Trump: Help me, Jesus…help me vanquish my enemies and lend a hand. I mean, I won and they’re trying to steal it.
Jesus: You sure?
Trump: I won it all. Georgia, Florida, North Carolina…look at the map. A wonderful, glorious thing.
Jesus: But Georgia’s still in play, no? The Atlanta vote is being counted as we speak.
Trump: But they’re trying to steal Pennsylvania, and it’s mine. I won it and they’re crooked thieves.
Jesus: Is Philly counted? Not until Friday or Saturday, I’ve heard.
Trump: The Democrats are evil. They’re manufacturing fake votes and throwing my ballots out.
Jesus: What’s my name?
Trump: Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus: Do you really expect me to step in and just…what, change your life with a wave of my hand?
Trump: It would be a good thing. The right thing.
Jesus: I don’t fix elections. I’m here to help you spiritually.
Trump: Can you get the Southern District of New York prosecutors off my back?
Jesus: I don’t do that either.
Trump: But I need your help. Or…you know, your guidance. I need to serve for another four years. I’m trying to fulfill God’s plan, as you know.
Jesus: You think?
Trump: The Evangelicals love me. They want me to strike down Roe vs. Wade. It’s my destiny.

10:55 pm [posted by a smart guy named Mike Vatis]: “Just a reminder for people losing their minds right now.  Biden was not really expected to win, and does not need to win, Texas, Florida, Georgia or North Carolina.  A landslide win by Biden that included some of those states would have been wonderful, a clear renunciation of Trumpism.  But the greater likelihood has always been that the race would come down to Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — again.  

“Plus we’ve known for a long time now that the early vote counts (i.e., the ones you’re seeing now) in Michigan and Pennsylvania would comprise election-day votes, which would favor Trump, as many Democrats voted by mail or voted early, and those votes are tallied later.  And we’ve also known that, because of the way different votes are counted in these key states, Trump’s strategy has been to (a) declare victory tonight or tomorrow morning based on the early vote counts, and (b) use the courts (and public disturbances) to stop the counting of any mail-in votes after tonight.  

“DON’T PLAY INTO HIS STRATEGY BY WETTING YOUR PANTS, PEOPLE!  

“All the votes must be counted, period.  We won’t know the results for several days.  That has always been the likely scenario, and that is what everyone should have been preparing for.  Don’t let dashed hopes of a resounding early victory for Biden now drive you into Trump’s trap of believing that Trump somehow won.  

“Also: Biden has an alternative path — if he does not win Pennsyltucky, but takes Wisco and Michigan, he can still get to 270 if he takes Arizona and the single electoral vote accorded to the Omaha congressional district.  That alternative path is still very much alive, too.  So there may still be some very good news tonight out of Arizona and Omaha.  And there may be some very good news out of Wisconsin early tomorrow morning (once Milwaukee county votes are tallied).  But Michigan and, especially, Pennsylvania, will take more time.  So be patient, and don’t do Trump’s work for him.”

10:45 pm: A recent 538 poll (posted on 11.2) had Demicratic challenger Sarah Gideon leading Republican incumbent Susan Collins in the Maine Senatorial race. The latest AP tally of today’s Maine vote has Gideon well behind Collins. In short, the 538 poll bore very little relation to what was in the minds of Maine voters.

9:55 pm: Anyone who claims he/she knew that the Biden vs. Trump vote would come down to a cliffhanger is lying. Two or three (including Joe Biden) predicted it would be closer than expected, but almost everyone believed that a decisive Biden victory was in the cards. Some were predicting a possible landslide.

What’s unfolding may well turn into a variation of Bush vs. Gore. Who knows? But what a mess, what a shocker. And there’s definitely something wrong with the polling industry. It’s infuriating that they got it so wrong.

Hey. So how’s everyone doing? pic.twitter.com/8I0XwuqM7F

— Marc Bernardin (@marcbernardin) November 4, 2020

:

9:10 pm: James Carville to MSNBC viewers — “Come down off the ledge, put away the razor blades and the Ambien….hang in there, we’re gonna be fine. The [final] count is gonna be good for Biden. I don’t mind putting the champagne on ice. I’ve waited four years for this…I don’t mind waiting another four days.”

As of right now (9:20 pm) Biden has 213 electoral votes vs. 136 for Trump. It’s all going to come down to the final tallies in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona — a good portion of the remaining votes being mail-ins.

7:50 pm: The tight numbers are horrifying. I’m going through an out-of-body experience. I feel like my brain is melting. I’m blaming the pandemic for his horrible evening, because we’re mainly talking about “live” voting and that means mostly Republican votes since righties don’t get Covid.

So yes, mail-in ballots could save Biden-Harris, but their stunning under-performance is mainly due to purported associations between Biden-Harris and hardcore p.c. lefty messaging….wokesters, cancel culture, looters, p.c. fanatics, Critical Race Theory, p.c. hatred of cisgender white guys, “Defund The Police” instead of “Re–Think The Police“, Robin DiAngelo‘s “White Fragility”, the Portland and Seattle marauders, the BLM ers and the Rosanna Arquette metaphor.

Yes, I know — there’s no rational reason to believe there’s strong linkage between the agendas of Joe Biden and odious wokesters, but how else to explain what’s happening?

You can’t tell me anyone gives a damn about Hunter Biden‘s laptop. Are older white cisgender male voters (including Cuban-Americans) afraid of Kamala Harris being President, considering Biden’s advanced age? I believe it has to be the wokester factor. Two years ago an Atlantic article reported that a vast majority of Americans hate cancel culture. Tonight they registered their displeasure, or so I strongly suspect.

Yes, Virginia…the woke left may (I say “may”) have pulled off the seemingly impossible — i.e., getting a compulsively lying, incompetent, sociopathic brute re-elected President of the United States. Maybe. Rank evil may actually triumph again. Trump supporters are voting for a form of social suicide and climate destruction They actually voted to support recklessness, incompetency and stinking-to-high-heaven corruption.

If I was a pollster I would be thinking about ways to obscure or camoflauge my appearance…fake noses, fake beards, fat suits, Woody Allen-styled fishing hats. Mobs with clubs and ax handles will be out looking for them on Wednesday morning, and I wouldn’t altogether blame them.

All along the argument against Trump has been irrefutable, but somehow the radical left has managed to weaken or dilute the argument for Biden, which is ridiculous given that he’s never been and never will be in any kind of wokester pocket. He’s a sensible, practical old-school center-lefty.

I can’t believe this is happening. I’m almost having trouble breathing. This could still come down to mail-in ballots…right? Plus all the predictions about Democrats ending up flipping the Senate in their favor…even that isn’t happening. Lindsay Graham and Susan Collins have been re-elected! Good effing God!

6:55 pm: I don’t like all these close races. Same day voting is favoring Trumo; mail-ins will mostly help Biden. There are nonetheless millions of voters out there who are flat-out loose-screw nihilists…they want to give an incompetent, lying criminal another four years, if only to spite the wokesters.

North Carolina numbers are driving me crazy. Trump has taken the lead in Ohio. Once the Pennsylvania mail-in ballots are counted (probably by Friday), it’ll be okay. I’m nonetheless nervous, anxious, biting my nails. And I’m feeling really angry at the pollsters. I want to literally punch them out.

Friendo: “The polls are off like they were in 2016. There should be a total overhaul of the polling formula. I hope to God this doesn’t extend for weeks and weeks. There’d better not be recounts.” Journo pally: “I’m feeling some 2016 deja vu.”

5:25 pm: A mere Biden victory will not be emotionally satisfying. I want Biden to beat Trump badly, or at least fairly badly. Right now…who knows? And what’s with those Trump-supporting Latino males?

5 pm: Red and blue states are voting accordingly. Biden has 85 electoral votes vs. Trump’s 55. Many millions want the beast to stay in the White House, and many other millions not only disagree but are slapping their foreheads in disbelief.

4:30 pm: This is like Oscar night only much, much better, so I guess I’ll start timestamping with running commentary starting around…uh, now. Biden has taken Virginia and Vermont, and will probably win North Carolina. Oh, and Trump has won Kentucky, West Virginia, South Carolina and…uhm, Indiana. In the cards. Florida will probably go for Trump. (Panhandle rubes + an apparently sizable percentage of Miami-Dade Latino males.) And also Georgia, it seems.

Trump: “Losing is never easy” pic.twitter.com/KzLJCwDvzS

— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) November 3, 2020

My first thought about Thomas Bezucha‘s Let Him Go (Focus Features, 11.6), which is a kind of period western, set 50 or 60 years ago, about family, horses, children, continuity, guns, axes and fingers…my first reaction was “wow, this is really well directed…so nicely composed, exacting, unafraid of silences, confidently paced, grounded.”

So right away I relaxed and settled in. This’ll be good, I told myself. Quite obviously. So well acted all around, so commanding, so nicely honed. And Guy Godfree‘s cinematography and Michael Giacchino‘s score are perfect. I was purring. I love films like this! I felt so good about it that I put some popcorn into the microwave. You know what I mean. If a film is really bringing it, popcorn completes the mood.

And then something happened around the 80-minute mark, and I went “what the hell?”

That’s all I’m going to say. I’m not going to elaborate except to say that the film, which is about a pair of grandparents (Kevin Costner, Diane Lane) who’ve lost their adult son in a fatal horse-riding accident, and months later are looking to see about the welfare of their three-year-old grandson after their son’s widow (Kayli Carter) has married a primitive bumblefuck who lives with a family of ornery polecat varmints a la Animal Kingdom and is headed by a cigarette-smoking Ma Barker sociopath (Lesley Manville)…I’ll only say that things turn rather violent around the 80-minute mark and hoo boy.

After it ended an excerpt from Barry Hertz‘s Globe and Mail review kinda pissed me off. It called Let Him Go a “skillfully executed thriller that is narrowly aimed at one demographic — audiences over 50 who like a little violence with their late-life dramas — but succeeds at entertaining just about anyone who comes across its dusty, blood-soaked path.”

So if a movie is smoothly assembled and takes its time building characters and moves at its own steady pace, it’s strictly an over-50 thing? Because…what, 45-and-under audiences require something noisier and punchier and faster-paced or they won’t sit still? My God, what’s happened to western civilization by way of movie culture? Because the cinematic value system that Hertz has described is, like, really fucked up.

Hats off to Bezucha, who directed, produced and wrote the screenplay adaptation of Larry Watson‘s same-titled 2013 novel. Bezucha knows what he’s doing. Let Him Go feels like it might have been directed by David Fincher or Fred Zinneman or William Wyler.

“He was my father…not in life but in Indy 3. You don’t know pleasure until someone pays you to take Sean Connery for a ride in the side car of a Russian motorcycle bouncing along a bumpy, twisty mountain trail and getting to watch him squirm. God, we had fun. If he’s in heaven, I hope they have golf courses. Rest in peace, dear friend.” — Harrison Ford to Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister.

I love “if he’s in heaven”…very few tributes step out of the usual realm.

In hindsight, Ford would probably agree that the motorcycle chase sequence is lively but somewhat routine, but the revolving fireplace barrier bit is a classic. Like almost everything in this 1989 film, it was perfectly choreographed and filmed, and cut just so. Tip of the hat to dp Douglas Slocombe and editor Michael Kahn.

“Oh, yeah, he’s definitely going to leave. The secret about people like [Trump} is, a lot of bluster and a lot of overcompensation, but most boys are actually cowards. And I can tell you the President does not like personal confrontation. He’ll tweet at you, but then if he sees in you in person, like was with Chris Wallace last summer, he tries to act lovey-dovey.

“It’s very typical, that middle-school bullying behavior…he’ll leave. The Secret Service and the Marines have already talked about the idea of him not leaving and who’s going to escort him out of the White House. There’s no chance that’s gonna happen. The defeat, the electoral defeat…he’ll be the third U.S. President in the last 120 years to only serve one term. That’ll be humiliating enough. I don’t think he wants to be physically escorted out of the White House by the U.S. Secret Service.

“His personality is bluster and saying things, but he really isn’t a doer that way. I think he will blow out. He’s a showman, but he actually hates the fucking job. Barack Obama has him read perfectly. [“He’s a bullshitter.”] He doesn’t like the arduous nature of the job. He doesn’t like the pain in the ass [stuff].” — former White House Communications Director, all-around New York financial hotshot and gregarious media gadfly Anthony Scaramucci, speaking with The Sun‘s Henry Holloway.

Sean Connery, the coolest, studliest and most commandingly masculine 007 of all time (especially in the first two Bonds, the mostly tech-free Dr. No and From Russia With Love) and a bald man among men when he cast aside the toupee and carved out a formidable (if spotty) post-Bond career with firmly grounded performances in The Hill, The Man Who Would Be King, The Wind and the Lion, The Untouchables, The Name of the Rose, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and The Rock…beautiful Sean Connery has risen from terra firma and is now hovering with angels.

A part of me feels a bit glum and forlorn, but then again the Scottish-born Connery had an amazing 90 years on the planet — 25 or 26 years of struggling to become a reputable actor, a bit less than 35 years at the top of the heap (Dr. No to The Rock) and the last 15 in luxurious retirement on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, in the flush Lyford Cay neighborhood.

Connery’s best Bonds (in descending order): Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, Never Say Never Again. (I’m sorry but I rewatched You Only Live Twice a while back and it hasn’t aged well.)

Finest post-Bond films: The Hill, The Red Tent, The Molly Maguires, Zardoz (a respectable failure), The Wind and the Lion, The Man Who Would Be King, Robin and Marian, A Bridge Too Far, The First Great Train Robbery, Five Days One Summer, The Name of the Rose, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt for Red October, The Russia House, First Knight, The Rock.

Mixed-bag Connery-Hitchcock outlier: Marnie, an interesting film if not exactly a good one.

Connery stinkers (in ascending order): Medicine Man, Finding Forrester, Rising Sun, Wrong Is Right.The Anderson Tapes, Family Business, Meteor.

Temperamentally Sean was rarely…well, not always a day at the beach. Nor did he need to be. He came from a working-class, rough-and-tumble background, and could flash a serious temper when riled. I’ve also heard he had quite the libido. Around the time of Wrong Is Right I heard a story about an impulsive sexual matinee with a journalist in a hotel room. I know nothing, just loose talk.

The wham-slam-bam train compartment fight he had with Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love is one of the greatest hand-to-hand bouts in cinema history.

Connery will always be remembered for dressing down Nic Cage in The Rock with the following line: “Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.”

Director-screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh (Armageddon, Die Hard With A Vengeance, the forthcoming Ice Road) confides that the “prom queen” thing was “one of the earliest lines contributed by Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, when they came in at Sean’s request to polish his dialogue.”

At that juncture Hensleigh “was working literally day and night to smooth out all the plot wrinkles required when Sean insisted that his character, SAS Captain John Patrick Mason, be re-imagined as a British national, thus requiring the almost overnight invention of the ‘aging James Bond’ character buried away in Alcatraz by the CIA and MI6.

“It’s a sad day,” Hensleigh remarks. “I loved Sean. He was difficult and demanding and made my life hell for six months, but [The Rock] was his comeback role and believe me, he knew it. I loved working with him.”

I agree with the alleged Facebook/Twitter suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop corruption story, whatever that may actually amount to. I don’t give a damn about Hunter’s alleged ickiness and neither does anyone else. Joe is the guy on the ticket, right? And not Hunter?

Will it come to light one day that Joe is faintly or moderately corrupt in some Ukraine- or China-related way? Maybe, and right now nobody gives a shit. The Hunter thing is a desperate, last-minute attempt to generate a Trump surge in the polls, and it’s not working.

Matt Taibbi has written that “attempts to squelch information about a New York Post story may prove to be more dangerous corruption than whatever Hunter Biden did with a crooked Ukrainian energy company.” Really? I don’t think so, and neither does anyone else.

Glenn Greenwald, who would love to spill battery acid on the Biden campaign, has quit The Intercept because “the news website he helped found [has] refused to publish an article he wrote on Biden unless he removed sections that were critical of the Democratic presidential nominee.” Good!

Agreed — Hunter Biden is/was a bad egg (or at least a formerly drug-addicted one) who profited from his father’s name and power and connections. This or that sundry maneuver (possibly revealed or alluded to on the infamous Hunter Biden laptops), and a lotta Ukrainian or Chinese dough in the mix.

All-too-standard stuff when it comes to problematic sons and daughters of famous wealthy guys. Icky, corrupt, not cool or admirable, etc. It doesn’t always come with the territory, but if often does.

So that’s one significant uh-oh on Biden’s side of the ledger. One.

How many Hunter Biden-level corruptions and worse (i.e., as in much, MUCH worse) are on Trump’s side of the ledger? Two or three dozen? Two or three hundred? The rank crimes and corruptions of Orange Plague are piled so much higher and are spread is so many different waya…the man’s lies and deceptions and shady deals aren’t just countless but breathtaking, and seemingly without end. C’mon, man!

On top of which the alleged odiousness of Hunter’s shenanigans have been roundly dismissed or at least deemed highly suspicious. Anyone can find the links, if they want to read the arguments.

Trump corruption stink bombs: 147 and counting.
Biden corruption stink bombs: 1.

As a friend says, “Even given that the Hunter Biden story is legitimate and should not be censored by the woke media, whatever transgressions did occur, in terms of what Joe Biden did, pale a thousand times next to the myriad documented transgressions of our president.

“Yes, the media, in recent weeks, has tried to bury the Hunter Biden story, along with QAnon and other things (and for the record: I’m not for burying any of that), but the contrast with Trump is the real story here.

“If Biden’s (lone) transgression matters so damn much, then why don’t Trump’s hundreds of transgressions matter more?”

Just a reminder that Adam Wingard‘s Godzilla vs. Kong, which wrapped almost a full year before the pandemic enfolded everything and everyone last March, is still planning to open on 5.21.21. Pic stars Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri, Eiza González, Jessica Henwick, Julian Dennison, Kyle Chandler and Demián Bichir.

Then again Dr. Fauci said today that the world probably won’t be achieving a semblance of normal until 2022. The U.S. will have a vaccine in the next few months, he said, but there’s a chance a “substantial proportion of the people” won’t be vaccinated until the second or third quarter of 2021. Remember last spring (i.e., “the good old days”) when everyone was saying the pandemic probably wouldn’t start to lift until the late fall of ’20?

On the set of 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, director Ishirō Honda confers with Shoichi Hirose (guy inside Kong suit) and Haruo Nakajima (guy inside Godzilla suit).

So Neo’s wearing a tennisball cut in Lana Wachowski‘s currently filming The Matrix 4. I realize I’ve never conveyed anything in the way of specific, adult-level reasoning, but there’s just something about a tennisball coif that rubs me the wrong way. Part of my concern in this instance is the fact that Keanu Reeves‘ follicles are a little too sparse.

And why make another Matrix movie at all? After the dual debacles of The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, which opened and collapsed 17 years ago to moans of regret and embarassment, where’s the honor in dredging it all up again? What are the odds that the newbie restores even a fraction of the mystique of the original The Matrix, which opened on 3.31.99? I’ll never forget catching it for the first time at a commercial screening at the Beverly Connection plex. I came out levitating.

Keanu Reeves was 33 or 34 when The Matrix was filmed in ’98. The film suggested that he was 25 or 26, somewhere in that realm. Neo would therefore be in his mid 40s in The Matrix 4. I’ll allow that Reeves appears to be in fairly good shape these days. He’s lost that beefiness that he’s been sporting in the John Wick films. But he’s kept the scraggly whiskers.

Project Ice Cream began principal photography in San Francisco on 2.4.20. Shooting was halted on 3.16.20 due to Covid. Shooting resumed in Berlin sometime last August. The Matrix 4 is expected to open on 12.22.21.

Received last night from Joseph McBride, author of “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career” (2006) and two other books about Welles; and cast member of The Other Side of the Wind:

“I am reserving judgment on Mank until I see it, as I always do with films. I am glad to know David Fincher and Eric Roth evidently have reworked Jack Fincher’s 1994 script, which was factually inaccurate about Orson Welles’ contribution to the screenplay of Citizen Kane.

“Film historian Robert Carringer’s research into the seven drafts of the screenplay in his 1978 Critical Inquiry essay ‘The Scripts of Citizen Kane‘ — the kind of research Pauline Kael did not bother to do — proved that the screen credit is correct: ‘Original Screen Play / Herman J. Mankiewicz / Orson Welles.’

“However, I am dismayed that Herman’s grandson Ben Mankiewicz continues to be allowed by TCM and CBS to spread lies about the script, denigrating and minimizing Welles’s contribution. I guess they don’t have fact-checkers, but then the fabled New Yorker fact-checking department fell down on the job when the magazine published Kael’s article (‘Raising Kane’) in 1971.

“[Kael] called me the day it first appeared to discuss it, and I wrote a response in Film Heritage, ‘Rough Sledding with Pauline Kael.’ Andrew Sarris wrote that I was the first scholar to study Mankiewicz’s contribution in detail, in an appendix to my essay on Kane in my 1968 book ‘Persistence of Vision: A Collection OF Film Criticism.’

“I am very, very tired of writing about this controversy over the script credit, having done so for the last 49 years, and I hope I won’t have to do it again but am concerned that I may be doing so for another 49 years.

“My role in this mishegoss has always been to try to keep the historical record accurate, as Carringer and others have also done. Perhaps the final version of Mank will handle the matter fairly; at least I hope so. In the meantime, I refer readers to my essay on the subject, ‘The Screenplay as Genre,’ in the 2009 Harvard University Press book ‘A New Literary History of America’. edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, and to Carringer’s research on the subject.