An excellent dealing scene (John Travolta and Eric Stoltz are a great team) but the dialogue between 2:45 and 2:56 is, like, way out of bounds according to 2021 standards. Even by Quentin Tarantino standards. Flirting with the realm of Joe Rogan’s Planet of the Apes story. The early ’90s were the early ’90s.

Nobody’s watched very much, ongoing Covid pall, no Golden Globes, delayed Critics Choice awards, no sense of box-office momentum, no sense of in-person screenings and in-person conversations, “after a while the Zoom stuff gets really old,” the crashing and burning of Kristen Stewart, the pro-Lady Gaga mafia, etc.

Anne Thompson #1: “Nobody likes Spencer, let’s be honest…critics liked it but the guilds don’t like it, it’s an art film and an acquired taste.”

Anne Thompson #2: “Steven Spielberg and West Side Story are fragile, at best.”

Anne Thompson #3: “You could say Lady Gaga is the [Best Actress] front-runner, but I refuse to believe that. In interviews she tries to convince you that she’s giving you the real Gaga, but she’s totally fake.”

Not too long ago the NAACP Image Award guys nominated Awkwafina for an “Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance,” partly for her doing a Black-speak thing. In formal professorial terms, Awkwafina’s crime is/was appropriating or making fun of African American Vernacular English, or AAVE**.

After being slapped around by humorless wokester scolds (particular Women of Color Unite founder Cheryl Bedford) for using a Blaccent for comic effect, Awkwafine has basically said ‘y’all can go fuck yourselves, and Twitter can blow me.”

Awkwafina: “Well, I’ll see you in a few years, Twitter — per my therapist. To my fans, thank you for continuing to love and support someone who wishes they could be a better person for you. I apologize if I ever fell short, in anything I did. You’re in my heart always.

“[But] I am retiring from the ingrown toenail that is Twitter. Not retiring from anything else, even if I wanted to, and I didn’t drunkenly hit someone with a shoehorn and now escaping as a fugitive. Also am available on all other socials that don’t tell you to kill yourself!”

Twitter is a sewer.

** formerly known as Ebonics

…with people who pronounce Oregon as “Awrriginn.” It’s pronounced “OHRuhgone.” How could anyone possibly look at the spelling of that state and think “oh, yeah, sure…Awrriginn.” You’d have to be a bit of a cracker to say it that way.

[Posted on 11.22.18] When I watch Cary Grant in North by Northwest I’m always aware this was his crowning big-screen moment of the ’50s, his last great role and the last film in which he could make a case for looking late 40ish and perhaps a suitable sexual partner for Eva Marie Saint (he was 54 when Alfred Hitchcock shot NXNW in ’58 — she was 34), and after this he was more and more the silver fox and starting to go gently downhill with grace and elegance (nobody believed he was an appropriate romantic match for Audrey Hepburn in Charade) but heading there regardless, and of course destined to retire by the mid ’60s. So North by Northwest was really the last shining moment of his career…the last VistaVision moment when everything was truly in place.

Hollywood Elsewhere is hereby requesting all motivated Photoshop enthusiasts to try and construct a movie poster for the re-christened version of Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Drive My Car, henceforth to be known as “Duuude, Drive My Car!”

The idea is to mimic or otherwise re-use the basic poster art concept of Danny Leiner‘s Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000) but nudging aside images of Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott in favor of Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tōko Miura and Masaki Okada.

The lead paragraph on the Dude, Where’s My Car? Wikipedia page says that “the film’s title became a minor pop culture saying, and was commonly reworked in various pop cultural contexts during the 2000s.” Indeed!

The basic idea is to make Justin Chang and the rest of the Drive My Car cabal seethe with anger.

[Thanks to David Edelstein for the inspiration.]

I’m thinking of something a name-brand director and actor said during a discussion before press and WGA members when he was promoting a certain 2005 film.

He mentioned having recently stood before an infant girl in a crib, a baby who was bright-eyed and beaming and glowing with excitement over the joy of being alive, and this guy was feeling almost heartbroken knowing what she’ll almost certainly go through when she gets into her tweens and teens, the inevitable hurt, the possible encounters with cruelty or callousness…emotional stuff that will almost inevitably leave bruises.

I had the same thought today. I suppressed it right away, telling myself “why dwell on potential negatives? Focus on the joyful and push your sad thoughts aside.” But that director’s thought was in my head for a few seconds. The infant girl he spoke of is now 17 or 18, and probably doing okay or maybe great. But who knows? Life is fraught with peril, not a bowl of cherries, etc.

Just after reading Owen Gleiberman‘s review of TikTok, Boom,” Sasha Stone‘s message about the TikTok vs. Twitter vs. Facebook dynamic popped up.

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As posted in this space on 2.2.22 (“CNN Schlongola Mishegoss“):