The pandemic is killing (i.e., has probably permanently killed) London’s Old Vic. I’ve only attended one play there — Peter O’Toole‘s Macbeth in December ’80 — and the odds of my attending another are…well, who knows? But it’s been a going concern since the mid 1800s, and there are damn few theatres with this kind of history, and the idea of this hallowed place shuttering for good because of some dead bats in Wuhan, China is…I don’t know what word to use but “infuriating” isn’t strong enough.

I was in a sluggish, downish mood this morning, and I couldn’t get rolling with the column. And then Faye Dunaway rescued me. In the space of two or three minutes I was smiling, happy. I watched it again twice.

How could Dunaway and director Frank Perry have possibly calculated that audiences (gay guys especially) wouldn’t have relished the camp value? How could they have expected otherwise in the face of such intense Kabuki theatre?

My first viewing of Mommie Dearest was in late August 1981, inside an upper-story screening room within the Paramount building at Columbus Circle. I distinctly recall the gaiety in the elevator after it ended; two or three passengers were cooing and squealing with laughter. It took Paramount marketing a while to realize what was happening. Five or six weeks after the 9.18.81 opening the tongue-in-cheek ads appeared– “The biggest mother of them all.”

I know very little about the actual playing of golf but a little something about what makes a good golf swing. And I certainly know a bad swing when I see one. Great golf swings are meant to be things of beauty. Like ballet or playing a violin or Minnesota Fats shooting the eyes off them balls.

Milestone celebration for 100k deaths?pic.twitter.com/KqSIGizg61

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) May 23, 2020

Jordan Ruimy’s latest critic and filmmaker poll focuses on the best of the aughts. The top ten are (1) Mulholland Drive (David Lynch), (2) There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson), (3) Zodiac (David Fincher), (4) In the Mood For Love (Wong Kar-Wai), (5) No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen), (6) Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron), (7) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry), (8) Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki), (9) Yi Yi: A One and A Two (Edward Yang) and (10) Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola)

HE’s Best of the First Decade (’00 to ’09 — 44 in all): Zodiac, Memento, Traffic, Amores perros, United 93, Children of Men, Adaptation, City of God, The Pianist, The Lives of Others, Brokeback Mountain, Sexy Beast, Avatar, There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, Almost Famous (the “Untitled” DVD director’s cut), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Collateral, Dancer in the Dark, A Serious Man, Girlfight, The Departed, Babel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Ghost World, In the Bedroom, Talk to Her, Bloody Sunday, No Country For Old Men, The Quiet American, Whale Rider, Road to Perdition, Open Range, Touching the Void, Maria Full of Grace, Up In The Air, The Hurt Locker, Million Dollar Baby, The Motorcycle Diaries, An Education, Man on Wire, Revolutionary Road, Che and Volver. (44)

All the best directors are nervy. If you don’t take risks, you can’t be great, and hedging your bets is what mediocrity is all about. Spike Lee rolled the dice in this scene from Summer of Sam, and the all-media crowd I saw it with was all but rolling in the aisles.

It’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback, but I would have chucked the dialogue and implied that some kind of demonic vibration was coming from the black labrador. Using CG to turn his eyes yellow or something in that realm.

I never knew, by the way, that the dog’s voice belongs to John Turturro.

I wasn’t especially interested in seeing Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan‘s Hollywood miniseries (Netflix, currently streaming) as it sounded, to go by reviews, like another exercise in woke historical revisionism.

The series reimagines late ’40s and ’50s Hollywood by eliminating musty taboos and prejudices that were in force 60 or 70 years ago. Hollywood on the planet Tralfamadore. Powerful women players (directors, agents, casting directors), gay guys and people of color occupying significant slots in the power structure plus a Scotty Bowers-like gas station offering sexual services.

Recreating and re-inventing America’s ethnic and sexual history has been in fashion since Hamilton, I reasoned, or over the last five years. Hardly a radical or even interesting idea today. Or so I thought.

Last night I finally watched the first two episodes, and guess what? Hollywood is engrossing, well-written, briskly paced, not predictable and most of the actors get it right. (I was particularly taken with David Corenswet, the lead character.) The wokester fantasyland thing, it turns out, is dramatically liberating. Or it felt that way to me. I intend to watch the remaining five episodes.

The actor playing Rock Hudson, Jake Picking, still isn’t right. (Murphy couldn’t find a so-so actor who at least half-resembles young Hudson?) But the guy playing agent Henry Willson, Jim Parsons, is exactly right in every department. Samara Weaving as extra-ambitious actress Claire Wood has a special blonde spitfire thing going on. This is partly because she’s actually attractive in a 20th Century sense, which is somewhat unusual in this day and age.

Joe Biden has apologized for mouthing a variation on Billy Bob Thornton‘s line from Primary Colors: “I’m blacker than you are. I got some slave in me. I can feel it.”

In a sense Biden was sharing a confident jest about African American identity, as in “c’mon, seriously?” He was also saying with absolute sincerity, “People of color who are on the fence about whether or not to vote for Donald Trump are perhaps a tad whiter than me, not to mention a couple of cards short of a full deck.”

Blackness, he meant, is about more than a matter of skin shade or tribal identity. It’s about absolute gut recognition of The Beast. It means “never ever Trump” because you’re an idiot if you think that America’s Oval Office sociopath is driven by anything deeper than his own narcissistic self-regard.

In a general sense it means knowing in your bones the difference between (a) your real deep-down friends and allies and (b) the posturing phonies who are only interested in using your friendship or political support in order to benefit themselves.

Oh, wait, I forgot…lefties are just as racist as the worst tobacco-chewin’ storefront crackers. Right, Jordan Peele and Bob Strauss? Trumpies, at least, are honest about their racism — you know where they stand — while good liberals hide behind their gates. Or something like that.

Some people are so far down their own rabbit hole that there’s no reaching them.

Among WWII action films of the ’50s and ’60s, Dimitri Tiomkin‘s theme for The Guns of Navarone (’61) is one of the great rousing anthems. But there’s a specific version that accompanies the main-title sequence that’s different from any other (and there are several hokey versions on YouTube). The main difference comes with the very ending of the suite, in which four notes from the primary theme — c-d-e-c — descend in volume and settle into slumber. Budda-BAH-duh, budda-BAH-duh, budda-BAH-duh…

(Apologies for the lopsided iPhone capture.)

Posted this morning by N.Y. Times reporters Lisa Lerer, Jim Rutenberg and Stephanie Saul: “The lawyer for Tara Reade, the former Senate aide who has accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of sexual assault, said Friday that he was no longer representing her, just two weeks after taking her on as a client. The lawyer, Douglas H. Wigdor, has been a leading plaintiff’s attorney of the #MeToo era. His firm is best known for bringing discrimination cases against Fox News — and its former star host Bill O’Reilly — and Harvey Weinstein, and his presence at Ms. Reade’s side gave her claims added legal heft. His announced departure came a day after defense lawyers in California said they were reviewing criminal cases in which Ms. Reade served as an expert witness on domestic violence, concerned that she had misrepresented her educational credentials in court.”

Bill Maher has been sharing one of his chief Donald Trump concerns for about two years now, which is that if he loses the ’20 election he won’t accept it and will call the results “fake” and whatnot. Perhaps he’ll even call for armed bumblefuck insurrection. The election is five and a half months away. Yes, 40% of this poisoned country would actually vote to give this sociopathic gangster another four years in office, even with the delusions and denials and deaths of tens of thousands due to his malignancy.

This chat between author and retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters and CNN’s Anderson Cooper is nearly a month old (4.25). Discovered it this morning.

Boilerplate: “Peters appeared frequently as an analyst on Fox News until March 2018 when he resigned, calling the network a ‘propaganda machine‘ for the Trump administration and accused the network of ‘wittingly harming our system of government for profit.’ On Anderson Cooper 360°, Peters likened Trump’s behavior to sedition.”

I’m breathing some fragrant, automotive-smelling Los Angeles air as we speak, but I’ve watched the new Tenet trailer a couple of times on the phone, and my basic opinion hasn’t changed — a super-handsome mindfuck movie that leans a lot on reverse-motion cinematography. It’ll obviously be quite the diversion, and yes, it should ideally be a theatrical experience with streaming down the road. Debuting at home would be a disappointment all around.