Before Sing Sing’s Clarence Maclin came along, was Flea the only famous guy to flaunt a top–row missing tooth? As a style statement, I mean.
We all understand that bad-teeth flaunting or calling attention to dental imperfections (a.k.a “grillz”) is a no-excuses, no-apologies Black cultural thing.
I guess what I’m really asking is if Flea is the only famous white guy to do the edgy gap-tooth. Would Adrien Brody be a leading Best Actor nominee if he had followed suit? How about Edward Norton?
It’s nearly 8 pm on Thursday, 2.6, and the Ojai-Santa Barbara area has been radiating awful, rain-soaked misery all day long. Dampness at the break of noon, eclipses of both the sun and moon.
As a result I’m in a mostly foul, wrapped-scarf, huddled mood right now, but at least I have a third-row seat at the grand Arlington Theatre, and the big hoo-hah Ralph Fiennes tribute show is about to begin.
I did an interview with Fiennes for the N.Y. Daily News back in early ‘94 (or was it late ‘93?). The focus was his Oscar-touted performance as concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (‘93).
The title of my article was “The Reich Stuff”. Other journos have used the same expression, but my use of it was the first, I think.
Sitting on-stage with Scott Feinberg, Fiennes looks a tiny bit schlumpy…charmingly, I mean…legs crossed at the ankles, thick-soled comfort shoes, projecting a certain modesty but explicityly not trying to sell the theatrical conceit that he’s chatting with Feinberg in the least. Nearly every moment Fiennes, leaning forward intently, is addressing the Arlington audience.
Best Fiennes quote of the night (as of 9:07 pm): “I liked Julia Roberts [when we met around the time of Shakespeare in Love] — I don’t think she liked me.”
Would that even be, like, allowed? You can’t eat Mahershala Ali — it’s just not done.
Friendo: “Wow, that Jurassic Park Rebirth trailer looks…kinda bad. They even repeat the scene from the first one when Sam Neill yells ‘Ian, freeze!’ at Jeff Goldblum when the big dino is behind him.
“I’m guessing Ali gets consumed. I know, I know, but he seems to have the Janet Leigh-in-Psycho role. Prominent but not too prominent. If he gets eaten the audience will go ‘Oh my God, the dino just ate an Oscar winner! Is anyone safe?!’ Plus ScarJo looks a bit ragged.”
The mainstream media will do everything it can, trust me, to steer the national conversation away from indications of a lack of sound judgment or sufficient skill on the part of Cpt. Rebecca Lobach, who was piloting the Blackhawk helicopter. Cut her a break at all costs — that’s the basic mindset as we speak.
The below video is related to “What the Black Hawk Pilots Could See, Just Before the Crash” (2.5.25), reported by Helmuth Rosales, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Mika Gröndahl and John Ismay. “A 3-D model created by The Times visualizes the helicopter pilots’ field of view minutes before a fatal crash with a jet in Washington=,” etc.
And none of the finest films of 2024 can begin to compete with it, quality-wise. The wild and woolly outdoors, and shot on a Warner Bros. soundstage yet! The dp was Ted McCord (Young Man with a Horn, East of Eden, The Sound of Music). Razor-sharp focus. The lighting was/is as good as it gets.
…due to a re-watch of The Brutalist. If I were to run into Brady Corbet on the streets of Ojai I wouldn’t take a poke at him — I’m a civilized human being — but I would probably give him a dirty look. Okay, I wouldn’t do that either — I would smile and go “hey!” and schmooze and whatnot. But I would hate myself for doing so.
Go to any wealthy or plain old middle-class bedroom community and you’ll never, ever see junker cars from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s parked on residential streets. But there are all kinds of decades-old beaters in laid-back, nestled-away Ojai, which is a hugely expensive place to live and quiet as fuck — you can hear a pin drop on Main Street.
…I’d want it be over as quickly as possible. So I’d choose a single, ruthless, chomp-and-gulp from a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I certainly wouldn’t want to get pecked to death by a Pterodactyl.
Posted on 6.6.18:
…Netflix execs would have Karla Sofia Gascon meet with an “accident” of some kind…just like Peter Finch‘s Howard Beale goes down in a hail of bullets after Robert Duvall‘s Frank Hackett and Faye Dunaway‘s Diana Christianson decide they have no other choice.
Paddy Chayefsky cooked it up, and then Sidney Lumet shot and cut it with all the necessary skills.
Is it fair to say that mainstream media types are being a bit ageist in their reportings and commentaries about Elon Musk‘s young guns, otherwise known as the six DOGE hotshots?
Mainstream mantra: “What the fuck is this?…they’re too young, too brash…what do they know?…this is crazy!”
The subhead of this article is “All The Young Dudes.”
Posted three days ago (2.2.25) by Wired‘s Vittoria Elliot, Dhruv Mehrotra, Zoë Schiffer and Tim Marchman:
Six young dudes, all in or certainly adjacent to their early 20s, are key players in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, “tasked by executive order” with “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
These brazen engineers, every one a gunslinger and all of them absolute government virgins, have basically been given the keys to the inner workings and wirings of the federal kingdom.
The hotshots are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger and Ethan Shaotran.
Even before my movie journalism career launched in the late ‘70s, I always considered it vital to see films that had seriously impacted the culture, even if the general consensus was that they were shit.
So it means something, I think, that I never had the slightest interest in catching Disney’s Freaky Friday, a popular but allegedly pedestrian mother-daughter body-swap comedy, when it opened 22 years ago.
I regard women-friendly films of this type as cotton candy at best, and the costarring of Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis seemed, in this context, like a formidable warning if not a flat-out repellent.
I therefore regard a 2.3.25 report that Cpt. Rebecca Lobach, who was killed on 1.29.25 when the Blackhawk helicopter she was co-piloting collided with an American Eagle commercial jet and caused the deaths of 64 passengers…reading that Lobach was a fanatical, repeat-watch fan of Freaky Friday is vaguely disappointing at the least, and kind of alienating, truth be told.
The 28-year-old Lobach was six or seven when Freaky Friday opened on 8.4.03. But her family kept re-watching it over and over and over, she later wrote. There’s no accounting for taste in films, needless to add.
