Thomas F. Cook

I guess because Manohla Dargis gave it a wonderful review in the NYTimes and it became a “critic’s pick” in the same newspaper, this play seems to be doing well. Sorry, it’s supposed to be a movie. But it’s a play.

At first I thought it was an adaptation because I didn’t know she had also written it, but there isn’t a single scene in the movie that I couldn’t also see, in my mind’s eye, on the stage. This is primarily because every moment of it is talking — and it inadvertently gets to the core of what the difference is between theatre and film.

First of all — this train of thought was brought about by another idiotic thing that Bill Mahr said, which was that “Magazines are dead.” Sometimes, a form can go dead. The thousands of gods that men have invented over the millenia are mostly dead, except for 2 or 3 now. Jesus’s attempt to kill his father almost succeeded, but God, the Father, still reigns over Jesus and I think most would agree that the Christian God is a god, while Jesus is a chimera or hybrid God/man. Sometimes, when we’re in a bind, we say, “Jesus fucking Christ,” and sometimes we say, “oh God.” But generally, I don’t think they’re interchangeable. Even in my own atheism I would probably say, “Oh God,” if I saw a car bearing down on me and not “Oh Jesus.”

Anyway, when it comes to art, there’s always been a most popular form. Poetry has existed alongside all these forms but has never been “thee” form. For many hundreds of years it was theatre. From the Greeks, Thespus and the Greek chorus, to the morality plays that toured around wearing signs that read, “Lust” and “Greed,” just to make sure the idiots understood what they were looking at, to Shakespeare and all the men and women that came after, theatre was the popular form. Then came the novel. After the novel was the movie. Then movies went to the small screen — the television. And now, probably, the most popular form is the cellphone screen and its snippets of memes and news.

But movies didn’t die. Television hasn’t died. The novel hasn’t died. Opera and Theatre haven’t died. Certain instruments, like the harpsichord, have disappeared, but you can still find harpsichord performances here and there. And in spite of Mahr’s tendency to exaggerate, the magazine hasn’t died either.

But theatre is very interesting because almost every transition from the stage to screen has been, at some level, a transposition of theatre to the new form. So the very early stage of television (think of The Jackie Gleason show) was basically a play, performed on a stage with an audience, and filmed from the audience’s view with a single camera using Cinemascope. Very early movies, like the vile Birth of a Nation, tended toward this setup as well. (Mostly the interior scenes.) But when Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball gave Columbia Broadcasting the number 1 show in America, Desi decided to use film, in 3 cameras, with sets and a studio audience BEHIND the cameras, and changed the way we viewed television. It was still theatre, but there was a little bit of movement in that they could go from one room to the next without much of a break. Every sitcom followed suit, right up to what is considered to be the last and final sitcom: The Big Bang Theory.

The main problem with theatre is that it doesn’t move and all of the action is spoken. A lot of times, the characters are just playing catch up — you can think of some of Shakespeare’s introductory pages and they are often two soldiers catching each other up on what’s happened. Sometimes he would even have a narrator or character come right to the front of the stage and say, “This has happened.”

That is the big problem with this movie. It is not a movie. It is a series of scenes that could take place on a blackened stage with very few props. A beer and a coke. Probably a cellphone or two. The most action that takes place is when two of the characters decide to drive up to “the country,” and then turn around after crashing a wedding party because they have a fight or decide they don’t like each other, or something. I don’t know. I didn’t care.

It’s also very poorly structured. She, the protagonist, goes with the ideal man: super wealthy, tall because he wanted to be, handsome, older, attentive. Then she decides she likes the poor, (also tall), (also handsome), a tiny bit older and (also attentive) guy. The End.

Like almost all movies I see these days, I was left wondering whether anything was going to happen, or when were they going to get into it. I was left wondering why there hadn’t been any conflict, except to a minor character who was mostly on the phone.

This movie supposedly explodes the Rom Com formula which, in my opinion, was just 90 minutes of cringe until the woman gets what she wants, which is a ring on her finger. (“If you liked it shoulda put a ring on it,” sang Beyonce.) Really, in my opinion, the romance or romantic comedy, is always about getting the woman to say yes. It is an extremely difficult genre to write because it looks as if the protagonist is the male, who is always doing the work, or walking away from it, or coming back to it — but in fact, it’s the passive female who is actually in charge — making the man work, or waiting waiting waiting, until the conditions are just right for her to say “yes,” which may mean marriage in the movie’s plot, but ultimately means “child.” And that’s regardless of whether or not the woman can have a child. Landford Wilson, one of America’s great playwrights, demonstrated this in Talley’s Folly.

But in the time tested tradition of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl — or some variation of that: meets, gets, loses, gets again — this didn’t have that. This was, as the title suggests, a shopping trip. She, as a matchmaker, has a set of boxes that her clients have to check: must be over 6 feet, must make $150K a year, etc. And the movie ultimately showed us how that computer based decision making works. Pedro Pascal’s character, once dismissed, never shows up again, not even once. He’s just discarded like packaging around some food. And then we’re on to number 2, Chris Evans. And that’s who she picks. The closing credits, where I was wondering nothing happened, shows the New York City marriage hall, where they are having a “poor” wedding and seem to have forgotten to bring two witnesses.

I suppose if the cynical “marriage is a business and you’re look for a grave buddy,” theme were disproved, somehow, it might have been interesting. But there is only lip service paid to love. and I think the director/writer probably doesn’t have a very strong sense of why it takes women longer to be in love, why she chooses her mate carefully, or sometimes carelessly, or what vulnerability means to women in the first place.

Women and gay men generally get along, not because they like shopping, creativity, crafts, flowers, fashion and so on, which may all be true, but because they both understand the violence of men and our attraction to them.

But ultimately it was just a 2-act play. Act 1: Pedro Pascal. Act 2: Chris Evans.

(Being tired of wasting my money on movies that are made by people who don’t know how to write and sometimes direct, I think I’m going to start skipping shit I don’t like. I was very curious to see “The Life of Chuck,” because of Tom Hiddleston, and in spite of it being a Stephen King story. But I’ll trust the reviews this time. It is a movie based on a Stephen King story, so it is garbage. The reviews called it Suburban Armageddon.)

I’ve become so bored with movies and television shows, primarily because of the terrible writing, casting, plotting, acting, directing and all the other gerunds. The most interesting recently was Department Q which had only a few drawbacks: one being the lead actor, who I’ve always liked but is just a little bit wrong for this part. Still, even saying that, I would rather have the part rewritten to fit Matthew Goode than to find another actor that is more like the part. It was just a very good mystery and the red herrings weren’t so abundant that it became an exercise in stretching a series beyond what was necessary.

I fell asleep for the first twenty or so minutes of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. I fell asleep for the first twenty minutes of The Phoenecian Scheme, as well. Bring Her Back was okay. I didn’t find it scary but I stayed awake.

The worst monstrosity was Mountainhead, which I had to watch in small doses. I don’t even know why I bothered to finish it. Toward the end, I started to wonder if maybe all the characters were retarded — I don’t want to say mentally challenged because they all believe they are the smartest people in the room. They are four billionaires — one starts off as a 600 Million-aire but he will go over the billion mark by the time the show is over — and they are meeting up at the poor one’s new mountain aerie of about 23,000 square feet which he has named “Mountainhead.” They speak nonsense words and they talk nonsense. They discuss how they should “Coup it up,” meaning the United States, so that no one, including the president, can mess up their plans. There was something about causing a brownout in Belgium which, apparently, one of the characters did from their cellphone. Watching this show was like watching someone slowly pull a hangnail out of your own big toe.

But I think the writer, whose name is Jesse Armstrong, I believe, has this weird sense of comedy. This was supposed to be funny and kind of zany. And there was that strain of humor in Succession, as well — like when Matthew McFayden swallowed his own semen and then sat in awe over the fact that it was like he had had sex with himself. And going back a ways, a movie called In The Loop also had humor. But instead of being a Three Stooges kind of humor, in that the Stooges were absolutely irrelevant to the world, the humor in his writing happens among people who cause harm in the world. So we end up watching these disgusting people and at the same time are supposed to laugh at their antics and sometimes how stupid they are.

I find it impossible. I could no more laugh at this scum as I could at the real life scum of Trump and his minions. I don’t think Trump is funny — I think he gets people to laugh at him, clown like, but it’s not funny. I can’t remember which president it was — it was probably Bush #2 — when Michael Moore made a movie about him which was filled with all these crazy antics and stupid Bush chatter. And yes the audience laughed and Michael Moore clearly knew that people would laugh but at the end, when Michael Moore implied that we would oust him at the voting booth, I thought, “You just gave everyone a reason to re-elect him. You made him funny. That makes him harmless and that means he will win.” And he did. Not, of course, because of Michael Moore, but because that was Bush’s schtick. He said somewhere in his career that he was never going to let Bubba win again. And that’s when he developed his Texas twang, his mangled use of words, and so on. He appealed to the idiocy of Americans. So does Trump. And like I said to a friend back then, who was laughing about something stupid Bush did, “It’s not funny.”

It’s not funny.

Fortunately, I don’t think many people will watch this. They’d rather watch another wretched piece of drek called “Sirens.”

David Cronenberg invented, apparently, the body horror genre, but I think the word horror is really a terrible description of his fascination. The last movie he made, people were watching surgeries as entertainment. These surgeries would take place without general anesthesia, upon people who had grown strange, unique and apparently superfluous organs. The removal of these organs is what people found exciting and in the case of the hero, his organs had been tattooed while inside his body, so each removal was also a piece of artwork.

But ultimately, what was really going on, and it seems like a subplot for the longest time, is a different group of people who could not eat regular food. If I’m remembering the plot right — does it matter — we didn’t find out until the end that all these superfluous organs and people who couldn’t eat food was because they were evolving to eat and digest plastic. The “horror” of this body focused story is environment disaster, not one’s revulsion to the body.

And I think if you look at most David Cronenberg movies (and perhaps David Lynch as I almost mistyped), there was always “something else” going on that affected humanity in a profound way. Videodrome wasn’t really about James Woods developing a vagina in the middle of his abdomen, into which people would place videotapes and later, a gun. It was about the persistence and overwhelming presence of television in our lives and, a hint in the manner of Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover, that pornography was invading every aspect of life.

The Shrouds could be a warning about technology and, I would add, its corruptibility. Corruption is an interesting word to use here because one of its definitions is decay, putrid, etc. — like the corruption of the body as it decays in a grave. In this movie, a few dead people, including the main characters wife, are wrapped in shrouds — shaped like the cocoon a spider might make — and this allows through wires and screens for people to watch their loved ones’ bodies decay. Some people are comforted by this. Some of the graves are vandalized but it turns out that it is not an accident and then corporate conspiracies and such take over. Not sure how much I cared, but I am sure that most of us do not see what is actually going on in a movie because we are too focused on the plot and can’t weed out the parts from the whole. David Lynch’s Eraserhead, at some level, can be seen as a plea for sympathy.

I think people have been trying to make anti-war movies for just about ever — and have been writing about it even longer. The Red Badge of Courage comes to mind as one of the earliest, but the entire field of history is based on “The Histories” by Heroditus, which was a written documentation of about 5 wars, but attempted to explain the hostility between the Greeks and non-Greeks. Someone, somewhere, wrote that it was created to try to prevent wars from ever happening again, but I think that’s b.s.

There is no way, as some have observed, to make a movie that purports to be anti-war which does not, in some way, feed the human thirst for war. The biggest offender of all the movies I’ve seen, was Platoon — Oliver Stone’s homoerotic take on the Vietnam war. Full Metal Jacket at the very least, pulled away from a specific anti-war message and made you wonder what the hell is going on in boot camps. The Deer Hunter was certainly harrowing but I wouldn’t call it anti-war. In fact, it seemed that he was almost a better person after having survived Vietnam because he had compassion for an animal he was going to kill. Before the war he would have killed it like those awful people do that pay for trophies in Africa — without a thought. And The Killing Fields may have come closest to capturing the horror, unlike Apocalypse Now which captured the absurdity.

War and combat excite people. It is written into our dna. I remember one foreign film where this guy was following a trail of clues to find his girlfriend and had to spend a night with some farmers. The mother of the house said, “Tomorrow we’re going to slaughter a pig. That oughta be fun.” Even a writer I loathe wrote a book called, “War is a force that gives life meaning.”

War movies inevitably confirm the excitement of war — as seen from a distance. All the screaming, blood, severed limbs, blindness, concussions and on and on and on don’t make us stop to think, “Maybe we should stop doing this.” Even now, in the 2020s, you can sense the drumbeat of warmongers, itching to get out there and kill others, destroy property, terrorize innocent people.

So it was interesting to watch this movie which is called exactly what it is because it attempts to not indulge our thirst to see bloodshed and fighting. Long periods of the movie are simply about waiting. The movie opens with some bizarre cis male hetero scene where the company is watching a workout video that could have been from the 80s, and screeching and hollering like none of them had ever seen a woman before. It was very bizarre given the amount of porn that exists on the internet. I took it as a forced male bonding scene.

But as a movie, there is literally almost no beginning, middle or end. We don’t know why they have taken over some family’s home — this is in Iraq and somewhere it’s written what battle it’s supposed to be. The only “event” that I could glean from this is that they have to get out, and in their first attempt, one is killed and two are injured, badly. There appears to be “enemies” on all sides of their house and on the roof. They call in some cavalry in the form of tanks and air support. They make their way to the tanks and leave. After that, all the enemies come out of their positions, gather on the street, and look at each other as if to say, “What was that all about?”

It’s 90 minutes but it felt like 15 because of the lack of anything happening. I also fell asleep at the very start of it. Does it give the sense that war should be avoided and that war mongers, like Peter Hesgeth, should be beheaded? No. It’s ultimately as if some people came into a conference room, had an argument with some of the staff, and then left.

War cannot be made unpalatable in the movie experience. We are too visual. It’s like John Krazinsky as Jim Halpert said, “Am I going to tell me daughter that violent video games are objectively more entertaining?”

I think Steven Spielberg, again, saw the absurdity of trying to show “nice cartoons,” in the opening cartoon to “Jessica Rabbit,” where he sort of had a Tom & Jerry character bashing each other and electrocuting each other and chopping each other up with a carving knife. People’s excited reaction and laughter to that cartoon said it all.

After he’s dead and gone — I’d prefer burning at the stake to a beheading, but I’d take either of Henry the VIII’s favorite methods of killing his rivals and the other 80,000 people he murdered — Trump’s era will be called an era of death. Optimists who believe in the myth of the phoenix will look at the scorched earth and think on this new fertile soil, full of ash from a once great civilization, and think that a new, brighter, shinier thing will emerge. Pessimists will look to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) as an example: a once thriving but small Island civilization that destroyed its habitat and starved to death, leaving only large heads of stone.

But the movie, I’m afraid, is gone. Spielberg began it. Lucas amplified it. And then came directors like Michael Bay. Jaws, Star Wars, Transformers. Jaws did something new and extraordinary which, unfortunately, rewrote the way movies had to draw us in. The opening scene. The ominous music, the naked girl in the water, swimming, shot from below. Our knowledge — truly Hitchcockian in the best of senses — that the shark was about to eat her. I remember seeing the movie when I was so young I couldn’t drive. My brother and I rode our bikes “all the way” to the mall to see the movie. The opening scene left me shaking and horrified. And then on the way back my brother had to spoil everything by re-narrating or “mansplaining” the entire thing to me. That opening was the first time in movie history (that I’m aware — and for our purposes, it doesn’t matter if it was done before) that a movie opened with one of the most dramatic scenes — possibly more dramatic than at any other point in the movie — at the beginning of the movie rather than at the climax. After that, it was just a matter of building it into the formula for movie writing.

Star Wars didn’t open quite so dramatically, but it was drama of a different sort. No villain had ever been created that was as scary as ruthless and as heartless as Darth Vader. The scene that gave me nightmares was the scene where he casually chokes (telepathically) someone who has “failed” him while having a normal conversation with the man next to him, who is going to take the soon to be dead man’s place. Continuing the Henry the VIII comparison — in the first adaptation of the first two books, Thomas Cromwell watches the beheading of Anne Boleyn and then walks to the palace where Henry is dressed in his finest, ready to marry his next wife, Jane Seymour. Henry stretches his arms wide as if to say, “What a wonderful day to get married.”

So with these two lead-ins, came comic book movies. Superman, with Christopher Reeve, was first. Batman second. But I think the X Men series really catapulted it above and beyond — mainly because it was such a good stand in for how isolated many people feel — not to mention they are all gays in a straight world. They’re just called “freaks” instead of “fags or dykes.” For me it was proof that a gay theme can be interesting to straight people, including guys.

But then the comic book got stale and so they turned to games — board games and then video games. Tron was the first movie that invented a video game. I remember playing in Times Square video game playlands — this was back in the day when you had to leave your apartment to do just about anything — and there was no “Tron” video game until the movie came out. Then a disappointing version of Tron hit those arcades and I think the game vanished. It just wasn’t fun.

But now all we have left are Minecraft movies, Disney animation, re-animation, live action films of animation and probably, to come, animation of live action, and then who knows what with the scourge of AI being foisted upon us by Zuckerberg, Musk, Microsoft and web browsers everywhere.

We aren’t going to have “Godfather”s or “Place In The Heart,” or “Brokeback Mountain,” anymore. There a few still working who can pull it off: namely Chrisopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, to name two. But while I used to find at least two to three movies a week worth seeing, now I’m lucky if there’s even one. This is taste of course. I could have gone to see The Minecraft movie last weekend, like millions of others did, but the plot of that movie is this: Tron meets The Karate Kid. Four people get “sucked” into a video game and must find their way back with the help of a master. I know how it ends. They do. But at least with The Wizard of Oz, one couldn’t help but wonder if she would ever get back, because there was a real sense, played right through to almost the end, that she would not make it. And the witch was scary and mean and heartless.

Now we get wicked, which is, in fact, not wicked at all.

The Dog movie is basically a family enforcer — practically a tool of the Christian Nationalists, who I consider to be the most dangerous religion currently infesting our world. In the past, Islamic Fundamentalism was probably the most dangerous, but since the failure of the “Arab Spring,” this U.S. grown and international Christian terrorist organization is threatening everything.

Thus, it’s a good reason to stay away from a dog movie, which is ALWAYS about a: a dog suffering a separation from his family and making enormous strides to get back home — like Dorothy in Oz, which was also, basically, about a dog; or a dog that dies at the end, like Marley or Old Yeller, cementing the rightness of the heterosexual experience, including children to replace said dog.

I don’t doubt for a second that a dog can be loved by a human, but I also think it’s one aspect of love, not an equal love. And it’s for the simple reason that you mourn a dog for a few days and then get over it. If it’s a baby or a child you’ve lost, or even in the nearly heartbreaking “Adolescence,” which is now on Netflix, your 13 year old, you mourn for years and sometimes don’t recover. (Perhaps one’s own love and ability to love can be measured by how much pain it causes when it ends. Just a thought.)

But this movie is not about a dog healing a family, thank God, or returning to a family, or dying sacrificially so a family can move on with “real” children. It is about a single woman and a Great Dane that her best friend — a human being — asked her “outside his last will and testament” — to take. Then he committed suicide.

The suicide is hardly talked about in the movie, but it’s essential and I think a little bit overlooked. What the dog seems to do is two things: remind her, continually, of her best friend and his suicide, and threaten, passively, to cause her to lose her rent controlled apartment.

It’s not chatted about too much in the movie, other than, “the dog has to go or you’ll be evicted.” But being evicted from a NYC rent controlled apartment which she finagled after her dad died, is like being kicked out of a productive gold mine. It’s huge. She will not find another apartment like that anywhere in the world — only word of mouth or relations get you into those, and even then, the rent is raised, sometimes to market levels. She will have to go to the far edges of Manhattan to keep a home over her head, as well as the dog.

And I forgot what I was going to say.

I think, perhaps, it’s because it is a single woman who is a writer and editor, and not one who is desperately looking for the right man to make her life complete, that the movie works in its most subtle ways. It doesn’t beat you over the head with the typical tropes of a dog movie, and the dog itself, a Great Dane, is filmed in an unusual way in that he is probably the least expressive dog in any dog movie I’ve seen, and many that I’ve not seen. The dog is — in movie terms — the least human dog that’s been filmed. It doesn’t raise one eye, or cock its head, or act guilty for pooping (and in one case, for tearing up her apartment). The dog is mourning too — one of the characters makes that point. And the writer’s ultimate intent is to get her main character to realize that her friend didn’t just “kill himself.” He caused a great deal of pain, confusion, anger and the rest of the stuff that comes when someone commits suicide for reasons that can’t be understood.

I’ve known, I can’t even count, many suicides. Most were suffering from severe depression but another was suffering from AIDS and simply didn’t want to go through the end stage of that disease (this was long before there were any treatments). But I think the most common post-suicide effect was the long search most survivors took to understand why they did it. Eventually, people develop a half answer to that question, especially if it’s obvious or if there was a note left behind or there were health issues, like Robin Williams, which were too devastating to face. But ultimately, when death comes passively to one of our friends, lovers or neighbors, we accept it and our search for meaning in that death is, perhaps, not very important. They just died. That’s all. They had cancer and died. They had dementia and died. They had a premature heart attack and died.

But when it’s violent, early, self inflicted or caused by someone else, stranger or otherwise, we struggle in this valiant but ultimately useless search for meaning. And I think this movie deals pretty well with that search, although sometimes it seems a little too remote. She doesn’t often seem like someone in mourning or struggling to find an answer to the question of his suicide. And there was one moment where the dialogue actually matched the scene. The dog is sitting on the top of hill, looking out at something and not moving. And she comments on how majestic it looked, and how still it was. That description was true, and it’s one of the scenes that stuck with me after the movie was over.

In all though, it was such a relief to see something that doesn’t turn a dog into a version of a human being.

I got to see Oppenheimer in IMAX, the way it was meant to be seen, and what a joy it was to hear and see the full movie in the form it was meant to be.

But this time, I was deeply annoyed. Of course we know that the country went through an anti-Communist (red scare) period. But through the entirety of the movie, most characters are on the defensive about being liberal, leftist, progressive, or communist. The only one who isn’t is Florence Pugh (Jean Matlock is her character’s name, I think.) If they’re not trying to defend having been a member of the communist party, or even being interested in their ideas, then they are almost always on the opposite side — participating in a witch hunt to root out communists and communist sympathizers. That’s why Emily Blunt, (a powerhouse, albeit an alcoholic and terrible mother), repeats “16 years ago, sorry 17, no sorry, 18. 18 years ago.” Trying, in vain really, to point out that her communist party membership was so long ago it was irrelevant.

But it’s not irrelevant to people who have a vendetta or who are on a witch hunt or, for whatever reason, think that DEI is the root of all evil. This is what’s happening now — with the Trump government going after anyone and everyone who might have worked on DEI projects, etc.

Lost in both the communist witch hunts of the post atomic bomb era, and the current witch hunts for DEI sympathizers and policies, is the freedom to think AND, I would add, the notion that conservatism is identical to patriotism, which it is not, at all and that leftist ideas are anti-American. This has been going on for decades — even before McCarthy — and yet I doubt a single person in this government or past governments could even describe Marx’s “Capital,” or the contents.

It’s like the word Woke, that John McWhorter recently wrote about because it is one of the words that has transformed within a matter of years from meaning: “politically aware,” to “anti-white racism,” I guess, and basically “liberalism.” When DeSantis said, about Florida, “This is where Woke comes to die,” he was basically saying, stupid and uninformed people are welcome here.

It’s really just too sad to be going through this again. You have to wonder who’s going to be the next sacrifice.

Well I don’t know how to do much with this web stuff, so I can’t figure out how to put text next to this image.

This Jane Campion movie and the novel it’s based on, published in 1967 if you can believe — before Stonewall — is a remarkable work. The movie is very concise and mostly follows the book, almost to the letter. But there is one thing that has been pecking away at me since I first saw it three years ago, and then read the novel afterward, in part because of Annie Prouxl who was asked to advice the moviemakers.

First — the novel basically deals with closeted cowboys and hidden homosexuality. Peter is an effeminate boy who might also be something of a sociopath. Phil, the main character, appears to be an absolute hardened Montana rough neck. The book opens with him cruelly castrating a bull by more or less ripping its balls off with his bare hands. That scene is replicated later in the movie. It’s a shocking and horrific opening, but one of the reasons I think Thomas Savage is a unsung genius is because it more or less explains the main character, at least at the start of the novel, in a single, violent and shocking scene. He treats people the way he wants to treat himself, and he would, at least in the public world, like to rip his own balls off so he could stop feeling.

Second — Phil constantly talks about a dead cowboy named Bronco Henry and he keeps the dead man’s saddle oiled and clean in the horse barn. The cowpokes around him are constantly asking about Bronco Henry and he has nothing but praises for his former master. Eventually in the movie and in the book, you realize that he and Bronco Henry were in love. But the moviemakers, through no fault of their own, couldn’t figure out from the novel whether or not there was an actual sexual relationship between Bronco Henry and Phil. That’s when they asked Annie Proulx to chime in. She read the book and said something like, “Read the first pages of chapter xyz.” And the entire two or three pages of that chapter is about sapling trees — willows or something — intertwining endlessly, dropping their seeds on the ground where more trees grew and intertwined with others, fertilizing each other…. you get the gist. It’s an absolutely astounding way of dealing with the issues of 1967, and maybe our own time as well — how to write about gay sex without explicitly calling it gay sex. Anyway, this cove, which is almost like an egg, is impenetrable except for one narrow tunnel — more sexual imagery. Phil uses the cove to masturbate and rub himself with clothing of Bronco Henry.

And in the movie — I don’t remember if this is in the book — Peter, the sissy, accidentally discovers Phil’s secret cove and then finds a stash of “physique” magazines. I looked up the date of one of them and it was accurate. Body builder magazines began around 1899, maybe a bit earlier. But they are all labeled B.H. (Bronco Henry), so they all date back to around 1904 when Bronco Henry died.

Now this is what sticks in my craw, after that long intro. The movie takes place in 1925 and Phil keeps goading his brother George to remember what was special about this particular cattle drive. George can’t remember, because he’s a little dim, (but also kind,) and Phil reminds him that it was 25 years ago that Bronco Henry first taught them how to do a cattle drive. Neither Phil nor George have ever married and neither have children. We learn that Phil was educated at Yale or Harvard (I can’t remember), so he’s not really a young one. Their parents, who they call Old Gent and Old Lady, have retired and moved to Salt Lake City. So George and Phil are both 25 + x: x being their age in 1900. On a plaque above Bronco Henry’s saddle is his birth and death date: 1864 to 1904. He was 50 when he died in 1904. Which also means, I think, that he was 46 when he first took Phil and George on their first cattle drive in 1900.

So the math kind of works out like this for Phil:

25 + 0 = he was 0 when he met and had sex with Bronco Henry — not possible.
25 + 15 = Currently 40 years old.
25 + 20 = Currently 45 years old.

and so on. What isn’t easy is that we never learn how old the brothers are in 1925.

But judging by the parent’s age, the fact that neither brother is married or has children (and they share the same bedroom at the start of the movie, like children) and Kirsten Duntz’s son’s age — high school and then prep school — which makes her about 35 or older — the brothers have to be pushing 40 in 1925. Which means Phil was 15 in 1900 and Bronco Henry was 46. My guess is that the brothers were younger. Which makes the whole story about the victim of a pedophile — a willing victim. But the strange thing about the movie and the book, and maybe this is because they couldn’t write about this stuff in 1967, Phil gave his entire life — devoted his entire being — to a dead man, because that dead man taught him how to feel and love. And then to prove he wasn’t a pansy, he turned his back on it.

I’ve written it over and over and over, again and again and again. Addiction is boring.

I think William Burroughs is probably the only writer who got it right (write). (But I haven’t read a word by Bukowski.) When Burroughs wrote about his own addiction to heroin he wrote about the joy he found in coming across an almost endless supply of horse, because he wasn’t going to have to worry for a very long time. When he talked about quitting, he talked about Ayahuasca and how it probably was the only thing that cured him. But the one thing he didn’t talk about was “moral failings,” or “trauma,” or “internal pain.” He refused to turn addiction into a psychological issue, and that probably is another reason he refused to accept that his attraction to men was also a psychological issue. He simply didn’t believe the stories.

Now… huge caveat… I haven’t read a single William Burroughs novel in at least 35 years and the only one I read was Naked Lunch. I didn’t even read Queer. I was probably too frightened to buy a book with that title at that age in my life. So I’m think Queer plus my memories of Naked Lunch and they may be merging.

But what I can say is that it is repetitive. I am less than 100 days from quitting. I’d like to quit before I go to Africa in February. But basically this is the exact same position that happened the last time I quit. I am so incapable that I can barely get off the couch and one of the only reasons I go out at all is to get another bottle. In the old days, I had to plan ahead and make sure I had enough to last from Saturday to Monday because Sundays were “blue.” In the old days, I would sit on my couch and work on my laptop, until it was drink time. It’s no different now. I have a larger apartment so I have multiple places to sit, but sit is all I do until it’s time to drink. I then I feel relieved, a little bit, and especially elated if I haven’t gone through everything and don’t have to outside and pretend that I am okay. My friend Ellie is in the hospital and I can’t visit her because I’m not sure what she’d say if she saw me trembling from the DTs.

I’m sure some people know. They are too smart not to understand. But they also haven’t asked me to stop. BUT, it’s not their responsibility. It’s all on me.

And frankly, with the flood of incompetents and corrupt people supporting the rapist and felon in the next 3 days, I’m really not sure I want to quit anyway.

In Queer, the William Borough’s alter ego tells a doctor that he is in Mexico because the drug he is addicted to is not a crime, while it is a crime in the U.S. It was such an interesting and honest moment in the movie, you sometimes wonder why people in the U.S. can’t just say something so simply, and without guile or the need to flatter or the need to outdo a rival. This said, coming from New York City.

That being said, one time, on his ridiculous and truly awful reality show “The Apprentice,” Trump said something like, “New York is the most vicious city on earth.” Of course that’s not true. But it was a key to his addled mind. “I want to hate them.” That’s what he said about the Central Park 5, in his full page ads in the NYTImes, The NYPost, and the Daily News. The opinion piece was about bringing back the death penalty. As the anti-death penalty nun Prejaen reminded us, Trump went on a killing spree at the end of his term. He executed 16 people (or maybe 13) that were on Federal Death Row. He did it in January, after months of saying the election was stolen — proof enough that he knew he couldn’t stay. It was almost as if he said, “Oh, there’s something I forgot to do before I go. I want to kill a bunch of people.”

There is no one worse, in my lifetime, to take the job. And that includes his previous incarnation which was a shit show. But I don’t think it’s a reason to stay drunk.

Another of Coppola dynasty has become a director. Well she’s been a director for awhile, but this might be the one that gives her some fame, just like Lost In Translation gave her aunt Sophia her a taste of fame.

Fame as well as motherhood is, perhaps, one of the themes of this movie. I don’t think it was a revelation, but I think Pamela Anderson was more than a little good. It’s another one of those performances that is almost startling because you would never associate this actress with the Baywatch actress, or the big breasted girl who was first discovered on a Jumbotron at a football game, nor the woman who starred in her own sex tape with Tommy Lee.

As I’ve said before, all art is about the artist. It can’t be any other way because artistry demands sacrifice and this is where the theme of failed motherhood comes in. The character, Shelly, has a daughter who she has never really raised, preferring to devote her life to being a showgirl, and understandably there is a great deal of bitterness between the two. She has also never revealed who the father is — Dave Bautista — a man she sees every day because he is the stage manager of her show.

The show, called the Razzle Dazzle, is and has been failing, being gradually replaced by something called the Hot Circus. Shelly has been playing this role for 30 years, since she was 22, and although you kind of know what it is, it isn’t really until the very end of the film that we finally see the full show in all its Las Vegas tackiness. There’s something terribly sad about a character who has given so much for something so banal and awful. It’s like a writer, perhaps myself, who slaves away at a novel that turns out to be an absolute bore, or even incomprehensible, but not in a good way like Thomas Pynchon.

Jamie Lee Curtis is always brave in her roles — one that immediately comes to mind is the absolute horror of an Italian mother she played on The Bear. In this it is no different. In a locker room scene you see how much she is trying to keep her body together — to look sexy, even though she’s gained too much weight to really pull it off. She was one of the razzle dazzle dancers, but now she is cocktailing and basically letting men play grab ass for tips. She doesn’t care. But in one particular hard to watch scene, she dances alone on a podium, and doesn’t seem to turn even a single head. She looks pathetic.