Hands down, no question…I hated John Wick, Chapter Four so much I began dreaming about strong opiates running through my blood…what a relief that would be, I mean.

Pay zero attention to the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic pissheads who’ve given George Clooney‘s The Boys in the Boat (MGM/Amazon, 12.25) failing grades. They’re wrong and mean.

I saw it a couple of weeks ago and it’s fine. It’s a familiar underdogs-take-on-the-powerful-guys sports saga…certainly not the most ambitious film of the year but it’s been assembled with clarity and confidence…it’s clean and unfettered and on-track, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with this kind of film.

I realized about halfway through The Boys in the Boat is Clooney’s best film — the least troubled or problematic, I mean — since Good Night and Good Luck (’05).

I had problems with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Leatherheads, The Ides of March, The Monuments Men, Suburbicon, The Midnight Sky and The Tender Bar. Given this 18-year history I wasn’t expecting much from The Boys in the Boat, God knows. But it surprised me. It’s really quite decent. There’s nothing really wrong with it. I’m speaking serious truth here.

Friendo: “The Boys in the Boat is the very definition of competence and likability.

“The reason for the low score is obvious. It’s allegedly a bad movie because it’s about WASP white men, and only WASP white men. Robert Daniels, the racist black critic, dissed it for that.

“And that (implicitly) is what everyone else is doing. It’s the woke militia saying: Enough movies of this sort!”

“When Seattle ‘Boys’ beat Aryan Krauts,” posted on 10.4.23:

George Clooney speaking in Boys in the Boat featurette: “These guys at the University of Washington are taking on the seniors, and then taking on the fraternity [something], and then taking on the Nazis.”

Clooney is using the usual shorthand, of course, but does he really mean that the young athletes who belonged to Germany’s 1936 Olympic rowing team were devout “seig heil” guys? Yes, Adolf Hitler saw the Berlin ’36 Olympics as a a potential proof of Aryan supremacy (Jesse Owens screwed that pooch), but how many German citizens were ardent supporters of the Nazi party that year, and how many were playing along to get along? A third or less?

How many blue-state liberals today pretend to be wokester sympathizers but are just keeping their heads down in order to stay out of trouble?

Let’s imagine, God forbid, that The Beast might win the ’24 election. He would therefore be president during the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Would it then be fair or accurate to describe the U.S. Olympic team as “the MAGAS”?

On top of which I don’t like his bee-stung nose…I never have.

Schneider: “Not that the Oscars count anyway. It used to be 100 million [viewers]…remember when they were really the Academy Awards? Barbara Walters interviewing Sean Connery or whomever was nominated that year and you’d watch with your parents and it was like ‘this is amazing!’

“And now the Academy is saying you have to have 40 percent LGBTQ-plus handicapped whatever…people who are challenged, emotionally challenged…it’s kind of like people have checked out…this isn’t really the best any more…it’s about how much they can suck up to this particular ideology of idiocy….it just turns people off…it turns me off. I haven’t watched [the Oscars] in years.”

Please start watching at 37:43 — Carolla answers with a riff about excellence in sports that is spot-on.

This morning I watched portions of the new Titanic 4K UHD Bluray (12.5), and I was seriously impressed by the super-sharp detail, enhanced compositions and generally exquisite fine-grain clarity.

My eyes recall very clearly what the film looked like 26 years ago (I saw it five or six times), and James Cameron‘s classic looks appreciably upgraded. It’s relatively rare for a 4K disc to deliver this kind of bump, but this one qualifies. The downside is that they’re charging $30 but I’m thinking I might pop for it.

@DemetriosPatsiaris (12.11): “As someone who worked on the 2011/2012 restoration/stereo conversion of Titanic, I can tell you that the raw scans looked very clean and well preserved. This UHD accurately reflects what was there, but better.”

@rmn070 (12.14): “Every review has given it a perfect score, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. As nitpicky as it sounds but I’m pretty disappointed that the changes made in 2012 have been carried over. That original sunset would have looked glorious on 4K, but looks like it will stay in SD for the rest of time. Preservation purposes, you know?”

“The N.Y. Times’ problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.” — from James Bennet‘s “When the New York Times Lost Its Way.” posted on 12.14.23 in 1843 magazine.

Bennet’s article is a rehash of what happened during the woke Times upheaval of mid July of 2020 (“Weiss Exits Over Woke Torquemada Brutality“), or roughly two months after the George Floyd riots that began in late May of 2020.