If it was my call and I had absolute power (and I’m not exaggerating for exaggeration’s sake), I would put Donald Trump‘s fat, half-naked ass into a Roman Colisseum-like arena and make him face three ferocious tigers, just like Russell Crowe in Gladiator and Victor Mature in Demetrius and the Gladiators. Yes, I would allow Trump to defend himself with a short sword, but you know he’d die anyway.

It goes without saying that Steve Bannon should suffer the same fate.

I’m not kidding — these guys are sociopaths, animals…hellbent on anti-Democratic revolt and sparking anti-Democratic insanity among the rural bumblefucks. They’re truly insane, and the crimes they’re guilty of deserve the ultimate penalty. A firing squad would afford them too much dignity. They need to face what Christians faced under the rule of ancient Romans.

Alternate scenario: Trump is murdered — stabbed to death — by the Praetorian guard, and in a mimicking of John Hurt‘s death scene in I, Claudius, he weeps and wails as the knives plunge in and out.

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From a q & a between Netflix honcho Ted Sarandos and Variety‘s Matt Donnelly, titled “‘I Screwed Up’: Netflix’s Ted Sarandos Addresses Dave Chappelle Fallout“:

Donnelly: “I want to circle back and ask definitively, do you personally and does Netflix feel that The Closer does not amount to hate speech?”

Sarandos: “Under the definition of ‘does it intend to cause physical harm?’ I do not believe it falls into hate speech.”

Donnelly: “So the special will remain on the service?”

Sarandos: “I don’t believe there have been many calls to remove it.”

Has anyone drawn a correlation between Dave Chappelle‘s The Closer and Richard Pryor‘s brief performance at a gay rights fundraiser at the Hollywood Bowl on 9.18.77?

Pryor talked about about having sucked a dick and “fucked some good ass-hole” back in ’52 (when Pryor was 11 or 12). And yet, angered by some racist behavior he’d witnessed backstage, Pryor also shared some harsh thoughts about his perceptions of racism (by way of indifference and whatnot) in the gay community.

Please read this excerpt from from Scott Saul‘s “Becoming Richard Pryor”, posted in the Guardian on 1.11.15.

By Pryor standards, Chappelle’s Closer material was a day at the beach.

Christine Ebersole is listed as playing Lucille Ball on the Licorice Pizza Wiki page so this lucylounge thing is apparently legit. (Thanks to worldofreel‘s Jordan Ruimy.)

Dune‘s Denis Villeneuve is a true film nerd….a believer, a devotional, a monk in robes. As Lawrence of Arabia‘s Dryden (Claude Rains) says to General Murray (Donald Wolfit), “He knows his stuff.”

But projection-wise, 70mm is not the best way to see Lawrence any more. Digital projection has surpassed it. There’s no question about this. I saw it digitally projected at the Salle du Soixantieme in Cannes so don’t tell me. In this respect Villeneuve is wrong.

Friendo #1: “For what it’s worth, I couldn’t get past page 50 of Frank Herbert’s Dune and thought the Lynch version dismal. But I have to say that the new Dune put me in The Zone in a way that I’m not accustomed to — I just locked into what Villeneuve was doing and more or less stayed that way to the end, quite admiring it all the way.”

Friendo #2: “Seeing Dune in a theatre is agony, an endurance test. Don’t do it. Choose the HBO Max option.”

Please listen to Joe Rogan‘s impressions of what’s going on right now. It cuts right through. The awfuls won’t listen, of course, because they’re hysterical, defensive and blind to anything but their own agenda.

Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, 15, attended last night’s Eternals premiere in a dress and looking like (gasp!) a young woman. Which is a switch, right? When she was two Shiloh told her illustrious parents that she wanted to be a boy named John. Kids with wealthy or stable parents do this, of course. They fiddle and faddle around with this or that fantasy or identity. And so Brangelina indulged her.

Now Shiloh is thinking she might be…well, who knows what she’s thinking? But “John” seems to be history.

Friendo: “Looks like little Shiloh is a female after all.”

HE: “Aided and abetted by insane parents, many kids these days decide their gender and sexual identity at very tender ages. Shiloh can always switch back in a year or two.”

Friendo: “I think she’s just outgrown it, as a lot of them do. Which is why parents should wait until after puberty to embrace or approve their children’s gender and sexual identity matters. This, of course, is totally verboten to say in woke circles.”

It’s all well and good for the hearing-challenged community to have its own Marvel superhero. This plus CODA makes 2021 a banner year in this respect, but banner isn’t the word I’m really thinking of — it’s banal. As in “what a banal world we’re all living in”….representation matters, representation matters, representation matters. But shouldn’t other stuff matter when it comes to making gripping cinema? You know that because Ridloff is part of the Eternals family…aahh, forget it. Not worth going into.

Tomorrow the handicappers will sample their very first taste of Javier Bardem’s performance as Desi Arnaz in Being The Ricardos, and will thereafter decide, depending on how much tasty Desi footage is included, if it’s a possible Oscar-level thing or not. Pins and needles, fate of nations, etc.