What’s the difference between book–burning and word–burning, which is what “sensitivity readers” (currently working for all major publishers) are basically about? It’s a matter of scale as the basic impulse is the same.

8:01 pm: I walked out of Ant–Man and the Wasp: Quantumania with approximately 30 minutes left to go. My soul was screaming with boredom. Make that boredom-fueled rage. I felt sick, poisoned.

It’s one of the most corrupt and sickening wastes of time I’ve ever submitted to, and that’s saying something.

I can’t believe that Peyton Reed, the guy behind the original glorious Ant–Man (‘15), has so completely sold his soul to the devil. For it was Reed, a twisted, perverse, black-hearted jackal if there ever was one, who decided to set the whole damn thing in the micro-sized Quantum realm, an “exotic” green-screen George Lucas visual disease land by way of Fantastic Voyage and the Star Wars prequels, complete with dopey exotic monsters amid super-lavish sets and bullshit CG backdrops that obviously cost a shitload.

Reed “did” this movie to me…he created it and suffocated and killed me tonight…his doing, his fault…and he should be hung upside down and dipped in a vat of boiling oil.

I nonetheless feel obliged to praise Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang Bang, the Sam-The-Sham Conqueror of the Kingdom of Self-Loathing. It was good enough to prompt me to imagine him one day playing Macbeth or Othello at the Old Vic.

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Today (2.17.23) is the fourth anniversary of Hollywood Elsewhere’s worst physical injury episode…actually the worst of my entire life. I slipped and fell and bruised the shit out of my rib cage. It happened on Sunday, 2.17.19 in the Sierra Nevada foothills, a 20-minute drive out of Lone Pine. It was my fault for wearing Italian suede lace-ups as I walked down a gentle slope covered by icy, fresh-fallen snow.

When I was nine or ten years old a friend and I had lugged a large boulder to the top of my parents’ backyard garage. (I think we wanted to drop it off and maybe crush something below.) The garage roof was shingled and slightly peaked. I can’t explain what happened precisely, but I somehow managed to fall off the roof and the boulder, insanely, rolled off a few seconds later and landed on my upper thigh. I howled and cried; it hurt like a sonavubitch and left an awful purple bruise. But later that day I was kind of hobbling around; I’d almost forgotten about it by the end of the week.

But the Sierra foothills tragedy dropped me into a pit of hurt and grief for a good four or five weeks. Oxycodone, walking with a cane, wearing a chest-wrap device. Just getting out of bed in the morning was awful.

If some kind of soothsayer or fortune-teller had declared 50 years ago that Stella Stevens and Raquel Welch would die within two days of each other in February 2023, somebody would have said “well, that would be coincidental,” given that both actresses were more or less at their marquee-brand, sex-symbol peak in early ’72. But Welch was a bigger name then, and her legend looms larger now.

I was always respectful of Stevens’ fame, atractiveness and sense of humor, but I never thought she was especially good in anything except Sam Peckinpah‘s The Ballad of Cable Hogue (’70). Film-lore-wise Stevens got lucky three times — Jerry Lewis‘s The Nutty Professor (’63), Cable Hogue and Irwin Allen‘s dreadful The Poseidon Adventure (’72). Otherwise, not so much but then again each and every day she was “Stella Stevens”…a pretty good deal for a few decades.

Roughly seven years ago Stevens moved to a long-term Alzheimer’s care facility in Los Angeles. I didn’t know that and I’m sorry. She passed from Alzheimer’s earlier today at age 84. Hugs and condolences.

“Cognitive Decline,” the guy who’s apparently been pretending to be a drooling old fart coping with personal hygiene issues, has been shown the HE door. He was warned eight or nine times to cease and desist, and refused to abandon his schtick, which basically boiled down to “pay no mind to whatever the topic at hand is…what matters are personal issues known to persons who are residing in an assisted living facility.” Never again will an HE commenter mention adopt such a persona. For mine is the sword that smiteth!

Yesterday trans-allied bully signatories of that two-day-old GLAAD protest letter to the N.Y. Times were basically told by management to pound sand…hah!

The message could be reasonably translated as “individual Times employees are hereby advised that further protests against Times management under the aegis of an outside political agenda org will not end well for them…do not mess with us in this fashion again.”

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This morning CNN This Morning‘s Don Lemon said 51 year-old Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime. Women, he said, are in their prime in their 20s, 30s and early 40s —- an obvious reference to their sexual peak, which is demeaning as hell when you’re talking about a Presidential candidate or any woman serving in any professional capacity. Haley is very much in her prime in that respect. So it’s true — Lemon (who’s since apologized) not only hurt himself, but he gave Haley a tremendous boost on both sides of the spectrum.

The Cowboy and the Samurai, a just-released short, dramatizes an alleged excerpt from the reportedly tumultuous relationship between Jack Nicholson and John Belushi during the filming of Goin’ South in early ’78 or thereabouts.

Directed by Jake and Sam Lewis (who play the freaked-out producers), The Cowboy and the Samurai costars Jamie Costa as Jack and and Sandy Danto as John.

The Nicholson-Belushi interplay is pretty good — well written, decently played. I love the Lewis brothers’ attempt to make the film look like it was copied off a 40 year-old VHS tape.

Goin’ South wasn’t Nicholson’s directorial debut — 1971’s Drive He Said was — so that needs fixing. But otherwise not half bad.

From “John Belushi Had A Major Grudge Against This A-List Celebrity,” a Giant Freakin’ Robot article by John Kotz: “Jack Nicholson’s Goin’ South was a western, directed by the star himself, in which he played horse-thief Henry Moon, who is soon caught by a posse and through a weird series of loopholes, has to get a woman living in town to agree to marry him.

“Mary Steenburgen, then an unknown actress, accepted the role of Julia Tate, while Belushi and Christopher Lloyd played town deputies and Ed Begley Jr. played Whitey Haber, one of the locals.

“Nicholson strived to create an open atmosphere [with] everyone part of the family and working towards a common goal, etc. Goin’ South was Belushi’s first film following the success of Animal House, and the comic’s growing ego as a successful Hollywood star led to him bossing around members of the crew, arguing with other members in the cast, and worst of all, partaking in what was described as “a significant amount of cocaine” on a near-daily basis with Ed Begley Jr.

“Belushi was the type of Hollywood personality that Nicholson was hoping he could mentor, but the belligerent comic was faced with a steadily shrinking role in the film due to his bad behavior.”

Here’s a portion of Bob Woodward’s 1984 Washington Post piece about Belushi.

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Yesterday a team of pro-trans, anti-mainstream-liberal activists wrote a complaint letter to the N.Y. Times. The beef is that the Times has passed along alleged “dangerous inaccuracies” in its reporting about trans issues.

As I explained in an intro to Jeff and Sasha’s latest podcast, it seems strange that the N.Y. Times, which has been prioritizing progressive activism alongside boilerplate gray-lady news reporting for the last four or five years and is totally in the woke progressive camp on pretty much all fronts, is being attacked like this.

What these woke bullies seem to be saying to the Times is “don’t report fairly and dispassionately on trans issues…that’s not good enough and that’s not what we want…you need to JOIN THE TEAM!”

Here’s a letter I wrote this morning to one of the signatories:

“I’m presuming that you think there’s a difference between the trans terrorist bullies who’ve signed that letter and the Red Guard who tormented and humiliated God knows how many hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens during the Great Cultural Revolution of the mid ’60s to early ’70s.

“I’m not seeing much of a difference, but maybe you can assist.

“Everyone makes their own choices and sets upon their own path once they enter puberty, although it’s probably a good idea to allow a certain degree of emotional maturity to settle in before moving on to mutilating surgeries.

“However, when it comes to minors (pre-puberty), the application of puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy and gender⁠-⁠affirming surgeries — which the fanatics claim have been “standard forms of care for cis and trans people alike for decades” — is, in the view of myself and many others, nothing short of grotesque and fiendish.

“Like, I’m guessing, 95% of the signatories, you’re probably just going along to get along. Like 95% of China’s youthful Red Guard a half-century ago. Like 95% of the people who went along with harsh punitive measures during the anti-Communist scare of the ’50s. All I can say is, the day when the crazies realize they’ve overplayed their hand and are forced to run for cover in order to protect their careers…that day can’t come soon enough for me. I relish the thought. I’m half tumescent about it.

“Oh, and all hail Pamela Paul!”

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Empty your brain, fill it with industrial sewage, wallow In cynical action crap, etc.

Jeff and Sasha’s latest Substack chat, explained below:

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