Jeff Wells

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.

I’m talking about a remake of The King and I, costarring a bald Cynthia Erivo in the Yul Brynner role (King Mongkut of Siam) and Ariana Grande in the Deborah Kerr role (Anna Leonowens). I’m not suggesting that Erivo’s king should be transformed into a bald lesbian, mind — she could portray the actual Mongkut but in the same way that Cate Blanchett played Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. And they (Erivo + Grande) could fall in love in a straight hetero sense, except the audience would process their affair as a whole ‘nother thing.

The first 12 hours of Tuesday, 11.5, will be such a nail-biter, I won’t know what to think or do. No encouraging or discouraging numbers will appear until 8 pm eastern, right? To alleviate my anxiety I might burrow into all kinds of non-political topics…I’ll be going quietly nuts.

But I’ll definitely be tapping out an HE live blog starting sometime in the early evening.

Today I’ll be catching a 4 pm screening or Clint Eastwood‘s Juror No. 2, which I’m excited about due to a reportedly unconventional ending, and an early evening showing of Steve McQueen‘s Blitz.

We all have to go sometime, and yesterday the bell tolled for the great Quincy Jones.

I don’t know how awake or aware he was at the end or how politically minded he may have been, but I feel a little bit sad that he didn’t get to witness the election of Kamala Harris as the nation’s 47th president.

Posted on 9.23.18: “I admire and respect Quincy Jones as much as the next guy. He hasn’t done much since the ’80s, but he’ll always be cool.

“Jones’ musical score for Richard Brooks‘ In Cold Blood (’67) is a standout…in my mind, at least.

“I was intrigued when I read that Jones’ ancestors include Betty Washington Lewis, a sister of president George Washington, Edward I of England, and Jane Fonda even. And I loved that Vulture interview he gave earlier this year, and particularly an implication that Jones had enjoyed some kind of intimate contact with Ivanka Trump.

“But I had no interest in seeing Alan Hicks and Rashida Jones‘ Quincy, as I don’t enjoy kiss-ass portraiture as a rule. The first 44 seconds of the trailer are suffocating in this regard.

“I would love to sit down with the 85-year-old Jones for hours and hours and listen to his stories, but his friends need to give that ‘oh my God, what an awesome, genius-level talent!’ shit a rest…no offense.”

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