Eight days ago The Atlantic‘s Tim Wainwright delivered the most arresting and insightful analysis of the Inside Llewyn Davis cat dynamic that I’ve read so far. “The theory that the cat is an extension of Llewyn also helps put the ending of the movie in context. When Llewyn leaves the Gorfeins’ for the second time in the final scenes of the film, he keeps the cat inside. This comes after he’s finally learned its name: Ulysses. By doing so, I think the uncontrollable, unpredictable Llewyn also comes to terms with a part of himself. He has been awoken from the dream that he’s an undiscovered genius, and from the erroneous notion that talent exists in a vacuum — that any of his poor decisions and arrogant assholery wouldn’t somehow limit his success.”

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Various articles about negative reactions to The Wolf of Wall Street have been posted by bored entertainment journalists over the last three or four days. This has led to at least one article (by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson) about why everyone is piling on. The snake is eating its own tail. The more these pieces appear, the more Average Joes are probably saying to each other “gee, negative reaction…maybe we should take a pass?” Once this syndrome starts, there’s no stopping it. Self-perpetuating.

Point #1: It’s probably true that older conservative types, a certain percentage of women and various none-too-brights have a problem with Martin Scorsese‘s film, but it seems inconceivable that viewers with a smidgen of smarts and social perspective wouldn’t be allied with the 75% of Rotten Tomatoes critics who admire it. Point #2: The heart of the afore-mentioned articles is Wolf‘s C grade from Cinemascore respondents. Cinemascore staffers always talk to viewers on opening day/night, and it’s likely that a good percentage of those who saw Wolf on Christmas Day were soft impulse types who went looking for a fun crazy comedy, or because they’re fans of Leonardo DiCaprio or Jonah Hill or whatever. The vast majority of moviegoers don’t read reviews, are under-educated and under-read, and they don’t want to know from metaphors about America’s financial elite. But that’s okay. By the slovenly standards of American culture it’s perfectly acceptable to misinterpret or flat-out miss the point of the best film of the year.

Peter Watkins‘ Privilege (’67) is an enervated but semi-fascinating faux-documentary about the British government exploiting the worship of a pop star (played by Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones) in order to manipulate his fans into a state of conformity. The film was buried by Universal stateside and is pretty much forgotten today. I’d never seen it before catching it this morning on YouTube. The futuristic tone is nervy and “provocative” and the film was certainly influential (at least as far as Stanley Kubrick‘s A Clockwork Orange was concerned, according to Watkins). It’s also a bit tedious. But costar/supermodel Jean Shrimpton (now the 71 year-old owner of the Abbey Hotel in Cornwall) was ravishing.

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I say this every year, but no New Year’s Eve celebration of any kind will ever match what the kids and I saw in front of the Eiffel Tower when 1999 gave way to 2000. A bit dippy from champagne and standing about two city blocks in front of the Eiffel Tower and watching the greatest fireworks display in history. And then walking all the way back to Montmartre with thousands on the streets after the civil servants shut the Metro down at 1 a.m. No cabs anywhere. Here’s a non-embeddable video. Three videos of tonight’s 2014 Eiffel Tower action after the jump.

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This afternoon I attended a rehearsal by the 20 Feet From Stardom gals — Merry Clayton, Darlene Love, Lisa Fischer and Judith Hill — for their performance at tomorrow’s Rose Bowl game in Pasadena. They’ll be singing “The Star Spangled Banner” before Michigan and Stanford go at it. It’s all but certain that the short-listed 20 Feet will end up as one of the five Best Feature Doc nominees. It’s now viewable on iTunes.

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Posted eight years ago: “I’d say ‘Happy New Year’ to everyone, but…all right, ‘Happy New Year.’ But I’ve always hated those words. Nothing’s ‘happy’ by way of hope. Happy is discovered, earned, lucked into. At best, people are content or…you know, joyously turned on for the moment or laughing or telling a funny story or a good joke. Placated, relaxed, enthused, generous of heart…but ‘happy’? Clams are happy. There’s only the hum. Either you hear it or you don’t.

Posted in 2010: “Nothing fills me with such spiritual satisfaction as my annual naysaying of this idiotic celebration of absolutely nothing.

“I love clinking glasses with cool people at cool parties as much as anyone else, but celebrating renewal by way of the hands of a clock and especially in the company of party animals making a big whoop-dee-doo has always felt like a huge humiliation.

“Only idiots believe in the idea of a of a midnight renewal. Renewal is a constant. Every minute marks the potential start of something beautiful and cleansing, and perhaps even transforming. So why hang back and celebrate a rite that denies this 24/7 theology, and in a kind of idiot-monkey way with party hats and noisemakers?

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Last June Fox News got its knickers in a twist over Aaron Sorkin‘s Newsroom line that the Tea Party is “the American Taliban.” As I noted last June, this observation is as dead-on as they come. Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson even has the look of a mullah. “Make sure she carries her Koran…save ya a lot of trouble down the road.”

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Yesterday Technology Tell’s Steven Silver posted a compelling retort to Christina McDowell‘s anti-Wolf of Wall Street essay (“An Open Letter to the Makers of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf Himself“) in a 12.26 L.A. Weekly post. “It’s pretty clear that McDowell hasn’t seen the film,” he writes. “If she had, she’d know that it does not ‘glorify’ the crimes of Belfort and Co. — not even close. The film treats its subjects as degenerate, criminal scum.” Well, not altogether. It treats them as degenerate criminal scum who partied like howling Caligulas — a slight difference. That’s the double-track strategy that Scorsese chose before shooting. No judging, you are there, no Cecil B. DeMille-like admonishing from on high. McDowell writes that in actuality “this kind of behavior brought America to its knees.” Silver replies — hello? — that this is “exactly the film’s point.”

If you’re one of those people who likes to sit in an idling car in a parking lot and do nothing, fine. Just don’t do it with your lights on. Is it really that hard to remember that idling in a crowded lot with your lights on (parking or front beams) suggests to other drivers that you might soon be leaving, and that this always results in someone deciding to all-but-block a parking lane by waiting for you to leave? Two explanations — (a) the person sitting in their idling car has forgotten his/her lights are on or (b) he/she doesn’t give a damn and is therefore a kind of parking-lot sociopath. I ran into one last night in the Gelson’s parking lot on Santa Monica Blvd. near Sweetzer. It was a woman in her 50s, gazing at her face in a small vanity mirror and applying some kind of makeup. Here are three related posts — “Public Enemies,” “Parking Lot Scolds,” “Special Corner of Hell.”

I know it’s not pleasant to inhale dog breath, but somehow dog-owners have coped with it for centuries. It’s barely something to think about. I’ve owned two golden retrievers and rolled around on the floor with dozens of other dogs, and I’ve never said to myself, “Oh, Jesus, here comes Fido and his stinky mouth”…not once! And yet the makers of Orapop are flush. They’re paying off their mortgages, taking trips to Barbados, getting face lifts in Brazil. Leonardo DiCaprio has said that the behavior in The Wolf of Wall Street is a metaphor for almost everything that’s wrong with this country (or words to that effect). I think that Orapup is a similar metaphor. If I met a hot girl at a party and she told me she uses Orapop on her dog, I would smile and politely excuse myself.

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This is the first “official” photo from Ridley Scott‘s Exodus (20th Century Fox, 12.12.14). I don’t know what ancient Egyptians looked like exactly, but I have an idea. Dark brown eyes, olive-shaded skin, a bit like Sal Mineo or Omar Sharif, etc. I doubt they had Anglo-Saxon features like Charlton Heston, Anne Baxter, Yul Brynner, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, John Derek, Vincent Price and others who had speaking roles in Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments. But somehow I’ve come to accept that Heston’s face wasn’t too far off the mark. He didn’t look “Egyptian” but the consensus at the time was that Heston’s jaw, forehead and cheekbones seemed to belong a bit more to the past than the present. But Christian Bale…it’s not fair to say this based on a single still, I realize, but he really doesn’t look Egyptian. His eyes are wrong. He has a CAA haircut.

A 12.30 Kris Tapley/Hitfix story includes a significant quote from The Wolf of Wall Street star-producer Leonardo DiCaprio. Significant, that is, to the morons who feel that Wolf is revelling in amoral behavior for its own sake. Asked to comment about those “who see [the film] as more of an irresponsible glorification than a satirical takedown,” he told Hitfix that “anyone who thinks that missed the boat entirely. Anyone [who] thinks this is a celebration of Wall Street and this sort of hedonism…if anyone watches this movie, at the end of Wolf of Wall Street, they’re going to see that we’re not at all condoning this behavior.

“In fact,” DiCaprio goes on, “We’re saying that this is something that is in our very culture and it needs to be looked at and it needs to be talked about. What these characters represent in this film are ultimately everything that’s wrong with the world we live in. I’m going to be 40 years old, but I see this incessant need for consumerism and wanting more and wanting to give into every indulgence that is more rampant than ever. That shift doesn’t seem to be happening in the evolution of our species. It just seems to be getting larger and larger. So yeah, to me, look, this movie is incredibly entertaining. But what we’re talking about is, to me, a very serious subject. That’s the best way I can put it.”