I might have a couple of free hours at the end of tomorrow (i.e., Thursday), depending on how the column goes. Perhaps I can rumble down to the Grove around 5 or 6 pm and pay nearly $20 to see Cathy Yan‘s Birds of Prey? I missed the all-media screening so I have to see it, right? Sounds like a plan.

From Owen Gleiberman’s 2.5 Variety review: “Coming after the stand-alone phenomenon of Joker, Birds of Prey is a comic-book movie that isn’t pretending, for a single moment, to cast a spell of poetic awe. Yet it’s still a compellingly novel popcorn jamboree. Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel were female-superhero movies that offered the empowerment of earnest fantasy. Birds of Prey offers the empowerment of utter irresponsibility. The women in this movie look badder than those previous heroines did because, for the most part, they just don’t give a fuck.”

Gleiberman finishes this paragraph with one of the saddest declarative statements I’ve read in recent years: “With any luck, that should all translate into a major hit.”

So in other words Birds of Prey (aka The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is about enraged fuck-all nihilism and, in a certain social-undercurrent way, anti-brute-male revenge porn. I don’t know about the HE community, but I think it’s is so cool when this sort of material is delivered with a savage wink, and with ten times the necessary emphasis!

Perhaps one day Birds of Prey will play alongside Emerald Fennell and Carey Mulligan‘s Promising Young Woman, the Sundance ’20 entry which, according to World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy, is drawing from the same well.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘restrained’ when describing Promising Young Woman,” he says. “There’s nothing subtle about this movie, and it’s not realism at all. It’s a post-#MeToo fantasy, a feminist version of Death Wish…a justifiably angry woman (Carey Mulligan) punishing filthy men. Mulligan is depicted as heroic without any real-life consequences or police investigations or social media gotchas. It gives you a lot to chew on and talk about post-screening — in a sense it’s right at the forefront of the post-#MeToo conversation — but then again it’s not saying anything new. And it’s definitely a world apart. It charges into extreme realms.”

The possible problem with female revenge porn, it seems, isn’t the justified anger that propels these films, but the broad-brush overkill that’s been deployed. To go by Ruimy and Gleiberman, I mean.

Coralie Fargeat‘s Revenge (’17), a rape-and-revenge action horror flick, was cut from a similar cloth.

In my judgment there’s been only one commendable (if not quite excellent) female-revenge film so far — Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale. I believed and admired that 2018 film start to finish, despite Kent allowing the story tension to dissipate during the last 15% or 20%.

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Ragin’ Cajun: “We gotta decide what we want to be. Do we want to be an ideological cult, or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct — to be a majority party? I am scared to death. We gotta get relevant. The urban core is not gonna get it done.” What’s he really saying? Forget Bernie, Joe may be done, think about Sensible Pete.

Kurt Russell has better, thicker, wavier hair than Karl Marx, and the shorter length on the sides is easily more flattering than Marx’s wild bushy side-growth, which is the size of bulky headphones.

Karl Marx

Kurt Russell as captured in a W magazine piece (copy by Lynn Hirshberg, photos by Angelo Pennetta) called “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood Gets a Sequel at Quentin Tarantino’s Dream Party.”

The Beast started it by refusing to shake Speaker Pelosi‘s hand. Huffy petulant fatass. Pelosi was therefore within her rights to rip up Donald Trump‘s speech (three sheets), and impassively at that! I’ve watched it over and over.

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Until this morning I’d never thought of Bernie Sanders in terms or images that were even vaguely indicative of any sort physical properties or biological urgency or anything along those lines. For years I’ve only thought of him as a tough, flinty, straight-shootin’ mofo — white-haired, blunt-spoken, Brooklyn-accented, cut the bullshit. Now, suddenly, I’m thinking of some kind of wolf-like predator with certain primal qualities or tendencies that I’d rather not get into if it’s all the same.

…to put money on Parasite winning Best Picture. Imagine. Not happening…sorry!

Betting Guy to HE: “The various odds — especially on best picture — are rather close. They will eventually converge as people ‘shop around’ for bets. I would say it would be worthwhile betting on Parasite for Best Picture. The odds are similar to what they were for La La Land Land (the favorite) and Moonlight. And, no, I don’t think people unfamiliar with betting will understand the odds postings, although they can be easily explained.”

If I was writing a semi-fictionalized HBO docudrama about last night’s Iowa caucus debacle, I would include a scene in which Shadow CEO Gerard Niemira is spotted in a Davenport parking lot by a crowd of pitchfork-wielding locals. “There he is…get him!” someone shouts. The mob chases the terrified Niemira across a field and into a wooded area with a couple of video crews following. The panting, panicking Niemira (who has an irresistably punchable face) climbs a half-dead pine tree as the angry Iowans surround him like the crowd chasing Boris Karloff in The Bride of Frankenstein. They begin to throw stones. One connects, Niemira falls to the ground, and the mob jumps like a pack of wolves, or like the costars of Lifeboat beating the tar out of Walter Slezak.

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Have you heard? Renee Zellweger is 100% guaranteed to win the Best Actress Oscar this Sunday for her touching performance as the beleagured, pill-popping, late-stage Judy Garland in Judy. How fitting, then, that five days before the Oscar telecast Variety‘s Marc Malkin has posted an interview with Garland’s equally famous daughter, the not-without-her-own-issues Liza Minnelli, 73.

Fitting but less than revelatory. Because Malkin and Minnelli almost totally dodge the Judy factor, and all Minnelli will say about Zellweger is “I hope she had a good time making [the film].”

Any journalist worth his or her salt wouldn’t avoid the Judy elephant if he/she could wangle a chat with Minnelli, and Malkin is no go-along fanboy so why did he post such a zero-content, kiss-ass interview? Apparently because Minnelli or her publicist told Malkin going in that she wouldn’t discuss Judy or offer an opinion of Zellweger’s performance. And Malkin said, “Okay, let’s do it anyway because…Liza!!!”

I don’t believe Minnelli hasn’t seen Judy. Does anyone? If Minnelli actually hasn’t seen it (which is theoretically possible) this would obviously indicate a neurotic avoidance syndrome that would choke a horse. But let’s presume that she has seen it, and is therefore harboring a reaction or two. If so, the only possible explanation for Minnelli’s silence is that (a) she has nothing all that nice to say, but that (b) she doesn’t want to rain on Zellweger’s parade on the final day of Oscar voting.

And so Malkin dutifully asks her a bunch of cottonball questions about her life and career.

In a 7.16.19 interview ET Online‘s Desiree Murphy asked Minnelli whether she’d seen the Judy trailer, which contained snippets of Zellweger’s performance. “Oh, really? No, no I haven’t [seen anything],” Minnelli responded. She called Zellweger “a wonderful actress” but added, “I just hope [the Judy filmmakers] don’t do what they always do. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

Even if she didn’t entirely care for the film and/or Zellweger’s performance, Minnelli could have offered a couple of puffy, insincere, carefully phrased thoughts — the kind of reactions everyone shovels when they want to say something nice but inconsequential. But she couldn’t even manage that, possibly because she regards herself as too much of a blazing truth-teller. Or, as I’ve noted, she’s intentionally avoided seeing the film, which of course would represent a herculean defiance of human nature as well as a bizarre response for a daughter who is naturally determined to protect and polish her mother’s legend as best she can.

Minnelli seems to have gone along with the interview in order to remind the industry that she’s in the pink and ready to work — active, healthy, parked locally, a few years sober. Malkin notes that Minnelli is living in “a modest Los Angeles-area apartment,” and that the main living room is “cozy with a grand piano squeezed into the corner,” and that “a collection of awards crowd a sideboard near the entryway.”

Malkin: Do you want to act again? Minnelli: “Oh, sure.” Malkin: “What do you want to do?” Minnelli: “Whatever comes up. I’ve always been like that.”

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The Democratic party administrators responsible for Tuesday night’s massive screw-up of the Iowa caucus results have to be severely punished. The state-wide catastrophe was reportedly caused by a faulty app (created by Shadow Inc., a tech company owned by Acronym) that was sent out to caucus secretaries only two or three days ago. The guilty parties need to be busted. Their sabres have to be broken in two. And by the way this is presumably the death knell of the Iowa Caucus.

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I want to say this plainly but carefully: I did not feel profound sadness when I read of Rush Limbaugh’s condition. His strident-rightie rhetoric did a lot to inflame Bumblefuck Nation and rupture the fabric of civility in this country and fortify the toxicity that fuels the culture-war fires to this day. In the eyes of many millions Limbaugh is a flat-out villain. Anyone on my side of the battlefield (i.e., with a liberal or progressive attitude or philosophy) who says he/she feels badly about Limbaugh’s misfortune is just “saying that”, trust me.