If Orange Plague seriously wanted everyone to get $2K rather than $600 as part of the now-signed pandemic relief bill, why didn’t he start engaging with the Cangressional process weeks ago? Or at least do it through Mnuchin? Pretty much all Trump has done since 11.4.20 is spread his delusional bullshit about battleground vote tallies being somehow rigged. $600 is an insult, of course, but that’s not the point.

The newly constructed Moynihan Train Hall, an adjunct of Penn Station, will open in a few days. The Moynihan can’t hope to challenge much less replicate the grandeur of the old Penn Station, which was demolished in ’64. But at least it’s an attempt to improve the coming-and-going atmosphere, which had degenerated into a “subterranean rat’s maze” (N.Y. Times, Michael Kimmelman, “When the Old Penn Station Was Demolished, New York Lost Its Faith“).

The Amtrak video indicates that the Moynihan lacks that sense of splendor, that scale, that aura of towering grandeur that has always characterized the great train stations of the world.

Interior of old Penn Station arounds 1910.

IMHO Grand Central Station is the only truly transporting and monumental American train hub; all the other choice ones are in Europe.

HE favorites: Milan, Gare de Lyon (love catching the 7:15 am train from Paris to Cannes) and Gare du Nord (Paris), Stazio Termini (Rome), Berlin Hauptbanhof and the stations in Prague, Munich, Zurich, Marseilles, Barcelona. Tatiana says after visiting the great Russian train stations (Kievsky in Moscow, the one in St. Petersburg) no U.S. train stations seem all that impressive.

What am I missing? Nominations for the all-time greatest train stations are requested.

I haven’t watched Arsenic and Old Lace since I was 12 or 13, but I’m fairly certain the clip at the 38-second mark is from that 1944 film (which was actually shot sometime in ’42). Right?

The reason I haven’t watched this Frank Capra film in decades is that my main recollection is that it’s hyper and strenuous. A 480p version is streaming on Amazon but I don’t know. I remember enjoying Raymond Massey (in the part created on the New York stage by Boris Karloff) and Peter Lorre, but that was all.

Cary Grant may have been classic Hollywood’s ultimate embodiment of suave sophistication, but thankfully he never took himself too seriously, as seen in these comedy classics that showcase his inimitable flair for farce.

Now playing on @criterionchannl! https://t.co/NFareI5kBW pic.twitter.com/OzDXPivz6r

— Criterion Collection (@Criterion) December 27, 2020

How real is John Goodman‘s “Charlie Meadows” (John Goodman) in Barton Fink (’91)? It never mattered much to me, and I suspect it wasn’t a matter of great concern to Fink creators Joel and Ethan Coen. I think they just enjoyed fiddling with Charlie’s amiable, common-man personality (he’s like John Candy‘s Del Griffin), but at the same time without a clear idea what to do with him.

John Turturro’s Fink is a Clifford Odets-like playwright who’s agreed to write a Wallace Berry wrestling movie for an MGM-like Hollywood studio. After arriving in Los Angeles and checking into an oddly grim-feeling hotel, Fink meets Charlie, a fellow resident who seems friendly and folksy and easy to talk to. Later, of course, Fink learns from a pair of hard-boiled detectives that Meadows is actually “Mad Man Mundt”, a mass murderer.

But in the final act Mundt’s hellfire insanity seems a little over-the-top, and we’re led to wonder if he’s flesh and blood or perhaps some kind of demon from Fink’s creative unconscious.

Joel and Ethan, the director-writers of Barton Fink, allow us to wonder about Mundt without tipping their hand. He might be an actual killer or a weird creation of some kind, or maybe a mixture of the two. (Real Charlie, imagined Mundt.) We’re never quite sure, and that’s intentional, of course.

Just as writers are condemned, in a sense, to live in their thoughts, instincts and imaginations, Fink is enslaved to anxieties and nightmares that course through his system, partly about where modern urban society is heading as far as “the common man” is concerned, and partly about whether or not a kind of irrational madness may be afoot.

Fink’s greatest concern may be about that ultimate bugaboo and destroyer of worlds — writer’s block. What seems certain is that there’s a kind of madness in Fink’s creative brain, and a corresponding madness in the behaviors of “Charlie Meadows” as well as Judy Davis’s character, the unfaithful wife of that alcoholic, William Faulkner-like writer who goes on benders from time to time.

Nothing is stable or settled in Barton Fink — everything that transpires feels a bit skewed or bent or…overly imagined?

Likewise, Anton Chjigurh (Javier Bardem), the deranged hit man in No Country For Old Men (’07), may also be a ghost of some kind, at least as far as Sheriff Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is concerned.

Like Fink, Sheriff Bell frequently meditates about the moral tempo of society and how a kind of madness seems too be spreading like a plague. As he slowly tracks the destructive Chigurh, Bell is more and more convinced that this murderer with a mid ’60s Ringo Starr hair is the culture and vice vera, and that it’s all changing for the worse. Chigurh, he believes, is the ultimate manifestation of this growing moral rot. It almost seems, in fact, as if Bell is more focused on the omens than in actually catching Chiguh.

The Nashville bomber was a 63-year-old named Anthony Quinn Warner, who blew himself up in the explosion. Shards of flesh, scalp, blood, brain matter. But why the grandiose gesture? Whatever happened to the idea of quiet, non-collateral suicide?

“Anthony Warner is the bomber,” said Donald Q. Cochran, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, at a news conference on Sunday afternoon. “He was present when the bomb went off and he perished in the bombing.”

I read somewhere that Warner may have been freaked about 5G, nonsensical as that sounds.

If you’ve ever been to the region, you know that some locals pronounce the name of the victim city “Naishville.”

I meant that it’s always a better idea to spread the glory around. If you insist on giving the Best Picture Oscar to Parasite despite the third-act problems (especially that atrociously drawn-out ending), give the Best International Feature Oscar to Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables. Or give the International Oscar to Bong Joon-ho‘s film and the Best Picture Oscar to Martin Scorsese‘s obviously superior The Irishman. Just don’t give both Oscars to Parasite…okay?

Joe Biden is calling Orange Plague‘s refusal to sign the pandemic economic relief bill an “abdication of responsibility”, and is demanding that Trump sign the damn thing today to prevent “devastating consequences.”

Biden: “It’s the day after Christmas, and millions of families don’t know if they’ll be able to make ends meet because of President Donald Trump’s refusal to sign an economic relief bill approved by Congress with an overwhelming and bipartisan majority.

“This abdication of responsibility has devastating consequences. This bill is critical. It needs to be signed into law now.”

Trump has tweeted that he “simply want[s] to get our great people $2000, rather than the measly $600 that is now in the bill.”

Last week the Washington Post‘s Eliza Goren, Shefali S. Kulkarni and Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn posted a survey piece about the horror of Covid. They had asked readers for one-word or ultra-brief descriptions of what living through the pandemic has been like.

The most oft-repeated responses are posted below, but HE’s favorite term…well, it depends.

I’ve most often called it “suffocating” or “draining.” Because I feel as if I’ve been living and working without the ability to inhale any real oxygen into my lungs. “Neverending melancholy” is good. Ditto “widespread depression”, “novocaine” and “low tide.”

I’ve been telling myself in recent months that Jimi Hendrix‘s “I Don’t Live Today” sums it up nicely, especially “there ain’t no life nowhere.” Which is true — there ain’t.

Washington Post responses in order of popularity: (1) Exhausting, (2) Lost, (3) Chaotic, (4) Relentless, (5) Surreal, (6) Groundhog Day, (7) Heartbreaking, (8) What fresh hell is this?, (9) Nightmare, (10) Stifling.

Here’s an example of real actual life…a video taken five years ago from a Key West hotel room during a rainshower…a red bicycle for riding around…bars and restaurants there for the sampling…crowds of people milling about with the wild roosters…listen to that rain drenching those palm and banana trees…God, I miss it.

This morning I read another pro-Showgirls article (“All About Eve With Strippers?”). An Air Mail q & a with casting director Johanna Ray, who began casting Showgirls 26 years ago. Dated 12.26 and written by Lili Anolik, it claims that Showgirls is beyond criticism now, that it’s iconic, maybe even a misunderstood masterpiece, etc.

For years I’ve been saying “no, the film really does suck eggs but it wasn’t Elizabeth Berkley‘s fault.” Way back in ’95 I wrote a semi-sympathetic piece in my L.A. Times Syndicate Hollywood column. I insisted that Berkley had delivered a respectably feisty performance, and that the catastrophic response to the film shouldn’t be draped around her shoulders.

Berkley got in touch soon after and thanked me for the words of support. A year later we met up at the Sundance Film Festival and exchanged a hug. In ’05 Berkley threw me a couple of ducats to an off-Broadway NYC revival of David Rabe‘s Hurlyburly, in which she costarred with Ethan Hawke. A few years later we ran into each other at Telluride — hey-hey.

Filed from the 2015 Key West Film Festival: “Last night I re-watched a good portion of Paul Verhoeven‘s Showgirls at the Key West Theatre & Community Stage. Adam Nayman’s revisionist book about this reviled cult film (which was selling at the KWTCS and at Key West Island Books) tries to resurrect the rep a la F.X. Feeney going to bat for Heaven’s Gate.

I haven’t even seen Jeffrey McHale‘s You Don’t Nomi, a Showgirls doc currently streaming on Amazon Prime….apologies.

Two noteworthy comments from HE readers: (1) “Has anyone ever mentioned about how much better Showgirls plays when you watch the DVD with the French audio track and subtitles? As a ‘French film’ mocking the Las Vegas lifestyle, it’s brilliant.” — Joe Corey; (2) “The only truly big sin of the film was that MGM spent $50 million on it. If Gaspar Noé remade it for $500K it would be hailed as ‘so out there it’s cool.'” — The Hey

For the sixth or seventh time, my old story about watching Showgirls at Robert Evans‘ place with Jack Nicholson, Bryan Singer, Chris McQuarrie, et. al.

Has anyone read Variety’s recently tacked-on apology for Dennis Harvey’s disparaging remarks about Carey Mulligan in a Promising Young Woman review that was written 11 months ago?

Harvey filed the review during last January’s Sundance Film Festival, but the apology coda didn’t appear until Mulligan complained to the N.Y. Times‘ Kyle Buchanan in a 12.23 profile, referencing Harvey’s 1.26.20 review.

“I read the Variety review because I’m a weak person,” Mulligan told Buchanan. “And I took issue with it. It felt like it was basically saying that I wasn’t hot enough to pull off this kind of ruse.”

Variety‘s apology, tacked on to Dennis Harvey’s 1.26.20 review after Carey Mulligan’s complaint to N.Y Times profiler Kyle Buchanan in a 12.23 article.

Harvey excerpt: “Mulligan, a fine actress, seems a bit of an odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale. Margot Robbie is a producer [of Promising Young Woman], and one can (perhaps too easily) imagine the role might once have been intended for her. Whereas with this star, Cassie wears her pickup-bait gear like bad drag; even her long blonde hair seems a put-on.”

I don’t agree at all with Harvey’s opinion of Mulligan. I’ve always found her fetching, for one thing. And young male party animals looking to take advantage of a seemingly drunk woman is not a syndrome triggered by exceptional Margot Robbie-level attractiveness. It’s basically a heartless predatory thing, whether the woman is a 9.5 or a 7 or whatever.

On top of which Harvey’s remark slipped right through Variety‘s editors 11 months ago and nobody said boo.

And it was reasonable to suppose that Harvey’s remark, however insensitive, might find a certain resonance in the general culture when PYW opens. He was basically saying that as far as the popcorn crowd was concerned, Carey’s casting as a femme fatale might not have been the most arresting choice from a commercial perspective.

I strongly disagree — Mulligan is one of our greatest actresses not just because of her Streep-level chops (did anyone else see her in Skylight on Broadway?), but she has a sadness about her, a weight-of-the-world aura. She carries the ache of the world in her eyes, in the slightly downturned corners of her mouth, and most certainly upon her shoulders.

Read the wording of Variety’s apology — they’ve completely washed their hands of Harvey in this instance and have more or less thrown him under the bus.

If I were a senior Variety editor I’d offer Harvey a chance to explain his remark in greater depth, or to amend his gut reaction or expand upon it or whatever. I’d say that “while Variety editors and senior staff don’t share Harvey’s opinion and feel he missed what the film was saying and/or expressed himself somewhat insensitively, we’ve respected his skills and perceptions as a film critic for years, and we will continue to do so.”

The Common Core standards seemed to spell the end of the writing style in 2010 when they dropped requirements that the skill be taught in public elementary schools, but about two dozen states have reintroduced the practice since then.” — Written by Emily Rueb and posted in the N.Y Times on 4.13.19.

I’ve noted before that even those who were taught cursive in grade school have more or less lost the discipline. Here’s a muddy photo of an autobiographical essay I wrote when I was ten or eleven. Apart from the appalling prose style it’s worth noting how clear and legible my handwriting was. My handwriting is pathetic these days. That’s what being on a keyboard all this time will do. I presume this is the case all around.