Day: February 9, 2024

It’s only February 9th! There’s plenty of time for Joe Biden to collapse his re-election campaign and for the political system to cough up another Democratic candidate for President.

Consider what happened over a six-month period in 1968 — (a) President Lyndon Johnson, the presumptive Democratic candidate for re-election, barely out-points antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire Democratic primary (3.12.68); (b) New York Senator Bobby Kennedy enters the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination (3.16.68); (c) Johnson quits in March, (d) Martin Luther King Jr. is murdered at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis (4.4.68); (e) RFK is shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles (6.4.68); and (f) Humphrey is nominated as Chicago cops wallop demonstrators during the Democratic Convention (8.22 to 8.30).

The whole world changed…everything did. And between now and mid-summer (the 2024 Democratic Convention happens in Chicago between August 19 to 22) we can’t nudge Biden into retiring and install Gavin Newsom in his place?

The withered-old-man thing is obviously a huge and quite possibly fatal problem for Biden. Do we really want the country to be once again roiled and besieged by ludicrous MAGA turbulence, and allow this to happen over a single man’s obstinate refusal to face reality and step aside for the general good?

Biden is clearly declining and a much more frail and muttering fellow than he was even four years ago, and he wants to serve again until January ’29, when he’ll be 86?

Yes, it’s possible that a majority of voters might decide it’s better to send an obviously toxic, deranged and foam-at-the-mouth reprehensible authoritarian back to the White House rather than give Gavin Newsom a try, but I seriously doubt this would happen at the end of the day.

But dishonesty is even worse, and I’ve really come to believe in not skirting or ducking whatever’s happening of a significant nature as long as it connects or reflects on some level. No icky stuff, of course. This has always been a movie-related column but sometimes an occasional random confession is in order.

I’m just going to blurt this out. The results of this morning’s medical exam gave me pause. All my life I’ve enjoyed excellent health, and right now I feel robust and bulletproof. I feel like I’m 37. But an element of doubt or at the very least uncertainty has crept into the room. I’m not feeling spooked as much as…I don’t know, somber or something.

Nobody of any age is ever assured of blue skies and fair weather. We’re all playing it one day at a time, etc. Who knows what lies around the corner? I’ll leave it there, I think. Right now it’s all tutto bene. I just can’t figure a way to write this daily fucking column (“let it all hang out”) without at least acknowledging this. Curtly.

Without getting into details I’ll be submitting to an examination procedure this morning around 10:30 am, and that’s all I’m going to say. Nothing wrong — just something I have to do. I’ll be out of it and presumably recovering by 12:30 or 1 pm.

All this time I had somehow failed to realize that Jack Arnold’s It Came From Outer Space (‘53), which is based on a Ray Bradbury film treatment called “The Meteor”, was a clear forerunner of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (‘56).

Both were black-and-white chillers about bucolic, small-town communities besieged by aliens with the power to surreptitiously replace residents with creepy, emotion–less substitutes, the difference being that Arnold and Bradbury’s visitors aren’t aggressively evil or looking to harm anyone and certainly don’t serve as metaphorical seed agents for ‘50s-era conformity, as they did in Body Snatchers.

And both focused on a cerebral alpha male hero figure (Richard Carlson, Kevin McCarthy) and nearly identical brunette wifey-girlfriend love partners (Arnold’s Barbara Rush, Siegel’s Dana Wynter) who are taken over by aliens in the third act.

There are too many scenes in which Carlson tries and fails to persuade fellow townies that some kind of alien invasion is actually happening. Over and over and over. Charles Drake’s Sheriff Warren finally comes around toward the end, but by then the skepticism horse has been beaten to death.

I was expecting to engage with Kathleen Hughes, the blonde on the 4K Bluray jacket cover, but she’s only in one brief scene.

I was delighted by the relatively recent digital restoration of It Came From Outer Space. Clifford Stine’s cinematography looks about as proficient and ace-level as this kind of boilerplate big-studio monochrome effort gets. At times the image quality seems as clean and rich as, say, the VistaVision lensing of William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (‘55), especially during the outdoor-simulating sound stage scenes.

We all know the great-grandfatherly Joe Biden, 81, “looks like his own skeletal remains,” as Bill Maher remarked on a 9.30.23 “New Rules” segment, and that he almost certainly lacks the mental agility and high-octane strength to run an effective campaign against the insane but grotesquely resilient, fat-as-a-cow Donald Trump, 77.

Every American of voting age, in short, has locked into “Biden is too old to serve another term,” so it was no shock to read that special counsel Robert K. Hur has noted, in his just-released report about President Biden’s occasionally errant handling of documents, that he comes off as a “sympathetic, well–meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — basically a rote confirmation of what everyone has long perceived or suspected so what’s the biggie?

But during Thursday evening’s impromptu press encounter at the White House Biden intensified the over–the–hill impressions by angrily barking at and sneering about Hur’s observations…a gruff and blustery short-tempered response that failed to exude even a semblance of the usual cool poise and confident assurance that Presidents have routinely been associated with.

My father used to behave like this in his 80s…grumpy, hair–trigger, junkyard dog–like.

Bill Maher on 9.30.23:

N.Y. Times: