Roman Polanski haters have kept English-subtitled Blurays of An Officer and a Spy (aka J’Accuse) off the market for the last four-plus years, and no English-sub streaming options have surfaced in the U.S. or Europe either (except via pirate sites). And yet a beautiful all–format Russian Bluray with English subs has been kicking around on eBay for a year or two. It took me a long time to wake up to this. I’m now a proud owner.

…I’d never even heard of Salmon P. Chase, the seventh Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1864-1873) whose facial features adorned the $10K bill, which was printed between 1878 and 1934.

$1K bills were printed between 1861 and 1954; the small-sized Grover Cleveland version was issued in 1928 and 1934. Since 1969 banks have been required to forward $1K bills to the government for destruction.

William McKinley $500 bills were also printed between 1861 and 1945.

$100K Woodrow Wilson bills were printed by FDR’s administration “in response to hoarding of gold during the Great Depression.” 42,000 went through the printing process.

Man, would I love to carry a couple of McKinley or Cleveland bills in my elephant-hide wallet, just to watch people’s eyes pop out of their sockets…boinnnng!

…for everything, all of it. Especially delighted that I finally own an English-subtitled Bluray of Polanski’s J’Accuse. Heartbroken that the hooligan bad guys are about to take charge and that the degradation of so much is about to kick in.

Otherwise I’m grateful for the hundreds of small pleasures and comforts and nourishments that constitute daily life…I could write a book. Good wishes and heartfelt greetings to everyone, even my comment-thread enemies…even those I’ve wished cancer upon.

Friendo:

I’d forgotten that before Clint’s Dave Garver slugs Jessica Walter’s knife-wielding Evelyn Draper — pow! — and sends her plunging to a rocky seaside death, Walter gives Donna Mills’ Tobie Williams a severe haircut.

That has to be one of the ugliest and creepiest things a cinematic serial killer has ever done to a victim — “Before I stab you to death I’m going to chop off half of your Jane Fonda-in-Klute hair.”

Clint was a young-looking 40 when he directed and starred; Walter was 29, Mills was 30 or 31, and John Larch, who played the amiable, well-dressed, Martin Balsam-like detective, was in his late 50s.

Evelyn and Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest are birds of a feather. Evelyn is a bit more manic and unhinged —almost an AIP horror film character — but they both slash their wrists in Act Two and threaten the hero’s significant domestic other during the climax.

The sexual ethos of Play Misty For Me (‘71) presents Dave, a KRML deejay who drives an Austin Healy and lives in a cliffside bungalow, as an innocent libertine. By 2024 standards mellow Dave is almost the bad guy — a handsome, low-key hound who gets laid whenever and with whomever (pick of the litter!) with a general understanding that casual, no-big-deal affairs are part of the no-strings nookie game of the Nixon era. No internet or social media spears or frowning feminist currents — an exotic world as different from our own as Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

I’m not saying that if either Wicked, Emilia Perez or The Brutalist win the Best Picture Oscar, it’ll feel like an apocalypse to me personally. Actually I am kinda saying that, to be honest.

If either Perez or Wicked win, I’ll feel the next morning like I did on 11.6.24.

THR’s Scott Feinberg recently wrote that a vote for Perez and/or Karla Sofia Gascon could be seen around town as a fuck-you vote against The Beast, and that this symbology could be a determining factor.

Please don’t do this, Academy. On a certain level movies like Emilia Perez and the attendant wokey influenza within are among the reasons that Trump won.

The bumblefucks didn’t so much vote against Kamala Harris as they voted against men competing in women’s sports. Please don’t make things worse by doubling down on this shit. Please consider backing away from radical gender fluidity and transitioned six-foot biomales competing againet female swimmers, and come down to the normal earth amidst the mindsets of Joe and Jane Popcorn.

Al Kooper needs to be re-saluted for his guerilla commando raid during the 6.15.65 recording of “Like A Rolling Stone”. I’m suggesting this because a highly abbreviated version of this session is included in A Complete Unknown. Kooper is played by Charlie Tahan, but Kooper’s personal recollection of what happened is, like, ten times better.

If unusually frank words had been exchanged between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on Sunday, July 21st, and if Harris had followed through on this frankness, the presidential race might have turned out differently. Maybe.

Harris: “So you’re doing this? You’ve firmly decided?”

Biden: “If I don’t fold the tent and pass the torch, Pelosi and the gang will further challenge and undermine me, and I’ll almost certainly wind up losing to Trump by an even greater margin than previously projected, and I’ll go down in history as an even greater villain…a withered, stubborn old coot who surrendered the country to MAGA facism, and all because of my Irish, bone-headed arrogance.”

Harris: “I’ve always supported you. I participated in the general gasllghting about you being mentally alert and fully able to continue doing the job, and I’m supporting you now…I respect and support your decision to withdraw.”

Biden: “So it’s on you now, Kamala. Do your best and go with God. You’ll need to hit the road running. I presume you and your team have been preparing for this all along, and particularly since my absent-minded debate performance last month.”

Harris: “Actually, no, we haven’t.”

Biden: “You haven’t?”

Harris: “We’ve been in kind of a holding pattern, waiting to see what you’d do.”

Biden: “Since 1.20.21 you’ve been one heartbeat away from the Presidency, and you haven’t done a single thing to prepare, policy-wise and contingency-wise, for the possibility of taking over if something, God forbid, were to happen to me? You’ve just been plotzing?”

Harris: “We didn’t want anyone saying that we were preparing to take over prematurely. That would’ve looked ugly and craven.”

Biden: “Jesus, man!”

Harris: “What’s important now, Joe, is that I’m going to be the Democratic candidate. I’m grabbing the reins, and…well, please don’t take this the wrong way but I have to speak frankly to you, and more importantly to the voters between now and November 5th.”

Biden: “Uh-oh, here it comes.”

Harris: “If I’m going to have even a prayer of winning, I’ll need to throw you under the bus a little bit. I can’t run as Kamala Biden…I can’t be a rubber-stamp successor. If I do that, Trump will win. Your numbers have been in the toilet for a couple of years so let’s cut the shit. I have to be able to say two things. One, the vice-presidency is a ceremonial position without any real agency of its own. Every vice-president except Cheney has acknowledged this and said as much to journalists and historians. I was obliged to be loyal to you and that’s how I played my cards up unti now.”

Obviously Earl Holliman‘s career peaked in the mid to late ’50s, and if you ask me his absolute top-of-the-heap moment was his solo performance in “Where Is Everybody?“, the debut episode of Rod Serling‘s The Twilight Zone. The episode aired on October 2, 1959.

Otherwise Holliman almost always played unsophisticated or doltish none-too-brights and second bananas — The Bridges at Ioko Ri (Mickey Rooney calling out “Lester! Lester!” when Holliman was shot by North Korean troops), The Rainmaker, I Died A Thousand Times, Forbidden Planet, Giant, Sergeant Bill Crowley in Police Woman, etc.

Until today I never knew Holliman was gay but whatever. Successfully closeted for decades…fine. An Advocate piece outed him in 2015. His husband was Craig Curtis.

The Taschen folks have issued a Dr. No coffee table book, and they’re charging $850 for it.

Boilerplate: “This detailed companion explores the making of Dr. No (1962), the film that first introduced the world to the cinematic 007. With over a thousand images, excerpts from the original script, and stories from the cast and crew, this book offers unrestricted access, etc.”

I would love to have this lying around but c’mon…

Last weekend I re-watched George Harrison: Living in the Material World, the 208-minute Martin Scorsese-David Tedeschi doc from 2011. I experienced the same reaction. A fair amount of annoyment with the jumpy, spottily edited, all-over-the-map first half, and a profound emotional involvement with the second half, especially the portion when George’s cancer starts to win and infinite finality is getting closer and closer.

As a kind of wind-down exercise in bed I re-read my 10.5.11 review and thought, “Okay, I was obviously in the tank for Harrison and Scorsese but it was also a perceptive, reasonably fair assessment.”

Then I read Bill Wyman’s 10.4.11 review for Slate, titled “The Boring Beatle.” The difference between my piece and Wyman’s is that he didn’t care for Harrison’s gloomy manner or a good portion of his output after All Things Must Pass, or for Scorsese’s sanitizing on Harrison’s behalf. I, on the other hand, was more or less a fan who was willing to look the other way.

Wyman’s review is much ballsier and more incisive than my own.

Please read them both, starting with my HE review…

Initially posted on 10.5.11: I saw the first half of Martin Scorsese‘s 208-minute George Harrison doc during the [2011] Telluride Film Festival, and was only somewhat impressed. It covered the first 23 or 24 years of Harrison’s life, or ’43 to ’69…and I felt I knew all that going in. But the second half, which I finally saw at a New York Film Festival screening, is highly nourishing and affecting and well worth anyone’s time.

Yes, even for guys like LexG who are sick to death of boomer-age filmmakers and film executives endlessly making movies about their youth. It’s reasonable to feel this way because boomers have been commercially fetishizing their ’60s and ’70s glory days for a long time. But George Harrison: Living In The Material World is nonetheless a very good film. Particularly Part Two.

Because it’s about a journey that anyone who’s done any living at all can relate to, and about a guy who lived a genuinely vibrant spiritual life, and who never really self-polluted or self-destructed in the usual rock-star ways.

Well, that’s not really true, is it? At age 58 Harrison died of lung cancer, which he attributed to being a heavy smoker from the mid ’50s to late ’80s. And he wasn’t exactly the perfect boyfriend or husband. (There were a few infidelities during his marriage to Olivia Harrison.) And he wasn’t the perfect spiritual man either, despite all the songs and talk about chanting and clarity and oneness with Krishna. He had his bacchanalian periods. And he did so with the wonderful luxury of having many, many millions in the bank. It’s not like Harrison was struggling through awful moments of doubt and pain in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Nobody’s just one color or mood or flavor. Everyone’s complicated and inconsistent and contradictory. If Harrison-the-holy wasn’t known for occasionally flawed or weird behavior his rep would be insufferable.

But this journey is something to take and share.

Part Two, as you might presume, is about Harrison’s solo career. It starts with the Beatles breakup, the making of All Things Must Pass, the 1971 Concert for Bangla Desh, etc. And then settles into the mid to late ’70s and ’80s, “So Sad”, “Crackerbox Palace,” Handmade Films, “Dark Horse,” the Travelling Willburys, the stabbing incident and so on.

The film is entirely worth seeing for a single sequence, in fact. One that’ll make you laugh out loud and break your heart a little. It’s a story that Ringo Starr tells about a chat he had with Harrison in Switzerland two or three months before his death in November ’01. I won’t explain any more than this.

Scorsese’s doc has no title cards, no narration, no through-line interview as Bob Dylan: No Direction Home had. As noted, I found Part One a little slipshod and patchworky at times. The editor is David Tedeschi, who also cut No Direction Home as well as Scorsese’s Public Speaking, the Fran Lebowitz doc, and Shine a Light, the 2008 Rolling Stones’ concert doc.

I still say A Complete Unknown should have been titled Ghost of Electricity (Searchlight, 12.25) because there’s definitely something ghostly (as in elusive, unknowable, wispy, shadow-cloaked, just out of reach) about the actual Bob Dylan as well as Timothee Chalamet‘s version of him. Not an allusion to “going electric at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival”, for Chrissake, but something, you know, trippier.

I would have also loved My Weariness Amazes Me because it’s the single best line in Mr. Tambourine Man…because before Dylan cooked it up nobody had ever been amazed by their own weariness, and I mean nobody. I sure as hell hadn’t felt that way, I can tell you. But ever since I first heard that line I’ve chanted it over and over. It’s almost become a kind of motto…a mantra to be repeated when the ache and angst and cosmic boredom get to be a bit much.

Eddie Ginley again: “A Complete Unknown is the boomerist boomer shit that ever boomered.”