I always carry around three combs because sooner or later I’ll lose one of them and then I’ll be down to two.

The best kind of comb isn’t too large + has a rubbery, bendable quality. This black comb [below] was perfect — my #1 default. The other two were semi-acceptable but not really — too large, too brittle, one is blue.

Anyway a couple of weeks ago the black comb disappeared. I looked and looked and looked and couldn’t find it — heartbroken. I have five backup combs (right size & bendability) that I keep in a trinket box, but I didn’t want to deplete my reserve. I exhaled and imperceptibly slumped and grumpily resigned myself to the loss of the blackie.

Then this morning I washed and aired out a dark blue couch comforter, and lo and behold blackie re-appeared. It made my day, but this is my life. I lose stuff all the time — combs, chargers, connecting cords. It’s always something. Stressful, anxious, unceasing.

Pretty much the entire cast (significant-name-wise) of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (‘47), which is partly a courtroom drama but mainly a saga of sexual obsession and unrequited desire that ends in total humiliation. Extremely minor Hitchcock + the Kino Bluray allegedly blows from a perspective of HD quality. Speaking as a Hitchcock completist I’d like to see the Bluray, but something psychological is preventing me. I would rent it in a second, but you can’t.

What needs to be done at this stage in our social-political evolution is an investigation into the possibly racist decisions made by Peter Jackson in the making of his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Why didn’t Jackson anticipate presentism? And why was he so oblivious to the notion of casting actors of color? I don’t want to sound overly scolding or militant, but it might be necessary to haul Jackson before a committee and rake him over the coals.

And why, by the way, couldn’t Denethor (John Noble), Grima Wormtongue (Brad Dourif) and Saruman (Christopher Lee) be gay?

With her wins from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and (today) the National Society of Film Critics, Parallel Mothers‘ Penelope Cruz has now won two major-league Best Actress awards. Plus 13 out of 27 Gold Derby go-along whores have included her among their top-five spitball picks.

HE has never harbored the slightest doubt about the award-worthiness of Cruz’s performance. And yet Cruz isn’t among the six nominees for the Critics Choice Awards Best Actress award. They didn’t even nominate her! And yet it’s been claimed that the CCAs are predictive of the Oscars — sure!

HE also applauds the NSFC’s first-runner-up support of The Worst Person in the World‘s Renate Reinsve (42 votes); ditto handing its Best Supporting Actor trophy to Reinsve’s costar Anders Danielsen Lie (who’s also quite good in Bergman Island).

Otherwise the NSFC went hog-wild for Drive My Car — Best Picture, Best Director (Ryusuke Hamaguchi), Best Actor (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Best Screenplay (Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe).

Drive My Car is a morose, slow-paced film about coping with grief and long-festering guilt (i.e., the trials and tribulations of grief monkeys). It’s strictly an art-house sauna movie for elite, ivory-tower critics — a respectable effort by any measure, but a movie that resides in its own cave and doesn’t begin to even try to capture or engage with or reflect anything about mainstream life in the years 2020 or ’21. It could have been made in 1957 or ’63 or ’86 or ’92.

NextBestPicture‘s Matt Neglia recently had the temerity to suggest that Drive My Car, having won Best Picture trophies from NSFC, LAFCA and the NYFCC, is cut from the same cloth as Goodfellas, Schindler’s List, L.A. Confidential, The Hurt Locker, The Social Network and Spotlight. Neglia is one of those film nerd types who lives on his own planet, or, if you will, inside his own rectum. There’s no reasoning with guys like this.