Jeff Wells

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I’ll tell you how Trump’s victory affects the Oscars. The approvable but less-from-masterful Emilia Perez, a musical about a male Mexican drug baron transitioning into womanhood, will surge to the front of the Best Picture competition. Jamie Lee Curtis and all the other progressive, ardently-trans-supporting lefties will want to stand up and embrace Jacques Audiard‘s film as a statement of defiance against Trump dystopia.

In so doing, of course, Curtis and friends will also in effect be saying “eff you” to the 71.7 million Americans who voted for this animal. (As of Wednesday morning 66.8 million citizens, myself among them, had voted for Harris.)

In line with this, I also suspect that in the Best Actress race Emilia Perez‘s Karla Sofia Gascon will now elbow aside Anora‘s Mikey Madison…same empathy motive. Madison’s performance totally blows away Gascon’s, of course, but the Trump factor may change everything. For me one of the glories of Anora is that it’s not in the least bit woke.

I’m not aware of Trump having expressed disdain for transitioned adults (he’s only against susceptible minors being dragged into the cult) but the Jamie Lee Curtis brigade will want to express up-in-arms support for Gascon regardless. Variety‘s Clayton Davis will no doubt be urging this upon his readers.

I also think that more people will suddenly want to stream Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice, a well-written, superbly acted drama about young Trump’s relationship with rightwing pitbull attorney Roy Cohn. If they have any respect for the grade-A artistry involved, they’ll certainly want to consider Best Picture and Best Director noms as well as a Best Supporting Actor nom for Jeremy Strong, at the very least.

I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s also…how to put this?…a sign-of-the-times, wokey, gender-fluid acceptance factor to be found in Conclave. Which should help it among the JLC “we all need to lock arms and tell Trump to go fuck himself” crowd. [Note: The Conclave thing has nothing to do with gender transitioning.)

…wouldn’t you be searching for tall grass right about now? I certainly would if I were in that camp.

I’m not in that camp, of course. As much as I despise Donald Trump and as much as I fear for the well-being of already-transitioned-and-just-living-their-lives trans folk, I think that Trump looking to make life difficult for academic or medical community pro-trans monsters (like those featured in Matt Walsh‘s What Is A Woman?) as well as trans-activist educators and pro-trans surgeons who have performed questionable gender-affirming bottom surgeries on minors…I’m not altogether unhappy that Trump feels this way about protecting vulnerable, susceptible minors from hormone blockers and gender-transition surgeries and whatnot, and will presumably act in concert with these views.

I’m sorry but I agree with some of this, partly because Trump’s attitude (he is not anti-trans as far as I know) and policies will probably help to protect my three-year-old granddaughter from trans activists within the educational, medical and social-activist communities. Maybe. I hope.

Posted by Forbes‘ Sara Dorn on 5.10.24: “Former President Donald Trump on Friday said he would undo a new Biden administration policy that will offer protections for transgender students under the Title IX federal civil rights law—his latest promise to restrict LGBTQ rights if elected to a second term.

“Trump said on ‘day one’ he would reverse the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX that will prohibit federally funded schools from preventing transgender students from using bathrooms, locker rooms and pronouns that align with their gender identities.

@lexibunni.official #trans #transgirl #donaldtrumpisyourpresident #trump #2024election ♬ original sound – Lexi ️‍⚧️

“Trump told a crowd in Iowa in March he would sign an executive order to ‘cut federal funding” for schools pushing “critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.’

“In January, he released a video [below] detailing a range of policies targeting gender-affirming care for minors, including pressing Congress to approve a federal ban and several measures to restrict federal funding when it came to trans issues.

“Trump said he would block doctors who provide gender-affirming care from Medicare and Medicaid, forbid federal agencies from actions to “promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” and task the Justice Department with investigating the medical industry to see if they “deliberately covered up horrific long-term side effects of sex transitions in order to get rich.”

“In the video, Trump laid out additional plans for extending the restrictions to schools, promising ‘severe consequences,’ including potential civil rights violations, for educators who ‘suggest to a child they could be trapped in the wrong body.’

“In 2022 Trump told a crowd in Texas he would ban transgender individuals from competing in women’s sports, and attacked transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, weeks after her hotly debated record-breaking swim meet in Ohio while she was competing on the University of Pennsylvania swim team.”

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“There is a dark part of the American soul, and Donald Trump appeals to that…” — political strategist Chai Komanduri.

Faced with a choice between a sane, somewhat middling but far-from-dangerous ex-prosecutor with a good heart and a deranged, brain-fart, authoritarian criminal who cares only about himself, America chose the criminal. More than half of the country voted this way, and not by a whisker. It was a blow-out.

My Trump-supporting friends and family members excepted, I really hate last night’s majority mindset. I completely respect the process — it was a fair election — but I loathe the rank stupidity and the refutation of common sense that resulted in Trump’s victory. I’m not exaggerating here — I despise many of the progressive wokester things that Trump supporters despise, but voting to put that animal back into the White House was truly insane. It was a horribly destructive and nihilistic thing to do, and may God protect us all.

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Unfair as this sounds in the immediate wake of Kamala Harris‘s electoral tragedy, which marks the eighth anniversary of Hillary Clinton’s striking loss to The Very Same Beast, I’m presuming the Dems will not be especially keen on another female standard-bearer. Not in ’28, at least.

They need to nominate Gavin Elster, the San Francisco shipping tycoon…sorry, Gavin Newsom. You know he’ll be able to skillfully debate J.D. Vance, who will almost certainly be the 2028 Republican nominee. Face it — too many voters in this country are misogynist ayeholes. Plus Gavin is 6’3″. Plus he has three years to erase his overly-friendly-to-bums-and-thieves image.

She found out he was voting Trump pic.twitter.com/nM3C9delDY

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) November 6, 2024

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I am thoroughly ashamed and disgusted this morning. Ashamed to be a nominal citizen of a country that has re-elected an unmistakably dangerous, authoritarian-minded, foam-at-the-mouth criminal sociopath as president. I am catatonic. I am empty. I spit in the faces of the American hooligans who did this to us.

There is really and truly no common sense, no sanity, no elemental decency out there. Not in Bumblefuckland, I mean. We’re now so fucked I can’t even breathe, much less calculate. The temple walls are tumbling down around us. Sewer water is pouring into our lives.

Joe Biden was the principal architect of our doom by refusing to get out of the race until last July, and may that withered Irish banshee roast on a spit in hell for at least the next thousand years.

The sane and sensible (if admittedly somewhat mediocre) Kamala Harris ran a generally excellent campaign, but — be honest — she almost certainly torpedoed herself when she declined on “The View” to even partially throw Joe under the bus. That was beyond ridiculous. What was she thinking?

The disgruntled under-45 dudes whom progressive Democrats have identified as a proverbial social problem (including your Millennial-aged blacks and Latinos) have had their revenge, and the rural bumblefucks have won also. And the sensible, practical-minded blue urbans who were deeply, morally, logically and quite appropriately horrified by Donald Trump’s run-at-the-mouth candidacy simply didn’t have the horses.

We’re living in a sinking horror film right now. The obese, obviously declining Joker has won, the progressive loonies (including your career-cancelling wokesters and elementary school drag-show proponents) are shrieking in their bathrooms right now, and decent people everywhere are so stunned and doubled over they can’t even weep.

So many pollsters got it wrong once again.

The progressive pundits who wrote that enraged women (including white, older, Nikki Haley-supporting moderates) who were determined to reclaim control of their lives and bodies would save us…wrong.

The ugliness of the MSG fascist rally, the late-in-the-game shitshow that was going to decisively hand the presidency to Harris-Walz —- didn’t happen.

The floating island of garbage line apparently didn’t hurt Trump all that much — good God, it may have even helped him.

We’re really and truly The United States of Regressive Social Suicide right now. The ghost of John F. Kennedy still resides among us, and he is appalled. He is vomiting, dude.

Who are we? What are we? Dear God in heaven, I think we know the answer.

Colonel Saito in The Bridge on the River Kwai: “You will be punished!”

…in order to alleviate my election-day anxiety, which is so intense right now I can barely stand it. I’m thinking, however, that it might not be such a bad thing if I pop an Oxy. Three and a half houre until 8 pm, which is when I’ll start live-blogging. God help us all if…

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Clint Eastwood‘s Juror No. 2 is a smart, somber, adult-angled jury deliberation drama that holds you start to finish. Alas, it leaves you with an unsatisfied feeling at the very end.

It’s about a reasonable, sensible 30something dude (Nicholas Hoult‘s Justin Kemp, a married, ex-alcoholic magazine writer) trying to wriggle his way out of a tough moral-pressure-cooker situation.

There’s no good way out of what Kemp is facing, and yet we, the audience, would like to see this obviously decent protagonist find a solution regardless.

Serving as a juror on a murder trial, Kemp is devastated early on by a two-fold realization — i.e., the guy accused of killing his girlfriend (Gabriel Basso‘s James Michael Sythe) is not guilty, and that Kemp, of all the forehead-slapping coincidences, is accidentally guilty of having hit this woman with his car on a dark rainy night.

Kemp initially thinks he might have hit a deer, but he’s also not sure. He’s actually suppressing a terrible inkling. His car was damaged by the impact but he had the dent fixed and then he lied to his pregnant wife about where the collision happened.

So the film is basically held together by Kemp’s moral discomfort as well as our own.

How to solve this horrific situation? Kemp tries the Henry Fonda-in-12 Angry Men solution by trying to talk his fellow jurors out of finding a guilty verdict due to reasonable doubt. A hung jury won’t suffice as the case will just be retried.

Juror No. 2 lacks the tension and intrigue of 12 Angry Men, but it never bores and it certainly ends boldly. That’s all I’m going to say.

Our natural inclination is to want to see justice done, which in this case means Kemp has to come clean and face the music. But an attorney friend (Kiefer Sutherland) tells Kemp that because of his prior alcoholism no one will believe he was sober at the time of the accident, and that he’ll wind up doing serious time. Excerpt hie wife (Zoey Deutch) is about to give birth so there’s nothing but pain either way.

Without getting into specifics there’s a major plot hole that involves auto-body repair receipts. That’s all I’m going to say but this issue becomes more and more bothersome.

Billy Zane‘s forthcoming performance as Marlon Brando will be fun to savor, and yet the trailer tells us immediately why Bill Fishman‘s Waltzing With Brando has been a tough sell, distribution-wise.

It’s not a film about Marlon Brando’s whatever — acting talent, rebel spirit, career turbulence, sexual prowess, spiritual lassitude. It’s a fact-based saga about the building of an ecologically balanced, earth-nourishing resort on the atoll of Tetiaroa, which Brando purchased a 99-year lease for back in ’66 or thereabouts. So it’s basically a story about a rich, flaky eccentric…a story about fiddling around in paradise, trying to do right by nature, gazing at the horizon, etc.

Written and directed by Fishman, and adapted from the late Bernard Judge‘s “Waltzing with Brando: Planning a Paradise in Tahiti,” etc. It could make for an interesting documentary, but dramatically speaking it sounds like a snooze.

The costare are Jon Heder (as Judge), Richard Dreyfuss, Camille Razat, Alaina Huffman, Tia Carrere and James (son of Mick) Jagger.