I’d forgotten how ludicrous Moonraker is. Released 35 and 1/2 years ago, it’s easily the stupidest, least reality-grounded 007 film ever.

I’d forgotten that Lois Chiles’ character was actually named Holly Goodhead, described on the Wiki page as “an astronaut scientist on loan from NASA who gives heavenly blowjobs.” (I’m kidding about the last four words.)

I hadn’t forgotten that Richard Kiel‘s “Jaws” falls in love with Blanche Ravalec‘s “Dolly.”

It’s almost as if Albert “Cubby” Broccoli sat down with Roger Moore, director Lewis Gilbert and the screenwriters and said, “We need to devalue this franchise as much as possible…we need to completely abandon the spirit of From Russia With Love and Dr. No…we need to turn 007 into a totally lightweight asshole.”

It took me nearly five years to sit down and actually read significant portions of Michael Benson‘s “Space Odyssey” (Simon & Schuster, 4.23.19). A hardback copy was sitting in the Wilton library’s film section…easy.

We all understand that roughly 19 or 20 minutes of footage was cut from 2001: A Space Odyssey after a hostile New York City press screening on 4.3.68. The original version ran 160 minutes. Director Stanley Kubrick, seriously freaked by the response, cut it down to 139 minutes.

In the book’s photo section I came upon a frame capture I’d never seen before — dead HAL. The image was apparently included in the 160-minute version after Dave Bowman disconnects the homicidal, calm-voiced, heuristically programmed algorithmic computer…the glowing red light snuffed out.

I’ve always understood that HAL wasn’t so much terminated by Bowman as given a kind of partial lobotomy — still operating and regulating the voyage of Discovery but with his higher brain functions cut. Maybe that’s why the dead HAL image wasn’t used, as it didn’t make basic sense.

I reviewed David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man for Films in Review. The Paramount film, exec produced by Mel Brooks, opened on 10.10.80 (less than a month before Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan). The review had to be 250 words or thereabouts, which made the writing of it incredibly difficult. I had to bang out draft after draft on an IBM Selectric, tearing my hair out. I went through a lot of White-Out, which used to come in little glass bottles. And I can’t find the FIR issue that the review appeared in anywhere.

I decided a couple of months ago that I had zero interest in seeing Lockerbie: A Search for Truth (Peacock, 1.2.25).

Based on Jim Swire‘s “The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice” and starring Colin Firth as Swire, it’s a story that we all know the ending to, and which dramatically speaking can’t do anything except swirl around in the Scottish mud.

Firth plays the anguished father of poor Flora Swire, one of the 243 passengers and 16 crew members who were murdered on 12.21.88 (not to mention 11 Lockerbie residents who died) when a Libyan bomb exploded in the luggage compartment of a U.S.-bound Pan Am 747 (flight 103). A gruesome slaughter.

It’s a story that can’t help but infuriate because the scumbag convicted of having orchestrated the bombing and who was handed a life sentence, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi, was sprung from a Scottish prison after serving ten years because he was ailing from cancer (i.e., “compassionate grounds”). Al-Megrahi returned to Libya on 11.2.09, moved into a villa in Tripoli, and died almost three years hence (5.20.12).

In a fair and just world, Al-Megrahi would have suffered some kind of traumatic execution…hanging, firing squad, thrown into a hungry wolf pit like Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings. But instead he more or less walked after serving a decade behind bars. What kind of a shitty ending is that?

Another Libyan guy, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, was prosecuted for his involvement in the crime but was found not guilty.

Zero Dark Thirty delivered a kind of dramatic satisfaction for the 9/11 victims, but what possible payoff could result from broken-hearted Jim Swire digging into the particulars and becoming more and more angry and haunted and disillusioned?

Last night I tried watching Return to Lockerbie with Lorraine Kelly, a 2023 doc that’s mainly focused on the trauma that Lockerbie residents went through.

If Pan Am flight #103 hadn’t been delayed, the bomb would have exploded over the Atlantic.

AI sez: Alpine goats are the best for vegetation management because they’re good at clearing land with taller plants and weeds because they can reach higher than other breeds. Boer goats, who are primarily meat goats, are the fastest at clearing land and are considered the best breed for land management.

In a discussion about the L.A. firestorm, former L.A. mayoral candidate Rick Caruso sounded pretty good.

The fire department lesbians are definitely facing heat in more ways than one.

“Liking” a film isn’t a matter of feeling good vibes from it. I don’t need a film to soothe or caress me, or to alleviate my fears.

It’s a matter of whether or not a film is bullshitting you or not…whether or not it’s conveying some kind of a full or fair understanding of the basic realities of life…whether or not it’s passing along a certain proverbial truth…whether or not it’s projecting a perceptive, fully considered sense of how things really are out there…kind or radiant or ungracious or brutally unfair…the take-it-or-leave-it rules of the game.

If I know one effing thing in my life right now, it’s that The Brutalist doesn’t do this.

One of my ideas of hell is living in (i.e., being trapped inside of) a world that’s been created, ordered and defined by Brady Corbet.

But hey, it runs 3 hours and 35 minutes and includes an overture and an intermission so it must be on to something…right?

THR’s Scott Feinberg knows full well that by posting the following paragraph in his latest (1.17.25) Oscar predictions piece…

…that this statement will activate a monkey-brain impulse among Academy members to show support for The Brutalist and Emilia Perez (not only right now but over the next few weeks) and thereby instill a feeling of…I don’t know, a feeling of belonging or vague job security or something.

Feinberg knows he’s aiding and abetting the Oscar fortunes of two big-swing movies that either aren’t loved (Perez ‘s RT Joe Popcorn score is 37%) or are determined to make viewers feel morose and under the weather.

Scott knows he’s contributing to an awful feeling within industry circles…a notion that the Hollywood community is contributing to its own sense of isolation from Average Joes and self-destruction by celebrating mediocre wokeism and/or pretentious show-off films that nobody really likes (except for the phonies).

Here’s how Scott rationalizes what he’s doing:

HE to Academy: Wake up, don’t do this and offer hugs to the genuinely well-liked, obviously well-crafted Conclave, Anora and A Complete Unknown.

Posted a half day ago by Walter Kirn:

“Many years ago the New York Times paid all my expenses and held out a nice check on the simple condition that I hang out for a few days with David Lynch and write up the experience.

“I did the hanging-out part, but it didn’t really amount to an experience. I couldn’t get a grip on him, at all. Because there was nothing to grip.

“I’m not saying he was shallow, more that he was truly elusive, meaning the ‘self’ that was in there, supposedly, was simply that of an artist in his off hours. Which is like the self of a vaccum cleaner in its off hours. Meaning it just sits there.

“In Lynch’s case, he smoked and drank coffee while he just sat there. And sometimes he said something. Nothing memorable.

“Anyway, the assignment completely defeated me in a way that no other magazine assignment ever has. I think I’ll write about this at greater length soon, this non-experience I had with someone so eccentric he didn’t even come off as an eccentric, but suffice it to say I’m sorry to hear he’s gone. He kept alive in the minds of millions the figure of the artist, the artist as individual, useless to society at large and therefore invaluable to all.”

At noon on 1.20.25, Orange Plague will be inaugurated inside the Capital rotunda. No, I haven’t the slightest interest in watching. (YouTube clips will suffice.) Horrid cold temperatures have forced the ceremony, which normally happens outdoors on the nippy Capitol steps, to huddle inside.

The same deal prevailed 40 years ago when Ronald Reagan‘s second-term inauguration happened under the Capitol dome.

Washington, D.C, was covered in several inches of snow — essentially a coating of “ice-nine” — during JFK’s inauguration.

Last night I spoke with HE’s “Eddie Ginley” about what the recent BAFTA and PGA nominations portend. And Ginley’s basic thesis was that Best Picture Oscars are fundamentally about Big Swings.

What Ginley said, in essence, was that Sean Baker can and should be celebrated, but he can’t win a Best Picture Oscar…very sorry…because Anora, obviously his finest film, isn’t enough of a Big Swing. It’s too Brooklyn, too Russian, too slapstick, too boozy and lap-dancey… right? It doesn’t, like, “say” anything.

This, at least, is what your basic industry dullards appear to feel, according to Ginley. To them it doesn’t matter if a Big Swing movie hits the ball long and hard. Babe Ruth swings don’t have to pay off in a sweet-smell-of-success fashion. All that matters to the none-too-brights is that a filmmaker said “no half-measures or standard strategies…here comes my go-for-broke Stanley Kubrick or Andrej Tarkovsky or trans Stanley Donen film!”

Hats off because Jacques Audiard and Brady Corbet picked up that big fat bat and swung hard! Big concept, drug cartel guy goes trans, long length, overture, intermission, etc. Okay, so they only got a piece of the ball and maybe hit a line drive or a pop-up. Doesn’t matter!

What matters is the ambition, the hunger, the size of the dream and the pretensions and the fevered imaginings that were poured into it. Don’t tell us about smart tap-dancers and brainy popcorns and soul baths that leave audiences in states of soothe and groove…toss that stuff aside, they’re saying.

Eff those guys.

Anora, Conclave, A Complete Unknown…these are the “sing” movies…clear water and unpretentious nourishment….movies that work.

Warning: I’m heartbroken about the static disturbance sounds in these two mp3 recordings, which last about 30 minutes each. I’ll have to figure another way of recording. My trusty digicorder served me well for so many years…no longer!

Last night HE commenter “Nerf” wrote the following about the late, great David Lynch:

For the most part, “things just got repetitive” is a four-word description of what every auteur-level filmmaker tends to go through over the course of a decades-long career.

That is to say that he / she winds up making the same film or certainly the same KIND of thematically-driven film (i.e., drawn from the same inner soul pool or creative wellspring) over and over. They just emerge in this or that varying form, in some instances with greater degrees of refinement.

“A director only makes one film in his life, and then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again” — Jean Renoir.

Because despite whatever annoyance or discomfort this state of affairs may provoke in guys like Bob Hightower (“stop talking about peak periods!”) the artist has only a finite amount of psychic essence to draw from.

And that’s primarily why creative peak periods (the full, robust and unfettered emergence of creative servings or statements or heavy-cat formulations) tend to manifest most often when the artist has gotten the trial-and-error or youthful indulgence stuff out of the way and has begun to develop serious command over what he / she has inside, usually starting during his / her late 20s or early 30s.

And then it all starts to wind down during his / her early 60s. Or a bit sooner or later. Ask Pedro Almodovar about this. Ask Alfred Hitchcock, for whom the tank mostly ran dry after The Birds. (No, Frenzy wasn’t a creative rebirth — it was an opportunity for Hitch to get more sexually graphic while re-connecting with some of that old London energy.) Ask Oliver Stone, whose creative powers began to dissipate after Any Given Sunday (‘99).

If only this could’ve happened to poor Buster Keaton, whose creative glory period ENDED around age 34 or 35, when sound came in during the late 1920s.

Exceptions will sometimes occur, as Paul Schrader once pointed out, when a film artist experiences a growth spurt due to some kind of tragedy or trauma (i.e., George Stevens or James Stewart’s experiences in Europe during World War II). In which case the psychic essence trove is reenergized or freshly reflected upon.

Obviously (a) variations abound and (b) this formula doesn’t generally apply to big-time rock musicians like Bob Dylan or David Bowie or Paul McCartney, all of whom were cooking with gas beginning in their early 20s if not younger.

In 2014 Lynch, then in his late 60s, was asked when a new feature film might emerge, and he said something along the lines of “I’ve got shards and slivers and segments in my head, but I don’t have THE BIG IDEA…I just don’t have that yet.”’

Surely Lynch knew deep down that big ideas are generally not ripe for plucking when artists are in their late autumnal years. It just doesn’t work that way.