I realize this photo was taken last August, but it’s an American classic. It belongs in the same gallery with that shot of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J day, that woman wailing over a guy killed at Kent State University, Barack Obama hugging the grieving parents of Newtown, etc.

A friend who lives overseas wrote the following earlier today: “I’m really suffering, and I feel really alone and broken. The closest people to me have all betrayed me in the last days. Go figure. The truth is that this world is not good, and people are afraid of the things they truly crave. I try so hard to be so good and give to so many, but receive so little of that care or kindness or closeness in return. And it hurts the most when it’s on a day like today, on Christmas. Yes, I know, just a random holiday but still.”

HE response #1: “If we were sitting in a cafe somewhere and you said ‘the closest people to me have all betrayed me in the last days,’ I would naturally say ‘whaddaya mean…betrayed you how?’ I’m presuming that at least one of these betrayals had to do with a woman hurting your feelings. Well, you don’t need me to tell you that this is sadly and eternally par for the course. Ask Frank Sinatra. Lovers ignore, pull back, occasionally bruise, cause hurt, sometimes even draw blood. Obviously not all the time but often enough for what I’ve just written to be a cliche. Quelle surprise!”

HE response #2: “What can I tell you? People mainly look after themselves. I don’t think that rule of existence is going to change any time soon. My grandparents used to have a green candy-serving bowl in their living room, and I distinctly recall chuckling as a nine or ten year-old at the slogan painted upon it: ‘People are no are no damn good.’ Ever since I’ve been measuring human behavior against this somber assessment, and my considered opinion today is that more than a few people (especially those blessed with good genes and decent educations and non-traumatic upbringings) are actually quite ‘good’ as far as kindly, considerate behavior goes.

“But you’ll never find a center of happiness if you’re looking for others to do it for you — to offer love and respect and care for you in the right ways — to provide that balm, those hugs, that emotional support system that we all want and need. That was probably what my grandparents were irked about, and they had several friends and a large extended family to hang out with from time to time. Friends and lovers are blessings but not solutions, and they never will be. Take yourself off that treadmill, get shut of it. Here comes another cliche: ‘Happiness and sadness are illusions — opposite sides of the same coin.’ We’re all part of a single, spherical, immaculate universe of chance and destiny. Buy a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, listen to Van Morrison on vinyl, sail into the mystic.”

HE response #3: “Or get hold of the Bluray of Brian Desmond Hurt‘s A Christmas Carol.”

I worked as a freelance staffer for People magazine from August of ’96 through early ’98. I was glad for the income but was never comfortable with the anxious atmosphere inside the 12th floor People offices in West Los Angeles, particularly the tense, watchful vibes that I often got from bureau chief Jack Kelly. Kelly was always giving you a look that said “I’m a wee bit concerned about what you may be doing or not doing….should I be?” He would always close the door when he dropped by the office of this or that staffer to chat. A nice enough guy but he gave me the creeps.

I was visiting the kids in the San Francisco area when I heard about the plane-crash death of John Denver, which had happened on the afternoon of Sunday, 10.12.97. I called the office and volunteered to drive down to Monterey and Pebble Beach to do some reporting. I arrived early Sunday evening and began knocking on doors. People correspondent Ken Baker, who later became an E! News gossip guy, had also just arrived in the area and was doing the same thing.

“An amusing, at times hilarious monster-hunt thriller, and at the same time highly attuned to and in fact feeding off social currents and attitudes of the late ‘80s…disdainful of country music and ghetto blasters, mindful of cocaine and the assholes who were still snorting it back then, and seriously in love with muscle cars.” — tweeted yesterday about a 12.21 Digital Bits review of the Warner Archive Bluray for The Hidden.

The other night I streamed a handsome high-def version of George Stevens‘ Gunga Din on Amazon. I still love it for the nicely choreographed action in the first half-hour and the serious tension of the final 40 minutes (prisoners, snake pit, hostage, Sam Jaffe‘s “stupid courage,” triumphant defeat of Thug army, Kipling’s poem, Jaffe resurrected in a corporal’s uniform). That leaves 47 minutes of material that isn’t exactly tiresome or “bad” but which taxes your patience in certain ways.

I’m probably wrong in thinking that Gunga Din was the first big-budget Hollywood adventure to mix acrobatic adventure, winking humor and servings of serious drama in one package, but it was certainly one of the first. Stevens knew about laughs and slapstick choreography from having worked for comedy producer Hal Roach in the early ’30s, and he certainly used those skills here.

Victor McLaglen, Cary Grant in George Stevens’ Gunga Din.

Is there a single Millenial out there who’s even heard of this film, much less seen it beginning to end? I wonder. It doesn’t even begin to speak their language. But the afore-mentioned hour-plus (especially the opening 30) delivers so much dash and zest. You can’t help but marvel at how the individual cuts and pieces fit together just so.

In a piece called “It’s Criminal,” New Republic critic Otis Ferguson severely criticized Gunga Din for celebrating the authority of British colonialism without hesitation and at the same time depicting the “thuggee” terrorists (anti-colonialists who were more or less a late 19th Century version of India’s Viet Cong) as mere cutthroats. “So much for the content,” Ferguson concluded. He added as an afterthought that the “form” of Gunga Din is quite entertaining, rousing, thrilling, etc.

N.Y. Times critic B.R. Crisler addressed only the form in a N.Y. Times review that was published on 1.27.39:

“At its best, Gunga Din is an orchestration, taut with suspense and enriched in the fighting scenes with beautifully timed, almost. epigrammatic bits of ‘business‘ and a swinging gusto which makes of every roundhouse blow a thing of beauty.

I’m almost teary-eyed with nostalgia for time I spent in New York City during the 2013 Christmas holiday. Six or seven days, whatever it was. I took a friend to see The Wolf of Wall Street at the gone-but-not-forgotten Ziegfeld on a Saturday night, and it was just heaven. The whole night was actually. The energy, the air, the aromas…all of it. Christmas isn’t really Christmas unless you’re roaming around midtown and lower Manhattan at night, and then maybe taking a train to visit friends in the suburbs for a day or two. Or if you’re roaming around London, which I was lucky enough to do in December of ’80. Nippy weather, overcoat, gloves, etc. The chillier the air, the better the holiday.

Remember those dim-bulb Academy members who harangued Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio after that first Academy screening because they didn’t get the satirical thrust behind all the coarse vulgarity (which was delivered both literally and within “quotes”)? And how Scorsese and DiCaprio had to attend screening after screening and patiently explain that they were depicting the louche adventures of Jordan Belfort and his cronies to make a point about the character of the buccaneers who have fleeced this country and will definitely fleece again? Remember the brief shining moment of Hope Holiday?

It’s been 13 and 1/2 months since Donald Trump was elected President, and my anger about what’s happened to this country since 1.20.17 has been tempestuous. But the root of my rage is still, the night before Christmas, aimed at older GenX and boomer-aged establishment Democrats who advanced and financed the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and eventually locked it down in the spring of ’16.

I voted for Clinton for all the usual sane, forward-looking reasons, but Hillary and the genderists and especially the entrenched Democratic mafia types who muscled her through the primary and delegate-pledging process…they are the main reason we’re currently stuck in the psychotic hellscape of the here-and-now. For Hillary is and was so polarizing, so hated by the bubbas, so unable or uninterested in trying to reach out to poor whites. The bumblefucks voted for Trump, yes, but a significant majority of them, I’m convinced, mainly voted against Clinton, and there can be no forgiving the liberal establishment donor class for making this scenario inevitable.

Any viable, dynamic woman candidate who wasn’t Hillary…if only someone had pushed through.

An anecdote from a six-month-old podcast between Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capeheart and Justin Gest, author of “The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality,” which explains the dug-in, deep-down mindset of rural bumblefucks who supported Trump and who will continue to support him despite the psychotic poison he and his cabinet have been spewing for the last 11 months.

Gest: “[For poor, working-class whites] racism has become an instrument of silence…it is a way of invalidating people…white working class people are not the silent majority, they are the silenced majority…many of them feel silenced by the political correctness brigade…Democrats used to be pro-union and pro-working class [but] since the late ’80s and early ’90s they’ve become [increasingly] allied with the financial class…there are 660 counties in the U.S. that are 90% or 80% white, and earning below the median income in the U.S….of those poor counties, how many did Hillary Clinton win? The answer is two.”

Yul Brynner owns this scene in The Ten Commandments. Poor Anne Baxter is defeated by the grotesque dialogue, but somehow Brynner isn’t bruised. His deep baritone voice, buff bod and sexual confidence (he was 34 or 35 at the time) rule.

I wonder if this scene would be written, much less go before the cameras, in today’s climate. Things have gotten so political. I’m trying to imagine the reaction to a scene in a big-budget, major-studio film in which an arrogant sexist ruler (a) professes a complete lack of interest in whether or not his presumed future wife loves him and (b) is only interested in conjugal rights once she becomes his queen.

Or am I being too cynical?

Yul Brynner (formerly Yuliy Borisovich Briner) was coming off a phenomenal B’way run as King Mongkut in The King and I, and enjoying all kinds of acclaim. 1956 was a huge trifecta year for Brynner with the film version of The King and I opening on 6.28.56, The Ten Commandments premiering a little more than three months later, on 10.5.56, and Anatole Litvak‘s Anastasia debuting on 12.13.56.

Three and and a half months after Anastasia‘s big-city debut (or on 3.27.57) Brynner won a Best Actor Oscar for his King and I performance.

From Scott Tobias’s 9.11.17 Variety review: “In the wake of the 2008 recession, some investors looking to recoup their losses from the subprime mortgage crisis traded one fraud for another, turning the inflated value of China’s economic boom into another bubble destined to be popped. Jed Rothstein’s wildly entertaining The China Hustle blows the lid off another multibillion-dollar heist built on complex financial instruments and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.

“Though it resembles the docu-journalism of Alex Gibney films like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Rothstein’s irreverent, can-you-believe-this sense of humor makes the anti-capitalist message go down even easier.

“Far from a postmortem, the film uncovers a scandal that’s still ongoing, with parties on one side bullish about promoting Chinese stocks and parties on the other looking for empty stocks to short. And as with the widespread malpractice that torpedoed the housing market in 2008, there are no rules or incentives for investment banks and brokers to stop perpetuating shady deals, so long as the commissions keep rolling in.

“’There are no good guys in this story, including me,’ says Dan David, the charismatic whistle-blower who serves as the film’s prevailing voice and de facto tour guide.

“Working at a tiny investment firm in small-town Pennsylvania, David and his brother took a massive hit in the 2008 collapse, but resolved to stay in business and figure out creative ways to earn back their clients’ investment dollars. What they discovered was something called a ‘reverse merger’: Because Chinese companies couldn’t be traded directly in U.S. stock exchanges, hundreds of them were ‘merging’ with American shell companies that still had a presence on the New York Stock Exchange or other trading floors. In theory, American investors could then seize on the opportunity to profit from the gains of an ascendant economy.

A couple of weeks ago Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson and Eric Kohn revealed something interesting about voting for contenders in this or that category on year-end ballots. They both spoke of “gaming” the system in order to favor artists of color. They discussed this during a “Screen Talk” podcast (#176) that posted on 12.8.17.

Thompson (starting around the 8:28 mark): “This is a horrible way to put this, but I know when I was filling out my Critics Choice ballot, there were a couple of categories where I did lean into a couple of movies including Get Out and Mudbound and Shape of Water…where I wanted to make sure there were some people of color on my ballot…I did! And you probably did too.”

Kohn: “Of course. I will cop to that, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think this would be a problematic tendency if the quality wasn’t there. But [it is], and so this is a year in which you can lean into those options without feeling guilty.”

Thompson: “What I noticed I did…what I did was that I made them higher. On my ballot. In each case. I moved them up to make sure that it was recognized. As opposed to putting them as #4 or #5 or something like that. Academy members are going to do the same thing.”

I’m mentioning this because of a comment posted yesterday by Australian HE reader Jeffrey Edwards, to wit:

“As a result of the #Oscarssowhite hysteria, regressive leftists are seemingly expecting Oscar voters to consider a potential nominee’s skin color as a primary factor when deciding who to vote for,” he wrote.

Edwards then imagined their thought processes being something akin to “Well, I would like to vote for Michael Stuhlbarg for Best Supporting Actor because I think his performance truly merits a nomination. However, all the actors I nominate for that category will be white so instead to avoid outrage I’d better vote for Jason Mitchell in Mudbound because even though I thought he was just solid and would prefer to vote for Stuhlbarg, I’d rather avoid incurring the wrath of hysterical people on [Twitter].

Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing, an intelligent, well-made film with a fascinating hook, is a dead puppy. It earned $768 per screen after opening yesterday in 2668 situations. This on top of the 52% and 63% respective scores from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic plus a Cinemascore C grade. Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro reports that under-25 viewers “hated it.”

I’m still advising HE readers to catch it this weekend. It’s not a typical “burn” but a sometimes brilliant disappointment. It delivers, in fact, a very good-to-excellent first act and a reasonably decent second act. But it commits hari-kiri in the third act, and in so doing destroys the initial good will that it had during the first…oh, 35 or 40 minutes. I’m truly sorry. My respect to Mr. Payne and his collaborators. Everybody drops the ball once in a while.

Here’s how I put it four and two thirds months ago (“Downsizing Deflates, Treads Water in Telluride”):

“Everyone knows the boilerplate. A futuristic setting and a dazzling, astonishing scientific discovery from Norwegian scientists that allows humans to reduce themselves to five inches tall. In so doing small volunteers live much more luxuriously and lavishly (their financial holdings are worth much more) while hundreds of thousands if not millions of carbon footprints are sharply reduced, and a far healthier environment results. Or so it seems at first.

“The story is about shlumpy physical therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his shallow wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) deciding to get small and live lavishly inside a downsized tiny town. A controlled environment inside a plastic dome, safe from birds and cats and other predators.

“The truth is that Downsizing starts off like a house on fire (loving it! yes! so great! Christoph Waltz is a hoot!) and then it starts to droop around the 40-minute mark, and then it really droops and sags when the movie moves to Norway. (No, I’m not going to explain what means, just that the film goes there during the final act.)

The brilliant aspects of this justly praised scene from Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, apart from the dialogue and Michael Stuhlbarg‘s exquisite delivery, are (a) the very slow zoom-in as Stuhlbarg begins speaking, (b) the subtle rumble of thunder at the :22 mark, (c) the gentle addition of Sufjan Stevens‘ piano at the 1:56 mark, and (d) the way Timothee Chalamet refrains from melting until the very end. Clip editor’s note: Things should’ve faded to black before Chalamet asks “does mom know?”