The French Dispatch

Wes Anderson has been in the vapor business for quite some time.

There was a brief respite from what has been the most cloyingly phony point of his career with the release of The Grand Budapest Hotel. That film, the director’s best since the twin masterpieces of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, hinted at the possibility of deliverance from the dismal slide that began in earnest with The Darjeeling Limited, but which began show itself in the thoroughly decent The Life Aquatic.

The timing is crucial here, as the last time Anderson collaborated with Owen Wilson in a writing capacity also marks a point of contention between two camps of filmgoers that, love him or hate him, can’t stop watching the movies. The first group, of which I consider myself a member, finds Anderson’s filmography to have steadily withered since Wilson was replaced by the likes of Roman Coppolla and Noah Baumbach. The second are more than content to cheer Anderson on as he disappears further and further into the dollhouse purgatory he has constructed for himself. They too, it seems, have eschewed stories of real human beings, with all their failures and triumphs on the hunt for connection and understanding, in favor of twee pastels that have not only overwhelmed Anderson’s visual aesthetic but seem to have penetrated his entire worldview as well.

I know very little about Wes Anderson’s personal life, but if his filmography has been any indication, one has to assume the last two decades have been nothing but cotton candy and rainbows. The only alternative explanation for such a breathtaking regression into treacly drivel would be Anderson’s steadfast refusal to engage with his own thoughts and feelings of consequence. That wouldn’t be quite as aggravating if the filmmaker’s world of make-believe had more to offer to those of us who, for whatever reason, have been thrust into adulthood.

Being a grown-up is full of beauty, terror, and contradiction, but it’s also undergirded by a sense of reality and community between people who are making sense of their own existence. Anderson, for the better part of twenty years, has refused to acknowledge the land of the living, and dreck like The French Dispatch is no exception. This is a well-educated adolescent’s wet dream about a cultural landscape that has long since evaporated, but the film’s sins are far greater than pointless nostalgia-sniffing. At its worst, sitting through the “charming” vignettes evokes a paralyzing morphine drip affixed to the IV of a wrongly committed mental patient who correctly insists that the world outside his window is ablaze.

A similar criticism has often been leveled at the Marvel Cinematic Universe for its whitewashing of our current geopolitical Hellscape and offering ersatz satisfaction instead of thoughtful interrogation. The kinds of filmgoers who defend Anderson at all costs would probably be quick to dump criticism on such “turn-off-your-brain” cinema product as much as they would heap criticism upon endless remakes and nostalgia grabs like the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The French Dispatch hammers down on that same pleasure-button for people who make a point of telling you they don’t own a television. It’s nostalgia for a time and place that never existed, and leaches what little goodwill it can out of allusions to real human beings that have been neutered of any contextual relationship to their world or ours.

Jeffery Wright is doing his best James Baldwin impersonation here, but good grief, the sheer dumb arrogance of reducing that titan of 20^th century thought down to a winking nincompoop prattling on about “Police Cooking” is enough to make a grown man cry, only because it’s tough to be angry at somebody who is clearly too foolish to even understand what he’s doing by shoving a Baldwin stand-in into his Adult Kindergarten claptrap. There’s a few pages of dialogue that Wright delivers heroically, reflecting on his own loneliness and isolation as he waxes poetic about prepared tables and a sense of belonging, but it’s simply not enough. This was a man who lived and breathed in ways that Anderson seems increasingly incapable of rendering through storytelling, and his inclusion as pawn in the filmmaker’s wish-fulfillment bonanza is nothing short of insulting.

Things get even more dreary from there. I’ve led with Wright to put the film’s best foot forward, but the first “article” actually gives us Benicio Del Toro as a psychotic outsider artist and Lea Seydoux as his prison guard muse. Both are…fine. Adrian Brody shows up playing a character who seems to be “guy who is way too excited to be in a Wes Anderson movie.” We get Owen Wilson riding around on a bicycle and doing two different pratfall gags in between quipping about prostitutes in one of those extended Anderson-esque meanderings that seems to delight the faithful and annoy the piss out of everybody else. Is this supposed to be funny? Sad? Incisive? All three? Somehow it feels like not even Anderson himself knows, and though I’m sure the same people who insist that M. Night Shyamalan’s Old is a top-five film this year will tell me I’m wrong, I’ve reached a point where that kind of thing matters.

It matters to me that The French Dispatch is, inarguably, about as meaningful as an $80 Ramones t-shirt worn by that particular blend of frat guy and hipster. It matters that this movie is—maybe?—about Bill Murray’s character though what little insight we receive as to what kind of man he is and what sort of mark he’s left seems like a tacked-on afterthought. It matters because I know—we all know—that Wes Anderson is capable of so much more, and it’s high time we began demanding he stop wasting our time.

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Kids These Days

Met up with Ricky at Lake Street last night, just to shoot the shit. I had been thinking about checking out Duff’s earlier, since I’ve only been there a handful of times, but it just didn’t work out that way. We talked about his new job, where Dana and I are at with the wedding, and certain types of dudes who cause trouble or are otherwise funny/annoying in public.

My earlier post about Lake Street neglected to mention something that Ricky reminded me of. On the weekends, Lake Street is a “stopover bar,” where a lot of younger and cooler people than us have a couple of drinks before going to the “main” spot of the evening. These days, it’s the terrible Twins Lounge a few doors up the street. Dana and I went once, I found it twee and irritating and the drinks were bad and overpriced. More to the point, it’s just one of *those* spots that always has a clutch of like 5-10 people smoking and being loud on the sidewalk. Greenpoint is definitely cool in the way that semi-aging bastards like me think of cool: has some culture, good bars and restaurants, some history, but is mostly pretty quiet. It’s taking a while for me to adjust to Greenpoint becoming COOL because that seemed to have left the neighborhood when Matchless died, but this Twins place seems to be picking up the mantle.

Anyways, there were not one, not two, but THREE clutches of these folks for us to make fun of that we ran across last night. In order of least to most offensive, I present them to you:

1. Two women came in, sat down at the table in the window, then came up to the bar and asked for “a menu.” For those unfamiliar, Lake Street doesn’t sell food outside of chips and nut rolls, and the entire bar menu is on a HUGE menu board behind the bar, that this woman was staring directly at as she made this request. Shane, the bartender, kind of looked at her and then gestured behind him. That in and of itself wouldn’t be so worthy of mockery, but there was no “oh geez, brain fart” laugh it off moment, just a blank stare and then continuing on as though nothing happened. What the fuck, lady, have you never been out of your house before?
2. Group of folks came in, ordered some shit, and I didn’t catch exactly what prompted this, but Shane then did the Gary Busey in Point Break thing: “Utah! Get me two!” which prompted blank stares from the crew of customers. He clarified “y’know, like in Point Break,” which got “what’s Point Break?” which he explained, and it left them even more confused than ever. The fuck, get out of here ya damn commie e-girl thots, and go back to whatever MCU “event” on Disney Plus you’re creaming over now. Who the fuck has never even HEARD of Point Break, and more to the point, who has Point Break described to them “Undercover FBI agents trying to infiltrate a ring of surfer bank robbers. It stars Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves.” and doesn’t immediately leave to go watch it?
3. Group of guys wearing different types of baseball-adjacent stuff who swaggered in, arms akimbo, chests puffed out, presumably so everybody would know how jacked they got at their Colossal Media semi-annual slow-pitch softball game.

Anyway, I’m slightly hungover and I’m gonna eat this BEC before I go on a walk, seeya.

Them’s Fightin’ Words

Dana and I were reading the news this morning, and I made a flip comment as we were discussing the second person who has been restrained with duct-tape on board a commercial flight in the past month or so. It was something to the effect of “if you stay out of the garbage pit, you don’t get garbage on you,” which was a reference to the budget carrier the incident occurred on, Frontier Airlines.

Dana—somewhat jokingly—accused me of being classist, but it got me thinking about a few things. Namely, the class and aspirational divides that dictate a portion of day-to-day, marketplace American violence in 2021.

Nothing I say will be revelatory, the result of Malcolm Gladwell-esque exhaustive researching, or probably correct, let’s just get that out of the way up top. This is speculative journaling at best.

OK, so here’s the thing:  for a while now, I’ve been pretty obsessed with watching videos of what could be classed as “day-to-day” violence. Meaning scuffles that occur between two otherwise ordinary citizens, over things not related to crime. There are two big categories: public freakouts and drunk bullshit. Public freakouts are not necessarily influenced by drunkenness, but certainly can be. Most tend to be some sort of stupid bullshit between two strangers over something incredibly trivial or, in the case of the Frontier groper, almost completely nonsensical/unnecessary. Perhaps the best term for it is “nonconsensual” violence, since a lot of the bar fights I’m talking about occur between two or more people that are more than willing to get into a scrape.

Anyways, the class part of it all is this. The question I kept turning over in my head as I watched these videos is this: where and why is all this happening for me to almost never see it? I live in New York City, a town on the verge of imploding if you believe Fox News and/or democratic mayoral candidates, and yet the amount of day-to-day violence I see is extraordinarily low. In nine years to the day, I think I can count the number of fistfights I’ve seen on one hand.

Obviously, violence can occur randomly, at any place, at any time, for almost any reason, and knows no class boundaries. However, I think a big part of my “missing the boat” on day-to-day violence has to do with where I live, the kinds of places I frequent, and my own socio-economic status. To begin with, New York City is expensive. It takes a lot of money to live here, period, and moving and staying is a sort of aspirational flex on its own (how valid you find that flex is another story). I bring this up because it supports one theory I have about what separates those who regularly engage in day-to-day violence and those who abstain: how much one has to lose.

Most, but not all people in New York have a lot to lose. People who are upwardly mobile or comfortably wealthy want to stay that way, and people who are riding the margins are keenly aware of how quickly they could tumble through the social safety net at any moment. Those who have fallen through already are de facto segregated from those who haven’t by public housing and “undesirable” neighborhoods. In short, you’re not all that likely to run into hood rat shit unless you hang out in hood rat places.

Here’s where the “aspirational” part of day-to-day violence comes in. Sometimes trashy people with nothing to lose venture out of their de facto segregation bubble and buy into the myth that the nightlife and liquor industries are constantly selling them. They want to go someplace where they feel like a big shot, feel like they’re in control of their lives, feel like they have money to burn, feel like they have status.

This is where, in my own anecdotal “research” (read: watching tons of youtube videos of people fighting), most drunken violence occurs. There are lots of bars in this country, and there are tons of bars in this city, yet most of them don’t experience very much day to day violence. That’s because this “aspirational” bubble is relatively small. You either have money or you don’t, for the most part. In other parts of the country, there are designated areas of “hot nightlife” where people with a lot to lose and people with nothing to lose mix freely. In Austin it’s Dirty Sixth or Rainey Street. In Nashville it’s Broadway. In Dallas it’s Deep Ellum or Lower Greenville. Every mid-market city has one, but big cities tend not to have as many places in which packing the most people possible into as large a space as possible and feeding them booze is part and parcel to the business model.

I’m going to back track for a minute here to clarify something. I’m not thinking of “people with nothing to lose” and “aspirational” people as necessarily the same thing as “working class” people. Working class people, that is people who live strictly by their means or very close to them (on either side of that bell curve), certainly can be aspirational, but many, particularly in an East Coast, formerly robustly pro-union city like New York, are not. They have little desire for the fabulous prizes promised by the US capitalist model and reflected in the liquor and nightlife industries aspirational bars and clubs, so they tend not to frequent them, and instead, hang out in places that—to be blunt—it makes sense for them to hang out in. Places where liquor is cheap and there are no dreams of poppin’ bottles and being the hottest thing in the club is far from anybody’s mind.

Aspirational working class or middle class people, on the other hand, occasionally or frequently feel the need to inject some illusion of meaning or control into their lives by the only way American culture presents to them: consumption. They need to spend more money than they can afford to get into and stay in these places, performing a grotesque pantomime of the influencers and reality television stars they see on social media, living the kind of life they’ve been conditioned to want, desperately grabbing for the brass ring of upward mobility and possessing the dim knowledge that they’re slipping further and further from it with every overpriced jager bomb they buy. But from here, there’s no way out but through. So they get deeper and deeper into the hole, and eventually, the frustration and rage, gassed up by eight gallons of booze, searches for a target, and explodes at the first one it finds. In these types of places, a like-minded individual is just around the corner. All you have to do is walk in a given direction without getting out of a passing person’s way for long enough and you’ll find a consensual violent encounter waiting for you.

I don’t hang out in these places. Not because I’m “better” than them, but because they depress and annoy me. The types of people they attract are irritating and sad, through no fault of their own, the music they play is terrible, there is no sense of community, and the bartenders are surly, overworked, and underpaid. By contrast, the kinds of bars I do like often get identified by people who don’t’ drink often or who exclusively drink in aspirational shitholes as “dive bars” or “shady” or “shitholes,” despite the fact that the amount of day-to-day violence that occurs in them pales in comparison to the booze troughs labeled as “classy” or “desirable” by the worst people online.

Lake Street in Greenpoint is my local. It’s a small place, there’s usually only one bartender on duty, no bouncer or doorman, because almost nobody under twenty-one would ever want to be in there. A few members of the band The Hold Steady work and hang out there. They have $3 jello shots. The one guy I can count on seeing there any day I visit after 11pm is a 55-year-old collections agent who lives in a rent-controlled studio apartment (we usually talk sports). It’s a peaceful, fun place with zero drama because it promises no upward mobility, no fabulous prizes of wealth and sex and superiority, and so the people who go to bars exclusively for those reasons avoid it. The people who go seeking a community watering hole love it, and come back time and again.

So what’s the point of all this? I guess it’s to say that I don’t think the issue of day-to-day violence, particularly as it concerns bars and drinking, is an issue of class per se, I think it’s an issue of the empty promise of the American Dream, and the boiling over frustrations of people who believe in it out of desperation.  If you live in Kansas City, work an entry-level job at an insurance company, but still think that you’re somehow on the track to living like a rapper, you’re going to feel frustrated, hoodwinked, and ripped off. Rightfully so. Pour a bunch of booze over that and take what hard-earned dollars that guy does have out of his pocket and he’ll probably not have the critical thinking faculties to figure out who he should be mad at, but that won’t matter.

2021 Films: The Perfect Day

Jesus H. Christ, what a work of art.

This is a movie by troops, for troops. I only recently became aware, but there is a small cottage industry of armed forces veterans who have managed to insinuate themselves into the scammer economy by selling shitty coffee that teenage murderers like, selling t-shirts that say “I’m a fully loaded BITCH,” and making movies that star themselves.

This same crew of folks were in a movie I’ve not seen called “Range 15” that is a black comedy about veterans mowing their way through a zombie apocalypse. This one is a “serious” movie but it reads more as the “Red Asphalt” of Homeland Security agit-prop. The movie opens with two of the stars, an Iraq War vet and a 9/11 Firefighter, talking directly to the audience about the dangers of terrorism and how to stop it. That sets the tone for the rest of the flick, which would probably feel more sinister if it weren’t so goddamn incompetent.

Jacob and I watch a lot of latter-day Seagal films, and one telling feature of those is that Seagal is often top-billed despite being in about 15 minutes total of the movie. The same thing happened with The Perfect Day, but the top-billed star is DEAN CAIN, a guy who wishes he could hold Seagal’s water, and he’s in the movie for literally one scene that lasts all of 3 minutes, and he clearly shot the footage himself on a webcam in his house.

The plot? Glad you asked. Some evil brown is coordinating the so-called “Perfect Day” theory, and setting up simultaneous terrorist attacks on American soil at once. These involve smuggling guns and cash into the US across Lake Erie, convincing the world’s dumbest teens to join ISIS “using video games” (this is never elaborated on further), and a bunch of self-contained, secret Sharia Law strongholds that have popped up across the country, one of which is–I swear I’m not making this up–Islamburgh.

You can imagine how shitty it is just from that information, but I promise you, it’s ten times shittier than you’re even imagining. Solid gold.

Films of 2021

Back again. The news sucks, even now that Joe Biden is President, so now I’m probably just going to use this as a space to write little micro reviews of new (to me) movies I watch. There will be a big dump now, and later probably just two or three per post. Whatever, nobody reading this cares. Onward!

Small Crimes

As implied by the title, a refreshingly small-scale, relatively small budget, small-town rot movie starring that guy who played Jaime Lannister. He’s really made a niche for himself as a reliably watchable actor for playing scumbags, and this is no exception. Not as good as Shot Caller, which also starred the crewcut dude from Mindhunter as the leader of Aryan Brotherhood, but this is still very fun and watchable. Wasn’t surprised to learn it’s a Macon Blair script, dude puts out quality. If you’re in the mood for tight stories about scumbags fucking each other over, this is the flick for you.

Beirut

Missed this one when it came out. Can’t remember why I stayed away, but Jacob tells me it got run through the wringer by various people who claimed it was anti-Arab, which is stupid. I can’t say whether or not its a particularly accurate or even sensitive portrayal of the geopolitical situation in Lebanon, but it certainly is very cynical about all the different state actors mucking about in the region, with no small scorn reserved for Israel and the US, who come off looking very, very bad (with good reason). This is good. Sort of like a more fun, less good, less sprawling Syriana. Makes you wonder why John Hamm doesn’t get more work, but on the other hand, maybe he’s actually discerning about which projects he says “yes” to since he has a bajillion dollars from Mad Men. Rosamund Pike is also quite good as the supporting lead, and she’s never looked more ghost-like. Solid.

Possessor

The hits in 2021 keep on coming! This feature from the Son of Cronenberg is nasty, brutal, lean, and unpolished. Very unique but still hearkening back to the best of the Elder Cronenberg’s sci-fi/body horror ouevre. A clinic in how to build a world with limited resources, and proof positive that a bloated SFX budget almost always makes sci-fi worse. Terrifying metaphor for alienation in the age of hyper-accelerated technology, and a mind-bending thought experiment about the potential consequences of pushing transhumanism to its more sinister conclusions. Of a piece with other recent tech-paranoia flicks like Upgrade and The Invisible Man.

The Line

OK, now we’re getting into the true dreck, which will surely only pile up as the second year of quarantine grinds on. I was, per usual, really high when Jacob and I telepartyed this bad boy, so I don’t remember much, but we both agreed it was pretty lackluster in terms of sheer batshit dumbassery, which is what you’re always looking for when trolling the depths of Amazon and Netflix for a nutty time. Ray Liotta does have a really stupid hat for the first 30 minutes, so that’s a plus.

Silent Trigger

Jesus Christ, the pendulum really swung the other way in terms of quality versus quantity. This is a Dolph Lundgren movie from 1996 that involves a lot of completely unidentifiable chronology jumps, as well as the absolute rapiest night watchman who ever existed. A few cool explosions.

Never Leave Alive

A rip-off of The Most Dangerous Game, but the crazy rich guy has been swapped out for some ex-KGB dudes and the shipwrecked person is a “world-famous hunter” (a thing that definitely exists) played by some WetHair who I was completely correct to assume must be connected to Pro Wrestling in some way. Really, you can’t go wrong with a movie starring a Pro Wrestler. In fact, the more wrestlers in your shitty action movie, the more awesome it will probably be, with the possible exception of that Steve Austin movie where he plays a school janitor who helps a fat kid learn to box so he can kick the shit out of a bully (actual plot).

Corpus Christi

I can already tell I’m going to need to space these out more, for no other reason than to avoid the mental whiplash of writing about really good Polish films right after Ukranian meth smuggler-funded vanity projects. This was Poland’s entry into the Oscar for Best Foreign Film when it was released, and I don’t know what won, but I bet it was some dumb bullshit about a French teacher in Prague who is secretly addicted to eating couch foam and he becomes unlikely friends with a Pakistani immigrant child.

ANYWAYS, Corpus Christi is about a young adult just coming out of juvenile detention, who had wanted to go into the seminary but instead has been assigned a work detail at a saw mill. On the day he’s supposed to report, he hightails it to the nearby town instead where–seemingly on impulse–he lies and identifies himself as a priest, and through a strange turn of events, winds up leading the town’s congregation. The protagonist seems conflicted about his faith, and it’s never made explicitly clear whether he actually believes, if the lie serves his own interests, or some mix of both, but in any event, he ends up bringing the people of the town–who are still reeling from a horrific drunk driving accident that killed several young people–together through an unorthodox and wholly needed method of ministering. The film ultimately ends up being a truly thoughtful Christ parable that is at once a critique of contemporary, organized Christianity but also an insistence that faith and spirituality possess an awesome unifying power.

He Who Dares: Downing Street Siege

Alright, enough of that arthouse shit, back to the movies of REAL MEN.

This is actually a sequel to the first He Who Dares which seems to think of itself as the British answer to the …Has Fallen series. In typical Britsploitation fashion, the stakes are laughably low. For some reason, the antagonists are literally overthrowing the British government and attempting to assassinate the PM for less than $1 million. The best thing that can be said about this turd is its edited in a way that was clearly meant to cover up all the terrible SFX, which it does, but at the cost of reducing the visual grammar of the film to an indecipherable mess. It’s almost impossible to tell what’s happening, where characters are, and what we’re cutting between. By contrast, almost every single instance of somebody being shot involves no cutting whatsoever, so it’s full of hysterically inept ragdoll dives from various extras pretending they’ve been blown away. Gerry Butler was right to get out of Scotland and escape this trash.

Gosford Park

I showed Dana The Player a few weeks ago, and we decided to watch another Altman neither of us had seen. It’s enjoyable enough I suppose, but something about it just made us both go “…who cares?” at the end. The twists and turns and delightful misunderstandings in the English countryside never quite seem to add up to much, and its not helped by the fact that its jaw-droppingly overlong. Good for killing time during a COVID-infested airplane ride and not much else.

Under Siege 2: Dark Territory

I’ve got three words for you: ERIC MOTHERFUCKING BOGOSIAN. Before he was silently stealing the show as Arno in Uncut Gems, Bogosian was a weirdo intellectual playwright getting cast as villains in Steven Seagal movies. The “Dark Territory” in this refers to a section of mountains that a passenger train goes through on a trip from Denver to Los Angeles, which is the perfect time for Hollywood’s favorite Armenian to hijack the train and then use computer whiz magic to make a satellite guided missile system blow shit up, or…something. This is Seagal near the end of his peak, most mobile period, but he’s honestly already starting to pack on the pounds. Bogosian’s second in command also looks like a Leather Daddy Mike Pence, so that’s cool.

Asian Connection

Boy, this Seagal is Seagal at his most bandana-ed. He actually plays a villain in this…sort of. I can’t say I recall much of the plot (insofar as one exists), but he’s sort of playing a Buddhist mindfulness expert/general international criminal who pops up every twenty minutes or so to give long rambling monologues about why he lives in Asia (we all know its because of sex tourism). This is that strange period of Late Seagal in which he’s featured on the poster, in maybe 30% of the movie, but also is still sort of trying to do kicks and stuff. Not a bad choice for a what-the-fuck movie night.

Savages

Much in the way Netflix has brought us pure, unfiltered versions of America’s favorite auteurs (see 6 Underground), Savages is pure, raw, uncut Oliver Stone. It’s more or less about a throuple of weed dealers in LA (pre-legalization) who decide not to sell product to a Mexican cartel. A lot of weird shit happens and in the end they all get shot to death. Is that it? NO! This movie also may be credited with starting Hollywood’s obsession with portraying Mexican drug lords as Satanic monsters who literally drink blood and do what they do not for money (like good, honest, WHITE drug dealers) but because they get off on being evil. Blake Lively is great as a stoned idiot who is always in trouble.

The Tax Collector

Jesus H. Christ. This movie co-stars Shia Labeouf as…well, it’s unclear if he is supposed to be a white guy who grew up in the barrio and so has all the same mannerisms as a cholo, or if he’s just supposed to be a white Latino. Either way, it’s an exceedingly odd casting choice, and Sleepy LaBeef is doing a comically thick “whassup ese” Vato patois the entire movie. He also has terrible tattoos which are apparently real? The trend of literally Satanic Mexicans continues here, with an actual scene of blood sacrifice. I think Sleepy dies at the end, but I can’t remember. Good times.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Dunno why it took me so long to see this. Great flick. Russell Crowe, back when he gave a shit, Paul Bettany before he was constantly being cast as an Angel and/or robot, and a bunch of awesome Naval battle footage which is really impressive both in terms of sheer scale of production and how real and consequential it makes everything feel. It’s not as though there are a lot of Napoleonic Naval movies to compare this too, but I feel like Maritime stuff tends to have a certain veneer of…aristocratic remove to it, and this movie really hammers home how insane and dangerous this kind of life was, while at the same time pointing out how nuts the British Naval hierarchy was. A blast.

Homefront

Another movie with a character of unclear origins. This piece of pure celluloid insanity was written by Sly Stallone himself, who was originally going to play the lead, but backed out and cast Jason Statham instead. At first it seems like Statham is supposed to be American, but any pretense of hiding his cockney accent goes out the window by the 20 minute mark. He also wears an awesome mullet wig in the first scene. Throughout the whole movie, nobody ever seems to find it out that a very, very, VERY British man is living in this tiny-ass town in the South where he presumably works double shifts at the Racism Factory. It’s sort of like all those Arnold comedies in the 90s in which nobody ever seemed to find it strange that an absurdly jacked, giant Austrian man who sounded like a monster was working as a mattress salesman.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Another one I just hadn’t gotten around to for a while. I was semi-shocked to find out Charlie Kauffman wrote this, because it’s just kind of a mess. Not sure why it has the “cult” status it seems to enjoy today, other than Rockwell’s pretty good performance. The dual, competing storylines of Chuck the CIA hitman and Chuck the gameshow producer eventually coalescing into a meditation on mental illness and loneliness is compelling enough, but it’s just all over the fucking place in its execution, and the last 5 minutes feel like they were pasted on because nobody knew how to end the thing.

Round-up

Here we are, as fall has truly fallen in Brooklyn. Well, not truly, I suppose, but today I left the house in flip flops and shorts and was too cold, which is the first marker in a list of many that summer is winding down.

Another marker is the arrival of football season, which is weird as hell during these pandemic ties, and–like everything the NFL does–ethically suspect. However, I have to pick and choose which compromises I make in my life to keep from going insane, and continuing to watch a league that spits in the face of my values is one of those.

Anyway, it was the first sporting event I’ve watched from start to finish since COVID began, and it was a somewhat surreal experience. Nice Midwestern dad/new Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy was masked up the entire time, and other members of ground staff, coaching staff, and officiating staff were–sometimes remembering to put their masks over both nose and mouth. Sigh. Add the empty stands and piped-in “crowd” noise on top of that and you have a truly dystopian vision of bread and circus, but hey, it beats staring off into the middle distance as the world burns. The Cowboys may have lost (helped along by a ticky tack OPI call in the final minutes), but I liked what I saw out of McCarthy in this game. He has a confidence and natural ability for the game that Garrett always seemed to be faking, reflected in his risk tolerance, end-of-game clock management, and post-game interview. Excited to see how the team syncs up under him in the weeks to come.

On Sunday Dana and I drove out to Long Island for a weekend getaway. That’s right, we now have wheels, boom! I’m really enjoying having a car so far, but Winter has yet to roll around. Parking is not as much of a pain in the ass as I thought it would be, but that’s largely because none of the ASP regulations go into effect until 11am at the earliest. Since becoming a regular motorist, my rate of yelling at/flipping off other New Yorkers has risen by at least 500%. Oh well, guess I’m finally becoming a local as I close in on a decade in da Big Apple.

Caumsett State Park was our main attraction, and it was a really nice nature walk down a wooded trail to a great coastal forest beach. It was rocky and breezy, with only a few other people there, most of whom were fishermen. I could see it becoming a regular haunt, but perhaps later in the year when the bugs aren’t so bad. I got the shit bitten out of me and I’m still scratching at the welts days later. Oh well, that’s the great outdoors for ya. We then had a burger and beer in Huntington, which was the closest semi-large town, and then did an improvved tour of where my grandaddy grew up, which has been the source of some short-term confusion for me. My mom was always saying he grew up in Glen Head, but the church his parents were involved with (and that apparently has a parish hall named after them) is in Roslyn, which is very close by. To complicate things further, the estate where I believe he lived until he was about 10 (his father was a groundskeeper) is in Roslyn Harbor, but what little I’ve turned up on ancestry.com shows them appearing in census records from Oyster Bay!

Well, it turns out I’m less of an NYC metro area vet than I thought because apparently all of that actually makes sense…Roslyn, Roslyn Harbor, and Glen Head are all “villages” (really no larger than small neighborhoods) within the “town” of Oyster Bay, Long Island. Fun fact that Dana dug up, Stern’s department store, which was the chain of stores owned by my great grandaddy’s boss, Benjamin Stern, was formerly headquartered at what is now a Home Depot on 23rd Street in Manhattan, which should be a pretty familiar landmark/public restroom to a lot of New Yorkers. I always wondered what that building had been before, because the exterior is very grand/faux baroque, and the interior has a wild layout that is fairly atypical of most Home Depots; now I know this was a chic department store my grandaddy may have played around in from time to time as a young boy.

Quarantine Brain in the Time of (more) Police Brutality

Now that I’ve got your attention, SEX!

Sorry, couldn’t resist. In all honesty though, I think it’s fair to say that we’re all going a little bit nuts here in New York City, where the lib-cuck nanny state has taken away our constitutionally protected right to cough into each other’s mouths and die for no reason. On the other hand, if you talk to the right people, they’re convinced that anybody who has left their house in the past 5 months is basically complicit in the genociding of the disabled and elderly. I feel queasy even typing that last sentence, lest I be mistaken for one of those “it’s not that big of a deal” chuckleheads that have infected (topical synonyms!) my home state of Texas.

I have gotten a little more bolder in recent weeks, it’s true. I went to a few protests, I’ve been riding CitiBikes around a lot, going to parks, I’ve even ventured into a few stores. I always mask up, sanitize and wash my hands frequently, and try to socially distance as best I can. After getting negative results for both COVID and Antibodies, I’m at least confident that I’m on the right track as far as my risk tolerance goes, and I take special care to give a wide berth to older people (though they don’t always make it easy). New York seems to be on the right track as well. As of today, we’ve entered phase II, which means non-essential businesses are open with limited capacity, and bars and restaurants are open for outdoor customers. While it’s true that some people are taking this as a cue that they shouldn’t worry about COVID at all anymore, I’ve found those to be few and far between here in Brooklyn.

My family lives in Dallas and Austin, respectively. Though people like to group these cities as polar opposites on the political spectrum, they’re both fairly liberal compared to the rest of the state. It’s been a back-and-forth saga between the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott—or as my brother likes to call him, Roller Pig—and its citizens, whom he is doing his level best to kill in ritual sacrifice to  “the economy.” Like most GOP strongholds, Abbott was reluctant to cave in to any of this scientific ballyhoo that suggested big daddy Trump was anything less than a genius, and so refused to institute statewide lockdowns, instead “leaving it up to counties,” which is basically the same as doing nothing. As non-insane Texans began to pass their own local ordinances/private policies about social distancing and face coverings, Abbott and his Wormtongue, Bathroom Warrior Extraordinaire Ken Paxton actually had the gall to threaten folks who exercised their constitutionally protected right to not die of preventable disease with legal action. Now, as Texas closes in on a New York-esque spike of infections, the governor has actually had to back off that death-cult stance. The question remains: when will Greg Abbott finally stand up for Texas?

As you can imagine, this has led to a lot of anxiety for my parents, brother, and sister-in-law, who have basically been treated like they are insane for wearing masks in public and observing even the most rudimentary of precautions. It’s also led to a lot of concern for me, because I haven’t seen any of them since well before COVID quarantine, and my parents are both over the age of 70, my mother with several medical conditions that put her at even greater risk. I’ve mostly been able to compartmentalize these worries and anxieties, aided by the fact that Texas wasn’t getting the worst of it, and that my family seemed to all be on the same page as far as risk assessment and not believing the GOP playbook, despite my folks both being lifelong Republicans. Well, now we’re several months into quarantine, and the picture has changed. NYC and Texas are more or less switching places, but my folks have been cooped up more than usual in this time, given their risk status, and the diligence is beginning to fade. My sister-in-law is now pulling double duty both as a doctor on the front lines of this crisis and as an enforcer of what should be common sense amongst her loved ones. I can’t imagine it’s been easy.

As that first line of defense against COVID anxiety has broken, so too has the second; it was only a matter of time before even my boring-ass, suburban, WASP family succumbed to the brain virus that all boomers eventually succumb to, and began spreading easily identifiable misinformation. I just wish it hadn’t happened when the stakes were so high. My aunt decided late on the evening of Father’s Day was a great time to share some “information” she had received from my uncle’s “doctor” (note: acupuncturists are not doctors.) The pre-forward text from her read “Just an FYI,” which understated the horrors of CHUD chicanery that lay lurking within the body of the e-mail. This acupuncturist has a website, that, along with the fact that they passed along this bullshit chain letter, seems to point to an aging wine mom turned fake hippy-dippy “natural medicine” enthusiast…the kind of person who says “Namaste” but also calls the cops whenever she sees black people in her neighborhood and also isn’t allowed at Thanksgiving anymore because she won’t stop bringing up Antivaxx talking points.

ANYHOW, the chain text, which I can only assume was passed onto her by an endless chain of other mush-for-brains and not written by anybody she knows directly, is supposedly authored by somebody who is “OSHA certified” (whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean) and is basically a screed against masks. Not the usual MUH FREEDOM anti-mask tirades, but a new, more insidious form of mask politicization that claims the best kinds of masks (N95, etc) actually don’t do anything to protect you against the virus and that some of the more improvised options (cloth masks, t-shirts, bandanas) are actually WORSE than going without a mask at all. I won’t go into details about the wealth of bullshit contained in this email, but suffice it to say I managed to debunk the “OSHA expert’s” assertions concerning OSHA and the CDC with about 2 minutes of googling. In short, OSHA recommends workplace compliance with CDC regulations, including face coverings for all employees, and that fraudster and the dope Karen who are propagating his bullshit are full of it.

Speaking of bullshit, the furor in New York has died down a little as curfew has been lifted by the reliably dumb DeBlasio, cops seem to have stopped outright attempting to murder protesters—or they’re at least being smarter about not getting caught—and the entire movement has gotten an injection of life and hope with the charges brought against the officers who murdered or were otherwise complicit in the murder of George Flloyd. Multiple protests are still happening across all five boroughs, despite the pleas from our “I’m-slightly-less-of-a-boob-than-DeBlasio” governor for everybody to pack it in, because systemic racism and state sponsored murder have apparently been solved forever. As the tide of public opinion across the country (and definitely New York) has turned against the police for all but the most hopelessly right-wing of mouth-breathers, cops are having their little fee-fees hurt, and have resorted to an old page in the Copaganda playbook: the crisis actor special.

You see, despite what every dumbass with a Blue Lives Matter t-shirt and/or Punisher logo Glock loves to tell you, most cops will go through their entire careers doing nothing but sitting in their cars, eating fast food, writing tickets, and fucking with teenagers and/or minorities to satisfy the superiority complexes that drove them into being cops in the first place. Faced with the gnawing realization that their jobs aren’t in fact the last line between “real” Americans and hordes of unwashed, gender-fluid Antifa super soldiers, the past week has seen an  uptick in a laughably naked and desperate attempt by police to make it seem as though the guys with guns who regularly slaughter citizens for no reason are in fact, the real victims.

Here in NYC a few boys in blue were busy keeping our city streets safe by stuffing their faces with milkshakes, when—in a turn of events that surely nobody ever could have seen coming—they felt a little queasy. What was almost certainly nothing more serious than a tummyache resulted in the officers being “treated” at a nearby hospital  on suspicion of “poisoning,” and TWO DOZEN cops clogging up the Shake Shack in question to interrogate the staff (who were almost certainly Black or Latino) for hours on end. Wouldn’t you know it, no criminal activity was revealed, and it turns out that the most fearless men to ever strut around the five boroughs are actually gigantic babies who definitely shouldn’t be trusted with firearms.

Even more laughable than this was “McMuffin Karen,” an officer in Georgia who had just gotten off a long shift ordered some breakfast for pickup at a local McDonald’s, and then lost her fucking mind when she had to wait for it, breaking down into tears because she was “afraid people were going to mess with her food.” In addition to highlighting the strange mental instability and hair-trigger emotions that seems to be part and parcel of being a police officer these days, this incident also highlights just how out of touch and entitled police are, as any halfway reasonable person would think nothing of having to wait a while at a fast food restaurant, one of the most universal experiences in American culture. Stuff like this only drives home the point that police are not to be reasoned with, reformed, or viewed as amenable to “dialogue” and “change.” They are hopelessly self-centered, violent, unstable, and fundamentally cruel people who break down into tears at the slightest perceived challenge to their absolute authority, which apparently includes getting sick from eating too much ice cream and having to wait during a morning breakfast rush.

In the interest of “both sides” (jk) I can’t pretend that this sort of “I am the protagonist of my own reality” magical thinking is limited to cops and their bootlicking supporters. A new conspiracy theory has taken social media by storm, and…hoo boy, it’s a doozy. One of the many things I like to poke fun at Northeastern libs for is their shrieking aversion to fireworks. Every year, when summer rolls around,  Twitter and Facebook fill up with post after post of people who basically think that teenagers setting off  a roll of black cats is tantamount to running down the streets waving a gun around. It’s a truly unhinged level of psychosis that defies human imagination. I remember once asking my girlfriend and her college friend if they grew up doing fireworks around the 4^th of July, and the shock and barely constrained contempt that came out of the friend’s face and voice was astounding. “No, that’s illegal.” She said gravely.

Anywho, that’s only part of the story when it comes to this tinfoil hat conspiracy, that asserts Brooklyn and other places around the US have seen spikes in civilian fireworks-related tomfoolery in the past month or so. I personally haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, but I do live in an exceedingly white, very gentrified neighborhood. All kinds of people love to blow up small pieces of their country around this time, of course, but throughout Brooklyn (and Los Angeles) a disproportionate number of kids making shit go boom are teenagers of color, and the greatest concentration of more-annoying-than-usual explosions seems centered in Black and Latino neighborhoods. That said, there is apparently data to back this up: fireworks retailers report that their sales on the year are up (I believe the figure quoted in one article was around 15%), and several news sources have claimed an astonishing uptick in the amount of fireworks-related complaints lodged in the past several weeks.

So what’s going on here? Well…according to a pretty vocal subset of folks on twitter and Reddit…(deep breath) cops and/or the government/CIA are either A)intentionally flooding black and brown communities with fireworks to exhaust residents and protesters B)actually setting off the fireworks in these neighborhoods themselves or C) doing either A or B as a method of “getting people used to noise and pops” in order to more easily begin mowing people down with live rounds.

…I’m not kidding, people actually believe this. A quick scroll through the greatest hits on Twitter reminded me why I’m not on that platform anymore, as it was clear that anybody who said “c’mon, this is fucking crazy,” was told they were “gaslighting” BIPOC and being “dismissive.” I’ve come to believe that the state and the police are capable of just about anything, but…c’mon, this is fucking crazy.

It seems much more likely that several factors are at work here. First, people, especially teenagers with no job or school, are stuck at home and bored as hell. Second, fireworks retailers have introduced new online ordering that makes it easier than ever to scoop ’em up. Third, it seems likely, though I haven’t verified this, that those same retailers probably have a surplus of product due to cancelled public and professional shows, and are trying to sell off their stock at a discount. Fourth, people who hate fireworks are stuck at home more, and thus more likely to a)notice them and b)complain about them, hence the dramatic uptick in calls and complaints. The only part of the “NYPD/FDNY are trying to terrorize Black people via fireworks” conspiracy that I buy is that the cops probably aren’t bothering to respond  to complaints about illegal fireworks as retaliation against the citizens they’re supposed to protect and serve. After all, those citizens said cops shouldn’t be allowed to murder them, it only stands to reason that NYPD should refuse to do their jobs.

Hoo boy, that’s all for now I think.

Masks Off

In the world of online leftism, “mask off” is a term that’s used to describe a creeping trend amongst the more conservative-minded on the right and the left.  Pre-2016, back when there  was still a general consensus around what constituted “norms,”  right-of-center politicians and commentators cushioned their socially abhorrent ideas with flowery language and doublespeak that catered to those who might harbor similar views deep down, but found a naked appeal to their baser political instincts unseemly. Folks like Frank Luntz made careers out of this, finding new and improved ways to sell austerity and neo-feudalism to rich people who’d like to think of themselves not as elites, but common people who worked very hard. This is “the mask,” a thin veneer of social acceptability and civility with which to dress up one’s selfish and evil ideology so as to fly under the radar of those obsessed with manners and optics.

“Mask off,” then, describes the exact opposite phenomenon. Punching the pedal of authoritarian, right-wing hatred to the floor and daring anybody to get in your way. This sort of sneering contempt for the vulnerable and oppressed in America had purchase in some pockets of the electorate before Trump (read: the Tea Party,) but the 2016 squeaker sent up a flare; enough people in this country were just as hateful, petty, and vindictive as the leaders they elected to represent them. Who knew? In most pockets of American conservatism, there is barely any attempt to hide the naked corruption and looting of the country at the expense of the nation’s most vulnerable. Supreme Court justice seats are stolen in broad daylight, elections math doesn’t add up and those in charge of overseeing these things shrug their shoulders. Most notably, a global pandemic threatens to destroy civilization as we know it and those in charge say, in no uncertain terms, that the poor, sick, and elderly should be happy to die if it means our (perfectly robust and functioning) capitalist order can keep chugging along.

Which brings us to the current moment concerning anti-police protests that have rocked New York City, the response from NYPD, and the indifference—or at least ambivalence—of the folks who are supposedly watching the watchmen. They’ve all gone mask off. In the case of the NYPD, both literally and figuratively. Much well-deserved vitriol has been directed at officers who seem to make a political point out of refusing to wear masks at protests, inside of  businesses, and other places where they have been directed by the city and state government to do so. The same occupying paramilitary force that terrorized waves of Black and Brown people for inadequate social distancing in the early days of lockdown are now proudly interacting with the public every day, sometimes in close quarters, with almost no masks or distancing to be found. This despite the fact that NYPD, in predictable self-pitying fashion, consistently wail about how many officers have fallen sick to COVID-19. By going “mask off”  in the physical sense, these cops are also going mask off in the figurative sense. Make no mistakes, the police aren’t just macho and stupid (though they certainly are that,) they’re also using this moment to try and reassert their authority and perceived extra-legal status at every possible turn. The message is clear: NYPD are above the law, and rather than being protectors and servants of the public, they view themselves as soldiers in a war for control of the city. Does it belong to us, or does it belong to them? The countless scores of American citizens (the vast majority of them non-white) who have been murdered by police forces across the country for “resisting arrest” speaks to the true ethos of every police department: obey, or else.

And what do our elected officials, who supposedly oversee and manage these thugs, have to say for themselves? Next to nothing. More attention and outrage came out of the mayor’s office in condemnation of a too-crowded Hasidic funeral than against a police force that continue to paint themselves as victims while they run over peaceful protesters with squad cars, launch tear gas into crowds of innocent people with nowhere to go, and storm apartment buildings in Black neighborhoods for the crime of grilling too late at night. Against this bloodthirst, jackbooted racism and fascist travesty, Bill De Blasio will only shrug his shoulders, suggest that what people can see with their own eyes isn’t really happening, and sputter out a pathetic, simpering, Trump-esque “Both Sides” apologia that attempts to make protesters culpable for their own maiming. Governor Cuomo, enjoying his moment in the sun as a civil servant who has done a barely adequate job in the face of Coronavirus, is no better, taking the opportunity to further his personal vendetta with DeBlasio despite having a more-or-less identical stance on the police-incited violence. Both of these feckless imbeciles have made excuses for the police and their actions, and when asked directly about NYPD’s flagrant flouting of Cuomo’s executive order regarding face coverings in public, only wag their fingers and agree the cops are being very naughty, but what’s to be done?

No discipline, no oversight, no enforcement, nothing to address the decades-long rot that is the NYPD and their blatant contempt for the people who pay their salaries. It’s clear which side Cuomo’s bread is buttered on, as a 2024 Presidential run seems all but assured at this point, and lord knows you can’t win a general election if the word gets out that you’re anti-cop. DeBlasio is a stranger case, since it’s his last term for the next few cycles under New York State law, and NYPD have had nothing but venom and disrespect for the man who never met a center lane he didn’t like. This hapless buffoon continues to try and court the respect of cops who publicized information about his own daughter’s arrest at protests, and, in more simpler times, “joked” about murdering his family in internal communications.

“Masks off,” indeed. There can be no doubt at this point that the police, and those who are supposedly in charge of policing the police, have no sense of duty or obligation to the people who put them into their positions of extreme privilege and authority in the first place. They do not have an ounce of respect between them for the health, well-being, or safety of the people of New York, and would rather see the city burn to the ground than admit that NYPD, and every other major police department along with it, have ceased to exist as administrators of public safety and have instead reinvented themselves as occupying armies that serve at the pleasure of the rich and powerful. The only solution to this problem lies not in reform, but in defunding, gutting, and overhaul. Our idea of what policing means needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from its foundations. This is not a renovation job, it’s a demolition, and anybody who is still inside the building when the people tear it down will suffer the consequences.

Doldrums

I’ve been better, but I’ve been a lot, lot worse.

First up: politics. Not feeling great right now! I know there’s still plenty of delegates up for grabs, but even if Sanders squeaks out a plurality of delegates, I think we’re going to have a contested convention that almost surely ends with…*sigh* Joe fuckin’ Biden as the nominee. Honestly, I keep thinking I’m jaded enough to not be thrown by the baffling political decisions people make, but I the Democratic establishment keeps surprising me. The resurrection of creepy Joe starts out strange and gets more and more depressing the more you think about it. Why the fuck would anybody want this sack of sentient bones to run against Trump?  He’s got all the same baggage HillDawg had, but he’s sundowning at an alarming rate, and his corruption problems are even more severe. Outside of electability issues, his policies are dogshit. He’s a dinosaur of the right-wing of the party, a Republican lite. If/when this pudding-brain gets nominated, we’re going to see record-low turnout for dems, because plenty of progressive voters, myself included, did not sign up for this shit, and we’re not going to roll over and play dead for the DNC just because they snapped their fingers.

So why coalesce around old Joe? Well, it’s possible that the DNC really thinks he has a shot at beating Trump, but I think it’s more likely that most of the party faithful are actually the dreaded “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” types you run into so much at terrible parties. Long story short, it’s all about greed, and the internalized “Protestant work ethic” that’s infected so much of American society for so long. Deep down, the folks pulling the strings at the DNC and the voters lapping up their bullshit don’t want their taxes raised and/or they think poor people have it coming. Setting up a loser like Biden as the nom, especially with a snake like Warren playing spoiler gives all the usual suspects a convenient excuse to fall back on when Biden inevitably eats shit; it’s all the Bernie Bros’ fault! As though we should be grateful for the opportunity to get rat-fucked out of a true progressive agenda because somebody who is mumbling “I’m not Trump!” at campaign stops claims he can bring us back to the status quo of 2015. Goodie!

In other news, I went to a doc’s office for an EKG today (technically yesterday now, I suppose). It was supposed to be routine. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was around 7 years old, and was on Ritalin for most of my childhood. That tapered off as I got into high school and I pretty much stopped taking it completely by the time I was midway through college. Now I’m 34, but a variety of things that have come up in my personal and professional life have me considering medication once again. My therapist has been quite open to the idea, but wanted me to get an EKG before she put me on any ADHD medications. Anyway, I went in for the thing, and was surprised to hear from the nice old Polish doctor that I had an “abnormality” in my test results. She was pretty kind and reassuring, saying that it was nothing to be worried about, but also said I needed to see a cardiologist before I went on any ADHD medication. Needless to say, this was not what I wanted to hear. I’ve been fairly depressed about my body/fitness lately, and have been on a steady weight-lifting regimen, which has made me feel a lot better physically, but I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been now, and I suspect some of whatever is showing up on this EKG is due to my lifestyle and diet. I like eating shitty food, and I like drinking, and I loathe aerobic exercise…so I guess something’s gotta give. I have an appointment with a cardiologist on Monday, so we’ll see what’s up then.

Speaking of medical issues…Coronavirus, let’s talk about it. I keep going back and forth on whether or not I’m freaking out just enough, under-freaking out, or over-freaking out. My initial reactions were that this was going to be another SARS type thing that blew over fairly quickly, but it seems to be lingering in the media. I still haven’t seen much concrete evidence that this is going to be particularly dangerous for anybody but the elderly and immuno-compromised, but I guess all that remains to be seen. More to the point, March 2nd was Texas Independence Day, heretofore known as the Day I Made Some Guy At A Bar So Mad He Stormed Out, and this was over the disease nobody can stop talking about.

A little background: I showed up a little early for celebratory drinks for the Great Republic a little early, and as I was nursing a Lone Star, found myself half-eavesdropping on a conversation happening at the end of the bar. I could barely make out some guy saying *something* about the dreaded plague, but didn’t quite catch it. Somehow the talk shifted to Amazon moving into New York, and the successful effort to block their new HQ location and tax breaks. The guy who didn’t seem to know anybody else but was loudly talking to everybody (there’s always one) was saying this was a bad thing, for some reason. With the patience of a saint, other dude at the bar explained that he was from Seattle, and went on to detail very specific ways Amazon’s base on the West Coast has been awful for working class people and priced them out of the city proper. The annoying guy responded with some nonsensical shit about how if they had come to NYC “we would have forced them to donate to nonprofits” (???) I began to text James about overhearing this guff, but he walked in a few seconds later.

We drank and chatted for a while, and then James had the bartender put on Monday Night Raw. I’m not extremely knowledgable about wrasslin’ but I do enjoy it from time to time, especially watching with my old roommate who has an encyclopedic knowledge and is always eager to catch a n00b like me up to speed. Anyways, after a while of watching Raw, annoying guy comes over and asks if he can join. I haven’t yet told James about the conversation I overheard, but figure the guy’s harmless, and for the most part he is. We have a nice chat while watching flyers from the top rope and RKOs for a while, annoying guy came back from the bathroom and did a thing I’ve literally only seen on TV. “Wuhan? Did you guys say Wuhan?” before launching into his spiel about Coronavirus. James and I laughed and I playfully called him out on “mishearing” what we were saying, but was game to talk about it. Unfortunately, it became clear after a while that he had some pretty…unorthodox views on the subject. James and I were both expressing a shared cautious optimism about the whole thing, only in the sense that the prevailing twitterverse attitude that this was the end times plague we’ve all been waiting for might be slightly exaggerated. Annoying guy was having none of it, claiming, repeatedly, that “we’ll all be dead in three weeks.” This was one of those arguments when the other person is insisting on trying to own you with “facts and logic” but doesn’t really understand how numbers work, constantly making huge leaps in logic to feed into his belief that once the virus hit NYC “for real” it was going to be a bloodbath. I said that wasn’t really born out by the data so far, as I understood it, and he continued to talk at us for a long time.

Eventually, it started to exhaust me. I have very little patience for doom ‘n’ gloom nihilism these days, and suggested that if he was so preoccupied with his own death he might consider talking to  a mental health professional rather than strangers in a bar. I further said that being blackpilled doesn’t really do anybody much good, because we’re all going to be here ten, fifty, however many years from now, and there’s work to be done to make the world better rather than pretending that it’s all going to crash down in a matter of days. For some reason, this made him incredibly angry, and he started aggressively asking me over and over again what *I* was doing to make  the world better. A little caught off guard, I offered that I had donated a lot to the Sanders campaign and textbanked. “What else?” he demanded, in a tone that let me know he was about to logic-fuck me. “Yeah, I’m not doing this,” I said, and signaled with body language that I was done with the conversation. “Yeah that’s what I thought, that’s what I thought,” he spat at me before storming out of the bar in a huff.

I honestly didn’t know I had it in me!

Oscars Round-Up

As somebody who has long considered himself to be in a dysfunctional relationship with the Academy Awards, it pains me to say: I’m back on my bullshit. This year, without  even really making any special effort to do so, I’ve seen all of the nominees for Best Picture. I surrender my Oscar-hating credentials to nobody, but I have to say, this is one of the first years in which I’m not extraordinarily outraged by a decent chunk of the nominees. Of course, that’s mostly because I’m outraged at the shut-out of Uncut Gems, but that’s an entirely different post.

 

Without further ado, a run-down, dare I say, some CAPSULE REVIEWS of each Best Picture nominee, presented in ascending order of personal preference:

 

Jojo Rabbit

Directed by Taika Waititi

 

Ugh. I may have to walk back my claim of not being “outraged” a little bit. I guess I’m not mad, I’m just…disappointed. Full disclosure of biases here: I kind of loathe Taika Waititi. I’m sure he’s a nice guy and all, and I’m glad he’s a new face making original films in a landscape so bereft of them, but…sigh. I haven’t seen Hunt For the Wilderpeople (some Taika-stan on twitter threw this in my face as  though it were some ancient, obscure lost film that nobody’s ever heard of), but Thor: Ragnaraok is easily one of the most tedious and annoying films in an entire universe of similarly tedious and annoying films. Waititi’s sense of humor is gratingly childish, screamingly unfunny, and brings to mind the worst kind of Redditors in its arrogant self-satisfaction. ZOMG GUYS HE  MADE A COMEDY ABOUT NAZIS CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?!?!? Snore.

 

A lot of hay has been made on film twitter lately concerning Jojo Rabbit and its humanization of Nazis, as the film seems to put forth the theory that those who are radicalized into right-wing death cults can be saved, and should be applauded for doing so. That’s not an especially appealing premise to me personally, but it’s made all the worse because Jojo Rabbit is just as grating and eye-roll worthy as the director’s previous outing. Hey, at least he managed to sandwich this in between Disney movies! Anyhow, once the initial “omg twee Nazis lol” thrill fades, there’s very little else to like about Jojo, until the third act, when Waititi absolutely bows the opportunity to turn everything on its head by showing the horrors and atrocities of the Nazi regime and treating its collaborators with unflinching judgement, but our man isn’t interested in anything that deep or cutting. Why not? It’s just about the fuckin’ holocaust, after all. That last scene with the dancing…I just…I can’t.

 

Marriage Story

Directed  by Noah Baumbach

 

We’re still firmly in “ugh” territory for now, though now the muck’s only up to our chests instead of our eyeballs. The smarmy David Spade character in me wants to say I liked this movie better when it was called The Squid and the Whale.  That may seem like a simplistic read, but a semi-autobiographical movie about Baumbach as a child of divorce is much more interesting and far less irritating than Baumbach making a movie about himself in the Jeff Daniels role. Marriage Story isn’t a terrible movie, it just doesn’t really amount to much, mainly because it’s so heavily centered around characters (I think) we’re supposed to love, who are boring, irritating, and have zero chemistry with one another. When this movie hit, everybody was talking about the infamous “wall punching” scene in breathless tones. I watched the movie, steeling myself for trauma (I don’t handle interpersonal toxicity well in movies), but I just thought it was pretty overwrought and silly. Honestly, it made me feel like Noah Baumbach has never actually been in a nasty fight with anybody he loved.

 

Speaking of things Noah Baumbach doesn’t know about, I’m not sure he knows the ages of his own children. That’s the only possible explanation I can come up with for some of the insane details buried within the stand-in son character in Marriage Story, who is eight years old but needs a car seat, isn’t 100% toilet-trained, and can’t read. Sorry Noah, either you have no idea how old your kid is, or they’re one of those Brooklyn weirdo kids (hair down to ankles, named Leviticus, favorite activity is eating rice cakes while reading Chomsky for kids).

 

Anyways, I often dry-heave when people object to a movie because there’s “nobody to root for,” but in this case  Baumbach builds the entire premise of his film around the idea that divorce is a messy and awful that happens to people with the best of intentions, and that we all can come away from it as changed, and hopefully better people. But Driver and Johannsson do little to communicate the goodness implied by such a reading, nor does Baumbach ever do much to make us think these people ever liked or even cared much at all about one another. It’s a flat, unremarkable story about the drama in the business of being alive and falling in and out of love, but Baumbach seems to think there’s a drama inherent in the telling. He’s sadly mistaken, in my opinion.

 

Joker

Directed by Todd Phillips

 

The hits start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’. What else is to be said about this movie that hasn’t already been said to death? I count myself firmly in the “Joker Centrist” camp. The movie is entertaining enough, I’m a sucker for the Batman universe, and I like the Joker a lot. Joaquin Phoenix turns in an incredible performance as sad sack Arthur Fleck, a mentally unstable, shakily employed man who aspires to be a comedian. In a lot of ways, Joker is back to basics for Gotham, transposing the comic book universe onto a slice of gritty nostalgia for the New York of Death Wish and Taxi Driver. As many have pointed out, Joker seems to borrow liberally from both movies, as well as King of Comedy, but most of the mainstream press coverage leading up  to and after the film’s release involve lots of fretting and hand-wringing, if not outright finger-wagging that a movie about a down-and-out mentally ill man could be interpreted as a paen to the would-be Incel massacres.

 

That concern is plainly hogwash, as Joker is a film about a man who feels left behind by society and gradually comes to focus his resentment on an appropriate target: the aristocratic Wayne family, as well as the less-deserving talk show host he idolizes, who mocks him on live TV at Fleck’s nadir. Never does Fleck shift his anger towards minorities or women, who are the universal targets of the abhorrent individuals the anti-Joker crowd claims will be emboldened by this film.

 

The problem with Joker is that Phillips has less insight into the themes his movie purports to deal in, and he’s not terribly interested (or perhaps not up to the task) of wrestling with them in any meaningful way. It’s remarkable and telling that a movie like Joker has gotten the widespread commercial appeal and critical recognition that it has, considering the subject matter, but it feels like a wasted opportunity in the hands of the guy who brought us the hard-hitting social commentary of The Hangover.

 

Little  Women

 

OK, we’re safely out of the woods now. Take a deep breath, and relax. Wait, who’s that, in the distance, is it…BOB ODENKIRK?!?!?

 

So aside from having the most delightful bit part of any movie this season, Greta Gerwig’s take on Little Women does interesting work with the source material, couching the whole thing in a sort of meta-narrative that centers the agency of all the women involved, both fictional and “real.” A few Academy dunder-heads have admitted on voting exit surveys that they got confused by the time jumps, which is proof that we shouldn’t be giving any sort of critical award power to folks who can’t stay off their phones for a solid two hours at a time, particularly when those folks work in the MOVIE BUSINESS.

 

Ahem Anyways, I have nothing particularly negative to say about Little Women. Oh wait, actually, Emma Watson is a bad actress, and that’s never been made clearer than by sticking her next to Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh and Laura Dern for two hours. Whew, she is awful. Just absolutely wooden, behaving at times like an animated porcelain doll. It’s hard to tell if she was always this bad and used her young age as a cover, but man, she is following the trajectory of a Heisman-winner that goes  bust in the pros. Stay tuned for my next blog entry, entitled “Why Emma Watson is the Baker Mayfield of Hollywood.” Ha, I’ve managed to alienate people who hate sporpsball and silenced women’s voices in one fell swoop. Take THAT, libs! (mostly joking)

 

Gerwig deserves a lot of credit for bringing this movie to life. I’ve never read the book, but watching the movie mirrors the experience of falling in love with an incredible novel at just the right age, a fact I’m sure was not lost on the many people who hold this story near and dear to their hearts. Suffice it to say, I’m not exactly the target audience for Little Women, but  I saw it anyways (please acknowledge my bravery), and I’m only more eager to see what Gerwig’s going to do in the future.

 

1917

Directed by Sam Mendes

 

A particularly annoying subset of Left-twitter have been haranguing 1917 for the crime of being a war movie that is not sufficiently anti-war, which is something I usually roll my eyes at. In this case, however, I’ve got to come down a bit on the naysayers’ side, only because the movie makes the cardinal sin of pretending to very much be an “anti-war” movie with a few lines of lip service coming from a 1.5 minute long Benedict Cumberbatch performance. If you’re not going to commit to the bit, just move on, in my opinion.

 

Anyways, Roger Deakins is Roger Deakins, and our visually-stunning King has found new ways to challenge himself here, creating incredibly immersive, unbroken panoramas that make all the senseless bloodshed and heart-pounding fear feel all the more real. Unfortunately, with an absence of any real character development, I was pretty detached from the movie’s events as they unfolded, outside of marveling at the sheer technical artistry on display. In that regard, watching 1917 is a little like watching somebody else play a very beautiful video game. Not altogether unpleasant, but nothing particularly mind-blowing or connective either.

 

Ford V Ferarri

Directed by James Mangold

 

OK, now we’re into the hot takes. I will defend James Mangold to the death. His movies are good. They aren’t jaw-dropping, they aren’t life-changing, but dammit, he does a certain kind of prestige picture better than almost anybody in the game, and at this point, competency and a commitment to craft is more than I expect about most things that make boomers and/or nerds wet themselves, so I’m all in. I mean, Mangold is the guy who always turns in the best iteration of a thing that’s been played out. He did it with Walk the Line, Logan, and now he triples down with Ford V Ferrarri, a movie that’s sure to satisfy your elderly parents who “just want a nice story,” that annoying friend of a friend who never shuts up about cars even though you live in New York and haven’t owned a car in almost a decade, and the sniveling whiner who thinks filmmakers should try new things, even when their staying safely within a tried and tested formula (it me!)

 

Nobody’s reinventing the wheel here (pun intended, thanks very much), but if it ain’t broke, well shit. Damon does a very passable Texas accent, and it’s a delight to watch him and Christian Bale carom off each other as stubborn car-racing aficionados whose job it is to convince a big fat idiot with tons of money he needs to trust the experts he hired to win him a race. It’s interesting that this movie was one of the last huge projects produced at Fox prior to the huge Disney acquisition, as the movie has a tragic coda, and struggles with what it means to try and think outside the box within a tightly controlled assembly line.

 

Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

 

Mmm…that’s the good stuff. I’m something of a QT-stan, but The Hateful Eight left me feeling pretty cold (no pun intended, thank you), and I was wary of the hype going into this one, but…man, what a movie, and what a movie for Tarantino to make. All of his calling cards are there, but the director’s ninth film feels very restrained compared to the rest of his catalog, even the slow-burn, neo-noir 70s throwback Jackie Brown. OUATIH is shot through with Tarantino’s aching love of movies, and of Los Angeles itself, a city that looks grimy and impossible until those magical moments when it looks perfect.

 

The movie unfolds at a languid place, telling the intertwining stories of the aging has-been Rick Dalton, his long-time stunt double and friend Cliff Booth, and Rick’s next-door neighbor, actress Sharon Tate. The fiction Tarantino weaves into the true story that many cultural historians label as the death of the 1960s is one of two men watching the world around them change before their eyes. Dalton goes practically kicking and screaming, while Booth tends to stoically take everything in stride, as he’s the man Dalton only pretends to be. All of this adds up to a revisionist history showdown, the likes of  which Tarantino’s become fond of, both in Inglorious Basterds  and Django Unchained, but there’s more going on than historical catharsis here.

 

OUATIH is about friendships, community, values, art, love, and expression, and how all of those things crash together in the chaotic frenzy we call life. It’s an ultimately uplifting movie, telling us all we have the power to change our present and our future, if not our past. Featuring stellar performances from a stacked ensemble cast, beautiful, scorched earth photography, and Tarantino’s typically flawless musical selections and crackling wit, OUATIH is a movie I’d be content to keep watching over and over for a very long time.

 

Parasite

Directed by Bong Joon-Ho

 

I saw this at this past year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin. Prior to this I had only seen Memories of Murder and Snowpiercer, both of which I enjoyed. I had heard nothing but incredible approval come out of every festival where it had screened, so I kept to my usual playbook and resolved to not learn anything about the movie until I could see it for myself.

 

The offerings at Fantastic Fest 2019 were already stacked, but Parasite stole the show for me, and it almost doesn’t seem fair to have this one hanging around in competition with genre indie hopefuls that might never get distribution. In a new era of pronounced class agitation, existential anxiety, impotent rage, isolation, and hopelessness, this is the movie that people were just begging for, whether they knew it or not. I’m not the first or only person to make this point, but Parasite achieves what Joker sets out to do, and it does so with humor, beauty, and a vibrant love for humanity and cinema shining through. The usual crowd of folks who need to find something wrong with the thing everybody loves have occasionally remarked that it’s too “on the nose,” but I really feel that would only be a problem if it felt deeply self-important or didactic. While the film is very clear in its politics, Bong Joon Ho’s masterpiece is less of a polemic than it is a tragic wail of grief.

 

The Irishman

Directed by Martin Scorsese

 

Well…here we are.

 

I’m not sure if you could count me as Scorsese-stan, but the best of his films are ones I go to again and again. Even his most commercial and mainstream films are achingly personal, and as mentioned in Bong Joon Ho’s victory speech for Best Director on Oscar Night, “the most personal is the most creative.”

 

As somebody who was deeply moved, even enthralled by The Irishman, I’ve been increasingly put off by the sneering contempt people seem to have for Scorsese’s epic, presumably because they’ve resolved to stop glorifying “old white guys,” or perhaps it’s because they’re put off by his completely restrained, publicly shared opinion that he doesn’t like Marvel movies and thinks they are bad for cinema (King).This came to a head when the crowd I was watching the Oscars with on Sunday night felt the need to continuously share just how little they cared about the movie, despite the fact that most of them hadn’t seen a frame of it.

 

When I offered that I thought it was perhaps Scorsese’s best movie…you would have thought I threw the cat out the window. It’s certainly his most achingly personal, and if you have been a fan of Scorsese the artist and followed his career, it’s hard to not be moved by this movie, which is something of sorrowful reflection on emptiness. Moments like these are when I wonder how much I actually share with other people in terms of how we look at the world. How can anybody watch the final third of The Irishman and not be devastated, or worse yet, continue to write this film off as “another mob movie?” This is the coda Scorsese has been gesturing at for all of his career, beautifully realized. It’s a coda not just to the movie, but perhaps to his own life, an exaggeration of his own complicated feelings about his Catholicism, his fascination with the swaggering tough guys of his neighborhood growing up and their swanky, glamorous lifestyles. It’s an aching plea to do something bigger instead of making yourself small and insignificant by making every compromise in order to reach the stars.

 

Frank Sheeran gave away everything, because he lived in fear of authority, but came to respect and find salvation in it. His entire life was based around the steadfast conviction that attaching himself to the right people would be his salvation, and in the end, as one FBI agent tells him outside his nursing home, “they’re all gone.” All the more heartbreaking, the “they” here isn’t just the mobsters and the union reps, it’s his family, his friends, everybody who exists to make one’s life more than waiting around to die. And so The Irishman ends, with an old man, so completely emptied of any meaning that he can’t even bring himself to feel sorrow or remorse for all the blood he’s shed, all the people he’s hurt. He only feels nothing, as the end draws near.