Donald Trump‘s announced cabinet nominees are wackazoid…nominated by The Beast in order to troll the mainstream Washington establishment….that and the notion of blind Beast loyalty…surreal but at the same time real.

“Trump’s selection of Matt Gaetz as his nominee for attorney general, along with his selection of Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, shows that Trump did mean what he said. He is going to govern with a sense of vengeance, and personal loyalty really is the coin of his realm.” — David French, N.Y. Times columnist, 11.13.24.

Except there’s obviously no THE in the title…

In the current Club Random podcast with Bob Zemeckis, Bill Maher confesses to having melted down during the Omaha Beach cemetery scene in Saving Private Ryan…the moment when the old-geezer version of Matt Damon collapses at the sight of Cpt. Miller’s (Tom Hanks) gravestone…because the actor who played old Damon, Harrison Young, strongly resembled Maher’s late father, who had passed three or four years before Ryan opened in ’98.

Posted in mid-April of 2018: Last weekend I watched a 4K streaming version of Steven Spielberg‘s Saving Private Ryan. There’s no question that this 1998 WWII drama is one of the most brutally realistic and emotionally affecting war films ever made, and is certainly among Beardo’s finest. And yet I found myself flinching at the occasionally forced or unlikely moments, at the too-broad “acting” and emotional button-pushings. It kept ringing my phony gong. “Jeez, I don’t know if I even like this movie any more,” I said to myself. “Even the Omaha Beach landing sequence is starting to bother me.”

I had the same kind of reaction when I rewatched Close Encounters of the Third Kind in ’07, or 30 years after it opened. The bottom line is that Spielberg’s sentimental or overly theatrical instincts aren’t aging any better than John Ford‘s similar tendencies.

The greatest offense comes from Harrison Young‘s awful over-acting as the 75-year-old Ryan. His face is stricken with guilt as he shuffles through the Omaha Beach cemetery, and he walks like a 90-year-old afflicted with rheumatism. In ’87 I visited this same cemetery with my father, who’d fought against the Japanese during WWII. He was quietly shaken, he later said, but he held it in because that’s what former Marines do under these circumstances. They show respect by behaving in a disciplined, soldier-like way. They don’t moan and weep and flail around like some acting-class student.

I almost lost it when the teary-eyed Young collapsed upon the grave of Cpt. Miller (Tom Hanks). “Oh, for God’s sake!” I said out loud. “Show a little dignity…be a man!” Kathleen Byron‘s performance as white-haired Mrs. Ryan is almost as bad. All she does is eyeball her doddering, bent-over husband. The whole family, in fact, is staring at the old coot like he’s about to keel over from a heart attack.

Then comes one of the most dishonest cuts in motion picture history, going from a close-up of Young’s eyes to the D-Day landing craft carrying the Ryan squad — Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Vin Diesel — as they approach Omaha beach. Matt Damon‘s Ryan (Young’s 21-year-old counterpart) won’t meet them for another couple of days, when they’re inland a few miles.

I don’t believe that loaded-down soldiers drowned after being dropped by landing craft into 15 feet of water. That might have occured in real life, but I didn’t believe this in Saving Private Ryan — it just seemed absurd. I didn’t believe that bullet wounds would cause the water off Omaha Beach to turn red with blood — in fact Spielberg’s crew poured 40 barrels of fake blood into the water to achieve this effect. The basic effect is one of Hollywood exaggeration blended with historical, real-life horror.

Then comes Hanks’ big zone-out moment when he hits the beach. He’s an Army captain in the thick of battle with machine-gun bullets whizzing by and guys getting drilled and blown apart, and he chooses this moment to go “Ohhh, I can’t think or move…it’s too much…I’m so upset by war and its carnage that I need to go catatonic for a couple of minutes…don’t mind me…I’ll come back to life after this sequence is over.” I’m sitting there going “get it together, man! You wouldn’t do this in a Samuel Fuller or Howard Hawks film…you’re only zoning out because Spielberg likes the idea of spacing out and turning the sound down.”

But it’s a worldwide blessing to hear the bells of Notre Dame ringing again. Five and two-thirds years after the April 2019 fire, The cathedral will re-open next month. Warren Zevon: “Jubilation across the land.”

Donald Trump has always been and always will be an animal….a whimsical ego monster (“He doesn’t listen to anybody“) with arguably the shortest attention span of any U.S. president, ever. He’s the brusque force of fuck-you evil in the second half of Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice….oh, I’m sorry, you haven’t seen it yet? I don’t regard Joe Biden as the same light as Trump, but in my heart of hearts, I feel more anger at Joe because he ushered in this scenario…his obstinate, arrogant refusal to bow out of the race before mid-July paved the way for the 11.5 catastrophe.

I’ve despised Trump for years, and am sadly accustomed to his bullshit. But Biden, to me, is almost worse in a certain way. He couldn’t let go of his Irish ego for months and months, and now the U.S. of A. will be taking it up the ass for the next four years and change.