Misheard rock lyrics is a popular meme. No less than three fellows (Gavin Edwards, Martin Toseland, Charles Grosvenor) have written books about this topic. Everyone understands that rock lyrics occasionally invite misinterpretation, and nobody accuses anyone of being an asshat if they insist that the key line in “Blinded by The Light” is not “revved up like a deuce” but “revved up like a douche,” as in fucking douchebag. That’s on Manfred Mann,** of course, and not “Blinded” author Bruce Springsteen.

But if you mishear dialogue spoken by a French actress (Camille Cottin) in the Stillwater trailer, you’re deaf and clueless. At the :43 mark, she says a quiet line to Matt Damon‘s character — a beefy, burly, cap-wearing 40something bumblefuck type -— and is apparently referring to his incarcerated daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin). The line she says to Damon is “the father of duhkat?…he left in six” something-or-other.

You’re also an asshole if you mishear movie dialogue spoken by a British actress of Asian descent in the new Eternals trailer. Despite the unmistakable fact that Gemma Chan absolutely does not say “beautiful, isn’t it?” but says “Eefrent…isn’t it?” Or possibly “Steefrent…isn’t it?”

Look at the teaser again — Chan’s line comes at the :29 mark.

When you say “beautiful” you have to get that first syllable right — sounds like “byew” or “byoo.” The second and third syllables are pronounced either “tihful” or “teefull.” There is no way on God’s green earth that Chan says “byooteefull.”

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As predicted, the crazy fever (weakness, fatigue, muscle ache plus a general inability to sleep or eat or do anything but lie on the couch and suffer) began to loosen its grip early this afternoon. I’m still weak, but the worst is apparently over.

I’ve been through this shit before, and the HE flu always lasts 36 to 48 hours. This, motherfuckers, is what “German genes” is all about.

When I told a doctor earlier today that my flu battles never exceeded 48 hours, she said “well, that’s highly impressive…you’ve quite the immune system.” Given my age, you mean? “I’ve treated patients in their 20s who’ve stayed under for three or four days or even a week,” she replied.

Let’s suppose that New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance manage to persuade a jury that Donald Trump and his minions were guilty of elaborate tax fraud…guilty. So after the appeal process has been exhausted, what’s the potential penalty? Are we talking orange jumpsuits or what? News analysts don’t want to speculate because to do so would erode their posture of impartiality. But c’mon…every reasonable person wants that fat fuck sociopath behind bars. He’s dirty, he constantly lies (Barack Obama called him “a bullshitter”) and he’s the boss of a crime family

If a studio-backed genre film becomes a hit, a sequel inevitably results. But the sequel is almost always less impactful than the original (anomalies like The Godfather, Part II aside) and the brand is thereafter mitigated. And then comes the idea for a second sequel and it’s like “oh, God…leave it alone.” But the suits know that Part 3 will perform decently, even if the general audience reaction to Part 2 is “not bad but a little meh.” And the principals can’t resist the idea of more fat paychecks and profit participations. And so we, the audience, are stuck with Part 3 whether we want it or not.

…of even the slightest exertion…of summoning the strength and discipline to tap out a thought or two…it’s exhausting to even consider. It’s draining to even think about sitting up. I slept restlessly all day yesterday and into the night — the kind of feverish sleep that isn’t really sleep. It’s bad. Hot cup of Thera-flu an hour ago…weak, sweating (which is good)…it’ll “break” later today, I suspect.

Four years ago I switched webhosts, signed up with Austin’s WP Engine. To save disc/cloud space the guy who did the transfer migrated a good portion of my JPEGs to Amazon Web Services. But uploading these images from AWS to Siteground has taken a fair amount of time, and so far it’s been a day and a half. Honestly? The migration has been agony. I can’t seem to manage the “pull” myself. The process is dragging on and on. Between this and the fever, I’m in hell.

Aching muscles, feverish feeling, faintly damp forehead, can’t stay awake, couch-napping for the last couple of hours, etc. If I hadn’t been double-vaxxed, I’d be worried. I’ve been through this before. I’ll be out of it by tomorrow morning, perhaps sooner. Maybe.

Water-cooler conversations still happen from time to time. Movie topics we can all point to and discuss and joke about are fully accessible, especially with streaming. (The Nomadland poop bucket, etc.) But Oscar conversations aside, the big movies and conversational jizz-wads that everyone talks about tend to be dumber, coarser, less interesting.

Plus features and major longforms are so much more more plentiful these days than 15 or 20 years ago (or even 5 or 10), and your middle-class, adult-angled films are gone, and the films that manage to capture brief attention spans across the board don’t last as long in the shared consciousness pool as they used to, and so the whole thing is…well, it’s just fucked up.

The 28th anniversary of that hugely frustrating Last Action Hero mythical-test-screening story that I wrote for the L.A. Times “Calendar” section is nearly upon us. My story was dated 6.6.93. I should wait until the 30th anniversary for a clean, proper rehash…right? But I might die in a plane crash next week. Or get stabbed in some back alley by Fatso Judson.

The hullaballoo that went down in late May and early June of ’93 was very strange. I felt like I was on DMT half the time. The story that I wrote was about an alleged-but-ultimately-mythical screening of LAH in Pasadena. It was partly be-doppa-beep and be-doppa-boop, but toward the end it invoked the legend and the metaphor of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone.

I chose to mention Serling and his show because the stuff I was digging up from sources didn’t quite add up — it wasn’t hard or nail-able.

Alas, my hardhead editors — Claudia Eller, Kelly Scott — wanted to run a “bust” story and knew only about working within the journalistic strategems of big-city entertainment reporting as it was practiced in 1993, and therefore they couldn’t roll with whimsical or fanciful or quizzical, and so the story that ran was too “police blotter.” It didn’t have the right mood and coloration — an uncomfortable blend of Wells paragraphs (i.e., the Serling stuff) and Eller/Scott paragraphs (hard-nosed!). Peaceful coexistence never quite happened.

I thought I’d made it clear to one and all that The Twilight Zone and concepts of hard factual reporting existed on separate planets. I thought that point was clearly made. Maybe it would have been clearer if I had invoked “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”

If I had written that damn story on my own…if the internet and Hollywood Elsewhere had existed back then, that whole stupid episode would never have happened because I would have written it the right way and people would have responded, “Oh, some people think that an LAH screening happened, or at least they’re trying to convince others that it did,” etc.

It would have been about certain people in this town wanting to take that movie down, rather than some purportedly fact-based, page-one, hard-news story.