Given the dynamic influence of Libs of TikTok upon the rightwing community and the triggering of anti-liberal talking points that pour out of it, LOTT founder Chaya Raichik can’t be too surprised that her anonymity has gone south.
Yesterday Raichik was outed — doxxed — by Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, in a story titled “Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right’s outrage machine.” You can be anonymous if your social media account is low profile, but once it dramatically grows in size and influence you’re obviously going to be outed sooner or later…c’mon. It’s just part of the natural rough and tumble.
There is irony, obviously, in Lorenz having publicly wept over online harassment a few weeks ago, and then turning around and drilling one of the rightwingers who, she felt, had made her life so traumatic.
Friendo: Libs of Tik Tok is great because people on the left have become so crazy. But it does sometimes border on phobia and bigotry, I’d say. Like everything, it’s not 100% great. It’s half good, half terrible.”
My excitement about President Joe Biden running for re-election is no more than level 3 or 4. If I have no choice I will vote for him, of course, especially if Donald Trump snags the Republican nomination. I can’t accept that moderate independents would be so stupid or self-destructive as to vote for Trump again. The man is a criminal, a sociopath, an enemy of decency, a beast.
That said voters will be very dispirited at the prospect of another Biden-Trump race. Deep down people don’t care for Biden’s old-guy vibes. People naturally like their leaders to project strength and vigor. Bernie Sanders is a year older than Biden but he projects more of a sharp and commanding quality.
I would feel better if a sensible Biden-esque figure in their 50s or early 60s was running instead of Biden — Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper.
I was a tad irked by Johnny Depp‘s testimony today. Not by what he said but that he spoke so slowly, at times haltingly. He certainly wasn’t loquacious. He seemed to struggle to remember stuff or to find the right words, although he eventually pulled it together.
Depp on the arc of his relationship with Amber Heard: “From what I recall, what I remember, she was too good to be true. She was attentive, she was loving, she was smart, she was kind, she was funny, she was understanding. We had many things in common”, and for the first 12 to 18 months Heard was”wonderful…it was amazing. And then things just started to change — or things started to reveal themselves, is a better way to put it. She became another person, almost.”
When you fall in love and move in with someone, you always put on your best face at first. But within the first year or so, the real inner person always comes out. Sometimes it emerges within three or four months; it depends. But sooner or later, the “act” falls away.
In the second exchange I should have inserted an acknowledgement of Darryl Ponicsan‘s screenwriting credits — original book of The Last Detail (which became the 1973 Hal Ashby-Robert Townemovie), Cinderella Liberty, Nuts (shared with Alvin Sargent and Tom Topor), Random Hearts (with Kurt Luedtke) and Last Flag Flying (novel and screenwriter).
I’m very sorry about Ezra Miller having been arrested for second-degree assault last night. Miller reportedly threw a chair at a woman inside of a Pahoa home, according to Hawaii News Now. Last month Miller was arrested in a Hilo karaoke bar after allegedly ripping a microphone out of a woman’s hands and lunging at a man playing darts.
It would appear that Miller is having trouble controlling himself, and now he’s blowing his career to pieces. After the karaoke bar incident he obviously needed to calm down and not be violent again, but now he’s branded himself as Mr. Wacko. Look at the HNN photo of him [below] — he could be Charles Manson’s grand-nephew.
I’ve always sensed something fierce and immoderate inside Miller…I’ve felt this tendency all along. This is what gives him power as an actor, of course. The trick is not to let inner feral tendencies overwhelm your judgment as an artist.
11 years ago I saw Miller in Lynne Ramsay‘s We Need To Talk About Kevin. Miller’s titular character, the neglected son of Tilda Swinton, was driven by anger issues. I described his character as “a steely-brained, black-eyed Belezebub…[the audience is persuaded early on that] the only humane and compassionate response to this kid would have been to put him in a burlap bag, fill it with rocks and toss it off a pier.”
Two years later Miller, a standout in Perks of Being a Wallflower, took part in a Virtuosos Award Ceremony at the 2013 Santa Barbara Film Festival. He was joined by Ginger & Rosa‘s Elle Fanning, Compliance co-star Ann Dowd, The Intouchables‘ Omar Sy, Beasts of the Southern Wild‘s Quvenzhane Wallis and Les Miserables‘ Eddie Redmayne.
Here’s how I described Miller’s on-stage demeanor: “The eternally weird Miller, 20, leaned forward in the interview seat, hunched forward like a cat about to chase a mouse. I half-expected him to leave the stage on all fours. Miller has Haight-Ashbury hippie hair now, and was wearing a pair of almost shapeless brown serf shoes. And he smiled a lot.”
We all go through difficult passages. I hope Miller can somehow get hold of himself and stop behaving this way. He’s only 29 — he has his whole life ahead of him.
MGM’s Raging Bull Bluray has been in my library for a dozen years, give or take.
Having seen Martin Scorsese‘s raw and turbulent classic two or three times during the original run in late 1980, I can say without hesitation that the 2009 Bluray looks much sharper and cleaner. The texture and detail have always looked magnificent, and the sound is far superior to what I heard in theatres in the final days of the Carter administration — the levels were so low at times you could barely hear the dialogue.
And of course, you can stream it on Amazon, Apple +, Vudu, etc. If there’s a difference in quality between the 2009 Bluray and the streaming version, my eyes can’t see it.
I’m therefore having trouble feeling excited about Criterion’s forthcoming 4K/Bluray version (7.12). It’ll look first-rate, of course, and I’m guessing that a certain extra-vivid quality will be apparent in the 4K version, but Michael Chapman‘s Raging Bull compositions have always had a rudimentary, right-down-the-middle 35mm look. Raging Bull was never meant to be pretty. It can never look as dazzling as Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War or Ida.
It would be one thing if it had been shot in black-and-white VistaVision (like The Desperate Hours and Fear Strikes Out were in the mid ’50s), but it wasn’t. So I can’t imagine a significant “bump” effect.
This is a nice Cannes Film Festival poster, but Peter Weir‘s The Truman Show (’98) is no masterpiece. I disliked it from the get-go. Jim Carrey‘s “Truman Burbank” is unaware that he’s living inside a corporate-funded, hermetically-sealed reality TV dome. This is what modern life feels like to tens of millions of actual Americans, of course, so we all get the metaphor. But I found the premise impossible. Complete disengagement.
I’ve posted the following two or three times over the last decade, but here goes again: Despite the impossible-to-swallow premise, The Truman Show could have saved itself if it had gone with a darkly ironic ending.
Weir’s film ends with Truman escaping from the dome and finally about to experience the blessings and pitfalls of real life…hallelujah! A far more satisfying ending would have been for Truman to escape into the real world and then, after a few difficult weeks or months, returning to the dome because he can’t hack the difficulty of real life — too much anxiety, trauma and heartbreak.
The final scene would show Truman embracing Ed Harris‘s “Cristof” and Laura Linney‘s “Hannah Gill” and shedding tears of joy at being able to return to the shelter of Fake World — a realm that tens of millions of actual Americans live in today.
An eight-year-old draft of The Trap, a never-shot movie written by Harmony Korine, appeared in my inbox. Just one of those things on gossamer wings. Korine’s most recent film was TheBeachBum (‘19), a meandering Florida keys stoner mood-trip with Matthew McConaughey. What impresses me here is Korine’s almost completely undisciplined signature. He manages a traditional H and a small a before dissolving into a kind of overdose scrawl. Not into structure. Fascinating.
Postscript: I decided to delete the erotic photo over fear of copyright lawsuits. There are too many velociraptor attorneys out there who are ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.
Many, many people are delighted by the prospect of another tongue-in-cheek Thor film. I am not one of them. Thor: Love and Thunder (Disney, 7.8) costars Chris Hemworth, Tessa Thompson (as the bisexual Valkyrie), Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, etc. Plus I am not a fan of director Taika Waititi. I probably never will be. Post-Jojo Rabbit (which Jeff Sneider had a great time with, chuckling and guffawing) my Waititi attitude became caveat emptor. I know mine is a minority opinion. I hope everyone has a great time with it.
On 1.23.07, or 15 and 1/4 years ago, the 2006 Oscar nominations hit like an impact grenade. Many blogaroos went into shock; almost everyone in the award-season loop was speechless. For on that darkly historic morning, Bill Condon‘s Dreamgirls — one of the most heavily hyped Best Picture contenders of all time — failed to be Best Picture-nominated, and it was like “Casey at the Bat” times ten. It gathered eight Oscar nominations but not for Best Picture.
And So A Question: That was then, this is now. Sometimes time and fresh perspectives can shed new light upon a film’s reputation. Who in the HE community has recently re-watched Dreamgirls…okay, within the last five years, say — and how does it play?
Here’s how I put it minutes after the announcement: “Dreamgirls, the musical that many, many people (David Poland included) had predicted would win the Oscar for Best Picture, hasn’t even been nominated for Best Picture….double, no, triple-strength shocker!…an omission that will live in the annals of Oscar nomination history.”
“The clouds hanging over the Dreamgirls camp right now are extremely dark and Cecil B. DeMille-y. For what it’s worth, my sincere condolences to Bill Condon, Larry Mark, Terry Press, Nancy Kirkpatrick, David Geffen and the gang. I never hated Dreamgirls or rooted for its demise. While we all knew it couldn’t win the Best Picture Oscar, I honestly thought it would at least be nominated.”
If anyone in the community was thrown for a loop it was Poland, one of Dreamgirls‘ most impassioned and tireless allies for months on end: “For those of you desperate for me to say ‘I was wrong’, I was wrong,” Poland wrote. “If you think [this is] a big deal for me, you have missed my reality completely.”
I was also deeply disturbed that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men, my personal hands-down choice for the year’s finest film, was also blown off in terms of a Best Picture nomination. Easily one of greatest films of the 21st Century (and featuring three of the most innovative action sequences in movie history), and not even nominated.
Condon didn’t get nominated for a Best Director Oscar, and yet United 93, arguably the most gripping and skillfully made disaster film ever, resulted in Paul Greengrass snagging a nom in that category.
There were only five Best Picture nominees that year — The Departed (brilliant), Babel (sad, meditative, cosmic, heartbreaking), Letters from Iwo Jima (hasn’t aged well), The Queen (ditto) and Little Miss Sunshiner (a near-perfect family comedy).
Posted on 2.20.07: “The defeat of Dreamgirls was a thunderclap moment along the lines of Roman Polanski winning the Best Director Oscar for The Pianist.
It was the Academy members saying en masse, “You guys can hype Dreamgirls all you want but we don’t really like it that much. It was diverting and energetic, of course, but not good enough for the Oscar big-time…the third act was weak, Beyonce‘s character amounted to almost nothing, that moment with Jamie Foxx looking at Jennifer Hudson‘s kid at the very end — throw it all together and the ticker tape read, ‘Not bad, pretty good but no cigar.'”
HE’s top seven 2006 films, in this order: Children of Men, United 93, The Departed, The Lives of Others, Volver, Little Miss Sunshine, Babel.
Before last night I had watched David Fincher‘s Zodiac seven or eight times, give or take. Two press screenings of the shorter theatrical version (157 minutes), and the Bluray director’s cut (162 minutes) five or six times.
But last night’s viewing was different. For the first time I watched it with subtitles start to finish, and it seemed to make a profound difference. It felt more granular, more “police blotter” on some level. I know each and every scene of the 162-minute version backwards and forwards, and yet I found it spellbinding, especially the last 45 minutes or so.
The Zodiac Wiki page says “an early version of Zodiac ran three hours and eight minutes.” 26 minutes longer than the directors cut! It breaks my heart that the Director’s Cut Bluray didn’t present this version as an option.
HE to Fincher: Given that Zodiac‘s rep has grown exponentially since it opened 15 years ago, I would think that you might want to offer the 188-minute version (if in fact it exists) as a streamer. Have you ever considered this?
I’m still annoyed that research-screening audiences said they didn’t like (a) the two-minute news + music blackout montage that suggests the passage of four years, and (b) especially the scene in which three cops — Mark Ruffalo‘s Dave Toschi, Anthony Edwards‘ Bill Armstrong and Dermot Mulroney‘s Captain Marty Lee — report their findings about Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch) over a speaker phone in order to obtain a search warrant.
