For anyone with half a brain, Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig‘s N.Y. Times report about Donald Trump’s massive losses between 1985 and 1994, as revealed by Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, totally pops the myth-bubble about Trump being a shrewd, swaggering, super-rich businessman.

Trump was in fact propped up all those years by his father, Fred Trump, and was subsequently propped up, most likely, by Eastern European or Russian interests at some point within the last 10 or 15 years.

Will the popping of this myth have any effect on the blind loyalties of Trump’s hinterland, red-state supporters? The basis of his legend, after all, is that he’s a powerful financial hotshot who knows the ins and outs of the system and how to finagle things, and now it’s clear he was never a winner and in fact was a clumsy, profligate loser through and through.

Will this make a difference in Bumblefuckland? Of course not. All they care about is Trump as a symbol of rich-white-guy power and the way things used to be when The Brady Bunch was a hit series. As long as he continues to push back against immigration and embraces the fossil fuel industry (and thereby helps to hasten the end of the natural world as mankind has known it for thousands of years), they’ll stand behind him.

The most entertaining portion of this Last Word discussion comes when Lawrence O’Donnell tells Craig that the IRS transcripts that she and Buettner drew upon to write the story “have to have leaked out of the IRS.” Craig says nothing, but her facial expression (a slight nod, a smile) is priceless.

There are three kinds of happiness, for the most part. I could crank myself up and say there are ten or fifteen kinds (and maybe there are), but let’s keep it simple.

The first kind of happiness is the mild, steady-as-she-goes, non-euphoric kind that’s based upon a general, good-enough satisfaction with the basics (fulfilling job, loyal friends, a more-or-less happy relationship with a significant other, financial security) and trusting that good things are in the offing. I’m basically talking about believing in your future — a belief that things are pretty good for the most part, and that you’re not looking at an ongoing or worsening tragedy (like having neurofibromatosis or incurable cancer or living under a hellish police state) and that some of the miles to go before you sleep will be interesting..

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Taken during one of our standard Santa Monica Canyon weekend hikes, which also included detours to Pacific Palisades and Brentwood.

I don’t have to explain where this was taken. The house number gives it away.

Last night Tatyana wanted to watch Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine, which she’d never seen. I hadn’t seen it since the fall of ’13 so I half-watched it and half-wrote, and it somehow played a little better this time. Not that I found it problematic back then. I felt it was a reasonably good tragedy but saddled with a story that was too dependent on A Streetcar Named Desire.

Last night it somehow felt stronger, snappier. I can’t explain why. I was impatient with it six years ago; last night was a better ride.

Tatyana liked it a lot, but at the same time was strongly affected by the sad arc of Cate Blanchett‘s Ruth Madoff-like character. Jasmine is a delusional wife of a financial wheeler-dealer (played by Alec Baldwin) who’s suddenly broke and without a life after Baldwin is busted by the feds and then commits suicide in the slam.

I explained all the Streetcar parallels, but Tatyana hasn’t seen that 1951 film either, in part because it’s too old. She does, however, have a liking for young Marlon Brando.

It’s basically very, very tough to get Tatyana to watch anything. She only wants to watch “masterpieces,” she says. Only films on the level of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 days or A Separation…that line of country. She won’t sully herself with the watching of anything less than top-of-the-mountain classics, and she doesn’t like films that she doesn’t relate to personally in some deep-down way. And she won’t watch genre films or guy films like Heat, The Outfit or The Candidate. And she hates crap. I invited her to join me at a Long Shot screening, but she sensed trouble and declined. And nothing scary or violent.

Tatyana basically watches what she watches because she wants to watch it, and that usually means films with some sort of emotional lift or real-life resonance. Or if she has a special liking for the actor or actress.

From “Joe Biden’s ‘Electability’ Argument Is How Democrats Lose Elections,” a 5.7 Vanity Fair piece by Peter Hamby:

“Since Vietnam, every time a Democrat has won the presidency, it’s because Democrats voted with their hearts in a primary and closed ranks around the candidate who inspired them, promising an obvious break from the past and an inspiring vision that blossomed in the general election. Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton. Barack Obama. All were young outsiders who tethered their message to the culture of the time.

“When Democrats have picked nominees cautiously and strategically falling in line, the results have been devastating, as Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton made plain.

“It’s not a perfect rule: While Gore and Clinton didn’t quite electrify the country, they still won the popular vote. And George McGovern was a heart candidate who got slaughtered by Richard Nixon in 1972. But the McGovern wipeout is kind of what Biden and his loyalists are clinging to: the idea that this Trump moment, like the wrenching 60s, is so existential and high stakes that Democrats will overlook their usual instincts and do the sensible thing.

“Theatrical and Irish, Biden surely is hoping that he can be a vehicle for both passion and pragmatism. But if he wins the nomination next year, it will be because Democrats went with their heads, not their bleeding hearts.

Avatar, the last James Cameron film to hit screens, opened nine and a half years ago. Since that time Cameron has been working on making four Avatar sequels. That’s right — four of ’em. Not a sequel or a trilogy but a five-parter if you count the original. Basically a theatrical miniseries.

It was announced today that the release date of the fourth and final Avatar sequel (aka Avatar 5) has been bumped from 12.19.25 to 12.17.27, which is (a) eight and a half years from now and (b) 19 years after the release of the original. Given that Cameron began work on Avatar in early ’06, there will actually be a time span of 21 years between the start of it all and Avatar 5.

Has anyone in the history of motion pictures ever invested this many years in the multi-part fulfillment of a single franchise?

New Avatar sequel dates, as dictated by Disney: Avatar 2 — previously slated to open on 12/18/20, now opening on 12.17.21 or eleven months after the swearing-in of President Pete Buttigieg. Avatar 2 — previously dated on 12.17.21, now bumped to 12.22.23, by which time Buttigieg’s re-election campaign will be in the final stages of preparation. Avatar 4 — previously dated on 12.20.24, now set to open on 12.19.25 or nearly a full year into Buttigieg’s second term. And then the debut of the grand finale, Avatar 5, on 12.17.27.

Nothing but upvotes for Lulu Wang‘s The Farewell, which A24 will open on 7.12. Billi (Akwafina), a Chinese-American 20something, flies to China after her grandmother Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen) has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The tension stems from a family decision not to tell Nai Nai of her condition.

I’m not questioning the heartfelt Sundance raves, but I have a couple of questions.

The idea, again, is to keep the grandmother in the dark about her illness…right? I realize that trailer cutters always try to deliver on-the-nose emotions but something feels wrong between the 20-second and 50-second mark. The trailer strongly indicates that family members (Akwafina included) are making very little effort to mask their sadness over the situation, to the extent that Nai Nai seemingly has no choice but to ask “what’s wrong?” What’s the point of a family deciding to keep bad news a secret if they’re going to convey their true feelings this blatantly? Wouldn’t everyone try to mask their feelings with too much gaiety?

And if an older women is stricken with lung cancer, wouldn’t she look like it? As in ashen, bent over with a cane, gaunt, chemo treatments, pain medication, napping a lot? And wouldn’t she knew what’s going on anyway? It’s her body, after all.

Right now The Farewell has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating.

Regional Journalist Friend: “If you have the time, check out HBO’s Chernobyl five-part miniseries, which premiered last night. Very grim but quite excellent — a perfect look at the incompetence and blinkered Soviet mentality that contributed to this epochal disaster.”

HE: “Oh, yeah. I made a mental note and then forgot about it. It’s almost oppressive how much quality product is streaming out there. Are you sure I won’t absorb radiation poisoning by watching it?”

RJF: “Yeah, there’s a ton of good stuff on TV, almost too much to keep up with. I promise you won’t get radiation poisoning watching it, although you will be watching God knows how many Ukrainians get it. I love the fact that HBO is not gonna let Netflix control the conversation — Chernobyl, Barry, Game of Thrones, the upcoming Deadwood movie. HBO is really hot now.”

Directed by Johan Renck, written by Craig Mazin, costarring Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, Emily Watson, Jessie Buckley, Adam Nagaitis, Billy Postlethwaite, Con O’Neill, Barry Keoghan. Shot last spring in Lithuania (Vilnius and Ignalina), a few minor scenes in Lithuania. New episodes debuting Mondays until the final episode on 6.3.19.

97% on Rotten Tomatoes, 82% on Metacritic.

To prepare for catching Kantemir Balagov‘s Beanpole in Cannes (Un Certain Regard), last night I watched his 2018 film Closeness (Tesnota) on a Russian streaming site. At a cost of $5 and change, which I was actually charged twice for. English and Spanish subtitles included.

Undeniably grim, powerful and penetrating. A nominal kidnapping saga in the gloomiest small Russian town you could ever imagine, but the focus is mainly on family (a tight-knit Jewish community), despair and resentments. A grim but highly believable milieu. Stark realism gives way to stark miserablism. In many ways convincing, riveting, pause-giving. Very claustrophobic with what felt like too many suffocating close-ups (what a horrible place to live!) but that’s Balagov’s intention, his way of making you feel it. Which I respect.

I believed every minute of it, but the lethargic places it took me to. It left me feeling drained and numb, and saturated with a downish vibe. But with an eye-opening performance by lead actress Daria Zhovner, for sure.

At 118 minutes Closeness seems to drag on longer than necessary. A few scenes don’t seem all that essential to the narrative — they’re basically about Zhovner’s interior life — her feelings of indifference, nihilism. The “taut story tension aesthetic” certainly isn’t upheld start to finish. And that horrible Chechen-Russian snuff film footage from that infamous 1999 Tukhchar massacre. I’m not likely to ever forget the sight of a young Russian solder screaming for his life, and then…I can’t describe it any further.

Overall this is a tough, commendable film, but the despair overwhelms. That’s the basic idea, I realize — this is a story about a community stuck with themselves in more ways than one. Serious respect, not much affection.

All Pedro Almodovar movies are perfect. Even the less-good ones. Whenever I recall my peak Cannes viewings over the last 20-plus years (although my first Cannes happened in ’92), there are always two or three Almodovar films swimming around. Despite the grueling experience of I’m So Excited, the pure-Almodovar-pleasure factor is something I’ve come to expect. I’m fairly certain it’ll be mine to savor when I see Pain and Glory sometime between 5.15 and 5.24..

From Film Comment review By Manu Yánez Murillo, posted on 3.22.19: “Pain and Glory is a heartrending, meditative, and deeply confessional culmination of Almodovar’s prolonged immersion in the waters of autofiction.

“The clues of this fictionalized self-portrait are hidden in plain sight: Banderas, in the role of a lifetime, wears Almodóvar’s messy hairstyle, flashy sweaters, and flowery shirts, and Salvador’s memories are in perfect sync with episodes from Almodóvar’s career. As a pretext for putting its physically, spiritually, and artistically stagnant protagonist into motion, the story knits one of its threads around a restoration of Sabor (Flavor), a movie Salvador directed 32 years earlier, to be presented at Madrid’s Spanish Cinematheque.

“Those happen to be the same number of years that have passed since the release of Law of Desire, whose restoration Almodóvar presented in 2017 at, yes, the Spanish Cinematheque. On that occasion he was accompanied by his greatest muse, Carmen Maura, while in Pain and Glory Salvador (the name is reminiscent of ‘Almodóvar’) intends to attend the premiere with Sabor’s star, a former and estranged alter ego played by Asier Etxeandia, in a veiled reference to actor Eusebio Poncela.

“It goes without saying that the third star of Law of Desire was Antonio Banderas, playing Poncela’s impulsive and psychotic young lover in his third collaboration with Almodóvar.”

From a Variety q & a with Almodovar and Pain and Glory star Antonio Banderas, conducted by Henry Chu:

Variety: “The whole style of the film feels stripped down. Is this a new phase in your filmmaking?”

Almodóvar: “Absolutely. The style, the narration, is a continuation of what I did with Julieta: much more restrained and austere. Visually, the colors in this new phase are still vibrant and intense, because I’m not turning my back on the coloring of my films. But the tone of the narrative is more stark. This is quite a challenge for me, being such a baroque director, to move into this new phase. I don’t know whether I’ll go back again to what I was doing before, because I don’t normally look ahead and forecast what my next steps are going to be.”

Roughly three or four years ago, the lefty-elite wokester era of filmmaking and film criticism began. How long it will last is anyone’s guess, but the guiding theme or mission of wokester cinema and wokester criticism is to (a) instruct by dramatizing social problems and (b) inspirational contrarian responses to said problems by women, POCs and LGBTQs. Resistance, progressive enlightenment, representation, etc. Fuck the white-guy oppressors.

Wokesterism is roughly similar to the WPA-funded social realism phase which happened among painters and art critics in the late 1920s and 1930s. Then as now, the idea is to produce art that “draws attention to the real socio-political conditions” of those who’ve dealt with socio-economic oppression “as a means to critique the power structures behind these conditions.” The quotes are taken from the social realism chapter in a reputable art history site, but they bear a certain similarity to the here-and-now.

As we all know the modern art movement began with the first stirrings of French impressionism, which began to manifest in the late 1860s and 1870s (Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne) and was really off to the races by the 1880s, which is when Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gaugin got rolling. Then came Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada-ism, Surrealism, etc.

And then came the German Depression of the ’20s and the Great Depression of 1929, and suddenly the whole modern art movement was more or less called off — suspended, put on hold — for the noble and celebrative common-man proclamations of social realism, which became the whole show throughout the ’30s. Largely government-funded art that celebrated the proletariat struggle while portraying tensions between working people and the oppressive, hegemonic forces of heartless capitalism.

Social realism ended with the beginning of WWII and certainly the winning of that conflict, and then came Abstract Expressionism (Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko), Pop Art, Photorealism and whatever the fuck followed.

I don’t have the first clue whether Wokesterism is any kind of current in the presently-configured art world, but I know for sure that it’s ruling the roost as far as indie movies are concerned — indie-level, Sundance-aspiring cinema coupled with your rank-and-file wokester critics doing the obligatory fawn whenever and however they can. Because the progressive zeitgeist insists that they do. Because, frankly, their jobs depend on it.

As Sasha Stone noted today, we’re living in “the era of the hive mind.”

Brett Easton Ellis on Green Book (at 18-minute mark): “What’s a movie I really liked that critics missed? It’s gonna be controversial but Green Book is one of those movies. Manohla Dargis said on Oscar night said, ‘Disgusting…how did this happen?’ Justin Chang at the L.A. Times had a breakdown too. And Wesley Morris wrote a brilliant piece about Green Book two days before voters went into the Academy that said ‘this is a movie you cannot support.’

“[But Morris] didn’t convince them, which proved that people like the movie a lot more than critics did, and that critics used their ideology to describe the movie rather than just enjoy the very real pleasantries of the film, which were really about craft, writing, acting, production [values].

“One of the reasons why I know so many who really like that movie is that is one of the only cultural artifacts from last year that really was about hope. A sense of hope between the races. No matter how clumsy or corny you thought it was.

Many people were moved by that notion, and a lot of critics rejected because they didn’t feel it was woke enough in the same way as Sorry To Bother You or BlacKkKlansman or Blindspotting. Which are actually very negative movies about bringing people together…bringing together black and white whereas Green Book, in its old fashioned way, said this is a possibility, these man can exist, they can love each other. And as hokey as it might seem, a lot of people liked that message, and they wanted to see that.” — Brett Easton Ellis (“White“) in a recent Commonwealth Club chat with moderator Nellie Bowles, N.Y. Times tech and culture reporter.

Also: Asked for his general thoughts about Moonlight, Ellis says “it’s okay…I think it was over-rated. That’s all.” (HE: Yes!) Sensing the chilly reaction to this viewpoint, Ellis adds, “Oh, God…oh, gasp! I said Moonlight was over-rated! Oh, my God! That’s the problem. Saying that and getting that reaction…that self-seriousness about Moonlight is part of the problem. Because you can’t say anything [negative] about Moonlight. You have to love it! You have to love it. Many people don’t.”