…and besides reminding me that Madonna doesn’t seem all that stable and centered (at least in terms of social-media posts), last night’s pre-Grammy TiKTok video told me that Madonna’s forthcoming biopic, co-written by Madonna, Diablo Cody and Erin Wilson with the Material Girl herself expected to direct, is going to be a problem.

You can just tell. You can just sense it. The aura of self-adoration and general lack of honesty is too pernicious.

I wish it could be otherwise. I wish, in fact, that Elyse Hollander‘s Blonde Ambition (which Madonna read and hated) was being made instead. Because that script, trust me, is a keeper.

Posted on 10.6.18: Yesterday a friend said A Star Is Born would’ve been much more interesting if the genders had been flipped — if the Jackson Maine character had been Sheryl Crowe with a drinking problem and if the ingenue had been some young guy (Shawn Mendes, Jaden Smith…someone in that realm). That way the plotline grooves wouldn’t seem so familiar and the whole vibe and atmosphere would’ve felt fresher and nervier.

I would have been delighted, in fact, if Bradley Cooper had instead directed Elyse Hollander‘s Blonde Ambition, the top-rated Black List script about Madonna‘s struggle to find success as a pop singer in early ’80s Manhattan.

It was reported last summer that Madonna is no fan of the script, and that she doesn’t want the film version to happen. They should make it anyway. If and when Blonde Ambition activates it’ll be a Universal thing. The producers will be RatPac Entertainment, Michael De Luca Productions and Bellevue Productions.

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You have to at least allow that these guys (Ben Platt and Noah Galvin) look like a ventriloquist act. You can’t say “no, they don’t look like a ventriloquist act, and you’re just saying that out of cruelty.” You can’t say that.

…pops sometime in May. No trailer yet but in the meantime…

George Carlin’s American Dream, directed by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio, chronicles the life and work of the legendary comedian.

Carlin’s career spanned half a century during which he headlined 14 HBO comedy specials and appeared on The Tonight Show over 130 times, constantly evolving with the times and staying sharply resonant up until his death in 2008 and beyond. The documentary examines a cultural chameleon who is remembered as one of the most influential stand-up comics of all time.

The two-part documentary tracks Carlin’s rise to fame and opens an intimate window into Carlin’s personal life, including his childhood in New York City, his long struggle with drugs that took its toll on his health, his brushes with the law, his loving relationship with Brenda, his wife of 36 years, and his second marriage to Sally Wade.

Intimate interviews with Carlin and Brenda’s daughter, Kelly Carlin, offer unique insight into her family’s story and her parents enduring love and partnership.

Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, Patton Oswalt, Stephen Colbert, Bill Burr, Bette Midler, W. Kamau Bell, Sam Jay, Judy Gold and Jon “demonic white people” Stewart are among those interviewed for the project.

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Zelensky’s Grammy speech was rather good — morally urgent, concisely written, well delivered, presumably rehearsed. Did the Oscars blow him off? If so, they shouldn’t have.

Feverish rock-guitar solos are the topic of this interactive N.Y. Times piece, “Why We Can’t Quit the Guitar Solo” by Nabil Ayers.

I’ve never been a fan of wailing, reach-for-the-heavens solos; the short guitar bridges are what matter, and the more concise the better. The 23-second bridge in Eric Clapton‘s “She’s Waiting” (2:10 to 2:33), say. Or the 3:02 to 3:19 bridge in this Jackson Browne song. Or my all-time favorite, the twelve-second bridge in “The Song Is Over” (:42 to :54).

I have this idea that “Pretty Ballerina” is kind of timeless. Okay, maybe not but it feels like a close relation of a 21st Century Emo song. If it had never been recorded and released several decades ago but if someone current had recorded it in precisely this baroque way, would it fit right in or would your music cognoscenti go “the fuck?”

HE to Jett: “If this song was released today, would it fit in as a kind of EMO thing?”
Jett to HE: “It would be more indie pop-rock. Not really Emo by today’s standards.”
HE to Jett: “What is it missing Emo-wise? I thought EMO was defined by a kind of whiny feeling…a soft emotional core.”
Jett to HE: “Emo is just more over-the-top these days, lyrically and production-wise.”
HE to Jett “Ballerina has strings, a falsetto singing voice, a feeling of longing.”
Jett to HE: “That’s fine but Emo is a subculture that’s completely detached from this.”
HE to Jett: “Detached from what? Good lyric writing?”
Jett to HE: “I’m not saying Pretty Ballerina is bad. It’s just not Emo. Today’s Emo is hyper-pop. You’d hate it.”

From The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody: “During the New York press junket for the film Morituri, in 1965, its star, Marlon Brando, received a series of journalists for brief interviews at a table in the Hampshire House hotel and toyed with them gleefully and mercilessly.

“This 1966 documentary, by Albert and David Maysles, captures Brando’s transformation of the setup, through the sheer force of his personality, into a grandly ironic variety of performance art.

“Brando brazenly flirts with several female journalists, complimenting them on their appearance, and aggressively questions male interviewers about their looks, too (with particular attention to their fingernails and their clothing). Challenging the interviewers’ readiness to act as ‘hucksters,’ Brando mocks the blatantly promotional conversations with sly or flamboyant sarcasm and disarmingly sincere reflections.

“In a streetside interview, Brando speaks French with a French interviewer, and in response to a political question about the circumstances of black people in the United States, he beckons to a black woman who’s passing by and poses the question to her. The resulting portrait of Brando — sexual, intellectual, aggressive, vulnerable, seductive, rebellious — shows him creating a greater character than any ever written for him: himself.”

Richard Linklater‘s Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (Netflix) is a plotless boomer nostalgia thing — a visit to the oasis of suburban family life in the mid to late ’60s and a re-sampling of all the pop cultural stuff of that era (late LBJ, early Nixon).

Like Linklater’s Waking Life (’01) and A Scanner Darkly (’06), Apollo 10 and 1/2 is rotoscoped — the only kind of animation I really enjoy. Performed by skilled actors and then converted to subtle, ultra-realistic animation.

It’s set in a bland Houston suburb, and is oriented to some extent around NASA and the July 1969 Apollo moon voyage. It’s about a Brady Bunch or Wonder Years-type family, of which Stan (voiced by Milo Coy) is the young lead protagonist. Dad (Bill Wise) works in shipping and receiving for NASA. It’s narrated by an off-screen Jack Black, playing an adult Milo. There’s a mom, an older brother plus two or three sisters.

Apollo 10 and 1/2 is an easy-going, laid-back time machine. Boomers and older GenXers will sink right in — it’s an amiable return to their young lives and everything that was happening in terms of music, TV, cultural changes, the Vietnam War, racial conflict, evolving sexual mores, etc.

I had a nice mellow time with it.

The only problem is that Linklater’s time trip has no POCs. If I were Jon Stewart or Race2Dinner’s Lisa Bond I would say that this absence reflects a foul racist agenda on Linklater’s part, and that he has to be lashed along with all the other white animators who’ve committed similar crimes.

To those who would say “but Linklater based it on his own childhood to some extent and it’s set in a ’60s whitebread neighborhood…there were no kids of color in this neck of the woods back then,” I would say “have you never heard of presentism? It doesn’t matter if there were no black kids in Linklater’s old neighborhood — this is 2022 and he should’ve blacked it up.”

I’ll tell you what I did last night while watching Apollo 10 1/2. I ignored the whole doofus fantasy subplot about the 14 year-old Stan being selected by NASA engineers to go on a secret Apollo mission, blah blah. I watched it, yes, but I didn’t give a damn. It bypassed my aesthetic digestive system entirely.

I was totally stone-faced throughout 95% of last night’s SNL, but then “Short-Ass Movies” came on…okay! I sat up, I woke up, the color returned to my cheeks, etc. Yes, being a short-ass movie hound means a moronic “no” to Heat, Barry Lyndon, Schindlers List, The Godfather (Parts I and II), Prince of the City, Malcolm X, Lawrence of Arabia, Malcom X, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, Spartacus and dozens of others, but compared to last night’s other skits, “Short-Ass Movies” was the shit.