One of the most horrifying Orwellian wokethink images mine eyes have ever beheld…I’m serious, I was there and I fucking snapped this photo…a N.Y. Times video ad inside the Washington, D.C metro, which first appeared in February ’22. Only two years ago, and one reason why Biden has reason to fear the wrath of the electorate.
Welcome to episode #2 of “The Misfits” as HE’s Jeffrey Wells welcomes this weekend’s hotshot guests — Wilson Morales, editor and founder of Blackfiklmandtv, and comedy writer, former Fox News movie guy and “Talking Movies” cohost Bill McCuddy.
Topics include (a) the last and final Oscar predictions (we’re all very glad the season will be over after next Sunday night, 3.10), (b) reactions to Dune: Part Two, and (c) speculations about five or six March releases. Again, the link.
Click through to HE’s Substack page to watch, and please be good people by becoming paid subscribers next week and down the road.
From “Myth of Good Driving While Half-Stinko,” posted on 2.18.22:
As we all know, Robert Zemeckis‘s Flight is about the disease of alcoholism. I responded well to this 11.2.12 release, in part, because I had become a sober person roughly nine months earlier — on 3.20.12. And yet the film contains a certain drunk-driving paradox. Because Denzel Washington‘s “Cpt. Whip Whitaker” saves his commercial plane from crashing by flying upside down. We’re led to understand that if Whip had been 100% sober he might not have rolled the plane over and saved the day.
But even if this isn’t what the film says, I’m thinking that this principle applies to some extent to car driving.
If you’re driving your Lexus drunk your reaction time is slower than if you’re cold sober, and if you’re really stinko you’re definitely a menace to all humanity. But drunk or semi-drunk driving isn’t all bad, and sometimes it works. Or at least it did for me.
I know, I know — did I just say that? In today’s world DUI is a felony punishable by huge fines and jail time in some cases, and rightly so. But in the ’70s tens of thousands of people drove from place to place every night with a buzz-on and in some cases plain shitfaced, and some awful things resulted, I’m sure. But quite often, probably the vast majority of times, drunks just drove home and parked their cars and watched a little TV and went to sleep on the couch. And then woke up at 3 am, undressed and flopped in their bedroom.
May God forgive me but in my early drinking days when I lived in Wilton and Westport, Connecticut, I drove late at night with several beers and/or Jack Daniels on the rocks in my system, and I just cruised on through, and I mean weekend after weekend after weekend after weekend. No accidents, no fender benders, nothing. Others plowed their cars into ponds and trees and guard-rails, but not me.
There were times, in fact, when I drove down those winding country roads at high speeds and I would focus like a motherfucker, and I was convinced at times that I was driving like Paul Newman at Lime Rock.
I started to tell myself, in fact, that I drove better when half-bombed because I was less intimidated by the possibility of something going wrong. I drove without fear, without hesitation. I took those hairpin turns like a champ.
Present tense: In short, if you’re as good a driver as I was and you’re not flat-out wasted, driving with booze in your system isn’t such a bad thing. Or at least it doesn’t need to be. Would I drive drunk now? Of course not. I stopped drinking 8 and 2/3 years and I’m not an asshole. I’m just saying that I got away with it for years, and…well, I’ve said it.
I had a few chats with Dennis Wilson back in the mid ’70s, and one of those times we briefly discussed Monte Hellman‘s Two Lane Blacktop (’71). And I can tell you that Wilson wasn’t a fan. I can’t recite an exact Wilson quote as it happened too long ago, but his basic opinion was that Hellman had missed the potential…that he didn’t really understand what the film was about or didn’t appreciate the glory of high-octane engines….something like that. Wilson felt he understood the fast-car aesthetic better than Hellman, and that he understood more fully what it should have been about.
As mentioned two or three times I got to know Charles Bukowski a little bit in ‘ 87. This was during the post-production period on Barbet Schroeder‘s Barfly, which I wrote the press kit for.
I visited, drank with and “interviewed” Bukowski (sans notes, Truman Capote-style) in his Long Beach home sometime around…I don’t know, maybe March or April or even May. Barfly opened on 10.16.87.
Barbet made me rewrite the press kit over and over and over, so much so that I couldn’t read it after the tenth or twelfth revision. I came to hate hat press kit, but you know what? It’s one of the most tightly composed pieces of writing I’ve ever authored.
All to say that somewhere during this period I experienced by very first reading of Bukowski’s “The Laughing Heart,” which I loved. Not as much as “The Genius of the Crowd” but still.
Originally posted on 7.28.08: Here’s a decent story about a celebrity-drinking incident, passed along second-hand by a friend. It involves Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart, as well as the non-drinking Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher**. It’s important to understand that no one had GPS on their phones, and that verbal driving directions were the law of the realm.
“It happened a week or two after the opening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” I was told. “Or sometime in late May or early June of ’08. Harrison, Calista, Demi and Ashton all went out to dinner. The latter two weren’t drinking but over the course of dinner Harrison and Calista had…I don’t know, two or three bottles of wine between them and got fairly loaded. Too drunk to drive, in any case. It was therefore decided — responsibly, intelligently — that Ashton would drive Harrison home in his car, and Demi would follow with Calista in her car.
“But somehow Demi lost Ashton at a traffic light, and Ashton and Harrison are now heading towards Ford’s home in the Pacific Palisades on their own, presuming that Demi will catch up. Except Calista has succumbed to the alcohol and passed out. Okay, ‘gone to sleep.’ Dead to the world, in any event. Demi tries to rouse her so she can get the directions and the address, but with no luck.” Wells note: STrange as it sounds, Demi hadn’t typed in the address on the GPS software on her Blackberry or iPhone before leaving the restaurant,
“So as she’s driving along, Demi starts prodding and shaking Calista with her right hand to wake her up to get the address, and as a result of the shoving the car slows down and weaves a bit, and as luck would have it a couple of patrolmen notice this and pull them over.
“Have you been drinking? the cops ask. No, Demi answers. I was trying wake up my passenger to get directions to her home. Has she been drinking? Demi doesn’t want to say, says she doesn’t know. The cops suspect inebriation despite Moore’s denials — “I haven’t been drinking! I don’t drink!” — and make her do the walk and touch her nose and all that.
“Meanwhile, Harrison and Ashton have arrived at Ford’s home. It’s been a little while and they’re wondering what’s happened to the ladies. Ashton calls Demi on her cell and by this time she’s being questioned by the cops and they’re saying ‘no answering the phone while you’re being tested for intoxication.’ Harrison says to Ashton, “You want an omelette? It’ll calm you down.” Uhh, not really, Kutcher replies, having just eaten an hour or so ago. Ford leads him into the kitchen anyway and starts on the omelette. ‘You want herbs? You want cheese? You want onions?’
“Back on the road, the combined efforts of Moore and the two cops finally wake Flockhart up. It’s like she’s coming out of a coma. One of the lawmen ask, ‘Do you know where you live?’ She gives them the address and they all get into their cars with the understanding that the bulls will escort Demi and Calista to the house.
“A few minutes later Harrison and Ashton see the flashing lights outside and respond as you might expect — “Oh my God, are you guys okay?,’ ‘What happened?,’ ‘Why didn’t you answer your phone?’ The cops say goodnight and leave, all’s well that ends well, and everyone’s safe and sound. And Harrison says, ‘So…who wants an omelette?'”
** Moore and Kutcher met in 2003, married in ’05. After six years of marriage they separated in 2011. In 2015 Kutcher married former costar Mila Kunis. Moore is allegedly currently dating celebrity chef Daniel Humm.
@hypebae @Sam Smith just walked the @Vivienne Westwood FW24 show. #tiktokfashion #parisfashionweek #samsmith #viviennewestwood ♬ original sound – HYPEBAE
…should be interesting, as I intend to prompt a discussion of (a) Dune: Part Two, (b) Sam Mendes‘ four-film Beatles project and (c) the last and final HE Oscar predictions, which are the same predictions that everyone else is making or standing by. Plus whatever else comes to mind.
But I laughed harder at this photo that at anything else I saw, heard or thought about today. I’m sorry but it’s funny. The slight hint of Shatner’s spray-tanned stomach flab, the tin-foil brassiere, the look of faint exasperation on the actress’s face…all of it plus the baked potato association. Perfect.
In my two-day-old review (2.29) of Dune: Part Two, I wrote the following: “If you can put aside the Frank Herbert story and just tune in to the other-worldliness, it’s quite a feast for the eyes — a major league art film. Stunningly exotic and quite original…quite the aural-visual knockout.”
Friend to HE: “Yes, but how can you put aside the Frank Herbert story? The car-wreck horror of Herbert’s storytelling is front and center. He’s the worst storyteller in the history of the planet. Dune: Part Two actually makes J.R.R. Tolkien seem interesting. I wouldn’t say that the movie has a bad script. I would say that it doesn’t have a script.
“I dug all the visual stuff you were talking about — the sandy colors, the moody grandeur of the fascist imagery. I’m not immune to that sort of visual-atmospheric pizzaz.
“But I still wanted to shoot myself. The film felt nine hours long to me. If you told me I have watch Dune: Part Two again, I would jump off a bridge instead.
“Some of the violence was good, and I really liked Austin Butler psycho baldie. But I did not think this was a good Chalamet performance. During the last act when he started shouting and asserting dominance, he started to remind me of Nicolas Cage.
“I’m just shocked that you got swept up in it…”
HE to Friendo: “I did so by deliberately ignoring the story particulars and large portions of the script. I was only interested in the acting and the design and atmosphere and cinematography and editing. I was totally bored by all that Fremen vs. Harkonnen bullshit. I could sense early on that I would soon feel tortured if I tried to follow the story. I decided instead to just turn on the phone and read the synopsis on Wikipedia.
“I didn’t care about the story, but I liked everything else about the film. It looks and feels really cool and exotic and unlike anything I’ve seen in this kind of dense fantasy realm…it’s a world unto itself, and the creation of it all is truly fascinating.”
Friendo to HE: “To me that’s like saying you liked everything about a restaurant — the look, the vibe, the service — except for the food.”
HE to Friendo: “I’ve never felt that a script is the primary supplier of the ‘food’ in a film. A script is obviously necessary in terms of exposition and expressing themes and providing basic story structure, but as Stanley Kubrick famously said, the payoff we get from most films is more from the emotional mood supply. The hook of a good film isn’t so much from the think of it but the feel of it.
“That said, I’ve actually felt this way about some restaurants. I’ve adored the lighting, the decor and design, the cultured vibe, the tablecloth and lighted candles, the conversation with the person or persons I’m eating with, the excellent service, the upscale bathrooms, etc. Sometimes the food is phenomenal and sometimes it’s just okay. But regardless of how good the food is, I tend to value the other things as much as the food and sometimes more than.
“There’s a restaurant in Paris that I’ve been to six or seven times, called Le Coupe Chou. When you walk downstairs to use the facilities there’s a door that leads to some kind of sub-cellar or subterranean tunnel that leads God-knows-where, and the rank aroma from inside that tunnel is astounding…it smells like Paris from the 15th or 16th Century, and you can’t sample that kind of aroma anywhere in North America, I swear…it’s strictly an ancient European city smell. This in itself sold me on Le Coupe Chou, regardless of how good the food is.”
