As I scan the early ‘25 cinema horizon, there is nothing that even comes close to depressing me as much as my inevitable submission to Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 (Warner Bros., 3.7). I hate this sight-unseen film so much that dark green ooze is seeping out of my ears.

On the plus side, there’s no film I’m more excited about seeing right now than Michel Franco’s Dreams, which recently premiered at the Berlinale. I knew it would be a must-see when the woked-up Jessica Chastain said she was uncomfortable about playing the wealthy but conflicted lead character.

No distributor has been announced, and I’ve been unable to find a press-screening link.

Anora doesn’t have to win everything. It’s okay — it’s still the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar.

Brutalist topliner Adrien Brody losing the SAG trophy for Best Actor and A Complete Unknown Timothee Chalamet taking it instead truly warms the cockles of my heart…thank God! I would have been crestfallen if Brody had triumphed. Brutalist haters, unite!

And hooray for Team Conclave taking SAG’s Best Ensemble. Does this mean there’s a chance that Conclave might win the top Oscar prize? Yes, there’s a decent chance of that happening. But it’s not all that likely.

Am I slightly bummed by Demi Moore snagging SAG’s Best Actress award? Yes, that bums me out a bit. Will I get over it? Yes, I will.

“I’ve worked with a lot of actresses who could be cancelled for inappropriate behaviour. It’s not just boys [who] behave that way. It happens on both sides of the street. But men don’t talk about it because they would fear [other men] would say, ‘why are you complaining?’”

— Zero Day‘s Matthew Modine speaking to the Telegraph‘s Helen Brown (2.20.25).

Pete in ’28! Please! Obviously the best and the brightest…the smartest lefty guy out there.

A few fellows have famously died during (or as a result of) coitus, but to the best of my knowledge this fate was suffered by only one woman in the showbiz realm.

One female movie character, I should say — Jane Fonda‘s Christine Bonner, a free-spirited but unhealthy young woman who dies after going to bed with Peter Finch‘s Murray Logan in Robert Stevens‘ In The Cool of the Day (’63). The film stinks.

The most famous American real-life victim of the sex-death syndrome was Nelson Rockefeller, who served as New York State governor for 14 years (1959-1973), ran for president a couple of times and then served as Gerald Ford‘s vice-president (1974-1977). On 1.26.79 Rockefeller suffered a fatal heart attack while boning 25-year-old Megan Marshack, a personal aide or mistress or both, inside a Manhattan townhouse at 13 West 54th Street.

Roughly two weeks before Rockefeller’s demise Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, a classic capturing of a Pryor stage performance, was released. During the show, which was filmed in Long Beach on 12.10.78, Pryor revealed that his father, LeRoy “Buck Carter” Pryor, had died during sex at age 53. Pryor: “He came and went at the same time.”

Felix Faure, president of France between 1895 and 1899, allegedly died while his girlfriend, actress Marguerite Steinheil, was…uhm, blowing him. Steinheil was thereafter nicknamed “kiss of death”. I’m mentioning Faure because of I’ve walked along rue Felix Faure in Cannes for many years.

I’m not including guys who died from auto-erotic asphyxiation (i.e., Michael Hutchence and David Carradine). They obviously bought it — were actively involved — tempting death. HE’s list is solely about people who didn’t see it coming and then whoosh….expiration.

Who am I missing? Movie characters, real-life victims…anyone who just keeled over at the moment or orgasm, or soon after.

Soon after they enter the Taft Hotel, Elaine Robinson (Katherine Ross) is at first puzzled and then vaguely alarmed that so many staffers are (a) effusively greeting Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) and yet (b) addressing him as “Mr. Gladstone.”

After a midget bellboy adds his own Gladstone greeting (“And how are you this evening?”) Elaine’s alarm slightly intensifies, and yet she expresses this by removing her left hand from her coat pocket and touching Ben’s right elbow.

The chaotic wedding finale aside, Elaine’s gesture represent the gentlest, most emotionally sincere and curiously touching moment in the entire film. It happens at the :15 mark.

Sometimes the dopiest attempts at humor are not only funny but lasting.

Back in ’75 three of us — myself, my cousin Chrie and a quietly sassy Manhattan dude named Carl Houk — were driving north on Route 7 (Norwalk to Wilton).

We passed a hot-dog stand I’d known for years. It had a hand-painted sign (red on black) mounted on the roof, and had always said the same generic thing — ARTS Roessler Hot Dogs**. Except this time Houk pointed out a pretty good job of vandalizing the sign, the artist having used the right shade of red paint and all…

FARTS
Roessler Hot Dogs

I couldn’t stop chuckling. Something about the owner knowing he had to re-paint the sign, but not having found the time with customers arriving each day and thinking to themseles “hmmm, yeah… FARTS.” I’d think of the sign an hour or two later and the giggles would start again. I kind of hate people who laugh excessively, but I was certainly no one to talk that day.

Here we are a half-century later and I’m still having fun with it.

Around a year after the 1975 sighting Carl Houk killed himself inside his East Village apartment. Gas oven.

** There was never an apostrophe between the T and the S.

Earlier today the progressiely-around-the-bend Spirit Awards gave Sean Baker‘s Anora their top three trophies — Best Feature, Best Director (Baker) and Best Lead Performance (Mikey Madison).

There’s a longtime HE commenter (his real-life initials are L.B.) who’s been saying all along that as much as he personally likes Anora, it won’t win many big awards as it’s too sexual and too profane, as least as far as the old farts are concerned. I think he owes the HE community an explanation about how he came to this conclusion. No big deal — just explain what told you this.

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George Armitage is gone at the age of 83? Sorry to hear….sorry and sad, but at least my evening’s activity is decided upon. Grosse Point Blank (’97) and the great Miami Blues (’90).

The early ’90s to early aughts were Armitage’s directing heyday, thanks to the critical huzzahs and decent box-office earnings generated by Blues and Blank.

Armitage began as an exploitation-level director in the ’70s. Alas, the reception to Vigilante Force (’76), a crude and schlocky drive-in flick that he wrote and directed and which subsequently tanked, earned poor George a 14-year stretch in movie jail. Then, as noted, he was out and fancy free during the ’90s.

But then Armitage wrote and directed The Big Bounce (’04), which did so poorly — $50 million to shoot, $6.8 million domestic box-office — that he was sent back to jail, and that time they threw away the key.

Vigilante Force “was the creation of writer and director George Armitage, who saw his career temporarily derailed when Vigilante Force flopped. It would take till 1990’s Miami Blues and then 1997’s Grosse Point Blank for him to get back on track, and by then it was too late for him to establish himself as anything but a cult curio with film buffs wondering what he might have achieved with more opportunities.” — from a review in the UK-based The Spinning Image.

We are clearly living right now under something fairly close to a post-democratic reactionary dictatorship.

I have no problem with Trump going after woke derangement, DEI and trans gender insanity, but the DOGE stuff is scary and some of the new terms seem outrageous, like Trump’s calling Zelensky a dictator, lying about his having started the Ukraine war and insisting upon mineral rights as a basis for a U.S.-Ukraine relationship.

Dissenters and anti-Trumpers are out there, obviously, but we’re in the thick of a semblance of fascist rule all the same. No strong opposition…everyone falling into line. Heads are spinning. Many Democrats still appear to be woozy, in shock. Not a developing situation, but one that’s happening right now and right here.

Earlier today Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman openly wondered if a scary, authoritarian, non-democratic government could actually happen here:

“I’ve rarely experienced such a bone-chilling reaction as the one I had watching Walter Salles‘ I’m Still Here. The movie itself, especially the first hour, is powerful. But that’s not what it was; I’ve seen plenty of powerful political films.

“What felt new to me — and intensely disquieting — was taking in a saga of repression like this one and wondering if it now had the potential to happen in America. I felt as if it was a question I’d never had to ask myself before.

“It’s not as if there hasn’t been staggering oppression within the confines of the United States. When you watch a movie drama about racism, from To Kill a Mockingbird to Malcolm X to Fruitvale Station, you’re seeing the scalding reality of systemized injustice.

“But I’m talking about something different: the specter of dictatorship.

“In 249 years, that has never defined America. And as we all struggle to wrap our heads around the question of what the second Trump term will mean, how far it will go, how much the rule of law is threatened, and how much freedom will be lost — the question of whether, in fact, it can happen here — it’s clear to me now more than ever that the movies have been teaching us about all this for decades.

We are not in the world of Costa-Gavras‘s Missing (’82), which I regard as the most chilling drama about a South Anerican fascist dictatorship and the secret murdering of leftist dissenters. American progressives are not being “disappeared,” of course, but this kind of oppression is closer than some of us might realize.