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I was heartened by the Biden-Harris inauguration, of course, but the most encouraging interlude of the entire day was the initial press briefing by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki — a forum for information, actual facts as opposed to alternative facts, respectful, intelligent, wonky, a bit boring, honest as far as it went, non-combative. In short it was the first White House press briefing in four years that wasn’t a farce or a forehead-slapper or some kind of shit show. Very comforting.

Due respect to producer Lynda Obst and exec producer Michelle Pfeiffer, but I’m having trouble remembering much about Michael Hoffman‘s One Fine Day. I didn’t dislike it, but it was kind of a “uh-huh, okay” by way of a chaotic romcom.

It focused on two single parents (George Clooney, Michelle Pfeiffer) struggling to juggle work and kid chores as they slowly (half-heartedly?) fall in love.

The 1996 Fox release made $46 million domestic, which was considered disappointing. Raising kids can be exhausting, at times even soul-draining…we all know this. That’s pretty much all the film conveyed. It was okay, I felt, but it got killed critically.

The best thing about One Fine Day is the final scene. Just as romantic sparks are about to manifest, Clooney and Pfeiffer fall asleep on the couch. That’s single parenting!

I showed One Fine Day at my Woodland Hills-based film series, called “Hot Shot Movies.” Obst graciously agreed to drop by for a post-screening q & a.

8 year-old Jett and 7 year-old Dylan attended also. They were fidgeting and fighting during the Obst appearance and embarrassing me to all to hell. Obst saved the day by speaking to them directly over the mike with the whole crowd listening — “Don’t do this when we’re talking, boys…be respectful.” And they shut right up! Hail Lynda!

If I were Joe I would install an anti-Trump, JFK-nostalgia color scheme in the Oval Office — subdued olive-green curtains, subdued grayish carpet with a hint of sea-green, off-white matching couches. A color scheme that (a) soothes and assures and (b) announces that Trump has been totally erased and heave-ho’ed. That means no effing gold.

People‘s Ale Russian is reporting that Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas have concluded that their relationship (aka “Benana”) was “a trip to the moon on gossamer wings.” That’s Cole Porter-ese for splitsville.

Their affair kicked in while costarring in Adrian Lyne‘s Deep Water, an erotic thriller that began shooting in New Orleans on 11.4.19. So it lasted roughly a year, perhaps a little more.

“Source” to Russian: “Ben is no longer dating Ana. She broke it off. Their relationship was complicated.” HE translation: They were fighting tooth and nail. Kicker: “Ana doesn’t want to be Los Angeles-based and Ben obviously has to since his kids live in Los Angeles.”

Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas.

HE completely and wholeheartedly guarantees that “Ana doesn’t want to settle in Los Angeles” was not a big factor in the breakup. At most it was an “also” factor. I’m guessing it had something to do with Ben’s demons (“Ben continues to want to work on himself”), and a little something to do with Ana’s Cuban blood, which can run suddenly hot and then cold. You know that expression “crazy Cubans”?

The People story reports that de Armas moved into Affleck’s Los Angeles home last August, or roughly five months ago. Plus “a source previously confirmed to People she [had] placed her Venice, California, home on the market.”

Ana wouldn’t have done that if she wasn’t totally sold on Benana. Most prudent people in a newish relationsbip would take things one step at a time and keep the Venice home in case things don’t work out, But she’s Cuban so she went in whole hog.

I adore you, you’re perfect, we’re soulmates, daily orgasms, life is heavenly, I’ll move in and we’ll be together for years…nope! Changed my mind after four or five months of cohabitation.

How will the bust-up affect Affleck’s Best Actor campaign for his performance in The Way Back? Not to sound crass or cynical but I think people will now feel sorry for the guy to some extent. Sympathy votes! The reverse would be true if he had dumped Ana, but she gave him his walking papers. Or at least, that’s what they’re saying.

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Great gushing cloudbursts are few and far between in my neck of the woods. I’m not talking about simple drenchings, which happen every so often — I’m talking cats and dogs, the wild Parasite rainstorm, monsoon-level, The Rains of Ranchipur and how this never happens in WeHo.

When you get right down to it I’ve experienced only five or six gully washers over the last 20 or 30 years, and almost all of them overseas. There was one serious soaking in Manhattan in the spring of ’81, when I was living on Bank Street. And a major cloudburst in Las Vegas back in the ’90s. But I wouldn’t describe either as super-exceptional.

The greatest urban rainstorm happened in Paris in the summer of ’03. Dylan I were living on a hilly street in southwest Montmartre — 23 rue Tourlaque. It was coming down so hard that the gutters were swamped with charging rapids. And the cacophony (trillions of water bullets clattering on hundreds of clay-tile rooftops) was magnificent. And the crackling thunder before it started. The wrath of an angry Old Testament God from a Cecil B. DeMille film.

The most exciting deluge in a forest primeval setting happened about 10 years later, in Vietnam. In a jungle-like area not far from the Mausoleum of Emperor Minh Mang, just south of Hue. We took shelter inside a kind of makeshift cafe — open air, plastic tables and chairs, a slanted wood-frame roof covered with palm fronds and banana leaves. The sheer energy of the downpour plus the overwhelming symphony of sound (half raging waterfall, half Noah’s Ark flood waters)…must have lasted a good 15 or 20 minutes.

23 rue Tourlaque, Paris.

That madman shot of Armie Hammer is like that 1969 Life magazine photo of Charles Manson. It’s going to appear again and again, and is obviously going to make things worse for the poor guy. Right now he’s being sliced and diced by social media carnivores. In a text he called himself a sexual “cannibal” — obviously an allusion to carniverous cunnilingus. He’s apparently a “dominant”, and yes, his [allegedly] stated appetites sound like the voltage was turned up too high. So yeah, he’s on the pervy side. But haven’t his affairs and assignations been consensual? What did he do to deserve to be ripped apart like an impala being disembowled by wild dogs? Who’s behind this? What’s the motive?

Regina King‘s One Night in Miami, which I saw and reviewed four months ago, is now streaming on Amazon Prime. I haven’t re-watched it, but it’s best to trust your initial reaction. Here’s what I said:

Variety award-season columnist Clayton Davis was apparently floating on a cloud while writing his review of Regina King‘s One Night In Miami, calling it “the first solid Oscar contender to drop in the fall festival circuit.”

All right, let’s calm down. Yes, this is a respectable, well-acted film in a disciplined and concentrated sort of way. But as interesting as it is and as admired as King may be for doing a better-than-decent job, One Night in Miami is basically a stage play and that shit only goes so far.

I don’t know how to explain it in so many words, but I somehow expected that a film about a February 1964 meeting between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke in a Miami hotel room would amount to something more than what this movie conveys.

Playwright Kemp Powers has adapted his 2013 play about African American identity in the ’60s.The result is not great or brilliant, but it’s good enough in terms of observational fibre and social relevance, or at least the second half is. But the fact that it was directed by King doesn’t make it any more or less than what it actually is.

And for a film that largely (65% or 70%) takes place in a single hotel room, it visually underwhelms. Tami Reiker‘s cinematography doesn’t match the high water marks of Boris Kaufman‘s one-room lensing of 12 Angry Men or Glen MacWilliams‘ cinematography for Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.

Denzel Washington’s titular performance in Spike Lee‘s Malcolm X was a tougher and more resolute dude than Kingsley Ben-Adir‘s version. Malcolm won’t stop beating up on poor Sam Cooke, and he seems weak when he asks Cassius (“Cass”) to join him in breaking with Elijah Muhammad. And he weeps! Just not the solemn, heroic figure that I’ve been reading about all these years. And wasn’t he wearing that carefully trimmed Van Dyke beard in ‘64?

Good moment: When Cooke criticizes Malcolm for reacting in a cold, racially dismissive way when JFK was murdered (“The chickens coming home to roost”). Cooke says his mother cried over the news, and Clay says his momma cried too.

Leslie Odom, Jr. is quite good as Cooke, but I didn’t believe an early scene at the Copacabana in which the snooty white clientele reacts to Cooke’s singing with derision and rudeness. In ’64 Cook was known all over as a major-league crooner who had released a cavalcade of hits going back to ‘57. No way would an audience of uptown swells treat him like that. Even if they didn’t like his act, the middle-class politeness instinct is too embedded.

I felt the same contemptuous attitude toward whiteys in the Copa scene that Ava DuVernay showed when she invented that Selma scenario in which LBJ told J. Edgar Hoover to tape-record MLK’s sexual motel encounters in order to pressure him into not pushing for the Voting Rights Act. You’ll recall how Joseph Califano called b.s. on that.

The postscript reminds that Malcolm X was murdered by gunfire a year later, but it ignores Cooke’s death in Los Angeles less than a year later. That tells you that King is a bit of a spinner — she didn’t want to leave the audience with a downish, mystifying epilogue. But it happened.

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Several 20something (i.e, Zoomer) students in a film appreciation class were recently asked to share impressions of Citizen Kane, which they’d all been asked to watch. Some remarks have been simplified or edited down and I threw in a few [sic] qualifiers, but what follows is otherwise verbatim:

Student #1: “I personally did not enjoy being confused by this movie. I need to watch the video breakdowns to understand it a little better. I did really like the camera angles and contrast in sizes. I liked Bernstein because he was a nice and ambitious man. I did not know the movie is 20 years away from its 100th year anniversary.”

Student #2: “I enjoyed this film, but I didn’t understand at first why this film has been called a masterpiece. It isn’t uncommon for us [huh?] the film that using multiple character points-of-view. However, at the time Citizen Kane was made the cinematography [seemed] sensational and it effected [sic] a lot of films later years. If I watched this film in the 1940s, I could have different thoughts. I found Susan’s perspective the most interesting. The impression of Kane from other characters’ perspective is [that he was] very confident, bold and sociable. In contrast, Susan’s perspective [tells us that he was] dignified, frightful and authoritative. This is because shooting from low angle intentionally in order to show how Kane looks from Susan. We can know what is Kane actually like or what did he ask for through his life from her perspective.”

Student #3: “Citizen Kane is a very confusing kind of film (in my opinion). I had to watch it twice to even get through it. The main character, Charles Foster Kane, is a very reserved and closed-off person whom nobody could figure out throughout his whole life. The whole movie’s plot threw me off on the whole last word ‘rosebud’ because it waited until the last possible second to tell everyone what it represented. I feel like this movie is an older kind of movie and I am a younger audience, so it didn’t appeal to me as much as any other kind of movie would. To be honest, I would not watch this again. It was way too confusing to me and I felt like they could have made this film way shorter.”

Student #4: “Although I personally liked the movie I completely understand it being a movie that requires a specific appreciation. I found it confusing and I did not really know what was going on. I need to watch it a couple more times to get a better understanding of the movie. I think it did not appeal to me because it was a movie from an older generation and I did not understand what they were talking about. I also feel it was a little long so I did not feel entertained while watching it. I think when I watch it again it will help me better understand it. I did like some of the angles of the shots they took. You could tell they used different styles of filming. I liked Mr. Bernstein the most because he was a really smart man and he was a really good actor. I liked him because he just wanted people to like him back and to help.”

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I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something incomplete about the trailer for Mike Cahill‘s Bliss (Amazon, 2.5). It feels like an Andrew Niccol head-scratcher.

HE to Friendo: “What’s with the flashlight gizmo with the nostril tongs? This is the MacGuffin flip switch, I realize — the transportation device — that’s propelling Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek into a digitally reconstituted reality. But is it…what, just an injection experience that lasts for a few hours or what? Are they actually sitting in some drab apartment the whole time? I’ve watched it twice and I’m not getting the geometry of it. Maybe I’m not intended to.”

Friendo to HE: “Apparently they’re plugging into some AI or VR system a la Strange Days, and you spend most of the movie being teased about which reality is the “real” one, etc.”

Boilerplate: “After recently being divorced and then fired, Greg (Owen Wilson) meets the mysterious Isabel (Salma Hayek), a woman living on the streets and convinced that the polluted, broken world around them is just a computer simulation. Doubtful at first, Greg eventually discovers there may be some truth to Isabel’s wild conspiracy.”

Many exotic overseas locations, but the film was lensed in Los Angeles and Croatia…nowhere else.

2:05 pm Pacific: Okay, it’s done, ratified and carved into stone — Orange Plague has been impeached for a second time. The vote was 232 in favor (including 10 Republicans) vs. 197 opposed.

Impeachment 2.0

Earlier: For the first time in U.S. history an American President is facing a second impeachment vote in the House of Representatives. Never before and probably never again. The roll call begins around 4 pm eastern. A majority of House Republicans will be voting “no’, of course, mainly, I’m presuming, because they’re afraid of what the Bumblefucks back home will say or do if they vote to impeach.

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6 pm update: Scott Roxborough’s original THR article described Parasite as “odd“. The words “downright weird” were also used to describe offbeat international films. Both terms were recently deep-sixed by THR editors.

Earlier: For 15 or 16 months Hollywood Elsewhere has stood alone in claiming that Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite is half very good and half looney-tunes. The latter portion starts around the halfway mark when the drunken con-artist family lets the maid in during the rainstorm. I’ve said this 36 or 37 times.

You think it’s fun or easy standing up to the woke Oscar mob? Well, this is a moment of rejoicing because someone, finally, has stood up and called Parasite an “odd” film also.

THR‘s Scott Roxborough: “Parasite has blown open the doors of the international feature category, long thought to be the purview of ‘serious message movies,’ to the experimental and the strange.

“If a movie about a family of South Korean con artists — one that shifts in tone among thriller, horror and straight-out farce — can win the highfalutin’ international feature Oscar, than even the weirdest overseas films have a shot this awards season.”

Posted on 7.23.20: “Parasite obviously won because a sufficient number of voters agreed with the blunt-social-assessment aspect (life is unfair for the poor) plus the wokesters loved the idea of choosing a well-made film by a filmmaker of color, and one that didn’t fit the usual definition of a Best Picture winner. Plus Bong Joon-ho worked the town like a locomotive.

“The first half of Parasite is very good (it goes off the rails when they let the fired maid in during the rainstorm) but it won because of identity (i.e., non-white) politics. Don’t argue, don’t lie, that’s why.”

Earlier version of THR headline and subhead:

Current, changed (i.e., tamer) headline and subhead:

Twitter suspended president Donald Trump’s account permanently https://t.co/AnR5pCQqmN

— Business Insider (@businessinsider) January 8, 2021