I was struck by People's limited vocabulary. Is "hot" all they can come up with anymore? Does does word connote sexiness anymore? Or just popularity. Also, that Wisconsin bride is so glum. Aren't brides suppose to glow with happiness? I don't think a bride's magazine would ever do a cover story on forced marriage or even grim golddigging. Too bad she didn't find that "hottest billionaire." And, in case you are curious, I did not arrange the magazines to emblazon "Charles Manson Was My Grandfather" across her chest.
"The newest, four weeks old, that’s Gizmo. Whiskers, Crooked Head because he’s got a crooked head. Let’s see — who’s left? Tiger, Love, Momma, and Homer. I don’t think I left anyone out."
More impressive than the speed at which he scrolled through the directory was that he immediately repeated the feat, à la Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting riffing through the names of his 12 (made-up) brothers.
Born October 8, 1970, the talented Mr. Matt Damon is 18,530 days old today. That's how old Wilford Brimley was on the day 'Cocoon' was released. Congrats Matt! You've reached the Brimley/Cocoon Line. pic.twitter.com/Jn0hWPUw9k
"And the most galvanizing two minutes of television of the week — two women tearfully and angrily confronting Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator — was nothing a comedy show could or should touch. Points to SNL for avoiding both. Knowing where not to go doesn’t make you funny, but it at least prevents you from being horrific.... Let nobody argue that Matt Damon doesn’t understand the fragile interior of the douche bro [Kavanaugh]; he went there. But he went there more empty-handed than should have been the case. All those referential moments weren’t shaped comic ideas so much as touchpoints of familiarity — they were SNL’s way of telling you that yes, it noticed what you noticed.... It may be that we’re in a moment — and by 'moment,' I mean 'endless soul-killing years-long slog' — so defined by anger that a certain kind of political comedy is all but impossible. You can’t win by being so afraid of losing half your audience that you say nothing...."
Writes Mark Harris at Vulture in "The Matt Damon Kavanaugh Sketch Proves How Hard It Is to Do Politics on SNL Now." He's apparently concerned not that the show doesn't go after liberals (and therefore misses half the targets of humor) but that it doesn't go after conservatives more viciously. It wouldn't be good to make fun of Christine Blasey Ford, but it would be good to kick Brett Kavanaugh around more intensely sadistically. I've got to give Harris credit, though, for pointing me to this. But this is what social media can do and that's just too rough to go on network TV:
I've watched this and I still have not read what anyone is saying about it, so let me sketch out a few thoughts before I read what people are saying.
1. Matt Damon was great. For a moment there, I thought he was channeling Chris Farley, with the idea of raging and amping up the rage, but that association left my mind as Damon continued and used a lot of the details observed in the hearing: turning the pages angrily, drinking water, sniffling.
2. Yesterday, I was predicting that "SNL" would do a Kavanaugh cold open, and I pictured lines like "I like beer, do you like beer," and I got them.
3. The character of the prosecutor Rachel Mitchell was very well observed, conveying apt criticisms that I myself have about how she was used. The SNL castmember, Aidy Bryant, did a nice job of playing the bland professional who found herself in a place where she didn't belong, asked to do something she wouldn't be permitted even to begin to do.
4. The Lindsey Graham part was a complete disaster. Kate McKinnon will get credit for suppressing any vanity and dressing as a man, but there were 2 things wrong. First, Graham was the loudest, angriest person in the room last Thursday, so McKinnon needed to top Matt Damon, and Damon set a high baseline. McKinnon has a less powerful voice than Damon, unsurprisingly, so the loudness may have been physically impossible, but she also couldn't begin to match him in conveying intense anger. Second, the writers gave her a script premised on the idea that Graham is a gay man. Some of the lines were like lines in a dating ad, saying he's 5'11" and "uncut," and the part ended with "This right now, this is my audition for Mr. Trump's cabinet and also for a regional production of 'The Crucible,' and let me tell you, queen, I was good." Queen???!!! Did I mishear that? I replayed it 10 times, and we turned on the closed captioning, which simply omitted the word (after pausing, so apparently the closed captioner didn't know what to do).
"I'm down with #MeToo. I'm not down with #MeCarthyism. Something is way off when Senator Kirsten Gillibrand can go unchallenged saying 'when we start having to talk about the differences between sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping, you are having the wrong conversation.' Can't we just be having an additional conversation? Can we only have one thought now? I get it that Al Franken had to become roadkill on The Zero Tolerance Highway — a highway, it seems, only Democrats have to drive on — but do liberals really want to become The Distinction Deniers, the people who can't tell or don't want to see a difference between an assault in a van and a backrub by the watercooler? Masturbation is normal and healthy. But not in the park. Giving up on the idea that even bad things have degrees? That is as dumb as embracing the idea of 'alternative facts.' I get it when Trump's side doesn't want to talk. He only knows 88 words. But we are supposed to be The Conversation People. Justice requires weighing things. That's why Lady Justice is holding a scale, not a sawed-off shotgun. Senator Gillibrand went on to say, 'You need to draw a line in the sand and say none of it is okay.' Yes. Agreed. But we can't walk and chew gum anymore? We can't agree that groping and rape are both unacceptable and one is worse?..."
"... on the Downsizing publicity tour, stemming from his comments about Hollywood's sexual assault crisis.* Damon probably wishes he could just shrink himself to nothing and disappear forever inside the film's 'Leisure Land,' a pint-sized monument to the suburban male ego."
1. The director is Alexander Payne, who made "Election," which is one of the best movies about politics (and high school).
2. I myself have contemplated the idea of getting small as an environmentalist solution. I didn't think about a radical medical procedure or reducing people to bug size (which is what happens in the movie), but I did think — for fictional purposes — of a government imposing a scheme of eugenics that bred human beings to the smallest natural, healthy size. I was picturing strong taxing and spending incentives along with extreme social pressure to be very small. This gets my tag "unwritten books." In my story, the government isn't fascistic about imposing this scheme. It catches on because people believe in it. It would be like the way so many women now hope to produce children who are as tall as possible. Flip that. Women would be oohing over how short each other's children are, and relatives who haven't seen the kid for a while would exclaim, My, how you haven't grown.
“That always went into my thinking. I mean, I wouldn’t want to work with somebody who—life’s too short for that.” he said [to Business Insider]. "But the question of if somebody had allegations against them, you know, it would be a case-by-case basis. You go, "What’s the story here?"'
He said that the “rotten apples” accounted for only about 1 percent of the industry and there are plenty of good men. “We're in this watershed moment, and it's great, but I think one thing that's not being talked about is there are a whole s**tload of guys - the preponderance of men I've worked with - who don't do this kind of thing and whose lives aren't going to be affected.”
He also said to ABC: “We’re going to have to figure — you know, there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right? Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated, right?”
"You had to spend about five minutes with him to know that he was a bully, he was intimidating — that was his legend... When people say everybody knew, yeah I knew he was an asshole. He was proud of that.... I knew he was a womanizer. I wouldn't want to be married to the guy, but it's not my business... But this level of criminal sexual predation is not something that I ever thought was going on" (Hollywood Reporter).
He just didn't know the level.
The clues were there and seen, but he claims not to have made any of the inferences that will put him in a bad light now.
At the same link, George Clooney is similar but different in 2 key ways:
"Harvey would talk to me about women that he'd had affairs with... I didn't necessarily believe him quite honestly, because to believe him would be to believe the worst of some actresses who were friends of mine.... The idea that this predator — this assaulter — was out there silencing women like that ... it's beyond infuriating.... There has to be a comeuppance for all of this. All of the people who were part of that chain. And then, we have to make it safe for people to feel that they can talk about it."
1. Clooney seems as though he had a simpatico relationship with Harvey. He had confidential conversations with him, and he's using the word "affairs" to refer to what Harvey did — even as he says that if the stories were true what the women were doing would be the worst.
2. And— unlike Damon — Clooney doesn't seem to have experienced Harvey as an "asshole." Clooney disapproves of the behavior that has come out recently, but he doesn't say that the man he knew first hand was "a bully... intimidating... an asshole."
Damon’s remark came in conversation with Effie Brown, the African American producer of many films, including last year’s critically lauded “Dear White People,” and a judge on “Project Greenlight.” Thus, it seemed that a white male — a very famous, Oscar-winning white male — was lecturing a lesser-known artist of color on how Hollywood works.
Damon doubled down in an interview later in the show. “It seems like you would undermine what the competition is supposed to be about, which is about giving somebody this job based entirely on merit,” he said.
Damon, not known for his social media presence, has remained silent on the exchange so far.
Brown had been concerned about how the director was "going to treat the character of Harmony, her being a prostitute, the only black person who gets beat by her white pimp." There are so many layers of problems here, and one of them, I'd say, is the endless enthusiasm for stories like that. A black prostitute beaten up by a white pimp. Why is that even the project in the first place? Quite aside from whether the director — whoever he is — will "treat the character" with — what? — sensitivity? — I'd like to know why debased crap like that is even the project in the first place.
Maybe I'd have some insight into that if I watched "Project Greenlight," but from this distance, the entire business seems so sick and inhumane that the flimsy remedy of considering hiring a black director is ludicrous. But I guess "Project Greenlight" is a competition reality show, and contestants are vying for the jobs, and in that context, allowing race to be a factor would wreck the reality show.
I assume Damon was paying no attention to the way his statements would apply outside of the realm of a reality show competition — in actual reality. And now Damon finds himself accused of opposition to affirmative action, pummeled with a hashtag and not particularly competitive in the social-media game.
After doing the film role, said Pacino, he didn’t feel he knew Spector much better – but that it didn’t matter, because his job was to explore the film character, not the real-life person.
“The play’s the thing,” said Pacino. “I was looking for the truth of the drama.”
It's not an impersonation, but something much deeper. Or that's the PR for the HBO movie. Maybe it's a preemptive defense against the criticism that he doesn't seem like Spector at all.
HBO’s new Liberace biopic was “too gay” for every studio in Hollywood, director Steven Soderbergh says.
What big name actor will be probing the depths of the truth of the drama of Liberace? Matt Damon? No. Damon's playing Liberace's younger lover. Liberace will be... Michael Douglas!
Aw, give me a break. The studios turned down this movie because it was (whine) too gay? It's obviously insufficiently commercial.
Promos of the film screened for TV critic in Los Angeles yesterday contain numerous scenes of the two male stars shirtless and about to kiss.
No one wants to see that. It's not anti-gay to say I don't want to see that. Who wants to see Michael Douglas shirtless and about to... do anything?
3. As for Warren, she says: "I feel like Scott Brown is raising ugly insinuations and I think he is doing it because he doesn’t want to talk about what is happening to Americas families. Middle class families are getting hammered and 72 hours ago Scott Brown voted to hammer them harder. And that is what this campaign should be about. Whose side do you stand on?"
Matt Damon, purporting to speak for "a lot of people who worked for Obama at the grassroots level."
"If the Democrats think that they didn't have a mandate — people are literally without any focus or leadership, just wandering out into the streets to yell right now because they're pissed off... Just imagine if they had a leader."
Matt Damon on James Bond. He, of course, thinks Bourne is better, but he's right, isn't he? Bond is mired in the 60s.
I remember a teacher in 1964 who talked about James Bond. Right about when "Goldfinger" came out, that was the high point. I remember going to see "Thunderball" and how everyone felt disappointed and sure that the James Bond fad had ended. We had some fun seeing "Diamonds Are Forever" in 1971. Bond was totally retro. How strange that the Bond movies have come out consistently every few years for almost half a century!
"The Bourne franchise is not about wearing Prada suits and looking at women coming out of the sea with bikinis on. It's about essence and truth, not frippery and surface." So says "Bourne" director Paul Greengrass, incredibly hoity-toitily.
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Magazine array at my hairdresser's.
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