He’s gone — I deep-sixed him last night. I couldn’t stand his ass. Every single thing he posted accused me not being woke enough or being deficient or indifferent. The straws accumulated and accumulated and finally the camel’s back snapped. Sure, he might return under a new comment-thread avatar, and if he does I’ll cross that bridge and assess the situation.

One of my most on-target riffs about the woke scourge stated that “there’s a historical precedent for what’s going on right now, and that it’s nicely recounted on page 30 and 31 of Tom Wolfe‘s ‘The Painted Word’.”

I noted that “today’s upscale, sensitive-person, social-reflection dramas have fallen under the influence of a new form of ’30s social realism and are arguing against social ills that wokesters regard as evil and diseased. The result has been a new form of enlightened propaganda cinema.

“It’s almost astonishing to read Wolfe’s description of the ‘social realism’ movement of the ’30s because the same damn thing is happening right now.”

In response to which “seasonalaffleckdisorder” wrote that “[my] tinfoil hat is slipping…the rays are getting in…the gulf between the races…metastasizing into every organ of the body politic. You’re not paranoid if they are really coming to get you! Get all the Klassiks indoors where it’s safe from the people of color and the womenfolk.”

I won’t tolerate this kind of lunacy and derangement. I was obviously making a fair and referenced point.

5.29, 9 pm Update: HE’s comment numbers are back, thanks to a very good friend and an excellent human being. Crisis concluded!

Earlier: On top of all the other daily aches and pains and gashes in the soul, the WordPress plug-in that displays the number of comments per each post has stopped working. I just have to find the right plug-in and then update it. I’m sure it’ll only take me three or four days or maybe 48 hours…a twinkling in the broad cosmic scheme of things. But until it’s fixed, every story will “appear” to have zero comments. I live for these grueling experiences. They make my day.

I will somehow get this matter fixed. I’ve reached out to some tech guys. Yes, it’s infuriating and deflating.

A few days ago I highlighted a quote of a Daily Beast Tom Wolfe interview, posted seven or eight years ago. “People are willing to confess to anything colorful or exciting [in their lives]…they murdered somebody or they smoked a lot of dope…it could be almost anything. Except for the humiliations. They will never write about the humiliations, which, George Orwell said, make up 75% of life.”

This is one such moment — a humiliation.

Again, I’m trying to repair it with the help of someone who’s smarter than me when it comes WordPress plug-in issues. This effort is failing so far, partly because some people don’t like working on Saturdays. Whatever the reason, the bottom line is that HE is now looking like a shunned site.

Tom Wolfe, seven or eight years ago (starting at:17): “I’ve never been tempted to write a memoir. I really honestly believe what George Orwell said, which was that the memoir, the autobiography, is the worst form of fiction ever devised. Because people are willing to confess to anything colorful or exciting [in their lives]…they murdered somebody or they smoked a lot of dope…it could be almost anything.

“Except for the humiliations. They will never write about the humiliations, which, Orwell said, make up 75% of life. I couldn’t agree more with that.”

Wolfe is right — the best autobiographies are those in which the author doesn’t cut himself/herself the slightest break. Which is why my forthcoming, work-in-progress memoir (I probably won’t call it Last Honest Asshole but the title is catchy) will rank highly as I’ve never shirked from talking about rejection, melancholy moods, sullenness and feelings of existential downerism and depression — these states of mind have been tugging at my spirit since I was six. The problem of course, is that most people don’t want to read about guys who scowl and feel shitty about things. And so editors are always telling writers to keep things lively, and that means good, well-told stories, etc.

This is one reason why I shut down after an hour’s worth of party chatter. Because you’re obliged to be “on” all the time, and nobody wants to hear anything but funny stories, pithy insights and amusing anecdotes.

Atlanta creator, star and sometime director Donald Glover believes call-out culture is diminishing or dulling down creativity in movies and TV series. “We’re getting boring stuff and not even experimental mistakes because people are afraid of getting cancelled,” Glover tweeted. “So they feel like they can only experiment with aesthetic.”

Glover was responding to Twitter users who’d complained about feeling deflated and bored due to too many cookie-cutter films and TV series. Yeah, he said — that’s because terrified screenwriters and show runners are afraid to step out of the box and risk offending Twitter jackals.

Some of the usual rationales were posted in response. Scriptwriter Lisa Hofacker reminded that “(1) There are only 7 basic plots so only so much can be done & redone with that in mind, and (2) script reviewers basically only review the 1st 5-10 pages of a script…if it doesn’t have the inciting incident or exciting enough it gets thrown out.”

The proverbial “inciting incident” has to happen within five to ten pages? When I took Robert McKee‘s class in ’88 the inciting incident had to happen no later than 25 pages in, and preferably within 20 pages.

Not to discount Hofacker or even McKee, but Glover’s tweets sounded a lot like something I tapped out a couple of months ago. At the risk of irritating regular readers, here’s the gist of it:

From “Wolfe Reminds, History Repeats,” posted on 3.22.21: “For since wokeness began to take hold in ’18 and certainly since the pandemic struck 13 months ago, the movie pipeline has been losing steam and under-providing, to put it mildly. Nothing even approaching the level of Spotlight, Manchester by the Sea, Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, La-La Land, the long cut of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor, Zero Dark Thirty or Portrait of a Woman on Fire has come our way from domestic filmmakers. **

Friendo: “I can’t believe how much the political climate described in Albert Marrin‘s “A Time of Fear: America in the Era of Red Scares and Cold War” is like right now.

“The only difference is that it’s all totally flipped. The fear of Communism and Communist association has become the fear of racism or racist taint or anything offensive to the Left, or even that which seems to argue with Critical Race Theory…anything in that realm. But the methods are exactly, and I mean EXACTLY the same. Except for the absence (so far) of a HUAC-like Congressional examination and indictment committee.

The approach of Phillip Noyce‘s Above Suspicion in mid May (digital/VOD platforms on 5.14, Blu-ray and DVD on Tuesday, 5.18) offers an excuse to recall a similar kind of film — Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero (’73), currently streaming on YouTube for free and for cost on Amazon.

Noyce’s film is classic, grade-A moonshine, and so was Hero in its day.

Originally posted in July ’05: Loosely based on Tom Wolfe’s legendary 1965 Esquire article about one-time moonshine smuggler and stock-car racer Junior Johnson, it’s about a young guy (called Junior Jackson and played by Jeff Bridges) on the wrong side of the law who went on to become a famous stock-car racer.

For me, Hero is the super-daddy of redneck movies — a slice of backwoods Americana that got it right with unaffected realism and showing respect for its characters, and by being intelligent and tough and vivid with fine acting.

Jackson is more or less content to smuggle illegal hooch until he gets pinched and his soul-weary dad (Art Lund) persuades him to think twice, and he eventually uses his car-racing skills to break into stock-car racing. Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ed Lauter, Gary Busey and Valerie Perrine are among the costars.

Johnson’s film was widely admired (serious film critics got behind it, especially Pauline Kael). And its influence in Hollywood circles seems hard to deny, its commercial failure aside, for the simple fact that it was the only backwoods-moonshine movie at the time that was seriously respected for what it was, as opposed to being (nominally) respected for what it earned.

As movies steeped in rural southern culture go, The Last American Hero had roughly the same levels of honesty and sincerity as Coal Miner’s Daughter, which came out in 1980.

On 2.4.21 the SAG noms were announced. It’s now apparent that SAG/AFTRA members were more driven by identity politics than Academy members seemed to be in lieu of this morning’s Oscar noms. For one thing the SAGsters blew off Mank‘s Amanda Seyfried, who has triumphantly landed a Best Supporting Actress nom. And they ignored Sound of Metal‘s Paul Raci, who prevailed this morning with a Best Supporting Actor nom. And they handed SAG Best Ensemble noms (the equivalent of their Best Picture noms) to Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods, Regina King‘s One Night in Miami and George C. Wolfe‘s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — all of which failed to land Best Picture noms this morning.

The SAG awards will air on the evening of Sunday, April 4, at 6 pm Pacific (TNT/TBS).

This morning I took part in a discussion about a 2.12 Wall Street Journal article titled “How Equality Lost to ‘Equity.’” The subhead reads “Civil-rights advocates abandon the old ideal for the new term, which ‘has no meaning‘ and promises no progress but makes it easy to impute bigotry, says Shelby Steele.”

Steele quote: “[The current meaning of the term] equity has no meaning, but it’s one that gives blacks power and leverage in American life. We can throw it around at any time, and wherever it lands, it carries this stigma that’ somebody’s a bigot.’ Its message is that there’s inequality that needs to be addressed, to be paid off. So if you hear me using the word ‘equity,’ I’m shaking you down.”

Here are some passages from the discussion that touched upon the Oscar race, and upon John McWhorter‘s “The Elect“:

Friendo #1: “The key concept is that ‘equity’ prioritizes equality of outcome over equality of opportunity.

“That’s where Martin Luther King Jr. would have reared up in protest against it. And where any sensible moral person today — e.g. the tiny fraction of those of us in media who actually resist woke mobthink — would stand up against it. Equality of opportunity should be the goal. Not outcome — that’s the social-cultural analogue of giving every kid a trophy.

“Applied to the Oscars, it’s especially ludicrous. Sure, you can have an Oscar slate where half the people are POCs, making up for past sins, etc., and we can all sing ‘Kumbaya’ and pat ourselves on the back when half the winners are black. But if that’s what you do, it’s such a contrivance, and you’re so cheapening what the awards are, that you’ve made it all mean next to nothing. ‘Look, Chadwick Boseman, Viola Davis and Delroy Lindo all won awards at the African-American Oscars! Hurray!! We woke white people really are something, aren’t we?!’

Friendo #2: ” The new enlightened white person religion [is about] atoning for past sins. I have a very privileged friend who lives in Ojai…married, rich, never had to work a day in her life. She’s now on a mission to explain white supremacy to all of her friends who ‘don’t get it.’ What does that do — it redeems and excuses her from accusations. I can’t wait until it all comes crashing down.”

Friendo #1: “If only it were driven by white guilt! The white liberals who Tom Wolfe mocked definitively half a century ago in ‘Radical Chic’ — Leonard Bernstein throwing his posh party for the Black Panthers, etc. — were driven, to a degree, by white guilt.

“The woke mob today is driven by white narcissism. By white vanity. Guilt would be too good for them. They’re adopted virtue-signaling as a lifestyle and as a cult. And as John McWhorter has brilliantly explained, these vanity rituals are so dependent upon reducing black people to a stupid masochistic permanent-victim status that, in fact, there’s no difference at all between white woke-ism and white supremacy.

Hollywood Elsewhere respectfully disagrees with the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle for having given their Best Film of 2020 prize to George C. Wolfe‘s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. A sturdy adaptation of August Wilson‘s play, lively performances, social realism, authentic 1920s milieu, etc. But it doesn’t transcend its theatrical origin.

I would have gone with Nomadland, The Trial of the Chicago 7 or Sound of Metal. Philly crickets also chose Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods as their Best Picture runner-up.

Last year the PFCC handed its Best Picture trophy to Knives Out, so they’re obviously into wearing eccentricity on their sleeve. They went for Roma in 2018 (fine) and the absurdly over-praised Get Out in 2017.

I approve of Nomadland‘s Chloe Zhao winning for Best Director, and definitely Mank‘s Amanda Seyfried winning for Best Supporting Actress. Here are some of the other winners:

Best Actress: Viola Davis, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Runners-up: Aubrey Plaza, Black Bear, Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman (tie.)

Best Actor: Delroy Lindo, Da 5 Bloods. Runner-up: Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

Best Supporting Actor: Chadwick Boseman, Da 5 Bloods. Runner-up: Leslie Odom, Jr., One Night in Miami.

Best Animated Film: Soul, directed by Pete Doctor and Kemp Powers. Runner-up: Wolfwalkers, directed by Tom Moore and Ross Stewart.

Best Documentary: Time, directed by Garrett Bradley. Runner-up: Dick Johnson is Dead, directed by Kirsten Johnson.

Best Cinematography: Nomadland (Joshua James Richards) Runner-up: First Cow (Chris Blauvelt).

Best Breakthrough Performance: Sidney Flanigan, Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Runner-up: Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

1. Steve McQueen‘s Mangrove — despite Amazon aiming it at the Emmys, it’s the best dramatic feature of 2020.
2. (tied for 2nd place) Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland and David Fincher‘s Mank.
3. Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse (An Officer and a Spy) — Ignoring this brilliant film is cowardly and shameful on the part of distributors and everyone else who has looked away in fear.
4. Florian Zeller‘s The Father
5. Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7
6. Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman
7. Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost
8. Judd Apatow‘s The King of Staten Island
9. Lee Isaac Chung‘s Minari
10. Ryan Murphy‘s The Prom — Not a fan of the first 50 to 60 minutes, but I love how it ends. Made me choke up, in fact.

HE Honorable Mention: Chris Nolan‘s Tenet, Kornel Muncruczo‘s Pieces of a Woman, Charlie Kaufman‘s I’m Thinking About Ending Things, Michael Winterbottom‘s The Trip to Greece, Cory Finley and Mike Makowski‘s Bad Education, Kelly Reichardt‘s First Cow, George C. Wolfe‘s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Regina King‘s One Night in Miami, Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods. (9)

Legendary test pilot and flying ace Chuck Yeager died yesterday at age 97. In 1947 the 24 year-old Yeager became first pilot to break the sound barrier. Tom Wolfe‘s “The Right Stuff” (’79) mythologized Yeager — made him into the ultimate jet pilot cool cat. Sam Shepard played Yeager in Phil Kaufman‘s wildly overrated film version, which I hated from the get-go.

Wolfe’s book was an absorbing, insightful take on the Mercury Space Program, a governmental patriotism initiative that promoted personalities and heroism to sell itself to the public. Wolfe passed along the technical intrigues of the early flights and especially the seminal Chuck Yeager lore and how that cockpit attitude influenced every pilot who ever lived. The film, sadly, was a popcorn denigration — an attempt to make populist puree out of almost everything fascinating that Wolfe had reported and made humorous.

[From BennettInk, posted in January 2017] In a letter to his editor about “The Right Stuff”, which he was in the midst of writing, Wolfe explained that it’s not really a book about the space program. It turns out that it’s not even, really, about flying. It’s about the importance of status to men, and what happens when the rules of any status game change.

There had been a status structure to the life of U.S. fighter jocks before the space program, and it was clear to everyone involved. At the top of the pyramid were combat pilots, and at the tippy top were the combat pilots who found their way to Edwards Air Force Base, in the California desert, to test new fighter planes. The courage and spirit required not just to get to Edwards but to survive the test flights. The pilots themselves never spoke of [them], but they were at the center of their existence.

That unspoken quality was what Wolfe called the right stuff, and the embodiment of the right stuff — everyone knows it and yet no one says it — is Chuck Yeager. Hardly anyone outside the small world of combat pilots has ever heard of him. Here is how Wolfe, in a single sentence [HE — but which I’ve broken up into paragraphs], changed that:

“Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot…coming over the intercom…with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless!— it’s reassuring)…the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because ‘it might get a little choppy’.

“Perhaps more fundamentally [it’s a] voice that tells you (on a flight from Phoenix preparing for its final approach into Kennedy Airport, New York, just after dawn): ‘Now, folks, uh…this is the captain
…ummmm…We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin gears’re not…uh…lockin’ into position when we lower ‘em…now, I don’t believe that little ol’ red light knows what it’s talkin about….I believe it’s that little ol’ red light that iddn’ workin’ right’ — faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I’m not even sure all this is really worth going into — still, it may amuse you — ‘But I guess to play it by the rules, we oughta humor that little ol’ light…so we’re gonna take her down to about, oh, two or three hundred feet over the runway at Kennedy, and the folks down there on the ground are gonna see if they caint give us a visual inspection of those ol’ landin’ gears’ — with which he is obviously onintimate ol’-buddy terms, as with every other working part of this mighty ship—’ and if I’m right, they’re gonna tell us everything is copacetic all the way aroun’ an’ we’ll jes take her on in’.

Earlier today a friend observed that the 2020/’21 Oscars are going to be a virtue-signaling “shit show.” Representational politics, woke priorities, aspirational attitudes…pretty much everything that your average popcorn-eating movie lover doesn’t necessarily look for as he/she buys a ticket or pops for a rental.

At least a few of the 2021 Best Picture contenders will be about POC characters and situations, and the odds that a woman will be nominated for and possibly win the Best Director trophy are fairly high. The presumption is still that Nomadland is the odds-on favorite to win the Best Picture Oscar, and that its director, Chloe Zhao, is likely to win for Best Director.

This morning I threw together a list of likely contenders while asking Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy for their own Best Picture spitballs. We all agree that the hottest five are Nomadland, Florian Zeller‘s The Father, David Fincher‘s Mank, Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Paul Greengrass‘s News of the World. Yes, two of these are unseen but you know Fincher and Greengrass will deliver..

After that it gets a little dicey. I feel that Regina King‘s One Night in Miami is a respectable film as far as it goes, but not necessarily Best Picture material. Then again it checks the right boxes. I haven’t seen Lee Isaac Chung‘s Minari but it also has the right kind of non-Anglo pedigree. Lee Daniels‘ The United States vs. Billie Holiday also meets the requirements. Ditto Shaka King‘s Judas and the Black Messiah and George C. Wolfe‘s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix, 12.18).

There’s also Taika Watiti‘s Next Goal Wins, but who knows?

Here’s what Stone said earlier today about the Best Picture Oscar situation as it currently stands:

“The good news about [my] list is that it checks off the boxes of what is required of Hollywood and the Oscars at this point in time.” Politically, she means. The right kind of potential would-be nominees whose nominations would convey the right kind of values and statements for the political-cultural times in which we live.

“The slate overall is a bit slimmer than we’re used to, which will allow for less juggernaut competition and thus, films that might not have a shot otherwise will likely have a better shot to be represented,” Stone explained. “It’s probably going to be GenZ’s favorite Oscar year ever.

“I would not be surprised to see Rod Lurie’s The Outpost pop up in a few places as it’s one movie that is really not like any of the others and could stand out for that reason. But for now, I think it’s probably too risky to predict for the Academy.

Earlier this month I posted a list of films that qualify as the year’s best for cinematic reasons alone, without necessarily assessing the wokester factor. Here they are.

Blind comment #1: “The bottom line is that there aren’t that many [Oscar contending] movies this year so it’s a good time to really pay the p.c. piper.” Blind comment #2: “Critics group choices will be politically correct up and down the line. You know that.” Blind comment #3: “Here we have the full spectrum of identity politics represented [with the current list]. Not just Chicago 7 but also a Black Panther movie. Not just a woman director but women of color. You get the drift.” Blind comment #4: “The political Oscar calculus was already bad enough [before the pandemic]. This year it’s gonna be 100X worse.”