The International Community of Movie Mavens welcomes the arrival of Ethan Ruimy, son of World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy and his wife Leora. Ethan arrived late yesterday afternoon in Montreal. One presumes that the legend of John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards had something to do with this blessed event, at least tangentially. That or Ethan Allen Furniture, but what are the odds?
Two weeks ago I asked my doctor about a prescription for hydroxycholoroquine, and his response was basically “forget it, doesn’t seem legit, no evidence that it actually works” and so on. It became a rightwing topic after Trump mentioned it. I had therefore written it off. The hype over the decades-old malaria drug seemed sketchy, dubious.
Now comes a 4.1 N.Y. Times story by Denise Grady saying that hydroxychloroquine “helped to speed the recovery of a small number of patients who were mildly ill from the coronavirus, doctors in China reported this week.
“Cough, fever and pneumonia went away faster, and the disease seemed less likely to turn severe in people who received hydroxychloroquine than in a comparison group not given the drug. The authors of the report said that the medication was promising, but that more research was needed to clarify how it might work in treating coronavirus disease and to determine the best way to use it.
“’It’s going to send a ripple of excitement out through the treating community,’ said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University.
“The study was small and limited to patients who were mildly or moderately ill, not severe cases. Like many reports about the coronavirus, it was posted at medRxiv, an online server for medical articles, before undergoing peer review by other researchers.
“But the findings strongly support earlier studies suggesting a role for the drug, Dr. Schaffner said.”
There was also a “small French study of 42 patients that seemed to show that hydroxychloroquine, particularly when combined with the antibiotic azithromycin, helped decrease patients’ levels of coronavirus.” — posted on 3.27.20.
Jordan Ruimy: “Hydroxychloroquine saved my friend’s father’s life. Just because Trump approves of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. We can’t play politics at a time like this. You should go to another doctor.”
Bernie Sanders may survive his first four-year term as President. Then again who knows? He’s a tough old goat, and he might trudge on through. But he’s also a 78 year-old man who had a heart attack five months ago. And the odds don’t seem to favor his being in robust health at the start of a theoretical second term in January ’25, when he’d be 84.
Bernie almost certainly wouldn’t run for a second term — be honest. Oh, and he’d better pick his vp running mate very carefully.
From Chris Cillizza‘s “The Delicate Issue for Bernie Sanders That His Democratic Opponents Won’t Touch,” posted on 2.28.20
“The scrutiny applied to a front-running candidate covers their policy positions, their personality and preparedness for the nation’s top job, and yes, even their health.
“Consider what President Donald Trump would do with the issue of Sanders’ health, given (a) that Sanders had a well-documented heart attack last fall while campaigning in Nevada and (b) the way in which Trump tried to make Hillary Clinton’s health an issue in 2016.”
Consider a 2.21 Slate piece by Jeremy Samuel Faust, titled “What Are the Chances Sanders Has Another Heart Attack Before November?”
Excerpt #1: “I considered the risk that, between now and Nov. 3, Sanders might experience any of the following: a second heart attack, another life-threatening emergency, any event that would require hospitalization (including any “false alarm”), or even death. The risk is not trivial, and is worth explaining in full.
“First, there appears to be little evidence that Sanders’ current health is a hindrance to the daily rigors of a national campaign. Considering the extent of his heart attack in October, he appears to be doing well, able to campaign vigorously, and likely up to the demanding position of president, from an endurance standpoint at least.
“Nor is his life expectancy the central question, though, yes, his remaining expected life span dropped from around 10 to five years after his heart attack.”
“But his one-year risk is low, meaning his chance of surviving the campaign is good. When Sanders entered the hospital in October (given what we’ve been told by his doctors), his calculated six-month risk of death was rather harrowing, likely between 11 and 19 percent. Fortunately, by virtue of surviving his initial hospitalization, and the incident-free intervening four months, those numbers have improved, to better than 95 percent.”
Excerpt #2: “Using Medicare claims data, researchers at Yale analyzed millions of patients who suffered heart attacks like Sanders’. (As an aside, using adjectives like mild, moderate, or severe to describe Sanders’ heart attack is not helpful. What we can say is that these researchers were looking precisely at patients like Sanders who had experienced approximately the same problem as his, in the same time frame.)
“Here’s what they found: From the day they left the hospital, the one-year risk of at least one rehospitalization for any reason in Medicare beneficiaries who suffered a heart attack like Sanders’ was about 50 percent (the baseline annual risk among his age cohort is more like 1 in 6).
“Again, by virtue of four incident-free months on the trail, that number is now lower for Sanders. But his chance of another hospitalization between now and November alone likely remains between 30–35 percent. While the daily risk is low, around 0.17 percent, we have more than 250 days to go until Election Day. The risks add up.”
Yes, I’m confessing to somehow not paying sufficient attention to the ever-evolving, shape-shifting American vocabulary and thereby missing the emergence of “zoomer,” which is a much better term for GenZ-ers than GenZ. Freshly coined terms are almost always alive and pulsing before the Merriam Webster researchers get hold of them, but the following MW update was only posted six days ago. It also claims that “zoomer” dates back to 2016 so double my fine.
Once upon a time a certain kind of producer made modestly-budgeted films that weren’t aimed at lowest-common-denominator morons. These films were made for semi-cultivated, marginally educated, upmarket audiences who were…oh, 30 years of age and older, let’s say, and a certain kind of distributor would endeavor to distribute these films.
This was a few years before Amazon and Netflix and other streamers were routinely delivering films in 1080p and 4K to home theatres, and audiences, arcane as it may sound, would get into their cars, drive into garages and pay money to see these films in places called “theatres” or, if you will, “multiplexes,” where they would show films on large-sized screens with the aid of complex, SUV-sized devices called “projectors.”
This was more or less the way things were done in the mid teens and before. But even in this progressive-minded, sometimes adult-friendly age, audience viewing habits would sometimes disappoint certain erudite columnists. Enterprising fellows, for example, like Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells. I’m mentioning this because earlier today a team of researchers came upon a portion of a column written by Wells many years ago, or way back in 2015. It’s only a portion of the column, apparently, but the tone indicates he was suffering from pique and irritation.
Here’s what it says: “The public, bless’ em, sometimes shows curious inclinations as far as which films they want to see. This is a roundabout way of saying that ticket-buyers only occasionally exhibit what used to be know as ‘taste‘ in choosing what they like, and that their moviegoing habits often indicate preferences of a lazy, ignorant and ineducable bent.
“On top of which narrative complexity (i.e., a deliberate, creative choice on the part of filmmakers to avoid black-and-white, dumbshit simplicity) seems to scare them to death.”
Is there anyone who didn’t know for a dead cold fact that sooner or later a driverless Uber would kill a pedestrian? Last night’s “autonomous” slaying in Tempe happened around 10 pm. It involved a 49 year-old woman who was walking with her bicycle.
Funniest N.Y. Times paragraph: “Autonomous cars are expected to ultimately be safer than human drivers, because they don’t get distracted and always observe traffic laws. However, researchers working on the technology have struggled with how to teach the autonomous systems to adjust for unpredictable human driving or behavior.”
The above news report says that the woman was “not using the crosswalk.” The autonomous Uber had undoubtedly been programmed — instructed — to not hit pedestrians walking in designated crossing areas, so technically the woman may have been at fault by crossing in a wide-open zone. If George C. Scott‘s General Buck Turgidson was involved in this situation, he would say “the human element seems to have failed us here.”
Yes, I’m kidding. Of course it’s the technology’s fault.
The movie I’m thinking of mostly right now is George Lucas‘s THX-1138. I’m imagining the relatives of the deceased woman going to their computers to talk about their grief, and the heuristically programmed algorithmic computer saying as they log on, “What’s wrong?”
In any 21st Century ensemble comedy involving four or five characters, there’s always somebody with a weight problem or worse. I haven’t invested hours of research, but can you imagine the shock waves rippling through Hollywood and the moviegoing culture if a Melissa McCarthy-type character wasn’t cast in an ensemble comedy? Fat chance given that 40% of American woman are now obese, and so filmmakers are naturally looking to appeal to all persuasions and sizes. Plus they’re afraid of being accused of diminishing or under-appreciating the calorically challenged by appearing to exclude them. That would set off a firestorm.
Obviously American comedies have used overweight talent for decades, but it’s only this century (and more particularly during this decade) when it became de rigeur. I don’t recall the one-out-of-four-or-five rule being in effect back in the ’90s, much less the ’80s. This is a 21st Century thing. A year ago Time‘s Alexandra Sifferlin, passing along data from a JAMA Network survey, wrote that “when looking at trends over time, [JAMA] researchers found that from the year 2005 to 2014 there were significant and steady increases in the number of American women who were very obese.”
Why isn’t a high-def version of Peter Bogdanovich‘s revised, expanded version of Directed by John Ford, which came out on DVD seven and a half years ago, streaming on Amazon or Netflix or wherever? One of the finest docs about a legendary director ever made and it’s still on DVD?
On 11.6.06 I posted an HE piece about Ford, called “Snarly Softie.” It was triggered by a viewing of Bogdanovich’s doc, which had its big debut on Turner Classic Movies in the spring of that year. The DVD popped two and a half years later, on 9.15.09.
That Ford piece I posted yesterday about his World War II service and more specifically his post-D-Day bender (which is mentioned in Netflix’s Five Came Back) led me back to the ’06 article:
“I’ve tried and it’s impossible — there’s no feeling just one way about John Ford. His movies have been wowing and infuriating me all my life, and after seeing Peter Bogdanovich‘s Directed by John Ford, the muddle is still there.
“But Bogdanovich’s film gives you a feeling — one that seems clear and genuine — that you’ve gotten to know the old coot better than ever before, that you’ve really and truly seen past the bluster and the scowl and the cigar, beyond the scrappy Irish machismo and into some intimate realm. After many years of saying “Ford sure made some great films but what a snappy old prick he was,” I’ve finally come to like the guy. And I feel I owe Bogdanovich a debt for that.
“I tried to say this during my Monday afternoon phone chat with Bogdanovich. We spoke for 25 or 30 minutes. And I never quite said what I felt the film had taught me about Ford, which is that he was a shameless softie who used a snarly exterior manner to keep people from getting inside and discovering who he really was. But of course, his films made that pretty clear on their own.
“A friend at the office said it’s like you’ve been tossed out of an airplane…you feel the alarm, the fear, you feel the freezing wind around you, but you haven’t gone splat yet. On the other hand no parachute has opened…there’s no sense of ‘aah, this is a normal event.’ The back and forth between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. There’s not that sense, at least not in me. But there is that impulse to make it such. Normalization. It’s a very human impulse…to normalize the situation so you’re not in a state of constant alarm or fear or sadness or agitation.” — New Yorker editor David Remnick in a 12.21 interview with BBC’s “Newsnight”, which was largely about Remnick’s post-election (11.9) essay — “An American Tragedy.”
Late yesterday morning respected author and movie journalist Peter Biskind posted the following on Facebook about Michael Cimino‘s The Deer Hunter (’78), obviously in response to Cimino’s death last weekend: “I hate to speak ill of the dead and all that, but the obits for Cimino, particularly Mark Olsen’s in the L.A. Times, are shockingly oblivious to the context of The Deer Hunter. Talk about historical Alzheimer’s!
“Of the notorious Russian roulette scenes, all Olsen can manage is that they became ‘instantly iconic, symbolic of the maddening pressures that set upon men at war.’ What? In fact, although it has a great cast and is undeniably a powerful picture, the politics are execrable, and were widely denounced at the time for turning the war inside out.
“The tiger cages in which our boys were held captive were a South Vietnamese invention, not a North Vietnamese. Nor were Vietcong guerrillas likely to grenade their own people, as the film portrays them doing. My Lai was a U.S. atrocity, not an NLF atrocity. The protests of the journalists who covered the war were the loudest, and all agreed that the North did not force U.S. prisoners to play Russian roulette, which was a device left over from an early script.
“All in all, Cimino was caught in numerous lies, ranging from his claim to have been a medic attached to the Green Berets, to his attempt to steal script credit from Deric Washburn.”
Reviewed on 5.18.15 by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Boyd van Hoeij: “The hunt for a teenage French girl who’s gone to the subcontinent to follow her possibly jihadist boyfriend turns her family into modern ‘searchers’ in Les Cowboys, the promising feature debut of celebrated French screenwriter Thomas Bidegain.
“Unlike the films he’s co-written for Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone), which often rely on Audiard’s stunning capacity to foreground grand emotional sweeps, this is a much more constructed narrative that could only be described as a writer’s film, though one with several pleasant — if shocking is your idea of pleasant, that is — surprises up its sleeve.
I’ve made it quite clear in this column that I wouldn’t touch LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) these days with a 10-foot pole. But back when I used to touch it I would always describe what it did to my brain as a kind of blissful washover that freed me from everything I’d learned in school and thereby delivered radiant truths. The usual mental associations and thought patterns were rescrambled by my senses turning all tingly and Technicolored — an elevator-in-the-brain-hotel sensation leading to heightened sensitivity, receptivity. Which led to the opening of Dr. Huxley‘s doors of perception and the gates of prana, satori, nirvana.
Four or five days ago researchers from London’s Imperial College, working with the Beckley Foundation, published for the first time in the history of LSD visual records that precisely show the effects of the drug on the brain. Here’s a PDF with the findings.
The team administered LSD to 20 “healthy” volunteers and then used various brain-scanning techniques to visualize how LSD alters the way the brain works. For the first time in history the images depicted the ch-ch-ch-ch-changes that that people have sought to verbally describe for decades.
Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial: “Normally our brain consists of independent networks that perform separate specialized functions, such as vision, movement and hearing — as well as more complex things like attention. However, under LSD the separateness of these networks breaks down and instead you see a more integrated or unified brain.
“Our results suggest that this effect underlies the profound altered state of consciousness that people often describe during an LSD experience. It is also related to what people sometimes call ‘ego-dissolution’, which means the normal sense of self is broken down and replaced by a sense of reconnection with themselves, others and the natural world.
“This experience is sometimes framed in a religious or spiritual way, and seems to be associated with improvements in well-being after the drug’s effects have subsided.”
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