There’s been a general dismissal of The Prom‘s closing musical number, “Wear Your Crown”, and especially of Meryl Streep‘s rap interlude (1.54 to 2:11) — “”And if somebody starts in with new drama, just go high like Michelle Obama.”

It seems unfair to dump on Streep, who’s just going with the flow and giving her usual all. What’s apparently wrong with or certainly grating about The Prom is the film itself, which is starting to feel like a Cats-level enterprise — an overflowing glass of sugary, sticky, socially enlightened energy fizz…overbearingly pushed, pizazzed…lemme outta here.

We all want Emma Nolan (Jo Ellen Pellman) to take her girlfriend Alyssa (Ariana DeBose) to their high-school prom in Indiana…do it! Live and let live! But the underwhelming pro-progressive vote in the 11.3 election told us that people are sick of elite wokester scoldings and instructions about how to think and behave. Thank you, enlightened Broadwayites, for flying in from The Big Apple to celebrate Emma and Alyssa and to straighten out the local anti-LGBTQ bigots….thank you for saying all the right things in such a treacly and overbearing fashion.

People hate this shit (or at least I do), and are in no mood to be entertained to death by Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, Keegan-Michael Key and Andrew Rannells. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people in Indiana voted for Trump as a way of saying “fuck the celebrative, hectoring, instructive attitudes behind musicals like The Prom!”

Everyone remembers Adrien Lyne‘s Unfaithful…right? Another Manhattan infidelity drama, somewhat in the vein of Fatal Attraction and highlighted by Diane Lane‘s affecting performance as a married suburbanite having a hot affair.

The story, written by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles, Jr. and based on Claude Chabrol‘s La Femme Infidel, was about Lane cheating on mild-mannered husband Richard Gere. The hot boyfriend was played by Oliver Martinez, a young-Gere lookalike.

I happened upon a couple of YouTube clips, and the first thing that came to mind was the much-reported uncertainty and equivocating that Lyne went through over Unfaithful‘s ending. Gere kills Martinez in a fit of rage, you see, and Lyne (or the 20th Century Fox suits) wanted everything to be morally right and owned up to.

The ending implies that after much hemming and hawing Gere has decided to tell the cops that he killed the boyfriend. Which I found hugely unsatisfying.

I don’t think anyone wanted this ending. The audience, I sensed, wanted to give him a pass for bashing Martinez over the head. He could feel badly about it, of course, but the only thing people really wanted was for Gere to SKATE — to walk away and live with it. The principle was that a husband killing his wife’s boyfriend is not a good thing, obviously, but that it’s semi-forgivable. Or at least understandable.

All I know is that as the closing credits rolled I was muttering “that‘s how it ends?”

Yesterday a N.Y. Times interview with Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, written by Ashley Spencer, appeared. I was somewhat interested in Kurt’s thoughts about guns or rightwing issues of any kind, or about Trump perhaps. (Five years ago there was a slight hoohah about a spirited discussion Kurt and I had during a Hateful Eight interview.) But there was nothing.

My main interest, honestly, was how this long-lasting couple (they’ve been together since ’83) are holding up appearance-wise. That’s all I’m going to say.

In late ’81 or early ’82 Russell and I happened to attend the same private Manhattan party. It was thrown by a female PMK publicist of some standing. Everybody was buzzed and having a raucous old time, and there seemed to be a certain spark or current between Russell and the publicist. Maybe. None of my business.

In any event I left at a reasonable hour. The next morning I decided to call the publicist and thank her for inviting me. Bad idea, as it turned out, because I’d called around 9:30 am, which was too early. The publicist answered, barely. She didn’t say “hello?” when she picked up — she said “hrmmph.” That told me to hang up right away as I didn’t want to be the bad guy who woke her up. I was calling from a pay phone at Grand Central so she never knew.

Michael Cimino‘s Heaven’s Gate had its disastrous New York premiere on 11.19.80, at the Cinema 1 on Third Avenue. A climatic moment in history, and I was there — a witness, a survivor, taking the pulse, mulling the significance. Was the legendary Larry Karaszewski there also? Maybe. Then again he was 19, about to turn 20, and as far as I know still living in South Bend, Indiana. So maybe not.

Posted on 8.13.12: “I was there, man. I was in that audience [at the Cinema 1], and in all my years of watching films I have never felt such a sucking sensation in a room…a feeling of almost total inertia from the oxygen having been all but vacuumed out by a filmmaker with a ridiculous and over-indulged sense of his own vision and grandeur, and by a resultant approach to filmmaking that felt to me like some kind of pretentious waking nightmare.

“I could feel it in one of the earliest scenes, when John Hurt is addressing his graduating Harvard classmates in a cocky, impudent, self-amused fashion and Joseph Cotten (as a character called ‘Reverend Doctor’) is shown to be irked and offended by the snide and brazen tone of Hurt’s remarks, and right away I was saying to myself, ‘What is this? I can’t understand half of what Hurt is on about and I don’t give a damn why Cotten is bothered. If this is indicative of what this film will be like for the next three hours then Cimino is fucked and so am I because I have to sit here and watch it.’

From “Trump tries to subvert the election, inviting Michigan G.O.P. lawmakers to the White House,” posted earlier today in N.Y Times: “After failing repeatedly in court to overturn election results, President Trump is taking the extraordinary step of reaching out directly to Republican state legislators as he tries to subvert the Electoral College process, inviting Michigan lawmakers to meet with him at the White House on Friday.

“Mr. Trump contacted the Republican majority leader in the Michigan State Senate to issue the invitation, according to a person briefed on the invitation. It is not clear how many Michigan lawmakers will be making the trip to Washington, nor precisely what Mr. Trump plans to say to [them]. The president has made few public appearances since the election and his daily schedule often has no events on it, despite the worsening coronavirus pandemic.

“The White House invitation to Republican lawmakers in a battleground state is the latest — and the most brazen — salvo in a scattershot campaign-after-the-campaign waged by Mr. Trump and his allies to cast doubt on President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s decisive victory.”

This is absolute insanity.

It’s one thing for Trump to use his presidency to undermine our trust in elections, but to have the GOP coddling and enabling him is abhorrent.

They should wear this shame forever – this is beyond embarrassing. https://t.co/xT6xULQNtw

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) November 19, 2020

Harry Styes brought this upon himself by posing in dresses for Vogue…just desserts, pay the price, cope with life, etc.

Earlier today some Facebook guy asked for examples of scenes with great nønverbal acting. The vast majority of respondents will point to scenes in which the protagonist is conveying strong levels of anxiety, stress or barely suppressed panic. Prime example: Al Pacino in the seconds before he whips out the gun and shoots Al Lettieri and Sterling Hayden in The Godfather. But of course, the increasingly louder sound of a subway train rolling underneath is a key ingredient.

I tend to prefer subtler examples.

Mark Harris‘s favorite is Lily Tomlin‘s simmering reaction to Keith Carradine‘s singing of “I’m Easy” in Nashville. I agree as far as Tomlin is concerned, but the scene falls apart because Carradine won’t stop pathologically staring at her. No cafe performer would ever do that as it makes him look obsessed if not insane. Women in the cafe are noticing his staring and looking around to see who the object might be…Jesus.

One of my nonverbal favorites is James Gandolfini collapsing inside at the end of the legendary “Long Term Parking” episode in season #5 of The Sopranos (i.e., the one in which Adriana gets whacked). That’s me — that’s how I feel 80% of the time when I let the combination of the pandemic and the Khmer Rouge get to me. And that’s how I always respond if anyone asks if I’m good.

A new trailer for Regina King and Kemp Powers‘ One Night in Miami (Amazon, 12.25) is out. It’s selling an impressively acted, respectably decent translation of a good, thoughtful play about African American identity in the ’60s. Here’s my 9.11.20 review.

HE to Journo Pally: “And I chuckled at that blunt candor moment when Jim Brown said he wasn’t down with the Muslim lifestyle because, in part, he likes white women.”

JP to HE: “I’m sure the real conversation was 12 times raunchier than that. I mean, one of the things I accept about this movie is that there’s a certain well-made-play decorousness to it. That’s why it’s not great or brilliant.

“One Night in Miami is a real middlebrow, meat-and-potatoes movie. Even though the meeting between Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown did, in fact, happen, you know you’re watching a conceit. It’s tidy in a certain way. But given all of that, there’s a life to it.”

As previously noted, a Paramount Home Video Bluray of Francis Coppola‘s re-jiggered 1990 family crime saga pops on 12.8.20 — just under three weeks hence.

Repeating: The primary problem with The Godfather, Part III, which nobody ever liked and which is still regarded as the dishonorable bastard child of the Corleone saga, is that it didn’t respect the established arc of its main character.

Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone was a somber, soft-spoken, cold-hearted iceman in The Godfather, Part II (’74), and a guy clearly consumed by his own dark and guarded impulses at the Lake Tahoe finale.

But when he returned as a gray-haired, crew-cutted Don in The Godfather, Part III (’90), Vito Corleone‘s youngest son had undergone a personality transplant. He’d become a reflective, fair-minded, at times shoulder-shrugging fellow who was no longer a coldly calculating shark but a thoughtful, moderately reasonable and even amiable head of a crime family.

Two entirely different hombres.

An hour ago I came across a photo of a guy I used to know in Westfield, New Jersey, a leafy and well-tended middle-class town that I struggled and suffered in for years before we moved to Wilton, Connecticut. And a couple of musty memories began to seep through.

The Westfield guys I hung with were into sociopathic group sadism as a kind of macho-pecking-order thing — a way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Somebody was always getting picked on. It was a kind of hazing ritual, the idea being to put someone’s feet to the fire and see how they’d hold up. Or something like that.

I never understood this damn game, but mockery, isolation and occasional de-pantsing (a gang of guys would literally hold a victim down and pull his pants off and leave him to walk home that way) were par for the course.

Anyway, five or six of us were all crashing in a beach house one weekend, sleeping on side-by-side mattresses in an upstairs rec room of some kind. And I recall waking up around 5 am because a couple of guys had slipped a tray or two of ice cubes inside the sleeping bag of another guy, and when he woke up he was so cold his voice was shuddering…he literally couldn’t speak clearly because he couldn’t stop shaking and trembling. He was standing near the foot of my mattress and berating the assholes who had ice-cubed him. Believe it or not but this kind of thing was par for the course.

After a while I went back to sleep. It was around 8 am when I was awakened with a hot foot — two or three large kitchen matches had been placed between my toes as I slept and then lit. I woke up with a shriek. (Or was it a howl?) I literally levitated off the mattress.

Posted on 2.19.18: The Westfield High School climate was hellish, no question. I suppose on some level it sharpened or toughened my game, but I think I suffered from a kind of PTSD for a couple of years after our family moved to Wilton, Connecticut.

In ’06 I passed along a story of drunken teenage vomiting during a long-ago weekend party at a New Jersey shore vacation home. It belonged to the parents of Barry, a nice-enough guy I knew and occasionally hung with during my mid-teen years when I lived in Westfield, New Jersey. A bunch of us had driven down there and partied without anyone’s parents knowing, especially Barry’s. No girls, no music to speak of — just a lot of beer and ale and vodka and everyone stumbling around.

During this weekend a big, dark-haired guy named Richard Harris had been chosen as the latest victim. He had thrown up on the floor of Barry’s beach home, and so he had to be punished. Much later that night (around 1 am) we found a dead mouse in a mouse trap, so we threw the corpse into a pot of boiling water and put it under the sheets of a bed Harris was sleeping in. He woke up five or ten seconds later and bellowed “get the fuck outta here!”

A half-hour later we went outside and shifted Harris’s Chevrolet into neutral and pushed the car down the neighborhood street about three or four blocks. We were all sitting around the next morning. Harris walked in through the pantry door, glaring like a gladiator and saying “where’s my fucking car?”

Is this a thing or a put-on or a hacking? Creating a substitute Facebook identity by way of an alternate name but still using your regular photos? I don’t know what this actually is, but it seems to be about splitting a social-media identity into two halves — the real-deal organic self with an actual history, and a recently created alternate mirror self that exists only as a reflection. Or something like that.

If this is an early clue to the new direction, I’d like to get in on this. If Bryce Dallas Howard can call herself Bry Dearing (which is a cool-sounding name), I could theoretically create an alternate Facebook page by calling myself Valentine Xavier. Just call me “Val.”