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Two days ago I saw Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers (Sony Pictures Classics, 12.24.21). I’m in 100% agreement with the 100% Rotten Tomatoes score. Okay, it’s not perfect, but it comes awfully close to that. I was murmuring to myself “this is easily one of the year’s best so far…this, King Richard, Cyrano and Asghar Farhadi‘s A Hero.”

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has written that Parallel Mothers is the finest Almodovar film since All About My Mother. I think it’s his best since Habla Con Ella (’02) or Volver (’06).

HE to friendo: “I’m not fully persuaded that the forensic finale ties in as profoundly or exactingly as Pedro intended, but it ‘works’ for the most part — it harmonizes with the whole children, family and continuity thing. He’s such a clean and commanding and confident filmmaker, especially when the story focuses on women and mothering.”

Friendo to HE: “Yes, some have a problem with the ending and I understand why, but I thought he made it tie in. The idea is that these people in Spain cannot be whole, as individuals or as families, until they come to grips with the past. It worked poetically. I found the last scene powerful and moving.”

One of the things I adore about Parallel Mothers is that it understands and respects a basic biological fact, a fact that Hollywood has only occasionally acknowledged. The bedrock genetic reality of family resemblance.

Almodovar clearly respects the fact that genetic recognition is always there, and don’t tell me that sometimes a baby will resemble his or her grandfather or grandmother more than his or her mother or father because that kind of thing is highly unusual.

I’ve explained that George Clooney‘s The Tender Bar has zero respect for the parental resemblance factor, at least as far as the casting of young Daniel Ranieri is concerned. Clooney would have us believe that Ranieri, who looks (take your pick) Sicilian or Lebanese or Egyptian or Jordanian, is going to grow up to be Tye Sheridan — a non-starter.

Clooney could be saying to his audience, “I know the kid doesn’t look like Lily and Max but there’s this whole woke and diversity thing going on now, and we have to play ball with woke Stalinist attitudes.”

Pedro’s film sits on the opposite side of the canyon — it completely respects the family resemblance thing, and in fact uses it as a plot point.

Without giving away too much of the story, Penélope Cruz is Janis, a Madrid-residing photographer who becomes pregnant by Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a kind of biologist-anthropologist who’s doing forensic studies of the skeletons of victims who were disappeared by the Franco regime.

Their affair has been on the sly as Arturo is married to a woman who’s struggling with cancer. Anyway, the baby (a daughter) arrives and one day Arturo drops by. The instant he lays eyes on her you can tell that he’s a tad confused. He senses thqt something might be wrong as he sees nothing of himself in the child’s features. We can see this also — it’s obvious.

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On 10.14, Cyber Dandy asked why is the Academy Museum ignoring the tough, scrappy Jews who founded the Hollywood film industry? You know, the Jews whom Neal Gabler wrote about 32 years ago?

Those crude, gut-instinct, cigar-chomping guys (including the Protestant Daryl F. Zanuck) are nowhere to be found in the Academy’s recently opened temple at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax. Nor are any of the filmmaking founders — Chaplin, Fairbanks, Griffith, Pickford, etc.

Filmmaker friendo: “This is what I felt when they announced the program but I reserved my judgement until I visited. This is not fair and not good. I hear [Martin] Scorsese is furious about the lack of history of the museum. I’ve also heard that Leo [DiCaprio] was very upset by what he saw there. The museum is a joke.** No D.W. Griffith, no John Ford, no Jewish moguls. What can be done here?”

Cyber Dandy: “I had hoped the museum would also pay homage to the motion picture pioneers who birthed the industry in the early 1900s and reflect the history of families like mine. But after touring the museum’s five stories, I discovered that Hollywood’s pioneers, who busted their [asses] building the industry it celebrates, ended up on the cutting room floor.”

HE to Cyber Dandy, Filmmaker Friendo: To wokesters the original Jewish founders and rulers of classic Hollywood along with the ground-floor filmmakers are defined by one thing — their whiteness.

“That’s all there is really. The Academy Museum is about apologizing for the working atmosphere created by white Jewish moguls and producers. Celebrating or at least acknowledging their historical roles is apparently the furthest thing from the Academy’s collective mind.

“The museum’s viewpoint is that the old days were bad, wrong, cruel, sexist, discriminatory, hugely unfortunate….there is only the wokeness of today and the future that lies ahead. Fairness and opportunity for women, people of color, LGBTQs, etc.”

** Scorcese and DiCaprio’s alleged disapproval of the Academy Museum’s lack of history has not been conveyed directly. It’s strictly “loose talk”, but it comes from persons in or near their circle.

A week ago I read a N.Y. Times story about Bright Sheng, a celebrated University of Michigan music professor, being savagely attacked by campus wokesters for showing a lack of sensitivity blah blah.

Basically Sheng was forced to grovel and apologize and finally withdraw from teaching a high-profile class because he was dumb enough to show the students Laurence Olivier‘s Othello (’65), which in today’s universe is an obscenity because Olivier plays the title role.

Seriously — could Sheng bave been any more blind to the times and socially tone-deaf? Black actors can play this or that historically white character but whites can’t play blacks — not now and never again. How could Shern have not known that?

To wokesters there’s no difference between Olivier playing Othello in ‘65 (or, for that matter, the Muslim “Mahdi” in Basil Dearden’s 1966 Khartoum opposite Charlton Heston) and the worst minstrel shows. It’s all the same offense — the arrogance and temerity of a white person playing a non-white person.

The fact that Olivier’s Othello is quite the tempest and suitably tragic (as was Orson Welles in his 1951 version) is, to woke lunatics, immaterial.

Would a white actor even flirt with the idea of playing Othello today? Of course not. But Denzel Washington can play a medieval Scottish social climber who was done in by his own (and his white wife’s) ruthless ambition. Actors of color can play anyone or anything they damn well please, but white actors have to respect ethnic boundaries or else. It’s simply the way it is now.

Shouldn’t there be respect for historical context and the social climate in which the Olivier and Welles versions were made? Answer: No way, Jose.

Great acting is great acting whatever the guise…right? Answer: Not in today’s climate.

By this same token Marlon Brando’s Emiliano Zapata performance in Viva Zapata! (‘52) also needs to be cancelled and forgotten. No less a personage than Guillermo del Toro once told me that he holds Elia Kazan’s 1952 drama in very low regard. “How would you feel about a Mexican-made film about Abraham Lincoln?”, he said. “And one that you might instantly recognize, as an Anglo American, as inauthentic and therefore disrespectful?”

I’m sure that University of Michigan wokesters would REALLY lose it if they were shown Black Like Me (‘64), a kind of African American or minstrel show-like version of Gentleman’s Agreement. It starred James Whitmore as a white guy who pretends to be black by coloring his skin. Remember that one? And it was made by good-guy liberals.

I love how one of the anti-Chappelle supporters grabbed a pro-Chappelle placard being held aloft by a bespectacled, cap-wearing pudgy guy, and ripped the cardboard sign off. And then one of the anti-Chappelles shouted that the pudgy guy had a “weapon” — i.e., the stick that remained in his hands once the sign had been trashed.

“You want me to drop the weapon?” the pudgy guy asked, mocking the mania. “Yes,” came the reply, “and then leave.”

I also love how a short anti-Chappelle demonstrator with a tennis-ball haircut attempted to push against the pudgy guy by holding his/her arms up, getting right into his 18 inches of private space. There was also a small woman with a shrieky, agitated voice shaking some kind of noisemaker at the pudgy guy. Talk about impolite, rude and disrespectful.

The pudgy guy nonetheless held onto a joshing, light-hearted attitude.

🚨#BREAKING: Dozens of Netflix employees and their supporters staged a walkout outside Netflix Headquarters

📌#Hollywood l #California

To protest the transphobic comments made by Dave Chappelle in his latest comedy special released earlier this month by the streaming giant pic.twitter.com/zkNnSDaE95

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) October 20, 2021

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Official Focus Features description: “Written and directed by Academy Award® nominee Kenneth Branagh, Belfast (11.12.21) is a poignant story of love, laughter and loss in one boy’s childhood, amid the music and social tumult of the late 1960s.”

Based Elena Ferrante‘s same-titled novel, The Lost Daughter (Netflix, 12.17) is the directorial debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Olivia Colman is Leda, a middle-aged professor vacationing in Greece for a week or two. Her obsession with Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter causes Leda to reminisce about her own motherhood trials as a conflicted 20something.

Katie Smith-SWong’s Flickfeast review: “Gyllenhaal incorporates an [intensely] artistic approach that heightens the film’s psychological tone. Beautiful and visually affecting, this creates an unsettling but unnecessary sense of paranoia that [modifies] the sentimentality behind Leda’s emotional journey.

“Plus the heartbreaking dialogue in Gyllenhaal’s adapted screenplay isn’t helped by the close-up shots that border on pretentious and the drawn-out narrative that prolongs the suffering of its key characters.

“Overall The Lost Daughter is an ambitious directorial debut. Colman shines as Leda but its overlong runtime and uneven supporting performances cause its dramatic effect to falter for the sake of style.”

I could and should have seen The Lost Daughter during Telluride, but I couldn’t fit it in.

Update: I’ll say this much — the coolest hombre in Dune is Jason Momoa‘s “Duncan Idaho, the swordmaster of House.” Moma is beardless here, and so he looks a bit heavyish — as if Joe Don Baker had succumbed to a cheeseburgers and beer and pasta diet after the success of Walking Tall. But Duncan has that macho mojo Han Solo thing going on. They should have ignored the Herbert narrative and kept him alive. Born in ’79, Momoa is no spring chicken but he’s got what audiences want.

Earlier: I’ve been watching Dune for 35 minutes, and it’s obviously an intelligent, expensive, thoughtfully composed film of its type. But within the first ten minutes I was dying within, dying of cancer and almost weeping with sympathy for poor Timothee Chalamet. Strange as it sounds, Dune made me want to shelter Chalamet and protect him from the sand storms of corporate boredom. Dune is so slow and suffocating that, even stranger, I almost wanted to forgive him for throwing Woody Allen under the bus.

Kill me now, Paul Atreides. Kill me now, sand worms. Suffocate me with spice, Denis Villeneuve. This is the equivalent of cinematic waterboarding.  I just can’t stand the idea of watching another Joseph Campbell saga…a hero’s journey of self-discovery and heroic destiny…I’m choking on it.

George Lucas had obviously been influenced by Dune when he made Star Wars in ‘77, and that was 44, 45 years ago. The basic template has since been copied to death. It’s the same old Skywalker story, more or less. Only grimmer, and with ugly-ass worms, and from a political royal family perspective, and with tons upon tons of swirling dust storms, and actors dressed in olive drab sand rags.

155 minutes later, not counting phone breaks, food breaks, writing breaks and cat-petting breaks: Thank God it’s over. Yes, Chalamet’s performance improves as it goes along — the closer he gets to becoming “Paul Muad’Dib, the Fremen messiah”, the better he is.

I’ll never watch Dune again — that’s for damn sure. No way this thing becomes any kind of serious Best Picture contender…not a snowball’s chance.

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If it was my call and I had absolute power (and I’m not exaggerating for exaggeration’s sake), I would put Donald Trump‘s fat, half-naked ass into a Roman Colisseum-like arena and make him face three ferocious tigers, just like Russell Crowe in Gladiator and Victor Mature in Demetrius and the Gladiators. Yes, I would allow Trump to defend himself with a short sword, but you know he’d die anyway.

It goes without saying that Steve Bannon should suffer the same fate.

I’m not kidding — these guys are sociopaths, animals…hellbent on anti-Democratic revolt and sparking anti-Democratic insanity among the rural bumblefucks. They’re truly insane, and the crimes they’re guilty of deserve the ultimate penalty. A firing squad would afford them too much dignity. They need to face what Christians faced under the rule of ancient Romans.

Alternate scenario: Trump is murdered — stabbed to death — by the Praetorian guard, and in a mimicking of John Hurt‘s death scene in I, Claudius, he weeps and wails as the knives plunge in and out.

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From a q & a between Netflix honcho Ted Sarandos and Variety‘s Matt Donnelly, titled “‘I Screwed Up’: Netflix’s Ted Sarandos Addresses Dave Chappelle Fallout“:

Donnelly: “I want to circle back and ask definitively, do you personally and does Netflix feel that The Closer does not amount to hate speech?”

Sarandos: “Under the definition of ‘does it intend to cause physical harm?’ I do not believe it falls into hate speech.”

Donnelly: “So the special will remain on the service?”

Sarandos: “I don’t believe there have been many calls to remove it.”

Has anyone drawn a correlation between Dave Chappelle‘s The Closer and Richard Pryor‘s brief performance at a gay rights fundraiser at the Hollywood Bowl on 9.18.77?

Pryor talked about about having sucked a dick and “fucked some good ass-hole” back in ’52 (when Pryor was 11 or 12). And yet, angered by some racist behavior he’d witnessed backstage, Pryor also shared some harsh thoughts about his perceptions of racism (by way of indifference and whatnot) in the gay community.

Please read this excerpt from from Scott Saul‘s “Becoming Richard Pryor”, posted in the Guardian on 1.11.15.

By Pryor standards, Chappelle’s Closer material was a day at the beach.