Ten minutes into last night’s opening episode of True Detective: Night Country, I was shaking my head, faintly groaning and muttering “nope…me no like.”

Set in the fictional village of Ennis, a grubby blue-collar hellhole in northern Alaska (but filmed in Iceland), it’s about a murder mystery (eight missing scientists) mixed with spooky horror jolts (a human tongue lying on a linoleum floor, a barefoot hippie wacko standing in a snowstorm) or, if you prefer, gulpy, uh-oh, nightmarish pan-flash stuff.

And I didn’t care…sorry. I was frowning. I actually watched episode #1 twice…well, nearly. But good God and Lordy Lordy. I hated the grimness and the gloom, the atmosphere of working-class gunk and chilly vibes, fleurescent lighting and the constant downer vibes…lemme out.

Miserable Me: “Who could stand living in this godawful one-horse town?”

I didn’t like any characters except for Jodie Foster’s “Danvers”, an aloof, flinty, sourpuss chief of police who’s no fan of the Beatles. I didn’t care for Kali Reis’s “Angeline Navarro”…didn’t like her sulking, sullen attitude or her cheek studs. There’s a young, good-looking cop (Finn Bennett) I took a shine to, but within a short while, as noted, I was sinking into a puddle of despair.

My spirit surged slightly when Reis came upon a CG polar bear on Main Street, but then we go in for the close-up and OF COURSE the bear is a bit scary due to a missing left eye. As soon as I saw that gnarly black eye socket I said to myself, “Fuck this show.”

It’s interesting (telling) that no one reporting about last night’s Critics Choice awards has mentioned any surprised, raised-eyebrow reactions about Emma Stone’s Best Actress win. Stone herself clearly didn’t expect it. Kyle Buchanan’s table “yelped in surprise”, he said.

And this morning, it seems, showbiz media reporters and columnists are all passing along the news in emotion-less, no-big-deal, police-blotter fashion.

Why is this? Because, I suspect, they’re probably terrified of acknowledging the Stone triumph as indicative of any kind of shift in the winds, as they don’t want to convey the slightest whiff of approval or excitement as that would go against “the narrative”, and hence might be read as an unfriendly-to-Lily sentiment.

The identity-counts-more-than-quality-or-depth-of- performance sentiment has been the foundational basis of the Gladstone campaign all along.

Stone’s Golden Globes win, last night’s score and her likely forthcoming win at the BAFTA awards will be three-in-a-row. If SAG gives it to Lily regardless then all bets are off — agreed.

Jordan Ruimy: “I think Stone wins the Oscar. If voters actually watch both films [Poor Things and KOTFM] Stone wins due to Lily clearly being a supporting turn.”

Friendo #1: “Academy voters might feel one person of color is enough with Da’Vine Joy Randolph and will not therefore feel obligated to pick Lily. That’s the best argument I can make for a Stone win.”

Friendo #2: “I’m not a fan of Gladstone’s performance, and even the misplacing of her in the lead actress category is a kind of performative identity bullshit. But sorry, I think she’s a lock to win the Oscar. (Might not be true if Stone hadn’t already won.)”

From Jonathan Dean’s London Times interview with Sopranos creator David Chase (1.12.24) about the 25th anniversary:

…the N.Y. Post’s Dean Balsimini posting a dead-Hollywood-luminary map of Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery and ignoring Some Like It Hot director & co-writer Billy Wilder…shallow bastard. And yet Don Knotts and Roy Orbison made the cut.

What would Walter Matthau and George C. Scott say in heaven about being interred side by side?

“This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls”, a marketing phrase for the same–titled remake that opened a couple of days ago, may have sounded to some like a taunt or a brag.

But according to screenwriter Tina Fey in a 1.10 N.Y. Times interview piece by Ashley Spencer, it was sorta kinda meant to reassure.

Having written the 2004 version as well as the newbie, Fey didn’t want her present-tense high-school bitches to violate current standards — no fatphobic or homophobic humor, for example.

Mean Girls is a critical bust on RT and Metacritic — 70% and 59%, respectively. And yet the somewhat-less-discriminating Joe and Jane Popcorn went for it over the last two nights — an estimated $31.5M weekend tally.

I re-watched the 2004 original a few weeks ago. For the usual HE reasons I decided to bypass the current version.

I didn’t feel merely seized by episode #2 of Howard Suber’s The Power of Film series (TCM, 1.4 through 2.8). I felt transformed, understood, opened up.

The episode is called “Trapped”, and it’s about more, I would say, than just cinematic instruction. It’s about me and my whole damn life…the whole journey and then some.

There are four key optionals, Suber says, that define characters who have mattered the most to audiences over the decades — destiny, fate, courage, defiance.

Fate is what you are — what you’re born with and will be with you until you die — whereas destiny is a choice that you need to act upon. It’s seizing life and refusing to be victimized or marginalized.

Not “changing the world” but changing your relationship to the world that you’re dealing with.

Society wants the bad guys dispensed with, but the heroic vanquisher, it often seems, must be exiled, isolated and made into a scapegoat. But we will remember him or her forever. And to live in the memory is one of the greatest powers of all.

We’re all trapped. Trapped by bad jobs, by our families, by our ethnicity, trapped by indecision and by cowardice, trapped in our schools, trapped in bad relationships, trapped by our friendships.

“Trapped”, Suber says, could be the title of nearly all memorable films. Because people go to these films to have a persistent question answered — “how do I get out of this?”

Movies say over and over you can escape the traps and fulfill your destiny — but what you have to do is act.

Here’s a credit-crawl rundown of clips used in this episode:

Vasectomy four months ago, sex five months ago…

“Now that’s what I call cutting it close” — final line, spoken by hospital orderly, in Lover Come Back (‘62).

“Tonight you WERE the father” regarding a pregnancy that began FIVE MONTHS AGO…I get it but on the other hand I don’t. I would have written “five months ago you became a full partner in the creation of a child”…something like that. Even if it didn’t actually happen, according to Keith.

And after 100-plus minutes, feeling exhausted by this extremely wordy proximity…this lavishly written deep dive into the madness of excess — ferocious, insatiable and particularly owned by Elizabeth Taylor.…good God in heaven. Surface-skimming wasn’t the half of it.

I’m not letting partner-in-crime Richard Burton off the hook, but at least his difficult Welsh upbringing and actor-of-great-promise burden (his glory years began in ‘49 and pretty much ended with Cleopatra) left him occasionally guilt-stricken.

I’ll always love the title, however, and to think it came from a condemning 1962 editorial in L’Osservatore della Domenica, the Vatican newspaper.

Three guesses who doesn’t have clue #1 about the Burton-Taylor legend, and the first two don’t count.

From the fearless Susan Orlean, author of “The Orchid Thief”…..

Call it the Poor Things effect…Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a feminist Frankenstein flick set in 1930s Chicago…Guillermo del Toro’s Dr. Frankenstein for Netflix…Zelda Williams and Diablo Cody’s Lisa Frankenstein. That’s it, right? Just three?

I’m sorry but I never want to watch another video of anyone doing any kind of X-treme jumping from cliffs, mountaintops, supertall bridges…no more skydiving or flying-squirrel gliding or free-falling or parachuting or bungee-jumping…I’m imaging that I’ve watched hundreds of these things and henceforth am only interested in wipe-out scenarios, which of course I’m being facetious about as I wouldn’t wish injury or tragedy upon anyone…it’s just the relentless sameness, the monotony, the repetition, the X-treme plague of it all.