Classic Mansplaining?

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Early this morning Jill Blake conveyed delight after turning a daughter (or some younger person) on to To Catch A Thief, particularly in response to the younger person’s request to see a film with Cary Grant “running around.”

Being a special kind of asshole, I jumped in with an anecdotal mansplainer. I pointed out that Grant doesn’t “run” anywhere in that 1955 Alfred Hitchcock classic but “scampers” cat-like across French rooftops. For this I received a hale and hearty “fuck off!”, which needed an extra “douchebag!” to really drive the point home.

Legendary Intimacies

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On Facebook Paul Schrader asked which kissing scenes deliver the best currents. In all candor the flying-and-kissing scene between Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried in Schrader’s own First Reformed is one of the all-time greats. I’m also thinking of that mad-hunger moment between Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis in Witness. Along with the usual-usuals.

Update; Apologies for forgetting Kyra Sedgewick’s name while posting about that “Moon River” kiss with Tom Cruise.

Collaborators, Conformists

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I just finished reading Anne Applebaum’s “History Will Judge The Complicit,” an Atlantic article about the differences between go-along collaborators vs. independent contrarians in politics, and with a particular focus on once semi-respectable Republicans who’ve abandoned principle by kowtowing to The Beast.

But the following passage also applies, I feel, to go-along film critics who routinely give thumbs-up reviews to films that they know deep down are mediocre, substandard or worse. One of the motivating factors in handing out “easy lay” reviews is that it feels comforting and almost peaceful to do so.

Here’s how Applebaum describes the mentality:

Dial-Up 56K Isolation

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The one bad thing about our San Felipe mobile home is the shitty wifi, which is roughly the speed of 56K dial-up (or the way things were 20-plus years ago). I can’t really file anything this way. It takes three to five minutes for a page to load. Option #1: walk into town (1/4 mile north) in search of a better signal. Option #2: To hell with it, go swimming or sailing, read Oliver Stone’s “Chasing The Light”, etc.

Basking in San Felipe

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We’re renting a little mobile home that’s right on the beach and 20 feet from the lapping waves. Not that many people are here but that’s cool. The heat and air temps are “Lawrence of Arabia”-plus. The Gulf of Baja is warm as a heated pool…warmer. Overall a much nicer vibe and a lot cheaper than the Hotel del Coronado.

Search For Acceptable Intrigue

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Nick Santora and Keifer Sutherland‘s The Fugitive might be good (who knows?), but I have to watch it in Quibi-sized bits?

I’m literally starved for some kind of adult-level longform that I could actually get into, but everything out there is thriller-ific, fantastical, horror-fied or supernatural-ed.

I’m thinking of re-watching Mindhunter, Season 2. That has the stuff that I’m looking for…that I need want, cherish.

Surrounded by Steers

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It was impossible to survey the flotsam & jetsam frolicking and lounging around the historic, all-wooden, once-transporting Hotel del Coronado yesterday and say to myself, “Life in these United States is just as layered and fascinating and distinctive — socially, fashionably, politically — as it was 100 years ago.”

We stayed last night in San Diego’s Holiday Inn Express, which is aesthetically acceptable and atmospherically fine except — except! — for the young drunks next door who were quacking like ducks and bellowing like sea lions way past bedtime hour. We called the desk three or four times, and I guess the last warning conveyed by security (“If you don’t shut up we’re going to evict your ass”) finally got through. But what an ordeal.

The same kind of bloated manatees I was observing at the Hotel Del Coronado were, like us, staying in less pricey digs back in the city. I couldn’t bring myself to part with $300 or $350 plus tax for a HDC room…I just couldn’t.

I grew up and came of age amongst proper (okay, mostly proper) citizens of Rome for the most part. But ill-mannered, crudely spoken, Jabba-sized, poorly dressed barbarians have since stormed the gates, and this, as that ancient Pelican Walter Cronkite used to say, is “how it is” these days.

I criticize no one individual. I simply report and speak the anthropological truth.

At Long Last, “Some Like It Hot” Beach

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After decades of putting it off or not caring or whatever, Hollywood Elsewhere finally visited San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado today. Which for me has always been the “Seminole Ritz” of Some Like It Hot fame. My first time, yes, but I felt as if I knew the place like the back of my hand.

Tatiana and I stood on the exact same spot where Tony Curtis‘s “Joe” (masquerading as a Shell Oil heir called “Junior”) and Marilyn Monroe‘s “Sugar Kane” (pretending to be a rich girl whose family has threatened to cut her off, wink wink) first flirted. The hotel, built in 1888, has been modernized quite a bit since Billy Wilder‘s classic shot here in the summer of 1958, but…let’s just say that the 19th Century mystique hasn’t been totally eradicated.

What disturbed me (as usual) were the low-rent, low-tide tourist visitors. The creme de la creme of 20th Century society used to stay here — U.S. presidents, movie stars, industrialists — and now the place is crawling with…I don’t want to use the same old epithets. What I am I supposed to do? Applaud the fact that not one visitor today even began to resemble Osgood Fielding III, Spats Colombo, Sweet Sue or “Beanstalk”?

Posted on 12.29.19 after visiting San Francisco’s Top of the Mark: “A time-traveling anthropologist comparing the differences between 20th and 21st Century clientele would be struggling for the right politely descriptive phrases while conveying an honest assessment, as I am now. The truth is that over the last 60 or 70 years certain aspects of American culture have not only gone downhill but sunk into the swamp. We’re talking about the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire here.”

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Bane of My Driving Existence

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I think I shall never despise a driving-aid app as much as I do Waze. Waze’s driving instructions are competent as far as they go, but I hate how the vocal Waze friendo never tells you what street or boulevard you’re turning on to — he/she just says “in one tenth of a mile, turn right.”

Most of us like to drive with the whole equation in our heads — heading south, approaching this or that major intersection or turn-off, X number of miles until the final destination, etc. WAZE ignores all that, treats you like an idiot. “You may think you want to know street names and mileage estimates and stuff like that, but you don’t need to,” the software says. “Just follow our cretin-level directions and we’ll get you where you want to go.”

Today Waze made a colossal mistake that I’ll never forgive it for. We were driving south on interstate 5, 15 minutes north of San Diego and just south of Torrey Pines. Our hotel (a Holiday Inn Express on Ash between Sixth and Seventh) is right smack in the middle of downtown, and there was only one way to get there — stay on the 5, which goes right through to central San Diego.

Did Waze tell me to stay on the 5? Of course not. It told me to take the 805 south (a loop highway for people looking to bypass the city), and then go south on the 163, which very gradually led me to the right address. But what an asinine suggestion. The best route between two points is the most direct, and not the most roundabout.

HE to Waze: I loathe your simpleton voice directions. As far as I’m concerned you’re equally confusing as helpful, and from time to time (like today) a hindrance to sensible driving. I’m a Google Maps guy all the way. I don’t want to hear your name again…ever.