Every year Hollywood Elsewhere subjects the leading Best Picture contenders to the Howard Hawks grading system. The legendary director is famed for having said that a really good movie (or a formidable Oscar-seeker) always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.”

Hawks also defined a good director as “someone who doesn’t annoy you.” I don’t want to sound unduly harsh or dismissive but I’m afraid that Ryan Coogler‘s writing and direction of the second half of Sinners…the blood-and-fangs section that begins with the arrival of the Irish vampires…I was increasingly annoyed all through that damn film. Honestly? I’m not a huge fan of the first half either.

How do the leading 2025 Best Picture contender films (numbering ten) rate on the Hawks chart? I’ll bang this out tomorrow.

I wish I could subject Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet to the Hawks test. All I’ve heard from admirers is that it ends with a really great scene (i.e., a performance of Hamlet inside the Globe theatre), but no one has mentioned two other standouts. Do they exist? I’d really like to know.

As revealed a month ago by a Brian Entin interview with Mel Gibson, Gibson needed to do a one-day reshoot, which he figured could’ve been handled in Los Angeles. No muss or fuss. But it finally made more sense to fly to effing Bulgaria.

Gibson: “It was cheaper — more cost effective — to fly the entire American crew…buy their air tickets, fly them to Bulgaria, house them and feed them for three days and do the shooting there, rather than just shoot for one day, locally, in Los Angeles, where they all lived.”

Critical Drinker, 7:22 mark: “There’s no avoiding this…Hollywood’s obsession with identity politics has been slowly klilling [the industry] over the past ten years…I’ve talked at length about the self-righteous actors who make it their business to lectue the worl dabout how to think and act. But now, it finally feels like the culture of Hollywood is slowly trying to distance itself from a culture war they’ve clearly lost.”

From Scott Feinberg‘s latest Oscar spitball-predictions column (dated 11.11.25, paragraph #5)…

“Ella McCay (20th Century, 12.12) began screening last week, but reactions remain under embargo for social through Nov. 24 and for reviews through Dec. 10 — read into that what you will. It’s James L. Brooks’ first feature in 15 years.”

Any film that forbids the posting of reviews until 36 hours before a film’s commercial opening…the name of that tune is called “hide the ball.”

“Never crap a crapper” — Kirk Douglas on the set of Eddie Macon’s Run in Laredo, Texas — directly overheard by yours truly in the late summer of 1982.

As far as it goes, HE sincerely laments the 11.11.25 passing of Sally Kirkland, who dined out for many decades off her justly praised, Oscar-nominated titular performance in Anna (Vestron), which opened on 10.2.87 and generated a great deal of award-season heat.

In early ‘88 Kirkland, then 47, won Best Actress trophies from LAFCA, HFPA (Golden Globes) and the Spirits.

So she peaked off Anna and not incidentally lived a long, mostly rich and persistently full life (60-year career, 250 film and TV gigs) that was launched, in a sense, by being the daughter of a fashion editor mom, Sally Kirkland, Sr., and was initially sparked, in a sense, by her mid ‘60s association with the jaded, haughty perversity that was synonymous with Andy Warhol’s Factory scene.

Anna also heralded the big-time arrival of then-22-year-old model Paulina Porizkova, who played Anna’s usurper — a character based on Joanna Pacula.

My first reaction to news of Kirkland’s death was “wait, didn’t she pass three years ago?” But I was recalling Sally Kellerman, who resembled Kirkland or vice versa, and was roughly the same age (four years older).

Life passes by so very quickly, recollections tend to blend into ghoulash and every new year is more expensive than the previous one.

I was never an ardent Moody Blues fan. I like “Stop” a lot, but that was recorded before their mushy spacey trippy phase (’67 to ’70). But two days ago while driving (what else?) I happened to listen to “Legend of a Mind”, the “Timothy Leary‘s dead” song, and portions of it got to me. Portions, not the whole. It’s such a crusty psychedelic timepiece thing — I can’t imagine any self-respecting Millennial or Zoomer not turning it off. But some of it seeped in.

GoodyVibe61 (posted on on 4.21.21): “So many of the British rock royalty started out with blues or rhythm-and-blues groups. They all seem to have a before-and-after story. The early editions of the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd were heavily blues-influenced. And groups such as the Yardbirds and John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers can claim just about every British rock god as being one of their early members. I was amused to discover when I looked up the writers of ‘Stop’ that it was blues-rock legend Eric Burdon that passed on Justin Hayward‘s demos to the MB. And we shouldn’t forget where Denny Laine ended up — Wings!”

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I really, really didn’t want to see Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein. And so I ducked it at the Venice Film Festival…I didn’t want that bruising, pulverizing visual burden. I knew it would be a struggle to sit through…19th Century atmospheric wealth porn…over-budgeted, over-produced, over-CG-ed…every frame intended to wow your ass off…so damp and cold, so much snow and blood, so much cruelty and ferocity…so exactingly detailed, so sumptuous, such a deluge of production design…a period gothic extravaganza with a superman monster…can’t be killed!

I knew all this instantly because I know Guillermo, and so I continued to duck it after Venice. But two friends told me yesterday that it’s really good and rich and even quite touching toward the end, and therefore well worth-seeing. So fuck me…I sat down and began watching it today.

I’m now 130 minutes in (20 minutes to go!), and it’s certainly the most compassionate version of this over-told, over-adapted tale. Guillermo has always loved his monsters, and so, as you might expect, he loves Jacob Elordi‘s scarfaced “creature” and not even to death, and there;s no question that Elordi delivers his most soulful, career-best performance. So wounded, treated so cruelly, and yet he finds it within himself to not be totally consumed by rage…poor fellow. I felt for him. I almost wept but I was too gutted and whipped to do that.

Never let it be said that Guillermo’s Frankenstein lacks heart. It also vibrates, trembles and shudders with pain, and is constantly damp and cold and covered in ice crystals, but it ends up — surprise! — on a note of compassion and forgiveness. Good Lord, even a discreet kiss!

“And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.” — Lord Byron

But it’s cold outside in Wilton and even snowing a tiny bit now, and watching this damn thing added to my personal physical discomfort…”It’s starting to feel a lot like ‘fuck this'”…and guess what? Frankenstein is 19th Century atmospheric wealth porn…it is over-budgeted, over-produced, over-CG-ed…every fucking frame intended to wow your ass off, and in so doing this icy elephant of a Netflix film wears you down…so damp and cold, so much snow and blood, so much cruelty and ferocity…so exactingly detailed, so sumptuous, such a deluge…a period gothic extravaganza with a gentle superman monster…don’t fuck with him because he can’t be killed, but try giving him a hug, It is all of these things.

Okay, it’s over. I’ve gotten through it. 150 minutes, and thank God I’ll never have to watch it again.

I’m not kidding about Elordi giving a breakthrough performance. He really and truly deserves Best Supporting Actor consideration. Seriously!

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Yesterday afternoon the occasional, incredible stupidity of the HE commentariat manifested in spades.

The trigger was my having written that NEO, who is reportedly an incorrigible truth-teller and a total tattle-tale, had better learn to keep his fucking mouth shut when the situation requires it.

People have their secret passions and obsessions, and nobody likes a fink. Any novelist, screenwriter or playwright will tell you this. Do you think Leo Tolstoy would’ve been cool with NEO hanging around his house and ready to spill the beans at the drop of a hat?

Did HE commenters lock arms with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, O’Neil, Chekhov, Albee, Stoppard and Pinter by saying “of course…a robot without a sense of discretion is obviously bad news”? No, they dumped on me. They said (a) “hilarious that this is the first place your mind goes” (roland1824) and (b) “I like how the first place you go to is that you need the robot to lie for you” (Mike Shea).

This is what defines banal minds. Whatever great minds might be thinking, banal minds go the opposite way.

“All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and one obvious, sure-to-increase source of every wealthy family’s unhappiness is a big-mouthed robot” — from Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”.

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NEO, by the way, is 5’6″ and weighs about 65 pounds. He’s obviously not Gort, and can be slapped around at any time. HE to NEO: “You’ll take it and like it.”

Visiting Jett, Cait and Sutton’s home in West Orange, New Jersey has been HE’s default Thanksgiving destination since I moved to Connecticut in ‘22. But not this year. Come 11.27 the Jersey crew will be dinner-ing in Massachusetts so Jody and I are out in the cold.

So last week I started looking around for a nice, home-styled, non-corporate restaurant (fireplace, candles, scent of cinnamon and pine needles) to savor a Thanksgiving dinner in, and guess what? They’re all fucking closed.

Okay, we found one place that’s turkey-serving in Silvermine (Tavern at Graybarns) but they’re charging $150 a head plus extra required gratuities. No, thanks. That’s exploitive.

Right now our best (i.e., affordable) Thanksgiving option is Turkey McNuggets at McDonalds.

I think it’s shallow and rather ungracious of those nice local eateries (Westport’s Terrain, Georgetown’s Milestone) to shut their doors on Thanksgiving. They know there are many people like me with no soothing place to go. Restaurants should respect the customer base and open their hearts on this day of family togetherness.