The Gotham Awards abandoned quality for its own sake some years ago. They’re basically become the gender-neutral, identity-celebrating, social virtue-signalling Wokey Awards…like their West Coast Spirit Award brethren they’ve become cultists in a kind of Branch Davidian way.

I haven’t seen Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man so who am I to talk, right? My avoidance impulse admittedly stems from weakness…from a sense of prospective anxiety and discomfort about hanging with an actual neurofibromatosis sufferer (in this case Adam Pearson). Which makes me a terrible person, of course.

I don’t want to avoid the disfigured…well, okay, I guess I do but I certainly don’t want to darken their lives in any way, shape or form. I merely choose to avert my gaze. If you ask me these feelings are benign and hands-off. And you know what? 98% of humanity feels the same way. Just ask Victor Hugo, Tod Browning (director of Freaks, which Andrew Sarris called “one of the most compassionate movies ever made”), Charles Laughton, Rod Serling.

I suggested in a piece last July that in response to my alleged or seeming cowardice and narrow-mindedness a certain kind of virtue–signalling hate snobbery (I called the proponents of this faith “neurofibromatosis wokeys”) would praise and embrace A Different Man as a way of trumpeting their open-hearted virtue and emotional support for not only the sufferers of this disease but anyone suffering from any oppressive handicap, biological or social.

They’re also determined to condemn anyone like me…anyone from the benign avoidance community, I mean…to eternal agonizing damnation. They are committed, trust me, to applying the bullwhip and sending we narrow-minded uglies straight to hell.

Last night the Gothams re-affirmed their social justice warrior belief system by giving their top prize to A Different Man — bingo! Like wind-up tin soldiers they walked right into their own self-lampooning satire…right into the mindset behind my snide little perception. In so doing they more or less said “we’re 100% sincere and real about this….neurofibromatosis sufferers have to be loved and supported and hugged, and we’re just the kind of enlightened organization to spearhead this social movement.”

Let me explain as carefully as I can that while neurofibromatosis wokeys are primarily guided by kind and gentle social impulses (as I am or at least try to be — I simply don’t want direct visual access to a manifestation of nature’s random cruelty) but they are also SJW snobs and haters. Remember Charles Bukowski’s “The Genius of the Crowd”? He nailed these detestable little scolds like few had ever managed. I’ve endured their slings and arrows in HE comment threads so I should know.

..sez that Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (Focus, 12.25) sorta kinda blows a bit, and especially that Lily Rose Depp’s lead performance doesn’t cut the mustard.

I’ve spoken to a friend who feels this way, and at least one just-posted trade review agrees; another doesn’t argue all that strenuously. Any Eggers film is a must-see, of course, but this one sounds dicey.

Wait…IndieWire’s David Ehrlich thinks Depp is just swell!

Jane Mayer’s 12.1 New Yorker expose, based on a Concerned Veterans for America whistle-blower report from 2015, all but certifies that Fox and Friends weekend cohost Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s Defense Department nominee, is the new Matt Gaetz.

Edward Berger’s Conclave finale was cooked up by author Robert Harris in 2015 (the book was published in ‘16), or well before the trans wokey thing (another factor that tarnished Biden and helped to ruin Harris in the eyes of bumblefuck voters) kicked into gear in the early ‘20s.

I feel soul-sick myself but the Great Woke Legend is that straight men are generally broken and corrupted and bad news, and that it’s time for women (and in one particular situation a cardinal with a uterus) to step in and call the shots.

Obviously a slight majority of voters disagreed with that scenario on 11.5, and so here we are…totally fucked as a nation and about to endure the pains of MAGA fascism.

I blame the wokeys. I really do. They brought this about. Right now they’re understandably searching for tall grass.

And I solemnly believe it would be wrong, wrong, wrong for John M. Chu’s handsome, uber-industrial pile-driver of a musical to take the Best Picture Oscar. Because if you put aside the musical numbers it has no great scenes.

Some Facebook dude wrote this:

But you’re a black sheep and a wrong one, and you fucked up repeatedly so ya gotta do the time, man. Really. No skating. It’ll build character. You’ll be a better, tougher person at the end of your sentence. It’s a growth opportunity.

HE comment: I think President Biden pardoned his bad-seed son Hunter out of resignation and despair.

Joe’s inner dialogue: “Obviously I’m reversing myself but my reputation is in the toilet anyway. Future generations will be taught to despise me as I’m the obstinate old coot who surrendered our nation to MAGA fascism because I wouldn’t collapse my ill-conceived campaign for a second term until it was way too late.

“You might be horrified by the return of Donald Trump but I’m the deluded scumbag who blew open the border and ushered in his second term so what difference does it make? History hates me now and will certainly hate me going forward.

“At the end of the day I’m defaulting to an age-old sentiment when it comes to broken-down fathers and weak sons: ‘The heart wants what it wants.’”

I’m sorry but Martin Scorsese and Dave Tedeschi’s Beatles ‘64 (Apple +, now streaming) is decent at best and shortfally at worst. It never quite rides the whirlwind.

The 106-minute doc tries to convey or suggest the spiritual-emotional endorphin highs that were surging through the fans in February ‘64, and it achieves that here and there, yes, but mostly it feels likes a spotty, half-assed, catch-as-catch-can affair. A catchy quote or an energy surge every now and then, but then it peters out. A bit lazy.

I own a mid ’90s DVD of the original Maysles tour doc, and we’ve all seen various snippets before, of course. So I wanted more, better, extra…something new that would get me going.

I wanted a gleaming, straight-from-the-lab, totally grain-free enhancement of the 60-year-old footage, but what I saw looked merely acceptable…nothing to jump up and down about. I wanted a stronger music track with heightened thrompy bass lines….nope. I wanted footage from the Saturday rehearsal session at the Ed Sullivan Show…nope.

No mention of the bizarre fact that the Beatles’ sets (in February ’64 they played inside a boxing stadium in Washington D.C. and at Carnegie Hall) were only about 20 or 25 minutes or so.

I wanted to hear about what surely went on between the lads and those few girls who were shrewd or persistent enough to penetrate security and meet them…stuff that nobody reported about back then, but c’mon…are you telling me nothing happened?

I have a vague recollection of a rogue photo taken during the August ’64 tour. I can’t find any evidence of it, but I recall the photo having appeared in Confidential or some like-minded scandal sheet. It was a flashbulb shot of a laughing, seemingly drunken John Lennon prowling around on his hands and knees and playing horsey to some floozy in black underwear…riding him like a stallion, riding crop in hand. You can accuse me of imagining this and maybe I did, but an inner voice says otherwise. **

Being especially receptive to the delicacy of Sutton these days, my heart went out to all those excited, screaming, jumping-up-and-down girls in their mid teens who surrounded the Plaza hotel (Beatles bunker) like General Santa Anna’s troops surrounded the Alamo. I wouldn’t have wanted them to be riding Lennon or anyone else. I just wanted them to get home safely.

You know what would have been far more interesting? An in-depth doc about the Beatles August ’65 tour (8.15.65 to 8.31.64), which happened right smack in the middle of their drug-experimentation heyday. This doc could’ve included the fellas hanging with Bob Dylan at the Warwick, not to mention the Peter Fonda encounter in Benedict Canyon when everyone was tripping (“I know what it’s like to be dead”).

At 5’8″ or thereabouts, Ringo Starr was the shortest of the fab four. But Beatles ’64 includes recent color footage of him speaking to producer Martin Scorsese, and Ringo is significantly taller.

https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/?s=Mangold-Chalamet+

Variety’s Elsa Keslassy from Marrakech:

We all understand what Luca is saying here. We all understand who the proponents of industrial taste are, the easy lays and the obsequious whores, not to mention the lazy rubes and slowboats who support big shitty franchise movies and tumble all over themselves when films like Wicked (which is not so much problematic as overwhelming in a blitzkrieg, Jon M. Chu-like way, which is what makes it industrialized) come along.