Without getting into details I’ll be submitting to an examination procedure this morning around 10:30 am, and that’s all I’m going to say. Nothing wrong — just something I have to do. I’ll be out of it and presumably recovering by 12:30 or 1 pm.
All this time I had somehow failed to realize that Jack Arnold’s It Came From Outer Space (‘53), which is based on a Ray Bradbury film treatment called “The Meteor”, was a clear forerunner of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (‘56).
Both were black-and-white chillers about bucolic, small-town communities besieged by aliens with the power to surreptitiously replace residents with creepy, emotion–less substitutes, the difference being that Arnold and Bradbury’s visitors aren’t aggressively evil or looking to harm anyone and certainly don’t serve as metaphorical seed agents for ‘50s-era conformity, as they did in Body Snatchers.
And both focused on a cerebral alpha male hero figure (Richard Carlson, Kevin McCarthy) and nearly identical brunette wifey-girlfriend love partners (Arnold’s Barbara Rush, Siegel’s Dana Wynter) who are taken over by aliens in the third act.
There are too many scenes in which Carlson tries and fails to persuade fellow townies that some kind of alien invasion is actually happening. Over and over and over. Charles Drake’s Sheriff Warren finally comes around toward the end, but by then the skepticism horse has been beaten to death.
I was expecting to engage with Kathleen Hughes, the blonde on the 4K Bluray jacket cover, but she’s only in one brief scene.
I was delighted by the relatively recent digital restoration of It Came From Outer Space. Clifford Stine’s cinematography looks about as proficient and ace-level as this kind of boilerplate big-studio monochrome effort gets. At times the image quality seems as clean and rich as, say, the VistaVision lensing of William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (‘55), especially during the outdoor-simulating sound stage scenes.
We all know the great-grandfatherly Joe Biden, 81, “looks like his own skeletal remains,” as Bill Maher remarked on a 9.30.23 “New Rules” segment, and that he almost certainly lacks the mental agility and high-octane strength to run an effective campaign against the insane but grotesquely resilient, fat-as-a-cow Donald Trump, 77.
Every American of voting age, in short, has locked into “Biden is too old to serve another term,” so it was no shock to read that special counsel Robert K. Hur has noted, in his just-released report about President Biden’s occasionally errant handling of documents, that he comes off as a “sympathetic, well–meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — basically a rote confirmation of what everyone has long perceived or suspected so what’s the biggie?
But during Thursday evening’s impromptu press encounter at the White House Biden intensified the over–the–hill impressions by angrily barking at and sneering about Hur’s observations…a gruff and blustery short-tempered response that failed to exude even a semblance of the usual cool poise and confident assurance that Presidents have routinely been associated with.
My father used to behave like this in his 80s…grumpy, hair–trigger, junkyard dog–like.
Bill Maher on 9.30.23:
N.Y. Times:
…when I was 12 or 13. Like Truman Capote I also was more into movies, reading books and drawing stuff than girls (the hound-dogging didn’t start until I was 23), sports or, God forbid, school studies.
When I was 16 or 17 I was putting much more time and energy into typing a socially satirical hand-out (circulated among my ruffian friends) than doing homework. I surely could have refined my writing skills by attending journalism school in my late teens or early 20s, but I’ve always been a do-it-yourself type.
The great John Waters on the nonbinary sexual revolution, as reported last week by the Desert Sun’s Ema Sasic:
Last night I re-watched George Pal and Rudolph Mate’s When Worlds Collide (‘51), an ambitious if under-budgeted sci-fi disaster flick. Early on I was intrigued by (i.e., fantasizing about) 23 year-old costar Barbara Rush, whom I’d never paid much attention to (and who is still with us, by the way, at age 97).
She was unquestionably front and center during the ‘50s, but my most vivid memory of Rush is from Warren Beatty and Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (‘75).
There’s a scene in which Beatty’s Beverly Hills hairdresser (i.e., George Roundy) is trying to persuade a bank officer (George Furth) to give him a loan to start his own hair salon with. When asked about collateral, Roundy tries to explain that his business value is largely based upon celebrity client loyalty. “I have the heads…I do Barbara Rush,” he states. Alas, this isn’t enough for the bank officer.
Married to Jeffrey Hunter from ‘50 to ‘55, Rush was very fetching in her 20s, but augmented this with a certain interior, deep-drill quality that seemed rooted in good character and basic values. Call her the trustworthy, on-the-conservative-side, guilt-trippy type. This was especially evident in 1958’s The Young Lions and ‘59’s The Young Philadelphians.
It was this sense of duty and restraint plus a corresponding low-flame quality when it came to hints of sultry sensuousness that probably limited Rush’s appeal as she got into her 30s. Wikipage: “She was often cast as a willful woman of means or a polished, high-society doyenne.”
For two or three weeks I’ve been watching a brief YouTube solicitation for donations to the Biden-Harris re-election campaign.
The spot might persuade a certain percentage to donate, but it mainly reminds that Joe Biden is too old and over-the-hill to be an effective campaigner.
Can Joe do the actual job? Mistakes and elite woke allegiances aside, he’s shown that he’s a moderate veteran who knows the ropes and can handle the demands after a fashion.
Does Joe project prime-of-life strength and hard-snap vigor? Please.
The 62 year-old guy on the left is clearly attractive, mentally sharp and possessed by natural charisma. The pale 81 year-old guy on the right is squinting too much — obviously in a state of natural great-grandfatherly decline — and he hoarsely mumbles more than enunciates.
I used to visit my late mom in an assisted living facility so don’t tell me.
This ad is telling us, in short, that the guy on the left has it and the guy on the right mostly doesn’t.
I want Biden to be re-elected and yet it’s obvious that he might not make it, as Steve Kornacki and that recent, seriously stunning NBC News poll suggests.
If Biden loses next November his name will be mud until the end of time.
Rather than accept reality and strategically step aside, historians will lament, he arrogantly insisted that he was the best candidate to defeat The Beast, and in so doing plunged the nation right back into another four years of deranged, law-defying chaos and neo-totalitarian horror.
Substitute Michelle Obama for Kamala Harris and the whole picture changes. People despise Harris and are terrified of a succession scenario, but the same folks would be down (or at least a lot happier) with Michelle.
I’d never heard of these magazines until late yesterday morning (Sunday, 2.4). They were sitting on a checkout rack at a ShopRite market in West Orange — a ten-minute drive from Jett, Cait and Sutton’s home.
The reason for their absence from HE radar is that my most-visited food haunts over the last two years — Wilton’s Village Market and WeHo Pavilions — wouldn’t dare offer them because this would suggest that Trumpers and obesity-sufferers are regular shoppers, which is somewhat degrading from a cultural standpoint.
The irony is that there’s nothing overtly coarse or downmarket about the ShopRite in question. And yet someone in ShopRite management figured these rags would appeal to customers. Do the math.
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