A couple of months ago there was an odd kerfuffle about the armpits of Wonder Woman‘s Gal Gadot having been shaved. Feminists actually felt it was some kind of betrayal or undermining of the Wonder Woman metaphor. But when have hairy armpits of any heroic movie figure ever been shown? 50-plus years ago some rolled their eyes over Jeffrey Hunter’s armpits having been shaved for his performance as Yeshua in Nicholas Ray‘s King of Kings.
I apologize for not catching Wonder Woman yesterday. I was all set to attend a 4:30 pm showing at the Savoy multiplex (Via Bergamo, 25, 00198) but the day fell apart when I was called on the carpet for (a) having exhibited bad taste in the choice of a former girlfriend and (b) more specifically because I foolishly failed to delete photos of same from one of my laptops. I’ll try again today. But in the meantime, now that a fair portion of HE community has seen Wonder Woman, the consensus is that it’s….what, pretty good but not great? That’s what I’m getting from over here.
Donald Trump‘s announcement of withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord is, of course, appalling and destructive. Time and again, day after mind-blowing day, the man reveals his ongoing bestiality and his small, miserable focus on shoring up support among the American dumbshit class.
I feel a certain amount of shame, yes, that I come from a country stupid enough to elect a man like Trump to the highest office in the land, even as I know that this latest horror is temporary (i.e., a four-year blip) in the grand scheme of things.
At the very least Trump will be gone by January 2021, but the damage to the planet, not to mention the United States’ standing as a leading, well-engaged player on the world stage, will not be marginal. It will be, in fact, substantial.
Trump is a stone villain — a manifestly despicable human being whose arrogant interests and worldviews are lowering the bar into the mud. Each and every day we need to remind ourselves who voted for this malignant asshole, and act accordingly on behalf of common-sense humanity.
From Todd Stern‘s 6.1 opinion piece in the Washington Post, “Trump Just Betrayed The World“: “Trump’s decision will be seen as…self-centered, callous, hollow, cruel. The ravages of climate change have been on display in recent years in the superstorms, floods, rising sea levels, droughts, fires and deadly heat waves that will only get worse as the carbon index mounts. Vulnerable countries will look at the United States, the richest power on Earth, the largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases, and think — even if they do not say — how dare you?”
From 6.1 N.Y. Times editorial, “Our Disgraceful Exit From the Paris Accord“: “Perhaps most astonishing of all, a chief executive who touts himself as a shrewd businessman, and who ran on a promise of jobs for the middle class and making America great again, seems blind to the damage this will do to America’s own economic interests. The world’s gradual transition from fossil fuels has opened up a huge global market, estimated to be $6 trillion by 2030, for renewable fuels like wind and solar, for electric cars, for advanced batteries and other technologies.”
I should be hunkering down and drilling into something or other, but right now things are a little too blissful with the summerish Roman weather, the new apartment and fresh pasta cooking on the stove, etc. I’ll be catching Wonder Woman tomorrow afternoon at the Cityplex Trianon (Via Muzio Scevola, 99, 00181 Roma), and I’m telling you right now it’d better be good. It’s now 7:45 pm and cooling down — heading outside for a longish walk.
Don’t kid yourself, Chloe Moretz — the basic premise of Red Shoes and the 7 Dwarfs is that the classic Snow White image would be severely compromised if she turned out to be corpulent. The third act will deliver the standard bromide about true beauty lying within, I’m sure, but look at the trailer, for God’s sake. The dorky dwarves under the bed nearly faint when rail-thin Snow undresses, and then moan with displeasure when it turns out her slim bod is illusory. Is the trailer saying that fat is ugly? No — that it’s disappointing, at least initially. And yet the p.c., Moretz-endorsed line is that traditional physical allure is meaningless. Sure thing.
Talk to any comedian — there’s no such thing as “a joke.” There’s only slap-in-the-face reality and the clever spinning of some painful, humiliating experience by way of wit, audacity and imagination. Jokes are always about ghastly things of one kind or another, and in this light there’s no such thing as going “too far,” even in a political satirical sense. I feel that Kathy Griffin‘s severed Trump head appropriately addressed one of the most malevolent gargoyles in American governmental history in tit-for-tat terms. It expressed what I feel about that bloated orange pig, and it provided a satisfying emotional fantasy. But why is dead Trump bleeding from the scalp?
What I’m hearing are blue-state actors doing exaggerated yeehaw accents, perhaps as some kind of underlying roundabout commentary about the sickening, world-threatening stupidity of Trump voters. Or maybe not. I’m also wondering if director Steven Soderbergh told the principal male cast members (Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig) to bulk up with Trump voter food. These guys look fairly beefy, and Tatum looks fucking fat. I only know one thing, which is that all Trump voters must hang. Okay, not “hang” but the more pain and suffering these assholes have to cope with, the better.
Wiki boilerplate: “Trying to reverse a family curse, the Logan siblings — Jimmy (Tatum), Mellie (Riley Keough) and Clyde (Driver) — try to execute an elaborate robbery during the legendary Coca-Cola 600 race at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina during Memorial Day weekend.”
There’s a soul-soothing atmosphere of quiet throughout the Dorsoduro and San Croce districts after dark. No scooters, no sirens, no thumping bass tones emanating from clubs, no half-bombed 20something women shrieking with laughter…just the barely-there sound of bay water lapping at pier pilings. There are many places, I’m sure, that are just as quiet when the sun goes down. But there are very few where you can’t hear hints of the far-away hum of civilization, where traces of the usual nighttime rumble aren’t at least faintly audible. I can sit at home in West Hollywood and feel cool and collected, but I’ll always hear the occasional helicopter or motorcycle whine or subwoofer speakers thumping in someone’s car or louche party animals roaming nearby. Venice is dead-mouse quiet, especially after 10 pm or thereabouts. You can hear a pin drop.
Last night we tried some of the home-made pasta sold by this guy, and there’s a huge difference between it and the usual stuff you buy at Pavillions.
Why grow your hair long if you’re just going to pull it back with a rubber band or velvet strap of some kind? If your hair is long, you need to rock that shit. Because man-buns are like…why? It’s like you were late for some black-tie thing and didn’t have time to style your Legends of the Fall hair or at least comb it out, and so you just tied it back and ran out of the door. In the spirit of “shit or get off the pot”, you need to either own your long hair or be a shorter-length guy. I’m talking to you, Emmanuel Lubezski. Because (a) there isn’t much difference between a man-bun, slicked-back moderate length hair and an Aaron Paul tennis-ball thing, and (b) man buns do nothing for the wearer. They make you look “hip” on a certain level, but also louche and indecisive and a bit scraggly. Joaquin Phoenix was wearing a man bun at the Cannes Film Festival awards last night. This plus wearing Converse lace-ups to the ceremony (what potential award-winner comes to Cannes without a pair of uptown shoes?) plus the pot belly thing….honestly, what a douche.
Last night’s Palme d’Or win by Ruben Ostlund’s The Square, a dry, sharply-ordered satire of political correctness in Sweden (which I called “a serving of deft, just-right comic absurdity”), was fully deserved. I would have voted for Andrey Zvagintsev‘s Loveless, a brilliant missing-child melodrama that won high praise from nearly every Cannes-visiting critic, but it only managed a third place showing — i.e., the Jury Prize. This isn’t a tragedy (it was celebrated), but it wasn’t appropriate either. I blame the usual political agendas.
The Square director Ruben Ostlund at the conclusion of last night’s Cannes Film Festival awards ceremony.
The 2014 Cannes jury shafted Zvyaginstev’s Leviathan with a piddly screenwriting award, and now another Cannes jury has delivered a similar message. Loveless should have at least won the Grand Prix, but that award went to Robin Campillo‘s BPM (Beats Per Minute), a impassioned, seriously didactic period film (i.e., early ’90s) about Parisian ACT UP members battling bureaucratic indifference and/or foot-dragging in the battle against AIDS.
BPM is a commendable (i.e., thumbs up but less-than-great) film, but the Grand Prix win, trust me, was largely about jury president Pedro Almodovar pushing a film with a progressive gay agenda. Pedro wanted this and the jurors went along.
I’m also blaming the inappropriate Jury Prize win for the Zvyaginstev on the feelies — i.e., jury members who wanted to honor films that supplied up vibes and socially constructive messaging, which the gloomy Zvyagintsev film couldn’t quite accommodate. I don’t know for a stone fact that Will Smith was a prominent voice among the feelies, but how could I not at least suspect this? Look at the movies he’s chosen to do over the last 20-plus years…good God.
The impetus for handing the Best Director prize to The Beguiled‘s Sofia Coppola was, I’m guessing, almost entirely a progressive-female-agenda thing. (I don’t know that jury member Jessica Chastain was pushing for this, but it would have been odd if she’d been neutral…c’mon.) The Coppola trophy was almost certainly inspired by the fact that the last time a Cannes jury gave their Best Director trophy to a woman was in 1961, when Soviet filmmaker Yuliya Solntseva won for The Chronicle of Flaming Years.
I’m saying all this because The Beguiled is far from brilliant or audacious. It’s just a slightly better-than-decent remake of Don Siegel‘s 1971 original — nothing more than that.
We were loaded down with bags, and decided on the spur that shelling out 40 euros for a water-taxi to our rental (2290 Fondamente de L’Arzere) might not be a bad idea. Our landlady had told us, I mean, that it would cost 40 euros, but she was wrong. The thugs running the water taxi service told us (a) the price is 60 euros and (b) they would only drop us off at the San Basilio vaporetto stop. It was all I could do to restrain myself from taking a poke. We refused and humped it over on foot. Not easy when you’re lugging all that weight, but I felt good for not submitting. Hundreds of baaahing tourists go along with this extortion every day but not people of character and backbone.
The first Allman Brothers album hit on 11.4.69, and right away you had to give it up for vocalist and keyboard player Gregg Allman, who at age 22 had a beautiful bluesy, achey, gin-guzzly, gravel-gut voice that made him sound like some 48 year-old, self-abusing guy who’d lived through more than his share of hard times. That voice carried him for the rest of Allman’s life, and peace be to his soul for that. For that voice, along with brother Duane’s inspired guitar playing and the churning, pumping sound of the band itself, gave birth to Southern rock. As it must to all men death came yesterday to Greg Allman. He might have lived another 15 or 20 years had it not been for years and years of alcohol abuse, which of course led to liver cancer. All party animals pay the price in the end. But if the final measure is “quality, not quantity,” Gregg Allman lived a rich, abundant, at times ecstatic life. Cheers, respect, condolences, salute.