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Corruption in plain sight…no evasions or apologies. Par for the course…shrug, right?

Changpeng Zhao Wiki page excerpt: “Zhao resigned as the CEO in November 2023 after the U.S Department of Justice alleged he violated the Bank Secrecy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four months in prison in April 2024. Zhao completed his sentence by September of the same year. In October 2025, Zhao was given a presidential pardon by President Donald Trump. The pardon was given amid extensive business dealings between Binance and World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company owned by the Trump family.”

All murder victims and their families are proverbial ingredients in the same profoundly tragic equation. They wanted to live, and were horrified by the sudden malice and brutality that ended their existence, and their loved ones were gutted and devastated by the loss.

Thud.

Leo Tolstoy: “All murder victims are exactly alike, but each and every murderer is unique in this or that way.”

Posted on 10.20.25:

Last night I watched the first three episodes of Patrick MacManus‘s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, a new eight-episode Peacock series about the infamous serial killer from a suburb northwest of Chicago.

Gacy was a fat, gay sociopathic beast who had an amiable personality and liked dressing up like a clown, but who also murdered around 34 young men in the ’70s (mostly during the Jimmy Carter era)…he buried most of his victims in a crawl space under his home, and some under his garage’s cement floor. And he dumped a few in the Des Plaines river.

As long as McManus sticks to the Gacy investigation by the Norwood Park cops (and then the prosecution in the later episodes), Devil in Disguise is aces…gripping and fascinating and appropriately gloomy. It has story tension, realism, a strange Midwestern eeriness.

But when it starts veering into the lives of some of the victims and the anguish of their families after they’ve disappeared, you can feel the tension dissipating more and more…you can feel the narrative padding slowing things down.

HE to MacManus: We’d rather not familiarize ourselves with the young gay victims, and we really, really don’t want to deal with the grief of their parents. Bohhr-innnng! If you’d just stuck to the cops and the prosecutors and cut all the dramatic flotsam and jetsom, you’d have a perfect miniseries. Read the “investigation” section of Gacy’s Wikipage…it sucks you right in.

The girthy Michael Chernus, whose Gacy perf sorta kinda reminds you of John Candy in Uncle Buck and Planes Trains and Automobiles, is fairly great as this suburban monster.

The last time I wrote about Chernus was when he played the extra-marital boyfriend of Stephanie Allynne in a glum 2015 Sundance comedy called People Places Things. My basic thought was “why would the pistol-hot Allyne want to cheat on her husband with a not-all-that-handsome overweight guy?”

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Let’s start with One Battle After Another. Identify the three great scenes. The final chase and shoot-out sequence on the rolling hills highway…that’s one. The French 75 assault on the migrant camp at the very beginning…that’s two. The failed French 75 bank robbery…that’s three.

But are there any “bad” ones? Hawks said you can’t have any. At all.

Every year Hollywood Elsewhere subjects the leading Best Picture contenders to the Howard Hawks grading system. The legendary director is famed for having said that a really good movie (or a formidable Oscar-seeker) always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.”

Hawks also defined a good director as “someone who doesn’t annoy you.” I don’t want to sound unduly harsh or dismissive but I’m afraid that Ryan Coogler‘s writing and direction of the second half of Sinners…the blood-and-fangs section that begins with the arrival of the Irish vampires…I was increasingly annoyed all through that damn film. Honestly? I’m not a huge fan of the first half either.

How do the leading 2025 Best Picture contender films (numbering ten) rate on the Hawks chart? I’ll bang this out tomorrow.

I wish I could subject Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet to the Hawks test. All I’ve heard from admirers is that it ends with a really great scene (i.e., a performance of Hamlet inside the Globe theatre), but no one has mentioned two other standouts. Do they exist? I’d really like to know.

As revealed a month ago by a Brian Entin interview with Mel Gibson, Gibson needed to do a one-day reshoot, which he figured could’ve been handled in Los Angeles. No muss or fuss. But it finally made more sense to fly to effing Bulgaria.

Gibson: “It was cheaper — more cost effective — to fly the entire American crew…buy their air tickets, fly them to Bulgaria, house them and feed them for three days and do the shooting there, rather than just shoot for one day, locally, in Los Angeles, where they all lived.”

Critical Drinker, 7:22 mark: “There’s no avoiding this…Hollywood’s obsession with identity politics has been slowly klilling [the industry] over the past ten years…I’ve talked at length about the self-righteous actors who make it their business to lectue the worl dabout how to think and act. But now, it finally feels like the culture of Hollywood is slowly trying to distance itself from a culture war they’ve clearly lost.”

From Scott Feinberg‘s latest Oscar spitball-predictions column (dated 11.11.25, paragraph #5)…

“Ella McCay (20th Century, 12.12) began screening last week, but reactions remain under embargo for social through Nov. 24 and for reviews through Dec. 10 — read into that what you will. It’s James L. Brooks’ first feature in 15 years.”

Any film that forbids the posting of reviews until 36 hours before a film’s commercial opening…the name of that tune is called “hide the ball.”

“Never crap a crapper” — Kirk Douglas on the set of Eddie Macon’s Run in Laredo, Texas — directly overheard by yours truly in the late summer of 1982.

As far as it goes, HE sincerely laments the 11.11.25 passing of Sally Kirkland, who dined out for many decades off her justly praised, Oscar-nominated titular performance in Anna (Vestron), which opened on 10.2.87 and generated a great deal of award-season heat.

In early ‘88 Kirkland, then 47, won Best Actress trophies from LAFCA, HFPA (Golden Globes) and the Spirits.

So she peaked off Anna and not incidentally lived a long, mostly rich and persistently full life (60-year career, 250 film and TV gigs) that was launched, in a sense, by being the daughter of a fashion editor mom, Sally Kirkland, Sr., and was initially sparked, in a sense, by her mid ‘60s association with the jaded, haughty perversity that was synonymous with Andy Warhol’s Factory scene.

Anna also heralded the big-time arrival of then-22-year-old model Paulina Porizkova, who played Anna’s usurper — a character based on Joanna Pacula.

My first reaction to news of Kirkland’s death was “wait, didn’t she pass three years ago?” But I was recalling Sally Kellerman, who resembled Kirkland or vice versa, and was roughly the same age (four years older).

Life passes by so very quickly, recollections tend to blend into ghoulash and every new year is more expensive than the previous one.

I was never an ardent Moody Blues fan. I like “Stop” a lot, but that was recorded before their mushy spacey trippy phase (’67 to ’70). But two days ago while driving (what else?) I happened to listen to “Legend of a Mind”, the “Timothy Leary‘s dead” song, and portions of it got to me. Portions, not the whole. It’s such a crusty psychedelic timepiece thing — I can’t imagine any self-respecting Millennial or Zoomer not turning it off. But some of it seeped in.

GoodyVibe61 (posted on on 4.21.21): “So many of the British rock royalty started out with blues or rhythm-and-blues groups. They all seem to have a before-and-after story. The early editions of the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd were heavily blues-influenced. And groups such as the Yardbirds and John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers can claim just about every British rock god as being one of their early members. I was amused to discover when I looked up the writers of ‘Stop’ that it was blues-rock legend Eric Burdon that passed on Justin Hayward‘s demos to the MB. And we shouldn’t forget where Denny Laine ended up — Wings!”

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