Category Archives: To Be Filed

• Sean Spicer is going to be on Dancing With The Stars. He's not going to actually dance. He's going to lie and say he did dance and that the press is lying if they said he didn't.

Alton Brown is back with his fine cooking program, Good Eats, this time in an online version. I like watching this guy because I think he uses television very well and I always learn something about something. Often, the lesson is that I don't know enough about cooking to cook whatever he's cooking, or don't have the time or patience or kitchen space or utensils or spice rack. In this first installment of his new series, he makes one of my favorite dishes — chicken parmesan — and pretty well ensures that I will never try to make it at home.

Which is fine with me…honest. I'm not a very good cook and I will never do enough of it to become a very good cook. Every time I toy with the idea of cooking something, I watch some online video, see an experienced chef make it and am disabused of the foolish thought that I can do that. That, to me, is what cooking programs are for. I'm going to follow Alton Brown's new show and I hope real soon he makes potato latkes because I have this idea in the back of my head that I could do that and I need to be shown how wrong I am. Here's why I won't even attempt chicken parm…

What's all this about Trump buying Greenland? Matt Yglesias explains but the bottom line is that Greenland is not for sale, Trump is not going to buy it and he sure wouldn't want to make it one of the United States. There's more chance of you buying Massachusetts.

We have here a kind of glossary/guide to the cultural references in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. For some reason, it makes no reference to the one that most delighted me, which was the inclusion of Seymour, a local horror movie host who was on KHJ TV and later on KTLA. I knew "Seymour" — his real name was Larry Vincent — and visited his set and even wrote some lines he used on his program.

Here's a link to an article I wrote about him back in 1999. The photo above is one I took on his set at KTLA around 1973 or so. For a long time, it was the clearest photo you could find of him on the Internet so lots of folks borrowed it for their websites and remembrances. I'm glad the guy is still remembered because he was the best I ever saw at what he did. His intros and interjections even got me to watch movies like The Mummy's Curse and Man-Made Monster which today, I wouldn't sit through if you paid me $500 and fed me Souplantation Tomato Soup throughout.

• Apparently, winning the title of President of the United States wasn't enough for Donald Trump. He's now actively campaigning for the office of Jesus Christ.

First one of these in like six months and I should have posted this earlier today. Very busy today…and some of you can help. Please stop sending me e-mails arguing either that the new Tarantino film is either the absolute greatest movie ever made or the absolute worst. I cannot be convinced it is either of those things. I'd try to connect each of those arguing one position with someone else arguing the other but, like matter meeting anti-matter, I fear an explosion that would rock the universe.

If you want to tell me something, tell me why it matters so much to you that I — a blogger with minimal influence on anything — totally agrees with you about this movie. And I promise you this: If you can ever manage to get every single other person on this planet to agree with your view of this film, I will throw in with you all. I will vote to make it unanimous.

Until then, leave me alone on this. I have a long-standing policy: The length of time you spend arguing about a movie should never exceed the running time of said movie. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (which I believe is how you should spell it, ellipsis and all) is two hours and forty-five minutes. I am currently at about 2:41. In one sense, it's great that a movie arouses so much interest and discussion…but I can only take about another four minutes of it and I prefer to spend it praising whoever did the redress of the Bruin and Village Theaters in Westwood. You have no idea how many movies I saw in those places when they looked like that.

Normal posting should resume here in a couple of days when the current workload abates, the sixth volume of The Complete Pogo is off to the printers, and my cleaning lady comes and I no longer have to wash one dish in order to eat one dish of anything.

The Daily Show has assembled 21 minutes of Donald Trump saying…well, let's put it this way: If you were a Trump fan and a Democratic opponent said any of these things, you'd say this was incontrovertible proof that the Democrat was an idiot and unfit to trim hedges, let alone be President…

• Jeffrey Epstein signed a new will just two days before he was found dead. Isn't this the plot of every single Ellery Queen novel?

As noted here, Donald Trump cannot understand why there's this poll out from Fox News that shows him losing to Biden, Sanders, Warren and even Harris. He said, "I don't know what's happening with Fox."

It's fascinating that among the possibilities that apparently didn't occur to him was that the Fox News pollsters conducted a poll by the same methods they've always used and the poll yielded those results. He seems to have assumed that since Fox has been generally favorable to him, they would rig their poll to show him clobbering the other candidates…or at least should suppress the results of a poll that showed him losing.

This may tell us a lot about the way this man views politics. The news is just a tool to manipulate public opinion and it's dishonest if it doesn't do that in service of Trump. If and when he runs a news network or newspaper, that's how it would work.

And if/when on Election Night 2020, Fox News reports that Donald Trump lost, he'll be able to understand why CBS, NBC, ABC and all the newspapers he hates would say such a thing…

…but why, oh why would Fox?

As noted here, my pal Frank Ferrante is currently starring as his alter-ego Caesar in Teatro ZinZanni in Chicago. I still hope I can get back there to see him before he leaves at the end of September.

Tuesday, September 17 would be a day off for Frank but workaholic that is, he's going to spend that evening in his alter-alter-ego of Groucho Marx. He'll be performing — for the first time ever in the city of Chicago — his acclaimed one-man-and-a-pianist romp, An Evening with Groucho in the Teatro ZinZanni tent. Here's your chance to see why I've been recommending that show for so long.  Tickets here.

If you're nowhere near Chicago for it, you might be within commuting distance of the city of Irvine, California. On Sunday, October 6, he'll be doing the Groucho show at 4 PM at the Merage Jewish Community Center of Orange County. Tickets for that one are here.

As noted, some fans and friends of the late Bruce Lee are upset with the way he's depicted in Mr. Tarantino's Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. A couple of you have written to scold me for not taking a stand in defense of Bruce Lee…and I'm sorry. I don't think I ever saw anything with Bruce Lee in it except for The Green Hornet, which was obviously not him at his best or representative of his stardom.

So this is not my fight. It belongs to people who knew him like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

If you've got 40 minutes, you might want to spend it watching Anderson Cooper interviewing Stephen Colbert. It starts out to be about Colbert's show and the things he says on it about that guy in the White House who's always talking about his own perfection. Then the conversation makes a hard turn and becomes about dealing with grief and you have two smart men speaking more like friends than like interviewer and interviewee…

I frequently mention my super-talented friend Shelly Goldstein on this here blog. Here's another website not only mentioning her but interviewing her. This woman doesn't perform her act nearly as often as she should but when she does, you should go.

• Just remember: No matter how good you are at whatever you do, you still aren't as good as Simone Biles is at what she does.

So many folks I know and/or read have cast strong votes on this one that I almost wish I could vote Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down and be done with it. With me, it's more like Thumb Sideways. Glad I saw it. Liked a lot of it. Zero urge to see it again and even less to own the rumored DVD/Blu-ray with an hour (?) of deleted footage.

My pal Ken Levine gave it a pretty good review but said something like Tarantino should have cut 45 minutes out of it. This didn't surprise me coming from Ken. You could show Ken a 30-second commercial you'd produced and he'd say you should have cut 45 minutes out of it…but in this case, I think he's right. And a bit more forgiving of the length than I was.

A lot of my friends who grew up where I grew up absolutely loved the re-creation of Hollywood in 1969…and yeah, I liked the KHJ soundtrack, the reappearances of buildings in Westwood Village and on Hollywood Boulevard that are no longer there, bus signs for George Putnam and so on. I couldn't help but grin at the video clip — I didn't think there were any — of Larry "Seymour" Vincent, a local horror movie host back then who I knew. After so many articles about how Tarantino had those sections of town painstakingly redressed, I was expecting to see more of that than there was.

Someone wrote that the film captured the way people talked and acted in Hollywood back then. Well, not around me, they didn't. (And hey, what's the deal with all the shots of feet? And of POV shots of people driving around with you, the viewer, in the back seat?)

I dunno. I liked so many things about this film, many of them spinning around Brad Pitt's performance, that I can't be negative. I guess I didn't care a lot about the sad predicament of poor, deprived Rick Dalton who doesn't have a TV series at the moment and tragically hasn't quite made the leap to being Steve McQueen.

And I just started and deleted a paragraph about other things I didn't care about but a lot of them would have required a Spoiler Alert here. Me, I think I enjoyed this film more than I might have if I'd read more reviews and seen more clips. I liked all the times I was surprised that the movie seemed to be going one way and then pulled a one-eighty and went in another. And that's about all I want to tell you about it.

So here's my one-paragraph review: Didn't love it. Didn't hate it. Glad I saw it. Don't get all the feet. Could have done with less violence. Liked seeing it at the New Bev with an enthusiastic audience. Might not have liked it as much at home and if I'd read or seen more previews. Brad Pitt deserves an Oscar and not a supporting one. A little too long. I don't blame Bruce Lee's family for being pissed at his portrayal but as I have no particular feelings for Bruce Lee, that didn't bother me. And isn't it nice that a filmmaker with a strong style and approach made a movie that so many people are talking about?