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In the same way that Mitch McConnell will never step down despite his freezing episodes, doddering Joe Biden will never throw in the towel until he’s forced to. He could be drooling and wearing diapers in a wheelchair, and he still wouldn’t quit.

Anyone who’s spent family time with an elderly grandfather or great-grandfather knows he’s too old to be President, and that it’s at least theoretically possible that he could become Woodrow Wilson during the last couple years of his second term, if not sooner…God forbid.

So given the impossibility of Trump winning against Biden, we’re all stuck with a muttering, slurring, wispy-voiced, physically healthy but obviously-less-than-mentally-alert President between now and 1.20.29, when Joe will be 86. (He’s now 80 — his 86th birthday will be on 11.20.28.)

Joe is holding things together and making some good moves (his strong support of the ongoing Ukraine defense effort is commendable) but there’s no question that he’s too old for the job. And I am literally terrified of Kamala Harris becoming president.

Every time I listen to Joe give a speech I sink into depression. God, how I miss the oratorical snap and cadence of Barack Obama or, for that natter, JFK.

If there was an activist God trying to make things better for American citizens from time to time, He/She/It would convince Joe to admit reality and throw in the towel and thereby allow the two most appealing gubernatorial heir apparents — Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer — to compete for the 2024 Democratic nomination. And then one or the other could run against Nikki Haley, and then things would feel right again.

Haley is a conservative, but she’s not a crazy sociopath — she’s sane and practical in the Glenn Youngkin mode.

As one who’s visited Morocco three times (and Marrakech twice — mid ’70s + the 10th annual Marrakech Film Festival (12.3 to 12.11) I can only say how sorry I am for all the misery and suffering following last Friday’s earthquake. The epicenter was closer to the Atlas mountains and so Marrakech didn’t get hit too horribly, but I wonder what the Marrakech town square (setting of the knife-in-the back sequence in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much) and the medina look like now. I’m very, very sorry.

UPDATE: The number of people killed in Morocco’s deadly earthquake has reached 2,681, according to official stats.

🔴 LIVE updates: https://t.co/NfK0xSQUDY pic.twitter.com/UlU4HK1cS0

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 11, 2023

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HE swears by Bernard Herrmann‘s original theme music for The Twilight Zone, particularly the end title music and extra particularly the concluding chords heard between :57 and 1:17.

Herrmann’s music was only used, however, during the first season (10.2.59 through 7.1.60).

Herrmann’s haunting theme and layered orchestration was trashed and replaced with the start of The Twilight Zone‘s second season on 9.30.60 — the first episode was “King Nine Will Not Return”

The new theme, the plink-plink-plink-plink-plink-plink-plink-plink which I’ve never really approved of, was subcontracted by Lud Gluskin and composed by the Romanian-born, Paris-based Marius Constant.

The plink-plink was actually a blend of two Marius themes, “Milieu No. 2” and “Étrange No. 3,” that were spliced together.

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Woody Allen‘s Celebrity (’98) was indifferently reviewed and proved a commercial bust ($12 million budget, $5.1 million in ticket sales). But at least it provided the last glimpses of the young (24) and slender and floppy-maned Leo, two years after Romeo + Juliet and immediately post-Titanic, and the 22- or 23-year-old Charlize Theron, post-Devil’s Advocate, pre-Mighty Joe Young (’98) and five years before her Oscar-winning turn in Monster (’03).

As HE reader “Mark” said a few years ago, “Leo’s last foray at being young, beautiful and still knowable, and Charlize fully in control of all her powers for the first time.”

Posted on 10.21.20: I admired several things about Celebrity. Sven Nykivst‘s beautiful black-and-white cinematography, of course. I occasionally felt amused and invigorated by Leonardo DiCaprio‘s manic superstar behavior (partly his character as written, partly drawing from his own post-Titanic popularity). Donald Trump‘s droll little cameo about tearing down St. Patrick’s Cathedral offers a decent chuckle. A lot of stuff works. Woody keeps trying and trying.

I was never bored and was somewhat taken with the flavor of Allen’s screenplay (i.e, forlorn acidity), and everyone loved the last shot. But otherwise Celebrity is less than masterful.

If only Woody had taken Kenneth Branagh aside before shooting and said, “You’ve obviously developed a half-decent imitation of my way of speaking — I respect that, it’s pretty good — but play this role as yourself. Use your own British accent. Playing me is too on the nose, critics won’t like it for that, and I wouldn’t blame them.”

This in itself would’ve improved things considerably.

The other problem is the deflating drift of the thing…the downswirl feeling, the repetitive moralizing, etc. Branagh’s Lee Simon could be wry and sharp and self-aware in a fleeting, in-and-out way, but it was clear within the first 20 or 30 minutes that he was also overly anxious, obsequious and stricken with a lack of self-awareness.

After a while you knew the film had no intention of doing anything more than making sure that Lee Simon wasn’t going to experience an epiphany of any kind…a breakthrough wasn’t in the cards

Todd McCarthy called the film “a once-over-lightly rehash of mostly stale Allen themes and motifs,” and noted that “the spectacle of Branagh and Judy Davis doing over-the-top Woody impersonations creates a neurotic energy meltdown…Branagh is simply embarrassing as he flails, stammers and gesticulates in a manner that suggests a direct imitation of Allen himself…Celebrity has a hastily conceived, patchwork feel that is occasionally leavened by some lively supporting turns and the presence of so many attractive people onscreen.”

By the way: The second syllable in Peter Biskind‘s last name is not, of course, pronounced like the second syllable in David Susskind‘s name.

Chris Walken‘s Scotland-born mother, Rosalie Walken (1907-2010), was born out of wedlock to Mary Burgess Russell, a domestic servant, and Joseph Egen, a leather merchant who eventually served a five-year sentence for receiving and re-selling stolen goods.

In 1932 or at age 25, Rosalie travelled alone from Glasgow to New York City. She married Paul Joseph Walken, who ran a bakery in Astoria, Queens. Chris was born in 1943, but out of shame or revulsion or whatever Risalie never told him about Egen, Chris’s biological grandfather.

Chris’s signature as an actor has always been a subtle blend of chilly, underlying malice and a touch or two of perversity. One presumes that at least some of the menace stuff was inherited to some degree from Joseph Egen.

Here are HE’s finest films of the first eight and 1/3 months of ’23 — post-Telluride and Venice, less than four months to go.

As before, a special demerit system applies in the case of otherwise commendable, first-rate films that delivered (a) manosphere pissnado or (b) caused my soul and knees to ache due to slow pacing and density of dialogue.

1. Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (a ’70s character-driven thing, yes, but an absolutely first-rate resuscitation of this type of film)
2. Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot-au-Feu (aka Tbe Taste of Things)
3. Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (rousing nutter filmmaking…bawdy, nervy, wildly imaginative and yet a tad over-praised at Venice and Telluride due to the hothouse atmosphere of those two gatherings)
4. Guy Ritchie‘s The Covenant
5. Christian Mungiu‘s RMN
6. Eric Gravel‘s Full Time
7. Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer — first-rate film but I groaned at the one-hour mark, knowing there were two full hours to go…my soul softly wept.
8. Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie [manosphere pissnado demerit]
9. Cruise & McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One
10. Errol Morris‘s The Pigeon Tunnel (richly visual, beautifully scored doc about John le Carre…enveloping and rather dazzling)

11. Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon
12. Matt Johnson‘s Blackberry
13. Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid
14. Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest
15 Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge (official German submission for Best Int’l feature).
16. Ben Affleck‘s Air
17. Aki Kaurismäki‘s Fallen Leaves (Chaplinesque, slightly glum relationship comedy-drama..quietly touching performances from costars Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen)
17. Celine Song‘s Past Lives
18. Jean-Stephen Sauvaire’s Black Flies.
19. Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike’s Last Dance
20. Nicole Holofcener‘s You Hurt My Feelings

My recent Telluride viewing of Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers reminded me that I really, really don’t want to be subjected to explicit gay-male sex scenes, especially if they involve older guys with beard stubble. And double-triple especially if they involve Joaquin Phoenix…pushing 50, paunchy, salt-and-pepper, etc.

I wouldn’t want to watch Phoenix having sex with a woman either. Please.

Todd Haynes has told Variety’s Elsa Keslassy that his next film will be a 1930s-era gay love story starring Phoenix and a not-yet–cast younger guy, and that it will feature “explicit” or otherwise “challenging” sex scenes, and that during their discussions Phoenix had been “pushing it further into more dangerous territory, sexually.”

What the hell would “dangerous territory” mean? I could speculate but let’s not.

Compromise: Back in the 1950s and ‘60s producers used to shoot two versions of sex scenes — tamer, less graphic ones for the U.S. market plus racier, more explicit versions for Europeans. What about Haynes and Phoenix shooting explicit sex scenes for those who are game plus straight-friendly versions in the vein of Call Me By Your Name or Brokeback Mountain for fraidy cats like myself?

Jordan Ruimy’s version of the story:

“Paul Landis was a twenty-eight-year-old Secret Service agent in President Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade on November 22, 1963. Though he was a witness to the events that day, he was never interviewed by the Warren Commission, and has kept his recollections private until now, including details surrounding a key piece of evidence.” — copy on Amazon page for Landis’s “Final Witness” (Chicago Review Press, 10.10.23).

If you know anything about the JFK assassination and the Warren Commission Report, you know about the magic bullet theory. A Sept. 9th N.Y. Times article by Peter Baker summarizes a startling recollection from Landis — one that strongly challenges this long-questionable assertion. Here are the key paragraphs:

“What it [all] comes down to is a copper-jacketed 6.5-millimeter projectile.

“The Warren Commission decided that one of the bullets fired that day struck the president from behind, exited from the front of his throat and continued on to hit Texas governor John Connally, somehow managing to injure his back, chest, wrist and thigh. It seemed incredible that a single bullet could do all that, so skeptics called it the magic bullet theory.

“Investigators came to that conclusion partly because the bullet was found on a stretcher believed to have held Mr. Connally at Parkland Memorial Hospital, so they assumed it had exited his body during efforts to save his life. But Mr. Landis, who was never interviewed by the Warren Commission, said that is not what happened.

“In fact, he said, he was the one who found the bullet — and he found it not in the hospital near Mr. Connally but in the presidential limousine lodged in the back of the seat behind where Kennedy was sitting.

“When he spotted the bullet after the motorcade arrived at the hospital, he said he grabbed it to thwart souvenir hunters. Then, for reasons that still seem fuzzy even to him, he said he entered the hospital and placed it next to Kennedy on the president’s stretcher, assuming it could somehow help doctors figure out what happened. At some point, he now guesses, the stretchers must have been pushed together and the bullet was shaken from one to another.

“’There was nobody there to secure the scene, and that was a big, big bother to me,’ Mr. Landis said. ‘All the agents that were there were focused on the president.’ A crowd was gathering. ‘This was all going on so quickly. And I was just afraid that….it was a piece of evidence, that I realized right away. Very important. And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision,’ and I grabbed it.’”

“Mr. Landis theorizes that the bullet struck Kennedy in the back but for some reason was undercharged and did not penetrate deeply, therefore popping back out before the president’s body was removed from the limousine.”

“Mr. Landis has been reluctant to speculate on the larger implications. He always believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman.

“But now? ‘At this point, I’m beginning to doubt myself,’ he said. ‘Now I begin to wonder.’ That is as far as he is willing to go.”

Here’s a corresponding Vanity Fair report

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“People I trust are saying it’s somewhat underwhelming” — Toronto Film Festival friendo, passed along earlier today.