Thomas F. Cook

I’ve written about Tammy Faye before, specifically “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” starring Jessica Chastain.

This musical failed in NYC, while it was a smash hit in London, and there’s a big question of Why?

I think in part, and this is without having seen it, it’s because they are elevating her to almost a gay rights activist, for the very simple reason that she dared to speak to a gay man with AIDS on her television hour. She wasn’t in the room with him. He was in his apartment or some studio in California. Her sympathy for the guy was thousands of miles apart.

She was a stupid and greed-filled religious televangelist. The real story behind her and her husband’s rise and fall is the damn television show and the station they built. It was PTL (Praise The Lord) network — and it was far more successful than CBN (Christian Broadcast Network), Pat Robertson’s network, which only had a few thousand viewers. There were a whole lot of transactions that went on between the Bakers and others, but when they became hosts on CBN of a show called The 700 Club, it ended up becoming the flagship program on CBN. When they left that network, they started their own network and it left other televangelists in the gutter. Everyone was jealous of them: craved their ratings, their world satellite network, and so on. So when scandal hit because of Jim Baker and a woman named Jessica Hahn, Jerry Falwell stepped in to become the chairman of the network and Jim and Tammy left or were tossed out. Not unsurprisingly, the donations to the station completely dried up and Falwell had to contribute 20 million to keep it afloat. He had lied to Jim Baker that Jim would get control back and instead called him “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.” Of course that just shows what an idiot Falwell was too. Christianity didn’t begin the day Christ died. In fact it wasn’t until 400 some years had passed that the four main gospels were codified, the apocrypha created, and Rome turned away from paganism. So 1600 years to be more precise. And of course there was Judas who you could accuse of being a stain on Christianity if he and Jesus weren’t, in fact, Jewish.

But never mind that. Falwell is dead and we are all better off for it. Tammy Faye died but Jim Baker still lives on, has repurchased the PTL name and logo and is trying again. But why did this show fail? Not sure. But I have a feeling it really gets the story of these two totally wrong. Jessica Chastain’s portrayal was probably closer. It might also be a much more amusing show in England, whose people, I sometimes think, are continually perplexed at the United States as a nation.

I sometimes watched the Jim and Tammy show for laughs and one time, to the very apparent annoyance of her husband, Tammy told a story about shopping in the middle of Indiana in this mall that must have been 500 years old. That is how stupid she was.

He has said the inspiration for this WWII movie was a picture of a little light skinned black child walking by himself during the Evacuation of the children of London. He wanted to remind everyone that the German’s attack on London was not solely an attack on pasty people, but that there was a lively and vibrant black community living there, including interracial couples.

This is true I think. But the really good thing about this movie is that it accepts the interracial aspect and doesn’t pound it over our heads. The little boy experiences prejudice, hatred, because of his color, but the main story is about the gallery of rogues he meets when he decides to jump the train and run home.

Getting home is far more difficult than he realizes, and he’s got almost nothing but a sandwich and a tiny bit of pocket change. Eventually, the authorities realize that he hasn’t arrived at his destination family, and have to tell Siorsese Ronan, his mother, that he is missing. This is unfortunate as far as the script goes because she then goes out to “find him,” but London is a sprawling town and there isn’t that much she can do. This sort of gives her character a kind of pointlessness, where earlier in the movie she had an urgency that was more palpable.

I think the jury is still out on Steve McQueen. I sometimes can’t understand what his movies are really about. The first one that I saw was Hunger, where Michael Fassbender played Bobbie Sands, the hunger striker who died during the Thatcher era. Even though it was a grueling depiction of what the British did to the Irish political prisoners in Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, I sometimes felt he just wanted to see Fassbender be as naked as possible. Then Shame, the next one I saw, didn’t seem to me to depict shame at all and Fassbender, again, was walking around naked with his huge floppy cock. 12 Years A Slave won for best movie that year but it did catch some criticism, especially the movie critic Armand White, who called it torture porn and got himself kicked out of The New York Film Critics Circle for heckling Steve McQueen for this very reason. I always thought White was perhaps one of the worst critics out there, back when he wrote for the New York Press, but there was, indeed, a kind of over the top quality about 12 Years A Slave, especially the whipping scene, which I assume was the scene White was referring to as torture porn. And then this one, where some real ghoulish grave robbers play with dead bodies and laugh about them as they steal their valuables. He might go too far, but in spite of that I don’t think I really know what his movies are about or who they’re for. But hell, he’s had a full career already and he gets great actors.

I wasn’t eager to see this because of Kieran Culkin and the really reprehensible character he played on Succession. They were all disgusting people but his character was so dismissive and awful, I just knew going in that a lot of that energy would be in this character as well. And I guess I just didn’t want to be reminded of it.

But I like Jesse Eisenberg and once saw him when crossing the street — he coming in the opposite direction. He stared at me and he has a very intense stare and he is also as thin as a rail.

In this they play cousins whose mutual grandmother, a holocaust survivor from Poland, has died and left them money with the request that the visit her homeland. Benji (Culkin) lives in Binghamton and David (Eisenberg) lives in Brooklyn. But they are vastly different personalities and I think the poster shows that pretty well. They are basically sharing a room on a holocaust tour guided by a British man (Will Sharpe) with a life long interest in Eastern Europe and that area of the world. Sharpe does a great job distancing himself from his recent character on The White Lotus (the one married to Aubrey Plaza) and you don’t feel that anything is exploitive about the movie, even the visit to the nearby Majdanek Concentration Camp which is just a few miles from Lublin. They intent to visit their grandmother’s home, parting ways with the others in the group.

But the conflict comes because Benji is, basically, a depressed and out of control nut while Eisenberg is a comfortable Brooklynite with a small family. And much of the very moving parts of the movie aren’t the holocaust related visits, it is Benji and David’s different ways of relating to being third generation jewish people. (3rd generation from the initial holocaust survivors, that is.) This whole notion of 3rd generation is repeated in various forms and I think it frequently comes up because it isn’t possible for the 3rd generation of any group to understand what the 1st generation went through. You can try. You can empathize. You can read books and wikipedia articles, or letters from that generation. But to really get at that core, (the real pain of the title), is not really possible.

Anyway it’s a wonderful movie and well worth the time to see it.

Okay, so a tiny little piece of me is incredibly jealous of Sean Baker and mainly because he went to NYU Tisch School of the Arts to learn filmmaking, and I went to NYU’s (at that time) Washington Square University College — now renamed College of Arts and Science. Or maybe it’s just Arts & Science. In any event, I took a number of movie classes that were offered by Tisch, and even a law class on the first amendment offered by the Law School. The reason I am jealous is because he is so freaking talented. And he’s not just a talented director, he is a talented writer.

He wrote and directed two movies I really loved: The Florida Project and Red Rocket. I probably would have loved Tangerine too, but I didn’t see it. He often writes about sex workers or people on the fringes of our worlds. In this, Anora, (she calls herself Ani or Annie), is basically a lap dancer who tries to do tricks on the side, outside the club. The club, incidentally, comes off in the movie, like something of a haven for women who like stripping and like getting naked for men. Because of her background, she’s asked to dance for the man in the photo, the son of a Russian oligarch who lives in the most expensive mansion in Brooklyn. It’s in the area called Mill Basin which looks, from the overhead view on Google Maps, very unnatural. They proceed to fall in love.

But if you actually know anything about human nature, the son of a Russian oligarch who doesn’t want to return to Russia, you know that when he asks her to marry him and offers to give her a four carat diamond ring worth, if it was lab grown, about $14,000 and up to $60,000 if it was a real diamond (although one of that size is rarely found in mines) — you know that he’s an absolute bull shitter. He’s also not a nice person — not a nice kid. Spoiled rotten, to the absolute core. There’s a couple of guys who are his father’s goons who live nearby and try to make sure he doesn’t get into trouble — or at least too much trouble. The movie turns pretty wildly when these three find out that he has married her at a church in Las Vegas. (Vegas also becomes a plot point in the movie.)

What really surprised me is that it was so funny. But what also surprised me — to a degree, because I think Sean Baker genuinely writes about people who are sincere — is that she, Anora, is just about the only sincere person in the movie. She’s also a truth teller which makes her, almost, a Tennessee Williams character like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar or Maggie in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. These truth tellers never get their way. Maggie wanted a heterosexual husband and by the end of the play, has convinced herself she’s going to turn him straight. Blanche was raped and sent to an insane asylum. Like those characters, Anora ends up not exactly lost in delusion or insanity, but it doesn’t really end well. It’s almost like a mini tragedy, as most of his movies have been. And I think that’s where our exhilaration and empathy begins. We understand, because of what she’s been through, why she sobs.

I hope he has the stamina and creative juices to continue, because film needs people and writers like Sean Baker.

This book was recommended by someone on Facebook, so it wasn’t the most trustworthy of recommends. Generally I find the books I want to read by browsing in a bookstore, reviews in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and then recommendations from people I’m actually talking to or listening to.

And then it turned out to be a memoir, a genre which is very popular right now but one I don’t like too much. Generally speaking, memoirs often blow up the writers trials and tribulations into much more than they are.

This one is about the death of the guy’s lover in the early 90s due to AIDS. And because I don’t read back covers, covers, flaps, jackets, or forwards, there began to develop a strong tension as I was reading whether or not the writer, Tim, was going to die also, or if he made it to the point where he could start taking combo therapies and survive. In fact, there were times I thought that maybe the narrator was dead, like in Sunset Boulevard where the voice over tells you, as you’re looking at a floating body in a pool, “That’s me.”

But it turns out he does not die in the book. And then I read the forward, afterward, which said that he had written this memoir in a frenzy, got it published in 1993 and died shortly of AIDS shortly after. So the book is basically the story of their relationship. And that’s why I hate memoirs.

But in some sense I am pleased to be able to add to my “taken too soon,” list of artists and writers and poets who simply didn’t have enough life span to become the writers they were meant to be. An artist needs time, above all, and privacy, and continual work. In some sense, I am taking my much longer life for granted, and have to stop that, and resume my writing. It’s basically what I planned my whole life for, and just because I never really achieved anything of much significance, I have to stop the self pity party.

So far, in addition to this, which was a mediocre book for me, other artists gone too soon are Donald Britton and Larry Stanton (and ironically, Larry painted numerous portraits of Donald Britton, as well as many other young gay artists who all perished too young.) They all might have achieved great things, but AIDS took them.

Someone who was writing about the joys of The Mineshaft, the notorious bar/sex club, said that it embodied the freedom between Stonewall and the condom. I think that’s a very simplified and probably stupid way of looking at it. Other STDs were off the chart in those days — and there was a pandemic of gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia that nobody cared about because you’d just take some penicillin and go out and do some more. And according to the latest science, HIV and Hepatitis C spread almost at the same time, peaking in around 1977/1978. It spread for years before the first cases started showing up. Somehow I only got Hepatitis C which is now cured. But the 2 are almost always seen together. And the fact that Prep is the penicillin, these STDs are rising once again, and HIV is spreading also, because not everyone takes the precautions they should.

Anyway, the book was heartfelt, but really didn’t have much of a punch.

Jason Reitman is the son of Ivan Reitman, the producer of some all time hits like Animal House and Ghostbusters. But Jason Reitman’s films don’t get great reviews and I’ve never quite understood why. His best received work was Whiplash, but in my opinion, J.K. Simmons was the wrong actor to play the part of the sadist. The other: Miles Teller, was perfect.

In fact, I think it’s his and his casting director’s ability to find actors that are on the cusp — like you know who they are but only vaguely. It makes watching the movie not an exercise in watching a famous person try and fail to convince you that they ARE the character. Unknowns don’t bring the baggage of their fame.

So, for example, you think “where have I seen that actor playing Lorne Michaels before,” and it turns out to be The Fabelmans, where he played a 16 year old Steven Spielberg. Or “why does the guy playing Chevy Chase look familiar,” and it’s because you saw him in May/December where he played the older (probably gay) son of Julianne Moore. I’m not suggesting this always helps. In this case, every actor is playing someone more famous – even in death – than they are now.

And the movie is pure fantasy anyway. There’s a little bit of drama about the show being set up to fail, lining up a rerun reel of Carson, and Dave Tebet who was in charge of finding talent, not destroying it, almost pulling the plug and saying, at the very last second, “Go Live.” It wasn’t his job and he wouldn’t have been in the control room. I’ll be happy to be proved wrong.

Maybe it’s nostalgia, but after watching 90 minutes of utter chaos and the kind of script that former cocaine addict Aaron Sorkin likes to write, it all came down to the beginning — the very first sketch on Saturday Night which was Michael O’Donoghue and John Belushi doing a bit about wolverines and then Chevy Chase, (Cory Michael Smith) coming out to say the famous opening line, “Live From New York, it’s Saturday Night.” And that final scene — and also the first scene of the show IRL — just warmed my heart a lot. I felt transported back 50 years to when I was 14 or 15 and watched the first episode of Saturday Night, for I had heard about it.

So house lights up, the original opening montage starts playing along with pictures of the famous cast and their real names. There’s a little sadness there too, because you know that John Belushi is going to die and that Gilda Radner is going to get ovarian cancer, twice, instead of a career, and will open Gilda’s Club to offer support to women with cancer. (That’s now been renamed Cancer Support Community, which seems… forgettable and odd.) West Houston Street is still second named “Gilda Radner Way.” You think about the decades that have passed and cast members that were murdered: Phil Hartman, or were fired: Norm McDonald. Some you hated: Gilbert Gottfried. Some that developed Trump-related insanity: Victoria Jackson.

Anyway, I enjoyed it, but knew, because it was in one of the downstairs theatres at Lincoln Plaza, that it must have bombed.

I wanted to see this before I read any reviews and come to my own conclusions.

Again, a supposedly master director and writer does not do even the simplest thing of allowing the audience to find its way into the movie. All art, including paintings, have this secret method of drawing you in. When it’s left out, or when it’s accidentally omitted, the audience or viewer must work overtime in order to “get” what’s happening. It doesn’t matter that there can be people running around all over the place, a movie, a book, a piece of art and a classical piece of music, must begin with an introduction which serves as a beckoning call.

Coppola chose not to do this, so for a good twenty minutes or so, I was sort of agreeing with everyone and the box office that this was a piece of garbage. After I had found my way in, I found it far more enjoyable, even with the bad casting choices and a distinctly outdated, it seemed to me, of filmmaking. I couldn’t really pin it down — what it was about the film that seemed so much like a 70s movie. Might have been the cinematography. I don’t know.

But all movies — all art actually — is about the artist’s journey. It doesn’t matter if it’s a dumb vehicle like Legally Blond, a historic musical like Les Miserables, or an epic like this. Coppola’s conclusion is that art is supreme and it is more important than affordable housing, various human needs and wants, relationships and so on. At the opening of the movie, he (Adam Driver) is standing on the edge of the Chrysler building, very precariously dangling his foot over the edge. When he starts to fall, he shouts, “Stop,” and the world stops moving and he stops falling, he pulls his foot back onto the ledge and straightens himself up. Then he shouts “Go,” and the world moves again. That is the artist in control of his or her world.

Ultimately, it’s a big fuck you to the movie industry. The character is an architect, but all the people around him can be seen as various types of industry people. The naysayers, the money men, and so on. I think I felt the most depressed about the movie industry when I realized that in order to get your movie produced, you had to pass literally hundreds of people who all have the power to say no. Just one of those people will destroy your chances. There’s just a handful of people who can say yes, and that goes for Broadway as well, and they almost never know what they are doing.

But I don’t think I would have spent $140 million on this. It might have been a long dream but it needed some outside help.

And please don’t hire Aubrey Plaza. She can be good, but when she has to act sophisticated, it’s like watching her and Chris Pratt as Andy as Bert Machlan on Parks and Recreation.

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.

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.

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.