…it would sorta kinda look like this. I don’t know what to say or think. All I can do for now is (a) gulp and (b) go “hmmm, maybe but I dunno.” It’s certainly simpler and cleaner, but right now I live in my own home, dammit — a place with a certain weather-worn history, a certain personality and attitude…a brand and a tradition that’s been around for 17 proud years.

My honest reaction is that HE Substack…a place I’m thinking of moving into…looks and feels like a modest, freshly-painted condo unit in a large sprawling complex, but at least it has a soft-drink machine off the main lobby, a large basement room for washing and drying, and of course underground parking.

I’m not saying it isn’t the right way to go (maybe it is), but right now I’m in shock. 17 years of blood, sweat and tears, and this is what it’s come to…a condo unit.

Writing is never easy — demanding, tiring, draining. Sometimes the spirit is upon me, and other times not. But it’s nowhere near as difficult as it was during the old Olivetti manual and IBM Selectric days of the ’70s and early-to-mid ’80s. Back then I would tell friends “I despise the process, but I love having written.” In my early Manhattan days (late ’70s) writing was like pushing a loaded wheelbarrow uphill, over gravel. I would spend way too many hours composing a 400-word film review, partly because it’s more difficult to write shorter than longer.

In Julia Lilian Hellman (Jane Fonda) threw her typewriter out the window. I got so crazy one night in my Bank Street apartment that I smashed a glass jar of peanut butter against the kitchen wall and cut my palm open. I damaged some nerves, but they gradually regenerated,

I don’t mean anything by mentioning Darren’s film — I just wanted to allude to Mother’s Day without sounding sentimental.

Read more

You could argue that this standoff scene between Eddie Albert and Charles Grodin in Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (’72) is Albert’s career-best moment. He’s playing an utterly humorless Midwestern banker who smells deceit and calls it out …and it’s beautiful.

Surely there are other noteworthy scenes in which an older, wiser, sharper character (man or woman) tells a young hustler (either gender) to cut the crap.

Written by Neil Simon: “I see through you. You don’t think I see through you? You could wear two wool sweaters and a raccoon coat, I’d still see through you. ‘There’s no deceit in the cauliflower’? Where do you get ideas like that? Do they just…do they just come out of that New York head of yours?”

During the last 20 or 25 minutes of Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (’71), professional thief John Dortmunder (Robert Redford) arranges for a deep-voiced hypnotist named Miasmo (Lynne Gordon) to put an unsuspecting safe-deposit-box teller into a kind of waiting trance state.

The trigger term that will make the teller obey any command is “Afghanistan bananistan”, a deliberately silly invention (presumably dreamt up by screenwriter William Goldman)…a noun-switch takeover in the same vein as “Oscar schmoscar”…obviously.

It goes without saying that there’s no reason on earth for Miasmo to have invented a similar-sounding term, “Afghanistan banana stand.” Why would she do that? Even with a silly attitude what do bananas have do with Afghanistan? Has anyone ever heard of a Kabul fruit seller restricting his goods to just bananas? It’s lame — a needlessly literal term when the much simpler “Afghanistan bananistan” will suffice.

And yet the Hot Rock Wikipedia page nonsensically claims that Miasmo says “Afghanistan banana stand”, and now a copy writer for the Criterion Channel has parroted this interpretation. Can we please nip this one in the bud? “Bananistan” is standard form — “banana stand” is ridiculous.

Read more

The wise and sensible John McWhorter feels condescended to, he said on Real Time with Bill Maher two nights ago. Robin DiAngelo‘s “White Fragility“, he complained, basically says that Black people are “hothouse flowers” and “everybody has to tiptoe around us…we’re always crying and always angry and just so very, very delicate. I don’t feel like that person. It should be used to keep the table from wobbling…that is the only use for that book.”

In a 7.15.20 Atlantic piece titled “The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility,” McWhorter said that DiAngelo’s book “openly infantilized Black people” and “simply dehumanized us.”

DiAngelo, he observed, “does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching [for residual racism by white people] is necessary to forging change in society. One might ask just how a people can be poised for making change when they have been taught that pretty much anything they say or think is racist and thus antithetical to the good.”

Read more

Elon Musk‘s mom obviously takes care of herself, looks great, excellent hair…the best moment came when she said “I love you very much.”

Does the fact that Musk is worth $166 billion constitute “a moral obscenity,” as Bernie Sanders has more or less stated? Great wealth comes with the kind of creative ambition and need to dominate that propels the Musk locomotive, it seems. Would I like a small cut of that fortune transferred to my Citibank checking account? Yes, I would, but the disparity between my own personal worth and Musk’s is not his fault.

Read more

Even before the shitty reviews surfaced (24% and 32% from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic), I had decided that my soul would be bruised and my life diminished by sitting through Land of the Lost. It was basically the combination of dinosaurs, Will Ferrell, Danny McBride and director Brad Silberling (whose Casper I’d hated). I could watch it right on Amazon but I won’t. I wouldn’t watch it on a 12-hour flight to Seoul without wifi.

In the wake of Amazon, Netflix, Time’s Up and others dismissing the foot-dragging, retrograde mindsets among members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association regarding issues of racial concern, Scarlett Johansson has become the latest voice to throw the besieged organization under the bus.

ScarJo has urged the industry to “step back” from the HFPA (i.e., think about refusing to attend the annual Golden Globe awards) until it does more than offer humanistic homilies and cosmetic changes.

No one would dispute that the HFPA is way too out of the swim of things by Hollywood standards, and that certain members, as Johansson mentioned in a statement to Variety earlier today, have asked “sexist questions” at press conferences “that bordered on sexual harassment.” The HFPA is a myopic outfit. The members live in their own world.

But I have to say that I’d become accustomed to Johansson being more of a headstrong thinker who’s occasionally swum against the tide (the 2018 Rub & Tug transgender thing, stating the following year that she “believes” Woody Allen). A voice is telling me that Johansson was probably urged by her team to speak out against the HFPA in order to shore up her woke credentials.

Seven weeks ago Tatiana and I shared a nice dinner at Spago on Canon. The salmon pizza, accented with red caviar and a light spread of cream cheese, was the hit of the evening. There were a fair number of diners inside and in the outside tent annex, but with room to breathe. You could sense a slight but substantial air of caution.

Last night we returned, and the salmon pizza was almost as good as before. (It wasn’t warm enough.) And there was no ignoring two things about the immediate neighborhood: (a) each and every restaurant was packed to the gills, and (b) commercial Beverly Hills felt like one big street party. Mostly under-35s, and not a whole lot of masks.

I wasn’t frowning because in upscale liberal Los Angeles it really is becoming an olly-olly-in-come-free climate. Not so much within Republican regions and “hesitant” African American communities, but it’s getting better and better in liberal-minded areas. If it weren’t for the idiots we could be more or less out of this nightmare by the mid-to-late summer.