The shithead critics who’ve pissed all over George Clooney‘s The Boys in the Boat — easily his best directed film since Good Night and Good Luck — have been themselves pissed on by Joe and Jane Popcorn.

Good for this — Clooney’s underdog-vs.-overdog Olympic sports film is familiar but elegant — a confident effort that believes in itself and presents grace and simplicity for the virtues they’ve always been.

The difference is that critics are hung up on racial signage (i.e., the woke comintern has instructed them to regard any all-white, non-diverse movie that isn’t about building the A-bomb…they’ve been ordered to regard such films askance) and Joe and Jane simply aren’t distracted by same…they’re just watching the movie and going “hmm, yeah, pretty good.”

My first thought while watching The Iron Claw was “my God, what has Zac Efron done to himself? He looks like the Incredible Hulk…not to mention that awful Prince Valiant hair…good heavens.”

Professional wrestling is a joke. I’ve always hated the crude theatricality, the over-amped machismo. Fuck this “sport” and fuck me for being gullible enough to believe I might have an okay time with this low-rent, on-the-nose, over-pumped waste of time.

Bodies dropping to the canvas, guys screaming in pain, the exaggeration of anguish.

I hate wrestling culture even more than bowling culture (Kingpin) and NASCAR culture (Talladega Nights) and that’s saying something.

It took me less than ten minutes to decide I didn’t give a damn about the Von Erich family and their ludicrous blue-collar braggadocio and strange penchant for self-destruction and tragedy — Kevin (Efron), Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), David (Harris Dickinson), Papa Fritz (Holt McCallany), Mama Doris (Maura Tierney), Pam Adkisson (Lily James) and Mike (Stanley Simons).

Which HE commenters urged me to see this fucking film? As they brought pain into my life, I will bring some kind of pain into theirs. It’s only fair.

Three dead brothers embracing at lakeside…

The Iron Claw has another half-hour to go. I feel obliged to stick it out but God, this is awful.

If you’re lucky or industrious enough to enjoy a peak period, it almost always happens between your mid 20s and early 40s. (Mine didn’t begin until my early 40s — go figure.) Any way you slice it youth is a ferociously fast train, and is over before you know it.

Johnny Depp was 31 when this Annie Leibovitz photo was taken in ‘94; Kate Moss was 20.

Gene Tierney was 23 when this shot was taken. She peaked in the 1940s — all was gravy, her life knew no bounds, she had a thing with JFK, etc. Career-wise and otherwise things got tough for her in the ‘50s.

Luce Potter was a Mexican actress (born in Chihuahua in 1914) whose best-known performance was entirely about silence and the power of seeming passivity. Augmented by way of reptilian pincer “fingers.” Nor was she expressive in terms of her eyes or facial features —she just stared and calculated and commanded. Okay, her eyes moved once when she glanced downward at a young boy but otherwise she was impassive. She had a slight assist from William Cameron Menzies, but no one who’s seen this wordless performance will ever forget it.

…that German-born actor Conrad Veidt (1893-1943), best known for playing the odious Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca (‘42), was quite the impassioned anti-Nazi activist (he and Jewish wife Lily Greger left Germany when Hitler took power in ‘33) and was “perhaps” bisexual and certainly into occasional cross-dressing, at least during the Weimar era.

I had somehow completely forgotten that Veidt played a major role in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (‘20), the seminal German expressionist horror film.

Veidt’s Los Angeles pallies called him Connie. He stood six-foot-three.

During his final two or three years he lived smack dab in central Beverly Hills (617 No. Maple Drive) and for a time was into occult spirituality.

Having inherited a weak heart from his mother and having aggravated this condition with chain smoking, Veidt died while golfing at the Riviera Country Club on 4.3.43 — roughly three months after Casablanca opened in Los Angeles (it had premiered in NYC in November ‘42) and eleven months before it won the Best Picture Oscar on 3.2.44.

Vertical Entertainment’s couldn’t-care-less theatrical release of Phillip Noyce’s Fast Charlie (12.8) was a reminder that some distributors are actively hostile to the idea of proudly presenting a first-rate film in theatres as a kind of cultural hors d’oeuvres prior to streaming.

Vertical apparently went to some effort to belittle Noyce’s film during its one week of theatrical life, such as limiting its NYC-area exposure to Coney Island’s Kent Theatre (1170 Coney Island Blvd.), allegedly a sticky-floors, hole-in-the-wall viewing experience.

Streaming is Vertical’s basic game plan, but if you’re going to briefly dip your toe into theatrical, you have to man up and summon a little heart and soul. You have show respect and a little caring.

“Yes, Priscilla’s darkly muddy visual palette must be celebrated….not. I felt as if I’d been locked in a realm of relentless gloom — confined like a kind of political prisoner with minimal access to sunlight.

“Director Sofia Coppola and dp Philippe Le Sourd are using oppressive under-lighting, of course, to convey how Priscilla Presley felt during that bizarre confining marriage.

“On one hand this is a respectable aesthetic strategy, but on the other it’s a strategy that punished me, Jeffrey Wells, as I sat there in my AMC auditorium.

“And by the way the under-lighting is evident during Priscilla’s life in Germany with her parents (gloom, gloom) so the visual confinement aesthetic lacks discipline.

“All I know is that Le Sourd’s cinematography made me feel like I was an inmate at Abu Ghraib.”

— response to K. Bowen’s effusive praise for Coppola’s film.

“The Zone of Interest is a highly respectable arthouse horror film with an obvious minimalist strategy, but it’s been boosted in a macabre sense by the genocidal stain of October 7th. Don’t tell me this isn’t a major factor in the minds of critics and industry folk alike — it obviously is. A vote for The Zone of Interest is a vote against that ghastly slaughter at the hands of Hamas. The fact that IDF shellings have also brought about many thousands of non-combatant Gaza deaths since Israel’s completely justified invasion…well, that’s another wrinkle. But don’t tell me that Glazer’s film and the Gaza conflict are unrelated.”

— HE response to “bentrane”’s comment that the current award-season heat behind Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust film “has nothing to do with Zionism.”