Daily

Go to the 49-minute mark…

Carville: “The last eight polls are all the same. 72%, 73% of the country…call it 75% of the country doesn’t want Biden to run again. That’s a big fuckin’ number, man.”

Maher: “That’s a very big number [for] something that is crucial…it’s ridiculous.”

Carville: “Biden vs. Nikki Haley. 49% to 43%. I have never seen an incumbent president at 43%. Do people actually know Nikki Haley’s position on anything? Naah.”

Maher: “Haley is another ‘this is as good as it gets’ Republican. It’s not going to get better than [Republican candidates like her]. There is no imaginary Alan Alda-from-The West Wing Republican. Am I right?”

Carville: “You’re right in that over recent years….[the Republicans] have stupid voters.”

Maher: “This is why they hate you. You just said ‘stupid voters’ and…I like to channel everybody’s side. They’re saying ‘yeah, okay maybe we’re stupid but do you think you’re doing stupid things in your own way? Like pregnant men?’ That’s what they say, and I get it.”

Carville: “About 10% or 11% of Democrats describe themselves as progressive liberals. Survey after survey, and these people are annoying, silly. And most people don’t know what they’re talking about. And the number of MAGA people among Republicans is 65%. So we pay a greater price for 10% of progressive wokesters than the Republican pay for 65% of their people. The identity people on the left are silly…they’re not evil…they’re just goofy. The original woke term came from a black jazz musician who was born in Shreveport and died in Houston. And then over-educated coastal white people got hold of the word, and they completely fucked it up and pissed everybody in the country off. If we could just get the faculty at Amherst to shut the fuck up, we’d be a lot better off.”

Carville: “Do you think that Joe Biden…if you tried to explain to Biden what woke is, do you think he could even understand it?”

Maher: “He’s like the dad who doesn’t really understand what the kids are into, but he doesn’t want to fight about it either. So when the wife is like ‘honey, the kids want to cut their dicks off and tear down statues of Lincoln’, he’s like ‘whatever, I’m watchin’ the game.'”

Carville: “Most of these older guys…they don’t even understand what [the kids] are talking about.”

It is my belief…okay, suspicion that Paul Schrader and perhaps others influenced Robert DeNiro‘s decision to bail on performing a Travis Bickle parody in the service of an Uber commercial. De Niro is still performing for Uber, still pocketing that cash…just no Travis stuff. Friendo: “Shame works.”

Please read Cenk Uygur’s 9.22 Newsweek piece that argues a statistical likelihood that President Biden might lose to Trump.

Plus a new Washington Post-ABC News poll (1,006 adults contacted between 9.15 and 9.20) has The Beast ten points ahead of Biden, 52 percent vs. 42 percent.

Not to mention this Hill opinion piece by Derek Hunter (9.20):

Uygur: “The old rule about incumbents was that if they are under 50 points in approval, they’re toast. President Joe Biden’s approval rating is under 40. There’s almost no chance he’s going to win. I’ve never heard of an incumbent polling under 40 points who went on to win reelection. When it comes to Biden, three in six recent polls had him in the thirties. In one recent poll, President Biden was at an abysmal 32 percent.”

Apologies for only just reading Leah Reich’s 9.11 N.Y. Times profile of HE’s own Kristi Coulter and her book, “EXIT INTERVIEW: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career.”

Amazon: “A candid, intensely funny memoir of ambition, gender, and a grueling decade inside Amazon.com, from the author of Nothing Good Can Come from This.”

Kristi’s brand was completely respectful and admirable before I read this, but now I’m feeling the fervor. If any veteran of the HE threads (particularly “George”) ever says anything unkind or disrespectful about Kristi I will dedicate myself to their HE termination, even if I have to do it manually on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis.

Here’s a fast and blunt assessment of Scott Feinberg’s handicapping of Best Actor and Actress hotties, posted on 9.21.23.

BEST ACTOR FRONTRUNNERS:

Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer — HE: I realize he’s a likely nominee, but he wears the same chilly, cold-eyed, alien-from-Betelguese expression in every scene.

Colman Domingo, Rustin — HE: A spirited channelling of an iconic, live-wire activist that conveys nothing except Domingo’s idea of a spirited performance. He’s so full of love and tingling energy that he almost puts you to sleep.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Killers of the Flower Moon — HE: As Ernest Burkhart, Leo is essentially playing a weak-willed, none-too-bright cockroach. He’s completely invested and believable, but who wants to concentrate upon, much less celebrate, the moral writhings of an Oklahoma yokel?

Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers — HE: A masterful, onion-peeled, drop-by-drop performance of an unhappy older fellow with a snappy tongue…a history professor humming with resentment…sad and smart and as honest as performances of this type get.

Bradley Cooper, Maestro — I haven’t seen it, but the word on the street is that Carey Mulligan blows Cooper off the screen.

Haven’t yet seen Adam Driver in Ferrari or Joaquin Phoenix in Napoleon, but if you ask me it’s Giamatti’s Oscar to lose. He should have won for Sideways — nobody with a brain disputes this,

BEST ACTRESS FRONTRUNNERS:

Annette Bening, Nyad — haven’t seen it but given the prickly reactions I heard in Telluride it’ll be quite the triumph for Bening to land a nomination,

Emma Stone, Poor Things — HE: Definitely the front-runner as we speak.

Margot Robbie, Barbie — HE: A likely nomination but think of Robbie’s exaggerated, chirpy-robot manner…do we really want to celebrate this kind of wind-up-doll acting?

Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon — HE: Gladstone’s intention to go for Best Actress may result in a nomination, but it’s a tactical mistake. She should go for supporting. Her campaign is strictly an identity pitch. Gladstone performs decently as Mollie Burkhart, but she has no (i.e., wasn’t given any) big moments. Most of the time she just glares at the bad guys and lies dying in bed.

Carey Mulligan, Maestro – haven’t seen it,

Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall — HE: A genuine, fully-lived-in performance — diary of a survivor of a fraught marriage.

Greta Lee, Past Lives — HE: Nope.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Origin — haven’t seen it.

As we speak it’s Stone’s Oscar to lose. If Gladstone wins it’ll be another equity-over-quality joke, thanks to the fanatical New Academy Kidz.

House speaker Kevin McCarthy is “a supernova of incandescent cynicism…he is MAGA’s greatest handmaiden…an absolutely corrupted individual…he has no conviction, he has no core, he holds no principles, he has no fidelity to the country…he has desecrated his oath of office.” — Steve Schmidt (“Why Kevin McCarthy’s government shutdown is in service of Donald Trump’s reelection“).

William Freidkin’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial begins streaming on Paramount + / Showtime between 10.6 and 10.8. Boomers and GenXers will be watching but not many under-45s, I suspect. Am I wrong?

A great many people took notice when Edward Dmytryk‘s The Caine Mutiny opened exclusively at Loew’s Capitol (B’way between 50th and 51st, directly across from the still-in-existence Winter Garden) on Friday, 6.25.54.

It was a much bigger deal to see Dmytryk’s Technicolor WW2-era film inside the cavernous Capitol (a deluxe 5000-seater where the Oscar-winning From Here to Eternity had premiered ten months earlier) than it will be for older viewers to flop on the couch and “watch” Freidkin’s film, paying sporadic attention while surfing-and-texting, feeding the pets, taking out the garbage, etc.

The Caine Mutiny’s biggest first-run competitor was Demetrius and the Gladiators, which had opened a week or so earlier at the nearby Roxy (153 West 50th, corner of 7th Avenue).

Roughly a month later Elia Kazan‘s On The Waterfront — a gritty, black-and-white, working-class drama set in wintry, down-at-the-heels Hoboken — would open at Loews Astor (1141 seats) on Wednesday, 7.28.54.

Jean Negulesco‘s Three Coins in the Fountain, a schmaltzy Rome travelogue romance, had opened on 5.20.54.

Allie Sherlock, age 18, is apparently Dublin based. (Was this video shot on Grafton Street?) Fionn Wheelan is 12 years old.

According to The Ankler’s Peter Kiefer, a jolting text message was sent last night to several writers from their agents.

It said that producers and writers “are truly on the one yard line…no deal on Thursday night but [almost certainly] by Sunday evening, or earlier. Down to two points.”

“The text also alluded to former WGA chief negotiator David Young: “Turns out the WGA negotiating committee called David and ran everything by him…last night at 5 pm they agreed to a deal. It was David who told them to go back and ask for those other two points and ‘squeeze their nuts the same way we did the agents’. That’s what happened and that’s who’s been behind the scenes this entire time, hence why it’s taking so long.”

HE friendo: “Due to the unreasonable duration of this strike, as well as considerable collateral damage heaped upon below the line personnel and outlying businesses, the WGA is trying to come back to its membership with a full victory lap on all issues.

“I’m hearing an extension of health benefits is also a sticking point for the AMPTP… they won’t relinquish [this in order] to discourage future strikes, but the WGA is being insistent.

“The AMPTP felt they’d closed a deal in principle on Thursday night, but the WGA came back with more caveats and it’s very convenient to attribute those to the hardliner not in the room: David Young. As I’ve said before, if Young had been the lead negotiator, he most likely would have advocated staying at the table, but the Guild was hellbent on this strike.”