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The surging revolutionary power of #MeToo feminism in the late 20teens had nothing to do with the death of Daniel Craig’s James Bond character?

Bullshit. Double triple quadruple quintuple bullshit.

The Bond producers (in particular Barbara Broccoli) had to fundamentally acknowledge the new social reality and show obesiance to feminist social upheavals in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s downfall of 2017. Broccoli had to symbolically kill Bond’s sexual predator persona — the rudest and most pronounced character trait of this historically sexist dinosaur of legend — and thereby re-set the Bond brand. Obviously.

Launched in the JFK era, the Bond franchise has been profitably rolling along for over 60 years, and various new Bonds have come along at various intervals — Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig.

And yet all during the long Bond history none of the James Bond characters were killed. Because there was obviously no need as it’s long been understood that the 007 franchise would continue to blitzkreig along with occasional replacements occurring.

But then sometime in the late 20teens Craig said to the producers that he didn’t want to be succeeded by a new guy. Instead he wanted the 007 character terminated with extreme prejudice. And for some reason Broccoli, the longtime (to the manor born) Bond producer, replied that this idea, after many decades of not even thinking of murdering 007, seemed like a good one.

And yet as we speak there are dangerous psychos out there who are insisting that the #MeToo groundswell had absolutely nothing to do with Bond being blown to pieces in No Time To Die.

Repeating: Decade after decade there was no reason to have Bond killed as they knew all along he’d coming back anyway so whadaya whadaya?

Repeating: The Bond producers had never killed Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton or Brosnan so why did they kill Craig? Obviously there was a particular motive or special reason, and don’t give me that “Oh, Craig took Barbara aside one day and just sorta kinda suggested it, and he was so persuasive that Barbara felt she had no choice” crap.

Repeating: Craig has said that the killing of James Bond (his Bond) was a necessary re–set. What he meant was that 007’s demise was decided upon as a symbolic apology gesture to the #MeToo community — as a solemn ceremonial acknowledgment that the sexist Bond of yore (even though Craig’s Bond was generally courtly, demurring and well-behaved with the ladies) had to be symbolically executed as a political–social statement — an acknowledgment of guilt, an apology to militant feminism, a ceremonial beheading of a sexual conquistador.

I for one believe that among the 30,000–plus Gazans who’ve been killed by Israeli troops since the invasion began, the vast majority have not been Hamas militants. Activist combatants are always a minority among any community engaged in (or adjacent to) armed conflict.

The basic view of the 1200 signers seems to be ”you may be right but when has war ever not been cruel and horrific?”

Just another Mad Max movie, which is fine but it’s just another one…right?

In the spring of ’21 I bought an iPhone 12 Pro Max with 256 gigs. But after three years the phone had been running out of space, and so I recently decided to trade it in for an iPhone 15 Pro Max with 512 gigs. The idea was that I would back up the contents (photos, apps, music) to the cloud, but I hadn’t backed it up since last November, and it took hours and hours to manage this. And then when I tried to load the contents of the 12 onto the 15, it had only captured about 60% or 65%. So I went to the local Apple store and asked them to do a phone-to-phone transfer, which would deliver an exact duplicate of the 12. I showed up when the store opened at 11 am, and it took all day and still didn’t complete the task. I had to leave it there overnight. I returned the next morning and the phone-to-phone had finally completed. All in all the whole process took several days.

Apologies for the squinting.

The HD video that I have on the phone looks much better than the cruddy, splotchy quality of the YouTube version, which is what’s showing here. If I were smarter about tech stuff…maybe I’ll figure it out.

Friendo: “Andrew Sullivan said the other day that the pro-trans-kid mob includes all of liberal-progressive culture and the Democratic Party, not to mention 95 percent of HE’s readers, as well as other ‘enlightened’ forces that are doing their utmost to usher in Donald Trump’s 10-year reign of tyranny.

“What all these people are literally blind about is that they think the issue is ‘trans rights,’ or respecting the dignity and souls of people who are trans…etc.

“That’s not what the issue is about. At all.

“I utterly respect, and would fight for, the dignity, the rights and the souls of trans people. And why wouldn’t I? I’m not a bigot.

“The issue here is about whether parents, in a sane society, have the right to have autonomy over their children. The obvious answer is ‘yes, they do.’ And the reason they need that right is that children aren’t old enough to make crucial life decisions by themselves.

“Rejecting that obvious fact is the insanity of this movement.”

UPDATE: The “Aaron Taylor Johnson being offered the James Bond role” rumor is untrue. This comes straight from 007 producer Barbara Broccoli. E! is saying the same thing.

Earlier: The 33-year-old Aaron Taylor Johnson, a first-rate actor who’s been floundering around in mostly crap-level films for a good 15 years, is apparently the new James Bond.

The talk is strictly “rumored” and unofficial as we speak, but 007, who was blown into bloody scraps and shards during the finale of No Time to Die, is definitely back and alive and ready to reinvigorate a big-budget action franchise that culturally mattered between the early to mid ’60s (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball) and has been mostly smirking at its own reflection or otherwise apologizing for itself ever since.

The fact that the long-ensconced Bond caretaker producers, Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, have decided to hire another brawny white guy instead of going BIPOC with someone like Bridgerton‘s Rege-Jean Page…the apparent fact that Bond is still white tells us one thing clearly, and that’s that wokester terror and intimidation isn’t what it used to be. The radiant beauty of non-white males in whatever context is no longer accepted doctrine. The cultural page has turned and Joe and Jane Popcorn are sick of the all-white-guys=are-toxic bullshit.

Plus we all know that Daniel Craig‘s 007 was killed in No Time To Die as an apology gesture to wokester #MeToo Stalinists — a statement that said “we hear you…yes, Craig’s 007 has been a relatively mild-mannered, non-carniverous fellow with a disciplined libido, but that aside the 007 character has been a problematic chauvinist since the Connery era, and we agree that he needs to die now as a symbolic statement of empathy with and support for progressive women and the #MeToo movement.”

Alas, alpha men can’t be eliminated from film or film will die — it’s that simple. And Aaron Taylor Johnson does have big shoulders and sizable arm muscles.

You know who I liked better, the guy they should have picked? Jake Picking.

In my book Johnson has starred or costarred in exactly one grade-A film, which is when he played Count Vronsky in Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (’12). He was reasonably good as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy (’09), although the film itself is godawful in a girly way. He wasn’t bad in Matthew Vaughn‘s Kick-Ass (’10) and better than half-decent in Oliver Stone‘s Savages (’12).

But that was it. ATJ’s other films have been consistently painful or under-serving or negligible — Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Nocturnal Animals, The Wall, Outlaw King, Tenet (very small role), The King’s Man, Bullet Train (ghastly!) plus the forthcoming (and therefore no comment about) The Fall Guy, Kraven the Hunter and Nosferatu.

Just over 14 years ago I posted a relatively short riff called “Respectful Sirk Takedown” (2.22.10). Through the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and aughts I had been constantly berated and belittled by elite film mavens. telling me it was my fault, not Sirk’s, that his films had never come together in my head as wondrous servings of lush “ironic” cinema.

So in my head I finally said “enough!” and posted my critique, and boy, did I get shat and spat upon by the dweebs. I was called a lowlife troglodyte, a vomiting dog, a man without a soul.

So it feels very gratifying that Paul Schrader has just posted along the same lines, saying in effect “is it time for a reassessment of this overpraised mofo?” For years I’ve stood alone against the fiercest of winds. Now, at long last, I have good company.

HE’s original piece: The German-born Douglas Sirk has long been considered a world-class, pantheon-level filmmaker. That’s because the film dweebs have been telling us for years that the dreadfully banal soap-opera acting, grandiose emotionalism and conservative suburban milieus in his films are all of an operatic pitch-perfect piece and are meant as ironic social criticism. (Or something like that.)

The dweebs are playing an old snob game. They’re basically saying that you have to be a serious cineaste to recognize Sirk’s genius, and that if you don’t recognize it then you need to think things through because you’re just not as perceptive as you need to be.

There’s no winning against this mindset, which is somewhere between a schoolyard bully move and an intellectual con. The dweebs (and I’m talking about a very small and cloistered group of big-city critics) have put one over on us. And I’m suggesting, due respect, that the time has come to push back on Sirk and to consider him once again as the Guiding Light-level director that some (myself included) believe that he always was.

Sirk was mostly dismissed by critics of the ’50s and early ’60s for making films that were no more and no less than what they seemed to be — i.e., emotionally dreary, visually lush melodramas about repressed women suffering greatly through crises of the heart as they struggled to maintain tidy, ultra-proper appearances.

In his praise of Written on the Wind, Roger Ebert wrote that “to appreciate [this film] probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman‘s masterpieces, because Bergman’s themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message.”

Aaaah, the old concealment game! For this is the essence of the Sirk con. John Ford used to “conceal” also, but you can watch Ford’s films, or at least savor what’s good about them (despite the Irish sentimentality). If Ebert’s comment isn’t Orwellian film-dweeb speak, I don’t know what would be.

Poor Ava Gardner had recently turned 36 when the filming of On The Beach began in January of ‘59. She looked at least 45…more than a bit puffy, the ravages of a fast life. Stanley Kramer’s apocalyptic drama opened 11 months later, and it lost money, you bet — $700,000 in the red. Educated folk gave it a tumble; Joe and Jane Popcorn mostly said “no thanks”. The fertilizer line is still a howler.

Of all the films allegedly destined to play at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the only one I’m exceptionally interested in is Ali Abassa‘s The Apprentice. Co-written by Gabriel Sherman and Abassa. Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump, Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump and Martin Donovan as Fred Trump.

…but not his granddaughter Sydney…no offense. There’s much, much more to the feminine mystique than the mere possession of a nice rack.

An excerpt from Bernard Girard‘s Dead Heat on a Merry Go-Round (66) in which James Coburn‘s Eli Kotch is speaking to Camilla Sparv‘s Inga Knudson, his love interest:

Coburn: “Bean Sweeney? Did you ever read him?”
Sparv: “Who?”
Coburn: “Bean Sweeney! Fantastic. The first time I read him, I couldn’t write for six weeks. Beautiful man. Said it all.”

Before global warming March in the tristate area tended to prompt morose meditations — more wintry than springy, damp, occasionally mild but just as often a climate best ignored. Daydreams of South Beach, Key West, Turks & Caicos.

But within the last few days the air has become warmish, standing on the Westport train station platform feels less miserable and trees are starting to think about sprouting leaves.

I’ve never seen Big Jim McClain (‘52 — John Wayne vs. Hawaiian Communists) but the term “treason trail” has recently become a mental irritant. James Arness and Nancy Olson costarred.

Robert Downey, Jr.’s bordering-on-bizarre evening wear (maroon tuxedoes, broadly flared suit pants, heavy-soled shoes) should be cause for alarm among decent Americans everywhere.