"He writes graphically of his own deflowering; how he passes on the favor to his friend Carrie Fisher; of the almost-hand job he gets..."

"... in the back seat from someone’s wife when hitchhiking, as everyone used to do before the Manson murders; how Tennessee Williams grabs his testicles when he’s waiting tables at a dinner party — for better and worse, people always seem to be making a run at Griffin’s crotch — and Martin Scorsese’s wrath when he violates an order of celibacy during the filming of 'After Hours' (1985).... Much of [this memoir] is a privileged young man’s search for a place in the showbiz court to which he was born.... dropping Timothy Leary’s finest acid. Sean Connery, then playing James Bond, saved him from drowning! Bob Denver from 'Gilligan’s Island' had a temper!"

Writes Alexandra Jacobs, in "Growing Up With Joan Didion and Dominick Dunne, in the Land of Make-Believe/In his memoir 'The Friday Afternoon Club,' the Hollywood hyphenate Griffin Dunne, best known for his role in Martin Scorsese’s 'After Hours,' recounts his privileged upbringing" (NYT).

Here's the book, "The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir" (commission earned).

"On set, Scorsese made one big stipulation. He ordered Dunne not to have sex for the duration of the shoot."

"I am gobsmacked by this, but the actor was unfazed. 'It made perfect sense to me,' he says. 'I knew what he meant. The character had to be boiling over with this unfulfilled anxiety. You had to see …' He pauses. 'Not to be crude, but you had to see the semen build up to where it’s practically coming out of his eyes.' One Saturday night, though, Dunne cracked and broke the rule. The next day of filming, Scorsese spotted the change and went berserk. 'You’ve fucked up the whole picture,' he shouted. 'I don’t think I can finish it now.' Dunne says that he was probably being directed here, too. 'Because now I’m afraid. I’m terrified. And it turns out that a certain level of fear is the same as not having sex. So [Scorsese’s] second piece of direction is telling me that I’ve ruined his movie. That’s excellent direction. It brought all the old anxiety back.'"

From "I’ll never forgive or forget’ – Griffin Dunne on the darkness that overtook his gilded Hollywood upbringing/Griffin Dunne’s memoir is full of wonderful tales about Martin Scorsese, Carrie Fisher and Madonna. But the killing in 1982 of his 22-year-old sister – and the subsequent trial – overshadows everything" (The Guardian).

If a male director did that to a female....

Anyway... the Scorsese movie in question is "After Hours":

"Are teens watching Pretend It's a City?" — asks Raphael Bob-Waksberg about the Martin Scorsese series — on Netflix — with Fran Lebowitz.

Are teens watching Pretend It's a City? Have the alternative teens discovered Fran Lebowitz? I feel like for a particular sort of high schooler this show could be It Exactly - a key into a different kind of being: "Oh, I'm That." If you are a teen or know a teen, please report.

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg (@RaphaelBW) January 19, 2021

Raphael Bob-Waksberg is the comic writer associated with the animated Netflix show "Bojack Horseman." I have read and enjoyed his story collection "Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory." I follow him on Twitter, and I loved his question. I've watched the Fran Lebowitz series, and I'm the same age as she is (and lived in the NYC in the 70s and 80s), so I liked it, but what about these kids today?

Bob-Waksberg hasn't gotten too many answers. A couple teens say they've watched it, but give no report on whether they found it to be any kind of "key into a different kind of being." 

But here's the most striking answer:

alternative teens discovered her a'ight pic.twitter.com/cJ7lUd9v3G

— ☹☹⌛⌛⚰⚰♻♻ (@zaws) January 19, 2021

I clicked around and found this: 

I love Fran Lebowitz too... & I would love to be simply excited for this new netflix thing but I have some awfully depressing news... Fran Lebowitz is a TERF! I know this because in this 2010 documentary about Candy Darling, Beautiful Darling, Lebowitz articulates the TERF position just about as explicitly as you can--that Candy isn't a woman, but a man tragically and fetishistically fixated on womanhood.... I suppose I am bringing it up because, as usual, it's that thing where an older cis lesbian has been just about as explicitly hateful towards trans people as you can be, but because she's an elder or whatever we're all pretending that never happened....

TERF = trans-exclusionary radical feminist. 

You can watch the entire documentary "Beautiful Darling" here, but I'll just embed the trailer, which begins with Lebowitz talking about Darling:

 

Lebowitz expresses the opinion that you cannot be a woman if you didn't begin life as "a little girl." The power behind Candy Darling was Andy Warhol, and Lebowitz knew Warhol — she wrote for his magazine — and did not like him, as you can see in this clip from a Scorsese domentary that was HBO in 2011:

 

"This is what happens when an inside joke gets into the water supply."

ADDED: I wrote "Lebowitz expresses the opinion..." but these are not "opinions" in the non-artist sense of the word. I like to quote Oscar Wilde: "Views are held by those who are not artists."

You've got to understand that Lebowitz is a humorist. She's releasing her inside jokes into the water supply. 

"Disney has thanked four propaganda departments and a public security bureau in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China that is the site of one of the world’s worst human rights abuses happening today."

"More than a million Muslims in Xinjiang, mostly of the Uighur minority, have been imprisoned in concentration camps.... Disney... worked with regions where genocide is occurring, and thanked government departments that are helping to carry it out....  Disney executives had thought that the original 'Mulan' would please both the Chinese government and Chinese filmgoers. But because Disney had distributed 'Kundun' (1997), a film glorifying the Dalai Lama, Beijing restricted the studio’s ability to work in China. Disney spent the next several years trying to get back into the party’s good graces. 'We made a stupid mistake in releasing "Kundun,"' the then-CEO of Disney Michael Eisner told Premier Zhu Rongji in October 1998. 'Here I want to apologize, and in the future we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening.' Since then, Disney has endeavored to please Beijing...."

From "Why Disney’s new ‘Mulan’ is a scandal" (WaPo).

"Kundun" deserves a more respectful description than "a film glorifying the Dalai Lama"! This is a beautiful film directed by Martin Scorsese:

"Ricky Gervais’ Golden Globes Jokes, Ranked in Order of Dickishness/From the righteously provocative to the just plain mean."

At Slate.

I don't care enough about movies and TV shows and awards to watch the Golden Globes, but I almost did, just to watch Ricky, and I kind of regret missing it. And I missed it hard, because I was sitting with the remote control within reach when I knew it was on, and I knew I could record it and then just watch the Ricky parts, but I actively held back, because I didn't want to see the Hollywood faces in the audience, phonily howling at jokes (or otherwise making faces, if something crosses whatever line they're able to calculate has been crossed).

But NBC gives us the whole monologue on YouTube, so I have no regrets:



ADDED: The stars object to SO many of the jokes. Now, that's pretty funny. I like the grace with with Martin Scorsese takes the joke at his expense. Scroll to 4:29 to see that segment.

AND: Don Jr. loved it:

OMG🔥🔥🔥 If you watch one thing today watch this. It’s about time someone in Hollywood says is it. RT!!!pic.twitter.com/DhGeMvyWNZ

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 6, 2020

"Today... there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination."

"The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other. For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness."

Writes Martin Scorsese in "Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain/Cinema is an art form that brings you the unexpected. In superhero movies, nothing is at risk, a director says" (NYT).

The top-rated comment over there (by a lot) is:

You don’t have to be an Academy Award winner like Scorsese to understand what’s going on in America these days and it isn’t confined to cinema, either. Intellectual curiosity has been replaced by ostentatious consumption, quality by quantity and political activism by slogans that fit on baseball caps. The barbarians are not at the gates, they’ve overrun us.

That might sound like another knee-jerk blaming of Trump, but that's reversing cause and effect. In the reasoning of that comment, Trump is someone who understood American culture deeply enough to speak to us. Other politicians can stand back, deplore Trump's style, and continue in the old-school form, but reaching people in great numbers is even more important in electoral politics than in the movie business. Scorsese says these movies are not cinema, and Trump antagonists say he is not presidential. You see what happens.

"I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them..."

"... as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being."

From "Martin Scorsese says Marvel movies ‘aren’t cinema,’ they’re ‘theme parks.'"

Of course, literally, these things are cinema. Scorsese is making a witticism in the tradition of Truman Capote's "That’s not writing, that’s typing" (disrespecting Jack Kerouac's "On the Road").

Did Capote actually say that? Here's Quote Investigator on the subject. Truman Capote used various versions of the witticism — against Kerouac and others:

"Life isn't about finding yourself — or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself."

"He lives simply, on 'the little bit of money' he inherited, and paints whatever he feels like."

"The canvases by his bathtub are of the 20 children gunned down three years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School. 'The minute they got shot, I was crying and painting,' he says. 'I was going to paint just one girl and one boy, but then I felt guilty. What about the fat kid?' So he painted them all, grouping the portraits in one giant frame and showing it at Villanova University, where, he says, only three people came out on a snowy night to see it. He offered the paintings to Sandy Hook as a memorial, he says, but was rebuffed: 'So f–k ’em. If someone offers me $10 and is willing to hang it and respect it, I’ll give it to ’em.'"

Said Chuck Connelly, quoted in a NY Post article with a somewhat confusing headline "Inside the secret world of Scorsese’s art world nemesis." Connelly was the model for the raging artist played by Nick Nolte in Martin Scorsese's contribution to the film "New York Stories."

He was part of the 1980s art scene but withdrew, oddly, and now has 3,000 paintings hoarded at home.

That's 27-and-a-third million dollars per Elvis.

Andy Warhol's "Triple Elvis" sells for $82 million.

That makes me want to do a search in one of my favorite books, "The Andy Warhol Diaries":

Sunday, May 18, 1980 

John Powers called and told me the prices at the art auctions, and the Triple Elvis went for $ 75,000 and he said he thought that was a fair price so I felt okay, but then he told me that the Lichtenstein went for $ 250,000 so I felt bad. Oh, and the three Jackies went for only $ 8,000, so that was a bargain.

Hey. Did Andy Warhol invent the "Oh, and..." locution that has infected American writing?

Martin Scorsese's George Harrison movie.

"He was trying to find a way to simplicity, a way to live truthfully and compassionately. It was never a straight line, but that's not the point. I think he found an understanding: that there's no such thing as 'success' - there's just the path."

Sayeth Scorsese.

Live-blogging the Golden Globes.

1. Oh, why not? Ricky Gervais is here, hosting, making jokes about the tininess of his penis and how it looks big in his small hands where it usually is. That might sound funnier if it weren't 7 pm (Central Time) on network TV. Then, here's Nicole Kidman looking great with red hair and a light pink dress featuring prominent tiny nipples. She reminds us about Haiti, then hands out the best supporting actress award to Mo'nique, who is overdraped in gold satin and fabulously made up with ultralong eyelashes. Mo'nique loves God and all the other actors in her movie "Precious."

2. Most of the women are wearing asymmetrical dresses, and Julianna Margulies, who won the TV actress award, looked like she got confused getting into the straps of hers. Michael C. Hall, who won the TV actor award, has on a wool stocking cap for some reason. As a tribute to victims of the Haitian earthquake? I don't know. [ADDED: I'm told Hall has cancer. I'm sorry.]

3. The set is orange. I'm tired of looking at orange. Is it supposed to be "golden"? Hey, suddenly: Cher! She looks statuesque and hourglassy. It's the song award. Paul McCartney is nominated and there, but he doesn't win.

4. Meryl Streep wins best [comedy/musical] actress for "Julie and Julia." She's shrouded in a big black dress clamped on with a thick buckled belt. But she has one naked shoulder left out of the shroud, so she's on the asymmetry kick with everyone else. She pretends she didn't remember what she wanted to say and stammers her way into a tribute to her mother and a mini-breakdown over all the suffering in the world.

5. Drew Barrymore gets a TV actress award for "Grey Gardens." She's wearing the best outfit for the day, but it's quite silly, covered in crystal pimples with a glitter hedgehog at one shoulder and the opposite hip.

6. Samuel L. Jackson introduces "a real-life movie star" — Sophia Loren. She's got a beautiful symmetrical dress. It's black, outlining her famous breasts and nipping in at her should-be-equally-famous waist, and it has sheer sleeves that are shaded at the shoulders with a sprinkling of black beads for an ombre effect. She gives the foreign film award to "The White Ribbon."

7. "Mad Man" is the best TV show. The best TV actress is Chloe Sevigny (for "Big Love"). Cool. I like her. She's wearing an insane widely-ruffled mauve dress and she's gasping about ripping it, not that she ripped it in any kind of an interesting way.

8. Halle Berry looks sharp and sleek in a tight black dress with little cap sleeves and a giant plunge down the chest. Her hair is crisply modern too — short and sticking up on top. She gives the supporting movie actor award to Christoph Waltz, who was so wonderful as the Nazi in "Inglourious Basterds."

9. "Marty eats, drinks, and sleeps film. I hear there are videos on the internet of Marty having sex with film." It's Robert DeNiro, talking about Martin Scorsese, who's getting one of these lifetime awards. Cool clip show, reminding me, among other things, of how much I love...  "After Hours"... and "King of Comedy"....

10. Oh, they love Jodie Foster. She's wearing a plain black dress, that makes it's nod to asymmetry with a slit up the left leg. She's not giving an award, just presenting one of the films. Gervais, sipping from that beer he's got at the lectern: "I like a drink as much as the next man... unless the next man... is Mel Gibson." Here's Gibson, acting drunk, for fun... supposedly. The category is director, and the award goes to ... suspense... James Cameron. He doesn't say "I'm the king of  the world." He tells us he's got to "pee something fierce."

11. The best TV show is "Glee." That's nice, I guess. "This is for everybody who got a wedgie in high school."

12. Ah, we're almost done. It's the best comedy/musical award. "The Hangover." Mike Tyson is involved. Strange!

13. Arnold Schwarzenegger! The actor. It's as if that whole thing about him being governor was just some crazy dream. He presents "Avatar," which looks really annoying. Then Mickey Rourke comes out — in a cowboy hat — to do the drama actress award. It's Mickey because he won best actor last year, not because he's the height of Hollywood glamour, which he's not. The winner is Sandra Bullock, and Mickey looks really disappointed. Sandra is wearing a very filmy, very purple dress.

14. Sally Hutton announces the drama actor award. She's wearing a nutty short dress. It's Robert Downey Jr.! I've always loved him. He's got a whole standup routine going. He's not going to thank anyone... but he does. "Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms." [ADDED: Oops. That was the comedy/musical actor. Hmm. Sherlock Holmes is comedy? Or was there music?]

15. The best drama actor is actually Jeff Bridges. The presenter was the lovely Kate Winslet, who's wearing a simple black dress with one thick vertical strap on the right side. Asymmetry. Jeff gets a standing O. Why? Because he's The Dude? "You're really screwing up my 'under appreciated' status," he says.

16. The best drama movie — presented by Julia Roberts, who thought it was cute to tell her kids to go to bed — is "Avatar." James Cameron warns us that now he has peed, so he's going to blabber. He loves his job. We have the best job. "Give it up for yourselves." He says that twice. Because "that's the most amazing thing." Jeesh. "'Avatar' asks us to see that everything is connected, all human beings to each other, and us to the earth."

17. And us to bed!

"George Harrison's music and his search for spiritual meaning is a story that still resonates today and I'm looking forward to delving deeper."

Says Martin Scorsese, who's making a documentary about -- making his camera gently weep for? -- the Quiet Beatle.

"I don't want an egg at this hour."

ADDED: It's always a Fellini film chez Althouse. We're watching this one.

MORE: Martin Scorsese has this in today's NYT:

[Michelangelo Antonioni's] “L’Avventura” gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies, greater even than ... “La Dolce Vita.” At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked “L’Avventura.” I knew I was firmly on Antonioni’s side of the line, but if you’d asked me at the time, I’m not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini’s pictures and I admired “La Dolce Vita,” but I was challenged by “L’Avventura.” Fellini’s film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni’s film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless. (It was two years later when I caught up with Fellini again, and had the same kind of epiphany with “8 ½.”)...

I crossed paths with Antonioni a number of times over the years....

But it was his images that I knew, much better than the man himself. Images that continue to haunt me, inspire me. To expand my sense of what it is to be alive in the world.

I'm in the Fellini camp -- can we go to a place called Fellini Camp? -- where the images continue to haunt me and inspire me and expand my sense of what it is to eat an egg or a banana.

AND: Right under Scorsese's piece, Woody Allen writes about Antonioni's death partner, Ingmar Bergman:

To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: “Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?” or “You think it will be interesting to make a movie where the camera never moves an inch and the actors just enter and exit frame? Or would people just laugh at me?”...

I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one. Bergman made about 60 films in his lifetime, I have made 38. At least if I can’t rise to his quality maybe I can approach his quantity.

Because, among other things, size matters:






That's from "Sleeper," and note that Woody Allen also made a film called "Bananas."

Now, let's compare two men -- Woody Allen and Marcello Mastroianni -- as they encounter the banana:





It's true that Woody has the bigger banana, but I'm going with Marcello!

AND: The weirdest part of it is that Woody Allen has a movie that is entirely about a recipe for egg salad!

"The doddering American Film Institute has finally updated its list of the best 100 films..."

"... (i.e., best big-studio fiction blockbusters made with white marquee stars and male directors in the good ol' days of Kabuki pomposity like Ben Hur)," writes New York magazine:

For New Yorkers, the Los Angeles–based list is predictably awful, but still worse than the last: Do The Right Thing's token inclusion at pitiful No. 94 stings worse than its omission in 1997 and many of the city's great filmmakers are still missing (Cassavetes, for starters). We never expected to see some of our personal faves (David Edelstein respects no list without Larry Cohen's Q, for instance), but we began fuming when we noticed that mainstream picks like Sweet Smell of Success and Scarlett Street didn't even make the 400-film ballot. Then we noticed Mean Streets was off the list and grew angrier. Our pique peaked when we noticed that Toy Story had been added — and Woody Allen's Manhattan had not.

I love the New York perspective that it's all a big struggle between the two giant coastal cities. It's so Woody Allenish. And the Woody Allen film they put on the list -- "Annie Hall" -- is itself about the struggle between the two cities. One character is deeply, neurotically bonded to New York (and a basket case on his trip to L.A. ) and the other blooms in L.A. By contrast, "Manhattan" fixates on Manhattan. Nowhere else matters.

The AFI's list is obviously not the 100 best films, but a collection of best films fiitting various categories that seem significant enough to include. Although a few directors -- Hitchcock, Scorsese, Chaplin -- are given more than one slot, it's pretty obvious that there is a second level category that the AFI deemed worthy of one slot. Thus, we have one, but only one D.W. Griffith film on the list (and it's not "Birth of a Nation"), and one but only one Woody Allen film. It's not a question, then, of whether "Manhattan" is better than "Ben-Hur," but only which Woody Allen film should get the Woody Allen slot.

***

This is my second post on the AFI list, and in the first, I said I'd tell you the films on the list I haven't seen, so let me do that now:

30. "Apocalypse Now," 1979.
45. "Shane," 1953.
59. "Nashville," 1975.
66. "Raiders of the Lost Ark," 1981.
72. "The Shawshank Redemption," 1994.
73. "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," 1969.
81. "Spartacus," 1960.
82. "Sunrise," 1927.
90. "Swing Time," 1936.
95. "The Last Picture Show," 1971.
100. "Ben-Hur," 1959.

Four of those movies I've had in my DVD collection for years and keep meaning to watch. I'm not able to admit that I never want to watch them. Three of them have made it into the DVD player. Two of those I tried to watch, maybe for an hour, then paused. I still half think -- months or years later -- that I'm going to finish. The third is the DVD I chose to test out my HDTV when I first set it up. I watched 5 minutes and thought -- brilliant! -- why have I gone all these years without seeing this movie?

One of those movies -- "Sunrise" -- is something I would have seen long ago if it were around and playing in the revival houses back in the 1970s when I did most of my catching up with movies that were made before my time. It's not on DVD either. So my failure to see that says nothing about my preferences.

The rest of them... it just doesn't matter. I've had enough Fred and Ginger in various clips of their dancing and don't need to sit through "Swing Time." And a few of those movies I actively snubbed when they first ran, and I don't feel any more warmly toward them because they made this list.

As for "Shane," well, I used to love the old TV show "Shane," with David Carradine. That's the original for me personally.

Simulblogging the Oscars!

I've got to get home first. The flight to Madison is boarding, so let me get going. Start without me!

ADDED #1: Hey, I made it home. No flight delays, but you should have seen how buried my car was. Well, you will see, because I took pictures. Anyway, I can see you're way ahead of me talking about this. 29 comments as I start. But the TiVo is running, and I've seen the really charming Errol Morris film that kicked things off. A sweet, self-effacing attitude. And now, here's Ellen DeGeneres, continuing the sweet, charming, self-effacing tone. She's wearing a dark red velvet tuxedo -- with white shoes -- and looks very sharp. Her first joke makes me laugh. She has a nice joke about Americans not voting for Jennifer Hudson (on "American Idol") and then how they did vote for Al Gore. For no apparent reason, a gospel choir comes out and Ellen dances and plays tambourine. Now, for the first award, for Art Direction, and it's Nicole Kidman, looking very Barbie-like, all plastic-y and shiny. She's wearing an impossibly tall, thin red dress, with a knot at the side of the neck. The award goes to "Pan's Labyrinth."

ADDED #2: They didn't start with a supporting acting award. Good! Now, there's a comedy song, and I'm using it as a chance to try to catch up with you guys. On to the next award: makeup! Again, with the "Pan's Labyrinth." The makeup did look pretty cool. Ooh, now it's Abigail Breslin and Jaden Smith. Kids. They're short, so they do the nominees for shorts. Sorry, it's another fast-forward opportunity.

ADDED #3: Wow, you guys are up to 43 comments. I'm desperately trying to catch up with you. Ooh, it's Rachel Weisz. She looks just great in a strapless beige dress that has a nice jeweled swirl across the chest. I like her dark red lipstick and piece-y dark brown hair. She's doing the Supporting Actor award. Aw, Eddie Murphy looks like he really wants to win. It's Alan Arkin. My favorite. I love this guy. He puts the Oscar down on the floor so he can pull out his speech. The film -- "Little Miss Sunshine" -- can help us in our "fragmented times." It's a choice not to act out the speech. Surely, he could have memorized it. Maybe he was acting the part of a guy reading a speech.

ADDED #4: Melissa Etheridge performs the song from "An Inconvenient Truth," and then out come Leonardo DiCaprio and Vice President Al Gore. Al looks happy (and carries his great weight well). Leo asks him if he's got anything he'd like to announce. He says he's "just here for the movies." He thanks Leo for being "such a great ally" in his anti-global-warming efforts. Leo's all "thank you, sir," and the camera -- pretty randomly -- goes to Jerry Seinfeld, who's caught looking like this:



Cameron Diaz, who also has piece-y dark brown hair, gives the award for animation to "Happy Feet," and she's unbearable cutesy and phony. Nice clip show about movies about writers. At the end, we see Jack Nicholson -- who was featured in the clips for both "The Shining" and "As Good As It Gets" -- and he's shaved totally bald. (A tribute to Britney Spears?)

ADDED #5: "The Departed" wins Best Original Screenplay. Hey, you guys are up to 75 comments. I'm still not reading them, because I'm trying to catch up. I'm sure it's all clever and stuff. There's a great commercial for American Express -- must be a Jerry Seinfeld thing, explaining the "random" shot noted above. And a beautiful ad for iPhone... of lots of hellos from movies. (No need to convince me to buy one of those things when they are available, so the commercial seems to just be about getting me more excited about it.) They're doing the costumes award now. "Marie Antoinette" wins. Tom Cruise presents the Jean Hersholt "humanitarian" award to Sherry Lansing. We're in the depressing "dead" center of the show now, so let me regale you with pix of my car, as I encountered it after my long trip home. It was in this deep:



And here's how it looked after digging just enough of a space to back it out:



How did I get it dug out? Am I the kind of person who keeps a shovel in the trunk? No, but as I was walking to the car, dreading seeing how locked in it was, I ran across a woman with a shovel, and she loaned it to me. Then, carrying a shovel, I attracted a man who helped me because he needed a shovel and a second man who had his own shovel. These two guys dug out the snow while I scraped the windows and lights. (I do keep a scraper!) And I was out in no time. And don't just say: Guys! Because there was also that woman with the shovel. I asked her, "Do you work here?" And she said no, she just drove over with a shovel because a friend called her up, and she trusted me to return the shovel to a spot in the snow that we agreed on. I left that trust with Guy #1 and I'm sure he kept it.

ADDED #6: Speaking of movies, I got my little movie up at last in the previous post. You can hear me and my long-time ex-husband RLC talking about things seen in a record store window. Whoa! You guys are up to 119 comments! Okay, I've gotta rush. Visual Effects. Doesn't Naomi Watts look lovely in that yellow-gold, strapless dress with a thick black band under the breasts? "Pirates of the Caribbean" wins. Now, we see Catherine Deneuve for... what the hell is this? Ah! There's Sacha Baron Cohen in the audience. He's so adorable! "Best Foreign Language Film. "The Lives of Others." Oooh! It's George Clooney. He's handsome! Best Supporting Actress!!! Jennifer Hudson!!!!! She says: "Look what God can do!"

ADDED #7: It's Jerry Seinfeld. He's doing the Documentary award. Oh, so they showed him before when Al was on stage because later he was going to present the award for which Al is nominated. Seems too fix-y to me. And Al wins the Oscar!!!!! Closeup of the oh-so-pleased Steven Spielberg. Why did they make the film? Because of the problem of global warming??? Oh, no: "We were moved to act by this man." So says the director, reaching over to touch the hem of Al Gore's garment. He's gasping with awe. It's kinda embarrassing. He pumps the Oscar weirdly twice in Al's direction and he says "We share this with you." The camera goes to Larry David, clapping righteously. Now, Gore speaks: global warming is "not a political issue, it's a moral issue." I like Al. He makes his wooden squareness hip and cool.

ADDED #8: Kirsten Dunst is wearing a beautiful, witty dress. It's gray and has a see-through section at the top with a collar that seems to belong on a prim blouse. It's intelligent. And the dress makes me love Kirsten! The award is Original Screenplay, and it goes to "Little Miss Sunshine." Now, we see Jennifer Hudson sing a song, which must be fun for her, having already won the Oscar. I try to imagine how Simon Cowell would detect deficiency. Beyonce joins her, and -- isn't it true? -- Beyonce is the better singer. Does Beyonce feel she needs to prove her superiority?

ADDED #9: There's a Michael Mann montage about "America." We're racist war mongers, you know. Then the elegant Thelma Schoonmaker wins the editing award for "The Departed." Now, we see Jodie Foster, dragging excess yards of slate-blue fabric along with her. But she's introducing my favorite segment, In Memoriam. I'll impolitely name the ones that had the most effect on me: Don Knotts, Sven Nykvist, Robert Altman.

ADDED #10: Phillip Seymour Hoffman arrives to give the Best Actress award. It's no surprise that the wonderful Helen Mirren wins. I love the array of actresses as the award is announced. They all do a perfect performance of the thought: Indeed, Helen Mirren is grand! I love the way Mirren "salutes" Elizabeth Windsor.

ADDED #11: It's Reese Witherspoon, here to give the award for Best Actor. She's got major hair extensions and a simple black strapless gown. Oh, don't you want Peter O'Toole to win? Yikes, what is that incredibly smarmy look Jada Pinkett Smith gives Will? Does she hate him + is a terrible actress? And it goes, as expected, to Forest Whitaker. The look on Peter O'Toole's face says: And now, it's impossible. He's very old. Whitaker raves -- touchingly -- about how acting is the belief that we can connect to others and create a new reality.

ADDED #12: Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg gang up to deliver the long-awaited Oscar to Martin Scorsese, and the Oscar really does go to Marty. Li'l Marty hugs C, L, and S. He stammers and just thanks a lot of people. "So many people over the years have been wishin' this thing for me."

ADDED #13: Damn! I never caught up! I've been struggling and fast-forwarding, but I never could make it. I hope you accept my belated scribblings! Well, Best Picture now. Presenting: Diane Keaton (swathed in black) and Jack Nicholson (gloriously bald). I'm just thinking about how nobody made a political statement tonight. They kept it clean and elegant. And the winner is... "The Departed." Excellent!

ADDED #14: I turn off the lights and collect my bags to trudge upstairs after a long day. I peer out the front door and see the people came to shovel my walks as I was watching the Oscars. I'd parked my car in the street and stalked through foot high snow when I got home tonight. So I put on my big down coat and went outside to pull my car into the driveway. Let me leave you with one last shot of my car at the airport. Actually, this one is so abstract, I'm not positive it is my car:

Golden Globes!

Hey, watch the Golden Globes with me! Comment away. I'll be adding to this post, with each update indicated by a number.

1. And they start right up with no preliminaries and -- even nicer -- they give the first two awards to two of my favorite people: Jennifer Hudson and Prince. Hudson, who wins Best Supporting Actress for "Dreamgirls" and accepts the prize from the lovely George Clooney, says thanks for making her "feel like an actress." Prince, who wins for some song in "Happy Feet," is not there, and Justin Timberlake, who for a long time seems not to know what to do, finally accepts the award for him, and, to do it, he does a deep knee bend to get down to a 5'1" height and symbolize the tiny purple genius.

2. Jeremy Irons has big bags under his eyes and is dressed in a strange but elegant suit that seems to come from the 19th century. He wins in some TV Supporting category. Next comes TV Dramatic Actress. Kyra Sedgwick. Her dress seems to come from ancient Greece.

3. Emily Blunt. Never heard of her... Best TV Dramatic Actor: Hugh Laurie... "Cars" wins for animation.... Wow, we're up to Best Actress, and with very little fanfare, we hear it's Meryl Streep. Oh, it's just Best Actress in the Musical/Comedy. Meryl also seems to be wearing a dress from ancient Greece. She says "I think I've worked with everybody in the room" in an affected voice that seems intended to impersonate an actress from the past that I can almost remember. I'm wracking my brain and rewinding the the TiVo, and I just can't get it. It's not Katharine Hepburn. It's someone more precious sounding.

4. Best Supporting Actor. Eddie Murphy. He's charming and sweet. Helen Mirren wins for her TV queen role (Elizabeth I). Whether she'll win for her big movie queen role (Elizabeth II) remains to be seen.

5. Cameron Diaz is transformed by black hair. She wears multi-layers of ruffles and yet somehow the effect is not wedding-cake. She seems very pleased by her ability to inform us that "The Departed" is another Scorsese masterpiece.... Next is the Best Screenplay award. "The Queen." The writer tries to make it a political speech about how public protest can affect political leaders. Just when you think you're about to hear about the current war, he's told to wrap up, and he does with a quick "I love you all."... TV Comedy actor: Alec Baldwin. He seems like an amusing guy, referring to the "autumn of my career."

6. "Ugly Betty" wins for Best TV Comedy. Do you watch that show? I watched the first episode, on the theory that it was supposed to be good. It wasn't terrible, but I didn't like it enough to stay with it. But then I don't really watch TV sitcoms, so pay no attention to me on this.

7. How stringy our Sharon Stone has become. The award is for foreign language film, and it goes to Clint Eastwood for "Letters From Iwo Jima," and the thought shoots through my head that I should see a movie every week. "You don't know what this does for my confidence," Clint says. He's wearing all black and a little silver bow tie.... In the comments, people are talking about whether Angelina Jolie is in a bad mood. Which is what's really important. She's so beautiful, and she's got the beautiful man, so, please, Lord, let her be unhappy.

8. Oh, Prince is in the audience. He was too late to receive his award. No wonder Timberlake was confused. We're told Prince was stuck in traffic. I find it hard to believe the world does not stop to allow the diminutive deity to proceed, but -- oh! -- Prince is there. Your humble blogger breaks down and cries.

9. Musical/Comedy TV Actress. Some terrific ladies. And it goes -- I'm not surprised -- to America Ferrera. Who, like every other woman there tonight, is wearing ancient Grecian garb. She's sweet, talking about "beauty that is deeper than what we see." Of course, she is lovely, but if she can speak for the ugly, that's nice. She thanks "Mommy." And you know you should all thank Mommy.

10. Tom Hanks is giving some award to Warren Beatty, who has such an embarrassingly self-satified look on his face. "What balls this man has. What balls this man has. And by balls, of course, I mean artistic vision and fortitude. What balls has Warren Beatty." Oh, he'll always be Milton Armitage to me.

11. Martin Scorsese wins the Best Director award, which he accepts with touching geeky fan style. He wanted to make a movie like "Public Enemy" or "Angels with Dirty Faces," and he lists all the actors he worked with on "The Departed," including "the great" Alec Baldwin... Next is the Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy award, and it goes to the brilliant man I love so much, Sacha Baron Cohen! As he walks up to the stage, they play his Kazakhstan national anthem. Here's a phrase: "When I saw your two wrinkled Golden Globes on my chin."

12. For dramatic acting, the two admirable Brits collect awards. Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker.

13. To present the last award, out comes our true American, Arnold Schwarzenegger, on crutches. The award for best dramatic movie goes to "Babel." And as Angelina Jolie gives Brad Pitt a slap on the back of the neck, I decide I should go see that movie.

ADDED, NEXT MORNING: Isn't it odd that there were two -- count 'em, two! -- speeches about testicles? (From Tom Hanks and Sacha Baron Cohen.)

"I gave him a personality. He was the equivalent of nonvintage wine, cheap plonk, and now, as a result of being around me, he's become full-bodied."

Said Simon Cowell about Ryan Seacrest -- in this big NYT article about Seacrest. (I like Seacrest. He's the glue that holds "American Idol" together. He does a lot more than you may notice.)

Speaking of Simon Cowell, you may have missed the piece in The New Republic about him. (Subscription-only link.) Franklin Foer says critics of "American Idol" are missing its "true contribution to culture":

That contribution comes in the form of Cowell.... Every week, he finds new pejorative descriptions for the lame music he encounters. "I think you're possibly the worst singer in the world," he has quipped. Or, "You take singing lessons? Do you have a lawyer? Get a lawyer and sue your singing teacher." But, far from precipitating cultural decline, these vicious performances have restored authority to the one figure that can salvage us from doom: the critic.

Critics don't just exist as arbiters of taste and explicators of art. They exist to bemoan their own inability to influence the world. In an essay on book reviewing, George Orwell once portrayed the critic as "a man in a moth-eaten dressing gown ... [a] down-trodden, nerve-racked creature." This self-pitying streak often makes critics sound like militant Muslim enthusiasts for the lost caliphate of Al Andalus--always pining, with somewhat selective memory, for the moment when they exerted genuine authority over Western civilization....

"American Idol," however, puts the lie to this nostalgic story line. Whatever influence Edmund Wilson may have achieved in his prime, it hardly compares with the power of Cowell....

On the program, "Idol" judges render assessments but don't actually vote for contestants. Their power rests entirely in their ability to sway the public--in other words, with the power of their criticism....

Cowell doesn't just influence the outcome of the competition; he affects its substance. In response to Cowell's advice, raw-sounding rockers have experimented with unfamiliar genres to expose their "sensitive side"; torch singers have dropped their crutch reliance on ballads. Of course, Cowell isn't shy about claiming credit for these small victories. ("Well, I have to take a certain amount of credit for that performance," he boasted several weeks ago.) When spreading the good news about his favored singers, Cowell avoids the fate of many contemporary critics, especially movie reviewers. After watching so much dreck, movie reviewers get so excited when they encounter a solidly constructed film that they lose control of their faculties, slathering Million Dollar Baby and Crash with superlatives formerly reserved for Fellini and Scorsese. Cowell, on the other hand, will frequently begin his most effusive comments with a deprecating remark about the contestant's hair style or past performances. And, even in his most enthusiastic moments, he'll rarely say more than "very good" or "it worked." But, in his restraint, he has achieved the ultimate critical fantasy--to actually shape the objects of criticism, to play the role of co-creator.

Foer's piece comes closer than anything else I've ever read to explaining my fascination with "American Idol" to me. I don't like the music very much. I like the criticism in action and the chance to hear an honest slam -- startlingly delivered right to the face of an optimistic, ambitious young person.

(Hey, the big finale is on tonight!)

The Althouse comments persona.

Here at Althouse, there's the Althouse of the front page posts and the Althouse of the comments. Things are a little more experimental and brainstormy in the comments. I'm used to having my posts linked, but it's surprising to get something I toss out in the comments linked. Not that I think it's off limits. I like links!

Today, I risked saying this in the comments section of that Bob Dylan post:

To be a great artist is inherently right wing. A great artist like Dylan or Picasso may have some superficial, naive, lefty things to say, but underneath, where it counts, there is a strong individual, taking responsibility for his place in the world and focusing on that.

That got linked over at Volokh Conspiracy (from the elusive Juan Non-Volokh), which led to a link at Crooked Timber, and now people are talking about my comment in the comments at both places, saying things like:

"Jesus, what an absolute load of bollocks. Artists are (in)famously left wing. Reading Althouse and Reynolds is like stepping through the looking glass. They say the most inane things as if they are just God’s own truth."

And:

"Are they actually insane? Has it come to this, that the insane now have tenured positions in law schools across the country? It’s clearly a product of wrongheaded liberal do-gooders in the 70s who made it harder to commit the delusional."

(I love the way Glenn Reynolds comes in for a gratuitous beating.)

Anyway, I was just trying on a little idea there in the back room, in honor of Right Wing Bob, giving you folks something to react to in the ranging conversation that is the comments page. So, react away. But try to focus on the actual point. I'm not saying great artists consciously adopt the agenda of the political right. I'm saying there is something right wing about the sort of mentality you have to adopt in order to be a great artist! Think it through people. Don't just blow a gasket!

UPDATE: Here's a comment that I'm going to leave over at Volokh in response to a commenter:

Dustin writes, "I feel somewhat disconnected from the discussion. How do 'left-wing' and 'right-wing', political classifications, apply to art and artists? Since 99% of artists who try to be 'political' an any which way, end up failing miserably and ebarassing [sic] themselves, I'm lincined [sic] to believe that good artists are neither left or right wing; and I don't mean that in a sesame street way."

You're asking a question that very nicely represents the way people keep misunderstanding my statement. I'm not saying that the great artist adopts a right wing political ideology. If fact, I agree with you that the great artist needs to separate himself from politics and certainly to get it out of his art. I'm saying there's something right wing about doing that. My comment arose in a discussion of the Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan, which shows how he did not fit in with the left wing folksingers who tried very hard to keep him in their fold and felt betrayed when he alienated himself from them. My observation is that he was, at heart, a great artist, and it was not possible to do what was needed to be a good lefty, which would require a strong focus on group goals and communal values. He certainly wasn't switching to right wing politics. He was getting out of politics.

I'm calling that right wing. It's certainly antithetical to left wing politics, which requires you to remain engaged and would require the artist to include politics in his art. The great artist sees that those requirements will drag him down. That's what I'm theorizing. Feel free to debate that and reject it if you want. All I'd like to ask is that you get your mind around what I'm trying to say before reflexively rejecting it. I'm not surprised that lefty bloggers and commenters can't do this. They've got to enforce the kind of values that freaked Bob Dylan out and made him want to disengage from their clutches. And don't even get me started on my experience with lefty bloggers. They treat me miserably, and if I tried to get along with them, it would guarantee mediocrity. And thus, I am a right wing blogger – even though I don’t share many beliefs with right wing politicos.

Dare I drop it over at CT too?

UPDATE: I'm glad I've started a conversation. But why are the people on the other side of the conversation so boring? All they say is that I'm "stupid" or my comment is "nonsense." What I said is apparently interesting enough to respond to, but you don't say anything interesting in response. Say something about art! Say something new and unusual about why I'm so wrong! Dammit! I can see people are talking about me, and I go over to hear what they are saying, and it's a thuddingly dull remark.

"So what exactly did Scorsese do?"

I'm not quite getting all the fuss over the "No Direction Home" documentary about Bob Dylan. I had the same questions the reviewer in The Guardian had:

I think most people watching will assume that [the interview with Bob Dylan] is new, most probably with Scorsese himself asking the questions. Certainly there's nothing to suggest that it isn't. It turns out though, that this interview happened in 2000, and it was conducted by Jeff Rosen, Dylan's manager. ...

It seems strange that Scorsese apparently turned down the opportunity to speak more with Dylan, and instead ran with the old stuff from five years ago. So what exactly did Scorsese do? An (admittedly very beautiful) editing job? But then what did David Tedeschi, the editor, do? Was Scorsese principally just a name to use as ammunition in persuading people to surrender their archive material?

Now, I haven't watched the whole documentary yet. I've only watched the second half of the first half. But it seemed amazingly old fashioned to me. I'm not surprised it's on PBS. It looks quite PBS-y. And I'll admit to being bored by now with the basic Bob Dylan story -- you know, the one where the climax is that he goes electric and pisses off folksingers. I'd prefer something with a little more edge, like the old documentary "Don't Look Back" or the book "Positively 4th Street" or Dylan's own book "Chronicles." I really detested all the drawn out, reverent material about about the role of folksinging in politics. It just didn't bring out how phony that was for Dylan. The most authentic thing about him is the way he felt like a phony doing that -- as I see it. "Another Side of Bob Dylan" -- I love that album -- that meant the non-phony side, didn't it? ("Ah, but I was much older then. I'm younger than that now.")

I'll watch the whole thing and come back and admit it if I think this preliminary view is wrong. Feel free to argue with me in the comments.