AP story filed around 4:30 pm Pacific:

“Binx the cat, until recently a resident of a ninth-floor apartment (#904) in the collapsed Champlain Towers in Miami Beach, has been found safe and well.

“Gina Nicole Vlasek, co-founder of The Kitty Campus, posted two days ago (7.8) that a black cat resembling Binx had been found near the rubble.”

Binx’s identity by confirmed the next day by one or both of the owners, Devin and Angela Gonzalez, both of whom had been “seriously injured” by the collapse.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava“: “I’m glad that this small miracle could bring some light into the lives of a grieving family today and could provide a bright spot for our whole community in the midst of this terrible tragedy.”

Tatiana and I are in the process of finding good loving homes for a few kittens. They’re just over six weeks old. Naturally we’re requiring a “re-homing” fee — you have to use that term in order to avoid the wrath of the Craig’s List fuzz.

Over the last two or three days a few people have dropped by to inspect the kittens before buying, and it’s all been good. Today a young hetero couple came over. Somewhere between their mid and late 20s, I guessed. Possibly a bit younger. Nice people, good natured, intelligent, etc.

But here’s the thing: When they arrived it was fairly warm outside, mid 80s with lots of glaring sunlight. And yet the young woman (short, a bit chubby-ish) was wearing a heavy black headcap (made of dense yarn) and a heavy-ish hoodie garment plus a sweater, leotard tights and athletic shoes — gear that would have worked for a nice cool fall day.

Except it’s July in Los Angeles. It wasn’t “Death Valley hot”, but if God had added less than five degrees to the thermometer you could’ve fried an egg on the sidewalk.

I didn’t say anything, of course — they were good people. But deep down I was thinking “seriously?” Who wears a heavy yarn headcap in this kind of heat?

Variety‘s Matt Donnelly: During a Cannes Film Festival press conference earlier today, Stillwater star Matt Damon said that his Oklahoma-based, vowel-swallowing character, Bill Baker, “absolutely would’ve supported Trump.”

Damon and Stillwater director Tom McCarthy “road-tripped through Oklahoma prior to shooting, where they were invited into the break rooms and backyard barbecues of the real men who inspired the character.

“These guys don’t apologize for who they are,” Damon said. “They’re in the oil business, of course he [would have] voted for Trump. [But] these people were wonderful to us, they really helped us. It was eye-opening for me.”

“They all have goatees, the sunglasses. They’re not six-pack ab guys, but they’re strong. You go to their barbecues and a guitar comes out and they start singing church songs.”

HE comment: Damon is portraying these Oklahoma fellows in fairly benign terms — authentic, earnest, no apologies for who and what they are. His generous impressions are more or less based on these guys being “wonderful” in helping Damon and McCarthy learn what they’re really about.

But what middle-American Average Joe wouldn’t be generously forthcoming if a famous actor wanted to know what made he and his friends tick? Supporting Donald Trump is not some idle preference. Anyone failing (or refusing) to understand that Trump is a malicious, anti-Democratic sociopath and criminal con man is living in a rabbit hole of denial, and is therefore not, by any fair or sensible standard, a fundamentally decent person. They are basically admitting to being delusional cult followers.

As much as I despise the idea of paying money to see Black Widow, the seemingly reprehensible Marvel newbie from director Cate Shortland and the evil, cap-wearing Kevin Feige, I’m determined to experience the big, full-blast whomping bullshit effect by catching it on a large IMAX screen. I’ll be submitting sometime later this afternoon, probably at the AMC Century City.

I know I’m going to HATE it, but I have to do this. For years I’ve hated most things (85% to 90%) Marvel. Oddly, in a strange way, I can’t wait to get my seethe on: “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering Marvel poison; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

Stephen Dorff to The Independent‘s Adam White on 7.5:

LMFAOOOOOOOOOOO pic.twitter.com/ftBeLCVM76

— Nariman△⃒⃘ (@slytherinus) July 9, 2021

HE to Jordan Ruimy: “I’m loving the wild reactions to Paul Verhoeven‘s Benedetta, and especially Kyle Buchanan‘s reference to a Jesus Christ figurine used as a sexual tool. Man to man, Jordan, and no beating around the bush: a small sculpture of Christ is used as a dildo…right? Please tell me this is true.”

Ruimy to HE: “Yes, sir. Carved to penis size because she wanted it deep and the nun’s fingers weren’t lengthy enough.” [Note: The Telegraph‘s Tim Robey claims that the sexual tool is “a whittled statuette of the Virgin Mary.”]

Does anyone remember the rightwing Christian loon response to descriptions of Willem Dafoe‘s Jesus having sex with Barbara Hershey‘s Mary Magdelene in The Last Temptation of Christ (all of it imagined as he experiences doubt and agony as he hangs on the cross and dreams about having lived a normal life)?

I saw Last Temptation at the Century City Plitt on the day it opened (8.12.88) and when it was over we encountered a mob of devout Orange County nutters howling about religious sacrilege.

Does anyone remember how Warner Bros. refused to integrate the infamous “rape of Christ” sequence into a DVD/Bluray director’s cut of Ken Russell‘s The Devils, presumably out of fear that heartland Christians would freak out over a group of naked, sexually frenzied nuns (Vanessa Redgrave among them) using a statue of Christ to grind out orgasms?

Judging by the heated Benedetta descriptions, The Last Temptation of Christ and The Devils were mere dabblers in terms of blending representations of the Son of God with sexually perverse eroticism.

When Benedetta opens stateside your deranged righties are going to have a field day…Tucker Carlson! And the left can point to relentless rightwing sexual hypocrisy over the decades, not to mention The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

The anti-Benedetta chant will go something like “hot lesbian action defiling the image of Jesus of Nazareth…this diseased Paul Verhoeven fantasy gives us an idea of what Christianity under the left is headed for…sweaty paganism spilling sex juice over the image of our Lord and Savior…these people are beyond sick…stop them at the ballot box in ’22! This is disgusting!”

Friendo to HE: “Val Kilmer may have been very shrewd to have his son speak his lines in that Val documentary. You’ll recall that Jack Hawkins, a heavy smoker who had his larynx removed, continued to act thanks to having all his dialogue looped in post by Charles Gray. He was still employable despite having a voice that sounded like Kilmer’s. Kilmer will surely be able to do the same thing with his son providing a voice.”

Rick Rubin to Paul McCartney: “When could you look back and realize [that] what we did back then was really special?”

If I was interviewing McCartney I would never ask a question as moronic and simple-dick as that…ever. Creative people never look back and say “wow, I was really rumbling with high-test gas when I did this or that”…never! You never stand back and give yourself a review…ever. If you’re somehow possessed of something special and exceptional and God-sent, you just go with it. You go with it and hope that it takes you someplace worthy and nutritious. And that’s it. Nothing more or less than that.

I think we’ve all understood for the last 10 to 15 years and certainly since the pandemic hit that the lore and religiosity of film…the faith and investment and occasional wonder of movies as it used to exist in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and even the early aughts is over…a few welcome exceptions aside, the beating heart of movies as it used to be is in permanent cardiac arrest…double kaput and triple fucking finito.

But just to be sure that we all understand this without the slightest trace of ambiguity, former Paramount and 20th Century Fox honcho Barry Diller has repeated the death mantra in so many words:

“The movie business is over,” Diller said in an exclusive interview with NPR’s David Goura during the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference. “The movie business as before is finished and will never come back.”

Diller’s remarks sounds better if you add the “f” word so here they are again, augmented: “The movie business that we used to know is fucking over. It’s fucking finished and will never fucking come back.”

“There used to be a whole run-up,” Diller said, remembering how much time, energy and money studios invested in distribution and publicity campaigns. The goal, he said, was to generate sustained excitement and enthusiasm for new movies. “That’s finished,” he said. “I used to be in the movie business where you made something really because you cared about it,” he said, noting that popular reception mattered more than anything else.

Best Diller quote: “These streaming services have been making something that they call ‘movies.’ They ain’t movies. They are some weird algorithmic process that has created things that last 100 minutes or so.” The definition of “movie,” he said, “is in such transition that it doesn’t mean anything right now.”

The Stillwater praise out of Cannes is fairly strong but I’m a bit leery. Something feels wrong or the wrong people are cheering it on. Can’t put my finger on it, but for the time being I’m just gonna wait. Update: The more reviews I read, the more promising Stillwater sounds.

Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich: “A strained but strangely affecting turducken of a movie that bakes a dad-on-a-mission thriller together with a heartwarming fish-out-of-water story and then a brutal crime drama before glazing the whole thing with a marvelously goateed Matt Damon, Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater is the kind of original Hollywood production that would make you say “they don’t make them like that anymore” if only they had ever made them quite this way in the first place…equal parts Taken, Paddington and Prisoners, one after the other.”