[3:50 am]. I’m taking care of Jett and Cait’s dogs (Joey and Luna) at the homestead in West Orange, New Jersey while they’re hanging out with Cait’s family in Tewksbury, MA. A solitary unit of three (me and the dogs), withdrawn and isolated by weather…reading, writing, snacking and streaming films (Mark Boal’s Echo, Walter Hill’s 48 HRS., William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives and no Brendan Fraser).

The fact of the matter is that we’re living in what I’ve been calling The Icebox or Chill House, i.e., not warm enough since the Arctic air mass arrived a couple of days ago. I’ve promised not to burn any extra heating oil and to rely on space heaters, and so I’m hanging out in layers, jackets, boots, a scarf and my black overcoat and cowboy hat. Okay, the upstairs guest room is warm but that’s all. It’s so chilly here that I’m afraid to take a shower. Nor have I shaved. A little gamey.

Plus I can’t seem to get a good night’s sleep. No more than three or four hours max. I routinely awaken at 2 or 3 am, read and write for three or four and then back to sleep for another three. I don’t sleep at night — I nap.

I was going to say I’ve become General Sternwood in The Big Sleep, coping nightly with “sleep so close to waking it’s barely worth the name.” But I’m closer to a half-and-half combination of Al Pacino in Insomnia and Dennis Hopper’s Tom Ripley in The American Friend. I’ll score some Melatonin tomorrow (i.e., later today) and see what happens.

HE correspondent “KJ” has hit upon something. Everything Everywhere All At Once is either a direct descendant or a very close relation of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (‘10). Edgar Wright and the Daniels are similar nerd birds, all right. Invested in cyber mythology, alternate realities, VFX realms. A notion that dull, deflated, frustrating lives have an amazing imaginary flipside.

Remember the Scott Pilgrim hate, and my own feverish loathing for that film in particular?

HE to KJ: “You’ve hit upon something…EEAAO is distinctly related to and perhaps influenced by Edgar Wright’s SCOTT PILGRIM.VS. THE WORLD — obviously a different ball of wax, but also a Marvel-forecasting, cyber-nerd fantasy slash bullshit comic-book film that I despised back then & will despise for the rest of my life.”

EEAAO is a slightly better film than Scott Pilgrim — the final scene is the clincher — and yet it made me feel a similar kind of revulsion. Both films have triggered brief suicide fantasies.

“Pilgrim Reckoning,” posted on 8.12.10: Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) is obviously a nervy, fairly bright and moderately gifted director — seriously, no jive — and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, even though it seems to be putting out a kind of aesthetic nerve gas, is some kind of cool-ass, smarty-pants, richly stylized…uhm, waste of time?

It’s kind of nifty if you want to feel connected to a movie that under-30 moviegoers are responding to. It’s empty and strained and regimented, but…you know, cool and funny and clever, heh-heh. It has wit and vigor and smart music, and it gradually makes you want to run outside and take an elevator to the top of a tall building and jump off.

Did I just say that? I mean that it’s a masterpiece of its kind. That sounds facile, doesn’t it? I think I might actually mean that Scott Pilgrim is a seminal and semi-vital thing to experience right now. My kids set me straight on this. Call me unstable or impressionable but I’ve also come to think that Michael Cera might be a fresh permutation of a new kind of messianic Movie God — a candy-assed Gary Cooper for the 21st Century.

No, seriously, it’s not too bad. I mean, you know…just kill me.

I was sustained, at times, by the meaning of the seven ex-boyfriends. They’re metaphors for the bad or unresolved stuff in Mary Elizabeth Winstead‘s life. If you’re going to really love and care for someone, you have to accept and try to deal with everything in their heads and their pasts, and not just the intoxicating easy stuff. Scott has to defeat these guys in the same way that any boyfriend or husband has to defeat or at least quell the disturbances in his girlfriend’s or wife’s head. That’s how I took it, at least.

I’m not doubting that Cera has been a Scott Pilgrim graphic novel fan for years, but the movie, I think, came out of his wanting to transform into a tougher, studlier guy in movies by becoming a kind of ninja warrior fighting the ex-boyfriends in a Matrix-y videogame way. I really don’t think it was anything more than that. Seriously.

“No offense, Michael, but the world thinks you’re a wuss,” Cera’s agent said one day on the phone. “They see you as a slender reed, a worthless piece of shit girlyman with a deer-in-the-headlights expression and a little peep-peep voice. Somehow we need to toughen you up, and having you fight a bunch of guys, even if it’s in a fantasy realm, is certainly one way to do that.”

I didn’t want to kill myself while watching Scott Pilgrim vs The World. That notion or impulse came later. I know that if movies are in fact going to be moving more and more in the direction of Scott Pilgrim in the coming years — video-game inspirations, glib dialogue, wimpy girlymen in lead roles, bullshit video-game fight scenes, laid-back gay guys engaged in threesomes in shitty basement apartments — then I really would rather die. Because movies as I’ve known them all my life would in fact be dead, and there’d be nothing to live for.

Then again I really liked the music that Scott’s band plays. It throbs and churns with a wowser bass line — not at all like the gay music my two sons seem to prefer these days. And I liked Kieran Culkin, who plays Scott’s gay roommate, and at the same time I wanted to see him cut in half (or into several pieces) with a chainsaw. And I liked the little lovesick Asian girl (Ellen Wong) who has a crush on Scott, and I despised Scott for not being able to summon the puny amount of courage it would have taken to simply lay it on the line and tell her he’s fallen in love with someone else. But…you know, as Scott says early on, “That’s haaaaard.” What a guy.

From Olivia Nuzzi’s “The Final Campaign,” New York / “Intelligencer,” 12.23.22.

Wednesday night Jody and I were having a light dinner at Terrain, and a guitar lady (late 30s, cute face, pleasant pipes) was singing the usual pop Christmas tunes.

But we were hearing too many kid-level songs (“Jingle Bells,” “Frosty the Snowman”), so I asked the waitress if the troubadour would consider something a little more adult-sounding. Like, say, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — a once popular, more recently derided 1944 holiday tune about a hound’s crude attempt at seduction. Icky, yes, but at least an improvement over “Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

Our cheerful server pretended to be horrified — “Oh, she can’t sing that! Somebody’ll get mad.” Could you ask her to sing it anyway? I asked. Maybe she’ll brave it? The waitress said she’d pass along our request. Deaf ears. The thought passed.

But we ran into the singer as we were leaving and mentioned our interest in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and to our surprise she said she was a fan and would’ve absolutely sung it, no prob. She seemed to simply like the idea of a Christmas holiday tune about possibly getting poked, and didn’t care about the 21st Century Harvey Weinstein creepitude**.

I’d forgotten that Alvin Lee, the fastest guitarist in the west, died in 2013 at age 68. Martin Scorsese was one of the camera guys filming this legendary Woodstock performance.

**

Word’s out, writing’s on the wall, all over but the shouting…we all love the smell of napalm in the morning.

The intro is confusingly written, but for our second podcast Sasha and I discussed HE’s top 20 films of ‘22…didn’t have time for all 30. Sasha was in central Colorado as we recorded; she’s currently in the vicinity of Topeka, Kansas.

Roughly 14 years ago, give or take…

Highlighted by Variety, this bucolic Kramer vs. Kramer moment never appeared in the film:

7:55 pm update: I forgot to include several ’22 films for my primo list — I’ll include them in Tuesday’s bigger, more definitive rundown.

The ones I forgot to mention are Bardo, The Batman, Thirteen Lives, Armageddon Time, Argentina 1985, Apollo 10 and 1/2, Navalny, God’s Country, Watcher and Palm Trees and Power Lines — 10 in all for a total of 29. Okay, if I add Till it’ll make an even 30.

Take that, Jeremy Fassler!

Earlier: Some of these 2022 films (boldfaced) are excellent. I’ll post an expanded rundown tomorrow with a few excerpts and rimshots, but here, for now, are 2022’s finest. Okay, it was a weak year.

Earlier this afternoon HE commenter Jeremy Fassler wrote “hey, man, all you do is piss on everything! If you hate movies so much why do you maintain HE?” Or something close to that.

Every year I come up with a list of least six or seven top-top tier films combined with 12 or 13 good to pretty good ones. This year’s tally came to 19.

Hey, Fassler — have you seen Close or Happening or Vengeance? Have you considered the possibility that your taste in films might be your own and that my preferences follow their own suit?

We’re basically talking about a p.r. move. The Elon Musk proxy would essentially be a facilitator, a smoother-over. He/she wouldn’t change the fact that Musk, Twitter’s enfant terrible CEO, wants to bring about the subjugation and, if possible, the ruination of the fanatical wokester left — a cause that in itself exudes a certain honor as wokesters aren’t just culturally suppressive Stalinists but Trotskyites. Alas, Musk has counter-balanced that horror by being impolitic and a blunderer.