Friendo: “Honestly? My first gut impression after glancing at this poster was that Paul Mescal is on crutches. Metallic multiple schlerosis crutches, of course. You can’t say that association isn’t there.”

Put another way, when oh when will Disney and Kathy Kennedy stop beating this irrefutably dead horse?

I’m sorry to report that the junket whores who were recently doing giddy cartwheels and back-flips over Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II…their ecstatic reviews are being disputed by…uhm, people who are not whores.

“Gladiator II is an absolute mediocrity,” a friend writes. “It pains me to say that Scott, at age 87, has lost his mojo. I don’t know how a studio can ever give Scott another big budget after this.

“And the over-rated Paul Mescal is absolutely terrible in the lead role. Denzel Washington’s supporting performance works, but that’s all.”

Friendo #2: “I thought it worked okay, but it’s no Gladiator.”

I haven’t seen Babygirl, and obviously I’m spitballing when comes to A Complete Unknown. But otherwise here’s a rundown of the best of the best and/or the likeliest Best Picture contenders.

Kamala Harris’s electoral loss wasn’t a squeaker — outside of the northeast, the west coast and certain blue urban slivers she was totally clobbered.

I had hoped that her victory would usher in a sane, sensible, moderately constructive presidency…nope! I had been clinging to Michael Moore’s prediction that she had a decisive win in the bag…not so much! As it turned out Tuesday, 11.5 wasn’t so much a presidential preference vote as a national referendum on cultural resentment.

The bumblefucks didn’t so much vote for Trump as against woke progressives.

Lee Fang and Linda have said it all.

There’s only one way to straighten things out going forward…only one way to cleanse the Democratic Party of the wokester fanatics who apparently triggered the most devastating electoral landslide since 1988 or maybe even 1964, and that’s to recognize that these people did this.

What Linda has said hits home: “People didn’t vote for Trump — they voted against you.” Which means, arguably, that they voted against hoodie mobs ripping off department stores without anyone lifting a finger, against Lia Thomas, against the George Floyd vandalism riots of May and June of 2020, against elementary school drag shows, against the trans thing flooding the educational system, against presentism in historical films and the general woke consensus that younger white males are what’s wrong with this country.

@lexibunni.official #trans #transgirl #donaldtrumpisyourpresident #trump #2024election ♬ original sound – Lexi ️‍⚧️

N.Y. Times columnist Pamela Paul, 11.7.24:

11:50 pm: What an absolute tragedy. We’re all heading to hell. A louche, indecent, fascist-minded sociopath will be running the country between January ‘25 and January ‘29, and the damage to our democratic system will be considerable. Is there a chance Harris can eke out a win? Not much of one. She’s almost certainly lost. I feel so drained and deflated I can’t even cry.

11:15 pm: Harris will probably lose Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and that’s all she wrote. This is the beginning of a second national nightmare under Trump. I’m disgusted by the corroded moral values and lack of common sense among the rural voters who brought this about. I’m ashamed to call these degenerates fellow citizens. Good ole Joe Biden is back in the villain’s circle — he brought this about. If he’d bailed in late ‘23 or early ‘24 a better candidate might have emerged from a primary system. Thanks, Joe!! Remember how Frankie Pantangeli died in the bathtub at the end of The Godfather, Part II? Think it over!

10:37 pm: Trump is slightly ahead of Harris in Pennsylvania, and if he wins in the Buckeye state he’ll win the Presidency. The Pig Beast may actually bring about a second national tragedy! I’m devastated. But maybe Harris will eke out a slight Pennsylvania win…maybe. Please? But right now she’s also behind a point in Wisconsin. I feel weak, bruised. This is AWFUL.

10:26: Selzer got it wrong…booo!

10:16 pm: I’ve said all along that Harris would probably squeak through. Barely. That seems likely as we speak. I’ve been studying the returns for about three hours, but it feels like five or six. I’ve aged about three months. I’ve grown four or five new gray hairs.

10:04 pm: Decisive battleground numbers still not in…still hovering.

9:47 pm: Okay, Wisconsin is looking okay for Harris. Ditto Michigan, Pennsylvania. No longer freaking the fuck out, but I still don’t like this.

9:28 pm: Harris has won New York State…expected. Pennsylvania is looking good for Harris, but Wisconsin sort of isn’t. (Right now) What is this? I’ll tell you what it partly is — Harris and the progressive Democrat party has pretty much written off the dude vote, and right now they’re feeling the terrible result of that prejudice. That plus garden-variety misogyny, I’m thinking.

9:04 pm: Aacckk! Aaacckk! I’m so on edge about the drip-drip-drip uncertainty that I haven’t even felt the effect of that Oxy I dropped an hour ago. Harris isn’t pulling in votes like Biden did four years ago, and Trump is doing a little better than he did in ‘20. Trump is five points ahead in North Carolina…yeesh. Millions of people are knowingly voting for a monster. My stomach is flooded with acid.

8:48: I feel nothing but nerves, anxiety, tension. This is as close of a race as everyone has been predicting. No unexpected Harris surge…that’s for sure.

8:41 pm: How many days is this going to drag on? Will it be finally decided on Thursday or Friday?

8:36 pm: Florida independent voters have gone bigger for Trump this year than in ‘20. A concerning sign?

8:20 pm: Harris obviously isn’t going to prevail in Georgia. Oh, dear God…I feel so scared. All the usual patterns are kicking in, exactly as presumed. Bumblefuck states going for Trump, etc. I’m just not feeling the “phenomenal surge of women voters” thing. I’m scared, Auntie Em…I’m scared.

8:14 pm: Kirk Douglas in heaven: “Ladies and gentleman, there have been times when I’ve been ashamed to be a member of, for lack of a better term, whitebread American dude nation, and this is one such occasion.”

White–haired septuagenarian: “Trump’s the man.”

HE: “Okay, but do you guys think there’s a slight chance you might go to hell when you die?”

While–haired septuagenarian (chuckling): “Heh, not a chance.”

HE: “Satan is his father, not Fred! He came up from hell and begat a son of mortal woman. He will overthrow the mighty and lay waste their temples!”

I actually didn’t say any of this Roman Castevet stuff, but I said it inwardly. I didn’t have the courage to say it verbally.

Ever since the marketing klutzes at Apple TV+ blew off debuting Steve McQueen’s Blitz at the Venice, Telluride, Toronto or New York film festivals and went instead for a London Film Festival debut, the clear indication was that McQueen’s film was some kind of not-quite-there curio or shortfaller.

And then came confirmation of same from a recent smattering of negative reviews. A 76% RT rating doesn’t say “wipeout” but it does suggest the drag-down effect of certain issues and concerns.

Bullshit!

I saw Blitz last night, and I’m telling you that Apple should be completely ashamed of itself for all-but-burying — are you ready? — this superbly composed, oddball period war fantasy — an exquisitely crafted, richly imaginative, occasionally horrific, constantly engrossing “adventures of a young lad” movie.

And the critics who’ve panned it need to fall on the church steps and beg forgiveness from the Movie Godz.

Blitz is a violent cousin of Disney’s Toby Tyler (‘60) with a racially eccentric, super-woke casting approach plus a little Empire of the Sun seasoning, amounting to something that almost feels a little Wizard of Oz-y — a multi-chaptered child’s adventure flick that blends (during the third act at least) Coppola’s The Cotton Club with Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.”

Partly because of the musical ingredients, I mean. Blitz has a strong, excitingly intrusive score (Hans Zimmer) and a fair amount of tunes that are sung — yes, sung! — with such spunk and warmth, it’s almost (but not quite) a kind of musical. It’s open-hearted and super-carefully composed in a way that vaguely reminded me of Spielberg’s 1941, if you substitute the tone of beardo’s failed comedy for the occasional jolts of brutal realism that punctuate John Boorman’s Hope and Glory.

You almost expect one of the kids whom Eliot Heffernan’s George runs into during his perilous, days-long, trying-to get-back-home-while-dodging-bombs adventure…you almost expect one of the boys he befriends to sing “Consider Yourself,” the 60-year-old tune from B’way’s Oliver!

I’ve been griping about presentism for years, but McQueen’s commitment to re-imagining and recreating the racial composition of 84-years-old London is so surreal and unbridled and fantasy-soaked that you have to give him credit for saying “fuck it” and just taking the damn plunge.

I mean, if you leave out Brixton and similar nabes, London wasn’t this black even in the mid ‘70s or early ‘80s — I was there back then so don’t tell me — and Blitz, of course, is set in ‘40 and ‘41, when there was one person of color for every 3800 palefaces.

Here’s what I tapped out on the train last night:

“Wow….Blitz is much better than I expected…a grittily imaginative, superbly composed Swing Shift meets the London Blitz meets ‘Oliver Twist’ meets Spielberg’s 1941 within a multicultural fantasyland that the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock and Alexander Korda would be totally flabbergasted by if they could somehow see it…

“McQueen is such a great, ballsy filmmaker…this is what brave, phenomenally skilled artists do…they swan-dive into their own, self-created worlds.

“It’s almost a musical & is fairly amazing altogether and yet some half-panned it for being too square and conventional! What the fuck! All of that music and spirit & impressionistic imagery & a general current of adventure as seen and felt by a young lad…it’s a great smorgasbord of 1940s magical realism…it’s brutally realistic and quite violent at certain junctures and yet it almost feels at times like an old Disney film, and that’s what’s bold and robust about it.”

Friendo: “I didn’t see any of what you saw and got off on. I saw a movie that just kind of sat there, and I suspect it’s going to be a MAJOR commercial dud. I don’t think anyone is going to go see it.”

HE reply: “No argument there. Apple did as little as possible for Blitz. They suffocated whatever commercial potential it had.”

I’m feeling fairly confident about Harris’s chances tomorrow, especially after that shocking Selzer poll out of Iowa, but I’m also continuing to feel quite antsy about Pennsylvania, where, outside of Philly, Scranton and Pittsburgh, the breathtaking, mule-stubborn, Alabama-mindset legions reside…truly dumber than a box of rocks.

I’d like to say something positive about Robert Zemeckis’ Here (Sony, 11.1), a bizarrely stilted adaptation of Richard McGuire’s 1989 graphic novel, and it’s this: the de-aging of Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, accomplished through Metaphysic Live, is much, much better than the de-aging of Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci in The Irishman. Serious points for this.

But if you’re going to focus primarily on a location — a living room in a suburban New Jersey home — and secondarily its various residents over the span of roughly 100 years (early 1900s to early 21st Century), which is basically an Our Town-ish concept (people come and go but the relentless, ever-expanding scheme of life pushes on), I think it’s a really, really bad idea to lock your camera into a single, static unmovable shot. I know…that’s the bravery aspect but it’s tedious all the same.

The nicest thing you can say about Here is that it’s an ambitious concept, although it would’ve worked better on-stage.

Who cares about dinosaurs stomping around millions of years earlier? Nobody. And William Franklin, the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, radiates the same indifference.

Zemeckis shows a young, attractive Native American couple making out in the 1700s and a black family moving into the home in the 1980s or ‘90s because woke Hollywood rules demand diversity.

Would a typical American family on February 9th 1964…would they have had their black-and-white TV tuned to The Ed Sullivan Show and the debut performance of The Beatles in particular but ignore this because of some domestic issue they happened to be focusing on?

The Dean Martin Show (‘65 to ‘74) was broadcast in color so you can’t show it playing in the same family’s living room in black-and-white. It just wasn’t a black-and-white show…c’mon.

Due respect to the Forrest Gump gang (Zemeckis, Hanks, Wright, screenwriter Eric Roth, dp Don Burgess) for having given Here the old college try, but it’s one of the most shoulder-shrugging, close-to- embarrassing “who cares?” flicks I’ve ever seen.

It should’ve been a play.