This is kind of a Walt Kowalski-ish thing to say, but my first big drop-out moment with Spider-Man: Far From Home was when the big-ass water monster (i.e, Elemental #1) started destroying centuries-old buildings in Venice, Italy. “Oh, fuck, here we go again,” I groaned. “Once again a grotesque American bullshit popcorn movie arrives in beautiful Venice and before you know it a whole lotta buildings are being wasted, all in the service of selling tickets so that more crap like this can be made. Is this all they can think of…monsters shattering centuries-old timber and brick or stucco walls being reduced to ash and powder?”

The same thing happens in Prague about 20 or 25 minutes later. Then Berlin. And then London. And then it’s finally over.

I hate Americans and American destruction culture. I hate big CG movies and massive CG budgets. I hate loudness and chaos and teenagers who aren’t X-factor types like me when I was 16 and 17. I despise Tom Holland‘s punchable face, and I really hate the Marvel machine when it has nothing better to do and starts jizz-whizzing all over everything and everyone. I really hate the idea of Jon Favreau boinking Marisa Tomei, and I think the romantic pairing of Jacob Batalon and Angourie Rice is close to ridiculous. There once was a time when a guy like Batalon couldn’t even dream about becoming the dweeby, mostly asexual, backwards-baseball-hat-wearing “gay” friend of a girl like Rice. But in Spider-Man: Far From Home, they become lovers almost immediately. Sure thing.

1950s society imposed rigid rules upon kids (boomers) and teenagers (baby-busters). Rules, expectations, behavioral standards, clothing styles that had to be followed, lines that couldn’t be crossed, etc. A lot of kids didn’t quite realize how rigid and oppressive that culture was, but it gradually came to them.

James Gilbert. author of “Another Chance: America After World War II“: “The rules were imposed by your parents. Parents talked about it a lot. There were high school counselors who told you what the rules were. Obey authority. Don’t ask questions. If you mishebave, you aren’t normal. Control your emotions. Don’t ask why. Aspire to a kind of vegetative state. Even if they weren’t written down, everybody knew [them]. You could almost read them out, cite them. And looking back, what people did in the ’60s was break every damn one of them.”

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In Bilge Ebiri‘s 6.27 Vulture piece about the Eyes Wide Shut orgy scene, Leon Vitali reveals that Cate Blanchett looped the dialogue of Amanda Good, who played the “mysterious masked woman” at the orgy. Remember her voice? She defended Tom Cruise during the ceremonial interrogation scene by shouting, “Let him go! I’m ready to redeem him!”

That voice, according to Vitali, belonged to Blanchett. Except Good didn’t play “Mandy”, the woman whom Cruise treats for a “speedball” overdose in an upstairs salon inside Sydney Pollack‘s home during that black-tie party scene. According to an 8.27.99 Independent piece by Charlotte O’Sullivan (as well as Google), that role was played by Julienne Davis.

Who played the naked and dead Mandy in the morgue scene, Davis or Good? I’ve read Ebiri and O’Sullivan’s articles twice, and they don’t say. (That or I need a nap.) I’ve found some links and captions that claim Davis played “morgue Mandy” so let’s go with that.

What convinced O’Sullivan that “speedball Mandy” and the “mysterious masked woman” were different actresses? Excerpt from fourth paragraph from O’Sullivan’s piece: “Sight and Sound editor Nick James knew the Mandy we see at the beginning of the film was not the same woman as that at the orgy. How? ‘Because they had different pubic hair‘.”

HE insert: Is there some way that p.c. investigators can track down the 20-years-older James and prosecute him after the fact for being a sexist scumbag? Who notices such things? We need to threaten this guy with career death in order to correct his behavior.

O’Sullivan to Davis: “Did Abigail take over from [you]?” Davis to O’Sullivan in an outraged tone of voice: “No — it’s all me. Abigail Good was just an extra. And anyway, she’s English.” (HE: The mysterious woman has an American accent — Blanchett’s!). Davis: “It’s hilarious. It happens a lot, people try to take credit for things they haven’t done”.

Good to Ebiri: “When all the other girls left, I was in this amazing position of being able to work with two incredible artists. I was on the set with Tom and Stanley, finding things on our own. Stanley asked my opinion a lot. Me and Tom were among the last people he ever filmed. Stanley died before the dubbing was done. And I always wondered before the film came out whether they were going to dub me, because I didn’t have an American accent.”

Vitali to Ebiri: “It was Cate Blanchett…that was her voice. We wanted something warm and sensual but that at the same time could be a part of a ritual. Stanley had talked about finding this voice and this quality that we needed. After he’d died, I was looking for someone. It was actually Tom and Nicole who came up with the idea of Cate. She was in England at the time, so she came into Pinewood and recorded the lines.”

BTW: Despite the assertions in several articles posted yesterday and today, Blanchett’s looping of Good didn’t constitute a “cameo” — and it still doesn’t. A cameo is when an actor briefly appears in a film (doing or saying something of momentary consequence) and then disappears. Looping someone is not a “cameo” or vice versa.

Stanley Kubrick always wanted “interesting” from his actors, especially his supporting actors. That tended to translate into behavior that most of us would call quirky, twitchy, peculiar, eccentric, heavily mannered, etc. Hands down, HE’s all-time favorite quirk-freak-twitch performance in a Kubrick film came from Alan Cumming in Eyes Wide Shut. Second favorite: a Clockwork Orange tie between Michael Bates, who played an officious, extremely uptight prison guard, and Aubrey Morris as “P.R, Deltoid”. Third favorite: Murray Melvin as Reverend Samuel Runt in Barry Lyndon.

In every major industrial democracy there are varying levels of concern about the flow of unmitigated immigration from the Middle East, Northern Africa, Central America and Mexico. It’s not so much an economic, party or principle thing as (I know this sounds overly primal and primitive) a simmering matter of blood and tribe. Sad as it seems, right-leaning European and North American natives have been reacting fearfully and in some ways violently. (The recent Rome attacks upon allies of Cinema America by far-right groups is but one example.) Natives of Europe and North America are sensing cultural and territorial threats.

I’m not sensing the slightest threat of anything from my home in West Hollywood, but it’s been fairly well documented that rurals in this country (i.e., those who have the least contact with immigrants) are somewhat agitated about this. And it has concerned some that almost all of last night’s Democratic contenders raised their hands in support of restoring protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as well as pledging to provide health care for the millions in the country without documents.

I don’t know what the wisest or fairest solution might be, but earlier today Politico‘s Jeff Greenfield supplied two Presidential views on the matter.

President Bill Clinton in his 1995 State of the Union address: “All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens…it is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.”

President Barack Obama in a 2014 interview with ABC News: “That is our direct message to the families in Central America: Do not send your children to the borders.” The U.S. Border Patrol, he said, should be able to “stem the flow of illegal crossings and speed the return of those who do cross over … Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws, and I believe that they must be held accountable.”

The title of Greenfield’s article is “Did the Democrats Step on a Second Big Land Mine?“, and the subhead states the following: “On immigration, they’ve steered the party close to an open-borders policy without any serious reckoning with how to handle the influx of arrivals.”

I understood what Marianne Williamson was saying about a New Zealand-type assault weapon ban (which of course would be a completely sane response to myriad U.S. shootings), but she obviously didn’t belong in that group — a spiritual outlier, to say the least. People don’t want gentle preachers for leaders — they want realpolitik hardballers with principles.

Hollywood Elsewhere would love to see Sen. Kamala Harris land the nomination and thereafter bruise and bloody Donald Trump in the general campaign. She is tough-tough-tough-tough-tough-tough-tough-tuhfff! (“Rats on the westside, bed bugs…uptown!”) Kamala simultaneously bitch-slapped Joe Biden tonight over being chummy with racist legislators and over not supporting busing (Joe: “What I opposed was busing by the Department of Education!”) and proved she’ll be merciless with Trump on a debate stage. Kamala was definitely the stand-out contender during tonight’s debate, and she killed any possibility of a Biden-Harris ticket down the road! Pete Buttigieg came in second (his remark about Republican values, his joke about Trump’s ability to rupture diplomatic relationships, his candor over failing to quell racist currents in South Bend). Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand did okay but Biden looked a little old, a little weak. Eric Swallwell got him on the age thing; so did Kamala. You’re yesterday’s news, Joe!

Hollywood Elsewhere won’t be satisfied with a wokester makeover. I also want gay currents (if not from all three then at least from Kristen Stewart). And everyone understands that there are four Bosleys this time…right? (Sam Claflin, Djimon Hounsou, Elizabeth Banks and Patrick Stewart.) Nobody, it appears, has John Forsythe‘s “role” of Charlie, but Luis Gerardo Méndez plays “The Saint”, whatever that means or indicates. Define “synthetic.”

So the winners of last night’s Democrat debate were Sen. Elizabeth Warren (at least during the first half) and Julian Castro. Except Castro hasn’t a prayer of joining the elite fraternity of five.

Right now that fraternity is composed of “Typewriter” Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders (who will almost certainly go after Biden tonight for being a softball, middle-of-the-roader — a symbol of business-as-usual-before-Trump), Warren, Pete Buttigieg (who needs to put the cop-shooting thing to bed by saying “no bodycam, no badge” and slug Biden with a Muhammad Ali jab or two) and Kamala Harris. The rest are just spinning their wheels and wasting everyone’s time, and they know it.

Bernie needs to drop out and stop spoiling things for Warren. He knows he can’t beat Trump (although he might have if he’d run against him in ’16), and that he’s just mucking things up at this point. He’s a kind of ballsy neo-socialist hero, but at the same time a stubborn old goat.

The only candidate who’s really got that X-factor thing — that weird Colonel Kilgore light or special halo around his head — is Mayor Pete.

If JFK had never lived when he did and was suddenly here and running for President at age 42 (born in ’77), he would kick the living shit out of Typewriter Joe and everyone else for that matter. But of course he’s not.

The two hottest U.S. film festivals happen within six weeks of each year — the Sundance Film Festival in mid-to-late January and South by Southwest in mid March.

Sundance appeals to your basic wokester SJW #MeToo LBGTQ crowd (along with your garden-variety Lefty Snowflake Stalinist Sensitives) who are committed to overthrowing old norms and ensuring that independent cinema is generally more progressive and “representative” with fewer white guys of whatever age.

SXSW attracts hipster genre geeks who’ve been fortified by woke attitudes but whose attitudes and tastes are still a little more whoo-whooish and popcorn-consumptive than your card-carrying Sundance followers. And that’s pretty much the whole enchilada.

It was announced today that John Cooper, director of the Sundance Film Festival since ’09, will move into a newly-created “emeritus director” role after the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. What does it actually mean to be an “emeritus director”? I wouldn’t know but I’m presuming it means you’re consulting from time to time but basically out of the driver’s seat in terms of selections, political ramifications, dealing with talent, putting out fires and whatnot.

One thing you can always count on in these situations is that the reason[s] why a well-connected person has decided to leave a powerful, well-paid gig will never be disclosed at first, but will usually leak out several weeks or months after the fact, or certainly within a year or two.

Cooper isn’t that old (what is he, late 50s or early 60s?) and has only had the director gig for 11 years. The El Sundance Supremo job has to be one of the coolest, most enjoyable and exciting gigs in the film realm so why leave? Why surrender that responsibility? What else is he going to do with his life?

Is Cooper leaving because of some kind of political power move by his rivals within the Sundance organization?

Journo friend: “I’ve been asking those very same questions myself. One would just assume that being the Sundance chief for 11 years and operating near that top slot for many years before that has taken its toll, but who knows. I’ve been a staunch supporter of the lineups, even the 2016, 2017, and 2018 editions, which you partially disregarded as “socialist summer camp” festivals, but I found much to admire with those editions and could come up with 15 or so high-caliber films/docs every one of those years.

“2019, however, was different. It was as if they had shot themselves in the foot with their mass virtue-signaling and overtly p.c./woke decision-making. I could barely come up with ten noteworthy films. There was The Farewell, Luce, Hala, Blinded by the Light, David Crosby: Remember My Name and then what? Maybe Cooper is seeing which direction the festival is heading and wants nothing to do with it. The docs were good, as usual, but there was something missing, I felt — a relevance that was badly needed but couldn’t be found.

It’s been a dirty little secret for most journos I’ve spoken to felt that Sundance 2019 was a horrible edition, but they wouldn’t dare utter that on print.”

HE to Journo Friend: “But if things were swerving into a certain woke/virtue-signalling direction and Cooper wanted to steer things back in a direction he felt more comfortable with or respectful of, WHY LEAVE? Why not stay and fight it out? Why not lobby for this or that kind of film that he may feel is underrepresented?

“Either Cooper decided he wanted to chill and lead a less stressful life — slip into cruise mode, live longer and healthier, laugh and enjoy life more, grow a vegetable garden, etc. Or he was politically pushed out and decided to take the emeritus job as a face saver.”

Journo friend: “Maybe he was outgunned? Outnumbered? It’s no secret that most ‘critics’ want an SJW-landscape as the future of movies. Just look at the results of Jordan Ruimy‘s poll yesterday. Even TIFF seems to be heading in that direction, albeit in more conservative baby steps. Also don’t forget Robert Redford‘s strange but brief appearance at the opening day press conference, when he all but admitted to stepping down from the festival. Something is happening. There’s an elephant in the room which no media whatsoever is going to have the balls to acknowledge.”