"People still love sex, sizzle and controversy — but the entertainment industry is too afraid to serve it up right now."

"It’s hard to believe, but 60 years ago entertainers had more guts. If you want proof, tune into 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel' on Amazon, an excellent new show about a fictional woman named Midge — clearly based on Joan Rivers — who starts a risky career as a stand-up comedienne in Greenwich Village in 1958. On stage, Midge makes jokes about her sex life, her Jewish upbringing and even rips off her top, exposing her breasts. As the crowd laps up the routine, the police arrest Midge for breaking obscenity laws. That kind of courage, that willingness to shock and offend, is what made Rivers so exciting to watch. It’s what makes great comedy. But today’s comics are afraid to go too far, out of fear of the woke police....  Here’s another: How is show business going to survive if it suddenly censors itself?"

From "The woke police have ruined entertainment" by Johnny Oleksinski in The New York Post.

Random reactions:

1. I don't remember Joan Rivers ever whipping off her shirt and exposing her breasts, nor can I even imagine such a move, given that there would have to be a layer of undergarment, not susceptible to whipping off, and I've seen "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," which is, indeed, an excellent show.

2. Some people were modestly entertained over the weekend when a South Korean ice skater's costume got unclasped and threatened to fall off. "I was like, ‘Oh no!’ If that comes undone, the whole thing could just pop off. I was terrified the entire program.... I didn’t stop because you get a deduction if you stop in the middle of a program. In my head, I was thinking, 'Is it better to stop and fix it and get the deduction or keep going?'" She kept going and we kept thinking: Is that thing going to fall off? And some of us, I'm sure, will continue to watch ice skating, now thinking, will the lady's costume — the whole thing — just pop off?

3. I don't think you need to be obscene to entertain. In fact, it was much easier to be shocking with sexual things in the old days, when you could get arrested for obscenity. But half a century later, sexual frankness isn't shocking, and the "woke police" are out to ruin you not because of sex, but because they're vigilant about the subordination of women. It's not easy to figure out how to avoid committing the kind of offenses that will get the "woke police" after you, but you men who complain about it are like the Ken counterpart to the talking Barbie who said "math class is tough" — Women's Studies class is tough.

4. Hollywood entertain — and the culture of Hollywood celebrities — has been awful for a lot of reasons for a long, long time. Can't you please just continue to entertain us? is a pathetic whine.



Are you not entertained? You shouldn't be! Man, "Gladiator" is putrid. I knew it at the time and stayed away, but can anyone justify the adulation that movie received? The answer to Russell Crowe's famous question is: no!

5. Meanwhile, speaking of bared breasts and slabs of man meat, over at the New York Times, Ross Douthat says "Let’s Ban Porn."

[W]e are supposed to be in the midst of a great sexual reassessment, a clearing-out of assumptions that serve misogyny and impose bad sex on semi-willing women.... It was only a generation ago that the unlikely (or was it?) alliance of feminists and religious conservatives made the regulation of pornography a live political debate. But between the individualistic drift of society, the invention of the internet, and the failure of the Dworkin-Falwell alliance’s predictions that porn would lead to rising rates of rape, the anti-porn case was marginalized — with religious conservatism’s surrender to Donald Trump’s playboy candidacy a seeming coup de grace.

Except it doesn’t have to be. Trump’s grotesqueries have stirred up a feminist reaction that’s more moralistic and less gamely sex-positive than the Clinton-justifying variety, and there’s no necessary reason why its moralistic gaze can’t extend to our porn addiction....

In many of them, you see a kind of female revulsion, not against Harvey Weinstein-style apex predators, but against the very different sort of male personality that a pornographic education seems to produce: a breed at once entitled and resentful, angry and undermotivated, “woke” and caddish, shaped by unprecedented possibilities for sexual gratification and frustrated that real women are less available and more complicated than the version on their screen....

Just when the prestige movies of Hollywood retreat from whatever entertainment they might have been providing, the social cons want to team up with the progressives — one more time, like it's the 80s — and scare you with proposals about banning pornography.

6. You don't have to actually ban pornography. Just have angry, righteous women go public about the  pornography habits various famous men and demand that they be fired from their jobs. I'm sure there are some members of Congress who can be Al-Frankened over porn. I'm sure a porn hysteria could be set in motion around various Trump men to generate an endless chain of headlines in the NYT like "Porn Claims Against Aide Further Roil White House." Could the White House be even more roiled that it already is? Yes!

"Hey God, you know you’re kind of a [expletive] when you’re in a movie with Russell Crowe and you’re the one with anger issues."

"Conservatives are always going on about how Americans are losing their values and their morality, well maybe it’s because you worship a guy who drowns babies."

Sayeth Bill Maher, and it's interesting logic, on many levels. 1. It's a joke; he's a comedian. 2. It's viral; I'm linking; Drudge is linking; everyone's talking. 3. It attests to his atheism, because if there really were a God like that, you wouldn't dare incur His wrath by telling the truth. Thus, it is, paradoxically, a statement that can only be made by one who doesn't believe the statement. 4. For those who do believe in God, they must resist absorbing this observation, because to see the point is to risk horrific retaliation. When you cannot escape the clutches of a "psychotic mass murderer" — to use another of Maher's epithets for God — you must appease and appease (and you may find peace in Stockholm Syndrome). 5. Tweaking the conservatives; it's always fun for liberals to think they are making steam blow out of conservative ears. 6. Dead babies... abortion... get on it, conservatives... surely, you can connect this up and hit back... this stuff always connects... babeeees... that insufferable prick said babeeees....

"Journalists are still hot in Hollywood."

Writes Maureen Dowd (who's hoping newspapers won't die):

Russell Crowe, playing a messy and morally ambiguous Washington investigative journalist, teaches the self-regarding blogger, Rachel McAdams, a thing or three, including why a pen is necessary.....

Oh, there's a blogger in that movie? A "self-regarding blogger," eh?

Meanwhile, Patrick Goldstein writes:

When I was in film school, we were bombarded with all sorts of rakish visions of newspaper life, including "Nothing Sacred," "His Girl Friday," "Sweet Smell of Success" and "All the President's Men." Even in the darker, more cynical renditions of the world, like Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole," you knew being a reporter was where the action was.

But we now live in an era of diminished expectations, especially when it comes to newspaper dramas. In "State of Play," Crowe's investigative reporter manipulates everyone to get to the bottom of the story, which involves some good old government conspiracy. The film makes a halting attempt to introduce a contemporary story line -- his paper has an annoying young blogger on the same story -- but instead of pursuing the tension in that relationship, the film simply turns the character (played by Rachel McAdams) into a perky gofer for Crowe's big-shot journalist.

Annoying young blogger....

Well, at least there's a blogger in a movie, or are bloggers stock villains in a lot of movies these days?

The actor and the concierge.

I saw Russell Crowe on Letterman last night. He was squirming and twitching his way through an apology:

Crowe told Dave he was frustrated with the hotel's poor phone service because he was "trying to fill my basic obligations to my wife who needs to know that I'm, you know, at home, I'm in bed, I haven't had too much to drink and that, primely important, that I'm alone.''

I'm assuming you follow the celebrity news. If not: Russell Crowe threw a telephone at a concierge named Nestor Estrada. The concierge, who was hit in the face, received minor lacerations and a glisteningly perfect cause of action.

Estrada's not talking to the press. My theory is that he's staying out of the public eye because he's really happy. Wouldn't you be, at this point?

Anyway, Letterman has always had a telephone on his desk, so he had the chance to do some funny business moving the phone far away from Crowe. Crowe obviously knows he's in trouble, and he's trying to salvage his life. So he grovelled like mad on camera for us. It was icky.

Unlike Nestor Estrada, who may be staying off camera because he needs to worry that he can't act duly sad and wounded, Crowe is a very capable actor, so however Crowe acted on Letterman last night is how he, along with his lawyers, has figured out it's best for him to act. Tell the story of how it's all about your deep devotion to your wife.