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Chappelle’s fans are not “transphobic.” They’re just highly suspicious of the kool-aid as a rule.

Elon Musk was booed heavily when he was invited on stage by Dave Chappelle last night. He fucked around and is quickly finding out. Sycophantic Twitter users are a small minority. Even Chappelle's transphobic fans don't like this jackass. pic.twitter.com/2DFlp8o3Kh

— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) December 12, 2022

“I just have this really weird feeling that something bad is gonna happen…”

McCuddy: “The big climactic bullet tango on the yacht does two things. It satisfies our curiosity especially after Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) asks the blood-soaked Quentin (Tom Hallander) if her husband was cheating and he says nothing PLUS it tells us something about next season. My 22 year old daughter thinks next season should be an African safari, which would be cool.”

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The snow flurry deluge earlier today was wonderful, but the weather wasn’t quite cold enough and so the snowflakes hit the windshield and melted, and the iPhone auto focus locked in on the water drops and the shot was more or less ruined.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association (aka eccentric foodie Venusians who occasionally get it right and sometimes wildly wrong) split their Best Picture award this afternoon — Tar (fine) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (absolutely not). These people are from the Planet Neptune, and now that they’ve gone gender neutral, forget it. They’re not of this earth. Nobody cares about what they think or who they like. Okay, the talent does.

LAFCA’s Best Director trophy went to Tar‘s Todd Field….great. He also took the Best Screenplay award. The leading performance awards went to Tar‘s Cate Blanchett (emphatic agreement) and Living‘s Bill Nighy (a good performance). One of the Supporting Performance awards should have goe to The Banshees of Inisherin’s Kerry Condon, but it didn’t. The winners in this category were Dolly De Leon of Triangle of Sadness (disagree) and Ke Huy Quan of Everything Everywhere All at Once (ditto).

Due respect but if you’re curious about the rest of the awards, here’s a link. Nobody really cares. LAFCA is its own realm, its own little dingle-dangle. I say screw ’em…they’ve gender-neutraled their way into oblivion.

Carol Theresa East (aka “Sister Carol” is still with us. A Jamaican-born American reggae recording artist and actress, she’s also gone by Black Cinderella and Mother Culture. Born on 1.15.59, Carol was 26 when she appeared in Jonathan Demme‘s Something Wild (’86).

Last night I re-watched about half of Joshua Logan and William Inge‘s Picnic (’55). Right up to the moment of Bill Holden and Kim Novak‘s sexy lakeside dance.

When she walks down the steps at the beginning, Novak’s moves are saying “okay, I’ve decided…I’d rather have sex with you than with Cliff Robertson, and while I know we’re not going to do it here and now in front of Susan Strasberg, Verna Felton, Rosalind Russell and poor Arthur O’Connell, a man who never had sex once in his off-stage life and whose character will never have sex with the spinsterish Russell…let’s express our mutual longing in a way that is 110% unmistakable.”

Holden was reportedly so nervous about his dance moves, which he was taught by choreographer Miriam Nelson, that he had to get drunk to perform them.

Where would Brittney Griner be right now if the press hadn’t steadily focused on her situation from the moment of her arrest and imprisonment last February? Which in turn made the Biden administration pay more attention and make her a prisoner swap priority, etc. If the press had ignored or under-reported her situation all along there’s a decent chance she’d still in the clink, right?

If I were in Griner’s size 17 shoes I’d be saying the following to myself: “Damn, all I want to do is hug and kiss my wife and live my normal life again. I just want to relax and be the person I was before the hash-oil arrest. I want to work out and dribble a basketball and eat my favorite foods…shit like that. But I’m a big international story right now, and for all I know I might still be in jail if the press hadn’t made me into an international focus of attention. And so I need to thank the press and give them interviews and sit for a press conference and so on. I have to play the game because it’s my duty, in a way. History is calling and I need to pick up the phone. I’m like an astronaut who’s just come back from the moon. I need to face the cameras and the questions — it’s the decent thing to do.”

Since arriving in San Antonio two mornings ago Griner has been out of sight, maintaining her privacy, sleeping, etc. If it was me I’d have done the press conference Friday afternoon or at the very latest Saturday morning. She’d do well to “open up” on Monday morning…just sayin’.

Mashable’s Robert Daniels has posted a strong disapproval of Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light. It’s fair, I think, to call this a racial admonishment piece, as Daniels has voiced a fundamental objection to older white directors “fumbling” films about black characters — i.e., having the temerity to make such films in the first place.

Paul Rai’s approving comment [below] also laments James Gray’s Armageddon Time, another instance of an older white director “using black characterization as foundation fodder for [a white] director’s ethos.”

What do you think Daniels is talking about when he calls Empire of Light “a contrived, politically trite exercise”? He obviously doesn’t like the brief romantic pairing of Olivia Colman‘s Hillary and Michael Ward‘s Stephen, and he regards Mendes’ decision to merge an older, white, mentally anxious lady with a young, good-looking lad of color as a “trite” attempt to inject some kind of current cultural flavor.

In short, Daniels is saying, older white directors (Green Book’s Peter Farrelly included) need to stay 100 yards away from period sagas involving black characters, and 500 yards away if the story involves interracial sex.

Here’s how I put it on 12.7 in an HE piece “HE Fights for Empire of Light”:

Daniel Craig is intending to become the first ex-007 to play a gay guy. Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan…none of them expanded their repertoire in such a fashion. But Craig will boldly go where no James Bond has gone before.

The Industry’s Jeff Sneider is reporting that Craig will star in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, an adaptation of William Burroughs’ same-titled, partly autobiographical novel that was written in the early ‘50s but not published until ‘85.

Presumably to be set in old-time Mexico City, where Burroughs himself lived in the early ‘50s, Queer may or may deal with the accidental shooting death of Burroughs’ wife, Joan Vollmer.

Roxanne Gay, a novelist, an essayist and a woman of undeniable size, is no fan of Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale (A24, limited). She’s written a harshly critical essay for the N.Y. Times called “The Cruel Spectacle of The Whale.”

I wish I could throw my two cents in, but I haven’t seen The Whale. Would it be okay if I lie by saying I’m looking forward to the experience?

Gay: “Most audiences will see the spectacle of a 600-pound man unwilling to care for himself, grieving the loss of his partner who died by suicide, eager to die himself, and using food as the means to that end. The disdain the filmmakers seem to have for their protagonist is constant, inescapable. It’s infuriating — to have all this on-screen talent and all these award-winning creators behind the camera, working to make an inhumane film about a very human being. What, exactly, is the point of that?”

I’m naturally presuming that Aronofsky disagrees with Gay’s assessment, and that he’ll probably take issue with it in some way.