Dispatches from Vilnius

My wife was translating excerpts to me from a book on healing the liver.  She took quite a shock to the system the other day when she tried a bullet coffee , which includes butter and MCT oil.  A friend of hers swears by this drink.  She immediately started sweating and felt awful the rest of the day.  Turns out this drink is a killer on the liver, packed with so many unsaturated fats that her liver took quite a pounding.  She recovered and is now reading a Lithuanian edition of Anthony William's  Liver Rescue , convinced that celery juice will restore her liver to full glow. The only problem is that Anthony William is not a doctor, or even dietician, but rather a " medical medium ," who claims he was given the power to cure at the very young of age of four by a spirit second only to God, and has been sharing his secrets on the Internet, garnering nearly 2 million followers, including some high profile ones like Kim Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sly Stall...

I was enchanted by the idea of a Loki mini-series, as Tim Hiddleston breathed new life into this mischief maker in the Avengers movies he turned up in.  Unfortunately, he was let down by a script filled with so many pot holes that it was amazing that he managed to get out of it alive, well almost anyway. Fortunately, the 6-episode series doesn't take itself too seriously, so you can forgive the many oversights.  However, the episodes quickly begin to drag once the plot is revealed and we are left with a whole bunch of time jumping in a desperate effort to avoid the TVA hunters.   Without giving away too many spoilers, I will sort through this mess to try to make sense of the time construct the writers conjured up to explain how the Marvel universe is held together.  They drew from everywhere and anywhere without successfully tying much of it together.  If Sylvie, Loki's female alter ego, was pruned as a child, she should still be a child as time essentially...

As I get older, I get less excited about the Olympics.  It has become such a huge money pit!  Japan allegedly forked up 30 billion dollars to host the event with all sorts of sustainable-designed sports facilities that are supposed to be green for the city.  So, it must have been quite a jolt to delay the event for a year and still be met with all this anxiety among countrymen and the world alike.  Yet, so far, the games have gone off with few reported coronavirus cases, and none that have affected the top athletes. The US basketball team seems to be suffering from jet lag though, enduring yet another loss to a much lesser team.  This time France.  Earlier, they lost exhibition games to Nigeria and Australia.  Everyone is waiting for All-World Kevin Durant to show up.  He has no excuses.  Brooklyn was bounced out of the NBA playoffs pretty early.  Not that it really matters as basketball shouldn't even be in the Olympics, or for that mat...

Well, we've reached the point of caricature when Kevin McCarthy tries to stuff the January 6 investigation committee with persons like Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, two of the most ardent Magaheads in the House.  He might as well have selected Lauren Boebert or Louis Gohmert.  He had to know Nancy would reject them , as she has the upper hand here, not him.  Nevertheless, he threw a great big temper-tantrum after she pulled the football out from under him again. I really don't know how the Republicans expect to win back the House with these kinds of antics.  They can try to change the voting laws in their states, but it affects conservative voters just as much as it does liberal voters.  All they are creating is a great deal of resentment that is very likely to manifest itself next November, even if it feels the midterms are coming up this November with all the wild rhetoric swirling around. It's not just the 1/6 investigation committee that has the potential to dra...

Judging by how many actors turned up for the official premier of The French Dispatch at Cannes, Wes Anderson was hoping for a little better reception from the jury than he got.  His film was due to premier at last year's festival but it was cancelled due to COVID.  Despite a standing ovation by the audience that lasted 9 minutes, the jury ignored the movie.  I suppose Spike and the gang wanted something a little more edgy, not a homage to famous foreign correspondents who filled the New Yorker with their quirky articles. The knock against Wes for some time now is that he is a miniaturist, regaling in the rich details he uses to fill the screen.  Then you have the purists, those who still hold up  Bottle Rocket  and  Rushmore  as his definitive movies and that everything since has been a sellout to Hollywood.  Granted these are very charming movies, but Wes has grown a little since then, even if he still wears his patent brown corduroy suit....

Well I'm back.  I needed a little sabbatical to refresh the mind.  I was trying to clear my head of all things Trump but that's pretty hard to do.  He's back on the campaign trail, rehashing his many grievances and adding a few new ones, like the critical race theory that has become the talk of conservative radio and television.  No one seems to know what it really is but it sounds bad and that's enough in the neverending cultural war these so-called Christian warriors perpetuate. Anyone who acknowledges it is immediately cast as the bad guy.  Poor General Milley came under fire last month when Tucker Carlson called the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a "stupid pig" for promoting CRT in the military.  Gen. Milley was quick to fire back but his defense of teaching critical race theory in the military was kind of odd.  He likened it to having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend."  Noting that he al...

Interesting to see that Quentin Tarantino launched his novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to coincide with July 4 weekend. There have been quite a few reviews posted, but the one that caught my eye was this one in Indiewire .  Christian Blauvelt wrote that once you get past the first 60 pages of Cliff Boothe dismissing iconic filmmakers and movies, it's a good read as the novel provides more backstory to the key characters in the movie.  It turns out Cliff was quite the cineaste, in addition to being a stuntman, offering his blunt assessments of John Ford, Bruce Lee and the French New Wave.  Not enough to convince me to buy the mass market paperback but I was curious in the beef Quentin had with John Ford. Tarantino thinks John Ford was an unabashed racist , noting that the director got his start as one of the hooded Klansmen in Birth of a Nation .  Q goes onto bash Ford for the wholesale slaughter of Indians in his movies.   Those "faceless Ind...