Curb Your Enthusiasm – The good news is that it’s great to see the old gang again. The bad news is that, at least through the first two episodes, it appears that the writers have lost their edge.

Then again, I thought the same thing a few years ago after I binge-watched the entire series; it went downhill after the first few seasons.

 

**

 

Apparently, there was some fuss about film producer Harvey Weinstein this week. I turned to Google to learn more, and this popped up:

 

 

Doesn’t seem so bad. When times are tough, don’t we all just fly to Europe for sex?

OK, so that’s a lame attempt at humor. But since Kimmel and Fallon and Saturday Night Live are all afraid to do Weinstein jokes, somebody has to pick up the slack.

 

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You turn on a football game to enjoy a few concussions and … aarrgghh, politics.

You turn to a Matt Damon movie to enjoy some mindless violence and … aarrgghh, politics.

Ditto for sitcoms, talk shows, and the Internet.

It’s to the point that if you want to absorb some good fiction, you have to turn to cable news.

 

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The Survivalist

 

Like the similar-themed apocalyptic thriller The Road, The Survivalist is relentlessly grim. A bearded hermit lives in the woods, planting seeds and arranging tin cans as a primitive alarm system to warn him of potential marauders. Nothing much happens in his Robinson Crusoe existence until one fateful day when two women appear at his cabin. This is a well-made film, well-directed and well-acted, and despite an unhurried pace it’s generally absorbing. But that sluggish pace and the pervasive gloom of the story, while realistic, also produce a movie that at times feels like an endurance test. Release: 2016 Grade: B

 

**

 

El Bar

 

Unlike The Survivalist, The Bar is fast-paced, infused with humor, and over the top. After two men are inexplicably mowed down outside the door of a humble Madrid café, a small group of customers find themselves trapped inside. Is there a sniper in a nearby building? Are there more targets in their midst? And why have the two corpses been dragged away? It’s a fun premise, and Alex de la Iglesia directs the action with gusto. But by the time star Blanca Suarez gets stuck in a drainage hole because her boobs are too big to slide through the opening (below), The Bar becomes downright silly. Release: 2017 Grade: B-

 

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                                                          How not to slip through a drainage hole

 

**

 

Life

grouchyeditor.com Life

 

Life won’t win any awards for originality, but hey, if you’re going to copy, at least this movie copies from the best. We get bits of Gravity, bits of Predator, and a whole lot of Alien. If you like those science-fiction/horror classics, you will likely enjoy Life, which borrows and expands on several of its predecessors’ best ideas. The plot: Jake Gyllenhaal and a small group of fellow astronauts must destroy a hostile alien organism before it makes its way to Earth – with or without the astronauts. Sound familiar? I will say this: For a movie that steals so blatantly from the classics, Life’s twist ending is both original and clever. Release: 2017 Grade: B

 

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**

 

 

Here’s an entertaining show you haven’t heard of: Rosehaven.

You haven’t heard of this sitcom because it airs on SundanceTV. And because it’s an Australian production set in … Tasmania. And unless you live across the pond, you’re not familiar with its stars.

The stars are Celia Pacquola and Luke McGregor, pictured above, who play best buds running a real estate business in small-town Tasmania. Yes, Tasmania. It’s a bit like Doc Martin in tone — not a whole lot of belly-laughs, but near-constant smiles and chuckles — and the chemistry between Pacquola and McGregor is priceless.

McGregor is especially funny, although I can only understand every third word he says. I’m not sure if what he delivers is a heavy accent or a speech impediment, but no matter.

 

**

 

“Bump Stocks”

 

In light of this week’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, it’s a huge relief to see all of the attention finally being paid to bump stocks. I’ve been saying this for years: If this country can ever get a handle on its bump stocks, all of our problems will be solved.

 

**

 

 

Survivor is back, which means that CBS cameramen are once again very happy.

 

Alexandrea Elliott displays her assets

 

 Chrissy Hofbeck, 46, opens up for CBS

 

What’s that you say? You don’t care for these sexist photo captions? Hey, Hugh Hefner died, so someone has to carry on the time-honored tradition.

 

**

 

My Minnesota Lynx won another basketball championship.

 

 

Alas, they still get no respect from Google, which opted to post this fake news:

 

 

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Hugh Hefner finally traded in his pajamas and pipe for – something. Probably not a harp. The geriatric germinator passed away appropriately on “hump day,” thereby inspiring much nostalgia and a million bad jokes on Twitter.

 

 

To me, Hugh Hefner was a lot like booze, particularly in my younger days: He was (partly) responsible for the best of times, but also (partly) responsible for the worst of times. If you were a teenage whippersnapper in the 1970s, Hefner and his magazine made you want to grow up fast — or worse, not grow up at all.

My favorite Hefner squeeze was Barbi Benton. Benton was on the cover of the first Playboy magazine I was able to successfully purchase, in the winter of 1970, when a bored cashier at Dayton’s didn’t seem to care that the 12-year-old, nervous boy in front of him was shaking like Colin Kaepernick in a VFW hall.

Here is the cover of my prized possession. That’s the bodacious Ms. Benton giving you the come-hither:

 

 

Below, Barbi frolics on the grounds of Hefner’s Playboy mansion in California. Below that, a clip of her appearance in 1982’s Hospital Massacre, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. Just kidding.

 

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“This is an island, surrounded by water. Big water, ocean water.”

– Donald Trump discussing Puerto Rico

 

That’s something you have to admire about President Trump. He has the ability to take complex ideas and describe them in terms that all of us can understand.

 

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Well, if that had been true, it might explain a thing or two.

 

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While I was mourning Hugh Hefner’s death, I began to muse about some other heroes of my misbegotten youth, and I wondered about the first and best James Bond, Sean Connery. I Googled him and discovered the following “news” items: 

 

 

Poor Sean Connery. Internet hoaxters wouldn’t have had the balls to pull this kind of crap back in the day.

 

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by Calvin Trillin

 

Killings is a compilation of true-crime accounts that Trillin wrote for The New Yorker, primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, about murders in the country’s heartland. Murder is an inherently interesting subject, and Trillin admirably fleshes out the lives of otherwise-unremarkable people caught up in horrific circumstances, but perhaps because we are by now accustomed to books and movies that spare no gruesome detail, Killings’s less-sensationalistic stories can feel sedate, at times almost quaint. As you read them they hold your interest, but you might not recall any of them six months later.

 

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grouchyeditor.com Cody

 

Quote of the Week, courtesy of Big Brother’s Cody 

 

Julie Chen:  “Congratulations Cody! You’re America’s favorite houseguest and you’re going home with $25,000! Anything to say, Cody?”

Cody:  (pauses and shakes head) “It doesn’t make sense.”

 

grouchyeditor.com Big Brother

 

**

 

grouchyeditor.com Weiner

 

Poor Weiner and Bush. Weiner and Bush should get together to commiserate. I mean, Weiner and Bush would make a good team. I mean … oh, never mind.

 

**

 

grouchyeditor.com Clapper

 

James Clapper might have lied again? Say it ain’t so!

 

**

 

grouchyeditor.com Lawrence

 

.          grouchyeditor.com Finch     grouchyeditor.com Lawrence     

 

In case you missed it, here’s a link to Lawrence O’Donnell’s stirring rant about hammers, Labor Day, and things that go bump in the night.

Lawrence now joins Peter Finch and Bill O’Reilly in the canon of hilarious temper tantrums forever preserved on YouTube.

 

**

 

 

In these Days of Trump, everyone has an opinion about the media. If you’re interested in watching a movie about the press at its best – and at its worst – check out a largely forgotten gem from 2003 called Shattered Glass.

 

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Can it be? After what feels like 25 years of nonstop zombie shows from Hollywood, it seems the walking dead are finally being usurped.

 

That’s the good news. The bad news is that now we can expect 25 years of nonstop killer clowns.

 

 

 

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TV Updates

 

Fall season disappointments:

The Sinner was disappointing. Top of the Lake: China Girl was disappointing. American Horror Story: Cult is disappointing (so far).

And The Deuce, after just one episode, is awfully dour, cynical and humorless.

 

**

 

 

I’m sorry, but listening to Beth Mowins and Rex Ryan (above) call a Monday Night Football game was like listening to Alvin and the Chipmunk.

For the first 15 minutes of the game I thought it must be Take Your Son to Work Day, and I was hearing some announcer’s 12-year-old boy do his first voice work.

Oh … that would be a reference to both of them.

 

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We keep seeing commercials for a “Noah’s Ark” tourist attraction in Kentucky, pictured above.

 

Now might be a good time for Floridians, who know a thing or two about tourist attractions (and floods), to check it out.

 

**

 

 

Hollywood’s Revenge

 

It takes a while to write and produce a TV series, but it’s now been ten months since the election, and so ….

American Horror Story: Cult is probably just the beginning of an onslaught of anti-Trump shows headed our way.

 

Sarah Paulson exults over Trump’s election triumph in American Horror Story … just kidding.

 

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Kate Middleton scored a legal victory against a French magazine that published her nude photos.

That’s our excuse for posting, one more time, these photos of the Royal Fanny.

 

.                              grouchyeditor.com Middleton       grouchyeditor.com Middleton

 

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Bummer. Because everyone goes to James Bond movies for the plot.

 

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We don’t know if these daring dads and their darling daughters are A) artistically uninhibited; B) sexually perverted; or C) some combination of the above, but we do know that it’s not every day that papa films his progeny in the buff — and then shares the lust-provoking results with the world.

 

Katrine Boorman & director John Boorman

 

 

“A lot of people ask me, well, ‘How did you feel about directing your daughter being raped?’ Well, she wasn’t being raped of course. It was just a scene. She didn’t mind, and nor did I.” – John Boorman on Excalibur’s director’s commentary

 

 

“I’ve always said that once you’ve been raped by Gabriel Byrne and Corin Redgrave in armor, watched by your father, you’ll never look back.” – Katrine Boorman in The Independent

 

 

“So I was doing the scene with John Boorman’s daughter Katrine, who was playing my wife, and I was supposed to make love to her in quite a violent fashion. Anyway, I made love to Katrine in the wide shot, doing my grunting and groaning and all those medieval sexual shenanigans. Then they came in for the close shot.”– Gabriel Byrne. 

Byrne’s turn humping Katrine was apparently left on the cutting-room floor; in the shots reproduced here, that’s Redgrave having his way with Boorman’s daughter.

 

 

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Katrine didn’t just bare her breasts for daddy when she was 23; she went topless again at age 39 in 1997’s Le Bonheur est un mensonge (above left). In 2012, Katrine got behind the camera to make a documentary about her famous family called Me and Me Dad. Below, the infamous pumping scene from Excalibur:

 

Asia Argento & director Dario Argento

 

 

“Argento began performing for her father when she was a teenager, appearing in the nude as a 16-year-old in Trauma. She was also a rape victim in another of his films, The Stendhal Syndrome. Not surprisingly, these roles and their father-daughter relationship scandalized Italy. Argento has said that they are viewed in her native country like a real-life Addams Family – ghoulish and weird.” – New York Daily News

Now 41, Asia apparently still has a thing for older men. It was recently reported that she’s dating TV personality Anthony Bourdain, 61.

 

 “How’s this, dad?” Sixteeen-year-old Asia in Trauma.

 

“I never acted out of ambition; I acted to gain my father’s attention. It took a long time for him to notice me – I started when I was nine, and he only cast me when I was 16. And he only became my father when he was my director.” – Asia Argento in Filmmaker Magazine

 

Above and below, Asia in Dracula 3D

 

 

 

 In Dario’s The Phantom of the Opera, above and below, Asia gets taken doggie-style.

 

 

Alexis Vogel & photographer Ron Vogel

 

 

From Playboy’s February 1979 pictorial “Father Knows Best”:

“Photographer Ron Vogel has been snapping pictures of his daughter ever since she was a baby. At 21, she’s still his favorite model.”

 

 

“Over the years, Ron took ‘hundreds of pictures of Lexi in various states of undress. She has youth and vitality greater than most of the models I’ve worked with and her coloring is extraordinary; she has earthy tones and dark penetrating eyes.’”

Click on the thumbnail shots below for full-sized views of Ron’s full-frontal shots of Alexis.

 

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“Lexi: ‘I was a ham. I’d try to get my dad’s attention away from the models … I never had any problems posing that way for my father.’”

 

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“‘Posing nude for me throughout the years has made Lexi very free about herself,’ says Ron.”

 

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Split

grouchyeditor.com Split

 

Yes, James McAvoy is impressive playing a psycho with multiple personalities in M. Night Shyamalan’s latest “comeback” picture, the thriller Split. Problem is, McAvoy’s disturbing characters often seem like the only reason to keep watching the movie. The plot, in which McAvoy’s crazy man abducts three teenage girls and confines them in a basement, takes a decent premise and goes from clichéd to ridiculous to boring. Sorry, but this is hardly a return to form for Shyamalan.  Release: 2017 Grade: C

 

**

 

The Edge of Seventeen

grouchyeditor.com Edge

 

After enduring the first 20 minutes of this coming-of-age comedy-drama, I wasn’t sure if I could continue watching. Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s script employed done-to-death voiceover narration, a la The Wonder Years, and worse, the protagonist was an incredibly bratty and vulgar teen. Eww. But then a funny thing happened on the way to study hall: The more our heroine was assailed by life’s slings and arrows, the more I grew to like her. By the end, I was cheering for her. Unlike so many teen-oriented movies, this one is smart, poignant, and boasts a winning performance from star Hailee Steinfeld. Release: 2016 Grade: B+

 

**

 

The Big Sick

 

The Big Sick has a lot going for it: It has heart, and it has endearing performances from writer-star Kumail Nanjiani and the supporting cast. Nanjiani plays a stand-up comedian of Pakistani descent who has to deal with his Muslim-traditional family and, after his WASP girlfriend lapses into a coma, her bickering parents.

Unfortunately, The Big Sick also has a Big Flaw. As the ailing girlfriend, Zoe Kazan is clearly intended to be spunky and lovable. But whenever her entitled, annoying character appeared on screen, I began to feel ill. Release: 2017 Grade: B-

 

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