Two days ago I wrote that Austin Butler doesn’t look enough like Elvis — at best he’s a young John Travolta. The new trailer suggests that Butler doesn’t have the surly Elvis drawl either. (Kurt Russell‘s Elvis voice was ten times better.) It’s one thing to not resemble Elvis but to sound like him, and another thing to not have the voice but to own a serious look-alike thing, but to come up short on both counts is a huge problem — it really is.

Forget reanimating the actual long-gone Elvis of yore — Butler doesn’t even seem like a good Elvis imitator. He just doesn’t have it.

And yet Baz Luhrman‘s Elvis trailer gets one thing absolutely right — it conveys the effect of Presley’s explosive sexual current and how the wiggles and pelvic thrusts made young girls pant, or at the very least pause.

All this time I’ve been wondering if the Elvis guys (director-writer Luhrman, screenwriters Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner) would be including the “fat Elvis” chapter, or roughly the last three years of his life. Unless the trailer is lying by omission, the apparent answer is “no.”

There is, however, a seriously fat Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker, and he’s wearing one of the best fat suits I’ve ever seen in a film…seriously, hats off. Or do I mean “fats off”?

I can’t seem to identify the fair-haired kid who plays 11 year-old Elvis in Tupelo, but this is almost exactly what Elvis looked like as a tweener. Odd that Luhrmann chose correctly in this realm, and yet totally dropped the ball with the adult-sized version.

This is definitely a sad week for guys associated with the National Lampoon‘s heyday. Three days ago Ivan Reitman, whose first big score came from producing National Lampoon’s Animal House (’78), died in Montecito at age 75. And now P.J. O’Rourke, who served as editor-in-chief of the National Lampoon in the late ’70s and for many decades was one of HE’s favorite satirists and comic essayists, has passed from lung cancer at age 74.

I interviewed O’Rourke in August ’15 to help promote Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, Doug Tirola‘s doc about the NatLamp’s hey-hey. Here’s the mp3.

I’ve been chuckling at the flip, iconoclastic, world-weary smirkings and pot-shots of P.J. O’Rourke since the mid ’70s — a long journey. I can’t think of another rightie libertarian whose stuff I’ve laughed at quite so often. Come to think of it I can’t think of another rightie libertarian whose stuff I’ve laughed at, period.

One way or another I’ve always been a fan of his material. (For the most part.) Mainly, I suppose, because O’Rourke was editor-in-chief at the National Lampoon during that legendary publication’s last decently creative period, or ’78 through ’80, and because I truly worshipped that mag back in the day so there’s a carry-over effect.

O’Rourke is the author of 16 satiric, smart-ass books (including last year’s “The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault) (And I’ll Never Do It Again),” which I haven’t yet read) and is currently a monthly columnist for the Daily Beast.

Two of my favorite O’Rourke books are “Holidays in Hell” and “Modern Manners“. I’ve also always loved the title of “Republican Party Reptile“, or more precisely the illustration of Dwight D. Eisenhower wearing a mohawk (which was dumped when O’Rourke’s publisher explained that relatively few targeted readers knew or cared who Eisenhower was). Honestly? I’ve never read “Republican Party Reptile”. No offense but why would I? I’m a leftie, and in some respects I’m selfish enough as it is.

A trailer for Baz Luhrmann‘s Elvis pops on Thursday — three months before its likely Cannes debut, a bit more than four months before it opens on 6.24. And I’m taking this moment to voice a concern.

Austin Butler is Luhrmann’s Elvis, and ever since this was announced I’ve been wondering why. Because Butler doesn’t look like Elvis. He doesn’t have those surly eyes and lips, I mean, or that vaguely bashful “aw shucks” Memphis rockabilly thing. And he sure as shit isn’t pretty enough.

You have to wonder why Luhrmann didn’t choose someone who could actually be the resuscitated, back-from-the-dead Elvis of the ’50s. There are dozens of spot-on Elvis imitators out there (and a few on YouTube), and a certain portion of these can probably act. Nobody wants to watch a guy who doesn’t quite look or sound like the Real McCoy — they want to watch something close to a dead ringer. So why didn’t Luhrmann find one?

I’ve been worried about Butler ever since he played his big scene as Charles “Tex” Watson in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (“I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s bizness!”). The instant he said that line, I muttered to myself, “Nope…not good enough.”

This Rear Window fan poster was composed by Jonathan Burton. The immediate question, of course, is why does James Stewart‘s L.B. Jeffries, a Greenwich Village-residing photographer with a broken leg and a wealthy, high-society girlfriend (Grace Kelly)…why does Jeffries have a massive bald spot, partially covered by greasy hair strands? Stewart wore his usual toupee in this 1954 classic. Is he half-bald because Burton himself is half-bald? What kind of illustrator does this? And what’s with the jug ears?

Based on a 1959 Tennessee Williams play, the film version of The Night of the Iguana (’64), directed by John Huston, is rather awful, which is to say dreary and stifled. But I’ve always wanted to visit Mismaloya, the small Mexican beach village (just south of Puerto Vallarta) where it was shot. The main stars were Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon. Elizabeth Taylor hung around during most of the filming. Huston wound up buying a home nearby.

People stopped watching films on VHS when DVDs emerged, or sometime in mid ’97. Pretty much everyone had adopted DVDs by the turn of the century, or roughly 21 years ago. (The first DVD players were priced at $799 and up.) And yet a couple of days ago some ornery old codger posted a photo of his Alfred Hitchcock VHS library.

https://apple.news/IKh3Y9WHmQB6oaC-vJDMyjg

22 years ago Javier Bardem played Reinaldo Arenas, a gay Cuban poet, in Julian Schnabel‘s Before Night Falls — a performance that launched his career. This year he portrayed another Cuban in Being The Ricardos — the band leader, conga-player and and TV comedian-producer Desi Arnaz, and the wokesters (including Variety’s Clayton Davis) gave him shit for it.

In response to this bullshit, HE hereby approves of Bardem playing any character from any culture in any part of the world who seems to speak with a Spanish or Mexican or any south-of-the-Border accent. He can play Spanish, Cuban, Argentinian, Chilean…he can play a Columbian immigrant living in the Bronx…he can play cops, drug dealers, heads of state, henpecked husbands from Rio de Jainero, a quadraplegic looking to humanely commit suicide…he can play an auto mechanic from Tijuana, a Venezuelan diplomat based in Washington, D.C., a smooth womanizer from Barcelona, drug dealers, arms dealers, a confused poor guy…he’s free to play anyone and everyone, including the voice of God.

Once upon a time progressive liberals were on the side of brave hearts, humanitarian beliefs, freedom of expression, the first stirrings of post-war beatnik culture, the Marlon Brando acting revolution, Jack Daniels and ginger ale, live and let live, and not intimidating people with terror and sometimes destroying their careers. Back then the Republicans were bringing the terror, not the left. So don’t try to goad me into believing that if Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Huston, Gene Kelly, Jane Wyatt, Richard Conte, Sterling Hayden, Danny Kaye, Paul Henreid, Shepperd Strudwick and the other good soldiers of 1947 were suddenly time-catapulted into 2021…don’t tell me they’d be arm-in-arm with the wokesters.

An excellent dealing scene (John Travolta and Eric Stoltz are a great team) but the dialogue between 2:45 and 2:56 is, like, way out of bounds according to 2021 standards. Even by Quentin Tarantino standards. Flirting with the realm of Joe Rogan’s Planet of the Apes story. The early ’90s were the early ’90s.

Not too long ago the NAACP Image Award guys nominated Awkwafina for an “Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance,” partly for her doing a Black-speak thing. In formal professorial terms, Awkwafina’s crime is/was appropriating or making fun of African American Vernacular English, or AAVE**.

After being slapped around by humorless wokester scolds (particular Women of Color Unite founder Cheryl Bedford) for using a Blaccent for comic effect, Awkwafine has basically said ‘y’all can go fuck yourselves, and Twitter can blow me.”

Awkwafina: “Well, I’ll see you in a few years, Twitter — per my therapist. To my fans, thank you for continuing to love and support someone who wishes they could be a better person for you. I apologize if I ever fell short, in anything I did. You’re in my heart always.

“[But] I am retiring from the ingrown toenail that is Twitter. Not retiring from anything else, even if I wanted to, and I didn’t drunkenly hit someone with a shoehorn and now escaping as a fugitive. Also am available on all other socials that don’t tell you to kill yourself!”

Twitter is a sewer.

** formerly known as Ebonics

“No, dumbass, it’s not in the center. It’s NEVER in the center. I thought you said you knew a thing or two about framing landscape shots. God, are you some kind of fucking Arizona dumbass?”

David Lynch is supposedly playing the snarly, blustery John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans, according to Rodrigo Perez.

What about a relaunching of thirtysomething, only focusing on child-rearing, home-owning Millennials and to some extent Zoomers? If the producers could keep it real and really drill down on the particulars and undercurrents of life among professional-class people attempting to live more or less conventional lives in the early 2020s (like Jett and Cait are doing right now), it might work. The cast would have to be at least 50% non-white, of course, but we’re all accustomed to that enlightened system and embracing of the here-and-now. What does the HE community think? Yes, it should be called thirtysomething…straight, no apologies, un-ironically.

“Late ’80s Yuppie Blues,” posted on 8.22.09:

I always felt that thirtysomething, the zeitgest-reflecting, essential-viewing yuppie series that ran from 9.87 through 5.91, was too sensitive-wimpy.

As honestly written and impressively acted as it often was, the show suffered from an almost oppressive self-examination syndrome — a constant exercise in fault-finding and angst exploration — among its boomer characters and their difficulties in managing and/or growing into adulthood and parenthood. To varying degrees everyone on the show wore a hair shirt, suffered or caused suffering, and was afflicted (if not wracked) with self doubt.

I forget who said “an unexamined life is not worth living” but thirtysomething sure as hell put the wisdom of that statement to the test. The women (Mel Harris, Melanie Mayron, Patricia Wettig, Polly Draper) were constantly fretting and kvetching over some crisis of the spirit, the bedroom, the bankbook or whatever. Always something darkening, taunting or haunting their brow.

And the guys especially (Ken Olin, Timothy Busfield, Peter Horton) — those poor Hebrew rock-pounders, bent and sweating under Pharoah’s lash! — were always being busted, picked apart and de-balled for this and that profound failing.

(l. to r.) Timothy Busfield, Patricia Wettig, Polly Draper, Mel Harris, Ken Olin, Melanie Mayron, Peter Horton.

I hated Harris’s character, Hope (who played Olin’s wife), most of all. I remember being told by a cast member in ’88 that Hope was referred to by others on the show as “mope.” Everyone hated her. I’m certain she brought tens of thousands of watchers down every week. For all I know she may have inspired real-life fights, separations, divorces. (Or maybe people saw her personality as a cautionary tale and tried to be unlike her as much as possible.) Either way she was a huge drag to be around.

I related to what the show was, of course. I began watching just before getting married to my ex-wife Maggie in October 1987. and we both both became fairly devout fans (Maggie wore a gray “thirtysomething” t-shirt that I bought her) until the end of the run, during which time Jett came along in June 1988 and then Dylan in November 1989. It wasn’t a portrait of our marriage in every last respect, but there were certainly echoes.

And it happened during the bulk of our time together (we split up in the fall of ’91) so it became — in my head, at least — a kind-of running commentary on not just our life but all yuppie life in the late Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush years and yaddah-yaddah.

And that’s what we were, all right — 30ish yuppies with kids and two cars living a nice Los Angeles life. We lived in the top half of a house in the West Hollywood hills (with a great view) and then in a nice Spanish home in Venice. We did volunteer work for Michael Dukakis. We took our kids to Gymboree. We threw parties about twice a year, and often flew east to see the parents (or we hosted them in LA). In Venice we had a backyard jacuzzi, a brick patio and an ivy-covered privacy wall.

The clip below contains one of the greatest statements about artists and performers needing to tell it straight and true, and how this and this alone is what saves people. The actor is Dallas Roberts, and the speech lasts between 1:20 and 2:40 — one minute and 20 seconds — and I could watch it each and every day from now until the day I die. And upon these few words hang all the law and the prophecies. The only thing that doesn’t work is Joaquin Phoenix‘s mournful moaning voice, which doesn’t sound at all like Johnny Cash. But other than that…