Average Joes and Janes hate you for ushering in an age of progressive ideology in movies (now rapidly drawing to a close, thank God)…a social-cultural spasm that destroyed the mystique of transportational cinema, which had sporadically been in relatively good health until ‘17 or thereabouts.

So given this lingering loathing and a belief that H’wood is a crawling hive of woke wackazoids, do you really want to re-enforce that notion by giving the Best Picture Oscar to a mostly mediocre trans musical in order to send a “blow it out your ass” message to Donald Trump? Do you really want to dig into that hole all the deeper?

Remember when ideology wasn’t the Academy’s ne plus ultra…remember when certain movies and performances delivered profoundly or at least assuredly on their own terms (i.e., Gene Hackman’s bravura inhabiting of a racist New York detective in The French Connection, a performance that would be shouted down today by the wokeys)…do you want to continue living in that woke ditch or do you want to move on?

I’m bringing this up because yesterday the HE community didn’t say jack squat about the final paragraph in “Oh, My Beloved,” my response to Donald Trump’s holy-roller inaugural address.

I lied about not planning to watch or listen to the Trump inauguration. I listened to the swearing in and to much of Trump’s speech while driving back to Wilton from West Orange, New Jersey. And then I heard portions of the speech again inside my local Starbucks.

The swearing-in itself seemed lame. Like a ten-year-old, Chief Justice Roberts had to read the words from a print-out — he couldn’t memorize it like Chief Justice Earl Warren did 60 years ago? And also like a ten-year-old, he restricted the pledge to almost comically short bursts. Back in ’61 Warren said to JFK “and [you] will, to the best of your ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”….good heavens, 17 words in a single breath!

Trump basically struck me as being outside of his mind, and certainly lacking any semblance of humility. He apparently thinks he’s Alexander the Great mixed with Laurence Olivier‘s Mahdi in Khartoum…a holy, nation-correcting deliverer on some kind of anti-progressive, anti-woke cleansing crusade.

Melodramatic and grandiose, Trump’s speech lied about a lot of stuff, and he certainly exaggerated his ass off. But he’s been doing that all along.

“We will move with purpose and speed to bring back hope, prosperity, safety and peace for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed” — he was primarily referring to whiteys, trust me.

“For American citizens, Jan. 20, 2025 is Liberation Day,” Trump said. Translation: The party’s over, wokeys!

“Let mountain and desert tremble…let cities shudder…and let the corrupt in far places mark this moment and turn in fear of all the miracles to come…and let none in this great country in this victorious hour…let no one believe I am anyone other than The Expected One.”

Trump didn’t say this — Olivier did — but he was coming from a similar emotional place.

Trump proclaimed that he was really and truly spared by God when McLovin fired that would-be assassin’s bullet in rural Pennsylvania on 7.13.24. “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason,” Trump said. “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

This is crazy madman stuff…casting himself as a chosen one, the fulfiller of a divine plan.

“Under my leadership, we will restore fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law, and we are going to bring law and order back to our cities.” By setting free the animals who were sentenced to prison for attacking the Capitol on 1.6.21? That‘s “fair, equal and impartial justice”?

In an apparent allusion to the L.A. firestorm, Trump lambasted a government “that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home…without even a token of defense.” Tell that to the L.A. fire fighters (including the lesbian division) who’ve been struggling and sweating their way through that godawful maelstrom.

The U.S. is going to “take back” the Panama Canal? Trump can’t be so asinine as to believe this can actually happen.

“To restore competence and effectiveness to our federal government, my administration will establish the brand-new Department of Government Efficiency.” Okay, but what just happened to Vivek Ramaswany, who was supposed to co-manage DOGE with Elon? All of a sudden he was toast.

Truth be told, I didn’t entirely mind some of the anti-woke stuff. Trump said that “we have an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves in many cases”…a reference to little white kids being taught that they’re the spawn of vicious racists and are basically the seed of primal evil. That’s not inaccurate.

And I kinda went “uh-huh” when he said he would “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life…we will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based” — i.e., equity can take a hike.

But I don’t feel it’s right or fair to put transgender people through the bureaucratic ringer by insisting that their passports designate them as a bio-male or bio-female. “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” he said.

A friend believes that this latter passage will all but lock in Emilia Perez as the Best Picture Oscar-winner, which everyone will process as a thundering fuck you to Trump by the Hollywood community.

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Yes, that’s HE’s Chinese cowboy hat.

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..but at this stage of the game, any hard-charging dismissal works for HE. Any kind of hate…I’ll take it. Without the trans experience angle this film would not be happening.

I hated The Brutalist so much that when I saw it at the NYFF, I walked out just before the ending of Part One. I finally saw Part Two a few weeks hence but enduring it was awful. So of course I understand the difficulty some allegedly had in watching the whole damn thing. The Academy members who’ve said they “didn’t get to it” are lying — they’ve heard what it basically is and didn’t want to watch it…period.

It was this exact moment in The Brutalist —- the bus-station moment when Adrien Brody starts weeping WAY TOO MICH when he hears his wife is alive — it was this exact moment when I said to myself “Jesus, I really hate this film.”

The snowflakes are so tiny they’re barely visible, but there are trillions upon trillions of them. Six to eight inches of accumulation is far from historic, but it’s noteworthy. I love the quiet…the hush that always accompanies a decent blanketing. (Stuart Terrace, West Orange, NJ.)

Friendo: “Jeff, can you explain the All The President’s Men screw-up on that H.R. Haldeman confirmation call? The guy says ‘hang up, right? Got it straight now? Everything okay?’ But after the story blows up Bernstein explains to Ben Bradlee that the guy ‘thought I said hang on when I said hang up’ or some such shit.”

HE reply: “Hoffman/Bernstein says VERY CLEARLY that if the Haldeman story is wrong, the guy he’s talking to will hang up before Hoffman/Bernstein finishes counting to ten. Only a drooling idiot could have misunderstood what the deal was. Hang UP if we’re wrong.”

What’s the basic idea behind Sly Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight serving as Donald Trump’s “special ambassadors” to Hollywood?

To try and…what, urge the suppression or perhaps even the eradication of the woke virus? To offer incentives to those looking to make features that aren’t social values tutorials…that don’t try to instruct viewers about the power and the glory of progressivism? That might try and stamp out absurd presentism in historical films? To halt the advancing Best Picture Oscar campaign of Emilia Perez?

I don’t want to sound like a coarse, thick-fingered troglodyte, but I don’t have problems with these goals. No more films like Josie Rourke’s Mary, Queen of Scots? Yes, please, thank you.

Not that any industry hardcore types will offer these old, crusty, well-past-their-prime guys any kind of serious attention or deference. Blah, blah, handshakes, bullshit facetime, whatever. Passing fart fancies in the wind.

I’d forgotten how ludicrous Moonraker is. Released 45 and 1/2 years ago, it’s easily the stupidest, least reality-grounded 007 film ever.

I’d forgotten that Lois Chiles’ character was actually named Holly Goodhead, described on the Wiki page as “an astronaut scientist on loan from NASA who gives heavenly blowjobs.” (I’m kidding about the last four words.)

I hadn’t forgotten that Richard Kiel‘s “Jaws” falls in love with Blanche Ravalec‘s “Dolly.”

It’s almost as if Albert “Cubby” Broccoli sat down with Roger Moore, director Lewis Gilbert and the screenwriters and said, “We need to devalue this franchise as much as possible…we need to completely abandon the spirit of From Russia With Love and Dr. No…we need to turn 007 into a totally lightweight asshole.”

It took me nearly five years to sit down and actually read significant portions of Michael Benson‘s “Space Odyssey” (Simon & Schuster, 4.23.19). A hardback copy was sitting in the Wilton library’s film section…easy.

We all understand that roughly 19 or 20 minutes of footage was cut from 2001: A Space Odyssey after a hostile New York City press screening on 4.3.68. The original version ran 160 minutes. Director Stanley Kubrick, seriously freaked by the response, cut it down to 139 minutes.

In the book’s photo section I came upon a frame capture I’d never seen before — dead HAL. The image was apparently included in the 160-minute version after Dave Bowman disconnects the homicidal, calm-voiced, heuristically programmed algorithmic computer…the glowing red light snuffed out.

I’ve always understood that HAL wasn’t so much terminated by Bowman as given a kind of partial lobotomy — still operating and regulating the voyage of Discovery but with his higher brain functions cut. Maybe that’s why the dead HAL image wasn’t used, as it didn’t make basic sense.

I reviewed David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man for Films in Review. The Paramount film, exec produced by Mel Brooks, opened on 10.10.80 (less than a month before Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan). The review had to be 250 words or thereabouts, which made the writing of it incredibly difficult. I had to bang out draft after draft on an IBM Selectric, tearing my hair out. I went through a lot of White-Out, which used to come in little glass bottles. And I can’t find the FIR issue that the review appeared in anywhere.

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I decided a couple of months ago that I had zero interest in seeing Lockerbie: A Search for Truth (Peacock, 1.2.25).

Based on Jim Swire‘s “The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice” and starring Colin Firth as Swire, it’s a story that we all know the ending to, and which dramatically speaking can’t do anything except swirl around in the Scottish mud.

Firth plays the anguished father of poor Flora Swire, one of the 243 passengers and 16 crew members who were murdered on 12.21.88 (not to mention 11 Lockerbie residents who died) when a Libyan bomb exploded in the luggage compartment of a U.S.-bound Pan Am 747 (flight 103). A gruesome slaughter.

It’s a story that can’t help but infuriate because the scumbag convicted of having orchestrated the bombing and who was handed a life sentence, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi, was sprung from a Scottish prison after serving ten years because he was ailing from cancer (i.e., “compassionate grounds”). Al-Megrahi returned to Libya on 11.2.09, moved into a villa in Tripoli, and died almost three years hence (5.20.12).

In a fair and just world, Al-Megrahi would have suffered some kind of traumatic execution…hanging, firing squad, thrown into a hungry wolf pit like Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings. But instead he more or less walked after serving a decade behind bars. What kind of a shitty ending is that?

Another Libyan guy, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, was prosecuted for his involvement in the crime but was found not guilty.

Zero Dark Thirty delivered a kind of dramatic satisfaction for the 9/11 victims, but what possible payoff could result from broken-hearted Jim Swire digging into the particulars and becoming more and more angry and haunted and disillusioned?

Last night I tried watching Return to Lockerbie with Lorraine Kelly, a 2023 doc that’s mainly focused on the trauma that Lockerbie residents went through.

If Pan Am flight #103 hadn’t been delayed, the bomb would have exploded over the Atlantic.

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