Right now my movie streaming apps include Amazon, Netflix, HBO Max, Criterion, Apple, Vudu, YouTube and Hulu. No Disney or Google Play, and I’m not certain that Paramount (debuting on March 4) is all that necessary.

Charlton Heston‘s career peaked during the ’50s and ’60s — The Greatest Show on Earth, The Ten Commandments, Touch of Evil, The Big Country, Ben-Hur, El Cid, Planet of the Apes. In the ’70s he mostly became a prisoner of sci-fi and disaster films — The Omega Man, , Skyjacked, Soylent Green, Earthquake (1974), Airport 1975, Midway, Two-Minute Warning, Gray Lady Down. It got so I was feeling sorry for the poor guy.

If you ask anyone his performance as the devious and scheming Cardinal Richelieu in Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’74) and in the Four Musketeers follow-up was easily bis best ’70s performance, and arguably the last really first-rate role that he lucked into. “I did the picture because of Dick Lester,” Heston told the N.Y. Times‘ Mark Shivas.

I got my first vaccine stab (Pfizer-BioNTech) last night around 7 pm. My follow-up is scheduled for Tuesday, 3.16. No after-effects at all. Do I feel safer? I guess but I’ve never felt vulnerable. I happen to have one of those constitutions that repels viruses, or quickly rejects them if they find their way in.

I know, I know….that’s a bad thing to mention. I should just go along with the crowd and say “I’m as vulnerable as the next guy and I’m so glad for my first stab!” But I’m not as vulnerable as the next guy.

It was exactly one year ago today that Donald Trump assured U.S. citizens that everything was jake and under control with the coronavirus. We all started wearing masks by sometime in early March. Things are going to be better by June or July. We might be out of the woods by next fall, but a voice in my chest says we won’t be fully done with this plague until spring of ’22.

Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin‘s Tina (HBORollin’ On Teh Rive Max, 3.27), a life of Tina Turner doc, will presumably explore the occasionally abusive relationship she endured with longtime romantic and musical partner Ike Turner (1931-2007), who struggled with cocaine-exacerbated issues in the ’70s. That’s a polite way of saying he was an abusive dick.

Given today’s climate, the doc will presumably come down hard on Ike — how could it not? But will it show Tina’s microphone fellatio routine that she performed during 1969 Rolling Stones tour? Not cool by #MeToo standards,

Tina, now 81, became a Swiss citizen in 2013. She lives in Château Algonquin, built on the edge of Lake Zurich in Küsnacht, Switzerland.

…that SpiderMan No Home was an oblique tribute to that Chinatown moment when Jack Nicholson pushes his way into Evelyn Mulwray‘s large mansion and notices the Asian-American maid laying drapes over the furniture. He asks what’s going on and the maid says, “Mrs. Mulwray no home.”

Then I thought, “Wait, a movie today can’t have an Asian person speaking imperfect English…the producers would be attacked for racism.” Then I realized the actual title is SpiderMan No Way Home. Oh. That’s a different kettle. Now I hate it. Actually I’ve hated the SpiderMan series for a long time now. Since before I was born.

This, we can confirm. #SpiderManNoWayHome only in movie theaters this Christmas. pic.twitter.com/kCeI8Vgkdm

— Spider-Man: No Way Home (@SpiderManMovie) February 24, 2021

From “Why Spider-Man Will Always Suck Eggs“, posted on 4.19.07:

“I love a good summer popcorn movie as much as the next person. I really do. Except we all know that most of them have been so CG-dependent and drearily formulaic and unimaginative and badly written that “summer popcorn movie” has become a euphemism for ‘big-studio CG piece of shit that makes you feel like a sucker when it’s over.’

“For me, there is almost no difference between watching a Spider-Man movie and reading a year-end profit-and-loss statement from the Sony corporation. They are about connecting the dots in order to connect the dots so the people who greenlighted and made them can make as much money as possible. The problem with that approach is, I don’t care about the bonus compensation deals.

“Spider-Man movies are about sitting through two hours of passable eye candy without any kind of human-scale believability or Raimi-esque personality or anything really ‘real.’ I tried watching the first one on DVD a while back and I couldn’t do it — it was awful.”

Woody Allen‘s chief defender disputes Allen v. Farrow producers…the plot thickens…

Olivia Colman‘s expression conveys a trace of amusement. Her face says, “My clever dad has his occasional moments…he worries me and amuses me at the same time.”

Anthony Hopkins‘ face says, “I know I’m amusing, heh-heh, and I’m glad to see you’ve noticed….you’re welcome!”

This father-daughter dynamic is not what the movie is about, of course, but that’s okay. The ad has its own mindset — its own movie to sell.

It’s hot and cold there. The soil is reddish or brownish terra cotta. The topography is like Twentynine Palms or east of Indio, mostly flat with occasional sand dunes, hills and scattered boulders. So where’s the exotic excitement?

When Kyle Buchanan wrote a profile about Promising Young Woman‘s Carey Mulligan a couple of months ago, attention was gained and the pot was stirred. Especially when Mulligan was quoted saying that she “took issue” with Dennis Harvey‘s Variety review of her film.

Yesterday Buchanan posted an interview with Nomadland‘s Frances McDormand, and the motive was more or less the same as Mulligan’s had been — perk up the conversation, blow a favoring breeze.

On 3.15 McDormand and Mulligan will almost certainly be announced as competitors for the same Best Actress Oscar. Why do I have this feeling that this is not McDormand’s year to win? Partly because she won an Oscar three years ago for her performance as an angry mom in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, her second such honor after winning for her Marge Gunderson in Fargo 24 years ago. Enough, right?

But now McDormand has offered another reason. She’s told Buchanan that she’s still looking to live under the radar. Buchanan notes McDormand “is highly skeptical of any ceremony where actors are done up like glamorous gladiators“, adding that when her husband Joel Coen “was asked to produce the Oscars alongside his brother, Ethan, McDormand suggested they set the telecast at Coney Island, which would have forced Hollywood glitterati to mingle with the freak show.”

Buchanan further notes that McDormand sometimes appears “barefaced instead of Botoxed and once wore her own jean jacket in lieu of borrowed couture,” a form of “mild noncompliance [that] is tantamount to a declaration of war in Hollywood.”

Right after Fargo, McDormand “made a very conscious effort not to do press and publicity for 10 years,” she says, “but it paid off for exactly the reasons I wanted it to. It gave me a mystery back to who I was, and then in the roles I performed, I could take an audience to a place where someone who sold watches or perfume and magazines couldn’t.”

“To her,” Kyle writes. “Nomadland is the culmination of that effort to keep herself unspoiled in the public eye. ‘That’s why it works,’ she said. ‘That’s why Chloé could bear to even think of doing this with me, because of what I’ve created for years not just as an actor, but in my personal life.”

Get the picture? Low-key, no thanks, we’re good, the Oscars are a bit gaudy, we have our own deal.

I’m very sorry about Tiger Woods having been injured this morning in a “serious” one-car accident, and that a Jaws of Life rescue was necessary to extract him.

It happened around 7:12 am. Woods’ vehicle (a Genesis GV80, made by Hyundai) was heading north on Hawthorne Boulevard at Blackhorse Road, on the border of Rolling Hills Estates and Rancho Palos Verdes.

People who drive at a reasonable speed with both hands on the wheel don’t, as a rule, wipe out and flip over. Usually accidents of this type happen as a result of speeding. Woods has reportedly injured his legs. His golf career may be seriously impacted.

A certain number of QAnon-influenced Texas morons are using TikTok to share suspicions about all the “fake snow” that has blanketed their homeland. The idea is that government baddie-waddies, possibly aided and abetted by Bill Gates, engineered the snowstorm in order to get the righties. The “proof” is in the fact that the stuff on the ground isn’t real snow, certain Texans are claiming. Because if you try and melt the “fake snow” with hair dryers. matches or bunsen burners, it turns black rather than melts.

Ain’t that America?

Uncle Joe has been President a bit more than a month now (33 days), and I have to say that I’m profoundly disappointed — shattered — by his Oval Office decor choices. I was all but certain he’d remove Trump’s hideous gold curtains, and imagined that he might choose some kind of classy, subdued rug color. (Like JFK’s olive green carpet or perhaps a midnight blue.) Instead Joe has apparently chosen a royal blue carpet — the same eyesore shade as Nixon and Clinton’s. And he seems to actually like glaring gold curtains, which Marie Antoinette or Louis XVI would have felt right at home with.

People reveal who they are by their choice of home or office decor. All this time I’ve presumed that Joe, an old-school Pennsylvania and Delaware guy, had better taste than this. This may sound overly dramatic, but a royal blue plus garish gold combination is the stuff of nightmares. Mine, I mean.

JFK’s subued Oval Office scheme, circa 1961.

Richard Nixon’s Oval office…ugh