Month: December 2024

Older dudes should stay the hell away from young women under the age of 20. Once she hits 20 (i.e., the age of a typical college junior), all bets are off. But when it comes to men who are more than ten years older than the woman in question, the age of consent shouldn’t really apply. If they’re under 20, keep your damn distance.

It is therefore fair and appropriate to condemn Matt Gaetz for having had sex with a 17 year-old on two different occasions at a party.

The $400 Gaetz gave her is, I believe, neither here nor there.

Step back for a second and ask if a man giving money to a woman he’s sexually interested in….well, isn’t that the way it usually works? An expensive dinner date, help on the rent, a weekend at a pricey resort, a trip to Europe for a week or two, diamond necklaces and bracelettes…sex without love or charm or serious passion can be a barren thing, but guys have always paid for primal pleasures. Way of the world.

Keep in mind also that there are seven states in which the legal age of consent is 17: Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New York, Texas, Wyoming.

There are quite a few more states in which the legal age of consent is, believe it or not, 16: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, etc.

In short, there are roughly 35 states (more?) in which an adult male having sex with a 16- or 17-year-old, however distasteful or odious this might be if the male is significantly (more than ten years) older, is not illegal.
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I wrote the following a couple of years ago: “Sex positive’ sounds a little too nice…a little too much like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Tame and tidy, not skanky enough.

“Because the best heteronormative sex is usually untidy and semi-objectionable in some way — rude, hungry, raw, animalistic, runting, howling, a tad pervy.”

There’s an old Woody Allen line (probably from Annie Hall or Manhattan) that answers a question about whether sex is dirty or not. Reply: “It is if you’re doing it right.”

In the mid ’80s I was “seeing” a pretty British woman in her early 30s. She had apparently come from a conservative family, or had gotten the idea from her mother that when it came to sexual congress and the “yes or no” moment…Christian momma told her that behaving in a cautious or conservative or even prudish manner was the only way to go.

But I’m telling you that one of the hottest things I’ve ever heard a woman say at the moment of peak surrender came out of this lovely lady — “oh, God, I love it!”

It wasn’t so much the “I love it” (which was fine) as the “oh, God” part that got me. What this meant, I determined, was that deep down she was apologizing to God the Father for enjoying being harpooned. “Oh, God” meant “dear Lord, I’ve tried so hard to be a more virtuous woman and here I am failing again…I can’t help myself…send me to a convent for I have no self-control!”

Following up on HE’s 12.20 piece, “Wokey Amazon Execs Are “Fucking Idiots” — 007 Producer Barbara Broccoli“:

Snicker #1: “This is not absolutely authoritative, but a former Amazon hotshot confides that Amazon and MGM Studios honcho Jennifer Salke has never seen any of the James Bond films before Daniel Craig‘s.”

Snicker #2: “Salke considers anything made before the ’80s to be an old movie. She’s not interested in the classics, and never reads scripts.”

Snicker #3: “You can ask people from her NBC days about this, but agents and managers [will tell you] she never read scripts. She just makes deals with name talents like the Russo brothers and greenlights crap like Red One. She’s not material-driven.”

Snicker #4: “Things were chugging along fine at MGM when Mike DeLuca, who obviously knows Bond and isn’t wokey, was running the show.”

I don’t think I’ve ever quoted Joanna Langfield before, but her A Complete Unknown blurb says it straight and plain:

A Complete Unknown can’t dramatically land or even touch bottom because Timothee Chalamet’s Bob Dylan is such a ghost…such a deflector and artful dodger and sardonic shape-shifter that he can’t experience any kind of dramatic catharsis because his whole game has been “something is happening here but it ain’t me because I’m not there…are you?”

And yet, as I’ve written a couple of times, “so much of Unknown is spot–on, the real thing, a bell ringer. I was sorta kinda emotionally melting during the first half hour or so — literally on the verge of tears. Yes, I’ve been deeply invested in Dylan my entire life so I’m especially susceptible but still…”

A Complete Unknown totally ignores the nuts-and-bolts anxieties that Dylan faced as a jobless artist.

He arrived in Greenwich Village on January 24, 1961, and 11 months later he and Suze Rotolo moved into his first apartment at 161 West Fourth Street (right off Sixth Avenue, right around the corner from the present location of the IFC Center). So for 11 months he couch-flopped around like Llewyn Davis but who were his gracious hosts? I’d like to know — who literally told him “okay, sure, you can crash here for a while?” How many benefactors altogether?

If Colin Jost and Michael Che had any balls at all, they would have read each other’s risque jokes like Norm McDonald would have — straight, deadpan, no girlyman giggling.

The reason for their giggling is that they’re both pussies. The tee-hee subtext, needless to explain, was “ooooh, we apologize!!!…please understand that we know how raw this is…please don’t take these clips out of context, wokesters, and use them to destroy us on YouTube!”

Che wrote the following for Jost: (a) “Y’all know Scarlett [Johansson] just celebrated her 40th birthday, which means I’m about to get up out of there!” (b) “We just had a kid together, and y’all ain’t see no pictures of him yet, because he’s black as hell!” and (c) “Costco has removed their roast beef sandwich from its menu, but I ain’t tripping. I be eating roast beef every night since my wife had the kid! Nah, nah, I just playin’, baby. You know I don’t go downtown! Shiz! That’s gay as hell!”

I feel deflated and disgusted by the threat of yet another Superman flick….the tedious, shameless emptiness of the collecive Warner Bros. mind!

I was never into Superman mythology all that much, even in the old Jimmy Carter days. I kinda shrugged when the first Christopher Reeve-Richard Donner version came along in ’78, or 46 friggin’ years ago. (The only thing I liked about it was the “would you like to see a very long arm?” scene between Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine.) My interest was still flickering, I suppose, when Bryan Singer‘s Superman Returns came along 18 years ago.

But then the completely evil Zack Snyder drained the Supie spirit and pretty much pounded the legend to death with 2013’s Man of Steel and 2016’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice…get outta my life!

Jeff Sneider has reported that James Gunn‘s Superman (WB, 7.11.25) is looking shaky or twitchy or something in that vein.

I was wondering if David Corenswet was….nope, he’s straight! Imagine!

New York City isn’t about beauty. Never has been. Some nabes are aesthetically pleasing, of course, and the echo of history is unmistakable all over but NYC can’t hold a visual candle to Paris, Rome, Bern, Prague, Barcelona, Marrakech, London, Zurich, etc.

NYC is about the power and the glory…it’s about the bolt and the buzz and the very best (okay, hungriest) people clashing and harmonizing…a chorus congregated, the music of activity…the commerce and the juice and lots and lots of mad money, etc.

…I Saw The TV Glow has been strong within me since it opened last May. Egg-crack, transgender, persistence of “Pink Opaque”, bury me alive, Tara and Isabel, Midnight Realm…later.

Friendo: “A middling, awkward, tiresome movie. That anyone could actually think it’s good is a sign of liquified brain matter leaking out of woke people’s ears.”

Here’s my final HE roster of 2024’s 33 best films. My enthusiasm levels are naturally strongest among the top ten (all of which are Howard Hawks-approved**) and start to taper off after #20 or thereabouts, but they’re all noteworthy or at least watchable stand-outs, one way or another.

Almost everyone has lamented that 2024 was a weak year, but the more I weigh the top 20 or 25 the more I’m thinking it wasn’t such a bad one.

Update: What does it mean that I initially forgot to include Wicked? It surely means something, and yet in all fairness it delivers impactfully and as well as could be expected. Rather than inserting it somewhere and having to change the numerical order of several films, here’s my 11.19.24 review. Fair?

Apologies to commenters for tech issues that forced me to copy and re-post the whole piece, and in so doing jettison their comments.

1. Sean Baker‘s Anora / HE review (5.22.24)

2. Edward Berger‘s Conclave / HE review (8.31.24)

3. Payal Kapadia‘s All We Imagine as Light / HE review (5.24.24)

4. Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera / HE review (4.24.24)

5. James Mangold‘s A Complete Unknown / HE review (12.10.24)

6. Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer / HE review (9.18.24)

7. Halina Reijn‘s Babygirl / HE review (12.10.24)

8. Steven Zallian‘s Ripley / HE review (4.27.24)

9. Robert Lorenz‘s In the Land of Saints and Sinners / HE review (4.5.24)

10. Ali Abassi’s The Apprentice / HE review (5.20.24)

11. Tim Fehlbaum‘s September 5 / HE mini-review (10.24.24)

12. Jesse Eisenberg‘s A Real Pain.

13. Alex Garland‘s Civil War / HE review (4.9.24)

14. Halfdan Ullmann Tondel‘s Armand / abbreviated HE non-review (11.18.24)

15. Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez (audacious but calm down) / HE review (6.18.24)

16. Steve McQueen‘s Blitz / HE review (11.5.24)

17. Magnus von Horn’s’s The Girl With the Needle

18. Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune: Part Two.

19. Coralie Fergeat‘s The Substance

20. Christy Hall‘e Daddio (Sony Pictures Classics, 6.28)

21. Rose Glass‘s Love Lies Bleeding

22. Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist.

23. Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Asphalt City (formerly Black Flies)

24. Clint Eastwood‘s Juror No. 2

25. Luca Guadagnino‘s Challengers

26. Ridley Scott‘s Gladiator II.

27. Yorgos Lanthimos‘s Kinds of Kindness

28. Wes Ball‘s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

29. RaMell Ross‘s Nickle Boys

30. Greg Kwedar‘s Sing Sing

31. Zellner Bros.’ Sasquatch Sunset.

Apologies for having still not seen Vera Drew‘s The People’s Joker, Pedro Almodovar‘s The Room Next Door and Nathan Silver‘s Between The Temples.

I also still haven’t seen Jane Schoenbrun‘s I Saw the TV Glow.

Posted on 5.18.24:

Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Kinds of Kindness was booed at the end of yesterday afternoon’s Salle Debussy screening.

It’s a kind of darkly humorous, oddly grotesque, Bunuelian satire of middle-class misery…an attempt to capture the cold, deathly emptiness of things…the self-loathing, the horrifying banality.

It’s basically a surreal elevated horror film…dead-eyed zombies and slithering serpents and empty robots eating food, talking about their fears, manipulating each other, indulging in wife-swapping, diving into empty pools, a husband asking a wife to cut off a finger and serve it as a snack, and then deciding to give it to the cat instead…you get the idea.

There’s a point to all this cold repellent antiseptic shit, and I respect that the humanity-hating Lanthimos had a deeply perverse vision in his head as he put it all together, but unlike Bunuel he hasn’t much chuckle in him, and when a film gets booed, even if only by two or three malcontents, it usually means something.

** Three great scenes and no bad ones.

Can you guess who the actor is? pic.twitter.com/7PEOBeJs7N

— Naomi (@TheNaomiWolf) December 19, 2024