Actor Stanley Tucci shared his belief that straight actors can portray gay characters during a recent interview with BBC Radio.
On the Sunday edition of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Tucci talked about his long career and iconic roles like in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada.
According to Variety, during his discussion with host Lauren Laverne, Tucci weighed in on the debate of straight actors taking on LGBTQ+ roles in television and film.
“Obviously I believe that’s fine. I am always very flattered when gay men come up to me and talk to me about The Devil Wears Prada or they talk about Supernova, and they say that, ‘It was just so beautiful — You did it the right way.’ Because often, it’s not done the right way,” Tucci said.
No, Stanley, it's not okay that you're taking roles away from gay actors. When out gay actors aren't struggling for work, then maybe you can play the roles -- play it in that same one note way that you play every role.
But there are too many actors who have been brave enough to come out who can't get work because people like you -- that no one seems to want to cast in straight roles -- keep stealing their parts.
$527.5 million. That's ticket sales worldwide for THE LITTLE MERMAID.
I had an e-mail about INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY (link goes to my review). Harold e-mailed to say that the DUE DISSIDENCE 'dudes' say the film's a box office bomb.
Huh?
That's the two 'guys' where one looks he beats women and the other looks like Bea Arthur.
They don't know politics so no surprise, they don't know movies.
It was a surprise that INDIANA only had $60 million or so at the box office (domestic). But it's not a bomb and two dookie looking White boys that don't know crap should shut their traps. Since Sunday, in North America alone, it's made $20 million. It's now at $83 million domestically.
And what the Bea Arthur wanna be doesn't seem to grasp is not every film is MARVEL (not that MARVEL's MARVEL lately). Meaning this teen boy rush to the theaters and $100 million or more opening weekend? That's not this kind of movie.
These are the idiots who were saying Sandra Bullock had a flop with THE LOST CITY. "Only 30 million opening weekend! It's a flop!"
No. It was not a flop. It was a hit film. As I pointed out, Sandra has staying power. She's a real star. She sells tickets which is why theater owners like her. Three weeks after her films open, there's still a steady flow (and that matters especially since theater owners get a bigger cut the longer a film is at the theaters). Yes, it made $30 million opening weekend. And it ended its run with $192 million (105 million of that was just domestic).
Harrison Ford is playing a part audiences want to see him in. The film will be in the theaters for several weeks and it will continue to make money. It'll probably go past $100 million after this weekend. It'll probably top off around $300 million worldwide. Maybe $320 million.
Those teen boys audiences that DUE DISSIDENCE needs to worship?
They turn off people. A lot of people -- and I get this more and more as I go to the movies -- want to skip opening weekend because of these teen boys and these movie theaters that don't enforce the rules. You get them acting the fool and you're not taking your family out to the movies -- for fifty or more bucks -- to put up with teen boys screaming at the screen or running up and down the aisles or tossing M&Ms at people trying to watch a movie.
Going out with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Thousands of dead fish have washed ashore in southeast Iraq, prompting an official investigation into the wildlife disaster that officials said Monday may be linked to drought conditions.
Recently, a large number of dead fish were washed up on the banks of the Amshan river in Maysan province, which borders Iran.
Khodr Abbas Salman, a Maysan province official, has verified that some of the factors that led to these dead fish were the lack of oxygen in the river and the rise in salinity.
An environmental campaigner, Ahmed Saleh Neema, also acknowledged that it is the rising temperature that contributes to the increasing salinity and low oxygen levels in the water. It has not yet been ascertained whether toxic chemical substances also caused the huge numbers of dead fish.
When many thousands of Iraqis turn on their taps “nothing comes out”, said Hayder Indhar for Phys.org.
So dire is the country’s water crisis – 7 million of its citizens have reduced access to water, according to the UN – many villagers are relying on “sporadic tanker-truck deliveries and salty wells” for drinking water.
While Iraq is known in Arabic as the Land of the Two Rivers, split as it is by the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, the water levels of both have fallen markedly. The results have been no less than devastating.
For Firas Mohammed, a former fisherman, life has been totally transformed by the shortage. Gesturing towards a “trickle of lime green liquid nearby”, he told Al Jazeera that “even dogs avoid it”. “If the government decided to move us to a camp with freshwater to cope with this crisis, we would even accept being moved to Ukraine,” he added.
Mou’ad Abel was able to return to his village in 2016 “after the area was liberated from ISIL”, but despite also working as a fisherman in his youth, he was shocked to discover “there are no fish anymore”, the news site added.
The reasons behind the crisis are numerous. Some cite shortages and low river levels in neighbouring countries; others point to the alleged mismanagement of water by local authorities. Regardless of who is to blame, one thing is abundantly clear: the issue must be solved before it becomes too late for the millions of people reliant on a clean water supply.
According to the United Nations, some “90 per cent of the country’s rivers are polluted”. Iraq is facing a “critical climate emergency”, said Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the UN special representative for Iraq, as by 2035 it is thought the nation will have the capacity to “meet only 15 per cent of its water demands”.
Desertification – the process by which fertile land becomes arid – is also a growing concern within the nation. It can be caused by both human factors and climate change.
Urgent and it only gets more urgent each day. Climate change is predicted to impact us all in the next few decades and one of the hardest hit areas, per climate models, will be Iraq. Already problems are evident. January 10th, Yale's School of Environment published Wil Crisp's article which opened:
For their biodiversity and cultural significance, the United Nations in 2016 named the Mesopotamian Marshes — which historically stretched between 15,000 and 20,000 square kilometers in the floodplain of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers — a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The marshes comprised one of the world’s largest inland delta systems, a startling oasis in an extremely hot and arid environment, home to 22 species of globally endangered species and 66 at-risk bird species.
But now this ecosystem — which includes alluvial salt marshes, swamps, and freshwater lakes — is collapsing due to a combination of factors meteorological, hydrological, and political. Rivers are rapidly shrinking, and agricultural soil that once grew bounties of barley and wheat, pomegranates, and dates is blowing away. The environmental disaster is harming wildlife and driving tens of thousands of Marsh Arabs, who have occupied this area for 5,000 years, to seek livelihoods elsewhere.
Experts warn that unless radical action is taken to ensure the region receives adequate water — and better manages what remains — southern Iraq’s marshlands will disappear, with sweeping consequences for the entire nation as farmers and pastoralists abandon their land for already crowded urban areas and loss of production leads to rising food prices.
The Mesopotamian marshlands are often referred to as the cradle of civilization, as anthropologists believe that this is where humankind, some 12,000 years ago, started its wide-scale transition from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement. Encompassing four separate marshes, the region has historically been home to a unique range of fish and birdlife, serving as winter habitat for migratory birds and sustaining a productive shrimp and finfish fishery.
AP notes, "Climate change for years has compounded the woes of the troubled country. Droughts and increased water salinity have destroyed crops, animals and farms and dried up entire bodies of water. Hospitals have faced waves of patients with respiratory illnesses caused by rampant sandstorms. Climate change has also played a role in Iraq’s ongoing struggle to combat cholera."
Great forests fell like buffalo
Everything got sicker
And to the bitter end
Big business bickered
And they call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence
Oh these times, these times
Oh these changing times
Change in the heart of all mankind
Oh these troubled times
While waiting for his plate of meat loaf, gravy, and an iceberg wedge at an empty restaurant in Concord, New Hampshire, on the first day of June, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was gently explaining to me that nobody knows whether HIV is the sole cause of AIDS.
“They were doing phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people,” he said of the scientists laboring through the 1980s on the array of protease inhibitors and other anti-retroviral drugs that would eventually stem mass death in countries where access to the medicines was made available, “without really being able to understand what HIV was, and pumping up fear about it constantly, not really understanding whether it was causing AIDS.”
That HIV infection causes AIDS is long-established science. But the conspiracy theory Kennedy is laying out, alongside several of its associated tendrils — that HIV is a free rider on a more dangerous virus, that scientists stifled debate in order to profit from the production of AZT, the first drug approved by the FDA to treat HIV and AIDS in 1987 — has deep roots and has borne tragic fruit. For instance, Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa from 1999 to 2008, shared Kennedy’s skepticism, and his distrust kept crucial therapies unavailable in his country for years, resulting in an estimated hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. Still, Kennedy — who has in other instances acknowledged that HIV causes AIDS — insisted to me over lunch, “There are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS.”
These mythologies are the chronological starting points for opinions Kennedy puts forth in his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who has spent the past two decades ever more beholden to repeatedly disproved arguments about a link between vaccines and autism, jumped thirstily into the COVID fray, becoming a vocal critic of almost every government-funded or endorsed COVID-mitigation approach, from masking to social distancing to vaccine development and mandates. His chosen nemesis was Fauci, the immunologist veteran of the AIDS fight, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, and chief medical adviser to Joe Biden from 2021 to 2022.
In his book, Kennedy characterizes Fauci as “the powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’etat against Western democracy” and claims that his “remedies,” including the COVID vaccines that stopped people from dying, were “often more lethal than the diseases they pretend to treat.”
COVID, like the AIDS epidemic before it, provided fertile ground for conspiracy theorizing. A new disease of unknown origin, it exploded lives and families and the global economy; it provoked fear and a longing for answers that those in charge could not initially provide. Public-health officials and political leaders made choices, some of which proved misguided, some of which led to solutions. And, of course, as Kennedy himself will eagerly explain, corporate entities — from Amazon to Pfizer to Moderna — profiteered, in grotesque fashion, from people’s pain, loss, and confusion.
See, that's democracy. Any idiot fool can try to become president. Low IQ or non-functioning brain need not disqualify.
Chris Lehman (THE NATION) notes the vile Moms For Liberty:
Even before Moms for Liberty had wrapped up its second annual national conference—bearing the Margaret Atwood–esque sobriquet “Joyful Warriors Summit”—in Philadelphia on Sunday, the event was a messaging triumph. That’s because the Florida-based right-wing school takeover group, launched in 2021 to protest Covid lockdowns, could count on an amnesiac and credulous press to dress up its race-mongering, anti-LGBTQ+, and hard-right organizing profile in the image of a standard-issue interest group steeped in the homespun politics of local citizen outrage at the grassroots level.
Don’t take my cranky left-critic word for it. NBC News’s Bianca Seward and Gabe Gutierrez attended a breakout session at the five-day Philadelphia confab dedicated to media strategizing. Leading the training workshop was Florida Republican Party chair Christian Ziegler, the husband of Moms for Liberty cofounder Bridget Ziegler—who now helps run Governor Ron DeSantis’s Disney oversight commission. “The media is not your friend,” Ziegler announced, and advised the group’s culture-war faithful to pursue a starve-them-out strategy: “If you give [the media] the least amount possible, you’re fully controlling the message. The more you give them, the less you control. The less you give them, the more you control.” This approach, he went on to note, exploits the key weakness of political reporters: “They’re lazy. They have no idea what’s going on at school board meetings. Oftentimes they don’t even know how local government works.”
The press wasted little time in proving Ziegler right. New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman opens his own report on the event with an account of a recent PR fiasco for the group, when the Hamilton County, Ind., Moms for Liberty chapter quoted Adolf Hitler in a newsletter and issued a shamefaced retraction along with a public apology. But instead of allowing readers to dwell on the autocratic tendencies of a Hitler-quoting political faction, Weisman instead cites the Hamilton County chapter’s antics as a case study in movement-building by means of “controversy”:
The group’s reputation for confrontation and controversy is very much intact, but as Moms for Liberty convenes on Thursday in Philadelphia, it is doing so not as a small fringe of far-right suburban mothers but as a national conservative powerhouse—precisely because of chapters like Hamilton County’s and their energized members.
It’s true that admirers of fascist leaders are generally a high-energy cohort.
Robert F Kennedy Jr was left grasping for answers after being confronted with a lengthy list of his conspiracy theories in a new interview.
The Democratic presidential candidate, 69, sat last week for a wide-ranging interview with Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller from Reason, which bills itself as the nation’s leading libertarian magazine.
Mr Kennedy told the publication he had “always been aligned with libertarians on most issues”, and that he would consider appointing Tulsi Gabbard as his secretary of state.
Towards the end of the hour-long interview, Mr Gillespie, Reason’s editor-at-large, noted that RFK Jr routinely trafficked in conspiracies and displayed a “kind of conspiracist mindset where almost everything that we take for granted is bad”.
Mr Gillespie went on to list the numerous conspiracies that RFK Jr has peddled, including his anti-vaccine stance and claims that 5G and Wi-Fi are “controlling our mind”, that AIDs is not caused by HIV, that boys are becoming transgender due to chemicals in the drinking water, and that his cousin Michael Skakel was not guilty of a murder he had been convicted of.
Kat's "Kat's Korner: Rickie Lee Jones provides songs of wisdom for unwise times" went up last night. The following sites updated:
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If Paul Revere Were Alive Today21 hours ago
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Doo-Doo Ron Ron DeSantis1 day ago
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Weekend box office1 day ago
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