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This is several weeks late, but there’s a reason I decided against watching One Perfect Shot, a six-episode HBO Max series hosted by Ava DuVernay.

The director-friendly doc focuses on ambitious, well-executed shots in six films, shots that the producers believe are worthy of special praise. They’re from Jon Chu‘s Crazy Rich Asians (’18), Michael Mann‘s Heat (’95), Patty Jenkins‘ Wonder Woman (’17), Malcolm Lee‘s Girls Trip (’17), Kasi Lemmons‘ Harriet (’19) and Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7 (’20).

The problem, obviously, is that only two of these warrant in-depth study — Heat and Chicago 7.

The other four were chosen for the usual inclusive woke-Hollywood reasons…tributing black artists who are pals with DuVernay, saluting #MeToo progressivism. Girls Trip was mildly enjoyable fun but forget any notions of it containing a perfect shot. Everyone regards Harriet as a negligible thing — second-rate, historically inauthentic, flat-out terrible in some respects. Wonder Woman is a decent enough superhero flick and Jenkins did a fine job for the most part (it’s way better than Wonder Woman 1984), but it’s not my idea of top-tier and certainly isn’t even close to Heat‘s level. And Crazy Rich Asians is appalling…a synthetic wealth-porn romcom.

It’s actually an insult to Mann and Sorkin that their films (especially Mann’s) have been lumped in with the riff-raff.

A message from Vice Chair @RepLizCheney about Thursday’s hearing. pic.twitter.com/SsnOOEnyVq

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 14, 2022

Tom Hanks to N.Y. Times interviewer David Marchese:

Another 2022 taboo: No major-league black actor (someone as big now as Denzel Washington was in ‘93) would agree to play a homophobe today. Too much negative signaling as everyone knows about real-life homophobia among blacks (just ask Pete Buttigieg) and therefore guaranteed antagonism from gay community. Am I wrong?

Despite dicey gossip stating that Amber Heard‘s Mera appears in several scenes in the forthcoming Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (Warner Bros., 3.23), JustJared is reporting that she’s been cut from the film and that another actress will replace her.

I’ll believe it when I hear it from the trades, but that’s what’s being reported.

5:25 pm update:

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Last weekend’s Elvis screening didn’t happen at the actual Graceland, but at The Guest House at Graceland, a super-sized, Vegas-styled hotel resort-slash-tourist trap located a quarter-mile north of Graceland.

Roughly 40 junketeers plus some TikTok influencers were taken around Memphis and shown Beale Street, the original Sun Records studio, etc. But what about the Lorraine Motel?

After the screening three Presley women — Priscilla, Lisa Marie (former beard wife for Michael Jackson) + Riley Keough — took the stage along with Baz Luhrmann, Austin Butler, Tom Hanks and others and showered the film with praise.

What were they gonna do…say it was not bad or pretty good or an in-and-outer? They’re following the script because the film enhances the Elvis brand…that’s it.

Elvis opens on 6.24. The big question is, how will Millennials and Zoomers react? Because Elvis isn’t as much fun as Bohemian Rhapsody — not with Hanks’ performance as Col. Tom Parker bringing everyone down.

@alecia_davis Priscilla & Lisa Marie Presley on the new Baz Luhrmann biopic, ELVIS. #priscillapresley #lisamarie #austinbutler #tomhanks #elvis #elvismovie ♬ original sound – Alecia Davis

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Let it never be said that Baltimore-based Daily Beast contributor Kyndall Cunningham is any kind of woke pronoun dilletante. She is in fact totally hardcore, and not just in her sentences but her headlines.

The latest example is a Cunningham/Beast story about poor, crazy Ezra Miller, who’s been flaming out for a while now. Here’s the headline:

My first response was “yo…brave Kyndall!…set the standards, blaze a trail!” Would the N.Y. Times, the Washington Post or the Daily Guardian run such a headline? Perhaps not, but this shouldn’t be Kyndall’s concern. For she appears to be the first woke soldier over the wire, our very own Sgt. Alvin York…clenched teeth, fixed bayonet….Ezra Miller is not only non-binary, but he may contain multitudes…he’s a community of souls within a single body…aarrggghhh!

The last time HE considered Cunningham’s history-altering use of woke gender pronouns in a news story was just over two months ago (4.8.22). In an article called “Pronoun Monsters on Maple Street,” I went into cardiac arrest over a Cunningham sentence written for a Daily Beast piece about Miller’s shenanigans.

Here’s the sentence:

HE reaction: I know this sounds abrupt but all of a sudden the pronoun thing — a re-ordering of the English language due to political activism on the part of one-half of 1% of the population, and driven by an attempt to show respect and establish boundaries that will benefit the ambiguous gender-fluid community — strikes me as fundamentally INSANE, or at least in this context.

Say it loud and proud: We cannot and must not use they/them to refer to an individual and a group of people within a single sentence.

Let’s not forget how Cunningham hit the roof last March when Power of the Dog director Jane Campion praised Venus and Serena Williams in the wrong way at the Spirit Awards. Nobody outside of Cunningham’s deranged woke enclave gave a shit, but she sure flipped out!

Posted today (Tuesday, 6.14) by the Washington Post’s Max Boot. I’m wondering if this has been Attorney General Merrick Garland‘s chickenshit plan all along — to do nothing and let the Jan. 6 committee reiterate the obvious case and then step in after it finishes.

Amber Heard won’t or can’t turn the page, and so the pain pageant continues. She wants sympathy and understanding, of course, but is this also a plea to Hollywood casting directors? I’m honestly more interested in seeing Heard in a feature now than I ever was before. She never made an impression as an actress (I didn’t even watch Aquaman), but now she has. Has becoming an ignominious figure upped her thespian game?

Streets on 8.9.22:

Older white guys have to sit there and suck it in and take it. And that’s all. No lamenting, no despairing, no “hey, this isn’t fair.” If you whine you lose your man rights. It’s that simple.

Seasoned commentator David Gergen to PBS Newshour‘s Judy Woodruff on 5.13.22 [during the Cannes Film Festival]: “[The Presidency] requires a keen sense of judgment. And you…I just turned 80. And I can just…I can tell you, you lose your…you lose a step. You’re not as sharp. You are more forgetful. You’re not quite sure where you’re going. You can’t…that’s too old to be in the presidency. I think people like Biden and Trump ought to both step back and leave open the door to younger people.”

Naturally, sucker that I am, I’m thinking about it. $35 — streets on 8.9.22.