Kamala Harris! What a wounded showhorse of a vice-president, not to mention the target of a devastating profile that will almost certainly make things worse all around. The N.Y. Times reporter, Astead W. Herndon, is a sharp-minded dude of color who doesn’t miss a trick, and he clearly has issues with her.

Five words: Herndon’s portrait is not flattering.

Kamala is basically seen as mostly a recipient of good luck and fortunate timing — a beneficiary of racial-political largesse, a diversity hire with nothing especially dynamic under the hood, a blah and brittle vp with no defining visionary issue apart from the usual incremental wonky talking points, and no personal charisma or rhetorical pizazz. A soporific, eyes-glazed-over spouter of “word salads.” A testy, defensive tactician whom no one outside of one key demographic and identity group — black females — really likes.

Plus she’s an absolutely dreadful public speaker with a weak, whiny voice and no sense of musical rhythm in her phrasings. Plus she’s quite short (5’2”) — the word is actually elfin. Plus there’s no ignoring the fact that aside from that one moment when she attacked Joe Biden over busing, Kamala never began to connect as a presidential candidate in ‘19 and early ‘20. Plus she sheds senior staffers left and right. Plus there’s that cackle. Plus she reportedly devotes huge blocks of time to her hair. (Okay, that’s a cheap shot.)

She’s basically a drip-drip, slow-motion, can’t-sell-it implosion who terrifies many democrats and is obviously an easy target for righties.

I know nothing, of course, but dead babies on gurneys? Some of them beheaded? This happened? How could anyone do this to children en masse?

'About 40 babies were taken out on gurneys… Cribs overturned, strollers left behind, doors left wide open'

Our correspondent @Nicole_Zedek continues to survey the horror scenes left behind in Kibbutz Kfar Aza where Hamas invaded and murdered dozens of Israelis in their homes pic.twitter.com/ZZCwDGkV8z

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) October 10, 2023

“When I think about what makes a good story — a tale that traces out a plot and a path from A to B — the answers don’t always square with the parts of movies I love best.

“I’m not super hot on Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, but the scenes in which Lenny conducts are magnificent and powerful, like being thrown into the middle of a sonic storm. The rest — the tortured-genius, bad-wife-guy intrigue — sometimes felt like homework. I often found myself thinking, ‘Let’s get back to the music.'” — from “When Did the Plot Become the Only Way to Judge a Movie?,” 10.8 N.Y. Times piece by Beatrice Loayza.

A recent Maestro conversation:

HE: “Emma Kiely’s Collider review of Maestro is totally in the tank for Carey Mulligan and that’s fine, but Kiely doesn’t even flirt with the possibility that Maestro might feel like weak tea to some. What is this review side-stepping? What about Cooper’s film that Kiely is being less than fully truthful about?”

Brooklyn Guy: “It’s the story of a marriage and a life between two people, one of whom just happens to be, in the view of many, one of the best composers and conductors of all time. [But the film suggests that] what Bernstein was doing with his life is just a coincidence. And yet without that, why should we even care about the marriage?

“In Michael Mann‘s Ferrari, the central couple (heterosexual) are business partners and that’s a crucial difference. There’s an actual conflict there. In Maestro the argument is over infidelity and drug use…nothing else. Bernstein’s politics? Nonexistent. Hers too. So it’s two-dimensional and complaint-driven, and yet it still manages to subscribe to a ‘great man’ theory of history.

HE: “Since Telluride I’ve been hearing that Mulligan’s big explosion-of-rage scene (while the Thanksgiving Day floats are moving past the apartment windows) is the keeper.”

Brooklyn Guy: “That’s about right.’

HE: “‘Non-existent’ politics alludes to the absence of the Tom Wolfe-chronicled Black Panther party (“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s“).

Brooklyn Guy: “A filmmaker could go either way with that, either try to make an ass of Bernstein and yuck it up at Black people eating canapés that Tom Wolfe thought they were better suited to serve (do you think it’s a coincidence that Wolfe dressed like a plantation owner?) or they could give the Bernstein’s credit for making an effort but they go neither way.”

HE: “Wolfe’s Gatsby-esque garb was a throwback to the 1920s…he presented himself as half of a wisacre and half of a genteel Southern lad from Richmond.”

…and I was surprised to discover that I immediately felt a certain compassion for Keifer Sutherland‘s Lieutenant Commander Phillip Queeg. He seemed far less certain of himself than Humphrey Bogart‘s 1954 version, who behaves in a far more high-strung and looney-toonish way at times.

Right away I said to myself, “Sutherland is not playing a bad guy…he’s playing a focused Navy lifer who’s afraid of losing face by way of slipping on a banana peel.”

And I really liked Tom Riley‘s performance as Lieutenant Willis Keith — a far more interesting performance (wittier, twitchier, faster on his feet) than the one given by Robert Francis in the Edward Dmytryk original.

I felt constantly repelled by those clunky, thick-soled black shiny shoes that all the Navy guys wear in this film. Jesus, they look awful.

As recently as 2017, the headline of a GQ article by Scott Meslow asked “Will Moviegoers Ever Be Comfortable Watching Two Dudes Kiss?“

Little did Meslow realize that six years later all kinds of explicit gay sex (i.e., the kind that goes way beyond lips and tongues) would be bustin’ out all over.

Last February I caught Episode 3 of HBO’s The Last of Us series, titled “Long, Long Time.” The episode abandoned the basic zombie apocalypse narrative in order to tell a domestic love story (a sad one) between two middle-aged men with hairy chests and beards (Nick Offerman, Murray Bartlett). My reactions were divided between earnest admiration and serious internal groaning. I wrote that I’d been permanently traumatized by a sex scene in the upstairs queen bed. Even today I shudder thinking of Bartlett blowing Offerman off-screen…Jesus God.

Just before Telluride I caught a screening of Pedro Almodovar‘s Strange Way of Life, an older-guy love story costarring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal. It contains a fair amount of joyful, slurpy kissing between the younger versions of their characters, played by José Condessa and Jason Fernández. And early on Pascal mentions “the smell of cum”…don’t ask.

A few days later I experienced a mixed reaction to Andrew Haigh‘s All Of Us Strangers, a classy, ultra-swoony, top-tier capturing of an intimate gay relationship. It costars Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, whose characters do a lot more than kiss — anal, fellatio, chest licking of sperm droplets. I knew it was a well-made film but…

Last month Todd Haynes announced that his next project will be a 1930s-era gay love story with explicit sexual content that will venture into “dangerous territory.” The lovers will be an older corrupt cop (Joaquin Phoenix) and a younger Native American character.

So if Meslow pens a GQ update, the headline might be “Will Moviegoers Ever Be Comfortable Watching Joaquin Phoenix Doing God Knows What With A Younger Dude?“

Alternate Meslow Title: “What Happened To The Good Old days of Straight-Friendly Gay Behaviors?” 2nd Alternate Title: “Do Moviegoers Want to Even Think About Older Dudes Having Sweaty Sex Together, Much Less Watch it?“

To say “times have changed in a relatively short time” is putting it mildly.

41 years ago Sidney Lumet‘s Deathtrap, an adaptation of the 1978 Ira Levin play, upset audiences with a very mild kiss between Michael Caine and Chris Reeve, whose characters are co-conspirators in an elaborate murder scheme. Reeve told “Celluloid Closet” author Vito Russo “that the kiss was booed by preview audiences in Denver, Colorado“, and that “a Time magazine report of the kiss spoiled a key plot element and cost the film $10 million in ticket sales.”

In “Murder Most Queer“, author Jordan Schildcrout described a Deathtrap screening in which an audience member screamed, “Say it ain’t so, Superman!” at the moment of the Caine–Reeve liplock.

HE’s own Dixon Steel recently reported that the audience “hissed” when he saw Deathtrap at Westwood’s Regent theatre.

When Steel attended a 1980 screening of Brian De Palma‘s Dressed To Kill at Manhattan’s New Amsterdam theatre, the audience “turned on the movie, booing and screaming at the screen” when it was revealed that the killer was Michael Caine in drag.

In short, basic hetero behaviors haven’t changed that radically over the last 40 years. Left to their own instinctual devices audiences would probably be coughing and clearing their throats at these recent depictions of gay sex. Alas, woke tyranny has taught them to shut the fuck up or risk social condemnation.