A friend has formulated a theory about a possible common impetus or motive shared by Martin Scorsese, 80, and William Friedkin, who was 87 when he passed on 8.7.23.

The idea is that both men, known throughout their decades-long careers for investing in headstrong, tough-nut stories about edgy characters, abandoned their traditional approaches by sanding the edges off and generating compassionate moods and social improvement vibes.

Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is obviously an outlier in his oeuvre — a tragic tale that emphasizes compassion for the Osage victims (personified by Lily Gladstone) and condemnation for the white-guy murderers (chiefly Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaporio).

Scorsese chose to ignore the dramatically compelling “birth of the FBI” saga that David Grann used in his 2017 same-titled book, and went instead for a dramatically unsatisfying (not to mention bizarre) embrace of a woke Native American perspective that basically leads nowhere until Jesse Plemons‘ Tom White character shows up at the two-thirds mark, and even then it doesn’t really pay off.

Scorsese’s goal, it seemed, was to earn social approval and atonement points from the guardians of (woke) morality. Rather than focus on anti-social criminals and rebellious oddballs, which he’d done his whole life, Scorsese seemed to be saying “okay, this time I’m going to hold the hands of the victims….instead of my usual identification with rogue sociopaths, I’m now showing what I have in my heart for the unfortunate good guys.”

Friedkin also switched up in a sense with his inexplicable removal of an N-word scene between Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider in a 2021 “director’s cut” of The French Connection. Eliminating an offensive racial slur made no dramatic sense in terms of portraying narcotics detective Popeye Doyle, a brutish racist who had no subtle or gentle sides, and it represented a betrayal of the coarse tone and hard-edged realism that led to Friedkin’s 1971 film winning the Best Picture Oscar.

And yet Friedkin approved the bizarre edit in question. Why? He may have been seized by the same impulse that led Scorsese to deliver a sympathetic or compassionate version of a murder saga. Friedkin may have thought to himself, “okay, this time I’m going to ease up on the rough-and-tumble Friedkin aesthetic….enough with identifying with tough cops and bold criminals…I’ve decided at this late stage of life to convey an understanding of the pain and harm that the N-word can generate, and so I’ve decided to accept the here-and-now and show the wokesters that even Hurricane Billy has a heart…I want to show that I understand that it’s better at this stage in our country’s social development to eliminate a painful word rather than hold on to the ethos of the gritty ’70s.”

In short, two 80something, white-haired, nearing-the-end-of-the-road directors decided to open the proverbial door and invite a little kindness and compassion into their lives and motion pictures.

What do you think my friend’s theory?

Diverse characters created for the sole reason of being diverse and box-checking woke points for their own sake.

Since premiering last Friday, South Park: Joining the Panderverse (Paramount +, 10.27) has become known as the first mainstream TV show to acknowledge and satirize woke-diverse-box check insanity.

Critical Drinker: “South Park’s Joining The Panderverse episode is a win for the silent majority of normal people caught up in the middle.,..people who are tired of this endless culture-war bullshit, and who just want some decent entertainment…South Park is the first mainstream production to openly acknowledge that yes, here is an actual problemn with how we’re making entertainment these days…yes, Hollywood is relying far too much [in the way of] lazy and tokenized diversity without any artistic integrity to back it up…yes, this is creating an increasingly antagonized relationship [between Disney] and their own customers…and yes, whatever their intentions might have been at first, Disney executives like Kathy Kennedy and Bob Iger have played a big part in this.”

In the latest South Park special “Joining the Pandaverse”, Eric Cartman asks his mother to check under his bed to make sure “Kathleen Kennedy and Disney executives are not hiding under his bed”. pic.twitter.com/7rPNAfg7jx

— Burnouts3 (@Burnouts3s3) October 27, 2023

Last night a friend wrote to complain about a line in the intro copy for the latest Oscar Poker podcast, to wit: “Sasha admits that Donald Trump MAY be a sociopath, but still thinks democrats are worse.”

My friend was mostly enraged by the “may” qualification apparently. Sasha and I have long agreed about many, many things, but not about The Beast. When she mentions him I usually just sidestep or change the subject. Yesterday, however, was a breakthrough moment when she acknowledged that he’s a sociopath.

I don’t dictate opinions to Sasha, I replied. I can only say what I think, which generally falls in the realm of sensible center-left territory. I thought it was a significant thing, however, when Sasha allowed that Trump is a sociopath, which she’s never admitted to before. The next step is admitting that he’s basically a crime-family felon — an authoritarian, uncivilized, intolerant, anti-Democratic ruffian.

She added the “and Democrats are worse” part to the intro copy. I’ve never tried to instruct Sasha about what to think or write. It’s not my style. Anyway…

“Sasha was a progressive pro-Hillary lefty before the pandemic,” I explained. “And it’s fair to say, I think, that not all right-of-the-spectrum types are necessarily evil. Position-wise and sensibility-wise Sasha isn’t all that different than Bill Maher or Dave Chappelle. Recently the pro-Israel Sasha has also express disgust about some of the more adamant pro-Hamas sentiments on the left, but who isn’t on that page?

“And you know what else? She hates it when Hollywood wokesters gang up and vote to purge and destroy iconoclasts like me, and for the last few years she’s long been an excellent friend and devoted ally in this regard.

“All in all I’m guilty of nothing worse than being an alleged ‘asshole’ of sorts…of venting opinions that the Stalinists don’t approve of…being a nervy, big-mouthed devotee of a certain late 20th Century and early 21st Century liberal aesthetic, and of being devoted to hundreds upon hundreds of great films. But there’s a whole Millennial-Zoomer gender-pronoun sector out there that wants me shunned and dismembered because they want anyone who doesn’t parrot basic woke-think doctrine…not that bad if you don’t listen to guys with H.R. Geiger Alien acid in their bloodstream like Glenn Kenny.

“Part of this animus, I’m imagining, is due to my admiration of Woody Allen and Roman Polanski.

“You should try being un-person-ed by the woke crazies and go-along cowards. It’ll have an effect upon your thinking, trust me.

I’ve said hi or bumped into Al Pacino 10 or 12 times over the decades, and he’s never been anything but calm, gracious, open-hearted and generally accomodating. Key quote regarding his occasionally florid acting style, which kicked into gear after Scent of a Woman: “I don’t mind ham as long as it ain’t spam.”

@ringwalkmedia12 Pay $25 and get to see Al Pacino! Boom! Beverly Hills tour produced! #moviestar #alpacino #hollywood #beverlyhills #usa #fyp #viral #viralvideo #viraltiktok ♬ original sound – Ringwalkmedia12

Israel's president @Isaac_Herzog in our interview: „Only now we got the note that Shani Louk has been confirmed as murdered and dead. They found her skull which means these barbaric sadistic animals simply chopped off her head.“ pic.twitter.com/BKttGyS0TU

— Paul Ronzheimer (@ronzheimer) October 30, 2023

Israel’s President Yitzchak Herzog has confirmed that the German-Israeli citizen Shani Louk has been found beheaded. “Her skull was found…that means those barbaric, sadistic animals simply chopped off her head,” Herzog has told BILD. (http://on.bild.de/BILDinfo / Datenschutz: http://on.bild.de/DSE)Barbarism

Prof. Victor Davis Hanson, 70, is obviously not a wokester, and that’s an excellent thing. He’s a sensible, articulate, well-educated guy who cares about responsible civic consciousness and American history and our Democratic institutions, etc. I ignored this YouTube ad the first few times that it played while I was doing something else, and then I began to actually listen to it.

Wiki bio: “Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, farmer, and political commentator. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Washington Times, etc. He’s a professor emeritus of Classics at California State University, Fresno, the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, and visiting professor at Hillsdale College. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and was a presidential appointee in 2007–2008 on the American Battle Monuments Commission.”

Now that Israeli troops have invaded Gaza and the brutal stuff is about to commence (and God help the Gaza residents caught in the crossfire, not to mention all the Israeli and American hostages), I’m expecting to see some serious handheld, you-are-there, Robert Capa, cinema verite, Gillo Pontecorvo Battle of Algiers footage from brave journalists….none of that long telephoto lens chickenshit stuff. Get out there and risk your lives and get that footage, or fly home.

Oscar Poker heartache is right here for the listening.

All hail Poor Things, which is basically a hipper, cooler, more baroquely imaginative and definitely a more sexual version of Barbie…basically Barbie meets a British-stamped, Victorian-era Fellini Satyricon but with similar feminist use-your-girl-power content.

Okay, Hollywood Elsewhere is looking to add a little extra income….big deal, right? I’ll be adding other features as things progress within the next couple of weeks…yeah, man. Again, here’s the link.

For nearly three decades I’ve felt dazzled by the main title sequences in David Fincher films. The awesomely jittery Se7en credits, the black-ink-flooding-a-keyboard sequence from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the cool and slick-feeling Zodiac and Social Network credits…always with a pizazzy, ahead-of-the-curve quality.

Same deal with The Killer‘s high-velocity credit sequence. The names and credits appear with a weird angle and fly by so quickly they barely have time to register. They happen so fast you’re going “wait…what?”, and then it’s off to the races. And it’s great.

I tried to snag a copy of this sequence over the weekend but failed. It’ll be viewable when The Killer starts streaming on 11.10, of course, but if you catch it in theatres try and pay close attention. It may be my second-favorite Fincher credit sequence of all time. (Sorry but the schizophrenic Se7en credit sequence, assembled by R. Greenberg & Associates, is still in first place.)

From Owen Gleiberman‘s “Is Leonardo DiCaprio Playing a Dumb Hick, a Pitiless Sociopath…or a Muddle?,” posted on 10.29:

“In Killers of the Flower Moon, Leo’s Ernest Burkhart feels less like a character of dark or even tragic impulses than like a man who, in any given scene, is what the film needs him to be.

“When he’s asked to do the ultimate dark deed — to add poison to the insulin shots his wife is taking — he carries out the task with such methodical thoughtlessness that instead of the heart of darkness opening up before us, we may feel like we’re seeing the heart of darkness closed off. Our connection to Ernest as a character should be deepening, but instead we’re on the outside looking in. Can a man slow-kill the wife he loves, without a shrug, all because he’s a dunce yokel following orders?

“There’s a disorienting lack of background to much of what takes place in Killers of the Flower Moon. Like how Robert DeNiro’s William Hale brought this scheme of organized murder into being. How Hale himself, a public friend and benefactor of the Osage, evolved into a genocidal terrorist is never even addressed — his terse heartlessness is presented as a fait accompli. And Ernest Burkhart’s compliance in the scheme is presented with the same quality of rote objectivity. It’s as if they’ve all been doing this their whole lives.

“The film is scrupulously true to the terrible facts of the Osage murders. Yet the answer to the ‘why?’ of how the Reign of Terror happened — that these men were heartless racists — is an accurate answer that still doesn’t always feel like a dramatically full answer.

“As we watch Mollie waste away, Lily Gladstone acts with a sorrowful bewilderment that haunts us, but the fact is that Killers of the Flower Moon is a movie that asks us to spend three-and-a-half hours in the shoes of her affectless deceptive scoundrel of a husband, who by the end we may feel we understand less than we did at the beginning.”

I respect Minnesota Congressperson Dean Phillips‘ intention to run against Joe Biden in New Hampshire and perhaps beyond. I admire his courage in speaking out (a lot of people are angry at him for doing this) and openly sharing his fears about Biden’s electability and trying to goad others into challenging Biden also.

He’s honestly concerned about Biden’s numbers being too low, which they are. He’s genuinely concerned that Trump might prevail in ’24. Plus he’s thoughtful and well-spoken.

But Phillips isn’t high-profile enough to launch a credible New Hampshire challenge, and he’s not good-looking like a movie star. His eyes are too small and beady-ish, and his nose is bigger than Bill Maher’s. But I’m glad he’s doing this regardless. At least someone on the Democratic side is trying to shake things up.