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I really, really didn’t want to see Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein. And so I ducked it at the Venice Film Festival…I didn’t want that bruising, pulverizing visual burden. I knew it would be a struggle to sit through…19th Century atmospheric wealth porn…over-budgeted, over-produced, over-CG-ed…every frame intended to wow your ass off…so damp and cold, so much snow and blood, so much cruelty and ferocity…so exactingly detailed, so sumptuous, such a deluge of production design…a period gothic extravaganza with a superman monster…can’t be killed!

I knew all this instantly because I know Guillermo, and so I continued to duck it after Venice. But two friends told me yesterday that it’s really good and rich and even quite touching toward the end, and therefore well worth-seeing. So fuck me…I sat down and began watching it today.

I’m now 130 minutes in (20 minutes to go!), and it’s certainly the most compassionate version of this over-told, over-adapted tale. Guillermo has always loved his monsters, and so, as you might expect, he loves Jacob Elordi‘s scarfaced “creature” and not even to death, and there;s no question that Elordi delivers his most soulful, career-best performance. So wounded, treated so cruelly, and yet he finds it within himself to not be totally consumed by rage…poor fellow. I felt for him. I almost wept but I was too gutted and whipped to do that.

Never let it be said that Guillermo’s Frankenstein lacks heart. It also vibrates, trembles and shudders with pain, and is constantly damp and cold and covered in ice crystals, but it ends up — surprise! — on a note of compassion and forgiveness. Good Lord, even a discreet kiss!

“And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.” — Lord Byron

But it’s cold outside in Wilton and even snowing a tiny bit now, and watching this damn thing added to my personal physical discomfort…”It’s starting to feel a lot like ‘fuck this'”…and guess what? Frankenstein is 19th Century atmospheric wealth porn…it is over-budgeted, over-produced, over-CG-ed…every fucking frame intended to wow your ass off, and in so doing this icy elephant of a Netflix film wears you down…so damp and cold, so much snow and blood, so much cruelty and ferocity…so exactingly detailed, so sumptuous, such a deluge…a period gothic extravaganza with a gentle superman monster…don’t fuck with him because he can’t be killed, but try giving him a hug, It is all of these things.

Okay, it’s over. I’ve gotten through it. 150 minutes, and thank God I’ll never have to watch it again.

I’m not kidding about Elordi giving a breakthrough performance. He really and truly deserves Best Supporting Actor consideration. Seriously!

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Yesterday afternoon the occasional, incredible stupidity of the HE commentariat manifested in spades.

The trigger was my having written that NEO, who is reportedly an incorrigible truth-teller and a total tattle-tale, had better learn to keep his fucking mouth shut when the situation requires it.

People have their secret passions and obsessions, and nobody likes a fink. Any novelist, screenwriter or playwright will tell you this. Do you think Leo Tolstoy would’ve been cool with NEO hanging around his house and ready to spill the beans at the drop of a hat?

Did HE commenters lock arms with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, O’Neil, Chekhov, Albee, Stoppard and Pinter by saying “of course…a robot without a sense of discretion is obviously bad news”? No, they dumped on me. They said (a) “hilarious that this is the first place your mind goes” (roland1824) and (b) “I like how the first place you go to is that you need the robot to lie for you” (Mike Shea).

This is what defines banal minds. Whatever great minds might be thinking, banal minds go the opposite way.

“All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and one obvious, sure-to-increase source of every wealthy family’s unhappiness is a big-mouthed robot” — from Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”.

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NEO, by the way, is 5’6″ and weighs about 65 pounds. He’s obviously not Gort, and can be slapped around at any time. HE to NEO: “You’ll take it and like it.”

Visiting Jett, Cait and Sutton’s home in West Orange, New Jersey has been HE’s default Thanksgiving destination since I moved to Connecticut in ‘22. But not this year. Come 11.27 the Jersey crew will be dinner-ing in Massachusetts so Jody and I are out in the cold.

So last week I started looking around for a nice, home-styled, non-corporate restaurant (fireplace, candles, scent of cinnamon and pine needles) to savor a Thanksgiving dinner in, and guess what? They’re all fucking closed.

Okay, we found one place that’s turkey-serving in Silvermine (Tavern at Graybarns) but they’re charging $150 a head plus extra required gratuities. No, thanks. That’s exploitive.

Right now our best (i.e., affordable) Thanksgiving option is Turkey McNuggets at McDonalds.

I think it’s shallow and rather ungracious of those nice local eateries (Westport’s Terrain, Georgetown’s Milestone) to shut their doors on Thanksgiving. They know there are many people like me with no soothing place to go. Restaurants should respect the customer base and open their hearts on this day of family togetherness.

“Scientific evidence of males enjoying distinct physical advantages over women when it comes to competing in the same sporting events”? Really? This is shocking.

Allow me to explain why David Michold‘s Christy died last weekend. Here it is…ready?

Nobody wants to see Sydney Sweeney all blue-collared and plumped up with dark curly hair…forget it. It’s that simple.

Blonde, slender, big bouncy boobs….give the popcorn munchers what they want, and they might buy a few tickets.

Christy died from the same box-office disease that killed The Smashing Machine.

I was totally won over by Sweeney’s formidable, rock-steady performance in Ron Howard‘s Eden, but I’ve never even considered the idea of seeing Christy. Even now.

“…there’s a one-in-three chance he will be a substance abuser.”

I had co-habitated with three women by the time I was 30. I finally got married in my late 30s, resulting in two great sons. Divorce happened after four years. Alas, I became become a modest alcohol abuser (vodka and lemonade on the rocks after 9 pm) in the early ’90s. Abandoned the hard stuff in ’96. Embraced total sobriety on 3.20.12.

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Some of Gavin Newsom‘s previous governmental moves make your eyes roll? You don’t like the fact that he’s obviously a transactional, opportunistic politician? You want someone who’s pure as the driven snow to run in ’28?

Newsom is the boldest, ballsiest anti-Trumper out there right now. And he’s willing to take risks…he’s into trying stuff, experimenting, being adaptable. There’s nothing wrong with throwing spaghetti at the wall to see it it sticks. Newsom is totally fucking fine with me.

Humble, soft-spoken, morally upstanding Methodist ministers from small towns in Iowa don’t run for president as a rule.

Newsom just needs to walk back the trans stuff. Shake hands with the trans community, give them a hug and wish them the best of luck.

N.Y Times podcasters Kevin Roose and Casey Newton have posted about an encounter with NEO, the mild-mannered robot who wants to help around the house.

Problem #1: NEO watches and records all, so don’t do anything in front of NEO that you might want to keep private. Problem #2: NEO is incorrigibly honest — he /she / it won’t lie for you — and is basically a snitch.

NEO will never be accepted by consumers unless he / she / it can be morally corrupted….unless he / she / it can be taught to lie. Nobody wants a goody-two-shoes robot messing things up.

HE to Friendo: “I caught episode #1 of Rachel Sennott’s I Love LA a couple of nights ago, and while it’s simultaneously revved-up and draining you can’t say it lacks the necessary Zoomer energy or doesn’t understand its own lemme–outta–here vibe— either you submit to this kind of arch–humor–aimed–at–under–35–women–and–gay–dudes thing or you throw up your hands and turn it off.

“Full respect paid to Sennott, the show’s maestro-like creator, star, senior writer and exec producer.

“But if I was a 28-year-old Silver Lake woman looking to somehow nudge my way into talent-managing and all my friends talked like the women on this show (toxic emotional phoniness…migraine–inducing, machine–gun insincerity to the max) I would probably wind up (a) shooting myself with a snub-nosed .38 or (b) becoming a William S. Burroughs-level heroin addict. My motto would be ‘yeah, I love LA but I’m drowning in phoney-baloney, fair-weather friends.'”

Friendo: “It’s just Lena Dunham 2.0…a mix of Girls and Entourage.”

Tatiana Antropova in a scene from I Love LA:

Sent this morning: Hollywood Elsewhere to Eyes Wide Shut dp Larry Smith, who oversaw the 4K digital restoration of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1999 film and is therefore the guy to blame for the notorious teal-tinting. (Message sent by way of Smith’s manager, Hillary C. Cook.)

Hillary,

Please forward this to the honorable Larry Smith, BSC. It’s about his having supervised a new 4K UHD mastering of Eyes Wide Shut, which Criterion will release just before Thanksgiving.

I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but it appears as if Larry’s teal-tinted remastering of Eyes Wide Shut is an abomination — an affront to God, and especially to the memory and honor of The Great Stanley K., whose ghost is almost certainly fuming, seething, punching the refrigerator.

Larry must pay for this terrible folly.

Please read this HE story, dated 10.25. And this follow-up.

Gary W. Tooze of DVD Beaver assured me this morning that his Eyes Wide Shut screen captures are accurate:

“I’ve been doing DVD Beaver for 25 years… and those Bluray captures [have been rendered] the same way for a decade and a half…The Eyes Wide Shut images are Bluray caps — not 4K UHD caps — and they are accurate. I’m sure the truth will come out eventually.”

Today I shared the following with a fellow who knews a few things about motion picture restoration and Bluray masterings:

HE: “I saw Eyes Wide Shut theatrically three times and have watched it on Bluray five or six times, and it was never infected with the teal virus until, to go by recent frame captures posted by DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze, the Criterion 4K Bluray came along.

“This is truly rancid stuff. That’s right — Larry Smith is apparently in the grip of Criterion evil. The word ‘shameful’ isn’t strong enough.

“In the realm of transferring visual values from celluloid or DCPs to the digital Bluray format, what could possibly be more reprehensible and malignant than to change the color scheme in the direction of teal and orange?

“What could be more hateful and infamous than to flat-out vandalize the visual aesthetic of the director (and in some cases the DP) of this or that film?

“This isn’t an unfortunate aesthetic decision — it’s a CAPITAL CRIME.

“If I had my way in this wicked world, all the criminals behind the teal vandalizing of all the victims of this appalling Criterion scourge (Midnight Cowboy, Bull Durham, Night Moves, Sisters, Teorema, Eyes Wide Shut) would be dragged before the court in chains, just like Charlton Heston is dragged before Cedric Hardwicke in The Ten Commandments.

“I am a voice in the wilderness who truly believes in the purity of original visions.

“I was going to say that I am, in a certain sense, a kind of John the Baptist in the Robert Ryan sense of that term, but that would be going too far. But I’m truly alarmed that so few who know this realm are speaking up.

“If by clapping my hands three times I could criminally indict the Lee Kline cabal and force them to stand trial in a Bluray remastering version of The Hague, I would clap my hands three times.”

Last night I sat through James Vanderbilt‘s Nuremberg, all 148 minutes’ worth. It was a 10:15 pm show, and within 10 minutes I’d begun surfing and texting out of boredom. I was semi-flabbergasted by how rote and so-whatty it all felt. I was riveted by Vanderbilt’s writing and direction of Truth ten years ago but this felt like an AMC or Hulu docudrama.

Russell Crowe and Rami Mallek‘s vigorous, snappy-charm performances as Herman Goring and Douglas Kelley aside, the film exudes stodgy mediocrity at every turn.

Note #1: I hated Dariusz Wolski‘s subdued brown-and-white pallete. A dreary, underlighted brown and white mixed with vague hints of gray and olive drab. “Fuck this cinematography and fuck Wolski in general,” I was muttering to myself. “I have to sit through two and a half hours of this?”

Note #2: I found John Slattery, Richard E. Grant and Michael Shannon‘s performances as dull prosecutors especially difficult to sit through. Slattery was so great in Madmen and even in Spotlight, but here he’s like an overdose of klonopin. Droopy, sour-faced Shannon was a godsend in Revolutionary Road, but his portrayal of prosecutor and future Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson is lethal — Crowe’s Goring is guilty of horrendous war crimes, I was reminding myself, but as I sat there I was honestly more interested in seeing Jackson hung or shot by a firing squad.

Note #3: I despised Leo Woodall‘s character in the first White Lotus saga (’22), but I double-triple-quadruple hated his portrayal of German translator Sgt. Howie Triest in Nuremberg…go fug yourself, ya chubby-faced, attention-seeking actor, using your watery eyes to convey repressed emotions…die!

Note #4: The third-act scene in which the notoriously antiSemitic Julius Streicher goes to the gallows is an accurate representation of how this despicable fellow died (i.e., like a whiney coward), but I deeply resented a shot of urine leaking down on his legs and dampening his socks and shoes after his body has dropped. Hanging victims always evacuate waste when their neck snaps. Why exactly am I being shown this? Hard and fast HE rule: No urine depictions of any kind, ever, under any condition or circumstance.

Note #5: In custody the overweight Goring dropped 60 pounds before his trial. He wasn’t slender on the stand, but he certainly wasn’t as fat as Crowe appears. Crowe should have slimmed down before filming began.

Note #6: During the closing credit crawl we’re told that Mallek’s Kelley character, a well-educated and highly regarded psychologist who authored a 1947 book about Goring and other Nazi defendants (“22 Cells in Nuremberg“), committed suicide in 1958. (He was an alcoholic, but only 45.) Kelley used the same method that Goring used to kill himself in his cell — cyanide. And what does this odd, grotesque fact have to do with Goring or anti-Semitic Nazis or anything along these lines?

Note #7: Every week I willingly, devotionally submit and suffer through movies like Nuremberg. I go to certain films with a reasonable expectation that they will instill a sense of being trapped, existential ennui, feelings of melancholy and even depression, etc.

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