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Friendo: “I agree with this a thousand percent. Very glad you wrote it. Something seismic has shifted. To the point that I don’t think comparing the Harris movement to the ‘High Hopes’ JFK campaign is at all out of line. As in 1960, this is about the candidate, but it’s also about something much larger than the candidate — a major pivot from the place we’ve been (the darkness of the Trump years, which absolutely include 2020-2024). You can feel the LARGENESS of the coalition. And the votes of women — of all stripes — are going to add up to a tsunami. Trump, the showbiz con man, suddenly looks like the old, dark, grim establishment.”

“When my mom got into her 80s, we had to deal with periodic medical issues. Fainting. Falls. Broken bones. Luckily, she was in good stead with the local rescue squad because she faithfully attended their crab feast fund-raisers.

“Each time, my siblings and I would move heaven and earth to get her home from whatever hospital she had landed in.

“In 2003, I tried to talk one emergency room doctor into releasing her after 11 hours.

“’I’ll let her out if she can tell me who the president is,’ the doctor said.

“We both looked at my mom, expectantly.

“’George,’ she said.

“I was thrilled; W., it was.

“’George Washington,’ she finished.

“After each episode, I’d proudly tell her internist, Dr. Simon, how we had nursed her back to health.

“‘You don’t understand,’ he said with exasperation. ‘Picture your mother hanging off a ledge, holding on by five fingers. After one of these incidents, she’s hanging on by four fingers. Another incident, three fingers. And so on. You think you’ve gotten her through and you’re starting fresh, but you’re not. It’s cumulative.’

“My mom was a stubborn old bird and she hung on with two fingers, and then one, until she was 97. We gave her morphine at the end, with a bourbon chaser.

“I know that octogenarians and nonagenarians can keep their wits about them. My mom was sharp and funny into her 90s.

“But I also know they begin losing threads of the narrative, and it’s as painful to them as it is to those who care about them.

“At some point, older people find themselves on that ledge. And, as Dr. Simon taught me, each traumatic incident you pull through just leads to another.”

— posted this morning (7.13) at 7 am.

“Kamala Harris would be the first woman president, the first black woman president and the first Asian president. But I don’t vote for who will be the first. I vote for who will win, and for whatever reason Harris has never been popular.

“You can count the number of delegates she won in the 2020 primaries on one hand. As long as that hand has no fingers.

“In three years as vice-president she’s been quieter than an electric car. And like an electric car, your MAGA uncle can’t explain why she fills him with homicidal rage. Sometimes life isn’t fair, and it’s not fair that she isn’t popular.” Alas…

I’ll tell you two reasons why Harris isn’t popular. One, that cackle. And two, those word–salad statements that she’s shared in interviews.

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I don’t understand the sudden, mystifying enthusiasm for Jean Negulesco’s Daddy Long Legs, a 1955 Fred Astaire–Leslie Caron musical. I’ve always respected and half-admired this romantic fantasy flick…oh, wait.

It is my unfortunate duty to report that the horror factor in Oz Perkins Longlegs is highly effective for the first…oh, 50 or 55 minutes. Very chilling stuff, in no small part due to Maika Monroe’s riveting performance as a psychic, Clarice Starling-like FBI agent.

But once a certain satanic Marc Bolan fan is arrested and the “trance-inducing doll meets crazy mama” plotting kicks in, it all falls apart. The fucking thing doesn’t add up, makes no sense, isn’t crazy enough, and has nothing going on underneath.

I saw Longlegs with a large crowd at the AMC Lincoln Square, and when the lights came up after the closing credits you could feel the flat vibes. The crowd seemed disgruntled, murmuring “huh?” and “the fuck was that?”

Screen Anarchy ‘s J. Hurtado, Bloody Disgusting’s Meagan Navarro and /Film’s Bill Bria are all apparently delusional or at the very least dishonest.

Edward Douglas:

Jeff Sneider:

In IndieWire‘s “The 100 Greatest Westerns of All Time,” Bill Desowitz (aka BD) writes the following about Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals (’66):

“Before The Wild Bunch, there was Brooks’ marvelous ode to friendship, loyalty, and disillusionment: A prestigious film that earned two Oscar nominations for Brooks (director and adapted script) and cinematographer Conrad Hall. While it lacked the stylistic bravado and fatalistic doom of the legendary Sam Peckinpah Western, Brooks’ crack at the genre was action-packed (with a sequence aboard a fast-moving train) and philosophically insightful (with lots of sarcastic quips).

“Oil baron Ralph Bellamy hires four soldiers of fortune to rescue his kidnapped wife (Claudia Cardinale) from revolutionary leader-turned-bandit Jack Palance: Planner Lee Marvin, dynamite handler Burt Lancaster, wrangler Robert Ryan, and archer Woody Strode. Turns out Marvin and Lancaster were friends with Palance, and, sure enough, nothing is what it seems. Filmed mostly on location in Death Valley and near Lake Mead in Nevada, the 87-day shoot required lots of efficient planning and day-for-night shooting by Hall and his crew.”

How the hell does “a marvelous ode to friendship, loyalty, and disillusionment” end up in 97th place on a list of 100 great westerns? Oh, and Palance’s Jesus Razq is not a “revolutionary leader-turned-bandit” — he’s a scrappy guerilla fighter. Taking what he and his small army need to survive, but no banditry at all.

A few days I called The Professionals one of three best films of 1966:

Four years ago I posted HE’s list of the 22 greatest westerns, to wit:

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in Robert Zemeckis’ Here (Sony, 11.15), an Our Town-ish, passing-pages-of-time film, has been exclusively previewed by Vanity Fair’s Anthony Breznican.

Robert Mitchum’s career began in 1945, when he was 28. It ignited in ‘47, when he hit 30. And he was 25 when this beach photo was taken.

Mitchum looked so young in 1942 that he was barely recognizable according to “Jeff Bailey” in Out of the Past standards. Some guys peak between their mid 20s and mid 30s and some in their mid teens or early 20s. But if you haven’t peaked by age 25, you’ll never get there.

I decided at a very young age to avoid seeing Hawaii (’66), and I’ve never seen it since. It was directed by George Roy Hill, who was 44 during filming, when the more seasoned Fred Zinnemann withdrew.

As a kid I’d always hated going to church on Sundays, and so I really didn’t want to submit to Max Von Sydow‘s Reverend Abner Hale character, a classic stick-up-his-ass preacher character. I never wanted to know the story or anything, and until today I didn’t know Julie Andrews‘s Jerusha Bromley Hale character dies in Part Two. I only just learned today that Gene Hackman and Carroll O’Connor had costarred. I never knew Bette Midler had a non-speaking background role.

A friend has seen it and swears Richard Harris‘s performance as Capt. Rafer Hoxworth, a whaler, was “really underrated”. The Bluray has both the roadshow version (189 minutes) as well as the general release version (161 minutes),

Wait…Jesse Eisenberg‘s A Real Pain doesn’t open until 10.18, or four months from now? I’d like to see it right now. It premiered six months ago at Sundance but this shouldn’t prevent it from playing at Telluride…right?

From Owen Gleiberman’s 1.21.24 Variety review: “Keiran Culkin‘s Benji is a loose cannon — a bro who never grew up, the kind of dude who says ‘fuck’ every fifth word, who advance-mails a parcel of weed to his hotel in Poland, and who has no filter when it comes to his thoughts and feelings. He’ll blare it all right out there.

“Since he’s a brilliant and funny guy who sees more than a lot of other people do, and processes it about 10 times as fast, he can (sort of) get away with the running monologue of hair-trigger nihilist superiority that’s his form of interaction. He can also be quite nice, and knows how to play people. Yet he is, at heart, an anti-social misfit, one who’s clinging to the recklessness of youth just at the moment he should be leaving it behind.”

Or, even worse, the apparent fact that Trumpies believe that “evil” — Donald Trump’s shameless criminality, thuggish vindictiveness, anti-fact, anti-democracy, a sociopathic loathing for the “other”, a complete absence of any sort of educated or insightful understanding of anything — isn’t such a bad deal at the end of the day.

Trump supporters are among the lowest forms of life on this planet right now. I hate wokesterism and deplore its pernicious influence more than most, but Trumpsters are pure poison. By blindly supporting a clearly destructive social virus they themselves are viruses. They would destroy democracy in order to suppress woke fanaticism.

Put them all on a large raft, tow it into deep water and sink it.

Last night I watched all three episodes of Hulu’s Cult Massacre, a new, well-honed, very thorough doc about Jim Jones. He was a paranoid user and obviously a stone sociopath, but if you ask me the real villains were his followers, which is to say his enablers.

By the same token the real monsters today are the Trump followers, or so says an HE reader who urged me yesterday to catch Cult Massacre.

“You look at Jones and his heavy-set face and tinted glasses, and listen to his maniacal repeating of cult slogans and phrases, and he really does remind you of Trump, especially against a backdrop of Kool-Aid drinkers.

“Jones’ baseline atttitude, caring for nobody but himself and willing to pull down the temple walls as long as his hold upon his devoted flock is rapt and absolute to the end…that’s about as Trumpian as it gets.

“The story is old, but the comparisons felt new to me. I’ve compared Trump to Hitler before, as many have.  But Jones feels like a closer fit.”

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Lex Fridman’s four-day-old interview with Kevin Spacey is magnificent. Completely worth the two-hour-plus investment.

Lex Fridman? It’s spelled Friedman or Freedman.

If you’re any kind of Dr. No fanatic, this nearly 19-minute catalogue of shots, set-ups, sunlight challenges and other technical and logistical hurdles during the first day of shooting in Jamaica is fascinating. Really.

Wiki summary: “Filming began on location at Palisadoes Airport in Kingston, Jamaica, on 1.16.62. The primary scenes there were the exterior shots of Crab Key and Kingston. Shooting took place a few yards from Fleming’s Goldeneye estate, and the author regularly visited the filming with friends.[62] Location filming was largely in Oracabessa, with additional scenes on the Palisadoes strip and Port Royal in St Andrew. 2.21.62, production left Jamaica with footage still unfilmed due to a change of weather.”