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Eight days ago (Saturday, 4.13) I was trying to figure out ways to reduce the crap and clutter on my decade-old Macbook Pro, which has less RAM than my 2019 laptop and is all gummed up.

I had this dumbshit idea, you see, that erasing the music, photo and video files that were sitting on the laptop would accomplish this task.

Why didn’t I simply say to myself “uhm, wait…if you delete these mp3 items from your Apple music library on this computer all your music files will be wiped off your Cloud-based library…all your songs and albums will be gone from all your devices.”

I’ll tell you why I didn’t say this. It’s because I’m a doofus on tech stuff.

Anyway, I deleted the mp3s and realized the next morning that all the music was indeed absent from my Apple music library. Just under 4000 songs, roughly 1200 album portions. Plus there was a ton of music library stuff from burned CDs and old Napster files from…Jesus, a quarter-century ago.

I was told by a couple of senior Apple reps that there was no easy remedy…that the music might simply be gone for good. Then a Genius Bar guy explained after some study that I could at least download purchased song files from my iTunes app, which I began doing on Wednesday….relief. This simple remedy hadn’t been mentioned by those senior Apple tech adviser bozos. The term “iTunes app” never so much as passed through their lips.

A day later I was cleaning out the same Macbook Pro when I realized that the “deleted” music files were still sitting in my trash bin app. It was simply a matter of selecting “all”, going to “actions” and reinstalling the files in the Apple music depository.

As we speak everything (3819 items) is back on the phone and in the Cloud, of course. And I have the option, of course, of downloading new albums and whatnot from my Apple music Library subscription service.

…because I’d be able to follow it this time with subtitles.. But forking over $20 bills for an Amazon rental feels excessive.

I know what this film basically is — cerebral dialogue, icy vibes, convoluted twist-plotting, more cerebral dialogue. I know this sounds dilletante-ish but I didn’t find my first viewing intriguing enough to pay this much for a re-match…sorry. Get that rental down to $4.99 and we’ll be in business.

The Wiki synopsis is up!

Lunatic race-conscious review…sorry but this woman is a total woke psycho:

@jstoobs Sinners spoiler free review #film #tv #horror #tiktokfilmtvcompetition ♬ original sound – stoobs

“Socially awake,” he contends…Jesus:

@popculturebrain Review: Sinners — there are simply aren't enoughs superlatives to throw at this movie. #sinners #michaelbjordan #ryancoogler #moviereview #tiktokfilmtvcompetition #movies ♬ original sound – Alex | Pop Culture Brain

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HE deeply mourns the death of actor Nicky Katt, who only made it to age 54 so some ill wind or unlucky incident took him down. No cause of death has been reported. I’m very sorry.

Rest assured that Katt’s acclaimed performance as “Stacy the low-rent hitman” in Steven Soderbergh;’s The Limey (’99) will live forever in the annals of cinema.

I know nothing but my wild guess is that Katt’s unfortunate failure to match, must less top, this one great performance over the last 26 years might have been a factor in his demise. I’m guessing that the poor guy died of a broken heart. He was 28 or 29 when The Limey was filmed.

All screen villains are perverse or flamboyant in one way or another, but it’s fairly rare to run into one with with a truly twisted or offbeat attitude. In an off-handed, no-big-deal, between-the-lines sort of way, I mean. Not a “comedic” figure, but a dour, compromised soul whose bizarre manner, obsessions and quirks makes him/her a bit laughable or at least amusing to some extent.

Stacy was one such figure. Fairly sullen and hostile and always ready to clip someone if the money is right, but there was something about his smart-ass manner that suggested a less-than-fully-malicious fellow. Something vaguely nihilistic in a laid-back way.

About halfway through The Limey Katt delivered an improvised bad-attitude riff while he and Joe Dallesandro watched a TV show being shot. “Why don’t they make shows about people’s daily lives?,” Katt/Stacy said. “That you’d be interested in watching, y’know? Sick Old Man or Skinny Little Weakling. Big Fat Guy…wouldn’t you watch a show called Big Fat Guy? I’d watch that fucking show.”

Katt was lucky that The Limey was shot in ’98 or ’99 because today you’re not allowed to say “big fat guy” in a movie as this would constitute fat-shaming, and anyone deemed guilty of writing or saying this would be eternally banished from the film industry and forced to move to somewhere in the hinterland to work in fast food.

Jonathan Tropper‘s Your Friends and Neighbors is, first and foremost, darkly comedic in a dry, deadpan sort of way…a sardonic, amoral, noir-inflected, upper-middle-class, nine-episode Apple series about…well, thievery and nihilism and living on the existential edge of self-destruction, or something like that.

The flush life of a hedge-fund guy (Jon Hamm‘s “Coop”) swiftly falls apart after being canned by his shithead boss (Corbin Bernsen), and then it gets a bit gloomier. And then worse once Coop decides to become John Robie as a way to maintain financial stability.

And Tropper’s dialgoue is really, really delicious. During the first significant conversation scene (Coop and Olivia Munn‘s “Sam” at a bar) I sat up in my chair and went “wow…the repartee is as good in a wise-but-fatigued 2025 way as Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck‘s initial ping-pong seduction scene in Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity.

You just have to figure a way to not judge Coop because he doesn’t feel all that badly about becoming a jewel thief. His attitude is basically “they won’t miss it…they’re filthy rich as well as, no offense, assholes, and I should know because I’m an asshole too, or at least I was before losing my job.”

The entire first episode sits below.

My current preferences for the ’28 Democratic race are Rahm Emanuel (tough, brilliant, street-fighter), Gavin Newsom (tap-dancing former wokey) and Pete Buttigeig (smartest and most compassionate of them all).

Amanpour and Company‘s Walter Isaacson: “A lot of people, including a lot of Democrats, have said that the Democratic brand has become somewhat toxic. Is there some truth to that, and if so, why?”

Rahm Emanuel: “I would take the word ‘somewhat’ out. [The brand] is toxic. No caveats or disclaimers. There are two words that define the Democratic party for the public — ‘weak‘ and ‘woke.’ And neither one is favorable, and that’s been a process of the Democrats being seen as weak in a time in which people prefer strength, and woke being not just woke on the cultural left issues but focused almost entirely [on that] and drowning out everything else you want to say.”

In a cryptic conversation with Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), “Control” (Cyril Cusack) brings up Hans-Dieter Mundt (Peter van Eyck), head of East German intelligence.

Control: “And how do you feel about him?”
Leamas: “Feel?”
Control: “Yes.”
Leamas: “He’s a bastard.”
Control: “Quite.”

Another fascinating Cusack riff:

Control: “Fiedler, my dear Alec, is the lynchpin of our plan. Fiedler’s the only man who’s a match for Mundt, and, uhm… he hates his guts. Fiedler’s a Jew, of course, and Mundt’s quite the other thing.”

I’ve watched The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (’65) several times. Mainly for Oswald Morris’s black-and-white cinematography (the Criterion Bluray is wonderfully rendered in this respect) and especially for the pleasures of Oskar Werner’s performance as the brilliant Fiedler.

Richard Burton is good, of course, but playing the dour, sardonic and scowling Leamas requires him to be relentlessly draining. (He’s such a pill that he even turns down Werner’s offer of free recreational sex with an East German woman.) I actually hate that moment when Burton laughs at Claire Bloom when she confesses to being a devoted commie. She may be naive but at least she deeply cares, and Burton can only snicker at her conviction.

Five years ago I posted about the very first California drive-in theatre — the old Pico Drive-In (10860 Pico Blvd., SE corner of Pico and Westwood Blvds., 1934-1944)

Last night’s viewing of White Heat (‘49) reminded me of the second such operation — the San-Val Drive-In Theatre (2720 Winona Ave. Burbank, 1938-1973).

Newspapers insisted on using a hyphen between San and Val; management disagreed. HE is siding with the news guys.

There’s an Act One scene in which James Cagney‘s Cody Jarrett, Virginia Mayo‘s Verna Jarrett and Margaret Wycherly‘s Ma Jarrett pull into the San-Val to escape a pursuing police car.

And man, the San-Val looks great! — towering big screen, blazing neon signage, car-hops with snazzy outfits.

There are just two…make that three curiosities.

The San-Val’s double feature (right on the marquee) is South of St. Louis (Joel McCrea, Alexis Smith, Zachary Scott, Dorothy Malone) and Siren of Atlantis (Maria Montez, Jean-Pierre Aumont), except the film on the big screen is Task Force (Gary Cooper, Jane Wyman, Walter Brennan).

Curiosity #2 is the fact that South of St. Louis opened on 3.6.49, and White Heat didn’t begin principal photography until 5.5.49…two months later. What are the odds that South of St. Louis played for over two months at the San-Val? I’m presuming White Heat‘s second-unit team shot the San-Val footage soon after the March ’49 debut.

Curiosity #3 is that White Heat opened on 9.2.49 while Task Force didn’t open commercially until 9.30.49. Pissed-off moviegoer: “Hey, I’ve seen a trailer for Task Force…it’s not opening for another month. How come the Jarrett’s are watching it way before the rest of us?”

I’ve repeatedly made it clear that I pretty much despise the British actors who’ve been hired by director Sam Mendes to play Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — Paul “hawknose” Mescal, Joseph Quinn and Barry Keohgan, respectively — in his quartet of Beatle biopics.

Only the handsome Harris Dickinson, who will play John Lennon, gets an HE stamp of approval. This despite his towering over Mescal when the actual Lennon and McCartney were both 5’10”.

This may sound disturbing to wokeys and dopeys, but early to mid ’60s pop groups had to have reasonably good-looking members to attract the girls — that was the standard set by the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, etc.

Three of the Beatles (McCartney, Harrison, Lennon) were generally regarded as good-looking and then some, which, like it or not, was a key to the group’s popularity. (Ringo’s puppy-dog charm easily overcame his huge honker.)

Keohgan may or may not be able to overcome his evil-warlock features in an attempt to revive that old Ringo spirit, but the hard fact of the matter is that Mescal and Quinn simply aren’t fetching…certainly not in the darkly handsome way that McCartney and Harrison were perceived to be in the early ’60s. They’re a bit funny looking, and during the LBJ administration funny-looking guys weren’t allowed to be pop stars.

Just ask the fellows who made up The Association.

Posted on 9.23.22:

Mid ’60s pop groups had to have reasonably good-looking members — that was the reality of the day. And then along came The Association — a six member group that had two handsome guys and four with the oddest, most homely-looking faces in pop-music history.

The dorkiest was Terry Kirkman, who could have been cast as a college-aged serial killer. Next came Larry Ramos (died in 2014 at age 72), a chubby guy who looked like a typical member of an A.V. Squad. The thick-featured Brian Cole (who passed in ’72 at age 30) looked like a bouncer or a rugby player. Russ Giguere was semi-presentable but couldn’t pass the dishy-pop-star test — too geeky, granny glasses, thin moustache.

Jim Yester and Ted Bluechel were the only ones you could honestly call “good looking.”

Yes, the “they have to be cute” thing quickly went away when the Rolling Stones, the Byrds and The Who became popular, but not in ’64 and ’65 when the Beatles were just catching on. Plus the Beatles were clearly in their mid 20s while there’s no dodging the fact that Mescal, Dickinson, Quinn and Keoghan are 30somethings.

I realize that Mescal is popular with gay guys, but to me he’s Satan’s emissary. His hawk nose is actually a lot like the actual Lennon’s nose, but the McCartney resemblance factor is off the charts wrong/bad. Plus Mescal’s pointy chin resembles that of John Barrymore’s Mr. Hyde.

Since the CinemaCon appearance of the Mendes quartet I’ve developed a new hate thing for Quinn, who will completely fail to convince anyone that he’s George Harrison or is even half-channeling him. The notion that Quinn, who was okay in A Quiet Place: Day One but generically repulsive in Gladiator II, could “be” Harrison is nothing short of ridiculous.

…for allowing me to step up and rent this Venice Film Festival crib….all paid for and locked down…myself + Jordan Ruimy…just south of Campo Santa Margherita, and close to a vaporetto stop…Monday, 8.25 through Sunday, 9.7.

Unless a major hair-and-beard coloring job is in the offing, we may as well accept the fact that Matt Damon‘s Odysseus is going to look a bit moondoggy-ish in Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey (Universal, 7.17.26). But give Damon credit, at least, for having gotten himself into shape. Look at those arms! Those flat abs!

Welcome to the world of Valerie Van Galder, a 25-year veteran of big-studio publicity and marketing (a total hotshot in her day) and currently a mental health advocate. A resident of one of L.A.’s westside communities, Van Galder recently posted an audio-visual Facebook essay that caught my eye.

VVG basically said that while tourists see only the hotels, freeways, billboards, malls and gas stations, native Los Angelenos see some kind of mellow Garden of Gethsamene…a community built upon nourishing vibes and gentle fragrances, delicious ethnic food, winding two-lane blacktops in the hills, sea air and large swaying eucualyptus trees.

What she meant was that if you live in an affluent nabe and you make a concerted effort to mentally block out all the ugly stuff, Los Angeles can “seem” like a kind of heavenly, laid-back, coast-of-Italy Neverland, or at least something in the vein of Montecito or Mendocino or San Juan Capistrano.

Van Galder blocked and erased my reply so I can’t repeat it verbatim, but I basically said that L.A. can feel like a fairly nice place to hang if you keep to the flush zip codes (Beverly Hills & Bel Air, north of Montana, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Hollywood Hills, Hancock Park, Malibu hills, Trancas beaches, the various canyons, the walk streets of Venice) and tell yourself that the ugly aspects needn’t interfere with your spiritual head space, but the ugly, over-commercialized, heavily-congested, appalling and thoroughly blighted parts of town prevail above all.

Compared to so many European cities I could name, Los Angeles — not counting the above-named exceptions — is a sprawling, vaguely smelly, butt-ugly metropolis. Driving on Pacific Coast Highway alone is enough to trigger a tailspin depression.

L.A. was once was a moderately beautiful town…so much flora and nectar and sparkling clear vistas back in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s…Robert Towne used to tell me all about it.

Here was Van Galder’s reply:

Posted on 12.5.24:

Posted on 10.17.06:

The Hollywood Reporter ran Nicole Sperling‘s nicely sculpted profile of Columbia TriStar marketing group president Valerie Van Galder yesterday…fine. I’ve always respected Van Galder’s aesthetic sense. I really admired that flower-pot concept in the Adaptation one-sheet that she worked on. I remember wanting to do an article on the various Adaptation poster concepts that she’d considered — she loved the film and was very enthused about getting the art just right — but the piece gradually died for some reason. Half me, half her.

I also remember Van Galder wearing one of those cat-in-the-hat hats in front of Park City’s Egyptian theatre in ’96 as I waited to scrounge a ticket for a public showing of Looking for Richard. Van Galder was a Fox Searchlight publicist and, let’s be honest, not exactly a friend. It was my choice to wait and hope — Valerie made no promises — but I stood in increasingly frigid cold for 45 minutes only to be told no-dice. It was nothing in the grand scheme and I naturally moved on, but on some residual level whenever I think of the talented and much-admired Val I think of the total absence of sensation in my toes that night, and the way snow was coming down so heavy and pretty, and how big Sundance kahuna Robert Redford and director-star Al Pacino drove up and jumped out of an SUV about ten minutes after the show was supposed to begin.

Posted on 10.15.06:

The sum effect of coverage of Marie-Antoinette in Vanity Fair, Vogue and the New Yorker along with the Kitson Boutique window treatments, wild posting and pink Converse sneakers…all of that…is “penetrating the culture,” Columbia marketing president Valerie Van Galder has told Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson.

“In just the way that Sofia didn’t treat [the story of Marie Antoinette] as a straight biopic, we’re taking a unique approach,” Van Galder explains. “We’re having fun with the marketing. The movie has captured people’s imagination.”

Surely Van Galder doesn’t mean the movie itself — which I’ve over-campaigned against, I realize — has done the capturing. What she means, I think, is that the idea of Sofia Coppola putting pink converse sneakers into a shot of Marie Antoinette’s closet (or against some other backdrop) has caught on within the culture of female movie journalists, columnists and magazine editors along with, I suppose, some of their male gay counterparts. Kind of a “you go, girl” thing.

Hollywood Bytes columnist Elizabeth Snead has written that “the modern pink footwear creates a funny, girly, rebellious moment in a frothy film about a young girl who just wants to flirt, shop and party in 18th century France. And the sneaks also work with the film’s punky pink ads and the pink-themed court parties, pink champagne, pink wigs, and pink pastries.

“More importantly, the shoes are also a bright pink emblem of Sofia’s creative and independent spirit.”

Snead reports in the same column that “someone asked Coppola about the pink tennis shoes and she explained that it was her brother Roman, her second assistant director on the film, who put them in the shot. Dunst stayed comfortable wearing pink Converse tennis shoes under her royal gowns during filming. You never see them on [her] but there is a funny shot of the tennis shoes that remains in the film.”