My first thought was that besides fighting disease and whatnot, an Elon Musk Neuralink brain chip could be used to instill good taste in movies.

Once surgically inserted, the chip could conceivably dissuade the host from wanting to see Bill and Ted Face The Music and lead them instead to the Criterion Channel and Ingmar Bergman‘s The Silence.

Call it the HE chip. Or, if you will, the David Ehrlich chip. Or the Jessica Kiang, Bob Strauss, Peter Howell or Glenn Kenny chip.

Millions would suddenly be interested in seeing Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War or Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero (’73) or…well, that line of country. Don’t get me started but you get the idea. Cultural benefits!

In my book an 80% Rotten Tomatoes rating spells trouble. Couple that with the reality-face-slap of a 66% Metacritic rating and you’ve come to the final truth of things.

THR John De Fore excerpt: “Dean Parisot‘s Bill & Ted Face the Music is almost exactly as good as its two big-screen predecessors — make of that statement what you will — while cleaning up some, but not all, of the things that might make an old fan of those films cringe today. Despite a dicey opening, the pic should please those looking forward to it, and, with the addition of a new generation (the duo’s daughters), attract a new fan or two as well.”

“Pic should please those looking forward to it“?

Frank Pierson‘s “My Battles With Barbra And Jon” is/was a New West article that was published just after the 12.19.76 opening of Pierson, Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters‘ A Star Is Born.

I mentioned Pierson’s piece in yesterday’s “Soggy Speculation Thickens” post, but a link on the Barbara [Streisand] Archives website has been removed.

Last night I found the Pierson piece on the Wayback Machine. It’s a longish read.

Key passage: “For us, the picture cost $6 million and a year of our lives. For the audience it’s $3.50 and an evening out. If it’s a bum evening, it doesn’t make me any better or worse as a person. But if you think the film is you, if it is your effort to transform your lover into a producer worthy of a superstar [and] if you think it is a home movie about your love and your hope and your deepest feelings, if it’s your life that you laid out for the folks and they don’t smile back, that’s death.”

I’ve pasted it forthwith:

In the summer when school is out, Instamatics and flashcubes at the ready, they wait outside the homes of the stars. Hoping for a glimpse of Paul, or Clint, or Steve, or Barbra. A glimpse of a radiant life, full of wealth and fame and sex and happiness.

Pursuing in their lemming way this fantasy of stardom, they have driven Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters, her ex-hairdresser, now her partner in life’s adventure, as far as they can retreat, up a narrow country road, overhung with great oaks and eucalyptus, to a rustic ranch house buried in the Malibu mountains.

But the fans are already there, lurking outside the gate, glaring at visitors. Jon is not dismayed. He roars with exuberant laughter — “We’re training the dog to attack.”

Barbra is not happy. Her brow is furrowed and her eyes are full of hurt. “What do they want from me?” she asks. And yet they’re the paying customers whose unending eagerness to pay $3.50 and up to see Barbra show emotion is making all this possible.

All this is a golden forest, where Barbra and Jon are at play like children of the gods. The ranch house is all earth tones and artfully aged wood, peopled with Art Deco statuary, every corner filled with antiques, pictures, elegant rugs and throws and shawls, lamps, plants, objets d’art of every description, none of it going together, in such profusion only an impression of magnificence is generated. For some reason it doesn’t seem cluttered, which is perhaps part of Barbra’s secret. It is like a magical attic, in which every trunk and old discarded hat rack or moose head has a sentimental history, printed on a card. Nooks and crannies abound, a great house for hide and seek. It is completely satisfactory; I believe Barbra Streisand lives here.

A new garden is being started today, during my first visit. It arrives on a truck, and the entire thing is planted before lunch, with everything in bloom. It reminds me of an old Hollywood joke about Cecil B. De Mille and his extravagant film vision of the Bible: “This is what God would do, if he had the money.”

The nation’s moral conscience needed to be challenged and goaded after the 5.25.20 George Floyd murder. Nobody’s ever questioned that. But then the challengers and goaders wouldn’t leave, and it’s been going on for nearly three months. Yes, it happened again with Jacob Blake, but that wasn’t quite as open-and-shut. Either way I think most of us kinda get it now, but maybe not. Maybe we need to keep being prodded and reminded and shouted at while eating on a permanent ongoing basis because, you know, a lot of us are slow.

Maybe we should drop to our knees and thank all the wokester shitheads out there for refusing to back off in the Northwest and Chicago and occasionally D.C.? Because America needs this element (nightly agitation, rightwing militias, shootings, storefront trashings) in our lives, and especially because we need to prod as many rurals as possible into thinking about not supporting Joe Biden. This is our charge.

People in the crowd are setting off firecrackers and shining flashlights into homes here in DC as the march continues pic.twitter.com/mZ2xGXr6go

— Shelby Talcott (@ShelbyTalcott) August 31, 2020

“I’ve been kinda down, as you know. Last two or three years, maybe longer. But I gotta tell ya it feels great to be doin’ better, at least as far as tonight is concerned. And I’ll tell ya one thing — even if you’re down you still gotta put on the brave face and bring the old kezazz. ”

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix, 9.2) is one of the most interesting creep-outs I’ve come across in quite some time. Please try to see it this coming weekend as I’d love to hear some reactions.

As I mentioned in my 8.27 review, I made a decision to more or less blow off the “what’s really going on here?” aspect and process it through the filter of my own push-pull feelings about my parents and my upbringing, and those little flashes of high-school trauma and heartache that have never really gone away.

The film basically conveys a feeling of being awash in a flood of suppressed memories that won’t quit lapping against your pilings. You might be unsure what to make of it. You might hate it or find it fascinating or somewhere in between, but it’s certainly not a trifle. I think that “psychological horror film” is an overly reductive way to describe it.

You’ve probably read that Rodgers & Hammerstein‘s Oklahoma! figures prominently in the film’s second half. Near the end a song called “Lonely Room“, sung by the Jud Fry character in the original 1943 production but cut from the 1955 film version, is performed in a surreal high-school production of the play. I had never heard it before seeing Kaufman’s film a few days ago. “Lonely Room” was restored for the 1980 and 1998 Broadway and London stage revivals of “Oklahoma!“.

The original Broadway production opened on 3.31.43 at the St. James Theatre.

Everyone knows “Morning Joe” Scarborough — thoughtful, vaguely left-leaning or at least “independent”, former Republican Congressman, hates Trump. And almost everyone has come to believe that we’ve reached the “Jesus, enough already” stage of the BLM protests in Portland, and that Rick Wilson‘s “woke shitheads” are generally doing more harm than good as far as the Biden-Harris campaign is concerned, etc. Just STFU until election day, and after that feel free to return to the streets and make the same noise.

So this morning Joe tweeted that the Portland chaos has to stop and that local authorities have to show a little authoritarian muscle, and what happened? He was told to “delete your account”, to stop kowtowing to the Trump narrative and to screw his head on correctly.

Is anyone else amused by the possibility that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom**, a ’70s-era ensemble drama, might be at least partly about the making of Barbra Streisand, Jon Peters and Frank Pierson‘s A Star Us Born? On-set snaps of Bradley Cooper closely resemble the way Peters looked back in the day, and it’s been written that costar Alana Haim “may” be playing a Streisand-like figure.

If true, this would fall under the heading of perverse casting, given Cooper’s recent Kris Tapley-endorsed Star Is Born remake. Twitter is certainly buying into the possibility.

Oh, and by the way The Film Stage‘s Jordan Raup reported today that Benny Safdie is playing longtime L.A. City Council member Joel Wachs in PTA’s film.

If — I say “if” — Cooper is indeed portraying young Peters in this Los Angeles-based film, I’d like to think that the inspiration came from three sources. One, JASH’s “Very Animated People” riff on Peters, which posted on YouTube on 8.28.17. Two, Frank Pierson’s “My Battles With Jon and Barbra,” a blow-by-blow account of the making of the ’76 version of A Star Is Born, written in a state of seething anger and resentment. And three, Karina Longworth‘s take on the Star Is Born debacle, “You Must Remember This,” episode #21, posted on 11.4.14.

[VIDEO] Bradley Cooper on the set of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest project (working title: #SoggyBottom) via @accessonline #AccessHollywood pic.twitter.com/258377pvuU

— Nelson Carvajal (@nelsoncarvajal) August 26, 2020

“In African cultures we often refer to loved ones that have passed on as ancestors. Sometimes you are genetically related. Sometimes you are not. I had the privilege of directing scenes of Chad’s character, T’Challa, communicating with the ancestors of Wakanda. We were in Atlanta, in an abandoned warehouse, with bluescreens, and massive movie lights, but Chad’s performance made it feel real. I think it was because from the time that I met him, the ancestors spoke through him. It’s no secret to me now how he was able to skillfully portray some of our most notable ones. I had no doubt that he would live on and continue to bless us with more.

“But it is with a heavy heart and a sense of deep gratitude to have ever been in his presence, that I have to reckon with the fact that Chad is an ancestor now. And I know that he will watch over us, until we meet again.” — from Black Panther director Ryan Coogler’s eulogy for Chadwick Boseman, posted this morning in The Hollywood Reporter.

Tell me this isn’t real. Tell me hinterland battleground voters aren’t this psychotic. (Or that these numbers represent a Republican Convention bump.) Tell me the legend of BLM lunatics hasn’t spread this far. Michael Moore is trying to shake liberals out of complacency, of course, but tell me it’s not much more than that.

“But aside from the 42 percent or so who consistently approve of Trump no matter what he or those around him do, most other Americans will see for themselves whether COVID-19 has evaporated or their economic security has improved this fall. Those are realities that Trump, for all his subterfuge, cannot alter.

“But racial animus is a less tangible and more enduring factor in America’s political fortunes, and it has been a toxic wild card in every modern election.” — from Frank Rich‘s 8.28 Intellligencer column, “Trump Thinks Racism Is His Best Chance.”

I suffered for three and a half hours earlier today. Stress, fatigue, confusion, anger. All in an attempt to mount a towel bar on our bathroom wall. The guy who put this video together (“TheRenderQ“) says it’s a relatively simple process, and would take a half-hour or so. Not if you have a 30 year-old power drill that only runs in reverse, and not if your bathroom ceiling is so old and lumpy that the floor-to-ceiling measurements aren’t equal, and not if the package contains a micro-Allen wrench that doesn’t really fit the fastening screw, etc.

I hate assembling things because stuff always goes wrong, there are always misleading directions (even when you find guidance on YouTube) and there are always unexpected hassles. I almost did it correctly in the end, but not quite. It left me feeling hugely depressed.

I’ve always been pretty good at woodwork (when we owned a home in Venice I built an octagonal jacuzzi cover and a wooden front gate) and I have a nice old toolbox, etc. But I hate instruction pamphlets.