Yesterday Tatiana was on a TV commercial shoot in downtown Los Angeles. The area was swarming with homeless people and other wretched-refuse types. Out of the blue she spotted a buck-naked white guy — late 30s to early 40s, good physical shape, relatively attractive — casually walking on a nearby sidewalk, and then waiting at a stop light and crossing the street like any average citizen. Q: “Was he wearing sneakers of flip-flops?” A: “I didn’t notice.”
I’m not saying Jodie Comer‘s Last Duel performance isn’t a lead — it is — but she’d have a better shot at winning if she was in the Best Supporting Actress category, and nobody would have an argument with her performance being so categorized.
With 83% of the Virginia vote tally, Greg Youngkin (R) has 53% (1,426,017) vs. 47% (1,263,758) for Terry McAuliffe (D). It’s a very bleak omen for what may happen in the 2022 midterms, and, in Virginia at least, a clear rejection of wokester policies as far as education (CRT) is concerned. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: Virginia women went roughly 50-50 in the 2020 Presidential race, but they voted against McAuliffe, 57% to 43%, on the race-education issue.
Friendo: “Democrats will probably not get the message. They should but they won’t. They have to stop listening to Twitter. Everything and everyone is racist to the wokester left (Thomas Jeffersons statue being removed from NYC’s city hall, etc.) and moderate Americans are finally pushing back. I was surprised it was such a decisive win though — 51.9% to 47.4%. They all said Virginia would be a squeaker.”
…as her impressive…er, upkeep or maintenance or whatever the proper term is. C’mon…the lady was born three months after the release of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo and look at her…she has a porcelain doll’s face. She must know my guy in Prague, or at least have heard of him. Gifted artists tend to congregate.
Madonna: It’s interesting because peace is subjective. The way people think about the pandemic, for instance, that the vaccination is the only answer or the polarization of thinking you’re either on this side or the other. There’s no debate, there’s no discussion. That’s something I want to disturb. I want to disturb the fact that we’re not encouraged to discuss it. I believe that our job is to disturb the status quo. The censoring that’s going on in the world right now, that’s pretty frightening. No one’s allowed to speak their mind right now. No one’s allowed to say what they really think about things for fear of being canceled, cancel culture. In cancel culture, disturbing the peace is probably an act of treason.”
MSNBC exit polls say Terry McAuliffe‘s negatives are much higher than Glenn Youngkin‘s, and that probably means (unless MSNBC’s exit poll methodology is completely detached from logic and reality) that McAuliffe is going to lose the Virginia gubernatorial election. The legend is that McAuliffe basically committed suicide over the teaching of critical race theory in Virginia schools, and particularly by implying that parents who shared concerns along these lines were racist.
The implication is that other Democratic candidates who endorse CRT and the early instruction of non-binary gender studies in schools may be similarly threatened.
No question about it — woke terrorists have taken a serious hit. Speaking as a left-leaning moderate centrist, I’m feeling mixed emotions. I think McAuliffe asked for it and has no one to blame but himself. On the other hand I feel badly about any Republican winning anything in this godawful lunatic climate.
…that I couldn’t identify, and at the same time I couldn’t push it out of my head. It kept playing, over and over. I knew it was either Max Steiner or Miklos Rozsa, but I couldn’t remember the film. I figured if I stopped trying, the answer would come. But it didn’t. I tried going back to sleep. It was 2:15 am. I thought of ex-girlfriends and childhood traumas and the endless boredom of school, distant cities, riding on trains through Switzerland…couldn’t drop off. Then it hit me…Steiner! Whew, what a relief. I finally dropped off.
The basic idea is that ’80s Star Trek films smacked of maturity, character and grace under pressure while the Chris Pine Star Trek films too often smacked of immaturity and impulsiveness, and were altogether whiny and enraged. And this devolution of a once-beloved franchise was primarily the fault of the coddled, wimpy, candy-assed writers (Simon Pegg Doug Jung, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, et, al.).
Critical Drinker, 11.2.21, 12:46 mark: “The final and probably biggest strand is the people hired to write this stuff. I’ve said before that a character is only as smart, capable and resourceful as the person writing them, and…well, you don’t need me to tell you that Hollywood creators these days aren’t exactly paragons of tough, stoic, confident self-reliance. They’re the kind of people who consider mean tweets to be on par with mass murder.
“The end result of all this is a generation of writers who are weak, fragile, spoiled, narcissistic, emotionally insecure…basically children in adult bodies. The ridiculous infantile shite that today’s writers produce” — the plot of Edgar Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns‘ Last Night in Soho, for example — “[fortifies] the endless river of sludge that passes for modern entertainment.”
…but the paycheck. The paycheck matters. That and starring in the usual lightweight crap…Onward, Lego Movie 2, infinite Guardians, Jurassic whatever, toxic Passengers, a bullshit Magnificent Seven remake, a bullshit Tomorrow War…nothing matters, keep earning, keep eating…me and Dwayne Johnson, man…we own this kind of attitude. Fuck it all, you only live once.
Soon after embracing sobriety on 3.20.12, I realized that my laughter triggers has stopped functioning, and I’d never been much of a hah-hah guy to begin with. This was where alcohol came in, and why I loved succumbing to the rude, silly, sporadic kind of beer-buzz humor that I’d discovered in my mid teens….a cackling, mad-hatter laughter on the fly, depending on the joke or circumstance or how many sheets to the wind.
Well, that kind of vocal laughter had left my system. Sobriety had shown it the door. I’d always been an LQTM type but now I was really living deep in the well. And whenever a table of younger people (or middle-aged sillies on their second glass of wine) would break into gales of laughter, I would turn and glare daggers. I’ve been sober nine and a half years, and I still do that. Hearty chuckles and moderate laughter are fine, but shriekers are obnoxious. And if I’m in the vicinity, you can bet they’ll feel my silent condemnation..
…how the Supremes upholding a Mississippi abortion law that states an abortion has to happen with 15 weeks of conception…how exactly does that undermine a woman’s right to choose?
The Texas abortion law is ridiculous, and yes, the Mississippi law, passed in 2018, is restrictive and problematic for low-income women, especially in its refusal to make exceptions in cases of rape or incest. If it were my determination I would certainly uphold Roe v. Wade.
Under present Mississippi law, women who’ve made their decision simply have to terminate a given pregnancy within 105 days. Let’s say that an unwilling mom doesn’t learn that she’s pregnant until the six-week mark — that gives her nine weeks or 63 days to do something about it.
A woman’s right to choose is the central thing, of course, and no civilized person would disagree with this. A 15-week timeframe will obviously make it harder for low-income women, and I’m not oblivious to an element of cruelty in the Mississippi law. Which is why it’s better, I believe, all things considered, to stick with Roe.
But here’s an 11.1 Times op-ed piece that says Roe is “as good as gone.”
The Supremes will evaluate Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on 12.1.21.
If Terry McAuliffe hadn’t fucked himself by siding with Virginia’s wokester-agenda educators, he’d probably be okay in the race against Glenn Youngkin. Instead he hinted that parents who object to portraits of Anglo-Saxon culture as hopelessly poisoned are doing so for subliminal racist reasons…that was a huge error.
If McAuliffe had just played it moderately liberal and sensible (i.e., like me) and not sounded like an obedient servant of woke transformationalists, he’d probably be leading slightly. At least that.
I hope to God Youngkin doesn’t win and that the most recent Washington Post poll turns out to be accurate, but if Terry loses he’ll be obliged to look into his bathroom mirror on Wednesday morning and say “okay, I fucked up, this was my fault and I helped the monsters to win.”
A Youngkin victory will certainly register as a warning gong to Democratic Senators and Congresspersons across the country. Historically Virginia has often gone blue, but McAuliffe managed to change that dynamic and fuck everything up in the bargain.
What’s happened to Bernard McMahon’s Becoming Led Zeppelin? In early September the 137-minute doc screened at the Venice and Telluride film festivals, which almost always signals some kind of imminent fall release, or at least early the following year. But then it disappeared. Either nobody acquired it or it was withdrawn for further editing or something. All I know is that there’s no word about anything.
HE wild guess: There’s been a general sense of frustration with the critical response to the doc. Most reviewers found it overly obsequious and not even slightly inquisitive, and so (again, purely a guess) some re-editing and re-shaping is going on.
Led Zeppelin headliners Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, who had apparently turned down previous proposals for a definitive Led Zeppelin doc over the years, presumably because they didn’t want a warts-and-all portrait (i.e., infamous drug use and groupie debauchery on the road + the drug-related death of dummer John Bonham), are presumably hammering things out with McMahon as we speak. Or not. Who knows?
I saw and reviewed Becoming Led Zeppelin at Telluride ’21. Like most many reviewers I found it satisfactory if (and I say “if“) you’re willing to just go with it and put away your cranky hat. Providing, in other words, that you’re willing to ignore the doc’s kiss-ass attitude and general lack of curiosity about anything other than how the band came together and how the early songs were created, etc.
Forty-eight words: Becoming Led Zeppelin is highly enjoyable but a bit under-nourishing due to control-freak conditions imposed by Page and Plant. Overly sanitized, dishonest by way of omission, totally obsequious. But I still “liked” it — i.e., had a mildly good time except during the last 20 or 25 minutes.
Excerpt: “The first hour relates the individual paths of the three remaining Zeppers, and straight from the mouths — Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones (all currently in their 70s and in good spirits) as well as the late John Bonham, who is heard speaking to a journalist about this and that.
“The second hour is about the launch of Led Zeppelin — the early play dates, the creation of the first two albums, the acclaim, the power and the glory. It’s basically about good times, and there’s certainly nothing ‘wrong’ with that.
“The problem is that it doesn’t dig in. It’s not even slightly inquisitive. It’s way too obliging, almost feeing like an infomercial at times. It offers, in short, a really restricted portrait, and around the 110-minute mark (and with 27 minutes to go) I started to mind this.