I have a thing about tracks recorded by bands before they became big, and which have always been regarded as minor for the most part.

If the definition of a successful heterosexual relationship is one that lasts a long while, then I’ve pretty much been an embodiment of failure my whole life. I’m thinking it couldn’t hurt to review this life-long pattern from time to time. If you find this sort of thing icky or tedious, fine — don’t read it. But I have a lot of stored-up material, and some of it may translate into worthwhile reading. Or not.

My basic problem is that in the realm of serious, committed relationships I’ve always been emotionally and spiritually attracted to women of character, steel and substance, which is to say strong, smart, bossy women like my mother. But for whatever reason I’ve always felt less than fully “attracted” to these women on a long-term basis, and so sooner or later — sadly, lamentably — the sensual, Henry Miller or Anais Nin-type currents have always seemed to fall away.

I’ve always completely trusted and valued the various mother-figure types, but I’ve always had a strange concurrent thing for exotic fruit — unhappy or bothered women, passionate loonies like my late sister, impulsive poet-kooks, MILFs when I was in my teens and 20s, kamikaze women, curvy fly-by-nighters and gloomheads of various shapes and modes.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Conservatives don’t represent the majority view, but they’ve nonetheless managed to tip things in their favor by cheating and playing dirty and blocking fair procedure. The four horseman of the apocalypse — gerrymandering, using all kinds of nefarious tactics to keep people of color from voting, dark money and the rank misrepresentations of the electoral college.

But right-wingers’ biggest ace in the hole — the factor that helps them more than any other dishonest, underhanded maneuver in their playbook — is the young person who refuses to vote.

If younger Texas voters got on the stick Beto O’Rourke would almost certainly beat Ted Cruz, but Texas leads the nation in disaffected voters. Right now the polls seem to indicate that Cruz will prevail, and there’s one reason for this — the refusal of young voters to step up to the plate.

Aside from murder and child molesting there is no human behavior more reprehensible than refusing to take an hour or two out of a single day to vote for the best person or, failing that, the lesser of two evils. Imagine all those hundreds of thousands who could’ve held their noses and voted for the deeply unattractive, heavily compromised Hillary Clinton, which would have saved us from Donald Trump. But they couldn’t be bothered. The general understanding is that young people are too pure to vote. They have an asinine view that candidates aren’t worth voting for unless they’re truly inspirational and unfettered. They make me sick with rage.

HE to under-30 assholes: “The responsibility of a country is not in the hands of a privileged few. We are strong and we are free from tyranny as long as each one of us remembers his or her duty as a citizen. Whether it’s to report a pothole at the top of your street, or lies in a State of The Union Address, speak out! Ask those questions. Demand that truth. Democracy is not a free ride man, I’m here to tell you. But this is where we live. And if we do our job, this is where our children will live.”

Formal oath-swearings are always accompanied by an open right hand. (And sometimes with the left hand on a Bible.) But you always swear with your fingers closed, not open. Open fingers are symbolic of insincerity or a lack of solemnity. Sir Thomas More: “When a man makes an oath, Meg, he’s holding himself in his own hands, like water. And if he opens his fingers then he needn’t hope to find himself again.”

Brett Kavanaugh’s opened-fingered oath showed who and what he is — a deceptive, unreliable partisan.

Valerie Plame got it right; ditto Barack Obama.

Naomi Watts got it wrong when she played Plame in Doug Liman’s Fair Game.

Yesterday the Daily Mail ran a story about Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount, 6.26.20), which is currently lensing in the San Diego area.

The article claims that Cruise barely looks older than he did in the original Top Gun, which was shot when he was 24. But he does look a bit more creased, of course. There was no missing that fact in last summer’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout. Every 56 year-old looks older than they did in their mid 20s.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Two weeks away from starting principal photography, Annapurna bailed yesterday on Fair and Balanced, a Roger Ailes biopic to directed by Jay Roach based on a script by Charles Randolph, and costar John Lithgow as Ailes, Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly, Malcolm McDowell as Rupert Murdoch and Margot Robbie as a fictional Fox News-employed character.

Who abruptly pulls the plug on a big-name, fact-based docudrama only 14 days before the start of shooting? Answer: No one unless something else is going on. Something unusual, head-turning, perhaps turbulent.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

I could smell Venom from a long way off, and so could Tom Hardy when he said his favorite parts of the film didn’t make the final cut. So (and who could blame me?) I blew off last week’s all-media screening. Most of us understand the concept of “so bad it’s good” (which I have a place in my head for) but the critical consensus was mostly “it isn’t ludicrous enough to be enjoyable…it’s just garden-variety shitty….later.”

The Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes ratings are 35% and 30%, respectively. Seattle Times‘ critic Soren Andersen called it “perhaps the worst Marvel-derived origin story ever.” The Globe and Mail‘s Sarah-Tai Black said Venom “made me laugh so hard I started crying…a horribly scripted film so bad as to be enjoyable, but not bad enough to be good.” And so on.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Before today’s Bryant Park Hotel interview with Cold War director-writer Pawel Pawlikowski and star Joanna Kulig, I was told I couldn’t take my own photos. Which I initially found irksome but whatever. So I asked the hired photographer, a guy with a really nice Canon camera named Andy Kropa, to shoot Pawel and Joanna using window-light only, and to shoot them together and then Joanna alone. Lo and behold, the photos turned out nicely…voila!

The interview was pleasant enough but only lasted 12 minutes, partly because my digital recorder wasn’t working at first. We covered six or seven topics, and indulged in a lot of chit-chatting and cross-jabbering. I’ll expand upon portions of our talk tomorrow.

I explained to Joanna that I’m the only Gold Derby “expert” who’s included her performance as a top five Best Actress contender, but (a) big things have small beginnings and (b) I know what I’m talking about. Here’s my Joanna riff, posted on 9.25.

A saga of a difficult, in-and-out love story in Poland and France of the ’50s and early ’60s, Cold War is a stone masterpiece. It deserves to win the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar — hands down, no question. It earned a huge, sustained standing ovation at the end of last night’s New York Film Festival screening.

Cold War star & Best Actress contender Joanna Kulig — Tuesday, 10.9, 12:45 pm.

Cold War director-writer Pawel Pawlikowski

In Here and Now, Sarah Jessica Parker plays a singer named Vivienne who’s told early on that has inoperable brain cancer with a year or so to live. The film is about Vivienne grappling with the whole magillah of her life over the next 24 hours. Fabien Constant‘s homage to Cleo From 5 to 7 costars Simon Baker, Common, Jacqueline Bisset, Taylor Kinney and Renee Zellweger. Paramount will open pic in select theaters plus VOD on 11.9.

The “Michael Keaton with cancer movie” was called My Life. Directed and written by Bruce Joel Rubin, it’s about a youngish husband afflicted with terminal =cancer and at the same time expecting a child with his wife (Nicole Kidman). It ends with a gray-faced Keaton staring into the camera as he breathes his last…over and out. My Life was released nearly 25 years ago by Mark Canton’s Sony Pictures.

Up until yesterday there was some concern that traditional American loyalist types might be cool to Damian Chazelle‘s First Man (Universal, 10.12) because it doesn’t show the American-flag-planting moment on the surface of the moon.

But now that National Review critic Kyle Smith is calling First Man “easily the best film I’ve seen so far in 2018, a standout in everything from the acting to the sound effects,” has this concern about right-wingers dissipated? You might be excused for thinking so. Smith foresees it “earning something like eleven Oscar nominations next winter“…well, all right!

“First Man isn’t overtly a left-leaning or unpatriotic movie,” Smith writes, “but its reserved, interior quality (it actually ends with two people staring silently at each other) is consonant with the tastes of liberals, whose unease with flag-waving is richly rewarded by the film’s omission of the moment when Armstrong plants Old Glory on the Moon.

“Does that choice bother me? Not really. The movie’s focus is simply elsewhere, with overlooked aspects of the mission. Fresh, contrarian approaches to familiar material give First Man so much energy that despite its contemplative character, two hours and 20 minutes pass briskly.”

But hold up there. There are also signs of trouble from certain pockets of left-wing Hollywood culture. First Man isn’t emotional enough, some are saying.

I’m starting to fear, in fact, that despite film festival raves, First Man might do a fast commercial fade with Joe and Jane Popcorn.

A critic friend says “the H-word seems operative here. I know a number of people who say they ‘hate’ it. And I find that beyond baffling, because leaving aside the fact that I love the movie, what’s there to ‘hate’ about First Man?”

All I can figure is that Chazellle’s film operates so closely to the personality of the low-key Neil Armstrong that to some it feels chilly and remote-feeling and a little too tech-heady.

This isn’t a problem for me at all. One thing I really like about First Man is Chazelle’s refusal to do the Ron Howard thing by cutting to wide or establishing shots for standard perspective’s sake. Instead Chazelle keeps us inside the cockpit seat alongside Neil almost the whole time,. All I can figure is that this strategy has made certain viewers feel claustrophobic or something.

Why do these new Suspiria posters suggest to the HE readership? I’ll tell you what they suggest to me. They suggest domination and discipline from a coven of ballet-dancing witches with powerful thigh and calf muscles…tough, tyrannical witches who would just as soon break your back and make arterial blood gush out of your nose as look at you….tough bitches, tough witches, and several stitches when they’re through with you.

You have a nifty job as the United Sates Ambassador to the United Nations. Stimulating work, pretty decent salary ($180K), nice New York apartment, etc. You’ve been at the job since 1.25.17, and yet 21 months later you announce that you’re quitting. Why? Who bails on a plum prestige gig less than two years after starting? The Trump administration has another two years and three months left.

If you scroll down to paragraphs #14 and #15 in Maggie Haberman’s N.Y. Times story about Nikki Haley resigning as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, there’s a hint of an explanation.

“Ms. Haley’s advisers have long tended to her political image, and stepping away now could be a logical end point if she wants to preserve her own political future.” In other words, she’s stepping away from the Trump administration now before the Mueller report is issued…?

“But in the short term, people familiar with her thinking said that she is likely to work in the private sector and make some money. After nearly eight years in government — six years as governor of South Carolina in addition to her time at the United Nations — her 2018 financial disclosure report shows Ms. Haley has at least $1.5 million in debts, including more than $1 million for her mortgage.”