Last Monday I dropped off four shirts at Eco Friendly Cleaners (127 West Canon Perdido Street, Santa Barbara) with plans to retrieve them a couple of days later. I didn’t get around to it until yesterday, but when I got there at 4:50 pm I discovered they had shuttered 20 minutes earlier. What dry cleaning establishment closes on a Saturday at 4:30 pm? I realized in a flash that I was probably shit out of luck. It’s now 10:50 am, I’m driving back to WeHo at noon or 1 pm, and so far they haven’t responded to my calls and emails begging them to please cut me a break and let me pick up my shirts before heading home.

I called their business line, I wrote them emails, I asked the business owner next door if he knew the Eco proprietors’ last names so I could call them at home…nothing worked.

It’s obviously my fault that I didn’t pick up the shirts before they closed. The Eco Cleaner guys are in no way to to blame — this is on me. But again, who closes on a Saturday at 4:30 pm? And isn’t Eco Cleaners supposed to be a service business? Isn’t it the duty of the good merchant to turn the other cheek and do what he/she can to help the customer? Thank you, Eco Cleaners, for ignoring my pleas. Now I have to shell out at least $60 or $70 bucks to have UPS or Fed Ex pick up the shirts, etc. If I was the owner of Eco Cleaners, I would’ve done the right thing and driven down to the store this morning to help a customer out. But that’s me.

“You never see the real person when you fall for someone; you see a self-flattering illusion, and this is triply true with celebrity crushes. That I ever believed Johnny Depp’s spin is a testament to the tenacity of my inner teenager. So now that he has ticked off the ‘become a parody of yourself’, ‘have an acrimonious divorce’ and ‘blow your cash on stupid shit’ boxes, we can all look forward to the ‘dodgy plastic surgery’ and ‘massively obese’ phases, following in the footsteps of Mickey Rourke, Marlon Brando and many others. Maybe celebrities are just too indulged now, or maybe we know too much about them — which is why I’m increasingly thinking that the safest celebrity to have a crush on is a dead one.” — from Hadley Freeman’s 2.11 Guardian piece about her disengagement from Captain Fatass Over.

From 2.10 Washington Post op-ed piece by Kathleen Parker, titled “Trump’s Two-Year Presidency”: “Good news: In two years, we’ll have a new president. Bad news: If we make it that long.

“My ‘good’ prediction is based on the Law of the Pendulum. Enough Americans, including most independent voters, will be so ready to shed Donald Trump and his little shop of horrors that the 2018 midterm elections are all but certain to be a landslide — no, make that a mudslide — sweep of the House and Senate. If Republicans took both houses in a groundswell of the people’s rejection of Obamacare, Democrats will take them back in a tsunami of protest.

“Once ensconced, it would take a Democratic majority approximately 30 seconds to begin impeachment proceedings selecting from an accumulating pile of lies, overreach and just plain sloppiness. That is, assuming Trump hasn’t already been shown the exit.

“Or that he hasn’t declared martial law (all those anarchists, you know) and effectively silenced dissent. We’re already well on our way to the latter via Trump’s incessant attacks on the media — ‘among the most dishonest human beings on earth’ — and press secretary Sean Spicer’s rabid-chihuahua, daily press briefings. (Note to Sean: Whatever he’s promised you, it’s not worth becoming Melissa McCarthy’s punching bag. But really, don’t stop.)

Read more

Posted on 9.17.16: “In the words of John F. Kennedy, I do not shrink from the occasional responsibility of shitting on a teen-angst dramedy — I welcome it. I was frowning and throwing my hands in the air and exhaling and checking my watch less than five minutes in. Okay, Edge became somewhat more tolerable during the last third, which is when neurotic characters in movies of this sort begin to fold and weep as they lay their emotional cards on the table. But God, that first hour. And the cliches! It poked and prodded and put me through long stretches of hell.

“As noted, Edge isn’t all torture and yes, director-writer Kelly Fremon Craig is a cut above in some respects, but with James L. Brooks producing, I wanted a kind of angsty-teen-girl Bottle Rocket. Instead I got a misery flick. Mine, I mean, more than Hailee Stenfeld‘s because of prolonged exposure to the enraged, obnoxious, take-no-prisoners personality of her character, Nadine, whom Craig probably based upon aspects of herself.

“The neurotic, obstinate and nearly friendless Nadine is suffering because (a) she’s an old soul and a secret genius (as was I during my high school years) and her classmates are too shallow to get her. Her father died some years back from a heart attack, and her frizzy-haired mom (Kyra Sedgwick) is ineffectual. On top of which Nadine’s resentment of older smooth-cat brother Darian (Everybody Wants Some‘s Blake Jenner) turns to seething hate when he falls in love with her lifelong best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) and vice versa.

Read more

A little more than 11 years ago I wrote a piece about how three or four well-reviewed, high-toned, emotionally engaging films didn’t appear, from my November ’05 perspective, to be on their way to attracting what seemed to me like just commercial desserts.

As it turned out two films that I mentioned — Craig Brewer‘s Hustle & Flow (which ended up making $22 million and change) and Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes ($32 million) — did reasonably okay, or at least enough so that no one called them shortfallers. But they didn’t really connect, or not like they should have. You should’ve been there when Hustle & Flow first played at Sundance — it was huge. And when In Her Shoes played the ’05 Toronto Film Festival…wow.

But everything falls away in the end. Who out there has streamed Hustle & Flow or In Her Shoes over the last decade? Even I haven’t, and I can’t really explain why, not even to myself. Hanson died last September, and whatever happened to Brewer? His last feature was a 2011 Footloose remake. Everything disintegrates, particles exploding into space.

Posted on 11.2.05:
An impassioned, extremely well-made film with a sincere emotional current (i.e., one that actually makes you feel something with an application of professional finesse rather than hokey button-pushing) opens after being acclaimed by critics or film festival audiences or both…and what happens?

The public doesn’t respond with much enthusiasm. The movie opens in third or fourth or fifth place, or it opens okay but not as strongly as it should have, and then it’s dead by the second or third weekend, if not sooner.

Read more

From Maureen Dowd’s 2.11 N.Y.Times column, “Trump’s Gold Lining”: “Donald Trump has indeed already made some of America Great Again. Just not the aspects he intended. He has breathed new zest into a wide range of things: feminism, liberalism, student activism, newspapers, cable news, protesters, bartenders, shrinks, Twitter, the A.C.L.U., S.N.L., town halls, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Hannah Arendt, Stephen Colbert, Nordstrom, the Federalist Papers, separation of powers, division of church and state, athletes and coaches taking political stands and Frederick Douglass.

“As Trump blusters about repealing Obamacare, many Americans have come to appreciate the benefits of the law more. Lena Dunham credited the ‘soul-crushing pain and devastation and hopelessness‘ of Trump with helping her get a svelte new figure. Trump may even have pierced the millennial malaise, as we see more millennials showing interest in running for office.

“Every time our daft new president tweets about the ‘failing’ New York Times, our digital subscriptions and stock price jump, driven by readers eager for help negotiating the disorienting Trumpeana Oceana Upside Down dimension rife with gaslighting, trolling, leaking, lying and conflicts.

“Similarly, whenever Trump rants about Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of him and tweets that Saturday Night Live is ‘not funny,’ ‘always a complete hit job’ and ‘really bad television!,’ the show’s ratings go up. They’re now at a 20-year high.

Read more

Read more

In addition to the reported disappearances and deaths of Sergei Mikhailov, Ruslan Stoyanov and Oleg Erovinkin, which I summarized in a 1.29 post, I’m wondering about the fates of the poor Russian prostitutes who may or may not have performed a urination show for Donald Trump four years ago in both Moscow and St. Petersburg. I don’t know if any of this is true, but if it happened and the Russians do have a Trump pee-pee tape, those poor women have probably been “disappeared.” If you were Vladimir Putin and you wanted the alleged pee-pee episodes kept under wraps, wouldn’t you order the murder of the women involved, just to be safe?

What a drag it was last night to catch a 10 pm screening of John Wick, Chapter 2 at the Fiesta plex.  Me and roughly 25 or 30 wage-earning lowlifes. Baggy pants, hoodies, etc. “What a way to live and think!”, I muttered as I sank into my seat. With all the wonder and excitement of life outside, we few have chosen to watch a shitty Keanu Reeves action flick in a crummy megaplex on a rainy Friday night…welcome to the dungeon!

I was half-okay with the original John Wick but this thing…God. There’s a cool, efficient way to assemble programmers of this sort, but the evidence suggests that director Chad Stahelski, a former stunt man, and screenwriter Derek Kolstad just don’t have the skill or the smarts to improve upon the 2014 start-up. There’s a vapor cloud of stupidity hanging over the film at every turn. The fairly applied adjectives include “dull, poorly written, lazily acted, predictably plotted,” etc.

Reeves brings nothing spry or special to his performance — his line readings make Clint Eastwood‘s Dirty Harry inflections seem almost on the level of Alec Guinness performance in Smiley’s People, and his eyes are dark and dead. Even the minimally talented Jason Statham is better at this sort of thing.

Read more

The big villain in Anthony and Joe Russo‘s Avengers: Infinity War (Marvel/Disney, 5.4.18) is an enraged purple-hued ayehole named Thanos (Josh Brolin). Marvel honcho Kevin Feige has described Thanos as “the biggest, the best, and the baddest villain we ever had, and the most frightening villain the Avengers have ever faced.” That is just horseshit — every snarly superpowered villain in every superhero movie ever made has been designed to be the most vicious and terrible ever, and at the end of the day there are only so many feet in a roll of rope. Nobody gives a shit — it’s the same old dance, the same old scheme and we’ve got so many dues to pay. Infinity War is being touted as the culmination of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, which began with the original Iron Man (’08). In a pig’s eye — one way or another Feige will dream up something bigger, grander, more awesome and holy-shitty (at least in his own eyes).

The anti-Trump Resistance is the new Tea Party, only from the left…right? But to hear it from Piers Morgan, the wisest way for progressive lefties to play their cards is to calm down, accept Trump policies (revival of Jim Crow racism, pro-fossil fuel, homophobia, anti-immigrant instincts, hooray for Putin), somberly acknowledge the fact that Donald Trump managed an electoral (if not a nationwide vote-count) majority and speak only when called upon after raising their hands. That’s Australian comedian Jim Jefferies ripping into Morgan and flipping the bird.