And you know who sounds like a perceptive, well-educated fellow and then some? Lieutenant General and all-around human being H.R. McMasters, who briefly served ae Donald Trump‘s chief of staff (13 months, February 2017 to March 2018). For the first time since I first heard of the guy seven years ago, I was thinking “this dude’s okay, has a sharp mind.”

There’s an unverified story that in 1953, tough-guy actor James Cagney agreed to submit to an in-depth, carefully supervised interview after allowing himself to be injected with a 21st Century woke-candyass serum.

Once under the influence of this experimental drug, Cagney stated that filming “problematic” scenes of murder and misogyny in films like The Public Enemy (’31) and White Heat (’49) were among “the darkest days of my life.”

The Cagney experiment was discussed on a recent episode of the Inside of You podcast, which had previously posted an interview with Buffy the Vampire Slayer costar James Marsters, who said more or less the same thing about filming a traumatic sexual assault scene with Buffy costar Sarah Michelle Gellar. So Matsters was hardly the first to feel this way.

Cagney quote: “Pushing that halved grapefruit into Mae Clarke‘s face while shooting Public Enemy made me feel awful. After the first take I ran off the set, sweating and sick to my stomach. All I could think of was how poor Mae must have felt with that grapefruit juice stinging her face. It was all I could do to keep from weeping out loud. I felt like I needed a priest.”

A biography of Public Enemy director William Wellman allegedly reports that Wellman was alarmed by Cagney’s on-set behavior. He got up from his director’s chair, pulled Cagney aside, slapped him hard across the chops and said “pull yourself together, you little fucking pussy….it’s acting, for Chrissake!…you’re pretending to be a a bad-ass Chicago gangster…get it?”

Cagney obeyed, and yet 18 years later he felt a similar sense of shame and remorse when slapping Virginia Mayo around during the filming of Raoul Walsh‘s White Heat. He also felt convulsed with guilt and moral revulsion after shooting a railroad engineer point-blank in the gut. Walsh had heard stories about how Wellman handled Cagney, so he too went up to the Oscar-winning actor, slapped him hard and said “you pathetic little whiner!… I don’t want to hear another word about your sensitive-ass feelings about pretending to be a psycho killer….man up and do the job!”

If, God forbid, Kamala Harris loses to Donald Trump in early November (and it could happen), it’ll probably be because Democrats have made no secret of the fact that they’ve written off the bro vote.

This, be honest, is where progressive culture has been coming from for the last six years — (a) straight male Zoomers and younger Millennials are bad news (crude, slovenly, under-educated, bad eating habits), (b) they have to pay for the racist oppression enforced by previous white-guy generations or, you know, at the very least they need to sit in the back of the bus as punishment, and (c) it’s better for youngish, child-bearing women to bond together and support each other than to pair off with dopey-ass young men who are too immature and simplistic in their thinking, etc.

Bill Maher calls out Taylor Swift for watching the Kansas City Chiefs game in a separate suite from Brittany Mahomes because Mahomes is Pro-Trump:
Maher: "Yesterday, the NFL season started. In the past, Taylor Swift she was always in the same box with Brittany Mahomes. Now, they… pic.twitter.com/G9aQtq0c9l

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) September 7, 2024

Congrats to roly-poly Brady Corbet, 36**, for having won the Venice Film Festival’s Best Director award (i.e., Silver Lion) for helming the 1940s and ’50s historical epic The Brutalist.

Don’t just look at Corbet —- look into him. He’s saying something with his appearance. I’ve contemplated thousands of northeast-corridor, working-class guys who look exactly like him. Look at that heavy, dark-blue K-Mart workshirt he’s wearing. Look at that tent-like T-shirt. Did he blow off washing his hair or did he apply product to make it look greasy?

I can’t wait to catch one of the New York Film Festival screenings of The Brutalist on 9.28 or 10.12! Seriously. Even if Guy Lodge omitted it from his “Best of 2024 Venice Film Festival” list.

** Born two months after Jett’s delivery room appearance on 6.4.88.