Monthly Archives: August 2019

• Apparently, winning the title of President of the United States wasn't enough for Donald Trump. He's now actively campaigning for the office of Jesus Christ.

First one of these in like six months and I should have posted this earlier today. Very busy today…and some of you can help. Please stop sending me e-mails arguing either that the new Tarantino film is either the absolute greatest movie ever made or the absolute worst. I cannot be convinced it is either of those things. I'd try to connect each of those arguing one position with someone else arguing the other but, like matter meeting anti-matter, I fear an explosion that would rock the universe.

If you want to tell me something, tell me why it matters so much to you that I — a blogger with minimal influence on anything — totally agrees with you about this movie. And I promise you this: If you can ever manage to get every single other person on this planet to agree with your view of this film, I will throw in with you all. I will vote to make it unanimous.

Until then, leave me alone on this. I have a long-standing policy: The length of time you spend arguing about a movie should never exceed the running time of said movie. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (which I believe is how you should spell it, ellipsis and all) is two hours and forty-five minutes. I am currently at about 2:41. In one sense, it's great that a movie arouses so much interest and discussion…but I can only take about another four minutes of it and I prefer to spend it praising whoever did the redress of the Bruin and Village Theaters in Westwood. You have no idea how many movies I saw in those places when they looked like that.

Normal posting should resume here in a couple of days when the current workload abates, the sixth volume of The Complete Pogo is off to the printers, and my cleaning lady comes and I no longer have to wash one dish in order to eat one dish of anything.

The Daily Show has assembled 21 minutes of Donald Trump saying…well, let's put it this way: If you were a Trump fan and a Democratic opponent said any of these things, you'd say this was incontrovertible proof that the Democrat was an idiot and unfit to trim hedges, let alone be President…

• Jeffrey Epstein signed a new will just two days before he was found dead. Isn't this the plot of every single Ellery Queen novel?

As noted here, Donald Trump cannot understand why there's this poll out from Fox News that shows him losing to Biden, Sanders, Warren and even Harris. He said, "I don't know what's happening with Fox."

It's fascinating that among the possibilities that apparently didn't occur to him was that the Fox News pollsters conducted a poll by the same methods they've always used and the poll yielded those results. He seems to have assumed that since Fox has been generally favorable to him, they would rig their poll to show him clobbering the other candidates…or at least should suppress the results of a poll that showed him losing.

This may tell us a lot about the way this man views politics. The news is just a tool to manipulate public opinion and it's dishonest if it doesn't do that in service of Trump. If and when he runs a news network or newspaper, that's how it would work.

And if/when on Election Night 2020, Fox News reports that Donald Trump lost, he'll be able to understand why CBS, NBC, ABC and all the newspapers he hates would say such a thing…

…but why, oh why would Fox?

As noted here, my pal Frank Ferrante is currently starring as his alter-ego Caesar in Teatro ZinZanni in Chicago. I still hope I can get back there to see him before he leaves at the end of September.

Tuesday, September 17 would be a day off for Frank but workaholic that is, he's going to spend that evening in his alter-alter-ego of Groucho Marx. He'll be performing — for the first time ever in the city of Chicago — his acclaimed one-man-and-a-pianist romp, An Evening with Groucho in the Teatro ZinZanni tent. Here's your chance to see why I've been recommending that show for so long.  Tickets here.

If you're nowhere near Chicago for it, you might be within commuting distance of the city of Irvine, California. On Sunday, October 6, he'll be doing the Groucho show at 4 PM at the Merage Jewish Community Center of Orange County. Tickets for that one are here.

As noted, some fans and friends of the late Bruce Lee are upset with the way he's depicted in Mr. Tarantino's Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. A couple of you have written to scold me for not taking a stand in defense of Bruce Lee…and I'm sorry. I don't think I ever saw anything with Bruce Lee in it except for The Green Hornet, which was obviously not him at his best or representative of his stardom.

So this is not my fight. It belongs to people who knew him like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

If you've got 40 minutes, you might want to spend it watching Anderson Cooper interviewing Stephen Colbert. It starts out to be about Colbert's show and the things he says on it about that guy in the White House who's always talking about his own perfection. Then the conversation makes a hard turn and becomes about dealing with grief and you have two smart men speaking more like friends than like interviewer and interviewee…

I frequently mention my super-talented friend Shelly Goldstein on this here blog. Here's another website not only mentioning her but interviewing her. This woman doesn't perform her act nearly as often as she should but when she does, you should go.

• Just remember: No matter how good you are at whatever you do, you still aren't as good as Simone Biles is at what she does.

So many folks I know and/or read have cast strong votes on this one that I almost wish I could vote Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down and be done with it. With me, it's more like Thumb Sideways. Glad I saw it. Liked a lot of it. Zero urge to see it again and even less to own the rumored DVD/Blu-ray with an hour (?) of deleted footage.

My pal Ken Levine gave it a pretty good review but said something like Tarantino should have cut 45 minutes out of it. This didn't surprise me coming from Ken. You could show Ken a 30-second commercial you'd produced and he'd say you should have cut 45 minutes out of it…but in this case, I think he's right. And a bit more forgiving of the length than I was.

A lot of my friends who grew up where I grew up absolutely loved the re-creation of Hollywood in 1969…and yeah, I liked the KHJ soundtrack, the reappearances of buildings in Westwood Village and on Hollywood Boulevard that are no longer there, bus signs for George Putnam and so on. I couldn't help but grin at the video clip — I didn't think there were any — of Larry "Seymour" Vincent, a local horror movie host back then who I knew. After so many articles about how Tarantino had those sections of town painstakingly redressed, I was expecting to see more of that than there was.

Someone wrote that the film captured the way people talked and acted in Hollywood back then. Well, not around me, they didn't. (And hey, what's the deal with all the shots of feet? And of POV shots of people driving around with you, the viewer, in the back seat?)

I dunno. I liked so many things about this film, many of them spinning around Brad Pitt's performance, that I can't be negative. I guess I didn't care a lot about the sad predicament of poor, deprived Rick Dalton who doesn't have a TV series at the moment and tragically hasn't quite made the leap to being Steve McQueen.

And I just started and deleted a paragraph about other things I didn't care about but a lot of them would have required a Spoiler Alert here. Me, I think I enjoyed this film more than I might have if I'd read more reviews and seen more clips. I liked all the times I was surprised that the movie seemed to be going one way and then pulled a one-eighty and went in another. And that's about all I want to tell you about it.

So here's my one-paragraph review: Didn't love it. Didn't hate it. Glad I saw it. Don't get all the feet. Could have done with less violence. Liked seeing it at the New Bev with an enthusiastic audience. Might not have liked it as much at home and if I'd read or seen more previews. Brad Pitt deserves an Oscar and not a supporting one. A little too long. I don't blame Bruce Lee's family for being pissed at his portrayal but as I have no particular feelings for Bruce Lee, that didn't bother me. And isn't it nice that a filmmaker with a strong style and approach made a movie that so many people are talking about?

Just back from a midnight screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at the New Beverly Cinema. For those of you who don't know, the New Bev is a classic cinema that tries to function like a movie theater of yore by actually projecting film. The place is owned or maybe controlled — one hears different things — by Quentin Tarantino so it was the perfect place to see his new movie.

What did I think of it? Liked a lot of it…was bored by large chunks of it…thought Brad Pitt walked away with the movie…didn't find the violence as thrilling as the folks sitting behind us did…

…and beyond that, I think I need to sleep on it. Good night.

My favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World will be screened — one show only — at 7:30 PM on Sunday, September 29 in its natural habitat. I'm speaking of course of the Arclight Cinerama Dome Theater in Hollywood, which is where the movie debuted and where I first saw it in 1963. The theater was built to show this movie and the rumor is that they plan to run it every year there. They'll also be running around the same time this year, a lot of great old films best seen on a big screen including How the West Was Won, Grand Prix, 2001, Battle of the Bulge, Lawrence of Arabia, Mad Max, Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Tickets for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World are available at this moment despite the fact that I just bought a bunch of them. Here's the link.

If you've never seen this film before, this is the place to see it. It's so much less on a small screen in your den. Some movies need a big screen and a big audience and I'm sure we'll have one that night at the Dome. In fact, it will almost certainly sell out so if you're thinking of going, don't dawdle.

And no, I don't know if there will be any special guests or speeches or anything. You can count the number of surviving cast members on one hand and still have enough fingers left to make a peace sign. I'm just going to enjoy the film for the I-don't-know-what-the-heck-number time. Won't you join me?

Graphic novelist Art Spiegelman — who I know but not all that well — was asked to pen a foreword to a collection of Golden Age Marvel comics. He was a curious choice since Art has long made clear his disdain for super-heroes and the kind of thing the book contained…but write it, he did. When asked to delete a somewhat-subtle reference to Donald Trump, Art instead withdrew his intro…and in this piece, he notes that the billionaire former CEO of Marvel, Isaac "Ike" Perlmutter, is a friend of Trump and a deep-pocketed campaign donor. I don't know if there's a connection and neither, apparently, does Art.

I like Art and find his views on comics worth listening to, even though I agree with few of the ones he holds about the super-hero variety. I think he fails to notice tongues-in-cheeks and overestimates how much of those comics are really about various people punching each other. He sees as fisticuffs what some of us see as ballet, but his views are hardly unique to him. You might want to give his essay a look-see.

New York Times obit for our friend Ernie Colón. Notice all the quotes from Ernie's friends saying what a terrific guy he was. They're right.