA Releasing, 11.24) is a cool, muted, decently made docudrama about how the Gucci family business gradually went downhill in the ’80s and ’90s, and how the 1995 murder of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) by killers hired by Maurizo’s ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), seemed to signify this decline.

The problem for me was one of expectation. Goaded by the trailers and that Patrizia Reggiani-slash-Lady Gaga money quote — “I don’t consider myself to be a particularly ethical person, but I am fair” — I was expecting Gaga to deliver a ruthless, high-camp, carniverous dragonlady — a new version of Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest.

Alas, despite what Team Variety and the fawning Twitter whores are saying, that’s not what this movie is. It’s not out to make Reggiani some kind of fang-toothed pit viper. It’s actually about trying to portray her in a half-sympathetic light. And so House of Gucci is basically about how an admittedly ambitious woman reacts when she’s scorned and bruised and cast aside.