They made him look too obese, the titles are crude and unwanted, and Trump has almost certainly never gazed at the sea since he was in his teens (if then), but otherwise it’s a great concept. Somebody should create a better one.

As far as connecting and forging bonds with mainstream, grass-roots voters is concerned, that is. Not everyone in flyover country despises brainy, well-spoken urban elites and their corresponding talking points, and yet many millions obviously do.

Because with so many millions of people strapped and the pandemic spiking all over place, Average Joe voters don’t wanna know from wokester razmatazz, elite cultural issues, the “Defund the Police” slogan (as opposed to “Re-Think The Police”), the obviously necessary struggle to fight systemic racism, the support of LGBTQ issues or even (despite the critical importance) climate change.

In a chat right after Dubya beat John Kerry in ’04, a colleague said more or less the same as above. So to really connect with proles the left needs to “bubba up,” I kiddingly replied. Not so funny any more.

Average voters aren’t necessarily dismissive of these concerns, but right now they need help with bread-and-butter, kitchen-table stuff. And one reason that a lot of Middle American fence-sitters voted against Democratic progressives in the House, is that they don’t sense a lot of ground-level empathy from them.

Excerpts from “Elissa Slotkin Braces for a Democratic Civil War,” a 11.13 article by Politico‘s Tim Alberta:

Everyone knew Georgia would eventually be called for Joe Biden, and now it has been on an “apparent” basis. (A manual hand recount is currently underway.) And Donald Trump has won North Carolina. These calls follow last night’s declaration that Biden has won Arizona. And so Biden has ended up with the same electoral count — 306 — that Trump accumulated in 2016 in his victory over Hillary Clinton.

Sometime in early ’18 I bought a 64G 4K Apple TV device. It’s a great little all-in-one platform. All the basic apps plus Apple TV, iTunes movies and music, YouTube…all of it. Sorry but I liked it so much that very soon after I stopped paying for Roku usage.

Two or three days ago the Apple player stopped working. It basically froze — no home page, no nothing. My TV guy said “try pressing the home button for about 10 seconds, and if that doesn’t work, unplug it for 30 seconds and then plug it back in.” I did both…nothing. Second time, zip. I repeated these steps again last night…flatline.

I had begun to resign myself to buying a new 4K device (around $200), which struck me as deficient on the part of Apple. Today I unplugged it one more time, removing both the power cord and the HDMI cable. A minute later I plugged them back in, and for whatever fickle-ass reason the little black box was suddenly working again.

I’m relieved, of course, but the shutdown phase really pissed me off.

HE will finally see Kornel Mundruczo‘s Pieces of a Woman (Netflix, 12.30) at 5 pm today. Followed by an AFI q & a with Mundruczó, screenwriter Kata Weber and costars Vanessa Kirby and Ellen Burstyn. Pic currently has an 81% RT rating; the Metacritic rating is 69.

Yesterday was Leonardo DiCaprio‘s 46th birthday. This gives me an excuse to re-post “Son of Thinner, Intense, Floppy Mane,” which I posted exactly one year and two days ago, or a day before his 45th.

Face it — 46 is kind of a nothing birthday. When you tell people “hey, I’m turning 46”, they give you a blank look and say “so?” I feel the same way about turning 48, which I happen to be doing today. I don’t know which age is more boring, 48 or 46. All I know is that the idea of turning 50 in two years scares the crap out of me.

Here it is: Leo will be 50 before you know it because time flies when you can’t jump off the treadmill. I chatted with Leo a few days ago at a San Vicente Bungalows after-party, and between the lines I was thinking ‘wow, the train is moving faster and faster.’

DiCaprio has been a power-hitter and marquee headliner for 23 years now, or since Titanic. 27 years if you count The Boy’s Life. Nobody can ever diminish or take away the killer performances he’s given in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, The Departed, Inception, Revolutionary Road and especially The Wolf of Wall Street…a lot to be proud of. And I can’t wait for what happens with Killers of the Flower Moon.

But when I think of vintage DiCaprio I rewind back to that dynamic six-year period in the ’90s (’93 to ’98) when he was all about becoming and jumping off higher and higher cliffs — aflame, intense and panther-like in every performance he gave. I was reminded of this electric period this morning that I watched the below YouTube clip of DiCaprio and David Letterman in April ’95, when he was 20 and promoting The Basketball Diaries.

I respected Leo’s performance in This Boy’s Life but I didn’t love it, and I felt the same kind of admiring distance with Arnie, his mentally handicpped younger brother role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, partly because he was kind of a whiny, nasally-voiced kid in both and…you know, good work but later. Excellent actor, didn’t care for the feisty-kid vibes.

But a few months before Gilbert Grape opened I met DiCaprio for a Movieline interview at The Grill in Beverly Hills, and by that time he was taller and rail-thin and just shy of 20. I was sitting in that booth and listening to him free-associate with that irreverent, lightning-quick mind, and saying to myself, “This guy’s got it…I can feel the current.”

Then came a torrent: a crazy gunslinger in Sam Raimi‘s The Quick and the Dead (’95), as the delicate Paul Verlaine in Total Eclipse (’95), as himself in the semi-improvised, black-and-white homey film that only me and a few others saw called Don’s Plum (’95), as the druggy Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries (’95), as a wild, angry kid in Jerry Zak‘s Marvin’s Room, opposite Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann‘s Romeo + Juliet, as Jack Dawson in Titanic and finally as a parody of himself in Woody’s Celebrity. Eight performances, and every one a kind of sparkler-firecracker thing.

Kelly Reichardt‘s First Cow has been nominated for four Gotham Awards, but I somehow can’t imagine it winning Best Feature. My 7.17.20 review explains why, for the most part. I know nothing, but here are some half-assed guesses about some of the likeliest winners:

BEST FEATURE: The Assistant, First Cow, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Nomadland, Relic. Likeliest Winner: Nomadland.

BEST DOCUMENTARY: 76 Days, City Hall, Our Time Machine, A Thousand Cuts, Time. Likeliest Winner: Possibly 76 Days (Covid in Wuhan) but I’ve really no clue…not the first hint.

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE: Bacurau (no!), Beanpole (maybe), Cuties, Identifying Features, Martin Eden, Wolfwalkers. Likeliest Winner: Not a damn clue. Martin Eden?

BINGHAM RAY BREAKTHROUGH DIRECTOR AWARD: Radha Blank, The Forty-Year-Old Version; Channing Godfrey Peoples, Miss Juneteenth; Alex Thompson, Saint Frances; Carlo Mirabella-Davis, Swallow; Andrew Patterson, The Vast of Night. Likeliest Winner: Not the first clue…nothing.

BEST SCREENPLAY: Bad Education, Mike Makowsky; First Cow, Jon Raymond, Kelly Reichardt; The Forty-Year-Old Version, Radha Blank; Fourteen, Dan Sallitt; The Vast of Night, James Montague, Craig Sanger. Likeliest Winner: Bad Education.

BEST ACTOR: Riz Ahmed, Sound of Metal; Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; Jude Law, In The Nest; John Magaro, First Cow; Jesse Plemons, I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Likeliest Winner: Chadwick Boseman.

BEST ACTRESS: Nicole Beharie, Miss Juneteenth; Jessie Buckley, I’m Thinking of Ending Things; Yuh-Jung Youn, Minari; Carrie Coon, The Nest; Frances McDormand, Nomadland. Likeliest Winners: Frances McDormand or Jessie Buckley.

BREAKTHROUGH ACTOR: Jasmine Batchelor, The Surrogate; Kingsley Ben-Adir, One Night in Miami; Sidney Flanigan, Never Rarely Sometimes Always; Orion Lee, First Cow; Kelly O’Sullivan, Saint Frances. Likeliest Winner: Kingsley Ben-Adir.

From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s 11.12 N.Y. Times review of Barack Obama‘s “A Promised Land” (Crown, 11.17):

“The highlight of the political memoir is [always] the gossipy bit, the small detail that surprises or upends what we imagine we know. That rousing rallying cry of the Obama campaign, ‘Yes We Can’? It was David Axelrod’s idea, which Obama thought corny, until Michelle said it wasn’t corny at all.

“Think of the iconic image of Jesse Jackson crying on the night Obama won the presidency. Here, we learn that Jackson’s support for Obama’s presidential campaign was ‘more grudging’ than the enthusiastic support of his son Jesse Jackson, Jr.

“And how odd that the first family pays out of pocket for food and toilet paper. Who would have thought that it would be generals rather than civilians who counseled Obama for more restraint in the use of force throughout the eight years of his presidency? Or that he is actually a slow walker, with what Michelle called a Hawaiian walk, after so many images of him nimbly bounding up plane steps, striding across the White House lawn?

“Or, given his image of tireless discipline, that he is ‘messy’ in that childlike absent-minded way that only men manage to be, knowing that someone will see to the mess. Someone usually a woman.”

When it comes to knowing and trusting other guys, messiness, for me, is kind of a bonding thing. I love super-clean, but I trust messy guys. Messiness is not being an animal but at the same time not being ultra-anal fastidious. Guys who wash the dishes well enough but perhaps don’t wash them to the satisfaction of a kitchen Nazi…that kind of thing. Guys who forget to put the strawberries away until they turn moldy. Guys who sweep up but don’t get down on their knees and scrub. I know what “messy” is, and in this regard Barack and I probably park in the same garage.

The plug-in for HE’s slider feature (i.e., the constantly shifting photos with corresponding headlines, just below the HE header) has somehow gone awry. It has to be updated or replaced, possibly with a slider plug-in created by another company (i.e., not the creator of the version I’ve been using for the last four years). Figuring this stuff out isn’t my strongest suit, so if anyone has any ideas, please get in touch.

Thursday, 11.12 update: A couple of hours ago Bay Area HE commenter and software guy Knox Bronson updated all the necessary plug-ins, including the Revolution Slider plug-in. But it didn’t restore the slider. Now I’m waiting to talk to a Fort Worth guy (a friend of Bronson’s) who might be able to lick it.

I came across a series of digitally finessed May-December portrait photos this morning. The one below of young Richard Gere sitting with his 60ish, silver-fox counterpart (or vice versa) was the only decent one. It struck me, in any event, that Average Joes would love having a dual-portrait photo of themselves, and that gift-wise it would be a surefire hit year round, certainly when it comes to grown children of long-of-tooth types. The Photoshopping would have to be first-rate, of course, and the finished product would have to be nicely framed, etc. Just a thought.

Most of the title changes that happened with popular mainstream films have seemed right in retrospect. Big was simplistic but a better title than When I Grow Up. Phil Robinson‘s Field of Dreams was almost called Shoeless Joe (the title of W.P. Kinsella‘s source novel), but that would have diminished audience interest. At some early point Close Encounters of the Third Kind was called Watch The Skies — a nice steal from Howard Hawks‘ The Thing but a little too passive sounding.

I’m mentioning this because I was reminded earlier today of an original title that should have been used, not because it conveyed an especially clear thought or because it made any particular sense, but because it had a great sound. I’m speaking of Adam Rifkin‘s Dog Years (’18), the Burt Reynolds swan song that was changed at the last minute to The Last Movie Star. The latter is a sucky-sounding title if I ever heard one, but Dog Years…brilliant! And I don’t even know why.

Another so-to-speak “dog” movie that underwent a title change was Karl Reisz‘s Who’ll Stop The Rain (’78). Based on Robert Stone‘s “Dog Soldiers“, it’s a tangy, complex adventure thriller that flirts with dark absurdist humor here and there. It’s surely one of the most articulate collapse-of-’60s-idealism films ever, and it features one of Nick Nolte‘s greatest-ever performances, as a reluctant drug dealer and a Neal Casady stand-in whom I’ve always referred to as “Samurai” Ray Hicks.

All to say that Reisz’s film was initially titled Dog Soldiers but it tested badly with women, or so I recall reading. Distributor United Artists thought it had potential as a date movie.