Is there some reason other than virtue-signaling that the organizers of this Zoom chat have a sign-language person while they also have subtitles, which YouTube puts on automatically?

Why does this feel like a meeting of super-loyal Stalinist apparatchiks in the 1930s? The “safe” alpha woke-think vibes coming out of this thing are sorta kinda suffocating.

This Guillermo del Toro snap was taken in the hallowed aisles of Laser Blazer — the Pico Blvd. location, I mean — sometime in ’00, possibly in ’01. Guillermo had either just finished shooting The Devil’s Backbone or was preparing to do that or…oh, hell, I can’t specifically recall. I could be off by a couple of years. It could have been ’04 or ’05.

Laser Blazer was where my heart was…it was my home, my soul haven. It began in ’88 just as laser discs were starting to happen; it finally died in ’11.

I didn’t watch season #4 of The Crown (the one with Emma Corrin as Lady Diana Spencer) until last summer, but once I’d gotten through it I felt sated and satisfied. My basic attitude was “that was pretty good…actually very good, but I think that’ll do.”

But then I was obliged to sit through the big Spencer screening at Telluride and endure all the subsequent hype and hoopla (Kristen Stewart for Best Actress). And then came the Diana doc, “The Princess,” at Sundance ’22.

And it’s still not over. Sometime later this year we’ll have to sink into The Crown‘s fifth and sixth season with Elizabeth Debicki and Dominic west as Diana and Prince Charles.

Debicki is 6’3″, of course, and West is six feet even. That means he had to adopt an Alan Ladd approach — i.e., stand on boxes or wear lifts when sharing close-ups.

You’re richer than Croesus and famous, and have lived a large, swaggering life for 15, 20 years now…you’re a kind of lunatic eccentric and everyone sees that…you turned into a Trump homey in ’17 and then ran for President in ’20, all the time flirting with mental instability.

Now, post-Kim Kardashian, you’re hopping around with Julia Fox, and have announced that your new, legally-changed name is “Ye” (pronounced “yay“). You’re such a moody, impulsive shape-shifter that you can’t even settle into your own name upon hitting your mid 40s? You’re still flirting, wondering…still not sure?

This isn’t Cassius Clay becoming Muhammud Ali, which signified a religious conversion. At age 35 in 1993, the late Prince changed his name to a love symbol but that was part of a legal dispute with Warner Bros. No, this is your thing. If it had been my call? I would’ve become “Ye–Ye” — sounds cooler somehow.

The MPAA’s rating system is about protecting sensitive and/or under-age viewers from disturbing film content (violence, sexuality). But protection from ideological propaganda should also be a matter of concern.

Friendo: “We need some kind of a ‘woke’ database (along the lines of the Bechdel Test) that lets people know if a movie is pushing doctrine or whether it’s not. A ‘W’ rating label at the beginning of each appropriately-labeled film might also work.”

I’ve forked over $20 for a Sunday Sundance viewing of Oliver Hermanus’ Living, a British period remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (‘52). Watching it as we speak. The great Bill Nighy inhabits the terminally ill public works bureaucrat, who was played 70 years ago by Takashi Shimura.

The descriptive terms so far are “low-key,” “no hurry,” “tonally and visually accurate” (it’s set in 1952 London) and “quietly affecting emotional undertow.”

One quibble: Whenever old-school British bureaucrats of yore sat down in their first-class train compartments and unfolded their newspapers, they took their bowler hats off. Not so in Hermanus’ film.

I’m pleased to report that Living is framed in a 1.37 aspect ratio.

For me, Hardy Kruger really stood out in only two films — the model-plane engineer in The Flight of the Phoenix, of course, and Cpt. Potsdorf in Barry Lyndon. Kruger was always a convincing actor, but he never blew the roof off. Which is fine. He was who he was, stood his own ground.

I think it’s important to post this portion of his Wiki page, for clarity’s sake:

“From 1941 [when he was 13], Kruger attended an elite Adolf Hitler School at the Ordensburg Sonthofen. At the age of 15, Hardy made his film début in Alfred Weidenmann‘s The Young Eagles.

“In March 1945, Krüger was assigned to the 38th SS Division Nibelungen and was drawn into heavy combat. The 16-year-old Krüger was ordered to shoot at an American squad. When he refused, he was sentenced to death for cowardice, but another SS officer countermanded the order. Krüger described this experience as his break with Nazism. He afterwards served as a messenger for the SS, but later escaped and hid out in Tyrol until the end of the war.

“He was a member of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and frequently spoke publicly against extremism and for democracy, citing his own experiences.”

16 months hence Errol Morris and Robert McNamara‘s The Fog of War will be officially 20 years old, and I’m wondering what our wonderful cancel culture fanatics would say about it today. “This film coddles a war criminal!…normalizes and rationalizes mass murder!,” etc.

I still regard The Fog of War as one of the most emotional docs I’ve ever seen. Phillip Glass‘s techno score is one of the most haunting ever created for a non-narrative feature.

Even in its meticulous recountings of wartime strategies and mistakes that led to mass killings on an almost unimaginable scale, The Fog of War is fraught with feeling…with ache and nostalgia and puddles of regret and candid admissions that cut like knives.

The combination of Robert McNamara stating that while working for Col. Curtis LeMay during World War II he was “part of a mechanism” that fire-bombed and murdered 100,000 Tokyo citizens, and his story of the B-29 captain who was furious that the 5000-foot bombing altitude led to the death of his wing-man, and in recounting LeMay’s response McNamara starts to choke up. 100,000 Tokyo citizens burned to death across 15 square miles, and McNamara weeps about a single Air Force guy who caught a bullet.

If that doesn’t get you emotionally, I don’t know what would. Alternately startling, numbing, unnerving…I’ve never forgotten it.

In early ’04 The Fog of War won the Best Feature Doc Oscar.