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.

Seven or eight years ago Toon Camera came along, and I paid it no mind. It may have been been refined and upgraded in the years since or not, but I know right now that Toon Camera delivers a reasonably passable version of the rotoscoping process. Obviously below the tech level of Richard Linklater‘s Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly and Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood but the conversion tech isn’t too bad. I’m also a fan of 8mmVintage Camera app.

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…than a schmuck for a lifetime.”

As it turns out, Rupert Pupkin‘s standup is moderately amusing. It certainly isn’t awful. As Pupkin explains to Jerry Langford in a fantasy sequence, his comedy is drawn from childhood currents of rage and low-self-esteem, largely due to his parents’ alcoholism and being seriously bullied at school. Pupkin’s standup, in short, has an undercurrent of reality as well as a theme. Which is surprising because everything in The King of Comedy tells you that Pupkin is a hugely irritating asshole and therefore incapable of possessing the talent, smarts and finesse necessary to be a moderately effective comedian. And at the end, that assumption is incorrect.

Hats off to director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul D. Zimmerman — they had the odd kind of balls to make a strange, fairly unlikable film that I’ve seen a good give or six times. Robert De Niro‘s performance is chalk on the blackboard — that’s the point and the pain of this film. But I truly love Jerry Lewis‘ performances as the sullen, dark-hearted talk show king.

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Apologies for hastily posting a photographic lie-slash-misrepresentation early last evening. An obvious lack of due diligence in a hurry. I was about to delete the post as I was leaving the house but the comments about alleged hiring tendencies were nonetheless interesting.

So I’m deleting the bogus photo, which seemed to indicate or represent a lack of diverse hiring practices at a certain company, and substituting some of the comments in its place.

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Performance capture shooting on Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar 3 began simultaneously in late September of 2017 — five and one-third years ago. Live-action photography “with the principal performance capture cast” began in early ’18 and ended in November ’18 — just over four years ago. Then came live-action filming in New Zealand, beginning in the spring of ’19 and concluding on 11.29.19. On 3.17.20 shooting was postponed due to Covid; it resumed on 6.16.20 and ended sometime during September ’20. The film was really, finally, no-foolin’ completed on 11.23.22.

I’m resigned to Avatar 3 (it’s done either way) but who really wants to see Avatar 4?

Cameron on Avatar 4: “I can’t tell you the details, but all I can say is that when I turned in the script for [The Way of Water], the studio gave me three pages of notes. And when I turned in the script for 3, they gave me a page of notes, so I was getting better. When I turned in the script for 4, the studio executive, the creative executive over the films, wrote me an email that said, ‘Holy fuck.’ And I said, ‘Well, where are the notes?’ And she said, ‘Those are the notes.’ Because it kind of goes nuts in a good way, right?”

The centrist Arizona Senator, 46, is looking to avoid being primaried in ’24 by a more staunchly leftist candidate. If she’s no longer in the Democratic Party (and let’s restate the obvious, which is that she’s never been an actual Democrat) she can’t be primaried — simple.

A Joe Manchin-like obstructionist and attention whore, Sinema believes that if she swings purple it will save her from a tough re-election bid. “Arizona values”…bullshit. She’s trying to sell leaving the Democratic camp as a matter of principle (i.e, more fruitful collaborations with both sides of aisle) and is fooling no one — this is clearly about Sinema trying to improve the chances of her own survival

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Would the AMC Lincoln Square management have the arrogance to show trailers and whatnot to viewers of next Friday’s 1:30 am show of Avatar 2: The Way of Water? Even if they start exactly on time (which theatres never do) the film would end at 4:40 am. If I emerged from this Upper West Side plex at that hour I would head over to an all-night diner and order breakfast (scrambled eggs, home fries, wheat toast, bowl of fruit). And then I’d head home and pop an Ambien.