First came last Tuesday’s report by New York‘s Gabriel Sherman that Hillary Clinton was being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — which, they strongly suspect, may have been manipulated or hacked.

Then yesterday’s (11.25) Washington Post piece by Eric Chenoweth, co-director of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe, reminded that there is abundant evidence that Russian hackers elaborately interfered in U.S. election process over the past several months.

And now comes today’s news that Hillary Clinton’s campaign will support an election recount effort, launched by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, in the battleground state of Wisconsin. TheWrap reports that “as of Saturday morning, Stein’s campaign raised more than $5.7 million online,” and that “the Green Party’s plan is to also file recount efforts in the swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.” Which the Clinton campaign is also down with.

Are these recounts likely to change the winner of the Presidential election? No, but if hackers (Russian or otherwise) managed to wrongfully swing a significant number of votes to Trump in any of these three states, that information should be obviously be aired and howled about.

Speaking at the recent Airb&b Open Conference in Los Angeles, Gwynneth Paltrow shared some thoughts that suggested she’s open to the idea of being in Donald Trump‘s corner, or at least that she’s potentially receptive to the social convulsions that Trump’s Presidency might bring about.

“It’s such an exciting time to be an American because we are at this amazing inflection point,” Paltrow said. “People are clearly tired of the status quo, and…it’s sort of like someone threw it all in the air and we’re going to see how it all lands. It’s very important for me, personally, now more than ever, to create a community and to remember the humanity of everybody and to create love and…understanding. The most amazing thing for me about this election is I felt…‘I don’t understand the opposition well enough at all.’ I’m not going to tell you what side I’m on, but my big takeaway was, ‘I really need to open my mind and understand better because I don’t.’”

At the very least Paltrow has joined that odious community, headed by Jimmy Fallon and Oprah Winfrey, that has sought to normalize Trump by suggesting that he’s not so bad. May she suffer for this.

This five-day-old Apple ad (“Frankie’s Holiday“) is perfect. Delicate, compassionate, handsome, performed just so, exquisite cinematography. The director is Park Pictures‘ Lance Accord, who directed “Misunderstood,” the awesome 2014 Apple ad. He also did the cinematography for Spike Jonze‘s Where The Wild Things Are and Adaptation and Sofia Coppola‘s Lost in Translation, Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette. Frankenstein’s monster is played by Everybody Loves Raymond‘s Brad Garrett, who stands 6’8″. Fair question: Apart from “Frankie” playing a Perry Como tune on an iPhone, what does this ad have to do with Apple product? Answer: Nothing.

Fidel Castro was no sweetheart, granted, but we helped to motivate and create him. Don’t kid yourself. Read your Chomsky, your I.F. Stone. Hell, any fair-minded historian. Ask Pablo Larrain, Alejandro G. Inarritu, Guillermo del Toro, Roger Durling, Alfonso Cuaron…any Latin-born filmmaker or film connoisseur who knows whereof he speaks.

Before Castro the U.S. had long regarded Latin America as fertile territory to be exploited. The Monroe Doctrine basically stated that European powers were to leave Latin America alone so we could exploit it for our own interests. The building of the Panama Canal was a constructive trade enabler, but primarily one of many operations that was mostly about serving U.S. interests.

We allied ourselves with Central and South American military regimes all through the 20th Century — i.e., right-leaning frontmen for the oligarchs (i.e., the upper-crust elite), which have always been in league with U.S. interests and the coldly capitalist, market-driven finaglings of the International Monetary Fund. And the lower classes have always had to eat bean dip.

The CIA engineered a coup d’etat in Guatamela in 1954 against a Democratically elected leader, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, because he was too independent-minded, not enough of a U.S.-favoring toady. In 1973 we helped engineer a brutal coup against Salvador Allende in Chile for the same reason.

Remember that Havana boardroom scene in The Godfather, Part II in which Batista confers with Michael Corleone and the heads of other U.S. corporate interests (i.e., the “United” Telephone & Telegraph company, United Fruit)? Did you get a feeling from that scene that these were good guys following humanistic impulses?

For all his flaws Fidel Castro was the first strong Latin American leader to assert nativist independence and tell U.S. interests to back off. As Oliver Stone‘s South of the Border explained a few years ago, almost all of South America had elected similar nativist leaders in the 21st Century — the late Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner (along with her husband and ex-President Nestor Kirchner), Paraguay’s Fernando Lug and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa — a sea change that was partly inspired by Castro.

We tried to oust and assassinate Castro in the ’60s, remember. We enabled him to be an alarmist and, for a time, to rally the Cuban people against us. We gave him the rationale, the fuel to run Cuba with a severe ideological hand — no question. If Castro was a tyrannical asshole, the U.S. provided the abusive influence that led to that mentality.

Who doesn’t admire Fidel Castro for leading a hard-won guerilla campaign against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, the manifestly corrupt U.S.-backed general who ran that exploited country from 1952 to ’59?  Castro campaigned, fought and organized against Batista’s government from ’52 on. He did nearly two years in jail, from ’53 to ’55. He left Cuba for Mexico, and then returned with 81 comrades in December 1956. But their ranks were quickly thinned by gunfire and whatnot, and so the Castro revolution began in the hills of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountains with less than 20 guys. Their numbers grew. They fought like motherfuckers for just over two years. As admirers of The Godfather, Part II will tell you, the Batista government fled the country right around New Year’s Eve 1958 along with Michael Corleone, Fredo Corleone, Hyman Roth, Sen. Pat Geary…they all got the hell outta there.

Then came Castro’s visit to the States, the seizing of elite Cuban property, the Cuban firing squads, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April ’61`, the ’62 Cuban Missile Crisis, the exile of the Marielitos that led to the arrival of Antonio Montana in Miami and the resultant deaths of Frank Lopez and Detective Mel Bernstein. Not to mention the constant taunting and defiance of several U.S. Presidents, Kennedy in particular. The years flew by and Fidel hung on with the beard and the cigars, the tenacity and the belligerence. Even with President Obama’s recent relaxing of relations and for all the music and all the classic ’50s autos, Castro’s Cuba is still is an impoverished, down-at-the-heels place with all kinds of repressive measures against gays and political dissent. 

And now Fidel is dead at age 90. He was undoubtedly a shit as well as a taskmaster, visionary and tireless propagandist. Quite the legendary figure. You can’t say he didn’t swagger around or that he didn’t have a steel pair. Communists are made, not born. Castro was on the right side of history in the ’50s, but after taking power in Cuba…well, remember the dictator in Woody Allen‘s Bananas who said that the new language of San Marcos would now be Swedish and that everyone would have to change their underwear every half-hour? Castro obviously wasn’t that bad but he wasn’t exactly Simon Bolivar either.

Posted in N.Y. Times on 11.22 — “Democrats’ Leadership Fight Pits West Wing Against Left Wing” by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman: “Struggling to respond to Donald J. Trump’s victory, a group of shellshocked Democrats moved swiftly to endorse Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, hoping that he would be a fresh face for a party with a depleted bench.

“But after steadily adding endorsements from leading Democrats in his bid to take over the party, Mr. Ellison is encountering resistance from a formidable corner: the White House. (It’s not highly significant to note that Ellison is African-American, but it does add to the intrigue.)

“In a sign of the discord gripping the party, President Obama’s loyalists, uneasy with the progressive Mr. Ellison, have begun casting about for an alternative, according to multiple Democratic officials close to the president.

“The battle pits the titans of the Democratic Party against one another, with Mr. Obama’s camp at odds with figures like Chuck Schumer, the new Senate Democratic leader, and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.”

This “making of La La Land” video posted yesterday. A real pleasure. Moves right along, makes you want to see the film. Until producer Jordan Horowitz comes along at 2:02 and says the following: “We really wanted to cast someone out of the music world. For that Keith role. And John [Legend] came along…” Except Horowitz speaks in that infuriating 21st Century patois known as “uptalk” in which every sentence comes with a questioning tone (i.e, “is it okay if I say this?”), and so he actually says “we really wanted to cast someone out of the music world?? For that Keith role??” I’m unable to listen to the substance of any person’s thoughts when this vocal tick interferes. It goes without saying that real men don’t use uptalk. Never, ever.

HE Quote #1: “Fences is straight, plain, direct. Life is hard, pain is passed along, pride is a burden, the burden is a bitch. This is a great film.” HE Quote #2: “Denzel Washington’s performance is eloquent, emotionally affecting, smooth and damn near close to perfect…heartfelt and beautifully refined.” HE Quote #3: “Fences for Best Pic, Best Director, Best Actor (Denzel), Best Supporting Actor & Actress (Mykelti Williamson, Viola Davis)…count on it.”

With Silence, Collateral Beauty and Passengers yet to be seen, HE’s 25 Best Films of 2016 are as follows & in this order — totally on a personal preference basis, zero consideration given to award-season politicking or Oscar predictions:

(tied for #1) Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea and Damien Chazelle‘s La La Land;

(2) Denzel Washington‘s Fences;

(3) David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water;

(4) Luca Guadagnino‘s A Bigger Splash;

(5) Ezra Edelman‘s O.J.: Made in America;

(6) Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle;

(7) Paddy Breathnach and Mark O’Halloran‘s Viva;

(8) Robert Eggers‘ The Witch;

(9) Gavin Hood‘s Eye in the Sky;

(10) Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight;

(11) Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson;

(12) Karyn Kusama‘s The Invitation;

(13) Bob Nelson‘s The Confirmation;

(14) Vikram Gandhi‘s Barry;

(15) Peter Berg‘s Patriot’s Day (especially the Act Two Watertown sequence);

(16) Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Lobster (even though it dies around the 75 minute mark);

(17) Richard Tanne‘s Southside With You;

(18) Whit Stillman‘s Love & Friendship (awaiting subtitled Bluray so I can understand everything Kate Beckinsale is saying with her blase, lah-lah British accent);

(19) John Lee Hancock‘s The Founder;

(20) Mike Birbiglia‘s Don’t Think Twice;

(21) Clint Eastwood‘s Sully;

(22) Todd Phillips‘ War Dogs;

(23) Jean-François Richet‘s Blood Father (best popcorn wanker B-movie of the year);

(24) Ben Wheatley‘s High-Rise;

(25) Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon‘s Sausage Party.

Most Overpraised Film of the Year, hands down: 10 Cloverfield Lane

Acknowledgment: This list is actually composed of 26 films, but I felt I couldn’t cut one of them out to even things off at 25. If and when Silence makes the cut (which I’m 95% sure it will) the grand tally will be at 27. No, I couldn’t in good conscience include Arrival, which I respected in certain ways but which mainly irritated me all to hell.

Two days ago I regretfully passed along a Boxofficemojo report about Warren Beatty‘s Rules Don’t Apply having averaged $59 per screen in 1100 situations last Tuesday night. The hope was that things would improve once the Thanksgiving family crowd began going to the plexes. Well, maybe the numbers will uptick today and tomorrow but yesterday Rules, playing on 2382 screens nationwide, earned $285K for a $120 average. Which represented a slight decline over Wednesday’s haul of $315K and a $132 average. Again, I’m sorry.

I could post a David Poland-style piece about all the things I’m thankful for today blah blah, but it hit me the other night how enormously thankful I am to be able to see movies at a truly great movieplex that really knows how to make a film look and sound as good as it gets. That would be the Hollywood Arclight, which I hit every week or so or at least two or three times a month. A visited a couple of nights ago, and I popped my head into four or five cinemas just to check out the projection quality and sound levels, and everything looked and sounded perfect. I mean wowser, as in “how much better could this be?”

I was at the Key West Film Festival last weekend, and I have to say that the projection standards in that town’s main theatre didn’t hold a candle to what the Arclight delivers. (Too small screen, so-so sound.) The Arclight sound alone is a knockout, but also the light levels and the sharpness of the image on each and every screen. The Arclight experience (including the Sherman Oaks and Culver City plex) is absolutely first-class and top-of-the-line, and on this day after Thanksgiving (11.24) I’m truly thankful that I live in a town where I can routinely bask in this level of presentation.

Yes, I’m thankful for my friends and my sons and the many blessings of sobriety and the success of Hollywood Elsewhere and comfort of knowing how to write well and the fact I’ve led a life that has allowed me to repeatedly stroll the grand boulevards and back streets of Hanoi, Rome, Paris, New York, Zurich, Munich, Telluride, Prague, London and Boston as well as the winding country roads of Tuscany, northern rural California, Fairfield County and the Berkshires, but I am really, truly double-somersault happy for the pleasures of the Arclight. Thank you, God…thank you for this delight, this radiance, this completeness.