I've never been closer to actually finishing Deadly Blessings.

I've watched well over an hour of it. A record.

But maybe I should listen to some Slayer now.

It's okay. I'm sure I'll finish that last half hour eventually.

 

I haven't bothered with that one.  It's like Bill Burr already said to his face: Bill Maher is not deep, either as a thinker or culturally.  He's superficially cultured, and he has zero interest in learning about anything he doesn't already know.  I can't remember, maybe it was the Armie Hammer one, but he also went off on the anti-cineaste thing, because such myopia is only a problem if you're younger than he is.

I didn't watch the whole 'Hawk Tuah' girl one, because I have no interest in that, but I did have to check out a few clips because people were really dragging Maher about how creepy he came off there.  He's basically trying to take a mentor stance, passing sage advice on how to navigate her career, while also very obviously trying to hit on the 21-year-old.  The whole thing started with a Weinstein groomer vibe.  But she might be ignorant, but she's not stupid, and clearly caught Maher's many snide asides which he naturally thought was so clever as to escape her comprehension, and she started crushing his fragile ego.  Maher really thought that she would be in the palm of his famous hand, but she had no idea who he is, and she offered to introduce him to her grandmother: "Do you like 80-year-old women?"  Maher, sunken, then pivoted back to his schtick about how the young people today are so unsophisticated, to which she pleasantly smiled and counted the minutes.

I wish Heidecker would take a deep edit of that episode so I won't have to.
 

Super Soul Brother is supposed to be getting a Bluray release.

I think you’re a fan of this one, Crumb?

As the Internet’s #1 Super Soul Brother fan, I’m sure you will enjoy all the special features.

crumbsroom wrote:

So does someone offering 80 year old grammas to Maher's pathetic cock.

It really is worth just watching the clip to see the look on his face.  He really thought she would be so awe-struck by him.

crumbsroom wrote:

But I'm going back to the Bobby Lee thing. Now, no new information is learned about Maher here. He's obviously thin skinned, and he's obviously got terrible taste in anything even slightly esoteric. We already are steeped in this. But his absolute animosity over Bobby Lee (!) even mentioning Kurosawa (!) in his presence, and him feeling like he had to fight against all the artsy fartsies out there that are judging him just from that...makes it how clearly low Maher's bar is for the kind of high end art the he's so pathetically suspicious of.

I can even almost understand how embarassing it would be to get outclassed by Bobby Lee, but whose fault is that really?  Maher is the worst kind of snob, the incurious kind.  Culture for him is status, not inspiration.  The thing that makes it so ridiculous that it's about Kurosawa is that basically what this implies is that Maher has likely never bothered watching any world cinema at all.  I guarantee you that he's never bothered with Pynchon either, and I'll put good money that the most Norman Mailer he ever read was in the pages of Playboy.

This incuriosity is more amplified in his podcast because unlike Real Time we can venture into a variety of cultural subjects.  Maher is never really interested in anything his guests have to say except as springboards for pronouncing his own "wisdom".  The Billy Dee Williams episode was pretty good for this reason, where Williams just stopped trying to talk about anything after awhile and enjoy his free drink.  (That was the episode where, after Williams told the story about getting hit on by Marlon Brando, Maher then complained that he's never been hit on by another man.  Ultimately, it's always about him, which makes the worst interviewer.)

crumbsroom wrote:

Then, I'm not entirely sure if he's 100% joking, he asks if he directed Godzilla.

Oh, so just straight up racist then.  What an entitled prick.

Jinnistan wrote:

Bill Maher on long-term sexual relationships from the Terry Crews episode:

A sex life is like a dog.  You want it to live forever, you love the thing so much and so great, and who doesn't love a puppy, but at some point that dog is gonna die, I'm sorry, and you're going to keep living, but the dog does not live forever.

The first question -  is he killing these women?  Is he the Kristi Noem of modern-day lotharios?

Or finally Maher's quote : "I wish someone had grabbed my balls."
 

I guess he liked that bit so much, he repeated it verbatim to Bobby Lee.

In regards to his personal life, if he doesn't feel he's a long term relationship guy, good for him. You be you Bill. I know a few people resistant to them as well, and they're doing fine. But as usual with him, his complete inability to actually understand why someone would be able to, or even want to 'keep that dog alive' is what makes him the sad specimen he truly is. It's why he has to keep deferring his personal choices to the fact that 'men are different'. Yeah, motherfucker. So different, some of them are actually different from other men.

Maybe if he wasn't actually such a pathetic and lonely cunt at his core, he wouldn't be so insufferable. So just keep trying to kiss those call girls on the mouth buddy. That will fill the void.
 

Man, somebody has already made the Cunt Dungeon trailer two years ago.



 

Bujalski's "Support the Girls" has the appearance of light fare for probably at least the first half of its running time. Pleasant but inconsequential. And in many ways that's exactly what it seems to be aiming for, at least on its surface. But in the meantime, it has also been delicately filling us in on the details of each of its main characters lives, women slugging it out, day to day, at their thankless jobs at a Hooters type bar in Texas. A film about friendship amongst the quiet indignities of the kind of employment that slowly crushes you...but ultimately can't as long as you hold your head up high.

Almost perfect in its mixture of surface simplicity and emotional complexity.
 

Somewhere in my top three I would have to have In: Palace of Swords Reversed, a Cog Sinister comp with non-album singles and the Slates EP.  Most of those singles are now available as bonus tracks, and Slates is now expanded to album-length with an extra Peel Session, but when I think "classic Fall", it has to include "Totally Wired", "Fit and Working Again" and "Leave the Capitol".