Harry Styes brought this upon himself by posing in dresses for Vogue…just desserts, pay the price, cope with life, etc.

Earlier today some Facebook guy asked for examples of scenes with great nønverbal acting. The vast majority of respondents will point to scenes in which the protagonist is conveying strong levels of anxiety, stress or barely suppressed panic. Prime example: Al Pacino in the seconds before he whips out the gun and shoots Al Lettieri and Sterling Hayden in The Godfather. But of course, the increasingly louder sound of a subway train rolling underneath is a key ingredient.

I tend to prefer subtler examples.

Mark Harris‘s favorite is Lily Tomlin‘s simmering reaction to Keith Carradine‘s singing of “I’m Easy” in Nashville. I agree as far as Tomlin is concerned, but the scene falls apart because Carradine won’t stop pathologically staring at her. No cafe performer would ever do that as it makes him look obsessed if not insane. Women in the cafe are noticing his staring and looking around to see who the object might be…Jesus.

One of my nonverbal favorites is James Gandolfini collapsing inside at the end of the legendary “Long Term Parking” episode in season #5 of The Sopranos (i.e., the one in which Adriana gets whacked). That’s me — that’s how I feel 80% of the time when I let the combination of the pandemic and the Khmer Rouge get to me. And that’s how I always respond if anyone asks if I’m good.

A new trailer for Regina King and Kemp Powers‘ One Night in Miami (Amazon, 12.25) is out. It’s selling an impressively acted, respectably decent translation of a good, thoughtful play about African American identity in the ’60s. Here’s my 9.11.20 review.

HE to Journo Pally: “And I chuckled at that blunt candor moment when Jim Brown said he wasn’t down with the Muslim lifestyle because, in part, he likes white women.”

JP to HE: “I’m sure the real conversation was 12 times raunchier than that. I mean, one of the things I accept about this movie is that there’s a certain well-made-play decorousness to it. That’s why it’s not great or brilliant.

“One Night in Miami is a real middlebrow, meat-and-potatoes movie. Even though the meeting between Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown did, in fact, happen, you know you’re watching a conceit. It’s tidy in a certain way. But given all of that, there’s a life to it.”

As previously noted, a Paramount Home Video Bluray of Francis Coppola‘s re-jiggered 1990 family crime saga pops on 12.8.20 — just under three weeks hence.

Repeating: The primary problem with The Godfather, Part III, which nobody ever liked and which is still regarded as the dishonorable bastard child of the Corleone saga, is that it didn’t respect the established arc of its main character.

Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone was a somber, soft-spoken, cold-hearted iceman in The Godfather, Part II (’74), and a guy clearly consumed by his own dark and guarded impulses at the Lake Tahoe finale.

But when he returned as a gray-haired, crew-cutted Don in The Godfather, Part III (’90), Vito Corleone‘s youngest son had undergone a personality transplant. He’d become a reflective, fair-minded, at times shoulder-shrugging fellow who was no longer a coldly calculating shark but a thoughtful, moderately reasonable and even amiable head of a crime family.

Two entirely different hombres.

An hour ago I came across a photo of a guy I used to know in Westfield, New Jersey, a leafy and well-tended middle-class town that I struggled and suffered in for years before we moved to Wilton, Connecticut. And a couple of musty memories began to seep through.

The Westfield guys I hung with were into sociopathic group sadism as a kind of macho-pecking-order thing — a way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Somebody was always getting picked on. It was a kind of hazing ritual, the idea being to put someone’s feet to the fire and see how they’d hold up. Or something like that.

I never understood this damn game, but mockery, isolation and occasional de-pantsing (a gang of guys would literally hold a victim down and pull his pants off and leave him to walk home that way) were par for the course.

Anyway, five or six of us were all crashing in a beach house one weekend, sleeping on side-by-side mattresses in an upstairs rec room of some kind. And I recall waking up around 5 am because a couple of guys had slipped a tray or two of ice cubes inside the sleeping bag of another guy, and when he woke up he was so cold his voice was shuddering…he literally couldn’t speak clearly because he couldn’t stop shaking and trembling. He was standing near the foot of my mattress and berating the assholes who had ice-cubed him. Believe it or not but this kind of thing was par for the course.

After a while I went back to sleep. It was around 8 am when I was awakened with a hot foot — two or three large kitchen matches had been placed between my toes as I slept and then lit. I woke up with a shriek. (Or was it a howl?) I literally levitated off the mattress.

Posted on 2.19.18: The Westfield High School climate was hellish, no question. I suppose on some level it sharpened or toughened my game, but I think I suffered from a kind of PTSD for a couple of years after our family moved to Wilton, Connecticut.

In ’06 I passed along a story of drunken teenage vomiting during a long-ago weekend party at a New Jersey shore vacation home. It belonged to the parents of Barry, a nice-enough guy I knew and occasionally hung with during my mid-teen years when I lived in Westfield, New Jersey. A bunch of us had driven down there and partied without anyone’s parents knowing, especially Barry’s. No girls, no music to speak of — just a lot of beer and ale and vodka and everyone stumbling around.

During this weekend a big, dark-haired guy named Richard Harris had been chosen as the latest victim. He had thrown up on the floor of Barry’s beach home, and so he had to be punished. Much later that night (around 1 am) we found a dead mouse in a mouse trap, so we threw the corpse into a pot of boiling water and put it under the sheets of a bed Harris was sleeping in. He woke up five or ten seconds later and bellowed “get the fuck outta here!”

A half-hour later we went outside and shifted Harris’s Chevrolet into neutral and pushed the car down the neighborhood street about three or four blocks. We were all sitting around the next morning. Harris walked in through the pantry door, glaring like a gladiator and saying “where’s my fucking car?”

Is this a thing or a put-on or a hacking? Creating a substitute Facebook identity by way of an alternate name but still using your regular photos? I don’t know what this actually is, but it seems to be about splitting a social-media identity into two halves — the real-deal organic self with an actual history, and a recently created alternate mirror self that exists only as a reflection. Or something like that.

If this is an early clue to the new direction, I’d like to get in on this. If Bryce Dallas Howard can call herself Bry Dearing (which is a cool-sounding name), I could theoretically create an alternate Facebook page by calling myself Valentine Xavier. Just call me “Val.”

After a year’s worth of delay, the theatrical release plans of Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot‘s Wonder Woman 1984 are more or less toast. It’s going straight to HBOMax on 12.25.20, concurrent with a theatrical debut in select upscale venues, and that’s a good thing. Seriously — I’d love to be able to catch it in a nice big theatre somewhere. But the vast majority of would-be viewers will watch it at home, of course. We all know this.

Pic was originally slated for a theatrical release on 12.13.19. It was subsequently advanced to 11.1.19, and then delayed to 6.5.20. On 3.24.20 the opening was further delayed to 8.14.20. In June 2020, it was bumped again to 10.2.20, and then again to 12.25.20. It was then reported that the film would probably be delayed until the summer of ’21. Now it’s back to 12.25.20.

It just hit me five minutes ago that “I Don’t Live Today“, the 53 year-old Jimi Hendrix song, is a note-perfect expression of everything I’ve been thinking and feeling about the pandemic for the last nine months.

“Will I live tomorrow? / Well I just can’t say / Will I live tomorrow? / Well I just can’t say / But I know for sure / I don’t live today”

From Thomas Friedman‘s “How Can We Trust This G.O.P. in Power Again?” (N.Y. Times, 11.17): “A political party that will not speak up against such a reckless leader [as Donald Trump] is not a party any longer. It is some kind of populist cult of personality.

“That’s been obvious ever since this G.O.P. was the first party to conclude its presidential nominating convention without offering any platform. It declared that its platform was whatever its Dear Leader said it was. That is cultlike.

Are we just supposed to forget this G.O.P.’s behavior as soon as Trump leaves and let its leaders say: ‘Hey fellow Americans, Trump tried to overturn the election with baseless claims, and we went along for the ride. But he’s gone now, so you can trust us to do the right things again.’”

A completely wise and sensible suggestion from Keith Olbermann:

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex turned 36 on 9.15.20, and already he’s on the ropes. Look at him — he’s almost completely wiped out. And in an era of micro-hair-plug restoration, needlessly. And he’s fairly loaded so he doesn’t even have to visit Prague to take care of things. I wouldn’t suggest anything too intense, but he could at least fill in some of the gaps and it wouldn’t look phony or anything. I’ve been there so don’t tell me. Going the Michael Stipe / Mr. Clean route is cool, but why any youngish, semi-flush dude coping with thinning hair wouldn’t want to at least arrest this syndrome and maybe fill things in a bit…for the life of me I can’t understand this.

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Megan Markle, Duchess of Sussex.

There are three ways to admit that you’re a somewhat difficult person to work with. Which is to say exacting, demanding, stubborn. A refusal to accept “good enough” or “not too bad” when “first-rate” is within your grasp. On a personal relationship level, the synonyms would be neurotic, obsessive, somewhere between a bit of an asshole and a raging one, etc.

The three expressions I’m thinking of are exactly synonymous. My personal favorite is one that I associate with Richard Pryor — “I’m no day at the beach.” The second is “I’m no walk in the park.” The third is “I’m no picnic.” I prefer the Pryor because…I don’t know why. Because I like warm sunny beaches better than parks and lawns, which can be damp and bug-infested?

In a Variety interview with Brent Lang, Mank director David Fincher goes for option #3 — “I know that I’m no picnic.”

If I was working for Fincher in some capacity, I would eat his mania for perfection for breakfast. I would shrug it off like a man. I would deal with any and all Fincherisms like water off a duck’s ass. And any coworker who complains I would regard askance.

But let me respectfully repeat that shooting Mank in black-and-white was, I feel, a cliche. Fincher did so “as a nod to Gregg Toland’s expressionist cinematography in Citizen Kane,” Lang explains. And we all get that, of course. Then again Fincher and cinematographer Eric Messerschmidt didn’t really offer that nod by shooting in a widescreen aspect ratio (2.39:1), which is alien territory as far as the Toland signature is concerned.

I’ve said this before but you know what would’ve been three or four times cooler? Not to mention unexpected? If Fincher and Messerschmidt had filmed Mank in the softly grained, vaguely hazy Technicolor hues of Nothing Sacred (’37, shot by W. Howard Greene) and The Garden of Allah (’36, shot by Virgil Miller plus an uncredited Greene and Harold Rosson). And in the old Academy ratio of 1.37:1, of course.

Favorite Fincher quote about filmmaking: “‘There’s plenty of blame to go around’ has always been my philosophy. I believe filmmaking owes a lot more to [a] demolition derby than it does to neurosurgery. It’s a miracle when it goes off the way you had it in your head. For the most part it doesn’t.”

“What, today, is leftism, at least when it comes to intellectual life? Not what it used to be. Once it was predominantly liberal, albeit with radical fringes. Now it is predominantly progressive, or woke, with centrist liberals in dissent. Once it was irreverent. Now it is pious. Once it believed that truth was best discovered by engaging opposing points of view. Now it believes that truth can be established by eliminating them. Once it cared about process. Now it is obsessed with outcomes.

“[And] once it understood, with Walt Whitman, that we contain multitudes. Now it is into dualities: We are privileged or powerless, white or of color, racist or anti-racist, oppressor or oppressed.” — from “Groupthink Has Left the Left Blind“, an 11.16.20 N.Y Times column by Bret Stephens.