Soon after opening on 9.25.21, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures became known as an industry joke -- a forum for unintentional, institutional, self-regarding satire.
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Posted on 12.30.21, previously paywalled: Almost all big-time gangsters go down in flames sooner or later, and almost always after a relatively short heyday — imprisoned, expelled from the U.S., blown away like Tony Montana or Tony Soprano, found stuffed inside a garbage can.
Gangsters rarely live to be old and gray-haired and surrounded by grandchildren. Okay, Vito Corleone did but that was fictional. Meyer Lansky made it to age 80 (cancer took him out) but he only had $57K in the bank at the end. Pablo Escobar was shot to death in the end, but he lasted as a kingpin for 17, 18 years — an exception to the rule.
If I was running Gangster Financial Services, my basic pitch would be this: “Sooner or later you’re going to have to lam it. You need to face the fact that you’re probably looking at five or six years at the top, perhaps a couple more, nine or ten at the outside. But sooner or later the law will indict you or rivals will have you killed.
“Smart gangsters understand that they need to start planning their escape early on. They need to start putting money away and building low-key homes in Vietnam or Eastern Europe or Belize or Paris or Rome, and having false passports and identity cards made and arrangements with good plastic surgeons, so when it’s time to go on the run, they do so on their own terms, and in relative comfort.
“We at Gangster Financial Services understand the game and how it works. Let us help you and your family plan for the inevitable, while you still can and before it’s too late. Oh, and by the way? No private zoos while you’re flush and at the top. Only idiots have Bengal Tigers and giraffes living on their property.”
Last night I re-watched George Pal and Rudolph Mate’s When Worlds Collide (‘51), an ambitious if under-budgeted sci-fi disaster flick. Early on I was intrigued by (i.e., fantasizing about) 23 year-old costar Barbara Rush, whom I’d never paid much attention to (and who is still with us, by the way, at age 97).
She was unquestionably front and center during the ‘50s, but my most vivid memory of Rush is from Warren Beatty and Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (‘75).
There’s a scene in which Beatty’s Beverly Hills hairdresser (i.e., George Roundy) is trying to persuade a bank officer (George Furth) to give him a loan to start his own hair salon with. When asked about collateral, Roundy tries to explain that his business value is largely based upon celebrity client loyalty. “I have the heads…I do Barbara Rush,” he states. Alas, this isn’t enough for the bank officer.
Married to Jeffrey Hunter from ‘50 to ‘55, Rush was very fetching in her 20s, but augmented this with a certain interior, deep-drill quality that seemed rooted in good character and basic values. Call her the trustworthy, on-the-conservative-side, guilt-trippy type. This was especially evident in 1958’s The Young Lions and ‘59’s The Young Philadelphians.
It was this sense of duty and restraint plus a corresponding low-flame quality when it came to hints of sultry sensuousness that probably limited Rush’s appeal as she got into her 30s. Wikipage: “She was often cast as a willful woman of means or a polished, high-society doyenne.”
Before today I regarded Jacob Elordi as a tall, broad-shouldered, dishy-looking actor who may or may not have been a fellow of serious character or intestinal fortitude.
His two most recent performances were nothing to write home about — a Paul Bunyan-sized Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla and a laid-back, to-the-manor born hunk in Emerald Fennel‘s Saltburn.
But after lightly roughing up Joshua Fox, a producer for Australia’s “The Kyle & Jackie O Show” after Fox good naturedly but idiotically asked Elordi for some dirty bathwater (a goof on Saltburn‘s Barry Keoghan slurping same)…after this episode was reported I said to myself, “This settles it…Elordi is now a man with his feet planted on terra firma.”
By which I meant he’s no longer just an actor looking for another job, another high-impact role…he is now his own poet, his own creation, the captain of his own ship…he’s now a dude who won’t take any shit from any douchebags and will most likely refuse to back down if this happens again.
Elordi is now a personality as well as a semi-tough guy…Frank Sinatra, Sean Penn, Robert Mitchum…that line of country. Hats off, stiff salute.”l
Elordi allegedly pushed Fox against a wall and then allegedly put his bands on Fox’s throat, but he didn’t hurt the guy. He was just making a point like Sinatra used to back in the old days when some asshole journalist or photographer had gotten on his nerves.
In a recording that was aired on the show, Fox can be heard introducing himself to Elordi before proceeding to give him a container. Here’s HE’s version of the conversation:
Fox: “Really random but I want to give you this…Jackie wants a birthday present.”
Elordi (reading from a piece of paper): “Jacob Elordi’s bath water?”
Fox: “She’s a big fan of [Saltburn.”
Elordi: “What am I supposed to do with this, put bath water in it?”
Fox: “Yeah, and then you could send it to the studio.”
Elordi: “Jesus, man…you’re kidding, right? God, why are there people like you on this planet?
Fox: “Seriously, it’s for Jackie O.”
Elordi: “You’re obviously goofing off like a 13 year-old but this isn’t even slightly amusing…not witty, not clever. It’s just fucking stupid. Wait, are you filming?”
Fox: “Yeah.”.
Elordi: “Can you not, man…please?”
Fox said he felt “intimidated” as Elordi got “in [his] face” and backed him against a wall. The actor’s security team was also present during the incident.
True Detective: Night Country, which I decided to stop watching last Sunday, is a relentlessly grim, noirish atmosphere puzzlebox series. Not as long or convoluted as the deeply despised Westworld series, but similiar in certain ways.
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Yes, another effing Lily Gladstone profile, this one from The New Yorker.
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For two or three weeks I’ve been watching a brief YouTube solicitation for donations to the Biden-Harris re-election campaign.
The spot might persuade a certain percentage to donate, but it mainly reminds that Joe Biden is too old and over-the-hill to be an effective campaigner.
Can Joe do the actual job? Mistakes and elite woke allegiances aside, he’s shown that he’s a moderate veteran who knows the ropes and can handle the demands after a fashion.
Does Joe project prime-of-life strength and hard-snap vigor? Please.
The 62 year-old guy on the left is clearly attractive, mentally sharp and possessed by natural charisma. The pale 81 year-old guy on the right is squinting too much — obviously in a state of natural great-grandfatherly decline — and he hoarsely mumbles more than enunciates.
I used to visit my late mom in an assisted living facility so don’t tell me.
This ad is telling us, in short, that the guy on the left has it and the guy on the right mostly doesn’t.
I want Biden to be re-elected and yet it’s obvious that he might not make it, as Steve Kornacki and that recent, seriously stunning NBC News poll suggests.
If Biden loses next November his name will be mud until the end of time.
Rather than accept reality and strategically step aside, historians will lament, he arrogantly insisted that he was the best candidate to defeat The Beast, and in so doing plunged the nation right back into another four years of deranged, law-defying chaos and neo-totalitarian horror.
Substitute Michelle Obama for Kamala Harris and the whole picture changes. People despise Harris and are terrified of a succession scenario, but the same folks would be down (or at least a lot happier) with Michelle.
I’d never heard of these magazines until late yesterday morning (Sunday, 2.4). They were sitting on a checkout rack at a ShopRite market in West Orange — a ten-minute drive from Jett, Cait and Sutton’s home.
The reason for their absence from HE radar is that my most-visited food haunts over the last two years — Wilton’s Village Market and WeHo Pavilions — wouldn’t dare offer them because this would suggest that Trumpers and obesity-sufferers are regular shoppers, which is somewhat degrading from a cultural standpoint.
The irony is that there’s nothing overtly coarse or downmarket about the ShopRite in question. And yet someone in ShopRite management figured these rags would appeal to customers. Do the math.
From Owen Gleiberman‘s “The Theatrical Success of Anyone but You Sends a Message: Has Streaming Become a Form of Stockholm Syndrome?“:
“Last fall, Richard Linklater’s Hit Man was one of the hits of the Venice Film Festival. It was a critical darling built around a charismatic performance by an up-and-coming star named…Glen Powell. Distributors were hot for it, and it was bought for $20 million.
“Here we are five months later, and Glen Powell is a star, and Hit Man, set to come out in June, will certainly advantage of all the marquee capital that Powell built up in Anyone but You. Which is a distributor’s dream, right?
“Wrong. Because it’s actually not going to happen that way.
“Hit Man was bought by Netflix, so no one was ever going to see it in a theater. And no one will see it in a theater now. Hit Man was a festival sensation that had the makings of an indie hit, but now it will be another movie that vanishes into the Bermuda Triangle of the streaming ocean.”
This is utterly brilliant. A student accuses @jk_rowling of being transphobic. This teacher skilfully dissects the claim and challenges it by asking questions.
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Very few major-league Hollywood stars have suffered such an abrupt and precipitous hair decline as James Stewart, and it all happened during his service as a bombardier squadron leader during World War II.
Before the war the rail-thin, tousle-haired Stewart looked fairly boyish; when he returned in ’45 he had developed widows’ peaks and stress fissures, and soon after (probably during filming of It’s A Wonderful Life or certainly before Call Northside 777) began to wear toupees. By the mid ’50s his hair was mostly gray and barely hanging in there.
Without the rug the older Stewart looked like an aging middle-management businessman or an Air Force General (which he was); with the rug he definitely looked younger but also like an actor wearing a rug.
Why didn’t Stewart take care of things “in Prague” via micro scalp implants? Because the technology didn’t really come into being until the ’90s or the early 21st Century.
Ayo Edebiri to Nikki Haley: “I was just curious, what would you say was the main cause of the Civil War? And do you think it starts with an S and ends with a lavery?”
Haley to Edebiri: “Yep, I probably should have said that the first time.”
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