The Netflix guys offered me a ticket for last night’s AFI Fest VOIR screening, but I had to catch Being The Ricardos in Westwood. The David Fincher-David Prior film-worship doc debuts on “the service” on 12.6.

But in the meantime, consider this verdict from Smart Critic Friendo: “Most overpraised movie of the millennium. For all the obvious reasons.”

Photos, I mean. Out of thousands. Chiesa di San Rocco. Taken in early June of ‘14. The tallest person in the group of six is my son Dylan.

I took one look at this snap of screenwriter Daniel Waters and immediately thought of Francis Bacon‘s screaming pope paintings. And I thought “this could be a horror film character…a subdued, stay-at-home house dad who fancies himself as a gourmet chef, and suddenly he loses his mind,” etc. Just remove the spatula and replace it with a butcher knife or meat cleaver.

Ten weeks after Kenneth Branagh‘s Belfast had its first showing at the Telluride Film Festival and after constant latherings of praise from film critics and festival audiences, it’s finally playing before ticket buyers in the gladiator arenas. Reactions from the HE community would be greatly appreciated. Please focus part of your writings on the music — to what extent does the musical score (i.e., the Van Morrison songs) make a difference? Anyway, that’s it. Thank you.

On 10.21 the House of Representatives voted to hold Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress over defying the January 6th committee and refusing to cooperate, etc. Attorney General Merrick Garland had no choice but to seek an indictment, but the House vote was over three weeks ago. From this corner it seemed as if the Justice Department was dragging ass. I don’t know if it could have been fast-tracked or not. I only know that a lot of activist Twitter types seemed irked and annoyed at the pace of things.

..and had witnessed the devastating toll that The Great Depression took and had personally witnessed how so many millions were suddenly without a pot to piss in, you would have probably felt some degree of sympathy and support for the ideas behind Communism and the party’s general anti-capitalist theology.

Hence a lot of people attended meetings, flirted with supporting the party (at least nominally), and in some cases confirmed their support with a signature on this or that form. Like Lucille Ball did in 1936. And Elia Kazan and many other left-leaning Hollywood types did. Even my mother, who became a mildly conservative moderate after marrying and raising a family, was a kind of “red” in her college years.

The same type of impressionable teens and 20somethings who believed during the ’30s that Communism was a more humane system than capitalism were cut from the same cloth as ’60s street radicals (i.e., Students for a Democratic Society, Yippies, Chicago 7 supporters) as well as today’s wokester terrorists. But of course, younger people gradually grow out of that shit.

Classic line “If you’re not a communist at the age of 20, you haven’t a heart. If you’re still a communist at the age of 30, you haven’t a brain.”