Anyone wearing a burgundy or maroon tux gets an instant HE demerit.

All hail the Golden Globe wins by The Holdovers Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Oppenheimer’s Robert Downey, Jr. The halting of the Charles Melton blitzkreig is noted and appreciated.

Or at least when it was still hanging in there on its own follicular terms. The 31 year-old Sean Connery may have applied some kind of augmentation for Dr. No (a scalp darkener?) but what the camera saw was more or less what was there. (The first 007 “rug” appeared in Goldfinger over two years later.).

On top of which Dr. No (which was only a modest earner upon opening in late ‘62) and From Russia With Love (ditto) are still the best of the series — lean and rigorous and relatively modest in terms of scale and pushing the bounds of credibility. Plus there were no sensitivity police around to protect the Zoomer candy–asses from all that bruising sexism and rugged machismo, Mainly because (thank you, 20th Century!) Zoomers wouldn’t become a cultural force until roughly 2010.

A weak snowfall — enough for a generic whitening but I’m not foreseeing much in the way of sledding, snowmen, snowball fights. Weather media always oversells the proverbial approaching storm. Hype falls short.

The term “clear box” is synonymous with “story-less template,” which is how I put it the other day.

It should be understood that the 108–minute version of Ken Russell’s The Devils (‘71), which is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, was dissed by Russell and star Oliver Reed before their deaths. The franker British version, which runs 111 minutes, is the one to settle into. The Criterion Channel makes no mention of this, although it does offer a doc about the film’s censoring, titled “Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of The Devils.”

In his latest THR Oscar forecast column Scott Feinberg is claiming that Past Lives helmer Celine Song is a more broadly popular Best Director nominee than Poor Things’ Yorgos Lanthimos, The Holdovers’ Alexander Payne and Maestro’s Bradley Cooper.

This is insanity! What kind of woke-ass, gender-focused sewing circle is Feinberg having tea with?

Past Lives is a nicely assembled but unsatisfying relationship film that doesn’t do the thing or bring it home (i.e., in crude terms it doesn’t let you come). It has been written off as a decent try by sensible industry folk, and yet Feinberg is allowing himself to be fiddle-fiddled by the A24 safe-space mafia…the identity fanatics who are whispering “we need a woman of color in the mix.”

Otherwise all I can say is that (a) Zac Efron sure looks better without the buffed-up wrestler bod and that godawful Prince Valiant hair, and (b) award–wise Colman Domingo, due respect, isn’t happening,