…stops at Matt Friend, 25. I’m a serious fan of the guy. Excellent Trump voice. “I’m an ass man!” Okay, I don’t like the too-short pants (nobody wants to look at calf skin) and the shoes, which don’t look Italian enough. But these are minor matters.

Ever since Broadway’s Hamilton popped in ’15 movies and stage shows been force-feeding progressive instruction to audiences…a hammering education about how things should or could have been in the past, if whites hadn’t been such racist assholes.

In the HE realm I’ve been calling it woke presentism for…what, three or four years?

In a 3.31.24 N.Y Times Sunday Magazine piece, written by By Kabir Chibber, it’s called “the Magical Historical Past.”

Yes, the N.Y. Times has finally summoned the courage to take notice of this widespread, years-long phenomenon. It actually calls it “Hollywood’s New Fantasy.” Hot off the presses.

Chibber quote: “You might call this kind of defiantly ahistorical setting the Magical Multiracial Past. The bones of the world are familiar. There is only one change: Every race exists, cheerfully and seemingly as equals, in the same place at the same time. History becomes an emoji, its flesh tone changing as needed.”

We all know the drill. Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots. Lynsey Miller and Eve Hedderwick Turner‘s Anne Boleyn. B’way’s Hamilton. Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Dev Patel as David Copperfield. Marvel’s Norse pantheon with a Black deity. A recently released version of Jane Austen‘s Sense and Sensibility is all Soul Sistahs. Bridgerton‘s Regency England ruled by a Black queen and a multiracial royal court. In BBC One’s Murder is Easy, originally written in 1939 and set (I think) in the 1950s, the lead protagonist and investigator is a Nigerian immigrant.

“Variety reported something on Friday that we simply cannot get out of our heads: the upcoming Joker sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, will reportedly be a jukebox musical with at least 15 well-known songs [performed or lip-synched] in the movie.

“There are some things in life that are just too good to be true, and this sounds like one of them.” — USA Today‘s Cory Woodroof, 3.23.24.

Joker: Folie A Deux, an all but guaranteed Venice Film festival headliner (and hopefully Telluride also!) opens on 10.4.24.

The three finest films in which the bad guy wins (i.e., totally outwits the good guys and demonstrates his absolute supreme dominance at the finale) are, of course, David Fincher‘s Se7en (’95), Gregory Hoblit‘s Primal Fear (’96) and Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby (’68).

These three are top of the pops in this regard (okay, it’s not so much Satan but Team Satan that wins at the end of Polanski’s film), but perhaps I’m forgetting something?

Okay, Jonathan Demme‘s Silence of the Lambs counts to a large extent because of Hannibal Lecter‘s brilliant prison escape, but Lecter doesn’t “win” at the end — he’s just escapes to the Caribbean for a little rest and recreation.

The extremely clever Keyzer Soze gets away at the end of The Usual Suspects but he doesn’t “win” — he just eludes the grasp of the law.

Same with Anton Chigurh at the end of No Country for Old Men — he slips away with a fractured arm but hasn’t demonstrated that he’s better than Tommy Lee Jones‘ sheriff or that he’s the absolute king of wicked hill. He’s obviously fallible.

Alex De Large doesn’t “win” at the end of A Clockwork Orange — he’s simply restored to his original venal nature by the authorities.

Wealthy, play-frequenting London liberals will eat this shit right up.

I’m sorry but I have a problem with Adam Driver‘s hairstyle in Megalopolis. His character, Ceasar, is a visionary architect, and his haircut strikes me as a cross between the 1964 bowl cuts favored by the Dave Clark Five and James Mason‘s Brutus in Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Julius Caesar (’53).

I think it’s fair to predict that Driver won’t be playing any more tortured, high-powered hotshots any time soon. Because Caesar makes it three in a row — Maurizio Gucci in House of Gucci (’21) and Enzo Ferrari in Ferrari (’23) being the first two.

Jeffrey Wells, Bill McCuddy and Ed Douglas vigorously examining new films, Cannes ’24, likely Best Picture contenders, the new King-Godzilla flick, the new Woody, “Sasquatch Sunset”, etc.

This is a Misfits “halfer” — a 30-minute freebie. For the full 65-minute-podcast, click here.

If you’re looking to make a left turn at a stop-light intersection that doesn’t have a special left-turn lane and there are three or four cars with the same goal in mind, you know that only three cars will make the turn.

Four cars never make it — three at the most and sometimes only two.

But the only way three can get through is for car #1 to drive into the middle of the intersection with its left-signal flashing, and also for car #2 to be right behind car #1 with its nose just ahead of the foot-traffic crosswalk, and car #3 right behind #2, usually behind the crosswalk.

When the light turns yellow and opposing traffic is coming to a halt is when everyone makes their move — cars #1 and #2 without breaking a sweat with car #3 barely making it through after the light has turned red.

But the whole system collapses if car #1 doesn’t nudge into the center of the intersection, and this is what today’s traffic rant is about — candy-asses who are afraid to move into the middle.

There are some who will only creep two or three or four feet beyond the white line as if they’re afraid of something bad will happen, and there are others who won’t move forward at all — who just stay in the left lane with their left signal blinking.

Meep meep…will you move ahead, please? Are you aware that if you hang back like a coward you’ll be condemning the third guy to wait for another light change? Show a little consideration and get out there.

“Bugsy would not have been the densely detailed and complexly imagined film that it is without the pooled-together contributions of producer-star Warren Beatty, screenwriter James Toback and director Barry Levinson.

“But one wonders what might have resulted had the authorial strands been pulled apart and had Mr. Beatty been able to make another of his studies of an American naïf (following Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde, George the hairstylist of Shampoo and John Reed, the radical journalist of Reds) blundering as best he can through the social upheavals of an era; or had Mr. Toback, with his fascination with sex, power and the romantic fatalism of the gambler; or had Mr. Levinson fully indulged his nostalgia for a lost era of sartorial elegance and tastefully lighted interiors.

“Levinson was the dominant force on the set, and the film duly reflects his fundamentally comic sensibility (even when the material dips into darkness) and affection for attention-grabbing period detail.” — from Dave Kehr’s 12.12.06 review of the Bugsy extended-cut DVD.

Two more observations about Francis Coppola‘s Megalopolis, which was seen last Thursday morning by an elite crowd of 300 or so at Universal City IMAX:

Observer #1: “Megalopoplis is about as non-Joe Popcorn a movie as one can imagine. But it is so startling, so original and sometimes downright confounding that there is a certain strata of moviegoer who will see it out of raw curiosity…especially if critics get behind it and if there is a major PR campaign.

“I don’t know if the print we saw [last Thursday] is finished or not. I hope Francis clarifies the story so audiences have something to hang onto. The first approximately 50 to 60 per cent of the film is much better than the last part because you lose track of the story and become bored.

“It is nonetheless a bold and utterly original film, and for that Francis will get tons of credit from some quarters.”

Observer #2: “There will be many and varied responses to this film. Those who love it for its boldness will be right. and those who dismiss it for the same reason will, if you insist, also be correct. And perhaps the film’s natural, eventual home will be in art museums.

“Megalopolis will require careful and loving handling, which may turn out to be an impossible task in today’s market. But here’s hoping otherwise.”

During last night’s SNL monologue, comedian-actor-writer Ramy Youssef, 33, said he’s not happy about voting for Biden or Trump, and would prefer a woman candidate (HE feels the same as long as the woman candidate isn’t Kamala Harris) or even a trans-woman.

Youssef is half-playing around and half-serious, and so am I. If there was a formidable biomale trans candidate as smart and practical-minded as Pete Buttigieg (i.e., not a woke lunatic), HE would vote for her. But of course, the odds of a formidable biomale trans candidate even getting through the primary process are negligible so what are we even talking about?