"I’m sorry, he was being a little bit of a B-I-T-C-H. He’s not a cowboy; he’s an actor. The West is a mythic space and there’s a lot of room on the range. I think it’s a little bit sexist."

Said Jane Campion, quoted in "Jane Campion Says Sam Elliott is ‘Being a B-I-T-C-H’ With Slam Against ‘The Power of the Dog’" (Variety). 

Here's my post from 10 days ago about what Sam Elliott said: "What the fuck does this woman—she’s a brilliant director by the way, I love her work, previous work—but what the fuck does this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American west?" 

"What the fuck does this woman—she’s a brilliant director by the way, I love her work, previous work—but what the fuck does this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American west?"

"And why in the fuck does she shoot this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana and say, ‘This is the way it was.’ That fucking rubbed me the wrong way, pal. And the myth is that they were, you know, these macho men out there with the cattle.... I just come from fucking Texas where I was hanging out with families.... Not men, but families—big, long, extended, multiple-generation families that made their living, and their lives were all about being cowboys. And, boy, when I fucking saw [Power of the Dog] , I thought, ‘What the fuck? Where are we in this world today?'... I mean, Cumberbatch never got out of his fucking chaps!"

Said Sam Elliott, on Marc Maron's podcast, quoted in "Sam Elliott Proclaims ‘Power of the Dog’ a ‘Piece of Sh-t’/The veteran actor is not a fan of Jane Campion’s Oscar-nominated cowboy movie" (L.A. Magazine).

Elliott complained about the "allusions to homosexuality throughout the fucking movie," and Marc Maron suggested "that’s what the movie’s about." And, really, why can't a cowboy movie be about anything? I guess it's irritating to see excessive honoring of a movie that's in your genre and made by an outsider to that milieu. But why can't that be the artistic leverage, the filmmaker's outsiderdom?

The gooiest ad I've ever seen — with a tinkling piano playing the National Anthem and the hilariously sentimental voice of Sam Elliott.

 

That ad played during the World Series. I'm not watching the World Series. I read about the ad in that WaPo article I linked to in the previous post. According to WaPo: "While Trump on Tuesday appealed in person to his most ardent fans with divisive themes, Joe Biden’s campaign beamed in to the nation’s living rooms during the World Series with a much broader audience in mind." 

Yes, whoever made that ad, sure had the "broader audience in mind." I can picture clever fellows laughing at their own work, comparing it to a "South Park" parody, and joking about how dumb Americans are. 

Watching that ad, a few seconds in, Meade said "Tegridy Farms," and toward the end, I said, "This is for the dumb people" and "Actually, this is very effective." I could feel the emotion they were trying to put over. Joe will bring us together — no reason why and don't you worry your head about what he'll actually do while you're in a hypnotic fog of phony-baloney togetherness.

I'm looking for the right "Tegridy Farms" ad to convey Meade's point. There's this, but as Meade said, "It doesn't have enough of that voice — you know, like that guy... that guy in 'The Big Lebowski.'" I say: "Sam Elliott! You do realize the voice in the Biden ad is Sam Elliott." Meade thought it was just some guy doing his damnedest to sound like Sam Elliott. No, that's actually Sam Elliott. You might think Sam Elliott is such an extreme that he'd be reserved for the comic exaggeration of the voice of a narrator...

  

... but the Biden campaign is using him utterly seriously, to stir our soulfully deep desire for America.

 

Why don't they just give us the marijuana already? Then we could sit back and laugh at all this absurdity. Ah, but then you'd be like me, abstaining.* They need you to vote. You've got to melt into a pool of goo and yet maintain sufficient semblance to a human creature to check a box on a mail-in ballot.

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* No, I'm not on marijuana. It doesn't even work on me. I'm naturally this way.