I’m not sensing a driving narrative or thematic undercurrent in these Spotify conversations between Bruce Springsteen (who’s worth around $500 million) and former President Barack Obama ($60 or $70 million).

If they were to sit down and grapple with, say, five burning topics of the day, and really dig into them while exploring how their personal histories have led to certain views, I’d definitely want to listen.

Good idea: Barack and Bruce discuss the takeover of the N.Y. Times by the Khmer Rouge, and whether or not sensible liberal types like themselves have to stand up to the New Racism (tagging all white people as inherently evil because of their skin color), or whether or not they believe in this shit? Or if Barack thinks one way about it and Bruce thinks another? (Don’t be afraid to debate!) Perhaps they should discuss why liberal media types won’t even discuss this madness, and why the forecasted “blue wave” of 2020 never happened. (It didn’t because average Americans feel that liberals are too much in the pocket of ideological leftist crazies.) I would definitely pay attention to a discussion along these lines.

But Bruce and Barack sitting around talkin’ about their bad dads and anxious childhoods? Bruce playin’ a little guitar and Barack singin’ along? Not feeling the urgency. Why are they doing this? Because Spotify is paying them a fee? Are they looking to promote their products (albums, books)? Aren’t they rich enough?

Bruce and Barry do have a 42-minute conversation about race in America called “American Skin: Race in the United States.” They “reflect on their early experiences with race and racism and the uncomfortable conversations we need to have.” But I’ll bet they don’t come with 200 feet of Average Joe discomfort with totalitarian lefties, cancel culture and certain people losing their jobs because they posted the wrong tweet.

Spotify “is a Swedish audio streaming and media services provider, launched in October 2008. The platform is owned by Spotify AB, a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange since 2018 through its holding company Spotify Technology S.A. based in Luxembourg,” blah blah.

Last year, I sat down with my good friend Bruce @Springsteen for a long and meaningful conversation that touched on so much of what we’re all dealing with these days. I’m excited to share it with you over the next few weeks: https://t.co/sQACD08AWx pic.twitter.com/biMoxCLhAG

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) February 22, 2021

One of my favorite Chinatown sequences is when Jake Gittes follows Hollis Mulray to some kind of seaside cliff area at dusk. Settled vibes, quiet street. Bunny Berrrigan‘s “I Can’t Get Started” can be heard from inside a small curbside cafe. Gittes watches Mulwray climb down to the rocky beach area and wait. Sitting atop the bluff and next to a large metal water pipe, Gittes waits also.

Night falls, and then the approach of surging water, whooshing out of the pipe…”runoff.”

I’ve been a Los Angeles resident since ’83. I don’t know why I waited 37 and 1/2 years to visit this fabled location, but at least I finally did. The Bunny Berrigan place is still there — a ramshackle joint called Walker’s Cafe, more or less a biker haunt. The address is 706 West Paseo del Mar in San Pedro — just off South Gaffey Street and right next to Point Fermin.

The isolated cul-de-sac vibe is gone, of course — partially destroyed by a large metal fence. But when you look down to the sea from the edge of the bluff it’s definitely the same spot that Gittes spied on Mulwray from. Before we left I ordered two root beers from Walker’s.

Gittes: “Jeez, he was there all night.”
Walsh: “I had to go back three times to pick up the watches.”

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Within the first 20 or 25 minutes of Allen v. Farrow (HBO Max, 2.21), co-directors Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering misidentify Berry Berenson, the late wife of Tony Perkins, in a 1979 New Year’s Eve photo.

Allen v. Farrow captions the 41-year-old photo as one of Perkins, Mia Farrow, and (far right) “Stephanie Farrow.” Except it’s Berry Berenson.

How could Kirby and Amy and their homeys (producers, allies, editors, publicists, Carly Simon) make a fairly glaring mistake like this? Who can say? But after working on this doc for three years and constantly, I’m sure, double-, triple- and quadruple-checking it over and over again, they did. So they’re fallible, capable of error. Like all of us.

Is there anything else they might’ve gotten wrong or misunderstood or otherwise dropped the ball on? Maybe not. Maybe they whiffed just this one time.

Repeating: Moses Farrow needs to answer Farrow v. Farrow on each and every wrongo or misunderstood or questionable assertion.

Screenshot of incorrectly captioned Allen v. Farrow photo — the woman on the far right is not Stephanie Farrow but Berry Berenson.

Over the past few weeks, we have received many requests to comment on the HBO documentary Allen v. Farrow. Below please find a statement, attributable to a spokesperson for Woody Allen and Soon–Yi Previn. Thank you.

“These documentarians had no interest in the truth. Instead, they spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods. Woody and Soon-Yi were approached less than two months ago and given only a matter of days ‘to respond.’ Of course, they declined to do so.

“As has been known for decades, these allegations are categorically false. Multiple agencies investigated them at the time and found that, whatever Dylan Farrow may have been led to believe, absolutely no abuse had ever taken place. It is sadly unsurprising that the network to air this is HBO – which has a standing production deal and business relationship with Ronan Farrow. While this shoddy hit piece may gain attention, it does not change the facts.”

In HE’s humble opinion the most engrossing and ravishing X-rated or NC-17 film ever released is Lindsay Anderson‘s If…, closely followed (most of us have this list memorized) by John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy, Pedro Almodovar‘s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Last Tango in Paris, Louis Malle‘s Damage, Nicolas Roeg‘s Performance, David Cronenberg‘s Crash and Abel Ferrara‘s Bad Liuetenant.

I know I’m obliged or at least expected to include Stanley Kubrick‘s A Clockwork Orange but I’ve absorbed it too many times — I can’t really “watch” it any more.

On the 56th anniversary of the murder of Malcolm X, it somehow never sank into my thick head that the former Malcom Little was six-feet-four. I can’t blame Spike Lee or Denzel Washington — it’s basically my fault, my lack of focus. Nor had I paid much attention to the fact that Martin Luther King was only five-foot-seven. I knew he wasn’t Wilt Chamberlain but I never understood that he was what most people would consider “on the short side.” He shared the same height as Al Pacino. Then again he was an inch taller than Alan Ladd.

Actual conversation that took place yesterday (HE being one of the participants), mostly focused on Kylie Jenner:

Friendo #1: “You can be as shamelessly sexual as you want any time you want. You just can’t be a guy noticing or commenting or looking.”

Friendo #2: “I think that cognitive dissonance you’re talking about in the culture — i.e., encouraging male lust while demonizing male lust — is almost psychotic. And toxic in its hypocrisy. One can only weep for the vanished honesty of Sex and the City. The demonizing of male sexuality now symbolizes a kind of cultural death wish.”

Friendo #1: “Hah — I can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up as a young white male right now.”

HE: “But wasn’t female sexuality (much less open expression of same?) rigidly of not punitively repressed in this country and throughout the world for centuries? Since forever? The pendulum has simply swung sharply in the other direction. Woke society to young males: We can’t stop your natural hormonal urges, but step out of line just once and WE WILL LOP YOUR HEAD OFF.”

Friendo #2: “True enough. But that repression of female sexuality took place within a more repressed culture, period. That didn’t justify it, but that was the context. Trying to make the pendulum swing the other way in a culture as openly, rabidly sexual as ours is insane. It doesn’t work. It only breeds…more Republicans!”

Kylie Jenner

HE: “Funny.”

Friendo #1: “What I’m noticing is the Kardashian brand…Cardi B or Miley Cyrus or any young female on Instagram or Tiktok, and even the rise of ‘only fans’ where young women are selling naked pictures of themselves. For instance, on Tinder apparently young beautiful girls attract a whole bunch of men who then pay them to send photos. Most of the young women only want that kind of interaction.”

“But the puritanism is played out on a much bigger stage where men are ‘creepy’ if they even comment on a woman’s looks (like Variety‘s Dennis Harvey). Maybe this ONLY applies to white men. Maybe black men or men of color can say or do whatever they want and it won’t matter. But I just find it all very odd — women seem to be at once infantilizing themselves as perpetual victims while also, and at the same time, feeling empowerment by displaying their hyper sexuality.

“I find it all really confusing. We know what the rules are who must obey them but they seem to change all of the time with the one constant being to remove the cultural power of straight white men.

“Like, for instance, how does this picture [of Kylie Jenner] get 12 million likes on Instagram:

HE: “What’s she drinking, iced tea? WHO CARES?”

Friendo #1: “I know. But she has 200 million followers. Barack Obama only has 34 million. The point is that ALL she’s selling is sexuality. That is it. Sold mostly to women, I would imagine.”

Friendo #2: “The power of EVERYONE is being removed. Women are coerced into these roles, and it only looks like ‘freedom.’ This is late-capitalist corporate control — Orwellianism in a thong.”

Jodi Shaw to Smith College as passed along by Bari Weiss: “I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself. Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my skin color. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on their skin color.”

…and native Roman architecture that I am and never having seen Meville Shavelson‘s The Pigeon That Took Rome (’62), which was shot in black-and-white Panavision (2.39:1) by the respected Daniel Fapp (The Joker Is Wild, One, Two, Three, West Side Story, The Great Escape)…being soft and susceptible I foolishly, unthinkingly and idiotically bought a $15 bootleg DVD of this all-but-forgotten comedy, which costarred Charlton Heston, Harry Guardino and Elsa Martinelli.

I was already annoyed about the DVD being advertised with a 16 x 9 aspect ratio, which apparently means the sides of the Scope image have been lopped off. Which is a huge fuck you to Fapp. HE to the guy who decided to present a 16 x 9 version: “If there was a God you would somehow suffer for this. Maybe you’ll suffer anyway. I hate you.”

And then I found a muddy looking, pan-and-scan clip from the film on YouTube, and my heart stopped.

One, the little kid (played by the native Italian child actor Carlo Angeletti (aka “Marietto”) somehow manages to sound like an American kid trying to fake an Italian accent. (Maybe Angeletti was dubbed,) Two, as he’s running toward his mother (Martinelli) across a field we see bullets from a German machine gun tear up the soil and the kid falls, presumably dead. Three, Heston comes upon the German soldiers who shot the kid and doesn’t shoot them with a .45 because they look too young. (“Give them to their mothers.” he tells Guardino.) Four, Heston and Martinelli come upon the groaning kid and discover “he’s all right,” as Heston says. So the young Germans missed him? Then why did the kid fall? What’s he groaning about — the dialogue?

From Bosley Crowther’s 8.23.62 review: “Forget Rossellini’s Open City and any other films you may have seen about the hardships and tensions among the people in occupied Rome during World War II. Conditions were tough, but everybody had a jolly, jouncy, topsy-turvy time while the Nazis were in control of the Eternal City — even the Nazis.” (Here’s the whole review.)

In short, I’d paid $15 to watch a side-cleavered WWII comedy that is clearly, obviously shit-level. All I have to look forward to is the Roman architecture. I hate myself.

Let’s hear it for the Brooklyn-born Melville Shavelson! — Bob Hope pally and screenwriter of several Hope films — The Princess and the Pirate, Where There’s Life, The Great Lover, Sorrowful Jones, The Seven Little Foys, Beau James. (He also directed the latter.) He also wrote Houseboat. He also wrote and directed The Five Pennies, It Started in Naples, On the Double, A New Kind of Love, Cast a Giant Shadow and Yours, Mine and Ours.

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Yes, I’m aware that Texas has a non-regulated, pick-and-choose, market-driven utility system and that California will never go there. I nonetheless wonder what I would do if God or fate had determined that my SoCal Electric could suddenly surge to $20K or thereabouts. Rest assured I wouldn’t pay it. I know that if they pulled this shit back in the early ’70s that Steve McQueen‘s Doc McCoy would pick up a 12-gauge pump shotgun on his way down to the local utility company.

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..,to compliment any woman about anything to do with appearance in a workplace environment these days? If you want to say anything complimentary to anyone, say it only to other guys, and even then you might be walking on thin ice. One wrong move these days and you’re dead.

Henry Fonda starred in a pair of classic films during a four-month period in the mid ’50s — Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Wrong Man (opened 12.22.56) and Sidney Lumet‘s 12 Angry Men (4.10.57). Both were financial disappointments, but this didn’t matter in the long run. Today the film snobs (i.e., guys like Glenn Kenny and Richard Brody) absolutely worship the Hitchcock while your hoi polloi, hot-dog-eating Average Joes (i.e., film mavens like myself) tend to prefer the Lumet.

Both are first-rate efforts. Blurays of both are sitting on my bookshelves. While I certainly don’t “dislike” The Wrong Man, it is (be honest) a bummerish film that basically says one thing for 96% of its length — “This Queens-residing, moderate-mannered family man and musician is unlucky and therefore fucked.”

I feel a much greater degree of affection and camaraderie for 12 Angry Men.

Sometime last night San Franciscco Chronicle critic Bob Strauss declared that The Wrong Man is “better” than 12 Angry Men. I tapped out a reply this morning:

“The Wrong Man is certainly ‘well made’ as far as that term goes or allows, but it mainly plays like a suffocatingly Kafka-esque thing, a chilly and rather downish and dull procedural about what it’s like for an innocent man (Fonda’s Chris Ballestrero, a Stork Club bass player) to be caught in the vines and tendrils of a judicial system that regards him as guilty of theft, and then what it’s like when his wife (played by Vera Miles) begins to succumb to depression and mental illness.

“The Hitchcockian care and craft levels are there in every frame, but watching The Wrong Man is like sinking into a pit of quicksand and being helpless to climb out…deeper and deeper into the slithery muck. Artier than 12 Angry Men — moodier, more visually expressive — but so much grimmer.

“And what a cast of dispirited downheads! Poor Fonda and Miles. Those suspicious, hawk-eyed detectives (the borough-sounding Harold J. Stone and the younger, WASP-ier Charles Cooper). The none-too-bright women from the insurance company who mistakenly identify Fonda as the thief. The intelligent and personable attorney (Anthony Quayle) who tries to defend Fonda in court. The woman who plays Fonda’s mother and even the two young sons. They’re all part of the same oozy swamp, and then the stuff begins to seep into your pores and down into your lungs and gradually you’re asphyxiated.

“It all alleviates when the real bad guy is captured at the very end. My favorite shot is when Cooper happens to spot the bad guy being brought into the police station. He walks outside, starts down the street and then begins to realize that the bad guy looks an awful lot like Fonda, and so he turns around and goes back inside.

“But that’s one good moment in a movie that’s all about being slowly smothered by a large bureaucratic judicial octopus. Compare this to the 15 or 20 diverting, emotionally engaging, character-rich or soul-stirring moments in 12 Angry Men, which is also one of the most inventively staged and shot confined-space films in cinema history.

“I’m sorry but only a Get Out-worshipping contrarian film snob would call The Wrong Man “better” than Sidney Lumet’s 1957 classic. For all I know Kenny and Brody feel the same way. (And don’t forget that these guys are Marnie fans also.)”

My God, the NYC jurors in 12 Angry Men could have been theoretically assigned to Chris Balistrero’s suspicion-of-robbery trial instead of the boy-allegedly-stabbing-his-father murder case, and then they would’ve died of boredom. As juror Robert Webber says early on, “Boy, these cases can be the dullest…”

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