..but at this stage of the game, any hard-charging dismissal works for HE. Any kind of hate…I’ll take it. Without the trans experience angle this film would not be happening.

I hated The Brutalist so much that when I saw it at the NYFF, I walked out just before the ending of Part One. I finally saw Part Two a few weeks hence but enduring it was awful. So of course I understand the difficulty some allegedly had in watching the whole damn thing. The Academy members who’ve said they “didn’t get to it” are lying — they’ve heard what it basically is and didn’t want to watch it…period.

It was this exact moment in The Brutalist —- the bus-station moment when Adrien Brody starts weeping WAY TOO MICH when he hears his wife is alive — it was this exact moment when I said to myself “Jesus, I really hate this film.”

The snowflakes are so tiny they’re barely visible, but there are trillions upon trillions of them. Six to eight inches of accumulation is far from historic, but it’s noteworthy. I love the quiet…the hush that always accompanies a decent blanketing. (Stuart Terrace, West Orange, NJ.)

Friendo: “Jeff, can you explain the All The President’s Men screw-up on that H.R. Haldeman confirmation call? The guy says ‘hang up, right? Got it straight now? Everything okay?’ But after the story blows up Bernstein explains to Ben Bradlee that the guy ‘thought I said hang on when I said hang up’ or some such shit.”

HE reply: “Hoffman/Bernstein says VERY CLEARLY that if the Haldeman story is wrong, the guy he’s talking to will hang up before Hoffman/Bernstein finishes counting to ten. Only a drooling idiot could have misunderstood what the deal was. Hang UP if we’re wrong.”

What’s the basic idea behind Sly Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight serving as Donald Trump’s “special ambassadors” to Hollywood?

To try and…what, urge the suppression or perhaps even the eradication of the woke virus? To offer incentives to those looking to make features that aren’t social values tutorials…that don’t try to instruct viewers about the power and the glory of progressivism? That might try and stamp out absurd presentism in historical films? To halt the advancing Best Picture Oscar campaign of Emilia Perez?

I don’t want to sound like a coarse, thick-fingered troglodyte, but I don’t have problems with these goals. No more films like Josie Rourke’s Mary, Queen of Scots? Yes, please, thank you.

Not that any industry hardcore types will offer these old, crusty, well-past-their-prime guys any kind of serious attention or deference. Blah, blah, handshakes, bullshit facetime, whatever. Passing fart fancies in the wind.