RIP “George”

The Italian film industry has lost one of its wildest facial expressions with the passing of George Eastman at the age of 83.

The actor, writer, and (on a couple of occasions) director formerly known as Luigi Montefiori actually did have some contact with “respectable” cinema like Fellini’s Satyricon and even a couple of Hollywood roles, but he was a lot better known for his work at the lower end of the Italian film industry, especially with Joe D’Amato; you can see him above in D’Amato’s Anthropophagus (1980) which he also wrote, but he also did some of Joe’s early skinflicks including Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and Porno Holocaust. I have seen the former and it convinced me not to go in search of the latter; it’s possibly the only film I’ve seen where I was actually kind of happy that I got the cut version…

Saving Private Somebody or Other

Michael Bay To Direct True Story On Largest Rescue Mission In American History To Save Two Downed Pilots In Iran

You know… that rescue where they’ve never actually named the guys they rescued, or proved that they even exist? That one. That true story.

Sources tell Deadline that Bay is developing a feature film chronicling the extraordinary heroism of the two U.S. airmen rescued after their F-15E Strike Eagle was downed during Operation Epic Fury. The film will be based on the upcoming book by Mitchell Zuckoff, which HarperCollins will publish in 2027.
In early April, a month after Operation Epic Fury began, the U.S. military launched a massive, successful rescue operation in the Zagros Mountains of Iran after the jet was shot down. The daring extraction successfully recovered the pilot as well as the weapons system officer from hostile forces behind enemy lines. The mission made global headlines and caught Bay’s eye as he was deciding what might be the next thing he directs. Bay most recently directed Ambulance for Universal and has a production deal with the studio, making it the obvious choice for the package once he was on board.
The film will reunite Bay with producers Scott Gardenhour and Erwin Stoff, who all collaborated on another true war story, 13 Hours: The Secret Solders of Benhazi. Bay, Stoff and Gardenhour will produce the new pic.
Bay has spent nearly three decades collaborating with the U.S. military and law enforcement on films including The Rock, Bad Boys and Armageddon. Most notably on titles including Pearl Harbor, Transformers and 13 Hours, military leadership provided immense logistical support, equipment and personnel to ensure accurate portrayals of the U.S. Armed Forces.
When reached by Deadline for comment, Bay said: “I’ve had an amazing partnership over my 30-year career working with the Department of War and amazing U.S. military members. In my film 13 Hours, no rescue force answered the call for help. This film is about everyone who answered the call in one of the most complex, intricate and high-stakes operations in recent history. It celebrates the true heroism and unwavering dedication of our service members.”

In other words, it looks like a retread of Black Hawk Down, which was a transparent attempt to rewrite the debacle of the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, with some exceptions: Operation Gothic Serpent (the actual official name of the Somalia event) was a far cooler name than Operation Epic Fury; the Iran debacle isn’t actually over yet; the people that BHD was about verifiably existed; and this is going to be absolutely and overtly government propaganda. The real executive producers of this thing are going to be Pete Hegseth and Mushroom Cock. Maybe they can give cameos or something to the “real” airmen.

The Guardian saves literature!

So the Graun’s done a 100 greatest novels list. And it’s… fairly obvious? I mean, these things always are, you make a poll with input from (in this case) 172 participants, and obviously the usual suspects tend to dominate. It’s how these things work, and there’s not usually a lot of surprises (in this case, probably the biggest ones are the absence of Tolkien and Rowling and the amount of Virginia Woolf, and maybe the high placing of Ulysses); I’ve only read about a fifth of the books on the list, but I recognise most of the other titles at least, and most of them are the sort of thing that you’d expect from a list like this, with Middlemarch at the top and Proust, Tolstoy, the Brontes, Austen, Flaubert, Dickens, Marquez, Rushdie, H. James, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Conrad, Thackeray, Ishiguro, Faulkner, Hardy, Baldwin, Lawrence, Hemingway… you know.

This is not what bothers me about the list; it’s in the nature of lists like this to be kind of predictable, as I said, but there’s also probably good reasons why these particular titles become “canon”, and sometimes they just are that good. I mean, Madame Bovary can fuck RIGHT off as far as I’m concerned, and I may always be perplexed at The Great Gatsby‘s enduring popularity, but I know why most of these books are here and that’s because they’re widely considered classics irrespective of what I might think of some of them. It’s their avowed rationale for the list that irritates me:

Never has such a list been more needed. Dwindling attention spans, screens, Netflix; whatever we blame, reading for pleasure is a dying pursuit. Half of adults in the UK say they never read, and levels among children and young people are at their lowest in 20 years. This year has been declared the National Year of Reading to address this crisis. “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all,” Henry David Thoreau advised. We are here to help. […]
Our list includes any book published in English, but originally written in any language. It is still partial – all lists are. Neither can we make a claim to being definitive – this is literature, not science. Is the best novel one that changes the genre, society or the individual? One that captures the zeitgeist, or has an afterlife far beyond its pages. Or a novel that scorches itself so deeply into your soul you can remember exactly when and where you were when you first read it? None of these criteria on their own is enough. My Proustian madeleine will be your raw potato. My Mrs Dalloway your Mrs Bridge. But we hope that in asking those who devote their days to the craft and understanding of fiction from around the globe, the result is as authoritative, ambitious and far-reaching as possible.

But it’s… not? It’s mostly the usual suspects you generally see on lists like these. It doesn’t reach that far beyond the US/UK/Europe axis (even Ishiguro is British). And authoritative? Well, that’s what the editors like to think. Cos I find something dreadfully smug in that “never has such a list been more needed” line; books need to be saved from other forms of popular entertainment and distraction, and THE GUARDIAN is just the… people for the job! Hang on, literature, WE’LL save you with this… list that should get the kids back into reading books! An unfinished four thousand epic about a guy eating a cake, THAT’s what The Young People These Days need…

OK, so I’ve never read In Search of Lost Time and it may well actually be the fifth-greatest novel(s) of all time, I’m being somewhat snide; and indeed, as you may have noticed, I haven’t read anything for nearly two years so I’m probably not the right person to be looking down on a list like this… but I’m not really looking down on the list itself, I’m more looking down at the self-important assumption behind it. And the assumption that 100 titles is enough, when 500 or even a thousand usually has a much broader and more interesting range cos the really interesting and less obvious stuff lurks somewhere outside the top 100. This is true of almost every list of this sort, books, films, music, etc. I’d be more interested in a full list of all the books nominated, really. Still, I suppose I should finally read Middlemarch and see if it is that life-changing…

Of course

Haven’t said anything about that hantavirus outbreak so far, but, well, how could I not now that I know Mushroom Cock’s got his most qualified man on the case, in the great tradition of RFK Jr.:

A new virus is killing people as global health organizations work to control its spread and convince the public that the hantavirus outbreak is just an outbreak — not another pandemic. Americans can rest assured that Dr. Brian Christine, a penile implant specialist and assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, is on the case.
According to a Friday report from CNN’s KFile, Christine — an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps — is a surgical urologist with virtually no experience in public health. He once hosted an “Erection Connection” video series on YouTube, and spread conspiracies about the Covid-19 vaccine during the Biden administration. He is now one of the Trump administration’s top officials in charge of infectious disease policy. […]
This week, Christine gave an update on the conditions of potentially infected passengers who were repatriated to a Nebraska medical center after being evacuated from the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius. “At the Department of Health and Human Services, our approach is grounded in science and it’s grounded in transparency,” he said. “This is what strong public health system looks like, experienced professionals, seamless coordination, and a shared commitment to protecting the American people. We’ll continue to follow the science. We will stay vigilant.”
It’s a vastly different tone from the attitude he took during the Covid-19 pandemic. During Christine’s confirmation hearings before the Senate, The Washington Post reported that the urologist had claimed there was “no question” that Covid-19 and the subsequent government response had been used to tilt the 2020 election in Biden’s favor, and suggested vaccines were part of a larger plot to exert control over the American population.

Apparently it’s OK to follow the science when it’s not an election year, or something like that.

O fuckwit, why art thou?

I have no idea if Christopher Nolan’s film of the Odyssey is any good or not (obviously, cos no one’s seen the thing yet) but it’s already pissing off the right people:

Elon Musk is facing backlash after he went on another online crusade against Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated forthcoming film The Odyssey.
Nolan confirmed in a recent interview that Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o will play dual roles as both Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra in his adaptation of Homer’s epic, slated for a July release.
The casting news sparked swarms of racially charged and misogynistic posts directed at the 12 Years a Slave star, with many people pointing out that Helen of Troy was renowned in Greek mythology as the most beautiful woman in the world.
Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh claimed in an unfounded X post that “not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’” and added, “Christopher Nolan knows that he would be called racist if he gave ‘the most beautiful woman’ role to a white woman. Nolan is technically talented but a coward. Too afraid to do anything that even slightly challenges the spirit of the age.”
Musk, 54, responded to the post by simply saying: “True.”

I do find it a little odd that this article (and, to be sure, others on the theme) picks up on Edolf reposting Malsh Walsh being a racist rather than Malsh himself, but I suppose more people know who Edolf is… they’re also not happy about Elliot Page being in the film, apparently as the ghost of Achilles, because there’s no transgender people in classical mythology so there shouldn’t be any in films about classical myths either… But, obviously the point is that the story of the Odyssey IS a myth, and they’re getting worked up about people who never existed in the first place. Odysseus moves through a literal world of gods and monsters; the Cyclopes, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the Laestrygonians, Circe transforming his crew into pigs, Calypso, Zeus, Aeolus, Athena, all of that is apparently fine for these shitheads… and instead for them the most unbelievable thing about this film is that a white character—who, again, never existed—could be played by a black woman. I can’t help but feel that if Nolan had cast a brown-eyed white brunette, Malsh and Tim Polio and Edolf and all these other cunts would have no problem with her not matching the traditional description of Helen either…

EDIT Friday afternoon:

I hear you’re an antisemite now, father

RTÉ to show ‘Father Ted’ instead of Eurovision in Israel protest, Graham Linehan calls it “antisemitic harrassment”

Irish broadcaster RTÉ has confirmed plans to show Father Ted rather than Eurovision in protest against Israel’s involvement in the ceremony.
Ireland is one of several countries to have withdrawn from competing in Eurovision in 2026 due to Israel’s participation, alongside Spain, Iceland, the Netherlands and Slovenia.
Now, Ireland’s national broadcaster RTÉ has gone a step further by confirming it will air the Eurovision special of the beloved sitcom Father Ted on RTÉ 2 rather than showcasing the singing competition, which is due to take place on May 16th in Vienna, Austria.
Similarly, the Slovenian national broadcaster will also not be showing Eurovision amid the boycott. Instead, they will be airing Voices of Palestine, a series of documentaries on the Middle East.
However, Father Ted creator Graham Linehan, who has become a vocal supporter of Israel in recent years, has aired his anger on social media with RTÉ for their decision to air his show instead of the 70th edition of Eurovision.
Taking to X, Linehan shared a link to a petition, which he created, calling for RTÉ’s director general, Kevin Bakhurst, to resign, writing, “Please join me in demanding the resignation of RTE’s Director General for using Father Ted as a tool of antisemitic harassment.”

As a serial hater and harrasser of trans folks, I suspect that Glinner is… not the best person to be making a statement like this. Also, can we not just boycott (which I initially wrote as “goycott”… Freudian slip or just struggling with a new laptop keyboard? You decide)—I say, can we not just boycott Eurovision on aesthetic grounds? Sometimes you don’t need to drag politics into a thing…