I’d forgotten how ludicrous Moonraker is. Released 45 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?