NASA recently tweeted an eerie audio clip that represents actual sound waves rippling through the gas and plasma in the Perseus cluster, which is 250 million light years from Earth.” — posted yesterday (8.22) by Vice‘s Vicky Ferreira.
The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole! pic.twitter.com/RobcZs7F9e
You could say that Sam Mendes‘ Empire of Light is a past-tense, memory-lane, movie-theatre thing. But it isn’t really. Or not that much.
Set in rural England (Margate) in 1980, it’s about an interracial May-December affair — a strapping, good-looking black dude in his mid 20s (Michael Ward, the main protagonist) and a white, middle-aged, past-her-prime British woman in her mid to late 40s (Olivia Colman). Separated by more than 20 years. Such affairs are always short-term.
So it’s not so much about a Cinema Paradiso-type atmosphere (The Blues Brothers and All That Jazz on the marquee) as a stew of race and sexuality and mental health issues and callous paternalism. One could infer, even, that Empire of Light primarily occurs within the Mendes sensibility of here and now.
Colman is a movie-theatre manager with an unstable, schizzy temperament; Ward is working for her (selling and tearing tickets, selling popcorn). They eventually fall into a sexual relationship, but problems surface. Such affairs were highly unusual if not what-the-fuck-are-you-thinking? in working-class circles.
Colin Firth is a crusty theatre owner who exploits Colman sexually, casually, off and on. Anti-immigrant skinheads and an act of particular brutality figure into the narrative.
Things were a lot different in England and the U.S. in 1980, racially speaking. If you ask me the likelihood of such an affair pushes the limits of credibility, or certainly the 1980 norm. Honestly. I visited London in ’76 and ’80…such affairs just weren’t in the cards. Interracial, sure, but older white woman-younger black guy? There was certainly a lot of racism among brutish working-class types. Gangs of skinheads roaming the London Underground…I was there, I saw it, I felt it.
May I ask something? Why would a smart, good-looking dude like Ward be interested in an unstable white lady on the far side of 45? What about all those foxy 20something girls running around town? I don’t get it. If Colman was in her early 30s, maybe. (I was into women in their 30s during my early to mid 20s.)
However unstable and erratic, Colman’s character would have had to nurse a streak of serious self-destruction to engage in a May-December affair like this. But if the director-writer of a film depicting such an affair adopts an attitude of presentism, a Ward + Colman-type affair is well within the realm of possibility.
A totally woke movie in 2022 has to cover at least two of the three fundamentals — race, gender, sexuality — and if it’s a 1980 period film the old presentism thang figures in. Empire of Light doesn’t do gender, but it covers the other three, you bet. Or so it would seem. I won’t see it until Telluride.
Five days ago (8.19) Farran Smith Nehme (aka Self-Styled Siren) posted an investigation into the “John Wayne slash Sasheen Littlefeather backstage-at-the-1973-Oscars” urban legend (i.e., specifically that Wayne had to be restrained by six security guards to prevent him from going medieval on Littlefeather after she declined Marlon Brando‘s Best Actor Oscar over the film industry’s treatment of Native Americans).
Nehme concluded that (a) the six security guards thing “never happened,” but (b) two people were responsible for creating and propulgating the myth — Oscar telecast producer-director Marty Pasetta, and British writer Joan Sadler.
The following day (8.20) HE “covered” Nehme’s article, adding emphasis here and here. HE’s piece was titled “Unreliable Narrators.” The key thing to remember, I wrote, was that the “bad guys” in this affair were Pasetta and Sadler, but primarily Sadler because she was first out of the gate with the security guys fable, having written about them in a 1981 article.
Hiltzik did, however, get one thing wrong, and in so doing subtracted something significant — poor Joan Sadler. Apparently because Nehme’s sourcing on Sadler’s 1981 article (i.e., the one that introduced the six security guys to the civilized world) is somewhere between thin and non-existent.
The thorough and exacting Nehme, however, did quote from Sadler’s article, so we can probably presume that it was in fact written and published.
Here’s how Hiltzik puts it: “[Nehme] says the story began as an exaggerated yarn that Oscar telecast director Marty Pasetta started telling interviewers a year or so after the fact ‘that got more exciting each time it was told’ until it became ‘a persistent urban legend.'”
All I know is that Joan Sadler’s place in history — a woman who, according to Nehme, did so much to shape the historical legend of John Wayne’s final decade and who was the first to provide a seminal enhancement of the Littlefeather legend by characterizing her as a female buckskinned Beowulf vs. Wayne’s Grendel — has been dismissed by Michael Hiltzik and the L.A. Times.
And yet according to Nehme, Joan did it first! Joan created the security guys, and then Pasetta ran with them seven years later.
Sadler, in short, almost certainly invented the Backstage Security Six as surely as Akira Kurosawa invented the Seven Samurai, as George Lucas invented Luke Skywalker and as Margaret Mitchell invented Scarlett O’Hara.
But Hiltzik is saying “Naaah, let’s give all the credit to Pasetta. An Academy guy, credibly sourced, killed in Palm Desert by drunk driver…safer that way.”
Flanked by his parents (Paul Dano, Michelle Williams), 7 year-old Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryna Francis-Deford) is wow-wow-wowed by Cecil B. DeMille’s recently released TheGreatestShowonEarth (‘52). It’s an early scene from Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical TheFabelmans (Universal, 11.11), which will premiere during the ‘22 Toronto Film Festival.
The same seasoned director–writer who told me about reactions to the Batgirl screening (“It makes Catwoman with Halle Berry seem like Abel Gance’s Napoleon“) says that (a) “orders came from the highest Warner Bros. level to put the Batgirl dailies, elements and preview cut on lockdown”, but that (b) “any reports that it’s been deleted are not true. But it will never be leaked anywhere.”
8.23 Washington Post story by Faiz Siddiqui, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski and Rachel Lerman: “Former head of security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko [has accused] Twitter of “lying about Bots to Elon Musk” in a whistleblower complaint filed in July with regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.
“Musk’s team is expected to use the complaint as a basis to argue for wider discovery into Twitter’s internal practices and data, something it could raise as soon as a hearing Wednesday, according to individuals with knowledge of the matter and legal experts who described the implications of such revelations.
“There is an analogy of an airplane. So you go on an airplane and [nearly half of the] passengers and attendant crew members…they all have access to the cockpit, to the controls…that’s entirely unnecessary…[and] it’s too easy to accidentally or intentionally turn the engine off.” — Zatko to CNN.
JUST IN: Twitter whistleblower alleges that the company is "lying about Bots to Elon Musk" and is a threat to national security.pic.twitter.com/yLPqPsDC92
In terms of the acting awards, Spirit Award wokesters have announced an abandonment of gender categories. No more Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor or Best Supporting Actress categories. Which is what the Gotham guys did a year or two ago. It’s insane but real…they’re doing it.
Idea #1 is to emphasize how different New York and L.A. wokester culture is from tens of millions of Joe and Jane Popcorn movie lovers in every corner of the nation.
Idea #2 states that “non-woke film fans may love the idea of gender-based acting categories for now, but we are leading the way to a bold and brave new realm…henceforth we are living in a gender-neutral world, whether you like it or not. Wake up and woke up and join us…it’s a joyful revolution!”
I will say this straight and clear and true: If the Academy decides to go gender-neutral with the Oscar acting awards, the eclipse will be total and absolute, and I mean beyond the level of anything dreamt of by Michelangelo Antonioni …culturally and aesthetically, the Oscars will have slit their own throats.
Which award-giving org will succumb next to glorious trans fluidity-slash-equality? If the gender-neutral advocates within BAFTA, the Academy, the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice and the guilds…if they manage to eliminate gender-based acting awards, Average Joes and Janes will simply walk away and stay away…they will raise their fists and voices and say “stop this insanity, stop this bullshit…men are men and women are women and they generate different moods and expressions and ways of living and processing the ups and downs of living…stop this bullshit and come down to earth.”
The Spirit Awards have decided to move to “gender neutral” categories, thus stripping the last tiny bit of fun the awards race had left. the Gotham awards have already done this, and my guess is that BAFTA, with their committee-driven nominees, will soon follow suit. So now they’ll need committees to choose not just an equitable collection of performances, but nominees that must represent every single spectrum of every marginalized group. People of color, non-binary people, people with disabilities, perhaps plus-sized people — I mean, all we seem to do now on the left is argue about which words we’re all supposed to use to not offend a single person, or get called out as a problematic witch on Twitter.
I guess by now we have to ask “what is the point of any of this?” We’re all keeping it alive by bumping the chest and blowing air into the lungs. But activists are imposing their ideology on nearly every corner of the industry, making film awards — and films in general — something other than what their original purpose has always been. And honestly, what are these awards going to be but a ceremony inside of a devout religion?
Maybe clinging to the past, or pretending film awards are meant to do anything but serve their newfound religious ideology, seems a bit pointless by now. People aren’t really all that thrilled with “gender neutral” anything, except perhaps bathrooms. All you need to remind you of this is the success of Top Gun and Elvis. Why do you think the Kardashians are a multi-billion empire? You don’t think sexy females are a hot selling point? That is why there is much excitement around the Best Actress category. It is the All About Eve of it all. But no one is going to listen to me. This train has left the station and there is no bringing it back.
“When SNL made this parody ad five years ago they were obviously goofing on wokester fanatics. Who knew it would become an actual reality?”
I took an instant dislike to the place, and when I got home I made a list of the reasons why. There were five of them. (1) Too many loud people congregated in a tight setting and generating so much conversational racket that I had a headache almost immediately; (2) Too many unattractive people who were either over-dressed or lacked that certain je ne sais quoi X-factor coolness that everyone needs to project when they’re out on the town; (3) Seriously ugly decor (baby blue seating booths with small and kitschy amber-toned lamps); (4) Decent but far from phenomenal food; and (5) A bizarre table-seating policy that may or may not have involved some kind of unsavory arrangement.
All I know is that the hostess declined to seat us next to an oceanview window, and when Tatiana asked why the hostess explained that a certain table in question was being held for a party of four that hadn’t yet arrived. In the politest terms I could muster I asked, “Well, are they royalty? What’s the special dispensation? We’re here in good faith and money in our pocket, and we’d like to sit at that open table so why can’t we exactly?” The hostess said that the party in question has paid a thousand bucks to Moonshadows so they’d always get a windowside table when they ate there.
Me (slightly agog): “Really?” Hostess: “Yeah. A thousand sounds like a lot, I agree, but…”
For the rest of the dinner I couldn’t think of anything else except this alleged thousand-dollar payoff. I was wondering how it worked exactly. Was it a thousand a year or twice annually or…? We asked our friendly waiter but he didn’t know of any such arrangement. I called the next day and spoke to a manager, a guy who said he’s worked at Moonshadows for many years, and he also said he was unaware of any such system.
All I can tell you is that the hostess said what she said, and that I didn’t imagine it.
I will never, ever go to Moonshadows again. I would rather eat a hot dog while sitting on the beach. I would rather go to Jack in the Box. On top of which Pacific Coast Highway is such an aggressive, high-speed thoroughfare. They say that the ocean is calming and restorative but not out there. I’ve been to beachside communities all over the globe, and Malibu is easily the worst of them. It has no sense of peace or tranquility.
How many times do I have to repeat this? Lusty old-dog celebrities who may have enjoyed sampling available fruit back in the lascivious ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and even the early aughts…these stubborn old coots have to understand that their poon days are over and done with, and if they don’t listen they’re going to be accused and prosecuted and thrown into the wolf pit. Because if they make the slightest move on anyone under the age of 50 TMZ will be chasing them around parking lots and gas stations within 48 to 72 hours. And yet they won’t listen. It’s pathetic but they just won’t.
All the press reports have described Ben’s spread as being either “in” Savannah or “just south” of it. In fact the Liberty County residence (which includes a 6,000 sq. ft. main house, a cottage house and a 10,000 sq. ft. guest house) is well south of Savannah, and in fact south of the Savannah suburb of Richmond Hill.
The hard truth is that Bennifer plantation is located between 35 and 40 minutes south of downtown Savannah…okay? Don’t lie about this. It’s way the hell out of town.
The luxurious spread sits on the banks of historic Blackbeard Creek — named after Blackbeard the pirate. It’s basically in the blue-collar boonies. The property isn’t that far from the moderately noisy interstate 95 and a little more than a mile south of a huge Target distribution center, and just east of Newport Timber in Riceboro.
The home actually lies near an old settlement called Seabrook. Wikipedia says Seabrook “was originally built up chiefly by former slaves”…whoops! Couple this with Affleck’s Savannah-residing ancestor, Benjamin Cole, being a slave owner…okay, leave it there.
HE to Larry Karaszewski: Paul Newman aside, Cool Hand Luke (‘67) was an ensemble thing, and if you ask me the six…make that seven standout supporting players are George Kennedy, Strother Martin (“failure to communicate”), the icy prison guard with the reflector shades, Jo Van Fleet, J.D. Cannon, Clifton James and Joy Harmon, the soapy blonde who was washing the car.
I know Dennis Hopper was in it but I don’t recall him saying or doing anything especially stand-outish.
I recall young Lou Antonio’s face from the film, but he didn’t have any stand-out dialogue or business that leapt to the forefront. He’s 88 and apparently in a wheelchair — hope he’s feeling okay and everything’s cool. Is there any video of your discussion? Love to listen in.
Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind the Candelabra, which opened on 5.21.13, wounded up earning $23 million, or two million less than it cost. Not in the U.S. but Europe, where it played briefly.
According to a calculus passed along by costar Matt Damon, it would’ve cost another $25M to market it for a domestic theatrical run. Plus half the revenues (or $12.5 million) would have been pocketed by theatre owners.
This is how Damon laid it out, in any event. HBO saved the day, but without HBO the producers (Gregory Jacobs, Susan Ekins, Michael Polaire) would’ve taken a bath.
“Candelabra Counts“, posted on HE on 5.21.13: “Of all the major directors of the past 20 years, Steven Soderbergh has always seemed the least emotional. So it doesn’t sound like much to call Behind The Candelabra (HBO, 5.26) his most emotional and touching work. And I don’t mean it lightly.
“This HBO movie truly touches bottom and strikes a chord. It’s a sad (but not glum or downish), movingly performed drama about a kind of marriage that begins well and then goes south after five years.
“Richard LaGravanese‘s script is complex, fleshed-out and recognizably human at every turn, and performed with considerable feeling and vulnerability by Michael Douglas (easily the top contender right now for a Best Actor prize) and Matt Damon.”
Joe and Jane Popcorn presumably weren’t all that enthusiastic about Behind the Candelabra because they didn’t want to see a movie that was at least partly about Damon being fucked in the ass by Michael Douglas. It was about much, much more than that, of course, but Joe and Jane can be simplistic and stubborn.
