It took me a full month to see Wes Ball and Josh Friedman‘s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century, 5.2), mainly because I’ve been off the Apes barge for many years now. I just don’t care any more. My investment is nil.

But I’m glad I finally sat down with it as Kingdom is obviously a first-rate, well-produced, technically excellent effort — as good as this sort of thing gets. As far as it went I respected the passion and exactitude that everyone apparently invested top to bottom, especially as it contains the most realistically rendered, subtly expressive CG simians I’ve ever seen.

Plus I found the performances uniformly excellent — Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon, William H. Macy, etc.

Plus I loved, incidentally, the re-appearance of those ape hide scarecrows, which I haven’t seen since Franklin Schaffner’e 1968 original.

But at the end of the day I felt completely untouched and indifferent. Respectful but also relieved when it finally ended. Yes, I was annoyed by the 145-minute length, but all features are too long these days. It’s a plague.

Zoomers are entitled, I suppose, to revel in their own reptilian space alien “no one can hear you scream” face-hugger flick…a seemingly rote, fairly primitive revisiting of all the “terrifying” Alien franchise basics.

The key phrase is “set between the events of Alien (’79) and Aliens (’86).” So Sigourney Weaver‘s Ripley exists somewhere in the realm of Fede Álvarez’s film, which is titled Alien: Romulus and opens on 8.16.

Perhaps the main Romulus protagonists are aware of the loss of the Nostromo but don’t know any specifics…who knows?

The Romulus cast members are all Zoomers (born in the late ’90s or early aughts). Alvarez, born in ’78, is a codger in their midst, relatively speaking. The close-to-dwarf-sized Cailee Spaeny (Civil War, Priscilla) is the hot-shit star.

HE readers paid little attention to this 7.16.21 piece about Grace Kelly, and then I paywalled it. So I’m giving it another go:

The thing I’ve always loved about the young Grace Kelly isn’t just her ice-queen beauty, but the blend of her Philadelphia blue-blood lineage and refinement with the many stories (however true or untrue) that suggest she was seriously promiscuous.

Am I allowed to say that Kelly was slutty, or at least that I love the stories that suggest she was? I don’t mean this in a derogatory way — I mean it in the most delicious way imaginable. Kelly in the sack = the stuff that dreams are made of.

Kelly’s father, John B. Kelly, was a hound and so, apparently or reputedly, was she. No shame. It has been my experience that very few women are Grace Kelly-like — they might be randy but they lack the looks and breeding, or they have said qualities but are hesitant and ambivalent when it comes to this or that opportunity. Kelly was reputedly focused and fearless.

I’m not suggesting anything new here. We’ve all read the stories. Whatever the actual truth of things, Kelly is believed to have been right up there with the voracious Tallulah Bankhead, Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Astor, Gene Tierney and Lupe Velez, and the mostly older (and mostly married) fellows Kelly allegedly got down with were all famous, wealthy, top-of-the-line…Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, Bing Crosby, William Holden, (allegedly) JFK, Oleg Cassini.

There were almost certainly more, or at least I hope so.

If you’re delighted by the idea of Kelly tearing at the belt buckles of almost every older guy she costarred with during her five-year film career (between ’52 and ’56), you don’t want to read Donald Spoto‘s “High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly” (’09), as he pours water on just about every sexual allegation and anecdote anyone’s ever shared about her.

You start to get the idea that the more stories about Kelly’s sexual life that Spoto is able to debunk, the better he feels. He doesn’t seem to like the idea of catting around in the slightest.

Whatever the truth of it, Robert Lacey‘s “Grace” (’94) delivers what I want to hear. During a discussion of Kelly’s affair with the married Ray Milland during the shooting of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Dial M For Murder, Skip Hathaway, wife of director Henry Hathaway, who directed Kelly in Fourteen Hours, a 1951 suicide-watch drama, says the following:

“Grace Kelly was a conniving woman. She almost ruined my best friend Mal’s [i.e., Muriel Frances Weber, Milland’s wife of many decades] marriage. Grace Kelly fucked everything in sight. She was worse than any woman I’d ever known.”

Please. Yes. More of this. God.

And yet it appears that Kelly didn’t have it off with her To Catch A Thief costar Cary Grant, or her Rear Window leading man James Stewart. It doesn’t add up but there it is.

Kelly starred or costarred in 11 films between Fourteen Hours (’51) and High Society (’56). Six of them are good — High Noon, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window (her best overall effort), The Country Girl, The Bridges at Toko-Ri and To Catch A Thief.

But you can’t really count Toko-Ri as Kelly’s screen time in that 1954 Korean War film comes to only 12 or 14 minutes, give or take. Her performance as William Holden’s wifey-wifey classes the joint up, but she wasn’t given any scenes that would qualify as meaty or even semi-substantial.

The one in the second row, trying to seem chill and nonchalant.

My young sons (Jett, 11, and Dylan, 9) really didn’t want to attend a screening of Tom Tykwer‘s Run Lola Run, which I was urging them to consider. (It had premiered in Germany in August ’98, and was about to open stateside in mid June of ’99.)

Their argument, being kids, was that they didn’t want to submit to a German-language film set in Berlin, and my answer was “it’s not about the language but the verve, the speed, the cutting, the color, Franka Potente‘s flaming red hair, the running, the animation, the excitement and the suspense.”

After I finally dragged them to a showing they said “okay, wow, fine…we get it.”

A new 4K restoration opens on Friday (6.7), and in plexes yet!

Jett, five minutes ago: “Still the first film that comes to mind when I think of German-language cinema.”

Born on 7.22.74, Potente was 23 or 24 during filming; she turns 50 next month.

I know what the HE woke nutbaggers will say about this, but what about the sensibles (Kristi Coulter, Bobby Peru, Regular Joe)? I feel roughly the same as Megyn Kelly, but that’s to be expected because I’m a hopeless “transphobe”…right, Canyon Coyote?

6.4.24, 7:15 am: I’ve just hit upon a great Biden campaign theme, inspired by Dido’s “Thank You.”

No joke, not being satirical…this could really work.

His campaign chiefs need to buy the rights and persuade Dido to record a Biden version with re-written lyrics, in the exact same way the JFK campaign got Frank Sinatra to record a new version of “High Hopes” in 1960.

Nobody’s going to vote for Joe with super-high enthusiasm or expectations, but everyone knows that the alternative is a sociopathic, foam-at-the-mouth, anti-democratic authoritarian felon.

The Biden trick is to plant a mild but attractive idea, which is that he’s sane and steady and, at the end of the day, he’s “not so bad…he’s not so bah–hah–hah–hahhd.” Play the song, play the song…over and over and over.

Last night…

Some Biden campaign slogans, provided by N.Y Times columnist Bret Stephens in a 6.3.24 “Conversation” column:

“I sometimes forget the names of foreign leaders, but I didn’t forget my oath to the Constitution.”

“Whaddya want, a little bit sleepy or full-blown crazy?”

“This election isn’t just a choice. It’s a choice about having a choice.”

“I might lose, but at least I’ll admit it.”

5.4.24, 5:45 am…

HE variation #1: “I may look like a walking cadaver from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but I’m healthy and vigorous as far as it goes. Inside I feel like I’m 55. Hell, 50!”

HE variation #2: “I may remind you of a drooling assisted living resident being helped to the dining table, but I feel fine…really!”

HE variation #3: “C’mon, you know I’ll never do anything rash or foolish, job-wise. I’m a normie, and I have sharp, woke-minded staffers.”

HE variation #4: “Steady as she goes, even while napping. And definitely more engaged than Reagan was in his late-second-term zombie phase.”

HE variation #5: “I could have withdrawn and allowed younger contenders to compete to succeed me, but my big-time politician ego wouldn’t allow that. I am what I am, but I’m not so bad…I’m not so bah–hah–hah–hahhd.”

HE variation #6: “I might well turn out to be Ruth Bader Biden, but then again I might squeak through. And I need your help to get there!”

HE variation #7: “Whadaya want, some kind of snappy, vigorous, nattily-dressed, JFK-resembling charmer with a Pete Buttigieg mind and a sensibly moderate agenda? Somebody like that instead of me? Okay, I get that on a certain level but it’s not happening, man! I’m it!”

Seriously? The best of them all and certainly the catchiest is the Dido option…”I’m not that bad…I’m not that bah–hah–hah–hahhd.” It has a ring. It’s honest. It touches a chord.

Because Biden isn’t that bad, and if you overlook the border and his administration’s winking at wokesters in general and specifically at hastily-advised trans surgeries for minors, his record has been pretty good. Inflation sucks and CEOs are making 200 or 300 times more than working schmucks, but no Oval Office resident is going to turn that situation around. The world is for the few, but at least doddering Joe Biden believes in and practices democracy.

Politician, scientist and academic Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, is now the President-Elect of Mexico. She won the election with 58% of the vote, succeeding president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

A member of Morena, Sheinbaum served as Head of Government of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023.

She was born to a secular Jewish family in Mexico City. Her paternal grandparents (Ashkenazi Jews) emigrated from Lithuania to Mexico City in the 1920s; her maternal Sephardic grandparents emigrated from Sofia, Bulgaria, in the early 1940s to escape the Holocaust.

Wiki: “A scientist by profession, Sheinbaum received her Ph.D. in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She’s authored over 100 articles and two books on energy, the environment, and sustainable development. Sheinbaum contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in 2018 she was listed as one of BBC’s 100 Women.”

HE respects George Conway for calling paid CNN commentator and Trump apologist Scott Jennings a liar. This kind of candor rarely surfaces. Go to 5:30.

Conway: “Scott’s lying, and that’s the problem with the Republican Party…it is continually addicted to lies.” He also lamented “the degree of moral rot we have on the conservative side in politics today.”

When Jennings asked what he was supposedly lying about, Conway said “you’re lying about the law…you’re lying about what the jury was charged to find…they didn’t have to find an underlying crime…they [had to be persuaded] there was an intent to cover up an underlying crime, and the underlying crime was pretty obvious.”

Returning to the Jennings, Conway repeated that the Republican party is “suffused with lies, [and] I don’t know why this network is paying Scott to say these lies on this show…it’s ridiculous.”

This happened three days ago — sorry for not paying atttention.

Since the ’50s and more particularly the advent of ironic, put-on cinema (which arguably began with John Huston‘s Beat The Devil), there have been two kinds of movies — (1) the just-described kind in which the viewer is repeatedly told that they’re watching a half-serious, half-goof-off enterprise “in quotes”…some kind of dry jape or half-real fantasy or alternate world wank-off that sophistos can certainly enjoy (we hope you do!) but which you’re not really expected to “believe” in, and (2) classically immersive stories that have been constructed and sold as “realism” within the usual cinematic boundaries.

Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, Michael Bay, the Russo Brothers and a whole battalion of like-minded filmmakers have never made a classically immersive movie in their lives, and they never will.

But throughout much of the 20th Century immersive realism was, for the most part, scrupulously adhered to up and down the line. With the exceptions, of course, of surreal fantasies (Disney, Alexander Korda, Michael Powell, Luis Bunuel) and animated features and adventure films with occasional applications of Hal Roach-styled physical humor (George Stevens‘ Gunga Din), it was the only game in town.

I’ve always responded more to immersive cinema than to jape movies, but I’m wondering what the general preference may be these days among movie fans.

When I sit down with a film I’m ready for whatever (really), but in my heart of hearts I mostly want to submit to a world that reminds me in a thousand different ways of the world that (I know this makes me sound old-fogeyish) actually exists outside the theatre doors, the one that I live and struggle in on a daily basis. Or at least a film that strongly echoes that world.

Which is why I’ve always tended to have a problem with films that defy basic rules or natural law to such a degree that it’s impossible to sink into them. (Even if they’re fantasies.)

I’m talking about superhero bullshit, of course, and family-friendly animation and supposedly realistic dramas or dramedies that are written with a tone of such ludicrousness that the characters don’t behave in any sort of semi-logical, reality-based manner, and especially robo-action films in which guys crash through windows, fall three or four stories, land on pavement, loudly groan but nonetheless get up, shake themselves off and run off to the next adventure.

It’s funny to consider that in 1946 Howard Hawks made one of the greatest immersive, super-realistic adventure films ever (i.e., Red River) and yet a mere 13 years later had completely tipped over into the realm of self-acknowledged fake-itude with 1959’s Rio Bravo, which basically said to audiences, “Okay, guys, it’s chill time…which means, of course, that you’re watching a laid-back movie and that we’re conversing with the aid of obviously scripted dialogue and also taking an occasional time-out for a musical number.”

Hawks went back to realism with Hatari! (’62) but went completely crazy with the sound-stage, wank-western aesthetic when he made El Dorado (’66) and Rio Lobo (’70).

From David Thomson‘s “The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies,” page 318:

Owning a pair of white Mickey Mouse gloves (three fingers and a thumb) used to be a cool thing, but no longer, I fear — not in this century.

Mickey Mouse was a seminal 20th Century cartoon character, but culturally he mattered for only about 40 or 50 years. He began with Steamboat Willie (’28), grew in stature with Fantasia (’40), peaked with the Mickey Mouse Club TV series and the building of Disneyland in ’55.

I was going to buy some Mickey gloves for Sutton, but I don’t think she’d “get it.”

I again feel compelled to discuss the passing of Chance Browne, a renowned cartoonist (“Hi and Lois“) and musician and painter…an all-around good fellow.

Chance died from pancreatic cancer a little more than three months ago (3.1.24). For nearly my entire life he was one of my dearest friends. We’d bonded in the mid ’60s and held fast friendship-wise through the many decades that followed. It’s unusual to hold onto amigos for this long — for one reason or another friendo fondness tends to fade or weaken or simply run out of spirit. But not when it came to Chance.

Me to Chance’s widow, Debbie, when I first heard: “Mike Connors told me the devastating news just now. I’m so sorry, Deb. I feel truly broken…state of shock…so sorry for you and the girls. Despite the horror of the woke plague and how that affected my relationship with poor Chance, we had over 50 good years together — warm years, bountiful years…so much hilarity and spirit. My heart is shattered. Please keep me in the loop regarding any memorials or gatherings. I’m soooo sorry. Doesn’t feel real.”

I’ve mentioned once or twice that Chance became an unregenerate woke scold sometime in mid ’21, and that he began accusing me of horrendous attitudes and behaviors that had no basis in fact, emotional or otherwise.

No exaggeration, it was the single most appalling episode of my emotional life. On 9.24.22 I tapped out a longish piece about a traumatic encounter I had with him inside Wilton’s Village Market.

During that stand-off Chance looked me right in the eye and called me a piece of shit, right to my face, literally shoving a knife into our half-century-old friendship.

When he passed I decided to try and focus on the good decades and let the woke insanity go. But now the shit-stirring is back slightly because the Browne family has invited old pals to drop by the homestead later this month and share memories and probably do a bit of hugging.

Given Chance’s decision in ’21 to turn into Donald Sutherland‘s character in the final scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’78), I didn’t expect an invite. And that’s fine. Our shared past can’t be fiddled with or diminished. It lives.

And yet a guy I loved for over half a century is being remembered and toasted, but because I was kicked off the bus due to not being a card-carrying wokester…aahh, let it go.