Earlier today a N.Y. Times story reported that “after two hours of sometimes tense exchanges in one of the most significant abortion cases in years, [a majority of justices on the Supreme Court] appeared poised to uphold the [Mississippi] state law, which bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.”
I’ve mentioned before that something happened inside me several months ago, back when Jett and Cait‘s daughter, the recently born Sutton, was growing inside Cait. Suddenly the idea of terminating a fetus’s life was no longer an abstraction. I was especially disturbed by the idea of terminating a fetus at 24 weeks, which suddenly seemed wrong on some primal level. The Roe v. Wade law stipulated 24 weeks because that’s the point at which fetuses become viable, yes, but why so long into the pregnancy? Why not 18 or 20 weeks?
The Mississippi law says no abortions after 15 weeks, or a couple of weeks shy of four months. Given reports that many or most women don’t even realize they’re pregnant until the fifth or sixth week, what is so difficult about deciding what to do about a pregnancy within a nine- or ten-week period?
However, the following sentence in the Times story bothered me: “Should Roe be overturned, at least 20 states will immediately or in short order make almost all abortions unlawful, forcing women who can afford it to travel long distances to obtain the procedure.” Why would these 20 states do that? Why not allow pregnant women to terminate pregnancies within the 15-week period?
Social media mavens who’ve seen Peter Jackson‘s Get Back doc have expressed boundless delight over Paul McCartney roughing out a semi-primitive version of “Get Back,” and Michael Lindsay Hogg‘s cameras capturing the moment of creation.
It’s fascinating, yes, but let’s not get too excited because “Get Back” is basically just a rhythmic chugga-chugger about dead fucking nothing. The lyrics are on the level of “Old McDonald had a farm, eeyii-eeyii-yo” — nonsense hokum about returning to your roots and beginnings. This is not on the level of McCartney’s “For No One” or “Eleanor Rigby” or Stephen Sondheim creating “Move On” from Sunday in the Park with George. The clip is cool but calm down.
Oh, it’s just Paul McCartney composing GET BACK out of thin air at 26 years old. He takes a few minutes but then when he hits it, the other Beatles spontaneously start playing, too. Incredible. https://t.co/n0iVjE0TPB
Daily Beast update, posted at 5:22 pm: “The shooter who allegedly killed four students and injured seven, including a teacher, at Michigan’s Oxford High School on Tuesday was previously flagged by administrators for ‘behavior in the classroom that they felt was concerning,’ Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard said Wednesday.
“Authorities have identified the suspect as 15-year-old sophomore Ethan Crumbley. His parents had been brought into the school the morning of the shooting for a face-to-face meeting about their son’s behavior, according to Bouchard. He wouldn’t say what the behavior was, and police weren’t informed about any potential issues prior to the tragic event.”
Previously: Fact #1: Tuesday’s high-school shooting in Michigan is the 28th school shooting of 2021. Repeating: over the last 11 months similar high-school shootings have happened in this country 28 effing times. What does that tell you?
Fact #2: It’s also the 651st incident this year in which at least four people were shot, whether fatally or not, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks mass shootings. What does this tell you?
Likely presumption #1: The assailant was almost certainly motivated by some form of acute angst and probable hatred for the cool kids. Most (all?) high-school shootings are about gun-toting nerds, creeps, loners and outsiders taking revenge upon the popular smoothies who galavant around and bully and/or look down their nose at their social lessers.
Fact #4: Bouchard reportedly said “the suspect’s father bought the gun [last] Friday” and that “the suspect appeared to post images of the gun online days before the shooting.” The father buys the SigSauer, and then the kid uses it to kill his fellow students four days later? What does this tell you, HE readers?
Question #1: So far the media isn’t reporting diddly squat about the kid’s identity — no last name, no social media info, nothing at all. Apart from the fact that he’s a minor, the reason for all the secrecy is what again?
Fact #5: “Undersheriff Michael McCabeacknowledged there were rumors about warning signs and said that they were being investigated. At least one parent told the Associated Press that her son was not in school over fears something could happen. “He was not in school today,” Robin Redding, who has a 12th-grade son, told the Associated Press. “He just said that ‘Ma, I don’t feel comfortable. None of the kids that we go to school with are going today.'”
George Stephanopoulos: “It wasn’t in the script for the trigger to be pulled.” Alec Baldwin: “The trigger wasn’t pulled. I didn’t pull the trigger.” Stephanopoulos: “So you never pulled the trigger?” Baldwin: “No no no. I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger. Never.”
Asked by @GStephanopoulos how a real bullet got on the "Rust" set, Alec Baldwin says: “I have no idea. Someone put a live bullet in a gun. A bullet that wasn’t even supposed to be on the property.”
Seasoned critic, scholar and documentarian Marshall Fine has written an assured and comprehensive take on the streaming takeover of (nearly) all things Hollywood. It’s in a forthcoming issue of Cigar Aficionado (i.e., Brian Cox on the cover). I have two or three quotes in it; Cinetic Media’s John Sloss, Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, Christian Science Monitor critic and LAFCA member Peter Rainer, and five or six others also chime in.
Chris Cuomo may be blind in his loyalty to his older brother, but I can't accept that he would be stupid enough to poke around and make inquiries that his CNN bosses might be uncomfortable about down the road. CNN Cuomo's no dummy -- he knows how it all works, and how everything always comes out in the wash, especially if you're a high-profile media person. So this doesn't make sense. It's probably cover-their-ass corporate performance art.
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At last night’s West Side Story premiere at Lincoln Center, costar Ansel Elgort (who is quite confident and kind of Brando-ish as Tony — don’t listen to the haters) was, no offense, wearing the wrong haircut. With his traditional black tux and tall, slender frame, Elgort needed to look less like Jared Kushner and more like a slightly scruffy street shuffler of some kind….more like a daydreamer who sometimes forgets to visit the barber shop. A family-of-Trump vibe isn’t the right thing to rock in this particular climate.
...was more of a 75% vs. 25% split reaction, but it was tweeted last night in earnest. The gladhanders who love almost everything have their place and function, but their raves about Steven Spielberg's just-premiered, sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated urban musical don't mean much. At the risk of sounding puffed up, Rod Lurie is right -- a single, emotional, very respectful thumbs-up from someone like myself (there are others who share my mixed view of Spielberg's career arc) is worth 15 or 20 jump-up-and-down raves from a community of junket prostitutes. It means something in the same way that an HE pan of a boilerplate Marvel or D.C. film is meaningless.
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21 years ago I sat down with Tony Curtis at the Beverly Glen shopping center, just south of Mulholland Drive. I waved to him above the heads of several customers sitting outside a popular, packed delicatessen. Curtis waved me over and led me to the inside of a less-crowded Starbucks — fewer people, fewer stares.
When he ordered coffee for both of us, the woman at the counter insisted on a freebie. “Really?” he said to her. “Well, thank you so much!”
We talked about everything — politics, drug-dependency (Curtis had difficulties in this area during the ’80s), Burt Lancaster, old Hollywood, his website (tonycurtis.com, a venue for selling his paintings), women, new technologies, etc.
At midpoint I handed Curtis a list of his 120 films and asked him to check those he’s genuinely proud of. He checked a total of 18. He checked Sweet Smell of Success (naturally) but not The Vikings. Some Like It Hot (of course!) but not The Outsider. He checked Houdini. Every film he made after Spartacus in 1960 up until 1968’s The Boston Strangler, he didn’t check. He checked his role as a pair of mafiosos — Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter in 1975’s Lepke and Sam Giancana in the 1986 TV movie Mafia Princess.
Among his notable TV guest appearances, Curtis checked only one — the voice role of ‘Stony Curtis’ in a 1965 episode of The Flintstones.
Dwayne’s answer would have to be “well, if you’re asking me that in the same way you asked Tony Curtis the same question, my answer would have to be zip. Because I’m not genuinely proud of any of my films. I’m glad a lot of them were popular and made money, and I’m certainly glad that I’ve become a hugely successful brand and all. But I’m not a Tony Curtis-level actor, and I never will be.”
Imagine my sitting down with Chris Pratt under similar circumstances. Imagine my handing him a list of the 14 or 15 films he’s starred or played a strong co-lead in over the last, say, 10 years, and asking him to check those he’s genuinely “proud of”.
Pratt’s answer would have to be “well, if you’re asking me that in the same spirit that you asked Tony Curtis and Dwayne Johnson, my answer would have to be that among the films I’ve starred in, I am genuinely proud of nothing. I’m ‘proud’ a lot of my films made money, and I’m certainly glad that I’ve become a hugely successful, bulky-bod, conservative-minded actor with big money and big homes.
“I’m genuinely proud of three films that I played a supporting role in between 2011 and 2013 — Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball, Kathy Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty and Spike Jonze‘s Her — but that’s another subject. The bottom line is that as a movie star I make commercial fast-food movies and that’s all. If I’m the star, you know it’s going to be a throw-away, more or less. You know it, I know it. I’m really sorry I did Passengers, which everyone hated, but the money was good so I took it and ran like a thief.
I’ve just asked a few of these pitchforkers to please post factual evidence that proves Elgort, co-lead of West Side Story, is in fact a predator, a sexual assaulter and/or a pedophile. Because my understanding (and please forgive if there’s something substantial that I’ve missed) is that Elgort isn’t guilty of a damn thing except for having possibly behaved brusquely (i.e., insensitively, heartlessly) with this or that lass.
Consideration #1: The “Gabby” episode — the one that happened in 2014 and blew up on Twitter for three or four days in late June 2020 — is nothing, or at least nothing indictable.
Consideration #2: I don’t think flirtatious texts between a 20something Elgort and this or that teenaged girl are proof of anything.
Ansel and “Gabby’s” relationship happened in New York State in late 2014, when she was old enough (17) to consent. Elgort turned 20 on 3.14.14. He and Gabby were sexual and then Elgort hurt her feelings by ignoring her messages in some kind of passive-aggressive way. That’s all it was. It was nothing. Relationships will occasionally leave bruises. I know what it feels like to be casually dumped or abruptly ignored by a lover, but it happens. Tough shit, life in the big city, etc.
Portions of Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story (20th Century, 12.9) had me in tears. Dude tears, of course — the eyes well up but you don’t go all the way and start sniffling with Kleenex. I’ve been listening to that original 1957 Broadway stage show album all my life, and earlier tonight it all came back and started flooding through me. I tried to tweet my reactions as best I could on the Metro North train back to Wilton. The final 25 or so minutes don’t work as well as they should, but I forgave the film anyway.
I can’t just roam around town on a whim. Because every waking minute I’m on the hunt for power outlets. Because I don’t feel secure unless my iPhone 12, both external batteries and the Macbook Air are fully charged. And finding outlets is a very difficult thing, or so it seemed today along Broadway on the Upper West Side (90s, 80s, 70s). Starbucks cafes used to be my default power-outlet lifeline ten years ago, but it’s literally been years since I’ve visited one in which the outlets weren’t totally covered over. (I get it — they don’t want wifi bums sitting there all day long.) A half hour ago I poked my head into a Starbucks at B’way and 75th…eureka! Six or seven outlets! Happy, blissful…the world isn’t as cold and indifferent as it seemed.
