Thank God Hunter Will Finally and Fully Be Exposed….Oh, Wait…

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Anyone who thinks there’s any serious value or intrigue to be derived from digging yet again into Hunter Biden‘s personal failings….c’mon, man!

For the 177th time: If there’s one thing that American families know about, it’s dealing with bad-seed sons, brothers, brothers-in-law, nephews or next-door neighbors. Alcoholism, drug abuse, self-destructive behavior…everyone’s either been through it or knows someone who has. Tragic but it happens. It’s certainly too common to be a thing.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has announced a special counsel investigation of bad druggie dingbat Hunter, to be headed that David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware who’s been all over Hunter for years.

N.Y. Times Charlie Savage — 12:30 pm: “It is not clear whether this step will change anything substantive about the Hunter Biden investigation. But Republicans have sought to portray the Biden administration as conspiring to go easy on the president’s son, so at a minimum the naming of Weiss as a special counsel will offer Democrats an additional argument to rebut those accusations.”

Death to “Demeter”

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Universal/Amblin’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter earned $750K last night in 2,350 theaters nationwide — roughly $319 per screen. The Dracula-upon-the-bounding-main horror pic, directed by the Norweigan André Øvredal, cost $45 million to produce. Deadline‘s D’Alessandro: “That preview result is in the vicinity of last August’s vampire horror movie, The Invitation, which did $775K in previews, a $6.8M opening and $25.1M final domestic.”

Is there any species lower in the theatrical attendance realm than fans of low-rent horror? Talk about greasy-fingered animals…the absolute bottom of the barrel.

R U Serious?

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The Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. thing REALLY isn’t happening at this stage. He’s too eccentric, too admired by toxic Trumpies, too disliked by MSNBC’s Laurence O’Donnell, too caught up in conspiracy interpretations, and his speaking voice is impossible.

If Woody Harrelson had worn this hat a few months ago, okay, but it’s kinda crazy to align himself now after most of the thoughtful centrists have said “naah, later.” It calls his judgment into question.

COVID renegade Eric Clapton is another Kennedy admirer/donor.

Kennedy is polling decently (i.e., around 17% or 18%) because many Dems and independents are profoundly uncomfortable with re-electing an octogenarian President — a guy who will be 86 when he leaves office on 1.20.29. They’re terrified of another Woodrow Wilson presidency, and especially of Kamala Harris stepping in if, God forbid, something were to happen.

You know what I would respect and salute? If Woody had worn a Chris Christie hat. Christie is the only Republican primary candidate who talks straight about The Beast. An adaptable, transactional politician, okay, but one with actual balls.

Ron Howard’s “Splash” Meets Soupy Sales

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Game show host and comedian Marc Summers is now 71. Burt Reynolds died on 9.6.18 at the age of 82. They collided on Jay Leno‘s Tonight Show on 10.17.94, or nearly 30 years ago. Summers was 43, Reynolds was 58. I’d never seen this video clip before today.

Summers wiki quote: “Reynolds was going through a bad divorce with Loni Anderson. This was not planned, it was all real. Jay called me afterward and asked, ‘What’s going on between you and Burt?’ It was like survival of the fittest. I was a comic. You wait your entire life to get on the Tonight Show, and I wasn’t going to let this guy fuck it up for me.”

Full Friedkin Saga Has To Be Known

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There can be no final closure on the life and career of the late and great William Friedkin until someone in the Friedkin camp spills the beans about what actually happened with the French Connection censorship thing.

They can’t just leave this confounding, weird-ass episode hanging in the air. C’mon, spill it already…give it up!

Woke-censoring his own Oscar-winning film runs so contrary to who and what Friedkin was his entire life, or certainly since he became big in the early ’70s…totally insane. Maybe, strange as it sounds, he approved it or even instigated it. Maybe he’d gone squishy on some level…I don’t know.

Either way the facts have to come out. Someone in authority has to say “this is why it happened, and why the woke-censored version is streaming only in the U.S. but not Canada or the British isles or other territories.” And when the French Connection 4K disc comes out, the entire film has to be represented. C’mon, please…air it out once and for all and put this stupid issue to bed.

Son of Dodger Bullpen

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[Originally posted on 7.18.15 but re-wrote and re-edited] The following is a true story. I was starting something with an L.A. woman (actually a fellow journalist of a vaguely similar ranking) in, I think, the early aughts. Okay, maybe the late ’90s. I was mildly intrigued as far as it went (i.e., not head over heels), but then she eventually conveyed what the situation was.

She was “seeing” two guys at the time. Meaning that she was boning them concurrently without either of them knowing about the other, or so I understood. It took a while for the truth to come out, but she gradually informed me that I was basically being auditioned as a back-up in case one of them didn’t pan out. She was serious. There were two pitchers on the mound (alternating innings?) and I was being told that if I wanted to I could start warming up in the bullpen just in case.

I told her I didn’t care for this arrangement, and her response was to basically say “whoa, really?…you’re throwing away an opportunity here.” Yeah, I was. My thinking was that I might step into a situation if a woman is seeing another guy — maybe, depending — but not two. Okay, I’ll be even more honest. If she had told me I could start “pitching” along with the other two and then come what may, I might’ve taken the deal.

I don’t think she was uninterested in me as much as more interested in where things might go with the first two guys. I know she was at least interested enough in me to say “go warm up in the bullpen and we’ll see.”

Okay, a lot of people juggle relationships. Younger people, I mean. I guess to be extra fair about it the woman from the late ’90s was just being upfront whereas no guy in this history of civilization has ever admitted to seeing two or three girls simultaneously. Guys tend to be covert about that stuff.

Comment from Seb Booth: “Between men and women of equivalent attraction levels, it is far easier for women to just get laid on average. Plus ugly and fat women can still get laid easier than ugly and fat dudes on the same level (unless they’re loaded).”

Little Did Hollywood Know

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On the night that Unforgiven won the Best Picture Oscar, which happened on 3.29.93, none of us had the slightest inkling that roughly two decades into the 21st Century (or 30 years hence) corporate Hollywood would be operating under the adhere-or-die principles of China’s Great Cultural Revolution, and that films that reflected the creative vistas, mindsets and inclinations of the dudes who were pretty much running things back in the early Clinton era would be all but suffocated.

Which isn’t to say that the moral, administrative and attitudinal changes brought about by wokester commandants starting around five or six years ago (post-Moonlight and post George Floyd BLM-ers, LGBTQ-ers, #MeToo) didn’t transform the Hollywood industry into a much more fair, just and humane thing. They did.

These changes also ensured, however, that the kind of urgent, occasionally irreverent and sometimes super-bull’s-eye films that occasionally poked through between 1930 and 2015…those kind of films would, for the most part, never again be made for theatrical.

Because the Hollywood Maoist system (“Don’t offend Zoomers or Millennials!…don’t wink at or even acknowledge outmoded attitudes!…don’t allow any representations of the way life was on the planet earth before woke-ism came along…all casts must prominently feature women, actors of color and LGBTQs”) has largely outlawed this approach or aesthetic.

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Oscar Poker: Roots & Journeys

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No Oscar Poker topics du jour this time. Instead Jeff and Sasha let their emotional hair down and share abbreviated versions of their life stories and career histories. Who they are, what they’ve been through, how they got to this point, etc.

Jeff writes for Hollywood-elsewhere.com, and Sasha writes for awardsdaily.com (and Substack).

Remember that late-night radio show hosted by Jack Nicholson‘s David Staebler in The King of Marvin Gardens? Which was basically about Stabler relating personal stories of his youth and whatnot, some of which were invented or at the very least exaggerated? Just for fun I could launch a whole mp3 series of 100% honest “David Staebler stories” about my oppressed, half-miserable childhood and my almost entirely miserable teenage years, full of trauma, unrequited lust, seething resentment and Kafka-like depression. I could record them weekly or twice weekly and post as I go along.

Anyone who says “aahh, fuck this jazz, just talk about movies…c’mon, that’s what we’re here for!”…well, I’ll include many tales of certain standout films that I saw as a young lad and largely clueless teen. When I feel like it, I mean. Maybe as a separate Substack.

Again, the link.

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Tunes To Ponder While Driving Across “Geo. Wash Bridge”

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If you listen in quick succession, these two tracks blend right together…this hit me last Saturday as I was driving across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey…the same bridge that a car carrying Virgil Solozzo and Michael Corleone began to drive across, only to abruptly do a 180 and head back to the Bronx (“Nice work, Lou”)…the very same bridge that an excitable, barely awake Max Schumacher told a cab driver to take him to in the early ’50s, in response to which the cab driver said “don’t do it, buddy!…you’re young, you have your whole life ahead of you!”

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Robbie Robertson

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The great Robbie Robertson, 80, departed earlier today in Los Angeles.

Good fellow, great musician. The Hawks, Bob Dylan guitarist in the early electric days, The Band (“The Weight”, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, “Up on Cripple Creek”), solo recording artist and soundtrack composer for Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, The Color of Money, Casino, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon).

After catching Flower Moon during last May’s Cannes Film Festival, I noted the following: “Robertson‘s musical score ignites with a reverb-y guitar riff that heralds the mixed-blessing discovery of oil on Osage land, and soon after settles into a steady metronomic rhythm that suggests the sound of native drums in the distance or perhaps just over the hill.”

Posted on 11.30.19: