The Stewart version [after the jump] is more impudent and anatomically specific.

Titane submission in less than an hour, and then The Tender Bar at 6 pm.

SPOILERS FOLLOW: A day or two ago I wrote that Leslie Odom’s Harold McBrayer struck me as the most compelling character in The Many Saints of Newark. Or at the very least the most centered — he just “was” in a Zen sense — a character with a thing or two to prove to the goombahs, but an actor with nothing to prove to the audience.

I also mentioned that Harold’s rising in the ranks with impunity and murdering a certain prominent Italian guy without apparent reprisals seemed a bit of a stretch.

There’s also the matter of Odom’s affair with a certain well-connected Italian woman, which seems unlikely given the deeply embedded racism in Newark’s Italian mob culture of a half-century ago.

Even more so this Italian woman inexplicably confessing this affair to her significant other, knowing as she surely did that Italian mob attitudes about black dudes were extremely toxic, not to mention the Italian machismo factor and territorial attitudes when it came to wives and girlfriends.

This really doesn’t calculate. A woman in her position would never confess to this, as in NEVER EVER as it would be tantamount to suicide.

Friendo spoiler: “I can believe that Giuseppina would have slept with a black guy, but no way would she have ever confessed this to Dickie. In that time period, when this kind of thing was hugely verboten among urban Italians? Just no way.”

The Critical Drinker’s review of No Time To Die is fairly amusing (a bit that appears at the :43 mark is a good hoot) and he doesn’t spoil anything. For a discussion of the ending and whatnot, you need to watch this Critical Drinker After Hours video (96 minutes) and go to the 11-minute mark.

Most of the British YouTubers are discussing spoilers as the film opened in England on Thursday, 9.30. It opens here in select, early-access venues on Wednesday, 10.6.

The Critical Drinker sidesteps the obvious conclusion that your progressive purists wanted James Bond, the smooth, martini-sipping pig chauvinist from MI6, dating back to the Kennedy era and before…they wanted him finished and finalized. In this climactic sense No Time To Die is, from a certain perspective, definitely wokey-wokey.

Prior to its BFI Löndon Film Festival debut (10.10), George Clooney’s The Tender Bar (Amazon, 12.17) has screened this weekend for Los Angeles industry early-birds, and will show again this evening. Upbeat responses so far, particularly for Ben Affleck as a Manhasset bartender with paternal instincts and inclinations. (Thanks to Jordan Ruimy.)