After decades of only half-listening to Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, I suddenly became a convert about three or four months ago. I actually bought three albums. Strange but that’s how it goes sometimes. You suddenly awaken and there’s no explaining why it took you as long as it did. I guess I felt removed from the blue-collar Michigan experience…something like that.

I was raised as an Episcopalian, and as much as I hated Sunday school when I was eight and nine the boilerplate teachings of Christianity must have somehow seeped into my head. Because via the profound transportation of lysergic acid diathylamide I sought out spirituality in my early 20s, and this resulted in my becoming a kind of upper-middle-class Hindu in flared jeans and Brooks Brothers shirts, led along by by the saga of Arjuna and Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita.

So I’ve always felt a certain affinity for satori and holiness and spiritual ritual (candles, incense, singing of dreary hymns). Sometime in the ’90s I attended a Catholic mass service inside Notre Dame in Paris, and on some level it felt right. I attended another one in Rome around the turn of the century — same feeling when it ended. I’m no Christian, mind — I’m an LSD mystic by way of Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Baba Ram Dass, Sri Chinmoy, Alan Watts, George Harrison and John Lennon.

But I’m not Bill Maher either. I respect what the faith of Christianity has at least tried to do as far as guiding or influencing the flock in the direction of kindness and occasional charity and whatnot.

But dear God, I felt such intense nausea when I watched the Ru Paul-ish drag show parody of the Last Supper during the opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympics. Pissing on Christianity! I sat there and felt sick. That morbidly obese chick with the silver-halo crown around her head, making a heart shape with her hands…I’ll never forget that Porky Pig face as long as I live. Jesus H. Christ! And that blue Dionysus guy! The trans community has really and truly shit all over itself this time. An obscenity.

News bulletin for full-of-themselves trans exhibitionists worldwide: There is more to life than gender switch-offs and sexual identity. You’ve just stamped your own ticket, guys. Your time of benign cultural favor has just ended. The world is disgusted. No offense but people hate you.

…bears a certain resemblance to Andy Serkis’s Gollum. There’s no debating this. This may not be a fair or kindly observation, but it’s certainly a valid one. And if you think Average Joe voters won’t come to the same conclusion you need to sit down and think again.

A former astronaut and the husband of former U.S. Senator Gabby Giffords, Kelly is a thoroughly decent and respectable fellow but in my humble opinion he’s more than a little unexciting. This plus the Gollum thing means Harris should perhaps think twice about picking him. Nobody wants a bald, pointy-eared gremlin one heartbeat away from the presidency.

Francis Coppola is an older rich white guy, and a decent percentage of urban progressive women (teens to mid 30s and perhaps beyond) would just as soon explode his life into smithereens as look at him.

I’m not kidding. Guys like Coppola are deer, and it’s deer hunting season everywhere right now, and if the Coppolas of the world want to be dead all they have to do is give the “hunters” a reason to get out their high-powered social media rifles and fire at them.

…I naturally think of (a) Miriam Karlin‘s “Catlady” Weathers (green leotard, white stockings, razor-sharp vocal chords) in A Clockwork Orange and (b) Edith Beale and her daughter in Albert and David Maysles‘ Grey Gardens

I personally relate as I’ve been a cat lover all my life.

J.D. Vance quote from 2021: “The U.S. is being run by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

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…after visiting 11 or 12 times and living there for an entire summer in ’03, I wouldn’t be there for the Olympics right now…not for anything….must to avoid. Tourists and lookie-lous are bad for the soul.

I love this reel because (a) it’s in 1080 HD 60fps, and therefore looks better now than it did on the best-quality TV in ’65, and (b) because the guys look so young. When you get older youth itself can seem indescribably beautiful.

Azazel Jacobs‘ His Three Daughters (Netflic, 9.6) is about a trio of estranged sisters “who come back together to care for their aging father.”

Fine, but where’s deathbed dad?

Imagine a film about three estranged daughters who decide to pool forces to rip off millions from a Middle Eastern sex trafficker, and then the movie goes “agghh, forget the sex-trafficking…let’s just focus on the actresses playing the daughters, show how good their acting chops are, that line of country.”

MGM’s 2011 Bluray of John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers (‘59) has a perfectly satisfactory 1.66 aspect ratio, but leave it to Kino Lorber to fuck things up by slicing off the tops and bottoms of the image for its 4K Bluray version, which came out a couple of years ago and which I just bought. Bastards. Presenting this profoundly handsome film within a 1.85 aspect ratio is an act of pure malice. Zero respect, nothing but condemnation.

I tried reaching out to a few well-placed fellows who could have theoretically shared what they knew about reactions to Jason Reitman‘s SNL 1975, which Sony will be releasing in October and which may — I say “may” — turn up in Telluride or Toronto in a few weeks’ time.

I didn’t get much help. A top-of-the-hill Sony honcho said he couldn’t “get into this stuff” but that the film is “indeed terrific.” The perpetually sullen Kris Tapley, whom I don’t personally like but who has a relationship with Reitman that goes way back, responded like an unplugged vacuum cleaner. Okay, a couple guys wrote back but only to say they hadn’t heard a thing.

I was excited by a research-screening reaction, you see, that World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy posted this morning. SNL 1975 has ben research-screened three times within the last month, I’ve been told. “Some rave reactions coming from yesterday’s test screening of SNL 1975,” Ruimy informed. “Possible Best Picture contender. Major comeback for Reitman.”

Hot response: “Fantastic. Big response from audience. Very Birdman/Lubezki-esque in its execution with the long takes and seamless transitions. Also shot on gorgeous 16mm, incredibly gritty and reminiscent of the period.

“Gabriel LaBelle (Lorne Michaels) was best in show for me, but it’s also hard to fully pinpoint a bonafide standout within the ensemble because it’s all over the place with the way it’s constantly moving and bouncing around to different characters (not a bad thing though, I thought it kept things fresh and avoided lingering/losing momentum). Nicholas Braun is also a scene stealer as Jim Henson, as is Cory Michael Smith, who plays Chevy Chase.”

Steve McQueen‘s Blitz (Apple, 11.1 in theatres) has just been announced as the closing-night attraction for the 2024 New York Film Festival — Thursday, 10.10, Alice Tully Hall.

McQueen’s film is principally a mother-son relationship drama set against the ghastly German bombing of England, generally known as The Blitz, which began on or about 9.7.40 and lasted until 5.11.41.

There’s a sentence within the NYFF Biitz page that gives me concern: “McQueen’s dazzling film offers a multicultural portrait of 1940s London, [one] too infrequently seen on screens.”

A “multicultural” London in 1940 and ’41 suggests that the film includes POC cast members other than just Eliott Heffernan, who plays George, the nine-year-old son of Saoirse Ronan‘s Rita, a working-class gal.

It’s one thing to consider the idea of Rita, a white woman, giving birth to a light-skinned POC son in the city that London was 93 years ago (1931). Life is always full of oddities and exceptions, of course, but this is obviously a stretch by historical social standards.

According to Wikipedia, in 1939 (a year before the bombing began) the total population of England was something in the vicinity of 38,084,321.

An IWM (Imperial War Museums) web page states that “before the first American troops arrived in 1942, the black population of Britain [was] around 8,000 to 10,000 people.” Let’s call it ten rather than eight.

In other words, in 1939 England there was one person of color for every 3800 palefaces. And yet two years after the start of the worldwide Great Depression with everyone scraping to survive, Ronan’s Rita zeroed in and mated with a POC fella within a nearly all-white culture that didn’t shrink from racist sentiments.

Okay, perhaps she adopted George but why?

I’m sorry but how can a rational, semi-informed moviegoer not conclude that casting-wise Blitz sounds like another case of presentism?