Earlier today Joe Biden had a blunt dispute with an auto worker who had accused him of “actively trying to diminish our Second Amendment rights and take away our guns.” Biden’s response included four eloquent words: “You’re full of shit.” He let this Second Amendment troll have it like any regular guy who’s had enough of the bullshit. When Joe talks tough and straight and true, Hollywood Elsewhere bows with respect. Don’t let the gunnies control the narrative. But why has this clip mainly been posted by rightwingers? And why did Joe’s campaign handler try to shut the conversation down? Combative Joe is a good look.

Significant shock waves have resulted from the Dylan Farrow-supporting denialists forcing Hachette management to cancel the publishing of Woody Allen‘s “Apropos of Nothing.”

Is there anyone who believes that wokester mob rule has shown itself to be anything other than deranged and deplorable? The consensus in this instance seems fairly clear.

Except, it seems, among Indiewire staffers. I was noticing earlier today that despite all the Hachette hand-wringing no Indiewire staffer has posted any opinion about the cancelling of the Allen book. Indiewire‘s Ryan Lattanzio has reported the basics and quoted the Stephen King tweets about it, but that’s been the extent so far.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the implication seems to be that Indiewire has adopted a shoulder-shrugging attitude about this matter. They certainly don’t seem especially riled by it. I asked a couple of senior Indiewire editors about this earlier today. I gather there are differing views among staffers, and that there’s no official unifying viewpoint. Maybe so, but sometimes silence can betoken.

From “Cancel Culture Comes for Woody Allen (Again),” a Quillette essay posted on 3.10.20: “A fair assessment of Kobe Bryant is that he was one of the greatest players in the history of basketball, as well as someone who may or may not have sexually assaulted a woman in 2003. A fair assessment of Woody Allen is that he is a great and influential film director who also tore apart his extended family by entering into a very odd (but not illegal) sexual relationship with his ex-girlfriend’s adopted 21-year-old daughter.

“It would be perfectly normal for the same fans who turned their backs on Bryant in 2003 to eventually forgive him, and then cheer him on when he led the Los Angeles Lakers to championships in 2009 and 2010 — just as it would be perfectly normal for the same cineastes who lavish praise on Woody Allen’s oeuvre to remain unsettled by the origins of his marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, while also recognizing that the Mia-Dylan abuse allegations are nonsense.

“Which is to say that, morally speaking, most of us can walk and chew gum. We recognize that everyone is flawed and complicated, and that forgiveness is possible. True, such attitudes are anathema to the mob mentality. But most ordinary people aren’t part of mobs.

“It’s only on Twitter, a medium that self-selects for hair-trigger puritanism and moral hypocrisy, that mobs get to form a majority government. The problem comes when the firewall between the fake world of Twitter and the real world of human institutions breaks down, and social-media star-chamber verdicts are ratified by institutional gatekeepers.”

A year ago Simon Christensen posted a 48 frame-per-second “motion interpolation test” of a portion of Aliens. Using the latest Aliens Bluray, he scanned and somehow doubled the frame rate, calling it a “fan regrade”. It’s obviously much much more vivid than any previous version, and yet it doesn’t deliver a synthetic video or motion-flow feeling. I would love to re-watch the whole film in this process. Hell, I’d watch each and every film in my library in 48fps.

“Game over, man…game over!”

Dylan Wells lives in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood in South Austin. Our nabe is roughly six miles south of the hipster downtown area. As middle-class districts go it’s “pleasant” enough, but you’d have to add “culturally underwhelming.” It’s somewhere between blandly acceptable and “is that all there is?” Or so it seems, at least, to someone accustomed to walking around and sniffing the air in Brooklyn, Paris, WeHo, San Francisco, Prague, London, Venice, Munich and Rome.

South Austin is “fine” as far as it goes, but it lacks a nutritional quality. The suburbs of middle and northern New Jersey are shadier and more soothing-like, and certainly more architecturally distinctive. Ditto historic Key West and Telluride, Connecticut’s Fairfield County, the North shore of Massachusetts, Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley…I could go on and on.

In and of itself Dylan’s place is quite nice — sizable rooms, large and fragrant backyard, a sedate suburban atmosphere, great wifi, excellent TV. And it’s great to see him again, of course. And I love his husky, Rudy. And a half-mile away there’s a nice little tree-shaded area where you can order gourmet dishes from food trucks. And last night we found an above-average Vietnamese “pan Asian” place. I just wish we were parked closer to East Austin or the Mueller or Second Street districts.

I’m told that not that long ago (i.e., back in the ’80s and ’90s) South Austin had a relatively undeveloped rural atmosphere…small forests of oak trees, green fields, creeks and streams and generally pleasing aromas amid the up-and-down typography. Now the natural elements feel challenged if not smothered by an endless, character-free sprawl of bland-ugly shopping malls and gas stations (no sidewalks, nobody walks) and El Crappo discount stores.

Yesterday we drove for miles and miles and it was like “why would anyone want to live here apart from the fact that the neighborhoods are quiet and rents are reasonable?” There’s a basic feeling of blah-ness everywhere. Given my druthers I would rather live in a one-room rathole in an interesting neighborhood than in a flush spacious home in a neighborhood with a nod-out vibe.

If I had to live somewhere in Texas and couldn’t find a decent place in the downtown Austin region I’d like to live in artsy Marfa, which is way too far to drive to from here. (It’s closer to El Paso, but by “closer” I mean a three-hour drive.)

To escape the South Austin blahs we’ve decided to drive this weekend to Rockport, a beach suburb of Corpus Christi, and then stay another night in Laredo (and maybe mosey across the border for some good Mexican food).

Last night invited guests caught a private Los Angeles screening of Corey Feldman‘s (My) Truth: The Rape of Two Coreys, which contains accusations of sexual abuse suffered by Feldman and his late actor friend Corey Haim when they were child stars in the ’80s. But relatively few people were able to stream the film online, due to technical difficulties or hackers.

EW‘s Rosy Cordero attended the private screening and reported early this morning that Feldman accuses men of sexually assault during this period, and particularly accuses Charlie Sheen of raping Haim while making the 1986 film Lucas.

Cordero reports that Feldman also levels sexual abuse charges at actor Jon Grissom, nightclub owner Alphy Hoffman and former talent manager Marty Weiss. Feldman also accuses the late Dominick Brascia, a former actor who passed in 2018, of sexual abuse.

Feldman’s doc will attempt another streaming today at 12 noon Pacific, 2 pm Central and 3 pm Eastern.

Eliza Hittman‘s Never Rarely Sometimes Always opens on Friday (3.13). As mentioned a few days ago, it’s been hyped as the U.S. indie answer to Cristian Mungiu‘s Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days.

Basic drill: Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), a pregnant teen from rural Pennsylvania who doesn’t want her parents to know, makes her way to Manhattan to have an abortion, accompanied by her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder).

They loved it at Sundance ’20, and right now it has a 100% and 91% rating from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

It goes without saying that you can’t trust critics on films like this. You can, however, trust Hollywood Elsewhere, and I’m calling this a respectable effort — spare, direct, quietly affecting. But it doesn’t give you enough.

Like Autumn, the film holds back a lot, and is basically buried within itself. That makes it a sad experience on one level, but on another it feels too spare, too closed off. It overuses the less-is-more aesthetic. Hittman tells you what you need to know, but at the same time as little as possible.

I couldn’t finally decide if Flanigan is playing a guarded, fearful, inexpressive women, or if she herself is that way. She connects four times — two singing scenes (one in which she karaokes “Don’t let The Sun Catch You Crying”), a scene in which she throws a glass of water in a teenage boy’s face, and an abortion clinic scene in which she breaks down while being asked some painful personal questions.

But she’s so buried, so shielded. She doesn’t even trust the nice abortion-clinic lady, who has nothing but kindness in her heart.

What a miserable life poor Autumn is leading. So cut off, so solitary. The film isn’t really a story about getting an abortion in NYC. It’s actually a study of Autumn’s isolation and defensiveness and brusque mood pockets. A study of a prisoner living in her own cage, and terrified of leaving it.

I’m sorry but Never Rarely Sometimes Always is nowhere near as accomplished as 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Not even in the same league. The women in Mungiu’s film were sullen and suspicious and kept to themselves also, but Mungiu let you in. You were allowed to peek into their feelings and pressures, to share in their fears and resentments and whatnot. Not so much here.

Ryder’s character is more open and expressive, and a little smarter. Ditto her performance.

If I was of Hispanic/Latino heritage, I would definitely prefer to be called LatinX. Just for the sound of it. In reality, of course, I’d have to settle for AngloX. Which also sounds fine.

If there’s an Old Testament God, and especially if that God has a wicked sense of humor, a certain pot-bellied, red-tie-wearing party has been infected with COVID-19.

“Stories about Trump’s coronavirus fears have spread through the White House. Last week Trump told aides he’s afraid journalists will try to purposefully contract coronavirus to give it to him on Air Force One, a person close to the administration told me. The source also said Trump has asked the Secret Service to set up a screening program and bar anyone who has a cough from the White House grounds. ‘He’s definitely melting down over this,’ the source said.” — filed earlier today by Vanity Fair‘s Gabriel Sherman.

Airport pickup areas usually smell like asphalt and shuttle-bus fumes, maybe a faint whiff of cigarette smoke or fast-food wrappers. The outside of terminal #1 at Austin airport is different. Like a wolf, I’m sniffing traces of soil, grass, leaves. I’d like to roam around during my stay here. Maybe drive down to the gulf, maybe the hill country.

I feel very badly for all those broken-hearted filmmakers who were hoping to make a splash at SXSW.

I haven’t much time before boarding my 7:15 am Southwest flight to Austin, but all hail the classic majesty of the late Max Von Sydow, who passed earlier today at age 90. He had a timeless face in that he looked the same age for 40 or 50 years. (I actually told MVS this when I met him a decade ago.). The Ingmar Bergman films come first, of course (opposite Liv Ullman in Shame/Skammen, lashing himself with birch branches in The Virgin Spring), but three English-language performances stand out: (a) Joubert, the refined, gentle-voiced assassin in Three Days of the Condor (‘75), (b) the bitter Soho painter in Hannah and Her Sisters (‘86) who declared that a resurrected Jesus “would never stop throwing up”, and (c) his mostly silent Father Merrin performance during the Iraq prologue in The Exorcist (‘73).

Despite Hachette having recently cancelled a planned publishing of Woody Allen‘s Apropos of Nothing in this country, the company’s French branch has announced that its Grand Central Publishing subsidiary will release Allen’s book in the U.S. on 4.7. Are we talking a French-language version or…?

RTI France: “Hachette chief executive Michael Pietsch on Tuesday defended the decision, telling The New York Times that “a large audience” wanted to hear his story.

The publisher had described Allen’s book as “a comprehensive account of his life, both personal and professional”.

I’m flying Southwest to Austin this morning (7:15 am departure) to visit my son Dylan, who recently moved there with his dog Rudy. I’m bringing two pairs of tight surgical gloves and ten all-but-worthless face masks. I’ve never taken such precautions before. I know they’re prudent measures, but we also know they’re slightly hysterical. Update: I’ve got the sniffles, and am occasionally sneezing. I guess that settles it…face mask!