The MI:7 shortfall has already been kicked around, but what in blazes is happening in this world? Aced out by Sound of Freedom, okay, but by anemic Haunted Mansion?

Shakeman, Bloomfield Ave., Verona, N.J. —3:45 pm.

…for not just the diminished returns of Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Daryl F. Zanuck’s “monumental mouse” (Judith Crist’s term) but about the dwindling power of the old studio system itself.

This morning HE commenter Dean Treadway wrote something curious in the thread for “Annoying Beefalo on Baltic Beach.” He wrote “you must have been a terrible bully in school.”

Au contraire — it was often the other way around. During my horrible gulag youth I was occasionally victimized by bullies, both in fraternal and official realms. I was a provocateur, true, but the social punishment measures were brutal, even fiendish.

“Hardly a bully,” I replied. “I frequently felt alone and isolated and picked on. Mainly starting in my teens. Not always but often among rancid, herd-instinct groups in junior high and senior high (i.e., mainly in toxic New Jersey, hardly at all in Fairfield County).

“I consequently withdrew to some extent. I felt much more attached to movies and TV shows than to real life, which struck me as characterized by tiresome duty and drudgery and regulated boredom with very little in the way of discovery and adventure or, as Jim Morrison put it, “true sailing”.

And yet I had a perverse streak from an early age, rarely adhering to the straight and narrow. An instinctive oddball contrarian thing. Perhaps on some level an anarchist instinct, but more simply a healthy anti- authoritarian urge.

The first long word I learned to spell was anti–disestablishmentarianism.

Example: My Cub Scout group was hand painting fake-leather folders for personal diaries — we were simply supposed to try our hand at stylized caligraphy with the word “DIARY”’ front and center plus our names and birthdates at the bottom. I wrote the word “DAIRY” because I found it amusing.

I’m still pushing back against the bullies, except now they’re mainly from the ranks of Millennials and Zoomers.

Last night I drove all the way to Pleasantville’s Jacob Burns Film Center (45 minutes) to see Christian Petzold‘s Afire. Then I had to drive back, of course — another 45 for a total travel experience of 90 minutes.

Afire really isn’t worth all that time and gasoline. Because it requires the viewer to spend the entire running time (103 minutes) with one of the emptiest, most self-absorbed, clueless and physically unattractive characters I’ve ever hung with in my moviegoing life.

We’re speaking of Thomas Schubert‘s Leon, a fat, seemingly untalented, self-deluding writer for the first 85 or 90 minutes. And yet following a third-act tragedy that I won’t disclose, Leon suddenly becomes a gifted writer. Quelle surprise!

And so the film, we realize, isn’t as much about pudgy, fucked-up Leon as the difference between spinning your wheels for no discernible reason and writing true and straight about something real. And what improving your game can sometimes involve (i.e., a horrific inferno, the charring of flesh, the blackening of bones, being faced with terrible finality).

So the ending isn’t half bad but the first 85 or 90…God! Immature, pissed off, lost-in-the-proverbial-woods Leon obsessing about the highly attuned, rail-thin Nadja (Paula Beer) and never making any headway because he’s such a fleshy, mopey, self-deluding asshole.

Yesterday’s boilerplate: “While vacationing by the Baltic Sea, writer Leon (Schubert) and photographer Felix (Langston Uibel) are surprised by the presence of Nadja (Beer), a mysterious young woman staying as a guest at Felix’s family’s holiday home. Nadja distracts Leon from finishing his latest novel and, with brutal honesty, forces him to confront his caustic temperament and self-absorption. An encroaching forest fire threatens the group as Nadja and Leon grow closer, and tensions escalate when a handsome lifeguard and Leon’s tight-lipped book editor also arrive.”

If I was a film director I wouldn’t dare make a movie as thin, irritating and lacking in tension as the first two acts of Afire are. I was instantly annoyed and glancing at my watch and feeling sorry for myself, being stuck with this obviously not-very-good film and coping with air-conditioning that was too cold.

All I can say is thank God Schubert never gets naked, and double thank God he and Beers never do the actual deed. (Early on sex happens off-screen between Beer and another guy who’s mainly gay.) That’s not saying stuff doesn’t happen between them, or that their interactions aren’t faintly interesting from a certain perspective.

I was just grateful that Petzold respected the sensibilities of persons like myself. His discretion was gratifying. For he spared me the sight of Leon’s cashew-sized appendage…down on my knees!

In a comment HE reader Canyon Coyote tried to casually normalize beefalo + thin girl relationships, which he says are par for the course in his neck of the woods. I’ve spotted such pairings but c’mon, they were highly unusual before the obesity plague began to encroach roughly 20 years ago.

As I noted yesterday, Schubert is actually a bit heavier than John Belushi in Animal House and not that far from his appearance during his final Chateau Marmont cocaine speedball chapter, and only a few heaping plates of pasta short of obese. Just saying.

During yesterday’s federal court arraignment Donald Trump was asked by Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya for his name. “Donald J. Trump,” he replied, adding “John!” Upadhyaya then asked for his age. “Seven-seven,” he answered.

If only Trump had said “seven and seven,” his reply would have sounded half-cool. Especially coming from a guy who doesn’t drink. Because he would have been alluding to both his age and the downmarket goombah saloon drink favored by Harvey Keitel (or was it Robert DeNiro?) in Mean Streets — Seagrams 7 and Seven-Up on the rocks.

But “seven-seven” just meant he was uncomfortable with saying “seventy-seven,” which conveyed a certain insecurity or wimpishness.