Monsters: The Erik and Lyle Menendez Story

I won’t write a lot about it because it’s become quite controversial. But one thing I think people are missing is that the series does not actually come to any conclusion about what happened, other than the undisputed facts that the two boys murdered their parents, tried to create an alibi that would place them somewhere else at the time, and then, when caught, made up a lot of stories about their father’s sexual abuse of them and that their mother allowed it to happen.

There are all sorts of possibilities presented in the series including, the most scandalous one, that the boys were having sex with each other. But other possibilities include that the father was having gay sex with prostitutes in New York City, while letting his wife think that he was having an affair with a woman. That the father was horrifically abusive — he moved his entire family out of a brand new house because his son got in trouble with the police and would embarrass him in the neighborhood, for example. That the boys were removed from the will. That the boys were sociopaths or psychopaths. Whatever the matter is or was, you don’t just murder your parents unless there is some serious underlying reason and I don’t think the series or in real life, it was ever really discovered why they did what they did.

What the series did, however, was put a lot of emphasis on sexuality in general — not nearly as much as happened in the trial. In fact, after the two hung juries where testimony about sexual abuse was allowed, the 2 were retried together, but that judge didn’t allow any testimony about sexual abuse at all. And there was some corroboration of it. The second trial seems to me to be clearly wrong, but all the appeals were exhausted a long time ago. There is another attempt going on right now, but it’s based on a note which won’t alter anything.

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Drug, rape your wife and invite others over.

So it almost seems like as soon as I write something like what I did regarding Zoe Kravitz’s first movie as a writer and director, panning it as unbelievable, real life (or RL as the young say) taps me on the shoulder and says, “Yes, it’s believable.” Everything I didn’t believe in the movie “Blink Twice,” turns out to have been happening to the woman in the above picture, Gisele Picolot. (That spelling may be wrong and there are several accents ague and grave in her name.) FOR OVER TEN YEARS! I don’t know what drug he gave her to make her fall asleep, but he was clearly more interested in watching men rape his wife while she was comatose because he filmed all the encounters.

I’m just baffled, to say the least. I continue to be baffled by people like James Franco, who was giving acting classes to the ladies and had them wear merkins, which are basically thongs decorated with pubic hair so that actors don’t have to actually expose their genitals, and during a “pretend” sex scene would casually move the thong part out of the way so he could get to the actual pussy. Or Trump, to say the least, who still refers to every woman who opposes him as “nasty.” Nasty woman. Nasty woman. It is his favorite insult.

The Taliban, the terrorists with whom Trump made the most disgraceful deal with ever, not even consulting the Afghan government we created and propped up, made it clear from the outset that their gutter religious belief consists of only one thing: a deep and never ending hatred of women. Women there are now nearly non-existent and the gutter dwelling Taliban has now made it a crime for women to even be heard by men who are not their husbands.

Saudi Arabia executes women routinely, for such things as “sorcery” and being raped. Not a country that discriminates too much, they routinely execute men as well — even in a so called holy place like Mecca.

But this Frenchman, who will probably end up in jail for the rest of his life, and who she is divorcing and taking back her maiden name, had so little respect for the woman in his life that he drugged and had her raped to satisfy some bizarre sexual urge which was his and his alone. It wasn’t her desire at all, and as happened in Blink Twice, she started to have strange feelings, memory loss, and gynecological problems.

My sister once said that all men would rape women if there wasn’t a law against it, and I remember being very angry about making such a statement, because I wouldn’t and the reason I wouldn’t is not because I’m gay. I wouldn’t do it because it’s violent, it’s wrong, it’s evil and it’s immoral. And “the law” doesn’t stop the Donald Trumps of the world from committing these heinous acts and then lying about never having met the woman. Hint: When you lie about not having done it, you know that it was wrong.

And now, a note about Judge Judith Scheindlin, who was recently trending on Twitter for having “shut down” Chris Wallace by saying the 34 charges Trump was convicted of was so confusing you had to twist yourself into a pretzel to try to figure out what they were about. Guess what? The jury didn’t have that much trouble, since they were unanimous and even one of them was a Trump supporter who only got her news from TruthSocial. But in this hack reality show judge, who has basically spent her life handling small claims actions like, “I gave him a car and he didn’t pay me for it. Was it a gift?” or, “He took terrible pictures at my wedding and I was devastated.”… In this interview she said, “I own property in Manhattan and I am a taxpayer and blah blah blah…” Basically, the stupidest fall back argument in existence: I am a tax payer. Because the rest of that phrase is, “Therefore, I don’t approve of my money going to some disreputable art,” or “Therefore, I don’t approve of my hard earned dollars paying for Israeli defense,” and the biggest one, that Judith herself has screamed on tv, “Therefore, I don’t approve of you living off of my taxes.” She screams this at people who are on public assistance of some kind, and more recently, people who were basically saved from poverty by the Covid relief funds.

There are an endless number of things you could object to, by screaming, “I pay taxes.” Guess what you idiot judge? EVERYONE pays taxes, period, end of story, nothing more to discuss. Why? Because of sales tax. Even the poorest of our poor have to pay sales tax when they buy something. Mercifully, they are not further taxed through the IRS or through NY State. And someone like me, who also owns property in Manhattan, has to pay just as much as you in taxes. And I WANT the DA to prosecute Trump for what you call this pretzel case. Trump and his people have created a convoluted and almost impenetrable mix of business fronts and artificial loans. Yes. It was election interference. And here’s how that works:

Trump was not president, he was running for president, therefore, there is no immunity that was recently granted by the Supreme Court. (Supreme, what a joke!) He had to pay off a porn actress who he had raped — yes raped — so he had his election committee write a check to Michael Cohen for 3 or 4 times the amount Michael Cohen paid her. They called is “legal services.” The reason they did it was he was so scared that he was going to lose against Hillary Clinton, he couldn’t afford to have the story appear anywhere because, on top of the grab them by the pussy comment he made to Billy Bush, a scandal of that nature: that he raped a porn star while his wife was suckling his 5th child, was too dangerous. That’s election interference for the very fact that he used his election committee to pay for it all.

Nixon did exactly the same thing.

So Judge Judith Manure: go fuck yourself. Vote for Trump and see how far you get you loser.

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Slingshot, by R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker

Casey Affleck and Laurence Fishburn are the stars of this simple movie. Basically they are on a ship that’s on its way to Saturn’s Titan moon, but in order to get there they have to use the enormous gravity of Jupiter to hurl them 2 or 3 times as fast, otherwise it would take far more than 2 years.

The problem seems to be that the drug which they’ve developed to keep these guys in hibernation for 3 months at a time is so powerful it causes hallucinations and paranoia.

It got lousy reviews from the critics and only slightly better reviews from the amateur users, but I thought it was quite good up until the end.

The reason is that about halfway through the movie I knew what the rest of the story was and my only concern was that they were going to leave the story unfinished — the hanging ending or the ambiguous ending that so many writers like to use when they don’t know which side to pick.

It can be a choice, but almost always, you can go back through the story and see the arc of the characters and where the story was meant to go. Sometimes the authors tack on an ending which can be a shock, but if you follow the story backward, that’s not where it was going. And this, I feel the ending was actually tacked on. People are saying that it was dull and not developed but I didn’t find it dull at all.

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Quitting

I stopped writing about my drinking problem a long time ago because it was so very boring and basically it’s the same old story, repeated ad nauseam through the human condition. Some of us are heavy drinkers and alcoholics, and others of us have no need to drink excessively or at all.

Drinking ends up cutting you off from the world. That may be its point. That’s why so many go to meetings and share their stories. Like the joke, “I’m not an alcoholic. Alcoholics go to meetings.”

But two days ago I had a dream which was kind of hard to interpret, except that I had, for a moment, an enormous sense of relief. I can’t remember where I was but I was doing my usual thing of trying to hide my drinking and I went downstairs where there was a kind of bar and restaurant. Some guy came and sat next to me and he said, “Let me ask you. What is it with the drinking?” And that’s when I felt such a huge sense of relief and I was just about to start telling him that I was an alcoholic and I was trying to hide, like most do, but then my family came in and sat down and started talking and showing me pictures and things and I never had the chance to come out. And then I woke with a sadness. But maybe knowing this feeling of relief was really the point of the dream.

My cousin’s husband is just like me. He cannot talk about it. He will stop and has stopped, but he can’t bear the shame. I think that’s what they call a dry drunk. George Bush was one too. But maybe that’s enough. I don’t think people should feel ashamed of anything, except cruelty, and those types of people never feel shame. But maybe avoiding shame is okay.

But I must stop very soon. It’s affecting many things now — my walk, my gait, going out. Oddly not so much my liver but it might be inflaming my liver a little too. Anyway, with so many people younger than me dying of various things, I really have to become a teetotaler.

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Blink Twice, sort of by Zoe Kravitz

I’ve always disliked Zoe Kravitz. I saw her in Fantastic Beasts but it wasn’t until Big Little Lies that she really got on my nerves. Then there was a commercial for Pepsi or something. Then The Batman and now this, which she kinda wrote and directed.

At first I thought she must have just watched Don’t Worry Darling and copied the plot but that movie came out in 2022 and according to the New York Times’ profile, she started writing this script in 2017, in London, while working on Fantastic Beasts. She wanted to vent her frustration, was how she put it. The actress with no training, but only the good luck of being the daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, and the granddaughter of Roxie Roker (the neighbor on The Jeffersons which was also, I believe, the first interracial couple on television, thanks to Norman Lear,) and Sy Kravitz. In other words, she was born into Hollywood.

And therefore gets all the advantages of Hollywood when it comes to having no experience and just jumping into screenwriting to work out some feelings.

The story is, more or less, two besties and roommates get invited to an island owned by an uber wealthy nothingburger, and once there, start to have strange feelings. The island has a rare flower, found only on that island… HINT… and they are rounding up some “harmless” snakes…. HINT… There is an indigenous woman going around killing the snakes and whose language they can’t understand… HINT… they do a lot of drugs after dinner, but safely… HINT… she finds lots of pictures of previous guests… HINT. A gift in her room is some perfume made only on that island… HINT.

Eventually the indigenous woman has her drink some snake venom and the main character starts to remember the rapes and the attacks and the beatings and so on that the men in the group perpetuated on the women the night before. The snake venom is an antidote to the memory loss caused by the perfume and the flowers.

There is a young guy there who I thought was the token gay but it turns out he is simply a eunuch. He’s also wearing the perfume so he doesn’t remember the other four dudes going at it with the unwilling women and apparently got beaten up for not participating. (Because he’s GAY!)

Apparently, women’s biggest fear, is men making them lose their memories of abuse, rape and harassment. This movie and “Don’t Worry Darling.” Men’s biggest fear is trying to find their buddy that they misplaced while in a blackout state which Bradley Cooper called, “A Great fucking time,” in “The Hangover.” and then again in part 2 and 3, both of which sucked balls.

But my biggest complaint is that the movie was made at all. The script misses on just about every level with the exception, I think, of Simon Rex, one of the male guests, who seems to have learned a lot from his time as a gay jerk off porn star. Christian Slater could be funny at times. I wish he had had a more successful career. But Channing Tatum was an absolute drip and although I’ve never disliked him and even found him fun to watch in the Coen Brothers movie he made, it kind of makes sense that he and Zoe Kravitz are engaged. The lead, Naomi Ackie, is absolutely horribly misdirected at least at the beginning — so much so that I wanted to leave. But Alia Shakwat performs pretty well in spite of the awful script and bad direction. Geena Davis is completely wasted and it’s a real shame. The gay/non gay kid is Levon Hawke, son of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. Basically the entire movie is a nepotism project and it infuriates me that there are so many people who can write better scripts and directors who are better directors, but then this is the piece of crap that gets made, just because she had issues she wanted to work out at a London cafe in 2017. What? That you’ve been too successful? That every door you want to open is opened for you. Ugh. Now I hate her.

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Skincare, by Austin Peters and 2 others

Elizabeth Banks is one of those stars that always seems to come near greatness but never quite reaches it. She reminds me of Debby Reynolds or Joan Collins vs. Elizabeth Taylor. Or in the more modern version: Jennifer Aniston vs. Angelina Jolie.

That isn’t to say she’s bad, nor either Debby, Joan or Jennifer, only that something gets in the way in almost everything she does. In this case, I think it’s the script. I certainly enjoyed the movie, and some people in the row behind me whooped because they liked it so much. But the movie is like its setting: Los Angeles. And although, (skin deep), it’s a story about dueling estheticians, the real story is about the deep and unexamined paranoia that most people live with. People would rather deal with their skin conditions than understand what is actually going on in their hearts and minds.

The Californians on Saturday Night Live kind of tackled this human condition when Fred Armison, for example, would walk in on Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig kissing and keep talking about how he had picked up some tangerines from a guy on the off ramp of the 405 freeway, and then, practically a minute later, seems to realize that “Devon” is kissing his girlfriend. Every episode of their soap opera satire ended with all the characters looking in the mirror, as if they were trying to see themselves but were unable to. That’s what this movie is, but with much less humor, and the movie was criticized by the few places that reviewed it, for not being enough of a satire — not being funny enough. But I think that any more humor would have completely missed the point.

She never misses an opportunity to see what she would look like if the space between her eyebrows were raised just a tiny bit. The movie opens and closes with extreme and repulsive closeup of her putting on her makeup. In the opening sequence it’s preparing for a television appearance. In the final sequence it’s to surrender to the police. But that’s sort of where the problem lies. You have an unreliable lead character. And someone somewhere once said you can’t write about a crazy person because nobody wants to spend time in the mind of a crazy person. It’s that strange contradiction about most story telling. The funniest stories are about people whose lives are in danger. Slapstick comedy is about desperation to get away from the police for example, or get away from a killer. The sitcom may be funny, but its structure is actually the structure of a tragedy. Every week we come back to the same people making the same stupid mistakes and ending up in a worse place then they were at the start of the half hour. How many times did Lucy screw up? But we laugh.

This near miss, I would call it, was good in the sense that she was absolutely right about being paranoid: she just had the wrong person. I’m not going to write more about this. I enjoyed the movie, but like most Elizabeth Banks pictures, it’s slightly off. I think her best performance was probably in People Like Us, from 2012, starring with Chris Pine.

She’s also one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood.

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Getting assaulted, by me

It hasn’t happened in a long time, but today I got attacked by one of those crazy people, all because I walked past him on the left. He didn’t physically touch me, but he followed me for several blocks, screaming at the back of my head, until I turned around and started screaming back.

The last time this type of thing happened, I was walking back to my apartment and a guy came out of a pizza joint and walked into me. He spilled his pizza and blamed me for not watching where he was going. In that case, he followed me, and a crowd gathered because they wanted to see a fight. When the crowd was too big to push my way through, I had to stop and the guy — he was an older black man — lunged at me and sort of hugged me but then backed off and left. That was the end of it. But what I was left with was a feeling of helplessness — when someone decides to attack you, for whatever reason they have, there is almost nothing you can do about it.

This guy, after I passed him, started muttering — very loudly — things like “can’t even fuckin’ say, ‘Excuse me,'” and other things, and he was getting louder. Finally I stopped and looked and he said, “Yea, you. This ain’t your grandfather’s time when you just hang me. I’ll kill you motherfucker.” So I continued walking but he wouldn’t stop the screaming — and maybe realizing that he wasn’t going to stop I, myself, finally stopped and screamed, “All I fucking did was pass you. I didn’t bump into you. I didn’t stare at you or say anything. I just passed you.” And that lead to him screaming to “hit me, hit me motherfucker. I’ll knock you the fuck out. I’m as big as you and…” blah blah blah. Eventually he started walking faster than me on his way to Union Square and he was several buildings away, still screaming. But that was when the adrenaline kicked in, or when I started to feel the after effects of the adrenaline rush, and boy was my old body shaking. I almost couldn’t even walk. I was heading to the 19th Street movie theatre and by this time he was at about 18th Street, thank God. But I could hardly order my ticket or pick the seat, and then I couldn’t eat anything — I had planned to make it my lunch. The whole thing was entirely demoralizing, but again, it makes you realize what — I think it was Joseph Campbell said — about other people. They aren’t insulting you. They aren’t attacking you. Even if they kill you, they aren’t killing you. It is entirely inside their own heads. They just externalize it, and this guy was angry as all fuck, about racism and maybe some weird old belief he had about himself that he was small and weak. He wasn’t small — he was my height and he was thin.

At first I was depressed. The movie was awful so that kind of had an opposite effect on my own depression. But on the bus on the way home, I was wary of black men who looked somewhat shady — a little disheveled. And then I wished I knew self defense.

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Housekeeping for Beginners, by Goran Stolevski

Goran Stolevski is an extremely talented filmmaker who lives Down Under but is originally from Macedonia. He gets the details so damn right it just boggles the mind. In “Of An Age,” for example, one of the characters is an Australian who is moving to Brazil or somewhere in South America to get a master’s degree. The other is a Serb who wants to win a dance contest. The Australian tends to listen to salsa music while the Serb dances to Azucar Moreno’s Bandido. This song won the Eurovision contest of 1990 and it was a huge massive hit in Serbia, but less so elsewhere. Why people in The Balkans took to it is sort of a mystery to me. But it’s the fact that this young Serb is dancing to it is what makes this director so great.

Anyway, I didn’t mean this to be about how much I like his previous movie, this movie is a total surprise in that it takes place in North Macedonia and is largely about a made up family of LGBQT people. Dita is a professional and the working half of a relationship where the other woman stays home to raise her two daughters. There is a gay man involved and he is the beard, literally, to the women, pretending to be the husband to one of them. He has a lot of lovers but finds one that “sticks” so to speak. The mother of the daughters dies and it’s known from the beginning that she is going to die. But Dita does not want to raise the children. So this is where the conflict begins and even though I can’t tell at this point, all the ups and downs of the plot, because I’ve forgotten, you believe it in its entirety. The closet is (being in the closet) is almost another character in the movie because of deep rooted homophobia which, maybe not ironically, seems to get worse as you move the West side of Europe to the Eastern part on the way to Russia. Even though I utterly and fully support Ukraine, I’ve seen a lot of videos where those soldiers are calling Russian prisoners faggots and the like. In this movie, that danger is always there: it’s almost the villain.

There have been so many wonderful foreign movies that take place in these distant (for Americans) settings. It’s uplifting to see them coming into their own while our movies keep declining into Pixar-ish cartoons about germs and constantly self-referencing super hero tripe.

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Reslience, by the Elderly

This is part 2 of my take on Biden and his age; what’s happening with polls and the media and so on.

So Biden was forced out, probably by mainly Nancy Pelosi who is driven to win more than most and is also incredibly good at reading the tea leaves, so to speak. But he waited until after the Republican convention to pull out, and he probably did this to spare Kamala, his natural heir, the five days of hatred that were being mis-directed at Biden. He’s not an idiot.

I finally took a look at some of the footage of the debate and I simply did not understand, based on the few snippets I could find, what the problem was. But it’s undeniable that his withdrawal from the race — what he actually said is that he would not accept the nomination — has energized Gen Z, other young people, and Democrats in general as Kamala shops around for a vice president.

And because the media is now focused on her, Trump’s near miss — possibly staged assassination attempt — did not track. It gave him no bump. Recent pictures suggest he was not hit by a bullet and if he was hit by something, it was a shattered glass. But there have been no pictures, say, of the supposedly shattered teleprompter, no reports on what treatment he might have received, and no explanation of how he was allowed to stand up in the circle of secret service agents and wave his fist like he was some mythic hero — during an active shooter event no less! This is why so many people think it was staged and, of course, he knows no bottom. He is depraved.

The polls are generally in Kamala’s favor, but not by much. Mindy Beller today on Facebook declared that Fox news was circulating a false poll which showed her ahead in four important (battleground) states. She thinks they’re doing this to create apathy among democrats. But it seems like pouring an 8 ounce can of seltzer on a forest fire.

But really the media is at fault. The NY Times, Washington Post, Twitter and Facebook (to a lesser extent). I don’t use Instagram so I don’t know what’s going on with that one. But it’s really the need to generate likes and clicks and retweets and shares that has completely warped our system. People are not getting their news from what used to be considered reputable sources, like NBC nightly news or PBS. They’re swallowing all the garbage that’s on Twitter and Facebook and their minds are warped. I don’t know how a reckoning can be made of this, but Joe Biden was really a victim of this warped vision. There’s been no corresponding cry for Trump to withdraw from the race even though he shows all the signs of dementia.

It’s a shame the bullet missed. Some people I know say we would have had riots in the street (by his supporters), but I’m not so sure about that.

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The Man In The High Castle, by P.K. Dick

I watched the entire series and then read the book because I wanted to see the changes that were made and if they actually translated Dick’s work and ideas into the film.

In one way they did. In another, not.

Either way, for someone who only wrote novels and short stories (I think 44 and 121 respectively), Philip K. Dick must be the most remarkably successful “screenwriter” ever. At least 13 titles — either stories or novels — have been filmed and a few more adapted to the stage. His themes often play with reality but, weirdly and maybe a bit scarily, much of what he envisioned has become true. Margaret Atwood was asked how she was able to depict such horrifying dystopias like in The Handmaid’s Tale or Oryx and Crake, and she said, “I just read the newspaper.” Orwell, knowing that the title 1948 would be a mistake, switched the last two numbers to 1984 so that everybody could think it was the future, when what he was writing about was actually starting to take place. In many ways, I think Dick understood what was going on in his own time and managed to fit his vision into the future (as in Minority Report), or into alternative timelines, which this one is.

The main difference between the series and the novel is that object — the MacGuffin. In the novel, the MacGuffin is a novel. In the series, it is a set of film strips — I think 8 mm but might be 16mm I’m not sure. That is a major major difference and it has something to do with the phrase, “Seeing is believing.” In Dick’s book, the Man In The High Castle as he’s called, has written an alternative history called “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.” I should have said first, that the United States lost World War II because it refused to get involved in the European theatre. The Nazis conquered Europe, Russia and England, then attacked Africa and finally the United States. On the other side, the Japanese attacked as well and those are the two super powers in the book: The German reich controls the East Coast and the Japanese control the west coast. Much of the mountain area is independent but poor. 15 years later, the American population has adjusted to their new circumstances and, in many respects, accepts and even admires them.

So people in the novel read this Grasshopper book and are intrigued, but nothing leads them to believe that it is anything but fiction. In the series, people watch film clips of the Nazis and Japanese being defeated by a powerful United States and they begin to believe that it may have happened. In the novel, one Japanese character seems to time travel, or alternate reality travel, toward the end of the book, but he attributes it to meditation. In the movie, alternate reality travel becomes one of the central themes and there are several reality travelers. In the book, the Nazis are colonizing Mars and possibly Venus (Dick was writing before anyone knew what was under the Venetian clouds.) In the series they are pursuing time or reality travel.

And this is what the Nazis came up with. The Time tunnel from the TV series.

Both the series and the novel end ambiguously, which is way that Dick liked his books to end.

As always with Dick, I got a little bit tired of the philosophizing, but I still admire him even though he was a homophobe and anti-abortion.

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