On Sunday afternoon Jeffrey Wells (fresh from his special Invaders From Mars screening at the Bedford Playhouse) and Sasha Stone settled into another Phase One handicapping conversation (i.e., Oscar Poker). In and out, up and down, Andrea Riseborough, Critics Choice, etc. And then Sasha broke through with another vein of thought and Jeff said, “Wait, wait…that’s good…this is better than before.” And it all flowed from there.

The Critics Choice voters are total woke lemmings — they’ve gone over the cliff (i.e., are lacking in good taste) and are no longer predictive of the Oscars, and that’s final. And where did Brendan Fraser’s win come from? How did he muscle aside Colin Farrell and Austin Butler? HE applauds Cate Blanchett’s Best Actress win for Tar, of course.

Veteran producer friendo (i.e., burdened with a sense of taste): “It’s criminal that Everything Everywhere All At Once took Best Picture at the Critics Choice Awards. And RRR for Best Foreign? Get outta town.”

Sarah Polley’s Women Talking script (essentially a barn-dialogue primer about women standing up to white male sexual assault) winning the CC’s Best Adapted Screenplay trophy is curious, given the obviously superior investigative pedigree of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s She Said screenplay.

The CC ceremony was some kind of award season glitch, a belch, an anomaly.. Voting the woke party line (sacralization of race, gender, sexuality plus focusing on emotional core issues over an instance of morbid self-destructive obesity) means NOTHING in this context.

Cate Blanchett’s Tar win aside, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Critics Choice voters lining up like stooges and voting a straight woke party ticket and, say, Democratic trade unions voting for Richard Daley’s Chicago Democratic machine ticket back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Wokeism is a cult and a scourge — its followers are indistinguishable from those obedient, red-book-waving Mao lapdogs during China’s “great cuitural revolution.”

I don’t know why I’ll always remember Captain Meathead, but somehow this late-night Park City encounter (1.17.14, or almost exactly nine years ago) has taken up residence. Probably because I loved the late Lynn Shelton’s Laggies (‘14) and…I don’t know. All seemed right with the world back in ‘14, and I was very happy for Shelton that night. Happy all around. I’m very sorry…well, for a great many things.

Posted a day ago: At the Oxford Union, Konstantin Kisin, a Russian-British satirist, podcaster, author and political commentator, recently made a case for “This House Believes Wokeness Has Gone Too Far”. The HE wokester brigade is hereby commanded to listen to this speech.

You Tube guys: (a) “Think of all the progress we’d make if our leaders felt this way, instead of pandering to woke idiots for votes and then just doing more of what is bad”, (b) “An absolutely phenomenal speech…I cannot stress enough how much it warms my heart to see people like Lisinb come out of relatively nowhere to carry the torch’; (c) “radiates with clarity!”, (d) “Can there please be more people like this guy, so civilization can hopefully be saved?”

Before this morning’s Bedford Playhouse screening of Invaders From Mars, I’ll be sharing a few words with the audience about the composer of the eerie musical score — the unsung Mort Glickman, an under-valued, under-the-radar guy if there ever was one.

In Laurent Bouzereau‘s two-hour Making of ‘Jaws’ doc, director Steven Spielberg says that John Williams‘ creepy leviathan score is responsible for half of the film’s effectiveness. Same deal with Invaders From Mars, which is chiefly distinguished by William Cameron Menzies‘ production design but would still amount to very little without Glickman’s input.

Glickman’s Martian choir music injects a profoundly creepy vibe…a sense of hovering otherworldliness…”a bleak acapella that conjures visions of a dying Martian landscape or the wailing of frightened minds in hell,” to quote from a 1986 Cinemascore article by William Rosar.

And poor Glickman, sub-contracted by Raoul Kraushar, didn’t even get screen credit — Kraushar claimed that honor. On top of which Glickman died of a heart attack two months before Invaders From Mars opened in April 1953. He passed on 2.27.53 at age 54.

Posted on 4.2.22: Yeah, I know…Mort who?

It’s been asserted for years by people seemingly in the know that the actual composer of the famously eerie Invaders From Mars score is not Raoul Kraushar, as I’ve stated a few times on HE, but longtime Republic Pictures composer Mort Glickman.

Reporting has it that Kraushar was a Hans Zimmer-like operator and compiler who would hire guys to ghost-write scores, which Kraushar would then take credit for.

I’ve been persuaded that the claims about Glickman may have merit. Okay, that they’re probably legit.

I am therefore apologizing if in fact (as it appears) I have passed along bad intel. Kraushar was apparently not the Invaders From Mars composer, and I apologize for previously failing to report that Glickman, a stocky, bespectacled guy who looked like a 1950s grocery-store clerk and could have played a behind-the-counter colleague of Ernest Borgnine‘s in Marty…Glickman was the maestro!

Three people have made the case — (1) David Schecter, co-producer of Monstrous Movie Music, a “series of re-recordings which feature a wealth of classic music from many of everyone’s favorite science fiction, horror and fantasy films”, (2) Janne Wass in a 2016 article for scifist.wordpress.com, and (3) William H. Rosar, author of a 1986 CinemaScore article titled “The Music for Invaders From Mars.”