CNN’s Abby Phillip, temporary host of The Lead, vs. author Kenny Xu (“An Inconvenient Minority: The Harvard Admissions Case and the Attack on Asian American Excellence“) and a board member of Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in an historic argument over race-based admissions which the Supreme Court found in favor of yesterday.

Phillip: “If you take race out of it, let’s call it socioeconomic status, whether or not they grew up wealthy or poor. Is that not something colleges might have an interest in considering?”

Xu: “The reason why you shouldn’t consider that is because you should consider the success of an applicant. Because of affirmative action, Black Americans graduate from law school at the bottom 25 percent of their classes, largely speaking. And we don’t want that. We want Black students to succeed. We want every student to succeed. Low-income students to succeed.

“You have to put them in scenarios in places where they’re likely to succeed. And lowering your standard to admit somebody of a socioeconomic status or race would not help them do that. In fact it would harm their graduation rate and excellence.”

Phillip: “Well, as the case also points out, the standard isn’t necessarily lowered because the students are all admitted. It’s the question whether race can be an added consideration, a tipping point…”

Xu: “The standard is lowered.”

When Xu said “the standard is lowered.” Phillip obviously decided to shut down the discussion:

Phillip:: “Kenny…”

Xu: “The standard is lowered. As the Students for Fair Admissions data shows, an Asian has to score 273 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance of admission as a Black person…”

Phillip: “Kenny…”

Xu: “So the standard is lowered for Black applicants.”

Phillip: “Kenny Xu, thank you for your perspective. We really appreciate it.

“The alteration of the [Zapruder] film in two instances proves its worthlessness as a document of anything other than deceit.”

So writes respected director-writer David Mamet in a 6.24.23 Unherd article titled “The Power of the Kennedy Myth.” The piece is partly about theories and suspicions about the JFK Assassination, which Mamet is co-writing a screenplay about (his co-writer is Nicholas Celozzi, great-nephew of late Chicago mob boss Sam “Momo” Giancana) and will begin to direct in September.

The costars include Viggo Mortensen, Shia LaBeouf, Al Pacino, Courtney Love and John Travolta.

Mamet and Celozzi will basically be passing along a “JFK was murdered by Momo and the mob” saga. This will put Mamet at loggerheads with Dealey Plaza conspiracy maestro Oliver Stone, who’s claimed for years that it was a CIA black ops job.

Mamet writes that he’s fond of “The Great Zapruder Film Hoax: Deceit and Deception in the Death of JFK,” a 2003 book that was edited by James H. Fetzer. I haven’t read it, but Mamet’s Unherd article says it asserts a claim that may arouse suspicions among JFK assassination buffs. It is, in fact, absolutely dead wrong.

“What’s wrong with the [Zapruder] film?,” Mamet asks, apparently leaning on the Fetzer book but possibly indicating his own suspicions. “To begin, several frames are missing,” Mamet states, “”No one has ever suggested a logical reason for their excision other than suppression of evidence.”

Then comes the Fetzer whopper. which Mamet is apparently on board with: “The blood-spatter explosion of the President’s head is, goes the claim, clearly painted on. It exists only for one frame, 0.04 of a second. In frame 312 it is absent, in the following frame it’s there, and in the next frame it’s gone — not dispersed or dispersing, but gone.”

This claim is absolutely incorrect, and the proof can be found by anyone examining this Zapruder file access page, which contains images of all 486 frames of the 8mm Zapruder assassination film.

All you have to do is examine frames #312, #313, #314 and #315.

#313 shows the initial blood-and-brain-matter explosion, and it’s quite a good job of “painting” given that it not only shows the eruption of tissue in different directions but also a hazy watery mist hovering above JFK and Jackie Kennedy’s heads.

But #314 clearly shows the continuation of the initial grenade-like impact with red-orange tissue continuing to shoot out to the right, along with the persistence of the blood-water-brain matter spray effect above.

$315 shows less spray but the left-to-right tissue surge continues.

Say it again: Mamet’s statement about the blood-spatter explosion “existing only for one frame, 0.04 of a second” is flat-out wrong. “In frame 312 it is absent, [but] in the following frame it’s there, and in the next frame it’s gone,” he incorrectly writes. “Not dispersed or dispersing, but gone.”

C’mon, David…look at frame #314! You and your pal Fetzer need to rethink and recalibrate.

Again, an easy link to all 486 frames.

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If, like myself, you’re a foot man, you probably agree that the recent hoopla over that Barbie shot of Margot Robbie‘s arched feet brought about a certain realization. It reminded me of an unfortunate or at least a lamented reality, which is that over 99% of the female peds out there (and I often have my eyes peeled) are no match for Robbie’s.

Outside of the Hollywood and modelling worlds, exquisite, perfectly shaped feet are such a rarity that numerical percentages are almost unworthy of mention.

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All hail the young anonymous woman behind Nerdworld, a YouTube channel that I discovered last night. She’s a brilliant 20something Canadian feminist of a different order — a woman who’s felt increasingly annoyed by aggressive feminist, anti-male posturing in movies and laments the trashing and diminishing of straight-up, non-toxic masculinity, not just in cinema but in all corners of the progressive community these days. She seems to have been strongly influenced by the great Camille Paglia, and for that alone HE is an instant fan.

…at Westport’s AMC Royale, and so far (5 pm) 31 seats have been sold. What does this tell you? It tells me that this James Mangold film will only do decent business this weekend…okay, better than decent, perhaps even brisk. But nothing to write home about.

Nearly ten months ago I saw Nancy Buirski‘s Desperate Souls, Dark City, and the Legend of “Midnight Cowboy” at the ’22 Telluride Film Festival. It’s a sprawling, large-canvas capturing of a revolutionary and fairly breathtaking moment in American cinema — a constantly probing look at not just the making of John Schlesinger’s 1969 classic but everything that was happening back then…culturally, creatively, the whole magillah.

Zeitgeist and Kino Lorber opened Desperate Souls on 6.23.23 — it’s now playing at the Film Forum.

It’s been noted that Buirski’s film doesn’t really answer why Midnight Cowboy received its X rating, which was later downshifted to R. I’ll tell you why — it was because of that scene in the 42nd Street theatre when Bob Balaban goes down on Jon Voight and gives him an off-camera blowjob. That was it, cut and dried.

Apart from Peter Glenville‘s oblique and non-sexual Becket (’64) and outside of Andy Warhol‘s experimental, barely-seen Blowjob and even Lonesome Cowboys, no mainstream film had ever grappled with gay activity quite as frankly as Midnight Cowboy, especially in its acknowledgements of down and dirty street life and gay street hustlers, not to mention Ratzo’s derisive reference to cowboy garb as “fag stuff”.

Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin is reporting that Universal has yet to announce a Japan release date for Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer, which opens everywhere else on 7.21.

Oppenheimer is the saga of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the father of the atom bomb and quoter of Vishnu’s statement in the Bhagavad Gita — “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”

I don’t know if Japanese distributors are åntsy about screening Oppenheimer or not, but it’s obviously understandable if they are. 200,000 Japanese civilians died after A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 8.6.45 and 8.9.45, respectively. If I was a Japanese citizen and my great-grandfather had been incinerated in one of those blasts, I would have issues.

And yet, oddly, Oppenheimer reportedly doesn’t dramatize these attacks upon Japan. It’s only fair to ask why. The essence of Oppenheimer’s personal tragedy and the A-bomb terror itself, after all, manifested less in the 7.16.45 Trinity explosion than in the murder of 200,000 Japanese civilians the following month. The story is the story.

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The appearance of Haley Atwell in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (Paramount 7.12) threw me off slightly. For a few minutes it put me into a kind of Twilight Zone.

Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise‘s film has 10 or 11 significant characters played by actors with facial and name-brand recognition, you see, and as I sat down at the AMC Empire two nights ago I hadn’t committed each and every name to memory, Atwell’s in particular.

So when I first laid eyes I thought “wait, who’s this again?” Then a thought flashed — “wow, Kate Mara must be around 40 but she’s looking good, except she looks chiselled…has she had work done?” Plus she was speaking with a hint of a British accent but I figured this was part of the performance.

In fact Atwell and Mara, who look like sisters, were born only 14 months apart — Mara on 2.27.83 and Atwell on 4.5.82.

Then Atwell’s name came to mind, but I haven’t paid much attention to her career. I don’t even recall her performance in Ant Man, nor do I remember her from Woody Allen‘s Cassandra’s Dream, and the only Haley that was coming to mind was Haley Bennett, except she’s a ginger and roughly five years younger than Atwell and Mara.

I put it all together when the film ended, of course, and I started researching.

I’m sure that HE’s wretched slimy bedbug commenters will call me a moron for mistaking Atwell and Mara, but they’re determined to be dicks no matter what. The photos speak for themselves. Maras’s nose is a bit smaller and narrower.

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled to eliminate affirmative action — i.e., racial preferences in college admissions. In other words, no more college or university acceptances based on “this kid’s grades aren’t what they could or should be but he/she has experienced everyday racism and a culturally disadvantaged life in other respects so let’s cut him/her a break, and in so doing try to redress social wrongs.”

Affirmative action, in short, was about addressing the inescapable fact that life is unfair. From the vantage point of the early to mid ’60s, life had always been deeply unfair for persons of color.

The term was first heard via “Executive Order No. 10925“, signed by JFK on 3.6.61 — over 62 years ago. On 9.24.65, LBJ issued Executive Order 11246, which required government employers to “hire without regard to race, religion and national origin” and “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

As a lad I was subjected to a standardized educational meritocracy, which I personally found brutal and exclusionary because the system back then wasn’t geared to recognize and accept, much less encourage, intelligent rule-breakers and clear-light-seekers like myself.

If you wanted to get into a top university you had to play along, ace your SATs and manage an excellent grade-point average…period. Alas, like Oliver Stone, Jim Morrison and others from a certain spiritual congeregation, I was more into the poetry of experience and upheaval and transformational rock music and pyschedelic Bhagavad Gita fulfillment than studying and brown-nosing my way into a sanctified community of Ivy League shitheads who play golf on weekends.

Affirmative action dismantled much of that for certain under-privileged youths, but now it’s back to struggling and scrambling and trying to out-point or out-maneuver those brilliant Asians and those smart white kids with rich parents. The unfairness of life has once again reared its head.

If I was a diehard progressive on a university admissions board, I would probably be telling myself “fuck those conservative Supremes…I’m going to finagle and pull strings and administratively pretzel-twist in order to approve disadvantaged kids of color anyway.” I can’t imagine that admissions criteria geared to favor non-whites and non-Asians whenever and wherever possible is going to just screech to a halt like that.