“I’ve made thuh preservationuharrAmerican democracy thuh central issue of my Presidency…agh believe in free and fair elections, the right to vote fairly and tuh have your vote counted…” — Joe Biden‘s opening words in new campaign ad.

It’s fair to say that this 60-second ad is primarily aimed at diverse rainbow types.

Until the one-third mark all the sympathetic faces are non-white. Footage of white, Confederate-flag-carrying yokels who marched in Charlottesville and during the Jan. 6th insurrection are shown between :12 and :18. A neutral-mannered 70something white bumblefuck type (i.e, blue plaid shirt) appears at the 19-second mark; another aging, white-bearded bumblefuck voter with a Home Depot baseball cap appears at the 24-second mark.

We’re shown a blonde Anglo Saxon female (40ish) with a ballot covering her face at the 40-second mark. The 1945 Iwo Jima guys (including Native American Ira Hayes) appear at the 52-second mark. But no white male Millennials and Zoomers, or none that I’ve noticed. And no middle-aged, beefy-faced white guys at all, most of whom are presumed to be Trump or RFK, Jr. voters.

At the 48-second mark Biden says, “That’s our soul…we are the United States Uhmerica.” He wanted to say “of” but it didn’t quite happen, and the ad guys decided against looping it in.

I just want to come clean and admit that despite my projecting a devotional film buff profile all my life or at least since the ‘80s, I never got around to seeing Carl Dreyer‘s The Passion of Joan of Arc (’28) until last night.

But I finally went there, man, and now I’m “experienced” in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the term.

An English-subtitled version of the definitve director’s cut (i.e., the 1981 Oslo version) became available for free public domain streaming on 1.1.24, you see, and that’s what I watched. Lying in bed, MacBook Pro, best headphones.

Good God, what a lapel-grabbing, no-way-out masterpiece! Right away it leaps out at you and says “stop scrolling and whatever the hell else you’re doing and grim up and give it up and watch this, will you?”

I knew right away it was made by a genius…a no-bullshit artist from the same general gene pool as Eisenstein, Murnau, Fincher, Eggers, Kubrick, Ford, Bresson, Fellini, Kurosawa, Scorsese, Powell.

The incessant close-ups, the feeling of Dreyer being in total control, the penetrating focus, the brilliant use of montage, the tracking shots, the sets (painted pink so as to stand out against the white sky), the anguish, the purity, the pain and the cruelty.

What a bleeding, bllistering, open-hearted titular performance by Renee Jean Falconetti.

And the cinematography by Ruolph Mate, who also shot Foreign Correspondent and Gilda and directed D.O.A., When Worlds Collide and The 300 Spartans (a decent sword-and-sandal epic).

I can’t stand tapping this out on the iPhone with the car running…more later.

Other than believing that A New Hope and especially The Empire Strikes Back are the only first-rate Star Wars films ever made, HE has no investment in the currently evolving Star Wars franchise.

And I couldn’t care less about the utter ruining of the material, the legend and the lore by Lucasfilm’s Kathy Kennedy (the Critical Drinker has been saying this for some time) and particularly her plan to launch an Untitled New Jedi Order film that will be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and star Daisy Ridley as Rey.

Average Joe fanboys hate this, of course. They’re up in arms. They don’t think the Star Wars franchise should be about pushing woke values or feminism but classic escapism, primal themes and the usual yaddah yaddah.

Obaid-Chinoy’s Wiki page describes her as “a Pakistani-Canadian journalist, filmmaker and activist known for her work in films that highlight gender inequality against women.”

Originally posted on 3.21.11, updated on 9.17.16:

One of the healthiest things you can say about anything that’s over and done with is “okay, that happened.” Unless, of course, you’re talking about a stretch in a World War II concentration camp or something equally ghastly. Otherwise you have to be accepting, past it. Especially when it comes to ex-girlfriends. We went there, it happened, nobody was right or wrong, that was then and we’re here now…let’s get a coffee and catch up.

All my life I’ve been friends with exes, or have at least been open to same. And they’ve been open to ease and friendship with me. Except for one.

She was (and most likely still is) a whipsmart blonde with a great ass, a toothy smile and a kind of young Katharine Hepburn vibe. She’d been raised in Brooklyn but always reminded me of a Fairfield County gal.

She’s married now and living in Pasadena; her husband — a slightly stocky, gray-haired guy of some means — doesn’t resemble me or her first husband (a doobie-toking small-business owner who owned a Harley) at all. Whatever attributes or nice qualities he’s brought to the table, he’s clearly a swing away from the past.

I gave up trying to be in touch with her 11 years ago, or towards the end of Barack Obama’s first term. She really wants to erase that part of her life — the first marriage (which began in the summer of ’96) and the affair with me that began in early ’98 and lasted two and two-thirds years, ending in late September 2000.

We last spoke in ’12. The most emotionally significant thing that happened before that was her friending me on Facebook, but what is that?

Our thing began at the ’98 Sundance Film Festival and finally ran out of gas in late ’00 when her husband found out.

I took the hurt and the lumps. I was dropped six or seven times. It was easily the most painful and frustrating relationship of my life. Whether things were good or bad between us was entirely about her shifting moods. Her father had been a philanderer when she was fairly young and this had caused a lot of family pain, so she felt badly about following in his footsteps. But she kept coming back and oh, the splendor.

The bottom line, obviously, is that she’s not at ease with having been a beloved infidel in the waning days of the Clinton administration. Easing up and looking back by way of occasional contact or e-mails just isn’t a comfortable thing for her.

I could write a Russian novel about what happened during our fractured romance. I once flew to NYC just to hang with her for a couple of days without the nearby presence of her husband. Toward the end we had a blissful rendezvous in Las Vegas.

But when all is said and done I’m basically a Woody Allen type of guy — the heart wants what it wants and all’s fair. Even if nothing hurts quite as badly as being the on-and-off boyfriend of a not-very-married woman.

But I’m past it. I’m not sorry it happened. And I’ve always liked her besides. She’s smarter than me. And a good judge of character, more practical, more planted, etc. But I’m deeper, stronger in terms of handling rough seas, and a better writer.

Eric Clapton first performed “My Father’s Eyes” on the 1992 “Unplugged” album. Written by Clapton and produced by Clapton and Simon Climie, it was released as a single in 1998. This might be my favorite easy-listening white guy soul song of all time.

The Ringer‘s Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins are making trouble for Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers.

On Fennessey’s list of Best Films of 2023, The Holdovers is #25…well below The Iron Claw, Showing Up and May December.

Friendo: “You gotta be on the front foot about this because these people are attempting to diminish The Holdovers in every way they can, and they do have influence among cinephiles. These arguments are not going away so you should tackle them head on.”

HE to friendo: “There’s no tackling a generational dislike of The Holdovers. Either you get what Payne and Giamatti are doing…either you appreciate the way films used to be made in the ’70s…either you’ve seen The Last Detail and thereby appreciate the care and the craft and roll with it, or you don’t. The fact that dumping on one of the finest films of the year makes you sound like a Millennial shithead…that doesn’t matter to people like Sean and Amanda, and why should it?”

Sean: “A movie that older audiences are feeling warmly towards.”

Amanda: “This is a lovely, well-made film…a set of characters who are thrown together for two weeks and they’re gonna talk through some feelings and go through some things and we’re going to keep moving. I didn’t connect to it and I don’t know why.”

Sean: “There are some people who think it’s a masterpiece of filmmaking but that wasn’t my takeaway. There are younger folks who are pretty much where you are. Thought it was really well made, lots to admire but there’s more here. We can be more audacious in our filmmaking.”

Amanda: “This movie lands but is maybe not that ambitious. Safe is unfair, but The Holdovers feels a little smaller.”

Sean: “What I can’t find in The Holdovers is what is the big idea? I don’t know what it represents more broadly.”

Amanda: “I wonder what my block is here. You know, I like it a lot. I do wonder if I am just responding to some of the larger enthusiasm, particularly awards enthusiasm. The word CODA kept popping into my brain. It’s like, can I, I was going to say something mean? It’s like Pottery Barn. And I say that as someone who owns a lot of Pottery Barn but you can feel the ageing on it is aged as opposed to it being, you can feel the reference and the difference.”

Sean: “Are you evoking Paper Moon? Is this for me or is this for you?”

Amanda: “There’s no Tracy Flick for me to latch onto.”

Sean: “I saw someone greviously or egregiously declare this [to be] this year’s Green Book, which makes me want to gouge my eyes out. But I know what they meant by that.”