Detachment

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From “On Coronavirus, We’re #1” by N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman: “It’s hard to believe, but just a month ago Donald Trump and his henchmen were dismissing the coronavirus as a nonevent. On Feb. 26 Trump declared that ‘you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be close to zero.’

“His remark came a day after Larry Kudlow, his administration’s chief economist, declared that the virus was almost completely contained, and that the economy was ‘holding up nicely.’ There are now more than 82,000 cases in the U.S. — we don’t know how many more, because we’re still lagging far behind on testing. But that makes us the world’s coronavirus epicenter, and the U.S. trajectory is worse than that of other countries.

“As for the economy: Last week more than three million workers filed for unemployment insurance, a number that is completely off the scale even as many others who are suddenly out of work aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits. We’re clearly losing jobs even faster than at the worst moments of the 2008-9 financial crisis, when we were losing ‘only’ 800,000 per month.

“Trump’s dismissal and denial played a large role in getting us to this point. And he should be held accountable. But the crucial question now is whether we’re doing enough to cope with the catastrophe.”

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Nothing From Nothing Means Nothing

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I was so bored last night that I couldn’t go to sleep, but I finally did. I woke at the usual six-oh this morning, but felt so lethargic about life that I went back to sleep. Then I re-awoke but I couldn’t quite come out of the fog.

I finally arose around 10something, but what did it matter? For we are prisoners on a kind of Devil’s Island. Allowed to roam around on the honor system, true, but still residing in a two-person clink with excellent wifi, a big TV, a kitchen full of food, five computers and a Bluray player, etc. And two cats.

Then my new Bluray of Raw Deal arrived at the doorstep…excitement! Then I drove to Pavilions to buy a few things, but the line to get in was long and slowish.

Then we decided to paint the living room walls in a Benjamin Moore color called “Coral Gables.”

Then I decided against paying to watch Joan Micklin Silver‘s Chilly Scenes of Winter because it’s free on YouTube, and then to watch Jean Luc Godard‘s entire Sympathy for the Devil doc, which I’ve only seen in random clips.

I guess we don’t really live on Devil’s Island, but it sure feels like it at times. Our lives are fucked or at least shuttered for the foreseeable future. Maybe until the mid to late summer, maybe longer than that. There ain’t no life nowhere.

A friend writes, “I was feeling down for few days but I am better today. I did yoga at 10 am on line and I keep thinking how much worse it could be, and that I am still lucky. We don’t go much out. Just to a store. I sit by the window and watch people walk , jog, stroll in endless stream. I think I should start making window diaries :)”

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What Difference Will $1200 Make?

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Let’s say you’re a freelancer currently unable to earn anything due to a coronavirus shutdown. Or an employee who’s been temporarily suspended because your employer has been forced to temporarily close or cut back. It would certainly be a welcome thing to receive a $1200 check from the government as every little bit helps. But presuming that the stimulus check would be a one-off, how much help would $1200 actually represent?

You could use it to help put a minor dent in your rent or mortgage payment for a month. Or you could buy $20 worth of food each day for 60 days. Or you could pay off your utility bills for a while. But the pandemic is going to be with us until mid to late summer and possibly (God forbid) into the fall or even beyond. So at best a $1200 windfall would make a slight difference for a very short period.

$1200 is fine, but it’s basically pizza money, a few Uber rides, a cable or cell phone bill, cat food, two or three tanks of gasoline, etc. And then back to the salt mines.

Absolute Masterpiece

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Last night I finally saw Roman Polanski’s “J’Accuse” (aka An Officer and a Spy). Yes, I watched it illegally, but we’ll never see it in this country because of the #MeToo Khmer Rouge prohibition of all things Polanski and so I figured, okay, just this one time. Actually I also watched Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in Manhattan illegally, and with the same justification.

In any event I watched it on the 65-incher in 1080p with English subtitles, and my God, the “holy shit, this is great” and “why can’t more films be this good?” current. The 86 year-old Polanski is undimmed…he seems to be as commanding and bull’s-eye as when he made Repulsion, Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, etc.

J’Accuse has been crafted with absolute surgical genius…a lucid and exacting and spot-on retelling of an infamous episode…a sublime atmospheric and textural recapturing of 1890s “belle epoque” Paris, and such a meticulous, hugely engrossing reconstruction of the Dreyfus affair…a tale told lucidly…a clue-by-clue, layer-by-layer thing.

You know what J’Accuse is? A bedtime comfort flick — comforting because it’s so damned good.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but it’s a tale of anti-Semitism and a rigged conviction for treason, an innocent man condemned to Devil’s Island, nationalist rightwing groupthink, suppression of the truth and the punishment of those who would bring the perversion to light.

Most of us know the basic bones, but Polanski’s film is absolutely riveting because of the detailed approach that he applies to each and every character, setting, line, costume, light source and choice of location. Adult-level subtlety to die for.

It’s my idea of a perfect film in every respect — Polanski and Robert Harris‘s brilliant screenplay, the ace-level production design by Jean Rabasse and art direction by Dominique Moisan, Pawel Edelman‘s naturally lighted cinematography, Alexandre Desplat‘s music…every single element is aces. Polanski concentrates on elements that 99% of today’s directors would run screaming from. The discovery portion of the film is all about ripped-up letters pasted back together, bureaucratic records, folders, etc.

Jean Dujardin’s lead performance as Georges Picqart, the intelligence officer who uncovered the frame-up, is easily his career-best. Ditto Louis Garrel as Dreyfus plus Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud, Eric Ruf, Laurent Stocker, etc. And with everyone under the constraints of the era, of having to hold themselves erect and behave in a stiffly correct manner.

I was especially taken having recently endured Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang (IFC Films, 4.24), which looks and feels like nothing more than a director re-inventing and re-stylizing the past in order to show off and look cool. I got through it but not without frustration.

J’Accuse is a textural, cerebral masterpiece, and yet one of the most affecting anti-racism films ever made. The sight of the Parisian nationalists and anti-Semites cheering on the lying military brass…the MAGA redhats of their day.

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Quietly Shattered, Crushed, Stunned

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For the last week or so it’s been sinking into me. Simultaneously appalling and suffocating, and so overwhelming that I’ve only been able to gradually process it one day at a time. We’re all living in a dystopian realm, the likes of which I’ve never known, almost a kind of On The Beach atmosphere…a low-security, self-policed concentration camp with all the comforts of home.

As HE regulars know (especially the scolding “virusbros“) I’ve been out two or three times since returning from Texas…wearing the usual mask and surgical gloves, and of course keeping my distance from one and all. CVS and Pavilions stopovers plus aimless rumblehog roamings.

What an inert, boring, vanilla, nothing-level existence.

In a 3.24 piece called “10 Comedies to Lift Your Mood”, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy mentioned that what we’re all going through is spiritually analogous to what many Americans went through during the early days of the Great Depression. That sunk in. Right now probably is the bleakest time of my life in certain ways…perhaps in all ways.

“You Can’t Leave”

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The Third Day, a forthcoming six-part HBO series that begins on 5.11, looks reasonably decent. But the trailer also suggests it’s basically Midsommar meets The Wicker Man…right?

And why is Jude Law starring or costarring in just about every other film and cable series these days? Is he the new Michael Caine? Does he ever say no? The New Pope, the Rhythm Section, Vox Lux, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, A Rainy Day in New York, The Nest, etc. I understand that Law’s early aughts hot period — The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain, Enemy at the Gates, Road to Perdition, I Heart Huckabees, Alfie, Closer, The Holiday — ended 14 or 15 years ago and we all have bills to pay, etc. I’m nonetheless sensing that he’s too willing to be in anything that comes along.

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Passing of Stuart Gordon

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The late Stuart Gordon had a rich and varied life, but he was mainly known for one thing and one thing only — his riotously funny horror-comedy Reanimator (’85), which I saw with five or six friends at Manhattan’s Rivoli (B’way and 49th) in late October 1985. We were all working at New Line Cinema at the time, my specialty being publicity and press kits. The Rivoli viewing, no lie, was one of the greatest theatrical experiences of my life — we laughed, howled, screamed, thigh-slapped, spilled our drinks and popcorn, laughed some more.

As it happened I soon after moved into a bungalow complex on Hightower Drive, and Reanimator star Jeffrey Combs was living right next door.

Reanimator was directed and coadapted by Gordon, the source being H.P. Lovecraft‘s “Herbert West: Reanimator“, a horror short story written in 1921. his partner Brian Yuzna produced it, and the coscreenwriters were Dennis Paoli and William J. Norris.

They all deserve an eternal pat on the back for coming up with the most insanely perverse oral sex scene in the history of motion pictures.

Gordon passed yesterday at the age of 72.

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Reprehensible Asshole

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But then you knew that about all Republicans spouting the current Trump slogan…”let’s get back to work already…if some over-60 types wind up dying then they die but no more hibernating.”

When My Tolerance Snapped…

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…and I realized I really and truly couldn’t stand the presence of Michael Fassbender any more…Steve Jobs is what did it to me…from that point on my basic attitude about Fassbender was “fuck that guy and also, unfair as it sounds, the movies he’s starring in.”

Super-condensed review of Steve Jobs, posted on 9.6.15:

“The main thing is that Fassbender just bothers me. I didn’t like him, didn’t care for his company, didn’t like those cold fuck-you eyes. All through it I was saying to myself “I know this is a class A enterprise with a sharp Aaron Sorkin script, but how much longer do I have hang with this prick?”

I will never watch Steve Jobs again. Just thinking about those endless Sorkin walk-and-talks…aagghh!

36 Years Ago

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A special edition Shout! Factory Bluray of Jamie Foley‘s Glengarry Glenn Ross pops on 6.2.20.

Sometime around 3.25.84 I attended a Broadway pre-opening performance of the original Gregory Mosher-directed play with all the big-gun critics (Frank Rich, etc.) in the orchestra. Joe Mantegna‘s Tony Award-winning performance as Ricky Roma ruled — a performance as seminal and historic as Humphrey Bogart‘s Duke Mantee in the B’way stage version of The Petrified Forest. Not to mention Mike Nussbaum, Robert Prosky (a brilliant Shelley Levine), Lane Smith, James Tolkan, Jack Wallace and J.T. Walsh.

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Woody’s Days in Capua

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I’ve read a little less than half of Woody Allen‘s “Apropos of Nothing.” I’ve gotten as far as the launch of Play It Again, Sam, his 1969 stage comedy that costarred himself, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts and Jerry Lacy. This was also when his romantic relationship with Keaton began.

I’m loving the book completely, but I have to say that the portions dealing with Allen’s fascinating if occasionally bewildering childhood and early adolescence in Brooklyn (roughly his first 15 or 16 years) make for richer reading than the portions that cover how his career began — first as a kid who submitted jokes to Manhattan newspaper columnists, then an in-house joke writer, then as a comedy contributor to The Colgate Hour and Caesar’s Hour, then his beginnings as a stand-up comic in the early ’60s, etc.

The “starting to make it happen” stories are fine, but the childhood stuff is full of wide-eyed wonder, fevered impressions, impossible dreams.

Allen’s description of his first look at 1942 Times Square, when he was seven years old and his father had taken him along on some errand, is truly thrilling. Ditto how he loved the way women looked and smelled and felt during brief hugs when he was knee-high to a grasshopper. Plus the absolute joy of watching old-school movies every Saturday afternoon with a five-years-older female cousin at his neighborhood theatre. A lot of this material was covered in Radio Days, of course, but the writing is tart and wise and a joy to sink into.

The childhood portion, in short, is like the first 35 or 40 minutes of Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus (i.e., the first 25%) inside the gladiator school in Capua — the story tension and the personal suspense element about when and how Kirk Douglas and his bros might break out. Apropos of Nothing is similarly about young Woody’s confinement inside his family’s small apartment and the middle-class neighborhood he explored as a kid, and always the hovering question of when and how he’s going to break free.

via GIPHY