Fair warning: Unless liberals start thinking practically about helping people with bread-and-butter issues instead of admonishing non-woke behaviors, the 2022 midterms may well usher in a Red Wave.

…are planning a huge Thanksgiving celebration with all the family members and in-laws gathering under one big happy roof? All together now, family is forever, pass the squash, stuffing and creamed onions, etc. Talk about an historic super-spreader event, from sea to shining sea.

“People know this…there’s like five stages of grief after a loss. Everyone knows this. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I don’t wanna name names but somebody seems stuck on the first two.

“The President is making an interesting case for himself. He’s saying he’s uncovered a conspiracy…a widespread conspiracy involving tens of millions of Americans voting for his opponent.”

“This guy reminds me The Sixth Sense. Remember that movie? The main character doesn’t know he’s dead?”

10 or 15 years ago I was fencing my way through an annoying discussion. It was for a film-related story about something or other, and the guy I was talking to was being “evasive” — sidestepping, playing dumb, pretending he didn’t know or understand, etc.

At one point the evasive guy said he needed to put me on hold or pause the conversation for half a minute, and I said “sure.” A nearby colleague, sensing my frustration, asked what was up. I rolled my eyes, pressed the phone against my chest and softly muttered that the evasive guy was a “moron.”

Right away Evasive Guy (i.e., EG) was back on the line: “You just called me a moron.”

HE: “Huh?”

EG: “I heard you. You said ‘he’s a moron.'”

HE: “I didn’t mean you. A friend asked me something. Unrelated.”

EG: “I heard you!”

I didn’t have the courage to admit the truth, but my real point was that it was an off-the-record aside and therefore not pertinent. I didn’t call him a moron to his face. He overheard me calling him that, okay, but I denied it — insisting I was speaking about someone else. That should have been the end of it because it wasn’t put face-up on the table. If I had been that guy I would’ve let it go because the remark wasn’t intended for his consumption or interpretation. It was an accident so it didn’t count.

I really believe that if someone says something confidentially to someone else — in a private email, say, or during a phone call — that it shouldn’t be grist for public discussion. I’m not talking about the Nixon tapes, which were meant to be eventually heard and transcribed for history’s sake. I’m talking about words spoken on the fly or the down low, shared on a totally private basis.

HE to readership: Have you ever muttered something to a friend or colleague after a couple of glasses of wine that you would never be dumb enough to share in a public forum? Have you ever tapped out an email that contained an extremely clumsy sentiment or an unfortunate choice of words or something bitter or despondent…some kind of stupid brain fart that escaped during a vulnerable moment, one that came and went and evaporated forever?

Now imagine someone getting hold of a surreptitious recording of you sounding like an idiot or a similar-type copy of an email, and using this to write a gotcha piece about what a clueless douchebag you are. Would you regard that as a fair thing? Life in the big city, roll with the punches, etc.?

What if a hidden video camera recorded your facial expressions while you’re attending to business in a bathroom? How would you feel about that?

Let’s imagine that Reese Witherspoon or Angelina Jolie were overheard saying something that might be regarded in mixed company as ignorant or insensitive or idiotic. Let’s say someone somehow overheard or hacked one of their cell phones and recorded an offensive remark or two. If I was an editor and a reporter came to me with a transcription of said discussion, I would say “wait a minute…they were speaking privately…it was an unguarded moment…I don’t think it’s fair to use it.”

I would suspend this reservation if a private conversation involved something politically heinous or world-order-threatening. A surreptitious recording of Donald Trump telling Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky that he wants dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden in exchange for US aid. Or telling Amy Coney Barrett that he expects her loyalty if and when an election issue comes before the Supreme Court. That kind of thing would be okay to use. Because a greater good would be served.

But private chats between Hollywood types talking shit about whatever…no. Different set of rules.

I posted my review Thomas Bezucha‘s Let Him Go (Focus Features, 11.6) on election day. I said I’d wait a week or so before discussing it in greater detail so here goes. Understand that three or four fairly significant SPOILERS follow so please stop reading if you haven’t yet had the pleasure.

To make it easy I’m just going to copy and paste a discussion I had with a colleague…

HE: “Loving Let Him Go — so well composed, exacting, nicely honed. But the bad guys just [performed a violent act upon a major presence] and I really, REALLY didn’t like that. You don’t do that to the laconic, tough-as-nails hero — you just don’t.”

Friendo: “That violent shock scene is one of my favorite things in the film. You’re right — you don’t do that. It’s not done. And that ‘rule’ makes our hero feel implicitly protected.

“That rule-breaking moment raised the stakes. It said: These people are THAT dangerous –— the hero isn’t going to be protected by the usual hero mythology. I thought the horror of that event made what followed more suspenseful, as well as placing [a significant character] on a path toward martyrdom, although we don’t know that yet.

HE: “If you ask me, Kayli Carter is the villain of the piece. She had a good gentle husband (the son of Kevin Costner and Diane Lane) and then, with a young son, she married a violent sociopath (Will Britain). She couldn’t sniff a whiff of trouble from that guy? Any half-intelligent adult could have. Especially with a three-year old to think about.

“Lane, we’re told, was less than supportive after her son died and so Kayli…what, had no choice but to marry the first available psycho who came along?
After all is said and done, that kid is going to be seriously traumatized, probably for the rest of his life. Decades of therapy.

“And of course Lesley Manville and her scurvy, white-trash, seed-of-Satan sons are cut from the same cloth that Trump supporters will come from 50 years hence. OF COURSE they are. Trump yokels + Deliverance + Animal Kingdom (David Michod‘s Australian crime family, released in 2010).

“And why did Kayli rat them out by telling Manville & Sons that Costner/Lane wanted her to move back with them? She knows that awful family is violent and territorial and yet she ratted out Kevin and Diane?

Friendo: “That plotting with the daughter is a weakness; it’s fuzzy. But I don’t think she’s villainous. The implication is that Donnie kept his true nature mostly hidden. (That can happen with abusers.)

“If you want to run with the Trump metaphor, then do — I think it’s interesting, and I don’t think it’s ‘wrong.’ I’m just saying that as someone disposed to hate rural Trumpers, it never occurred to me.”

They made him look too obese, the titles are crude and unwanted, and Trump has almost certainly never gazed at the sea since he was in his teens (if then), but otherwise it’s a great concept. Somebody should create a better one.

As far as connecting and forging bonds with mainstream, grass-roots voters is concerned, that is. Not everyone in flyover country despises brainy, well-spoken urban elites and their corresponding talking points, and yet many millions obviously do.

Because with so many millions of people strapped and the pandemic spiking all over place, Average Joe voters don’t wanna know from wokester razmatazz, elite cultural issues, the “Defund the Police” slogan (as opposed to “Re-Think The Police”), the obviously necessary struggle to fight systemic racism, the support of LGBTQ issues or even (despite the critical importance) climate change.

In a chat right after Dubya beat John Kerry in ’04, a colleague said more or less the same as above. So to really connect with proles the left needs to “bubba up,” I kiddingly replied. Not so funny any more.

Average voters aren’t necessarily dismissive of these concerns, but right now they need help with bread-and-butter, kitchen-table stuff. And one reason that a lot of Middle American fence-sitters voted against Democratic progressives in the House, is that they don’t sense a lot of ground-level empathy from them.

Excerpts from “Elissa Slotkin Braces for a Democratic Civil War,” a 11.13 article by Politico‘s Tim Alberta:

Everyone knew Georgia would eventually be called for Joe Biden, and now it has been on an “apparent” basis. (A manual hand recount is currently underway.) And Donald Trump has won North Carolina. These calls follow last night’s declaration that Biden has won Arizona. And so Biden has ended up with the same electoral count — 306 — that Trump accumulated in 2016 in his victory over Hillary Clinton.

Sometime in early ’18 I bought a 64G 4K Apple TV device. It’s a great little all-in-one platform. All the basic apps plus Apple TV, iTunes movies and music, YouTube…all of it. Sorry but I liked it so much that very soon after I stopped paying for Roku usage.

Two or three days ago the Apple player stopped working. It basically froze — no home page, no nothing. My TV guy said “try pressing the home button for about 10 seconds, and if that doesn’t work, unplug it for 30 seconds and then plug it back in.” I did both…nothing. Second time, zip. I repeated these steps again last night…flatline.

I had begun to resign myself to buying a new 4K device (around $200), which struck me as deficient on the part of Apple. Today I unplugged it one more time, removing both the power cord and the HDMI cable. A minute later I plugged them back in, and for whatever fickle-ass reason the little black box was suddenly working again.

I’m relieved, of course, but the shutdown phase really pissed me off.

HE will finally see Kornel Mundruczo‘s Pieces of a Woman (Netflix, 12.30) at 5 pm today. Followed by an AFI q & a with Mundruczó, screenwriter Kata Weber and costars Vanessa Kirby and Ellen Burstyn. Pic currently has an 81% RT rating; the Metacritic rating is 69.

Yesterday was Leonardo DiCaprio‘s 46th birthday. This gives me an excuse to re-post “Son of Thinner, Intense, Floppy Mane,” which I posted exactly one year and two days ago, or a day before his 45th.

Face it — 46 is kind of a nothing birthday. When you tell people “hey, I’m turning 46”, they give you a blank look and say “so?” I feel the same way about turning 48, which I happen to be doing today. I don’t know which age is more boring, 48 or 46. All I know is that the idea of turning 50 in two years scares the crap out of me.

Here it is: Leo will be 50 before you know it because time flies when you can’t jump off the treadmill. I chatted with Leo a few days ago at a San Vicente Bungalows after-party, and between the lines I was thinking ‘wow, the train is moving faster and faster.’

DiCaprio has been a power-hitter and marquee headliner for 23 years now, or since Titanic. 27 years if you count The Boy’s Life. Nobody can ever diminish or take away the killer performances he’s given in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, The Departed, Inception, Revolutionary Road and especially The Wolf of Wall Street…a lot to be proud of. And I can’t wait for what happens with Killers of the Flower Moon.

But when I think of vintage DiCaprio I rewind back to that dynamic six-year period in the ’90s (’93 to ’98) when he was all about becoming and jumping off higher and higher cliffs — aflame, intense and panther-like in every performance he gave. I was reminded of this electric period this morning that I watched the below YouTube clip of DiCaprio and David Letterman in April ’95, when he was 20 and promoting The Basketball Diaries.

I respected Leo’s performance in This Boy’s Life but I didn’t love it, and I felt the same kind of admiring distance with Arnie, his mentally handicpped younger brother role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, partly because he was kind of a whiny, nasally-voiced kid in both and…you know, good work but later. Excellent actor, didn’t care for the feisty-kid vibes.

But a few months before Gilbert Grape opened I met DiCaprio for a Movieline interview at The Grill in Beverly Hills, and by that time he was taller and rail-thin and just shy of 20. I was sitting in that booth and listening to him free-associate with that irreverent, lightning-quick mind, and saying to myself, “This guy’s got it…I can feel the current.”

Then came a torrent: a crazy gunslinger in Sam Raimi‘s The Quick and the Dead (’95), as the delicate Paul Verlaine in Total Eclipse (’95), as himself in the semi-improvised, black-and-white homey film that only me and a few others saw called Don’s Plum (’95), as the druggy Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries (’95), as a wild, angry kid in Jerry Zak‘s Marvin’s Room, opposite Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann‘s Romeo + Juliet, as Jack Dawson in Titanic and finally as a parody of himself in Woody’s Celebrity. Eight performances, and every one a kind of sparkler-firecracker thing.