Politician, scientist and academic Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, is now the President-Elect of Mexico. She won the election with 58% of the vote, succeeding president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

A member of Morena, Sheinbaum served as Head of Government of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023.

She was born to a secular Jewish family in Mexico City. Her paternal grandparents (Ashkenazi Jews) emigrated from Lithuania to Mexico City in the 1920s; her maternal Sephardic grandparents emigrated from Sofia, Bulgaria, in the early 1940s to escape the Holocaust.

Wiki: “A scientist by profession, Sheinbaum received her Ph.D. in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She’s authored over 100 articles and two books on energy, the environment, and sustainable development. Sheinbaum contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in 2018 she was listed as one of BBC’s 100 Women.”

HE respects George Conway for calling paid CNN commentator and Trump apologist Scott Jennings a liar. This kind of candor rarely surfaces. Go to 5:30.

Conway: “Scott’s lying, and that’s the problem with the Republican Party…it is continually addicted to lies.” He also lamented “the degree of moral rot we have on the conservative side in politics today.”

When Jennings asked what he was supposedly lying about, Conway said “you’re lying about the law…you’re lying about what the jury was charged to find…they didn’t have to find an underlying crime…they [had to be persuaded] there was an intent to cover up an underlying crime, and the underlying crime was pretty obvious.”

Returning to the Jennings, Conway repeated that the Republican party is “suffused with lies, [and] I don’t know why this network is paying Scott to say these lies on this show…it’s ridiculous.”

This happened three days ago — sorry for not paying atttention.

Since the ’50s and more particularly the advent of ironic, put-on cinema (which arguably began with John Huston‘s Beat The Devil), there have been two kinds of movies — (1) the just-described kind in which the viewer is repeatedly told that they’re watching a half-serious, half-goof-off enterprise “in quotes”…some kind of dry jape or half-real fantasy or alternate world wank-off that sophistos can certainly enjoy (we hope you do!) but which you’re not really expected to “believe” in, and (2) classically immersive stories that have been constructed and sold as “realism” within the usual cinematic boundaries.

Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, Michael Bay, the Russo Brothers and a whole battalion of like-minded filmmakers have never made a classically immersive movie in their lives, and they never will.

But throughout much of the 20th Century immersive realism was, for the most part, scrupulously adhered to up and down the line. With the exceptions, of course, of surreal fantasies (Disney, Alexander Korda, Michael Powell, Luis Bunuel) and animated features and adventure films with occasional applications of Hal Roach-styled physical humor (George Stevens‘ Gunga Din), it was the only game in town.

I’ve always responded more to immersive cinema than to jape movies, but I’m wondering what the general preference may be these days among movie fans.

When I sit down with a film I’m ready for whatever (really), but in my heart of hearts I mostly want to submit to a world that reminds me in a thousand different ways of the world that (I know this makes me sound old-fogeyish) actually exists outside the theatre doors, the one that I live and struggle in on a daily basis. Or at least a film that strongly echoes that world.

Which is why I’ve always tended to have a problem with films that defy basic rules or natural law to such a degree that it’s impossible to sink into them. (Even if they’re fantasies.)

I’m talking about superhero bullshit, of course, and family-friendly animation and supposedly realistic dramas or dramedies that are written with a tone of such ludicrousness that the characters don’t behave in any sort of semi-logical, reality-based manner, and especially robo-action films in which guys crash through windows, fall three or four stories, land on pavement, loudly groan but nonetheless get up, shake themselves off and run off to the next adventure.

It’s funny to consider that in 1946 Howard Hawks made one of the greatest immersive, super-realistic adventure films ever (i.e., Red River) and yet a mere 13 years later had completely tipped over into the realm of self-acknowledged fake-itude with 1959’s Rio Bravo, which basically said to audiences, “Okay, guys, it’s chill time…which means, of course, that you’re watching a laid-back movie and that we’re conversing with the aid of obviously scripted dialogue and also taking an occasional time-out for a musical number.”

Hawks went back to realism with Hatari! (’62) but went completely crazy with the sound-stage, wank-western aesthetic when he made El Dorado (’66) and Rio Lobo (’70).

From David Thomson‘s “The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies,” page 318:

Owning a pair of white Mickey Mouse gloves (three fingers and a thumb) used to be a cool thing, but no longer, I fear — not in this century.

Mickey Mouse was a seminal 20th Century cartoon character, but culturally he mattered for only about 40 or 50 years. He began with Steamboat Willie (’28), grew in stature with Fantasia (’40), peaked with the Mickey Mouse Club TV series and the building of Disneyland in ’55.

I was going to buy some Mickey gloves for Sutton, but I don’t think she’d “get it.”

I again feel compelled to discuss the passing of Chance Browne, a renowned cartoonist (“Hi and Lois“) and musician and painter…an all-around good fellow.

Chance died from pancreatic cancer a little more than three months ago (3.1.24). For nearly my entire life he was one of my dearest friends. We’d bonded in the mid ’60s and held fast friendship-wise through the many decades that followed. It’s unusual to hold onto amigos for this long — for one reason or another friendo fondness tends to fade or weaken or simply run out of spirit. But not when it came to Chance.

Me to Chance’s widow, Debbie, when I first heard: “Mike Connors told me the devastating news just now. I’m so sorry, Deb. I feel truly broken…state of shock…so sorry for you and the girls. Despite the horror of the woke plague and how that affected my relationship with poor Chance, we had over 50 good years together — warm years, bountiful years…so much hilarity and spirit. My heart is shattered. Please keep me in the loop regarding any memorials or gatherings. I’m soooo sorry. Doesn’t feel real.”

I’ve mentioned once or twice that Chance became an unregenerate woke scold sometime in mid ’21, and that he began accusing me of horrendous attitudes and behaviors that had no basis in fact, emotional or otherwise.

No exaggeration, it was the single most appalling episode of my emotional life. On 9.24.22 I tapped out a longish piece about a traumatic encounter I had with him inside Wilton’s Village Market.

During that stand-off Chance looked me right in the eye and called me a piece of shit, right to my face, literally shoving a knife into our half-century-old friendship.

When he passed I decided to try and focus on the good decades and let the woke insanity go. But now the shit-stirring is back slightly because the Browne family has invited old pals to drop by the homestead later this month and share memories and probably do a bit of hugging. Given Chance’s decision in ’21 to turn into Donald Sutherland‘s character in the final scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’78), I didn’t expect an invite. And that’s fine. Our shared past can’t be fiddled with or diminished. It lives.

And yet a guy I loved for over half a century is being remembered and toasted, but because I was kicked off the bus due to not being a card-carrying wokester…aahh, let it go.

Yesterday I barely summoned the energy to catch a theatrical showing of Tony Goldwyn and Tony Spiradakis‘ Ezra…barely. Inner meditation: “Do I really want to wade through a family-conflict drama about an autistic lad in his mid teens? Really? I have to watch this fucking thing?”

But I did, and I have to admit that I found it somewhere between tolerable and decent, and at times even affecting. It’s a good, pro-level film as far as it goes. Did it bother me somewhat? Here and there, yeah, but not to a fatal degree.

The eccentric, bespectacled Ezra (played by William Fitzgerald, a real-life Asperger’s kid) exhibits all the usual Raymond Babbit traits — no touching, no eye contact, insightful, uncomfortable with emotional intensity. His divorced parents — Max (Bobby Cannavale), an excitable and immature aspiring comedian, and Jenna (Rose Byrne), a conservative, worry-wart mom — are arguing about whether Ezra needs to attend a special-needs school and maybe take suppressive medication.

Jenna and boyfriend Bruce (Goldwyn) lean towards regulation and meds while Max wants Ezra to be a free improvisational soul…the kind who wears loose shoes and thinks on his feet and even allows himself to be hugged.

There’s also Stan (Robert DeNiro), Max’s feisty dad who supports his son despite concerns about his hyper personality. (DeNiro looks better in the film, by the way. than he did at that recent lower Manhattan press conference in front of the Trump-vs.-Alvin Bragg courthouse.) There’s also Max’s friendly manager (Whoopi Goldberg), old friend Grace (Vera Farmiga), childhood pal Nick (Rainn Wilson, who’s really lost some hair and packed on the pounds), some FBI guys and even Jimmy Kimmel and Geraldo, who furtively appear in the third act.

I can’t fucking do this. It’s draining my soul as I try and summarize the anxious and busy plot, which of course involves a coast-to-coast road trip. I’m feeling weaker and weaker, I mean. The sand is running out of the hourglass.

But at least Ezra ends pleasantly, and I have to acknowledge that Cannavale, his face covered with Yasser Arafat salt-and-pepper whiskers, gives an affecting performance, even though he taxes your patience at times. HE to Cannavale: Will you please calm the fuck down? Asperger kids don’t like excessive emotionality, and neither do I.

For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg‘s tastiest and wickedest film — intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing and yet highly cerebral, dramatically complex and certainly perverse.

I watched it again last night, and whoa, mama…Vincent Cassel‘s Otto Gross (1877-1920), a real-life Austrian psychoanalyst and sensualist outlaw, is easily the most fascinating character.

Not to take anything away from the carefully calibrated performances of co-leads Michael Fassbender (Carl Jung), Keira Knightley (Sabina Spielrein) and Viggo Mortensen (Sigmund Freud), but they’re made of earnest dramatic fibre. Cassell’s Gross is a pure groin rebel, and serving of dessert.

Cassel to Le Soir: “The character of Otto Gross is special, a kind of trap…a kind of Trojan Horse! That is to say, we send him for something and he does something else. I find my character very modern. It’s a bit like the manager of the Rolling Stones finding himself dropped into a period film. And, above all, he has very good lines. So, all in all, I couldn’t refuse. I had to play this role.”

Brad Pitt has been sober for nearly eight years, but because he lost his alcoholic temper during that infamous chartered flight (on 9.14.16) and was physically abusive to Maddox, one of the six Jolie-Pitt kids…because he was a belligerent drunken dick that one time, at least two of his daughters, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, 18, and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, 15, are convinced that he’s a living embodiment of Satan and want the Pitt struck from their last names.

Shiloh has in fact filed legal papers to change her name to a Pitt-less Shiloh Jolie. Perhaps Vivienne will follow suit when she turns 18.

We all understand teens who feel estranged from their parents (I was one), but who goes into court and says in effect “strike my father’s last name from my legal history!…he doesn’t exist, his name is anathema!…I judge him damned with the devil and condemn him to molten-lava hell with all the other fallen angels, where he will writhe in terrible pain for all eternity.”

What kind of nutbag daughter thinks this way?

Why is the divorce initiated by Angelina Jolie against William Bradley Pitt still ongoing and unresolved eight years later? Sane exes don’t behave this way as a rule.

Trust me — I’m not the first person on planet earth to rhetorically ask “what exactly is Angelina’s basic psychological malfunction?”

Then again I may be thinking too narrowly. Perhaps Pitt is the devil incarnate, and therefore deserves to be hunted down with clubs and spears and burned like Joan of Arc or Oliver Reed’s Father Grandier from Ken Russell’s The Devils?

…if a movie about a struggling family dealing with a life-is-no-picnic situation…wouldn’t it be amazing if such a film wasn’t named after or didn’t focus on a character with special needs or a special affliction? Or who wasn’t strugglng with his or her sexuality and wasn’t an immigrant or a person of color or an aspiring 10-year-old drag queen or a kid dealing with his queer parents’ unhappy marriage due to one of them being in transition and the other committed to his/her natural biological cards…?

Wouldn’t it be amazing, in short, if an occasional family- or community-related movie came along that wasn’t about any of this SJW-minded, attention-demanding, vaguely woke-driven bullshit and was just about…you know, an average kid dealing with normal difficult shit…difficult because nothing is easy for kids in their early to late teens and yet the problems are more or less par for the course?

Example: What if a family movie was about an average non-homophobic straight teenaged male whose parents are reasonably stable and decent types…and who (fasten your seat belts!) likes girls but whose grades aren’t very good and who lives a life of random distractions and daydreams but at the same time is a bit of a lady-killer, a bit of an Alfie…God in heaven!! Call out the Strelnikovs!!