99.4% of the time, a woman is a human born with XX chromosomes, a uterus, female sexual organs (i.e., no schlongola), smaller feet and a mellower, more humanistic, less territorial attitude about life.
I’m sorry if that upsets a certain percentage of well-meaning persons out there.
Geraldo Rivera on “The Five”: “Shame on Neil Gorsuch, shame on Amy Comey Barrett, shame on Ryan Kavanaugh” for saying they would uphold Roe in confirmation hearings and then doing the opposite…”they lied.”
I never thought I’d be praising a Rivera opinion voiced on Fox News, but this is one such occasion.
Gerardo’s rant begins around the 3:10 mark:
I know that the general view is that Johnny Depp & attorneys have presented a better case than Amber Heard and counsel, at least as far as public opinion is concerned. But Heard’s testimony today struck me as earnest and compelling.
So who’s partly lying and who’s mostly telling the truth? Watch Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. My presumption is that neither Depp and Heard are as pure as the driven snow.
After being bruised and body–slammed during last night’s show (Tuesday, 5.3) at the Hollywood Bowl, the intrepid Dave Chappelle joked that his assailant was “a trans man.”
Or not. The perpetrator might simply be a maladjusted, garden-variety impulse performer. The world’s full of such fellows.
Nobody knows anything except that (a) Chappelle was definitely assaulted by a dude of color (THR reports that Chappelle referred to his assailant with the “n” word), and that (b) the attacker was subsequently roughed up by either Chappelle’s bodyguards or the HB security guys or both.
I’m not speculating about motive but c’mon, do the math. That or Will Smith’s Oscar slap unleashed something primal in the populace. Or perhaps last night’s altercation was caused by a combination of both.
I’ve been trying to sell my 65-inch Sony UHD 4K TV plus two Bluray players (a Sony 4K domestic plus my prized Oppo that plays only Region 2) + a Marantz AVR mixer + a 4K Apple TV player + a Roku player + wireless headphones + a black wooden cabinet that holds everything.
The whole kit & kaboodle is listed on Facebook Marketplace, Craig’s List and another forum that slips my mind.
Having sold stuff online before and dealt with a few shady types, I’ve learned five lessons. One, when someone offers to buy an item in question without first arranging to drop by and evaluate the merch, he/she is almost certainly full of shit. Two, that goes double for anyone who doesn’t have a Los Angeles-area phone # or won’t share his contact info when requested. Three, when the perspective buyer says he’s not in town but that he’ll send the dough via Zelle…another red flag. Four, when he asks for my street address so he can arrange for his brother (or wife or girlfriend) to pick up the merch, you know he’s a hustler. And five, if he can’t spell or write clearly that’s another “tell.”
Hence this recent exchange:
Anya, Katya and myself are sitting in the spacious, strikingly designed Alaska Airlines lounge at San Francisco Int’l Airport. (It has a Pinkberry.) Our SFO-JFK flight leaves at 10:20 pm; arrival at 7 am.
A visibly shaken and angry Senator Elizabeth Warren just spoke in-front of #SCOTUS. @TheNationalNews pic.twitter.com/KzQ2Z0Lg3b
— Willy Lowry (@willy_lowry) May 3, 2022
If there’s an extra-long wait to speak to an Alaska Airlines rep (i.e., to resolve an issue that can’t be handled online), they give you the option of getting a call-back. And the average wait is three to four hours. But not in the evenings — only during business hours. And so last night I waited to speak to an Alaska rep for two hours and 50 minutes, and was forced to listen to the most horrifying MUZAK for that length of time. And then it sounded as if I was about to speak to someone…”hello?” And then they hung up on me.
18 months before Covid shut down movie theatres I posted one of my melancholy “woe is us” pieces, titled “How Degraded Thou Art.” I have to fly in a few hours so there’s no time to settle in and write a big essay. But right now most of us feel pretty good about Covid fading away (despite Kimmel and Colbert‘s infection) and exhibition gradually coming back to life….right?
But once the old patterns settle in and we all get back to normal, it’ll probably be 2018 all over again…right? Or has something changed?
Some kind of technical glitch prevented comments on this essay in November 2018 so here goes again…
Late November is a good time to catch films in cinemas, of course, but otherwise the megaplex experience is generally a must-to-avoid, or at the very least a touch-and-go thing. Mainstream movies have been declining for many decades, and always because of stupid audiences.
In the early ’50s Manny Fatber wrote an influential essay called “Blame the Audience,” although if you consider what was playing in Manhattan in the late summer of 1953 it’s hard to understand what he was on about.
In 1964, Pauline Kael asked “Are the Movies Going to Pieces?” in The Atlantic Monthly, claiming that “the younger generation’s embrace of crudely made films and the intelligentsia’s fondness for intentionally confusing ones was responsible for Hollywood’s decline.”
On 1.21.72, right in the middle of the grandest, funkiest and most fabled era of auteurist glory, Dick Cavett asked four directors — Robert Altman, Mel Brooks, Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Capra — if Hollywood was dead. He didn’t mean L.A.-centric filmmaking but the big-studio system that reigned from the ’20s through the ’50s. He was also observing that corporations and corporate-think had taken over from old-school moguls like Harry Cohn, Daryl F. Zanuck and Louis B. Mayer.
On 6.23.80 Kael published her famous New Yorker broadside — “Why Are Movies So Bad or, The Numbers” — about the increasing corporate influence upon Hollywood filmmaking culture.
I first began to sense the onset of megaplex theme-park cinema and the general loss of the spiritual in the early ’90s…a general feeling of alienation from the concept of theatres-as-churches and a gradual slide into the swamp.
Friendo (alluding to below quotes) to HE: “Are you happy, Jeff?”
HE to friendo: “One, I’m not a rightie — I’m a fair-minded, center-left moderate. Two, Edroso is mostly right. There’s a lot of cruelty out there amongst righties, but if there EVER was a time in U.S.history to despise the extreme left, it’s RIGHT FUCKING NOW. (When I say “extreme left,” I don’t mean run-of-the-mill feminists, lefties, LGBTQs and whatnot. I mean the crazies, as in George Romero‘s crazies.) Three, Wheeler and Hodgetwins have a point.”
Friendo (alluding to below quotes) to HE: “Like Pete Seeger asked, which side are you on? And as David Mamet said, it’s fuck or walk. Given how much scorched earth Ben Shapiro and company are gleefully plotting, you think their stepping on the necks of the pronoun police is worth the trade off? Because THIS is what’s actually happening.”
HE to friendo: “I’m sorry but the pronoun police could use a little slapping around.”
Paul McCartney‘s tour began our or five days ago in Spokane. He can’t do that Helter Skelter wail like he used to, but whadaya want from the guy? The McCartney cameo in Dunkirk is what got me.
“Bertolucci In The Lap of God,” posted on 11.26.18: The passing of Bernardo Bertolucci…good God. The dying of such a man must be shouted, screamed…Bertolucci is dead! Bernardo Bertolucci of Rome lives no more!
There were five distinct Bertolucci eras or episodes — (1) early, earthy, scruffy (The Grim Reaper, Before The Revolution), (2) Glowing, Sensual, Perverse Perfection (The Conformist, The Spider’s Stratagem, Last Tango in Paris, 1900), (3) The First Stumblings (La Luna, Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man), (4) Return to Glorious Form (The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky) and (5) The Long, Gradual, Modestly Respectable Downfall (Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty, Besieged, The Dreamers, Me and You).
For 90% of his followers, Bertolucci’s lasting glory stems from episodes #2 and #4 — the other three don’t count. If he had only made The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, his world-class reputation would be assured.
Bertolucci talked like a Communist in the ’60s and early ’70s but from the mid ’70s on he loved going first class. He was a delirious sensualist, a colorist, a composer, a wearer of the finest clothing, a pageantist, and always a maestro of tracking shots. He and Vittorio Storaro, hand in hand, joined at the hip…brothers of the softest light and the most magical of colors (particularly amber).
If there’s one term or phrase that sums up Bertolucci’s spiritual or directorial signature, it would be “exquisitely composed decadent luxury.”
Remember that elegant party in 1900 when a huge white horse is led into a living room full of rich swells sipping champagne, and the owner tells everyone that the horse is named Cocaine? That was Bertolucci. He was every element in that scene…the guests, the horse, the cocaine, and certainly the audacity of leading a magnificent four-legged animal into a beautifully decorated living room and saying quite calmly “say hello to my gentle friend…for he is you and you are he and we are all together.”
Bertolucci was an absolute God between the releases of The Conformist, which opened stateside on 10.22.70, and Last Tango in Paris, which opened on 2.7.73. Two and a half years of being the absolute Zeus of filmmakers, and everyone on the planet was bowing down.