…when you star in one really good film, and then you refuse to even try to star in another one as good for the rest of your life. This. Is. What. Happens.
Diesel costarred in Rob Cohen‘s better-than-decent The Fast and the Furious (’01) and yes, he had a good supporting roles in Boiler Room and Saving Private Ryan. But Find Me Guilty was the peak, and that was 15 years ago.
The other day Paul Schrader posted that photo of his 20-year-old self from the spring of ’67. Given the current mindset of the community of friends and collaborators that he runs with, Schrader felt obliged to disparage the rural-white-kid look that he had at the time.
Facebook: “This is [what] white living in Michigan can make you and there was nobody to say, ‘Man, you’re white'”
As in “man, you’re hopeless…that look on your face, that smug Columbia T-shirt….you need to get out in the world and rumble it up and suffer some hard knocks and see what’s what.” Which all young people need to do.
The under-implication wasn’t just that the Schrader of ’67 needed to learn and grow and mature — the implication was that his Michigan whitebread background was an expression of inherent blindness and perhaps worse. He was a flawed human being because of his skin shade, his family heritage.
Which, of course, is the current view everywhere — white folk are inherently rotten apples unless proved or re-educated otherwise. And so I just posted the following (which no Hollywood liberal-progressive would dare share in a workplace):
Pete Davidson during last night’s “Weekend Update”: “[Masks weren’t a refuge] because everyone can still recognize me from my eyes. When you see someone who looks like he just woke up and hasn’t slept in days, it’s me.”
With these words Davidson, whom I’ve regard as a great, nakedly honest, world-class actor-writer-comedian since catching his performance in The King of Staten Island, acknowledged that he’s not Cary Grant, and that he radiates a basic mood medication-meets-Staten Island strangeness. And so he was encouraged (told) to grow out or otherwise “normalize” his hair for Judd Apatow’s film.
But since King opened, Davidson has been rockin’ a tennis ball, despite the universally accepted maxim that guys with extreme facial features need to modify this with a little hair flow…a little follicle smoothitude.
Davidson seemed to be saying last night that he’ll soon be leaving Saturday Night Live. Presumably so he’ll be free to play supporting oddballs in DC and Marvel films. What he needs to do is star in another King of Staten Island-type feature, but without the stoner friends or the Staten Island backdrop. He needs to play the witty, sexy, unbalanced guy of the 2020s…to play “Pete Davidson” in a long series of real-deal, here-and-now, cultural-state-of-things comedies, romantic and otherwise. He needs to be a new strain of the Woody Allen thing.
PD: “AIDS is just like SNL. It’s still here, except no one has gotten excited about it since the ’90s.”
The film is called Stu, and these are easily the most horrifying photos I’ve seen all day. Mark Wahlberg + tennisball buzz cut + at least 30 if not 35 pounds. (Real + fat suit.) Directed and written by Rosalind Ross, starring Wahlberg, Mel Gibson and Teresa Ruiz, produced by Wahlberg and Jordan Fass, and exec produced by Colleen Camp and Miky Lee.
I went searching for Sam Waterston‘s death eyes in this scene from the director’s cut of Oliver Stone‘s Nixon (’95), and in so doing was reminded of how good this Helms-vs.-Nixon confrontation scene really is. Perfect focused and haunted performances from Anthony Hopkins and especially Waterston — God, he’s so much better at conveying chilly remove than caring and compassion.
The eyes have it at the 9:13 mark.
Robert Connolly‘s The Dry (IFC Films), an Australian mystery thriller, opens today. A huge hit in Australia after opening last January (as of 3.23 it had become the 14th-highest-grossing Australian film of all time) and based on a same-titled 2016 book by Jane Harper, pic costars Eric Bana, Genevieve O’Reilly, Keir O’Donnell and John Polson.
On Oprah Winfrey‘s new doc series “The Me You Can’t See”, Prince Harry says that the death of his late mother, Princess Diana, was essentially caused by unscrupulous media jackals. “The ripple effect of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices ultimately took her life,” he claims.
The predatory media certainly did what it could to make Diana’s life anguished and miserable, and shame on them for that. But as I explained in August 2017, the primary cause of her death was Dodi Fayed, the millionaire asshat whom Diana had been involved with for a few weeks.
Excerpt: “I was working at People when Diana began seeing Fayed in July 1997. Two or three of us were asked to make some calls and prepare a file on the guy. Within three or four hours I’d learned that Fayed was an irresponsible playboy, didn’t pay his bills on occasion, lacked vision and maturity and basically wasn’t a man.
I was startled this morning by a snap of 20-year-old Paul Schrader in the spring of ’67, taken “in a Quonset hut at Iowa’s Writers Workshop.” “Startled” because he was nearly the spitting image of my son Dylan at roughly the same age. Almost the same brown eyes, definitely the same nose and hair. It appears to be a photo of a photo, hence the odd Rubber Soul album cover effect.
How did Anthony Quinn feel when he first saw this poster in ’61 and knew that for the rest of his life certain movie fans would associate him with the idea of seething rage and muskrat teeth? And it’s all imagined by the illustrator. There isn’t a single scene in The Guns of Navarone in which Quinn gets angry at anyone, much less flashes his teeth. During most of the film he plays it steely and sullen. The one exception is an Act Two scene when he pretends to be a coward, moaning and whimpering and crawling around on the floor in front of Nazi captors.
I can’t find the link, but I’m 96% certain that “way back when” I read a print interview with Cher that touched on her relationship with Gregg Allman, and that she told the interviewer that when she and Allman first met sometime in early ’75 “I’d never heard of him.”
The Allman Brothers Band burst onto the rock scene in ’69, and had become stone legends by late ’70. Duane’s motorcycle-accident death (10.29.71) was a huge tragedy. The Eat A Peach album (’72) was huge. They toured all over. Not knowing the Allmans was like not knowing who Elton John or Linda Ronstadt or the Eagles were.
Cher had been rich and famous since the mid ’60s, and living in her Sony and Cher Comedy Hour realm between ’71 and ’74. I’m not 100% sure about the above-referenced quote, but if Cher said it it’s worth contemplating, I think.
I’m not a big pie guy as a rule. I’ll have an occasional slice of pumpkin pie around the holidays, but that’s about it. I nonetheless ordered apple pie a la mode last night at Barney’s Beanery…an idea that hit me out of the blue. The vanilla ice cream was perfect, but I went into…well, you’d have to call it shock when I saw that the pie was covered with melted cheese.
Call me ignorant and naive, but until last night I’d never even heard of cheese-melt apple pie. I knew right away that I couldn’t even think about eating it. Or sampling it. I was gradually persuaded to take a single bite, and I couldn’t really taste the cheese. The sugared apple stuffing was overpowering.
Our waitress informed us that cheese-melt apple pie has been served by Barney’s Beanery since it opened 101 years ago.
Research: “In 1998, a reader of the Los Angeles Times complained that ‘[a column] about cheese and apple pie left me feeling like I live in the twilight zone… I have so far never encountered American friends or acquaintances who even want to try this.” When asked whether he ate pie with cheese in his home state of Mississippi, one chef said: “Oh, God no! They’d put you away in a home.”
“The idea appears to have originated in England, where all sorts of fillings were added to pies. At some point, the 17th-century trend of adding dairy-based sauces to pies morphed into a tradition of topping them with cheese. For instance, in Yorkshire, apple pie was served with Wensleydale, which is likely how the phrase ‘an apple pie without the cheese is like a kiss without the squeeze’ began.
“According to The Mystic Seaport Cookbook: 350 Years of New England Cooking, New England settlers brought the idea behind these Yorkshire pies with them, but instead of Wensleydale, they began using cheddar.”
"I don't know what to do."
A 10-year-old Palestinian girl breaks down while talking to MEE after Israeli air strikes destroyed her neighbour's house, killing 8 children and 2 women#Gaza #Palestine #Israel pic.twitter.com/PWXsS032F5
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) May 15, 2021