HE’s 2026 GoFundMe Campaign On The Home Stretch!…Another $3K and Done!

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Monday, 1.26 update:

HE’s 2026 GoFundMe Cannes / Venice campaign is doing relatively well and on the home stretch!

The briefly faltering campaign rebounded on Friday (1.16), and now the total is around $4.3K and on the final laps. .

The early January stall was my fault because (a) I launched the campaign too quickly after the holiday spending surge with (b) people just now paying off credit card debt and feeling understandably crunched and cautious about other potential spends.

Earnest, down-on-my-knees gratitude to the HE loyalists who coughed up…you saved everything! Hope is an elusive butterfly, but sometimes it just turns around and flies into the net.

I’ve got enough to chip in my share for the Cannes pad ($1500) plus buy the NYC-to-Nice air fare with $1300 or so set aside for the Venice pad. (The NYC-to-Venice air fare can wait.) I’ll keep the current campaign going until, say, Valentine’s Day and see where things are at that point. If the donations haven’t moved I’ll have to figure out the Venice situation in March or April. One step at a time, I’ll get there, etc. The campaign continues!

As it went last year, HE’s 2026 GoFundMe is a double-header. I’m trying to raise enough scratch to attend both the 2026 Cannes Film Festival (Monday, 5.11 thru Saturday, 5.23) and 2026 Venice Film Festival (Wednesday, 9.2 to Sunday, 9.12), and now HE’s 2026 GoFundMe page is up and rolling.

I’m looking to raise $4K per festival or $8K total. Rent, air fare, train fare, low-rent meals, cappucinos, baguettes, etc.

Please remember that I’m not “begging” for dough, as a few haters have claimed. I’m simply attempting to attract donations in a different, far less draining manner than the monthly method used by other webzines and columnists. I’m just asking for a one-off gimmee of $25 or $50 and whatever feels right. HE stopped paywalling this site a couple of years ago, and so the regularly refreshed content is entirely free and wide open, and this — this! — is the only pitch I’m making.

Should We Posthumously Condemn Indiana Jones?

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In his mid 20s Indiana Jones was a bit of a Jeffrey Epstein guy, concurrent with the ravenous heyday of Charles Chaplin but several decades before the Epstein psychology became known as a social malignancy. At 25 or 26, Indy (born around 1900) Indy had a torrid affair with Marion Ravenwood when she was 15 and perhaps even younger.

Cannes and Venice Pads Booked & Locked

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HE’s 2026 Cannes pad is a bit north of Le Suquet and just south of the Voie Rapide…roughly a 10-minute walk to the Palais, maybe a bit less.

The Venice pad is right smack on the big Castello promenade, facing the lagoon…a stone’s throw from the San Marco vaporetto stop.

Gushing gratitude to all those fine souls who dropped cash into HE’s 2026 GoFundMe project. I didn’t get to the $8K target — maybe I’ll re-boot the ask sometime in late March or thereabouts.

What Journos Are Starting To Realize, As Much As It Hurts

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…regarding the agonizing matter of the still-missing Nancy Guthrie, seven days after her initial abduction.

(1) The second note from the odious abductor, a “layered, well-constructed” message sent to Tuscon’s KOLD, reportedly indicates (according to TMZ’s Harvey Levin) there would be “no talk” with the Guthrie family. In other words, no interest in providing proof of life.

(2) No interest in providing proof of life suggests that the abductor is Steve Buscemi‘s Carl Showalter in Fargo, in other words some kind of intemperate nihilist who’s not an especially bright bulb. Everyone over the age of ten knows you can’t hope to score ransom money unless you provide proof of life…period. Why kidnap anyone unless you understand the rules of the game and are ready to abide by them?

(3) Upon nabbing Nancy a week ago, the idiot abductor didn’t think to grab her medication. This suggests he/she was too stupid or brutally inclined to understand that keeping Nancy in a state of relative good health would be a necessary component in his/her attempt to snag a ransom.

(4) What kind of kidnapper uses brutal violence upon an 84-year-old victim, leading to several blood drops splattered near her front door? What kind of an animal would bash or punch out an old lady? The perp sounds like Peter Stormare’s Gaear Grimsrud.

(5) The abductor having not thought things through, the hair-trigger violence, the impulsive thoughtlessness and now an apparent lack of interest in providing proof of life…all of this indcates that poor Nancy may not have survived this brutal ordeal. A frail woman (i.e., unable to walk very far on her own, her pacemaker disconnected from her iPhone watch) going a full week without medication? It breaks my heart but I’m very afraid that Nancy may be a goner, as the Lindbergh baby was not long after the March 1932 kidnapping.

The FBI has reportedly offered $50,000 to anyone who can supply pertinent information as to who may be the abductor. In the wake of the 94-year-old Lindbergh kidnapping, “the New Jersey State police offered a $25,000 reward, equivalent to $576,000 in 2024, for anyone who could provide information pertaining to the case.”

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When Old-School, Middle-Aged Clint Had Virility and Confidence

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Over the last two nights I re-watched Wolfgang Petersen‘s In the Line of Fire (’93), which I hadn’t seen in over three decades.

Clint Eastwood was 62 during filming, and he looks like a fit-as-a-fiddle 54 or 55, at the oldest. Such a good looking hombre, in such good shape (the old-guy exhaustion bits are just fake acting) and with such a great haircut. The camera loves him.

He’s playing a kind of Clint Hill figure named Frank Horrigan — a haunted Secret Service agent who was riding right behind JFK in Dallas on 11.22.63, and who can’t shake the guilt pangs…a deep-down feeling that after the first shot he could’ve leapt on top of the Presidential limo and saved the day by taking Oswald’s head-shot bullet.

Did I just say that? Yes, I did. The brain-matter blowout shot didn’t come from the grassy knoll.

Frank, in any event, finally puts that Dallas nightmare to bed at the very end.

Horrigan is an old-school sexist who thinks of Renee Russo‘s Lilly Raines, a fellow Secret Service agent, as political “window dressing.” No film made today would even flirt with using a character like Frank, who even in the early ’90s was skirting the edge of uncoolness.

Lilly sees Frank for the dinosaur that he is, but she still finds him charming and even fuckable. (Not an incongruent notion, Russo being 38 at the time.) They don’t quite “do it” in the course of the film, but they’re together at the finale.

Bill Clinton had just been elected when ITLOF began filming in late ’92, and that was a long time ago, you bet. The technical aspects feel quite creaky and analogue-y. The computer screen fonts are positively prehistoric.

John Malkovich, 39 during filming, has enormous fun playing the bitter, unhinged, wackjob assassin, alternately known as Mitch Leary, Joseph McCrawley, James Carney and Booth.

There’s a great bit in a third-act scene in which he’s getting dressed for a swanky black-tie party at L.A.’s Hotel Bonaventure. Petersen and dp John Bailey (who became AMPAS president) deliver an insert shot of Malkovich’s hairy pot belly, and he slaps it twice…pohp, pohp!

In The Line of Fire is a flush-looking, slightly above-average, big-studio action thriller…nothing more or less than that. A diverting, highly competent popcorn thing.

HE Wants Credit For Having Instantly Recognized Savannah Guthrie’s Use of “Silence of the Lambs” Dialogue…

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…in her video plea to her mom’s kidnapper who

[s].

By affectionately praising her mom’s character and kindness, Guthrie was appealing to the humanity of the kidnappers. Exactly like Diane Baker‘s Sen. Ruth Martin did in her video appeal to Buffalo Bill, her daughter’s kidnapper.

I want credit, I mean, for having recognized the Lambs dialogue but also allowing myself to get sidetracked by other stuff and eventually forgetting to mention it. I want credit for this.

Diane Baker is still with us at age 87; her 88th birthday is on 2.25.26.

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RoPo Pitchforkers, Beware!

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Oh, and that forthcoming, yet–to–be–shot movie based on Samantha Geimer ‘s “The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski”, a 2013 account of the media maelstrom that had dominated and permeated Geimer’s life from 1977 until the date of publication (and which still hangs over Geimer’s head as we speak)?

If it’s at all true to Geimer’s 13-year-old book, Marina Ziolkowski’s film won’t be a “Roman Polanski is evil and still deserves to be punished” thing — it’ll be a condemnation of the Polanski pitchforkers, many of whom have posted rabid RoPo condemnations on HE for many, many years.

Geimer quoted in a 2023 Le Point interview:

Diminished, All-But-Dead News Organization

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“When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post more than a decade ago, journalists inside and outside the newsroom were cautiously optimistic. But those hopes were dashed on Wednesday, when the paper carried out widespread layoffs. The Post has jettisoned more than 300 journalists…a bloodbath. The Post also eliminated its sports section, one of the last bastions of great sportswriting.” — from “Bezos Guts The Washington Post,” posted on 2.6.26 by N.Y. Times.

“The Washington Post is dying not in darkness but by the light of noon, and by its own hand. Over the past few months, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has shed a large part of the paper’s workforce, asserted control over the management of its newsroom, spiked a presidential endorsement for the first time in the paper’s history, and driven out some of its best writers and editors. On Wednesday, Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion pages will exclude views that contradict his own libertarianism.” — The Atlantic‘s George Packer, 3.1.25