….if you love and care for your kids or your pets. That’s your rote kind of good…the natural, vaguely banal, no-sweat easy kind. Jospeh Goebbels loved his daughters, Hildegard and Helga, until he poisoned them on 5.1.45.

“We knew a [movie villain] of old by his Black Hat or his Black Moustache; and today by his white skin.” — a passage from David Manet’s “Everywhere An Oink–Oink.”

From Mark Athikatis’s Washington Post 12.7.23 review:

A just-released Wall Street Journal presidential preference poll has Nikki Haley running 17 points ahead of President Biden — 51% to 34%. That’s not a huge margin but the thundering rumble of mighty horses.

The Beast is also beating Gurgly Joe, but only by 47% to 43%. Biden and DeSantis are running even, 45% to 45%.

THR’s Scott Feinberg surely understands in the depths of his soul that he’s deeply disappointed (angered?) the Movie Godz by placing the three most admired, exciting and deserving Best Picture contenders — Poor Things, Maestro, The Holdovers — in the #5, #7 and #8 slots in his latest Oscar prediction column.

I realize that Variety’s Clayton Davis doesn’t approve, but American Fiction, as much as I adore the first 45 to 50 minutes and agree that it’s among the year’s finest, is not happening as a frontrunner. Pundit-wise it simply hasn’t caught on like some of us thought it might..

Take away the guilt + identity factors and nobody really loves Killers of the Flower Moon — it’s a long hair shirt movie with a tiresome lead character. And Barbie has been showered with more than enough accolades, thanks.

The latest Gold Derby rankings are more accurate.

Jordan Ruimy: “GD-wise I honestly think The Holdovers should be #3. Ahead of Poor Things. Joe and Jane LOVE The Holdovers. Every non-critic I speak to cannot stop raving about it.”

One of the reasons that enthusiasm levels for Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders have been diminished all along is Austin Butler’s relentless, extremely off-putting chain-smoking. Nothing looks cheaper or pollutes an actor’s presence like smelly nicotine sticks. Marlon Brando knew this territory like the back of his hand, and never lit up in The Wild One.

HE to Butler: Never, ever go there again.

Note: “Austin Tucker” was a political consultant of an assisted liberal politician in The Parallax View (‘74).

I prefer the idea of Poor Things or Maestro or The Holdovers taking the Best Picture Oscar because they’re such grand buffets…because they combine lavish and concurrent servings of cinematic nutrition and dessert, fascinating novelty and invention in the case of the first two and well-constructed involvement (endless emotionalism and irony, thematic richness, abundant imagination and just-right-ism, and inescapable leakage in the case of Maestro’s ending)…because they flipped me over and held me in their grip.

Oppie on the other hand…that oppressive college-lecture hall delivery and horrible, aching sense of frigid isolation (stuck in that godawful makeshift New Mexico isolation camp and that suffocating D.C. committee testimony room with the killer combo of Nolan’s dialogue and that soul-stifling, cold-eyed, alien-from-planet-Tralfamadore performance from Cillian Murphy, whom I now never, EVER want to watch in a film ever again….please.

I’ve begun to rewatch Oppie on Amazon and the subtitles do help to some extent, but I once again felt caught in a long, punishing endurance test…that same feeling I had during my two theatrical viewings…DEAR GOD I’ll never forget that feeling of entrapment and interior devastation…those volumes upon volumes of dialogue pages and a running-time clock that proceeded at a snail’s pace, only to chickenheartedly avoid the obvious and inescapable climax of those Hiroshima and Nagasaki infernos.

Oppie is obviously a smart, well-crafted, full-court-press film for smarty-pants viewers with greater intestinal fortitude than I, but it killed me to slosh through that Murphy-Oppie swamp…that dense narrative thicket, that after-school detention feeling…wading through a three-hour technical briefing that murdered my spirit and killed my legs and made me feel like Winston Smith’s head in a rat cage…a steady, plodding, scene-by-scene procedural that was always about Nolan saying “I won’t be coming to you because you have to come to ME”…an intellectually freeze-dried process if I’ve ever endured one.

And I’m supposed to feel somehow knocked out, by the way, by Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as the Salieri-like Lewis Strauss and those 16 or 17 repetitions of that outdoor Einstein-Oppie-Strauss scene that Nolan diabolically keeps cutting back to over and over and over again?

I’m glad that Oppie is so well liked and has enjoyed great financial success, and if it wins the Best Picture Oscar…fine.. But it compressed and suffocated and held me down on the wrestling mat, and is basically, for me, this year’s TAR.

HE isn’t 100% persuaded in terms of the Disqus poster’s identity, but it may the same Lily Gladstone with whom we’re all familiar,

Either way I have two replies — (a) thanks for the recognition and the for the implied limited respect therein, and (b) thanks for expanding my horizons with a Navajo term I wasn’t familiar with — da’alzhin, which means ayehole.

The HE comment in question appeared late last night. It was in response to yesterday afternoon’s “Lily Wins Again…Yeesh” riff. I’m mentioning it for posterity’s sake as her Apple handlers will most likely be urging @lilygladstone to delete the post, if (and I say “if”) the authorship is indeed genuine.

HE statement: I don’t have an issue with Lily Gladstone per se — not in the least. She’s fine within the realm of her own talent, and there’s nothing wrong per se with wrapping herself in a Native American identity blanket on the campaign trail.

Gladstone is simply out of her depth in the current Best Actress race compared to Emma Stone and Carey Mulligan’s guns-blazing performances in Poor Things and Maestro, respectively. Her Mollie Burkhart performance in Killers of the Flower Moon, good as it modestly is, is a supporting thing —it simply lacks the necessary scope, depth and intensity that is commonly associated with an award-aspiring lead performance.

Alas, Lily has been running an effective woke identity campaign (a three-pronged one, one could argue), and it’s obviously working with the rank-and-file. Such efforts have been yielding award-season fruit since the Great Awokening kicked in four or five years ago.

…with a little touch of Pietro Annigoni’s JFK portrait for Time magazine back in ‘62 or thereabouts This is what Bell’s Palsy has done since last weekend. For the time being my looks are destroyed — I can’t smile, my right eye sags, dogs howl when I pass by.

Anne Thompson’s cautious and temperate instincts have led her to rank Lily Gladstone as a fifth-place contender in the Best Actress race despite Lily’s recent Gotham and NYFCC wins. This means something. Thompson is no provocateur in the HE mode, no radical firebrand. She never walks upon unsafe ground.