Daily

A little while ago I was on hold with with TLC (Tender Loving Care), a nearby WeHo pet clinic. I’ve dealt with these people before, and I think it’s fair to describe them, no offense, as bloodsucking opportunists looking to emotionally exploit pet owners who don’t have kids but have cash to spare. That’s a roundabout way of saying that their prices are ridiculous.

I asked for an estimate to spay Anya, our female Siamese, and they said it could cost between $600 and $2000 [hint: the final fee will be closer to the latter estimate than the former], plus $300 for a pre-operative blood work examination. ($300 just to draw blood and determine her general health?)

TLC is now offering dental and gum treatment for dogs and cats who have bad breath. “Is your pet’s bad breath sending a bad message?” the recorded message says. “They could be suffering from gum disease, which tends to occur after a pet reaches age 3. TLC offers professional dental and gum cleaning,” etc. Any guesses what they’re charging to cure halitosis? $300 or $400 minimum, is my presumption.

It is estimated that our main pet clinic, Laurel Pet Hospital, will charge $700 and change, all in.

Finding a low-cost spaying operation is hell. Hours and hours online and on the phone, etc. Maybe we can save money by taking Anya to a reputable Mexican pet clinic in Tijuana or Rosarito. Update: I’ve made a neutering appointment with a reputable animal clinic Rosarito Beach for Thursday, 8.12. The cost will be $80 to $100.

Read more

Yes, Adam Driver‘s Burberry Hero ad (runs on beach, swims with a horse, becomes centaur) is “out there”, but it somehow works. Partly because it’s beautifully shot, cut and scored, but also because Driver’s features were described in certain corners (not in this space!) as horse-like before this ad came to be. It makes you wonder if the ad happened because of this association. In which case it’s a fairly bold statement.

Driver could be saying that “some people (mean people) have said I have a face like a horse. Well, here I am selling Burberry cologne in an ad in which I become a human steed.”

Driver and the people who threw this ad together have my respect.

Again: I’ve never slagged Driver or even mentioned the term “horseface” in the same breath. All I’m doing here is reacting to what “they” have said.

Adam Driver for Burberry Hero, featuring “Two Weeks” by FKA twigs. pic.twitter.com/j938KYEtMF

— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) July 27, 2021

…was really bothering me. But no longer. Thank God it’s settled once and for all.

Most of us are attuned only to life’s tangibles — food, shelter, warmth, money, clothing, pets, guns, cars, shoes, homes, furniture, trees, hills, mountains, oceans, swimming pools, sailboats. Things we can see, touch, smell, eat, wear and dive into.

But others, fortunately, are also mindful and in some cases stirred or motivated by invisible things — thoughts, feelings, spirits, ghosts, dreams, intuitions, morality, melancholy, premonitions, memories.

Any filmmaker can focus on the tangibles. Most of them do, in fact. Movies that are strictly about tangibles are “mulch” movies, a term that I defined earlier this month. Mulch is the source of our shared Hollywood ennui…the muck at the bottom of the dried-up lake…the disease that keeps on infecting…the gas that fills the room.

Except for a smattering of elite, award-season stand-alones (or festival movies) and select forthcoming streamers like HBO’s Scenes From A Marriage (Bergman remake), Hollywood makes almost nothing but mulch these days. The streaming + re-emerging feature realm is flooded with mulch…empty, inane, meaningless, spirit-less, jizz-whiz “content” crapola that nobody wants to see or cares about, but they’re made anyway because the zone-outs and knuckle-draggers need stuff to watch.

But only serious directors are able to convey or dramatize the presence of invisible things. The finest films are actually concerned with a mixture of tangible things, which is natural and inevitable in any corner of life, but are driven by the invisibles.

And the best of the best almost never articulate in so many words what the invisible currents or particles are about. They hint at them or nudge audiences into considering or meditating upon their presence, but they never say “these are the things that really matter.” The great films always say “you figure it out…you put it together.”

The more a film is focused upon or at least mindful of the invisibles, the richer and more accomplished it is. And the more moving, of course,

From a 7.14.21 heyuguys review of Valdimar Jóhannsson‘s supernatural Lamb, by Joan Titmarsh:

“A childless couple living on a sheep farm, Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Himir Snær Guðnason), deliver a lamb that they decide to take into their home and raise as their own child.

“When Maria performs a terrible act in order to protect her ersatz motherhood, it is clear that she has stirred up the wrath of something ancient, and in her taking the lamb from its mother there is something from the natural == or supernatural — world that will come to seek retribution. Rather than the humans signalling this, it is the animals, most notably the trusty sheepdog, who pick up on the looming danger.

“This is an intelligent and hugely entertaining film that quietly creates a bucolic horror and has much of the ancient fairy tale about it. It deals with important questions such as motherhood, family and happiness, as well as the lengths people will go to when they see any of those things slipping from their grasp. It is a film about grief, but it is full of fun. It joins Rams in that hallowed pantheon of Icelandic films about sheep, a genre that is rapidly turning out to be one of my favorites.”

HE confession: I didn’t care for Rams at all. I felt stuck on that damp farm with those bearded brothers and all that wool, and the smell of it.

Read more

Example: Terminator: Dark Fate. A dreaded Mandy McFly in a gender-swapped Back to the Future…”do not ruin Back to the Future!” A male version of Heathers or Mean Girls, Jennifer’s Body, etc.

“If Hollywood just leaned a little bit more into originality…a little bit more.” — Film Threat‘s Chris Gore.

Read more

“Some have constructed a counter-narrative to discredit this process on the grounds that we didn’t launch a similar investigation into the urban riots and looting that occured last summer [following the death of George Floyd]. I was called on to serve during the summer riots as an air national guardsman. I condemn the riots and destruction of property that resulted. But not once [during those disturbances] did I ever feel that the future of self-governance was threatened like I did on January 6th. There is a difference between breaking the law and rejecting the rule of law.” — Rep. Adam Kinzinger, speaking this morning during committee hearings on the 1.6 Capitol assault.

Comment #1: Kinzinger is a decent, thoughtful, principled human being who has no future in the sociopathic bumblefuck cult that calls itself the Republican party.

Comment #2: There were some suppressed tears this morning during testimony from the security guys. Kinzinger also let go with a few. There’s no question in my mind that vivid recollections of the pain and trauma of January 6th fueled this morning’s emotion, but the sniffles are one more reason why Kinzinger has no future as a Republican. Rightwing males don’t relate to politial PDE**. Just saying.

Comment #3: Having observed rioting, looting and the burning of a building during one of the Floyd disturbances in West Hollywood, I can testify first-hand that a lot of people helped themselves to free footwear that day.

Read more

“…and then something happens.”

My first impression is that Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter (Focus Features, 9.10) is almost certainly going to prove a better (punchier, more interesting) poker movie than The Cincinnati Kid. How it stands up to Rounders…we’ll see. Obviously the return of a familiar Schrader archetype — God’s lonely man. “Hello, old friend…it’s really good to see you once again.”

Tattoo: “I trust my life to providence…I trust my soul to grace.”

Read more

Forwarded last night by Stuart Cohen, this slightly enhanced color snap of Michael Rennie during the filming of The Day The Earth Stood Still (‘51) is, according to Cohen, from a LIFE magazine shoot. The shamrock-green outfit (notice the slight sparkle effect) seems intense, but color flash photography had that effect. Plus the car Rennie was standing next to and the parking lot in which this and other cars were parked and the warm dusk-hour lighting (the area appears remote and undeveloped) seem natural enough.

There’s something odd about this kid. That strangely mature-seeming face. He looks like a 27 year-old shrunk down to the size of an eight-year-old. I’m not “odd”-shaming him — he grew into a sane and sensible performer who went on to fame and fortune — but you have to admit he had a peculiar tyke vibe.

Danny Trejo‘s “My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood” became an immediate best-seller when it was published on 7.6. It’s currently 11th or 12th on the N.Y. Times list, and was at #3 for a short while. I gave some thought myself to buying the Kindle edition. I’ve always liked Trejo, and I still maintain that his best performance is in Michael Mann‘s Heat (’95)l

I’m presuming that the people who’ve bought the book are mainly Trejo fans…proles who personally relate to his hard-knocks saga and are sold on him as a real-deal sort of guy who’s led a rugged, dangerous life (especially during his tweener and teen years) but managed to save himself and gradually grew into a better person.

A week or so ago I read Lewis Beale‘s Daily Beast profile of Trejo and the book (“Is Danny Trejo the Most Lovably Terrifying Actor Ever?“).

We all understand that most many actors aren’t necessarily gifted at writing, and that whenever they “author” a book it’s usually been tweaked and edited by a professional. In this case the co-author is actor Donal Logue, a longtime friend of Trejo’s.

In a chat with Beale, Logue reveals that Trejo didn’t sit down and try to write anything — not even a half-assed rough draft. He just spoke with Logue extensively, and then Logue did the heavy lifting…hah!

Beale: “The book itself actually got rolling thanks to Logue, whose literary agent suggested Trejo do a work about his life. So Logue wrote a proposal, and then spent two years interviewing his buddy and whipping the project into shape.

“‘He’s the most articulate guy I ever met,’ says Logue, ‘and he pretty much laid out the structure of the story. He has no problem speaking or being quoted, but packaging it, putting some structure to it, fell on my lap.'”

Logue and Trejo first met 22 years ago (i.e., 1999) at an AA meeting. At the time both were acting in Reindeer Games, the Ben Affleck-Charlize Theron film.

Having read the book, Beale offers a criticism about Trejo’s over-reliance on “recovery speak” — the presence of lines like “the magic of forgiveness is so profound, and it starts with us forgiving ourselves.”

Utterances of this sort “are scattered throughout the book,” Beale notes. “You can imagine thoughts like this being articulated at every AA meeting, but their greeting card sincerity can be a bit off-putting.”

16 or 17 years ago I asked an odd hypothetical of HE readers: If Hollywood was a mythical industry built upon ruthless criminality, and if the HE reader in question was an all-powerful mafia boss who was persuaded that Hollywood had to improve the quality of films or else face financial ruin and a permanent loss of respect, which producers, directors, screenwriters and actors would the big mafia boss get rid of in order to arrest its worst instincts and thereby save the industry from itself?

More concisely: In a lurid, fantasy-realm Hollywood, which filmmakers should be whacked for the good of the industry?

I should immediately add that I’ve always frowned upon violent behavior in any form, and that if I was the hypothetical mafia boss in question I wouldn’t order anyone to be “hit” — I would kidnap the targets and secretly place them under house arrest in a comfortable, handsomely decorated, high-security prison with excellent meals and first-rate wifi. No one would get hurt, but the targeted filmmakers would be removed from the hurly burly and could do no further harm.