Sometimes A Bomb Is Just A Bomb

I don’t, as a rule, go to “romantic comedies“ unless I’m dating someone who wants me to go to one.

As I am about as straight as a cis gender white male can get, the odds of me going to a gay romcom are right down there with Stevie Wonder pitching a called third strike against Luis Arraez.

Billy Eichner, the inexplicably famous producer and star of the LGBTQRomcom “Bros”, has spent the last week blaming people like me for his movie catastrophically taking the previous weekend.

So it’s mildly entertaining to see Matt Brennan, the LA Times entertainment writer and deputy A & E editor, throw a bucket of cold water on a Richner’s snit.

“No one wants to support a movie at the point of a bayonet.”

Openers spiraling rant last week reminded me of a conversation I had with an LGBTQ activist probably 15 years ago. The person said “tolerance“ for gas wasn’t enough; what they we’re looking for was to have the lifestyle “celebrated“.

And which I responded, as a conservative who’s participated in a gay bashing on the side of the gay guy, that I didn’t have time or spare energy to celebrate my own sexuality. He’s just going to have to get in line.

Note to Billy Eichner: want me to show up to a movie? Do it gay film noir.

I still probably won’t go, but at least you’ll have a shot

Hamilton

A friend of the blog emails:

Something else I recently watched on Disney Plus is Hamilton. It was long. I wasn’t enthusiastic about watching the entire show in one sitting -might be better live.

But, I started listening to the soundtrack. Some of those songs are pretty good. I think they are uplifting in a “I’m proud of my country and it’s history” way. It’s good to hear modern day pride in our country and our founders.

But, one song sticks with me in particular. “You’ll be Back.”

https://youtu.be/JF23buZH4WU

It makes a mockery of the King of England. But, I can’t help think some of these lyrics apply to many present day Democrats.

There are times that honestly wonder how many would repudiate the terms of the Declaration of Independence, in a double blind test…

Somewhere In Hollywood, Tomorrow Morning

SCENE: At a studio at “Yoicks”, a new streaming service. On one side of the table, Bernie BRICKMAN, head of development for Yoicks, sits, brow furrowed, reading a script. By his right elbow sits Beyonce CAPRIÉ, his assistant.

Across from him is Ashley KLEIN, age 27, graduate of Oberlin’s screen writing program, veteran of the writer’s room at several streamcasts – Cringey, Can You Hang and Millennial Hellscape Bachelorette.

She’s pitching script for a new show…

BRICKMAN: …Sounds Like A You Problem. Cool.

KLEIN: Gen-Z angst and hopelessness meets post-Covid dystopia in a world shaped by Trump.

BRICKMAN: I like it! Let’s see. So we’ve got…

KLEIN: The show follows the ongoing life, love and adventures of Isabella “Izzy” Cohen, 26 years old, from Darien Connecticut, a graduate of a small liberal arts school who works at a social justice non-profit (CAPRIÉ makes a check on a checklist), and as she navigates the modern world of work, love and society.

BRICKMAN: So the cast of characters…

KLEIN: Yep. Roommate Queen Jenkins, her high school and college classmate, valedictorian at both, majored in Afro-American studies, and is the youngest woman on the partner track at her downtown law firm (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist), who’s navigating a complicated relationship with her boyfriend and supervisor, junior partner Geoffrey Belcher, a former Ivy League lacrosse player – which is complicated by her friendly and occasionally intimate relationship her her and Izzy’s other roommate, Natasha Kim, a genderqueer Asian woman of color (CAPRIÉ makes yet another check on the checklist) who works as chef and caterer, and is a closet alcoholic (CAPRIÉ makes another check).

BRICKMAN: And Izzy’s love interests…this Kyle Dershowitz…?

KLEIN: Kyle is sort of a neurodivergent child-man-child (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist), lost in the world, clinging to Izzy as his only real link to the heterosexuality he is so clearly uncomfortable with (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist). He loses his job as an executive assistant to Izzy’s in the first episode, and has to go to work at Natasha’s catering company, and he thinks he’s good at it, but he is just terrible, and realizing that sends him into spiral.

BRICKMAN: I see Dershowitz as sort of a Woody Allen type character…

KLEIN: Yes, only less masculine, especially after Izzy meets her other boyfriend, Tyrone Marley, a Jamaican-American bicycle messenger and rapper (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist). The love triangle is the big conflic

BRICKMAN: And Queen tells Izzy to follow her truth…?

KLEIN: Yes – but the twist is, Izzy has no idea what her truth, or any truth, is (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist).

BRICKMAN: Heavy.

KLEIN: Could get dark (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist). .

BRICKMAN: So, Beyonce – where does that leave us?

CAPRÉ: (Adjusts her glasses) It appears it checks every box on the modern young adult streaming dramedy checklist.

BRICKMAN: Awesome! Let’s talk directors!

And SCENE

America: F___ Yeah.

Tom Cruise’s Top Gun sequel Maverick is the biggest open in Cruise’s long, lucrative career.

The 59-year-old superstar just got his first $100 million opening weekend with “Top Gun: Maverick.” In its first three days in North American theaters, the long-in-the-works sequel earned an estimated $124 million in ticket sales, Paramount Pictures said Sunday. Including international showings, its worldwide total is $248 million…“These results are ridiculously, over-the-top fantastic,” said Chris Aronson, Paramount’s president of domestic distribution. “I’m happy for everyone. I’m happy for the company, for Tom, for the filmmakers.”

Was it because it was the first post-Pandemic tentpole picture?

But even as the months, and years, went by and many other companies chose to compromise on hybrid releases, Cruise and Paramount didn’t waver on their desire to have a major theatrical release. A streaming debut was simply not an option.

“That was never going to happen,” Cruise said in Cannes.

Was it because the pandemic gave it a three year marketing runway?

“This is one of the longest runways for a marketing campaign for any film ever. And it only served to create more excitement around the movie,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “This movie literally waited for the movie theater to come back.”

Was it because it wasn’t another Godforsaken comic book superhero movie? Truth be told, that’s almost enough reason to go to Maverick all by itself. The endless comic book franchise is living evidence of Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy. I haven’t been to one since the first X-Men and Spiderman (the Toby McGuire/Kirsten Dunst one) movies.

Or could it be because it’s the first tentpole movie since American Sniper that isn’t an endless parade of woke tropes, a movie that isn’t afraid to show masculinity, merit, patriotism and military values as virtues rather than punch lines?

Fearless prediction: look for Woke Hollywood to try to simultaneously undercut and exploit this.

Life Is Art Is Life

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Still working from home (two weeks to flatten the curve, you know). Can’t log in today. My “remote authentication certificate” is not recognized.

Called the Computer Support phone number. Recorded message says they’re experiencing a problem with remote login software but will send updated information to affected users by email.

I am – literally – living in a Dilbert cartoon.

Joe Doakes

Dilbert has been running since 1989.

If it took you until 2022 to realize this, you’ve had a very good run indeed.

Going Not So Much “Where No-One Has Gone Before…”

…but in this case, “going where late night TV and Saturday Night Live apparently don’t dare go anymore”: Saudi TV lampoons Lesko Brandon:

I’m old enough to remember when all presidents were fair game on American TV.

The Invisible Man

SCENE: A suburban family room. MOTHER and FATHER are anxiously looking at their SON, who’s watching…TV.

MOTHER: It’s all he’s watching lately. .

FATHER: What is it?

MOTHER: He’s binging Band of Brothers

FATHER: Again? This is like the third time.

MOTHER: And before that, it was 13 Hours. And then Taken.

FATHER: I caught him watching Die Hard the other day.

MOTHER: He has the scene of him rescuing his wife from being pulled out the window with Hans Gruber as his social media avatar.

FATHER: God. I wonder what’s going on with him?


So I started binge watching “The Flight Attendant” last night.

Pros: it’s really well written. That’s nothing to sneeze at. I’ve been terribly disappointed by the writing in a lot of things I’ve seen lately (I’m looking at you, Love Life, whose laziness completely wasted Anna Kendrick).

The writers toss out a completely un-subtle “Crime and Punishment“ reference in the first couple minutes, and then go on to deliver on it throughout everything I’ve seen so far (#StuffEnglishMajorsLike). And Kaley Cuoco makes a completely believable protagonist.

Bonus pro: it’s got Rosie Perez, who may be the most underrated actress of her generation (although she’s just a tad underutilized in the first couple episodes).

It’s not Dial M for Murder, much less Gaslight, but it ain’t bad.

Speaking of that Ingrid Bergman / Charles Boyer classic…

Cons: These aren’t all in re Flight Attendant alone – far from it.

Hollywood writers seemed to have gotten together and signed a weird, junior high quality pact amongst themselves: “For decades, we wrote women as one dimensional caricatures; madonnas, whores, bimbos and housewives. Let’s pack a century of retribution into a couple of years worth of television and movies.“

Apparently, women can be protagonists, or nuanced, complex characters, or turbocharged badasses, for good or evil – or at least not incompetent caricatures.  That’s a good thing.

On the other hand, rules for men of these days seem to be boiled down to:

  • Gay besties
  • stock black, Asian, Latino or Semitic guys
  • The villain (usually an older white guy, usually played with all the subtlety of a mustache-twisting melodrama villain, although occasionally a white woman)
    – The love interest – who is usually safely ethnically ambiguous.
  • pathetic, beaten down sacks
  • Buffoons, tools, frat bros (apparently all white anglo-saxon protestant males get lacrosse scholarships. I didn’t know that), frat bros that have grown up to be buffoons and tools, cliché rednecks and every kind of cad ever offered up by central casting.. Almost inevitably white, although I guess it’s a sign of evolution the screen writers are showing the occasional less than bright/moral/ethical black male character.
  • Part of a married couple – usually as a hapless schlub whose league his spouse is waaay out of, but with plenty of dysfunctional, abusive cads thrown in. (Same sex couples apparently are immune to most serious dysfunction in Hollywood. Who knew?)

Patronizing? I think so.

Virtue signaling? Sure.

 Lazy? Completely.

Gaslighting?


FATHER: Junior? Why are you watching all these…

MOTHER: …movies and TV shows?

SON: Because it’s fun, for a change, for the first time in my life, to see people like I am, or plan to become, not portrayed as idiots, buffoons, fools, blackguards and expendable simps?

MOTHER: (sotto voce, to FATHER). Do. you think we should call a therapist?

Delp and Goudreau

This is a CD I’ve been meaning to get around to for a long time, and finally checked off that box. It features two members of Boston, Brad Delp and Barry Goudreau. It was recorded in Goudreau’s home studio and released in 2003. The cover and reverse photos were taken on the beach near Goudreau’s home.


Delp was the clear, high, strong voice of Boston, and while Goudreau (on guitar) was sometimes overshadowed by Tom Scholz, he was part of the founding of Boston and, pun intended, instrumental in the sound of the first two Boston albums that together have sold over 30 million copies.

Continue reading

Deformed

“Everything the Left touches, it destroys”
— Dennis Prager

To add a corollary: everything modern, left-infused culture touches, it also destroys.

For a variety of reasons, Cyrano De Bergerac was one of the bits of literature I grew up positively steeped in. I won’t say Dad – a speech, writing and literature teacher – was obsessed, per se, with the De Rostand book and the many theatrical and film versions that’ve appeared over the years (Jose Ferrer’s version was a particular favorite, especially once we got a VHS) being fairly constant fare at the Berg house.

And if you’re not familiar, it’s a pretty brilliant concept. I won’t spoil it; it’s most accessible version to Americans maybe the 1987 Steve Martin version ,Roxanne, which is as 1980’s a Steve Martin comedy as you can think of, but I think is an underrated adaptation…

…that stayed fairly faithful to the concept of the original story.

Which is more than we can say for what Woke Hollywood’s done with it.

If they decide to do a “woke” remake of Casablanca or It’s a Wonderful Life or Best Years of our Lives…

Oh, I fear I’ve already said too much…

I Wanna Make Some History

Last week’s kerfuffle between Spotify (and their contract employee, Joe Rogan) and Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Barry Manilow and (reportedly) Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters, may not mark the point where the iconoclasm and “rebellion” of popular music fromthe 1950s through the 2000s finally died.

But it’s certainly a waypoint on populist conservatism’s path to being the real iconoclasts.

Kid Rock wraps himself, crudely and profanely, in the Constitution in a new song aimed at the President, “woke” culture and the cancelers.

Armond White reviews it:

The strongest lyric on Kid Rock’s new single “We the People” is 235 years old: “In order to form a more perfect union / Do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”…On the day Kid Rock released his song, rock-music veteran Neil Young publicly threatened Spotify with an ultimatum: Either remove its broadcast of the political commentator and comedian Joe Rogan, or he’d remove his music from its streaming service. It’s enough to make a true rock and roller revolt…In this sudden ideological skirmish, Kid Rock wants to reclaim populism and protest against Young’s imperious assertion of authority and limited expression.

As with most things Kid Rock has done in the past three decades (but by no means all), light leaving “safe for work” right now won’t reach us for centuries. A radio edit bleeping out the profanity would sound like Morse Code.

You’ve been warned. Here goes.

Very NSFW. Probably not for family consumption, either.

Don’t…Er, Mess With The Babysitter

The 1980s was the golden age of teensploitation movies; the Breakfast Club, 16 Candles, Pretty in Pink, Saint Elmo’s Fire, Risky Business, Weird Science, and many, many less memorable ones.

For me, maybe two of them have held up over time; Better Off Dead and Adventures in Babysitting.

And now, 34 years later, Elisabeth Shue talks about the making of the movie.

Your turn, John Cusack.

Travesty Most Fowl

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I loved the Artemis Fowl books.  I just saw the trailer for the movie and I feel like crying.

Artemis is a teenaged boy, a genius and ruthless criminal mastermind, assisted by his hulking bodyguard, Butler.  The scriptwriters dragged out all the tropes to make him a naive kid guided by the Wise Old Black Man to Save the Planet from Ancient Evil and Rescue his Father . . . they turned him into a Disney Princess.

Look guys, you bought the movie rights to a wildly popular series of books because you wanted a ready-made fan base.  But that fan base knows the character and knows the story.  They don’t want you to ‘improve’ it, they want you to put the movie in their minds up there on the screen, like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.

Yeah, yeah, Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench and awesome special effects, great stuff.  But couldn’t they have done it with a new story, one that nobody knows so the fans wouldn’t mind if it was butchered?

Joe Doakes

Hey, you’re lucky they didn’t turn him into an ass-kicking girl.

Faith Noah More

NOTE: This blog’s editing tool, “Word Press”, just keeps getting worse and worse. It ate the lede, literally, for this piece. We’ll try again.

I’ll cop to a certain amount of Schedenfreud, watching the array of reliably “progressive” and utterly un-funny late-night talk shows sinking beneath Greg Gutfeld.

Four years of Donald Trump made conventional late-night “comedy” indolent and lazy. Writers – many of them not very funny to begin with – seemed to think anything with Trump in the punch line would earn ’em a laugh. The “A-list” “talent” hosting these affairs – dismal talking heads like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, whose careers peaked at parodying “Red” media and watching women jumping on trampolines, respectively – aren’t helping much.

And few stories of of this decline make me happier than Trevor Noah’s Daily Show, which traded the (relative) wit and charm of Jon Stewart for…

…well, Trevor Noah. I’d normally tell a joke at this point at Noah’s expense, but it seems fitting to remain un-funny.

And between a lame host and “writing” that can’t quite find, well, any traction in any way, the Daily Show is sinking fast.

The “Daily Show” host is as reliably progressive as his peers, although he occasionally will smite his own side (at least far more than Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel). Still, his show’s most recent ratings snapshot isn’t bad

It’s abysmal

“Abysmal” may be charitable:

#Shrug.

How bad has it gotten?

Noah has sunk below the unctuous, priggish John Oliver. Below the hapless and abysmal Samantha Bee. Ahead of the pointless, Colbert-produced “Charlemagne Tha God”, and nothing more.

Will Hollywood learn?

It’s been 30 years, and newspapers still haven’t.

The Long And Winding Road

While the New Yorker’s politics just keep getting more blinkered and puerile, their arts and entertainment coverage remains frequently excellent.

With that in mind, I commend to all of you this fascinating piece by Lee Remnick on Paul McCartney, on the near-eve of the release of a Peter Jackson documentary on the last days of the Beatles that is almost enough to make me consider subscribing to Disney+.

It’s long, but it’s worth it.

Dear Hollywood

To: Hollywood
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant and Lapsed Movie-Goer
Re: Planning

Dear Moguls,

Get an option in on this story. Stat.

And don’t put some moron who cut his/her teeth writing comic book movies on the job of writing the screenplay; the story calls for someone of David Mamet’s stature and talent. Nothing less.

Don’t f*** this one up.

(NARRATOR: “Hollywood will f*** this one up”)

UPDATE: And in case anyone tries to morph some credit over to the civilian and/or military chains of command?

“This Herculean effort couldn’t have been done without the unofficial heroes inside the airfield who defied their orders to not help beyond the airport perimeter by wading into sewage canals and pulling in these targeted people who were flashing pineapples on their phones,” Mann said.

Which brings up a troubling question: if one must defy orders to do the right thing, what does that do for unit cohesion and morale? The authority of the chain of command?

Hidden in this one bit of scarce good new is a lot of really awful stuff for the future of this nation’s institutions.

Preview

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Oh, please, please, let this be as good as it looks.

Joe Doakes

I’ve read a few good reviews – although I’ve tempered my enthusiasm by remembering that, outside classical music, the “critic” class is bastardized beyond salvation.

Still – if one couldn’t hope, why would one live?

Way Too Good To Fact-Check

A lot of people are yukking it up over this story – yep, including me the other day. You recall it – Italian “artist” selling an “invisible sculpture” / block of air / “vacuum full of energy” for $18,000.

“The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that ‘nothing’ has a weight,” Garau said of the statue according to as.com. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”

Italy 24 News reported that per Garau’s instructions, the sculpture must be displayed in a private home free from any obstruction, in an area that is about 5 ft. long by 5 ft. wide. Because the piece does not exist, there are no special lighting or climate requirements.

The story was, to say the least, thinly sourced, to the point where the BS meter is howling.

On the other hand? This, along with the “dumpster fire” last week in Uptown Minneapolis, is the ultimate metaphor for society today.

It’s a cube of nothing – that means whatever the viewer can conjure from it.

It’s no different than “woke”-ism. Or “Critical Race Theory” . Or “Whiteness” theory. All of them are conclusions that are left to the viewer to fill in any way they want.

Signore Garau may be a garbage artist, and a con man extraordinare – even if you assume the story isn’t a hoax (and I’m abou 50-50 – mixing wealthy Frenchmen and dubious “art” is never completely implausible.

But the metaphor he is alleged to have constructed may be the best bit of literature, or at least the best bit of (unintentional?) literary symbolism of the year.

Whether it happened or not.

I Missed My Calling

An Italian “artist“ just sold an invisible statue – and not for invisible money, either:

an artist has sold an invisible statue for 15,000 euros. His name is Salvatore Garau and he has managed to auction his “work” for an amount that many consider crazy. However, he defends his creation tooth and nail.

The artist explained that “the success of the auction confirms an irrefutable fact: the void is nothing more than a space full of energy, even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle that nothing has a weight. It therefore has an energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is to say, into us

My mission is clear. I need to create a better space full of energy.

The world of art demands it.

Pop Life

I’ve never much liked the entire “Seventies Midwestern Arena Rock” genre. 

But among the bands in that genre, it’s Styx that’s always gone beneath and below the rest, the one whose impression to me swerves from apathy into active dislike.  

It’s not that they couldn’t play.   They certainly had live game. 

But unlike REO Speedwagon, or Head East or Trooper or April Wine (I know, they’re Canadian, but they fit the genre) or Michael Stanley Band or any of the others that were more or less like them, Styx’s Dennis DeYoung spent most of the late seventies and eighties whining about how awful being a pop star was, how degrading the machinery of the stardom industry was, and what mindless sheeple the fans were. 

To which I eventually responded “OK – then go to work in a meat processing plant and quit your whining”.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

This is the Sinead O’Connor I suspect most of us remember:


This is the response I suspect most of us, even us Protestant goyim that found, nevertheless, much that was admirable about JPII, would have loved to have made:

Thirty years and change along, and it turns out it wasn’t (just) rabid anti-Catholicism. Turns out she really, really, really loathed being a pop star, and she also had some serious mother issues:

In the book, she details how her mother physically abused her throughout her childhood. “I won the prize in kindergarten for being able to curl up into the smallest ball, but my teacher never knew why I could do it so well,” she writes…O’Connor was 18 when her mother died, and on that day, she took down the one photograph on her mom’s bedroom wall: the image of the pope. O’Connor carefully saved the photo, waiting for the right moment to destroy it.

“Child abuse is an identity crisis and fame is an identity crisis, so I went straight from one identity crisis into another,” she said. And when she tried to call attention to child abuse through her fame, she was vilified. “People would say that she’s fragile,” Geldof said. “No, no, no. Many people would have collapsed under the weight of being Sinead O’Connor, had it not been Sinead.”

Of course, being an “artist” (I put the term in scare quotes not because O’Connor isn’t one – she was an exceptional singer – but because the term has been stretched far beyond meaning these days) means being able to pass the abuse on without ever having to adopt any sort of adult coping skills, which is one of the reasons people go into being one in the first place.

The piece is an interesting read, although kind of depressing by the time you get to the end and really digest it.


Oh, yeah – I said I’d come back to Styx and Dennis DeYoung. I have a habit of saying “we’ll come back to that”, and I don’t, always. I should go back through a few years of this blog’s history and finish some of those threads.

Anyway. DeYoung.

Uh…

Actually, for all the whining about the pop star life he had (and still has), and how vocally I dislike most everything he has ever written, in or out of Styx, DeYoung would seem have avoided the most cliched pitfalls of stardom; he’s abstemious and rigorously healthy, as devoutly Catholic as O’Connor is, well, not, and he’s been married to the same woman for 50 years; he used to take his family on the road to avoid, y’know, all the problems that families get when Dad is on the road all the time. And as whiny as most of his music was, in interviews he’s always been one of the funniest, most genial, and seemingly audibly well-adjusted, grateful people in the music business.

That might be worth an article all by itself.

Entropy

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Question from a writer’s forum:

“What books made you forget it was a book, and just want to eat at the George and race through the NeverNever on spell-box powered motocycles and play with the band, command that ship, and run with the pack?”

I had that feeling when I was a kid, devouring the Sci Fi section of the local public library.  I haven’t had it for a long, long time.  Modern literature just doesn’t grab me and suck me in as it once did. 

I miss that.

Joe Doakes

Possibility 1: we focused on the generally-acknowledged great books when we were younger. They seemed better because they were, pound for pound, better than the stuff you grabbed off the “New Releases” shelf at Barnes and Noble.

Possilbility 2: the stuff coming out today really does suck.