HE to Eric Kohn: “You said on your most recent Indiewire podcast that Booksmart (UA Releasing, 5.24) is Oscar-worthy. I thought it was supposed to be the new Superbad…fine. I can’t wait to see it. But why bring Oscars into it?” Kohn to HE: “The enthusiasm for Beanie Feldstein could very well have legs. People are gonna come out of this film and say ‘she’s really arrived.'” HE to Kohn: “Oh, I see…Beanie’s cool. She punched through in Lady Bird.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern: “I can tell you one thing right now. Our gun laws will change.”

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“Beto got in the race. Beto O’Rourke from Texas. He was pretty popular a while ago. But now he’s being greeted with ‘huhn, a white guy?’ Suddenly the ‘I don’t see color’ people, see color. You know…white, black, who cares? Let’s stop orange.”

Anyone who can easily slip into dreamland gets my vote. Like my son Jett. When he was only two or three weeks old, I fell extra-double in love with the guy when he began to forsake the usual 3 am wake-ups and sleep all through the night (i.e., midnight to 6 am). No-sweat slumberers also tend to be deep sleepers, I’ve found. And nicer people.

Light sleepers doze on the surface of the pond, and wake at the slightest disturbance. I always sleep at the very bottom, on the sand and silt. Insomniacs, I’m sorry to say, can be unpleasant at times — depressive, resentful, prickly. Remember Al Pacino‘s Will Dormir in Insomnia? Talk about an anxious, miserable mope. His best moment came at the finale, after Robin Williams had fatally shot him — “I need sleep.”

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Hollywood Elsewhere hereby nominates John Huston‘s Escape to Victory (’81) as perhaps the dumbest, phoniest, most jingoistic, credibility-straining and most audience-despising POW film ever made.

The bullshit story attempts to blend The Great Escape with a rousing tale about a big soccer match between a German team and Allied prisoners of war and blah blah. Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, Max von Sydow, Pelé and Daniel Massey costarred.

The climatic game happens in Paris (le Stade Olympique Yves-du-Manoir) with a huge crowd cheering the Allies and yelling “victoire!” Not only do the allies win it, but they escape through a tunnel after doing so.

I caught a press screening at the Ziegfeld in July of ’81, and I distinctly remember staggering out of the theatre and groaning and tearing it to shreds in giddy chats with journo pals.

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Everyone uses hand gestures while speaking in front of a group or crowd. It’s just a matter of using the right ones. Just make sure your palms are always facing up. Keep them open and unclenched, like you’ve nothing to hide. And don’t slash the air with your hands — just pretend you’re one-handedly dealing cards with your right (or left) hand. If you want to emphasize a point you’ve just made, “deal a card”. Another point, another card — simple. Every so often you can do a JFK finger-point gesture, but the main thing is to keep it simple and don’t over-gesture. Anyone who knows anything about public speaking will say the same thing. Make sure that your palms are facing the ceiling or the sky.

I don’t give a single infinitesimal fuck about James Gunn having been re-hired to direct Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3. Because I was down with the original Guardians but hated the second one so I figured the third would be worse. But the willingness of Disney’s Alan Horn to reverse course about a Twitter-related nervous nelly firing is somewhat encouraging.

Posted today by The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield: “I want to pause long enough to congratulate Hollywood on making it to the Belated Backdoor [of the] Who The Hell Knows What the Rules Are? era of corporate decision-making under the Social Media Backlash Sun

“That’s a step forward from the Kneejerk Duck, Cover and Throw Everyone Under the Bus era that we’ve been living through.

“But what does this experience say for the future? Sometime next week, when some other Disney employee has their ancient words ‘surfaced’ [on Twitter], is Disney now making a statement that they aren’t going to be pushed around by the social media mobs, but they’ll take their time and give things a little thought before they drop an employee over a cliff?

“Or are they saying ‘yes, if the mobs get loud enough we may have to throw you overboard. However, if somewhere down the line you can get the mobs to quiet down or get distracted, we might be able to give it another try’?”

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Over the last 24 hours Ugly Lefty Purists have jumped in whole hog on their Beto bashing. Partly because his positions, which are obviously liberal and probably something close to reasonably progressive, haven’t been fully articulated in books or position papers, but mainly because he’s a Rich Charismatic White Guy.

Why isn’t his skin browner? Why isn’t he female? What’s with the sharp beak nose and those spazzy hand gestures? Takedown time!

Progressive, all-or-nothing, gotta-revolution crazies (Time’s Up feminists, POC anti-white-male congregations, classic Berniebots) hold the self-destruction cards in the 2020 election. They have the zeal and the rage to attack aging centrist Biden as well as practical-liberal-humanist O’Rourke, and possibly wound them both sufficiently so that neither will make it all the way to the Democratic nomination.

At least 12 to 14 months of in-fighting lie ahead, and the Stalinist SJW left is going to attack Beto non-stop…month after month, week after week…from here until the late spring of ‘20. Slash, stab, slug, jab, kick, gouge.

In the vast realm outside of Political Lefty Twitter, rank-and-file Democrats just want to defeat Trump. Most of the country regards Cheeto as a lying crime boss who has no business being in the Oval Office — they just want his ass out of office by 1.20.21, if not sooner.

But progressive crazies have a better, nobler, more elevated agenda — to bring about profound, much-needed social change by eliminating as many white guys as possible from positions of power and by voting in people of color, LGBTQs, and more AOC and Bernie types.

My gut tells me that as time gradually passes more average, sensible-minded Democrats will rally around Beto than Biden because Beto is younger, somewhat more liberal than Biden, more in the swing, more social media savvy, and more likely to beat Trump because of the generational age factor.

Polling will gradually indicate this, but the pecking order will become clear starting with Iowa and New Hampshire ‘20 — a whole fucking year from now. Biden is too old, too centrist, too gaffe-prone, and not part of the current political zeitgeist (older than boomers). He’s a holdover from the ‘80s and ‘90s. His last big moment was during the ‘08 primaries, and he couldn’t make it happen.

But the spitting rage junkies among the militant purist left are just getting warmed up. They are the ones who could and quite possibly MAY usher in a second Trump term — holders of the key to Trump getting re-elected in 2020.

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Late yesterday afternoon I was nudging my way east on Melrose Ave., between Robertson and San Vicente Blvd., waiting for a green light. For the time being I was to the right of a youngish brunette in a late-model Hundai. We were side by side within a lane and a half’s worth of road space. I saw that up ahead the right-side lane would open up after we got past a parked car, so I nudged my way forward, inching past Hundai girl.

This pissed her off. She lurched forward so that we were side by side again. She then expertly pantomined “what are you doing? You can’t elbow your way in front of me! I own the main lane and you’re only in a half-lane to my right, so I’m the dominant driver!”

I glanced at her mute performance out of the corner of my eye. Due respect but I politely ignored what she was putting out. No defiance, no eff-you-back gestures — just “oh, are you upset about something?”

A few seconds later the traffic started to move and the right lane opened up. I darted in, took the lane and gunned it across San Vicente. Within five or six seconds I was at least six to eight car lengths ahead of Hundai Girl. I’m sure this made her even more unhappy. Pardon my dust, Peggy Sue, but this is how life in the big city goes sometimes. We’re all living in a kind of Mad Max world.