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Hollywood Elsewhere is anticipating a different kind of New Year’s Eve celebration. It’s basically a Parasite thang at Mama Lion (601 So. Western). It’ll be hosted by Miky Lee, exec producer of Bong Joon-ho‘s Oscar contender as well as vice chairwoman of CJ Group. (Lee is in charge of the overall strategic direction and management of CJ Group’s entertainment and media division.)
Tatyana and I are going to politely sidestep an 8pm Parasite screening (I’ve seen it twice) and just hit the party.
The evening will include a musical performance by A.C.E., a South Korean boy band. K-pop and J-pop (as in Japanese synth pop) are pretty much indistinguishable. The last time I was in Hanoi there was a V-pop band (Vietnamese) playing at an outdoor venue. Due respect but anything “pop” isn’t my cup. When it comes to New Year’s Eve sounds, I’m more of a boogie jazz cat Mose Allison type.
Lost in the general holiday zone-out, obscured by the bombing of Cats and out-shone by the respectable box-office hauls of Little Women ($33.5M domestic) and Uncut Gems ($22.7M) is the curious foundering of Jay Roach‘s Bombshell.
After two and a half weekends in wide release (1,480 situations) the R-rated #MeToo dramedy is currently looking at a $17M domestic total. That’s bad news for a film that cost $33 million to make, not counting marketing. The Rotten Tomatoes rating was 67%, but the audience score is a not bad 83. The IMDB rating is 6.6.
I don’t know if this lack of b.o. energy will penetrate the industry membrane by way of diminished support for Charlize Theron‘s Best Actress chances, but I’m sensing that it might.
A few weeks back one or two HE commenters predicted that Bombshell would fizzle. I thought it would do a lot better than it has. It’s a crafty, well-made film with an urgent theme, but for whatever reason (creeping #MeToo fatigue?) Joe and Jane Popcorn seem to be only half-attentive. I’m sorry about this. At the very least I thought Bombshell would develop legs.
Ten years ago fake Criterion covers were…well, not ubiquitous but fairly noteworthy in terms of occasional online amusement. With the gradual passing of physical media FCCs have also done a kind of fade. I miss them. I’d love to see some covers of recent titles. No, not Uncut Gems.
Riding the flying Triumph over the barbed wire is the Steve McQueen moment everyone remembers**, but his stardom was officially sanctified with his return to Stalag Luft III. The whole camp came to a standstill. With everyone — German commanders, guards, inmates — staring at Cpt. Virgil Hilts and hanging on his every utterance, director John Sturges was telling the audience that McQueen was the King of Cool and that further attention would be paid. There but for the awful grace of God went Rick Dalton.
Shortly before his 1980 murder, John Lennon spoke about the difference between his 17-year-old son Julian Lennon and his five-year-old son Sean Lennon.
Quoted by U.K. Express, posted on 12.24.19: “Sean is a planned child, and therein lies the difference. I don’t love Julian any less as a child. He’s still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn’t have pills in those days. He’s here, he belongs to me and he always will.”
He added that John-Julian relations were in a nascent stage at the moment: “Julian and I will have a relationship in the future.”
I didn’t see this George and Harrison deepfake thing when it popped on 12.24. The next day we drove up to San Francisco, etc. Caught up with it only this morning. I honestly think it’s brilliant in spurts. The voices, the wigs, the stoned stuff (“I know what you’re up to, on that ranch”), “McClunkey,” etc. Best Collider thing ever. But it should have been trimmed. Four, five minutes tops.
This morning I finally read the 12.29 N.Y. Times story (reported by Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and Mark Mazzetti) about Trump’s demand to halt military assistance to Ukraine, and particularly the 8.16 Oval office meeting in which National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper pleaded with Trump to lift the military funding freeze, to no avail.
Moscow Mitch’s intention to blow off any pretense of a fair and thorough Senate impeachment trial is locked down, of course. He will continue to coordinate with the White House in order to facilitate a whitewash, etc.
Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (posted on 12.31): “In objecting to a fixed trial with rules dictated by President Trump, you have distinguished yourself as someone willing to place country and Constitution above party.
“You alone cannot stop a grievous injury to our Constitution, but with several Republican colleagues (might I suggest Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, retiring senators and those senators whose constituents will run them out of town on a rail for going along with a rigged trial), you have the ability to stop a travesty that would bring dishonor on the Senate, prevent a full accounting of the president’s conduct and result in a verdict lacking credibility with the American people
Given the general presumption that certain fellas aren’t exactly into Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women, and given that the film has a robust army of progressive-minded female champions, it’s worth noting certain male critics who’ve stood by Little Women and generally bonded with Gerwig, given her a comradely hug or poke, sung her praises, insisted that reticent males should re-think it and so on.
It’s been observed that Gerwig’s “white knights” include rogerebert.com and N.Y. Times contributor Glenn Kenny, Vanity Fair‘s Mark Harris, MCN’s David Poland, N.Y. Times critic A.O Scott, Variety music guy Chris Willman, TheWrap‘s Alonso Duralde, THR‘s Todd McCarthy, New York‘s David Edelstein and L.A. Times critics Justin Chang and Kenneth Turan.
Kenny responds: “I am fine being listed as a booster of the movie, but not as a ‘white knight.’ I’m not being chivalrous. Gerwig [is] a real filmmaker. From my year-end blog post: ‘Guys, it’s good! It’s got mise-en-scéne! I kept hearing about how radical and stuff it was, but what more impressed me about the picture was its genuine tenderness…there’s a rare delicacy of feeling here.'”
Willman responds: “I wouldn’t object to [the white knight thing], although it’s hard to take it as anything other than tongue-in-cheek. Unlike Poland or Kenny, I have no clout in film circles. I should never have gotten caught up in the Twitter debate with [redacted], but it was just hard to resist pointing out that it’s not some kind of even split on the movie and vast majorities really like it just fine. I did not realize I was joining a ‘pile-on.’ Anyway, as there are so many critical voices supporting Gerwig or the movie, mine hardly counts.”
I’m not particularly qualified to riff on the worst films of 2019 as I almost always steer clear. I can smell them a mile away and will only occasionally endure. I could mention Cats, of course, but I feel mostly pity for that film. I could complain about the Miss Bala remake (the Mexican-made original was 17 or 18 times better) but I didn’t see It: Chapter Two, Glass, Last Christmas (even though I have a screener), Men in Black: International, Isn’t It Romantic, the Hellboy remake, the Shaft remake, etc. I’m not saying Alex Ross Perry‘s Her Smell was one of the year’s worst, but I really hated it. Long Shot pretty much stunk, I thought. I never saw Tolkien or Ophelia. I hated Spider-Man: Far From Home. Almost everyone felt that Stuber blew chunks. I hated The Goldfinch and was mostly dismissive of Ad Astra. I never saw Rambo: Last Blood. I didn’t care for The Aeronauts at all. I ducked 21 Bridges. I avoided A Million Little Pieces, etc.
Race is the principal reason that your Fox News bumblefucks are so blindly loyal to The Beast.
The U.S. was generally a European-descendant white country during the 18th, 19th and most of the 20th Century, and it technically still is with 60.7% of the U.S population composed of non-Hispanic whites. But by 2050 whites will only represent 47% of the population. The country is basically tipping in a pluralistic, multicultural direction. For a half-century the Republican party, which adopted a kind of Anglo Saxon Maginot Line mentality (the “Southern strategy”) and which today is represented by guys like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan, has been the party of white resistance.
And so lunatic righties see themselves as defending the Alamo, and they see Trump, for all his appalling ignorance, arrogance and self-destructive behavior, as a fat Jim Bowie or an orange-faced Davy Crockett mixed with a New York City crime boss.
This is their last stand and they know it, and he’s all they’ve got. They know that sooner or later General Santa Anna‘s troops (multiculturals, LGBTQs) are going to scale the walls and bayonet them to death and ravage their daughters and mitigate the bloodline all to hell.
On top of which they know that urban liberals not only despise them for their Trump allegiance but because they embody what has become a full-on racial epithet — “crusty older white person.” (Just ask Rosanna Arquette.)
So they don’t care. They’re the Wild Bunch shooting it out with General Mapache‘s troops. They’re dead men, but at least they’ll know the dark satisfaction of causing as much chaos and destruction as possible before they fall to the floor, bleeding and cut to pieces.
What’s the current U.S. population? Roughly 330,149,796 as of 12.16.19. In 1620 the non-Native (i.e., immigrant) American population was around 2300 persons. That number had grown to 2.5 million by 1776, and then 31 million by 1860, 76 million by 1900, 180 million by 1960 and 282 million by 2000.
White guys “settled” this country (i.e., stole, slaughtered, railroaded, plantationed, bulldozed, capitalized) fair and square. And now the non-elite, non-urban, under-educated sector of whitebread culture has been marginalized and discredited, and is on the verge of being finished.
This is why Michael Moore is saying that Trump, God help us, has a fighting chance of being reelected in 2020. Because they’ve latched onto an idea that they’re fighting for their very existence.
Bumblefuck despair and depression is the main reason that average life expectancy in the United States has been on a decline since 2014. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention cites three main reasons: a 72% increase in overdoses in the last decade (including a 30% increase in opioid overdoses from July 2016 to September 2017), a ten-year increase in alcoholic liver disease (men 25 to 34 increased by 8%; women by 11%), and a 33% increase in suicide rates since 1999.
In short, if Scott Feinberg’s insect-antennae readings are correct, all the ardently woke film twittering and comintern-ing that repeatedly protested the award-nomination snubbing of LittleWomen…all of that has come to naught. If, to be clear, Greta Gerwig’s film turns out to be a “major threat.”
