What to do, say or think when a raging super-fire strikes like Godzilla, destroying hundreds of homes and displacing untold thousands and just spreading horror all over?

The thing that’s sticking in my mind right now is that Moonshadows Malibu has been destroyed. I visited Moonshadows five years ago and didn’t have many nice things to say, granted, but right now I feel very badly for everyone and anyone who ever worked there or had a few good times there…anyone who’s gotten drunk there (including Mel Gibson)…anyone carrying around any kind of good-vibe association with the place.

What’s happening right now is horrific.

More sanity from the SAG nominations! The selection of certain Golden Globe winners were, I feel, deranged, in no small part because they ignored Anora and they over-awarded The Brutalist…eff those Penske-selected international journalists…ignore these chumps.

The five nominees for the Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture award — SAG’s equivalent of a Best Picture trophy — are A Complete Unkown, Anora, Conclave, Emilia Perez (if SAG voters were to ignore Perez they’d be accused of transphobia so I understand) and Wicked. In short, SAG voters have gloriously blown off The Brutalist…yes!!!…oh, yes!!! Also blown off: Dune: Part Two, The Substance, Babygirl, A Real Pain, Sing Sing…sorry for Babygirl.

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role: The Brutalist‘s Adrien Brody (please, God…not again!), A Complete Unknown‘s Timothee Chalamet (HE’s chosen courduroy prince!), Queer‘s Daniel Craig (superb, emotionally vulnerable, rock-solid performance!), Sing Sing‘s Colman Domingo (not happpening, bruh…you’ve been nominated because SAG voters are cautiously playing their DEI cards, but mainly because nobody saw Sing Sing…nobody!), and Conclave‘s (if magnificent Ralph beats astonishing Timothee, so be it…but the important thing is to make sure Adrien Brody loses…please!)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role: Anora‘s Mikey Madison gave a searing, vulnerable, guns-blazing, ball-of-fire hellion performance…vote her in! Mikey’s competition is The Substance‘s Demi Moore (she had her big moment at the Golden Globes last Sunday…that’ll suffice), Wicked‘s Cynthia Erivo (too green, too pixie-sized, too bald plus those eight-inch-long fingernaile), Emilia Perez‘s Karla Sofia Gascon (somebody tell Netflix marketers that identity campaigns are yesterday’s news), and The Last Showgirl‘s Pamela Anderson (nominated because she isn’t wearing any makeup these days).

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role: A Real Pain‘s Kieran Culkin will probably win again, but HE’s two favorite sons are Anora‘s Yura Borisov and The Apprentice‘s Jeremy Strong. I also loved Edward Norton‘s Pete Seeger in A Complete Unknown. HE to Wicked‘s Jonathan Bailey: Not happenin’, man…sorry.

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role: SAG voters need to punish Emilia Perez‘s Zoe Saldana for crying too much and going on too long during her Golden Globe acceptance speech last weekend. HE supports A Complegte Unknown‘s Monica Barbaro (i.e., Joan Baez). Forget Wicked‘s Ariana Grande (too tiny), The Piano Lesson‘s Danielle Deadwyler (sorehead) and The Last Showgirl‘s Jamie Lee Curtis (not a chance).

A semblance of sanity (and therefore an aesthetic challenge to last Sunday’s Golden Globe awards) was conveyed by today’s DGA nominations for the feature film directing award — Sean Baker for Anora (whoo-hoo!), James Mangold for A Complete Unknown (yeaaahhh!), Edward Berger for Conclave (yowsah!), Brady Corbet for The Brutalist (baaahhh!) and Jacques Audiard for the overpraised Emilia Perez.

So who got stiffed? Who got the shaft? The Substance‘s Coralie Fargeat, Wicked‘s Jon M. Chiu, A Real Pain‘s Jesse Eisenberg, The Apprentice‘s Ali Abbasi, Dune: Part Two‘s Denis Villeneuve, Babygirl‘s Halina Reijn.

The 77th Annual DGA Awards ceremony will be held on Saturday, February 8.

The Palisades fire is raging and spreading and obviously dangerous, but what got my attention while watching this clip was the fact that a Millennial KTLA reporter didn’t recognize 66-year-old Steve Guttenberg. Poor guy…imagine the feeling in Guttenberg’s chest when the reporter asked for his name.

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All hail fond memories of Peter, Paul and Mary as we lament the passing of Peter Yarrow, who had a gentle spirit within him. Or so I always felt.

Peter, Paul and Mary peaked for roughly a decade — between the early to late ’60s. But they’re regarded as a classic evergreen act, or they were for a long while.

Peter had the gentle soul, the late Mary Travers had great pipes and the blonde folkie hottie glamour thing until (I’m sorry but there’s no sidestepping this) she turned into a whale, and Paul Stookey had the folkie smartass thing.

When I think of Yarrow I think of “Puff, The Magic Dragon” (’62), which he wrote based on a Leonard Lipton poem. And when I think of Mary I think of her excellent 1969 recording of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane”, which was written by John Denver. And when I think of Paul I think of “I Dig Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” (’67), which he co-authored.

I don’t like admitting this, but when I look at YouTubes of Peter, Paul and Mary, I vastly prefer videos recorded when they were young, slender and attractive. Old bald Peter is okay because his kind-heartedness comes through at any age, but I still prefer the guy he was in the ’60s. But I really don’t like looking at…uhm, I prefer looking at videos of young, rail-thin Mary.

Here’s a slightly less articulate version of HE’s post-Golden Globes complaint (2.6, 10:30 am) about Emilia Perez beating Anora in the comedy-musical category.

@emmasamanthaaa GOODBYE #fyp #fypシ #anora #snub #emiliaperez #movie #goldenglobes ♬ original sound – emma

John Ford’s The Searchers, which is back in the stream of things with a brand-new 4K restoration, is not the greatest American movie or even the greatest American western.

It goes on and on and on. Episode after episode after episode. Runs 119 minutes, but feels like 150 minutes if not three hours.

The visual compositions are magnificent start to finish and the iconic John Wayne is excellent in a caustic and ferocious way, but oh, God, the story and the supporting performances drive you crazy

Jeffrey Hunter’s over-acting is deeply painful (I’m sitting there begging him to effing tone it down); ditto Vera Miles.

Hunter’s Martin Pawley writes Miles’ Laurie Jorgensen ONE non-romantic letter over a five-year period and is surprised that she gets engaged to someone else?


The over-spirited Ford ensemble celebration scenes amount to a kind of cornball endurance test. Hank Worden‘s acting as village idiot Mose Harper is silly and cartoonish.

The simplistic racist depictions of Comanches as mere bloodthirsty savages, not to mention that poor overweight Indian woman who is treated like garbage and then killed by U.S. troops and especially the wailing delirium of those white women who had been kidnapped and raised by Native Americans…all deeply repulsive.

The film offers no explanation why Natalie Wood’s Debbie has no children by Henry Brandon’s Scar, who has been fertilizing her for years on end and probably prior to puberty as Lana Wood was eight or nine when she played adolescent Debbie at the time of her abduction.

Ethan Edwards’ last-minute abandonment of racist fanaticism is just thrown in there without rhyme or reason — his character arc is basicallly “Indian hate and revenge, hate and revenge, hate and revenge, hate and revenge…hate, hate, hate” and then “let’s go home, Debbie.”

Ford’s The Horse Soldiers (‘59) is much more realistic and just as sad and even poetic and far less arduous.

From Reid Rosefelt‘s admiring, strongly written, no-holds-barred Facebook review of A Complete Unknown, posted this morning:

And this…

It’s utterly miserable out there. Nothing but frosty, biting, stinging pain when you step outside. It’s mostly the wind chill. North Pole agony.

Earlier this evening I finally watched the new 4K Searchers. No more complaints. Among the most beautiful VistaVision restorations ever created, and certainly equal to the recently released North by Northwest 4K disc. All hail the great Winton C. Hoch. The 70mm projected version I saw last summer at the MoMI in Astoria was nothing compared to this. Wowsah. Yowsah.

Posted on 6.23.12: The boys and I visited the Dachau concentration camp memorial early yesterday afternoon. It’s located 9 miles to the northwest of Munich. You take a subway (about a 20 minute ride) and then grab a bus or a taxi when you hit town. It’s surprising when you reach the entrance, which is located on a fragrant, curving, tree-lined street. Maybe 150 visitors were there, some with tour guides. At first it feels like you’re walking into a large, well-tended city park. It’s attractive. And then you get to the main gate.

The words on the base of the statue, translated into English: “To honor the dead, to admonish the living.”

How can you visit a place like this and not feel sickened and somewhat depleted? I felt like I wanted to nap minutes after I began walking around the grounds. My system was feeling the odious signals and just wanted to shut down and escape, I guess. Obviously going there was not about me but about them. But I was thinking all kinds of tedious and banal thoughts. Some kind of blocking mechanism?

The main pebble-covered yard separating the German command and SS barracks and the area where the prisoner barracks stood is flat and wide and quite vast. Only two barracks — simulations of the actuals — remain on the grounds; only the gravel-based foundations of the rest remain. We saw it all and felt as much as we were able. Some 31,000 people were killed there. I was imagining what it might have felt like to be stuck at Dachau in the ’30s and ’40s, and how it might’ve felt to survive on a day-to-day basis. I can never know, of course, but my imagination was aflame and then some.

The ceiling on the gas chamber in the main crematorium building, located on the extreme southwest corner of the grounds, is quite low. The gas-dispensing “shower” holes on the ceiling were only eight or nine inches from the top of my head. There was one small window near the cement floor, covered with hard-metal chicken wire.

I couldn’t take any shots. The thought of raising my camera occured two or three times, and then it went away. At the end I forced myself to take a shot of a statue of an inmate (the model was Kurt Lange, a gay guy who served two “rehabilitation” sentences), and then one of the entrance.

Last night I read about the Dachau massacre, and I felt very, very gratified to read that after the camp was liberated in late April 1945, some U.S. soldiers gave handguns to some of the prisoners and allowed them to go to town on some of the SS guards.

We met a young Turkish guy at a food stand near the Dachau train/subway station, and his friendly personality and general vibe were really nice. “You from California?,” he asked. “Yeah, Los Angeles.” He has a brother in California, he said. “What town?,” I asked. “I don’t know, just California,” he said with a shrug and a smile. He’d obviously love to visit. It could have been anyone, but it was just beautiful on a certain level to meet and talk with him a bit. Some people just have an aura.

Donald J. Trump is a brutish sociopath who had permanently soiled his reputation well before the events of Jan. 6, 2021. But the Capitol MAGA riot that happened exactly four years ago today sealed his rep for good.

Trump is a criminal — an anti-democratic, would-be dictator in the mold of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and the recently deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. U.S democracy has been permanently bent and dented by Trump, and it’ll take many years to recover or restore any sense of normalcy because of his pathology.

I hate wokesters as much as the next guy, but the forthcoming Trump solution will be worse than any kind of crazy Kamala Harris wokester regime.

Posted by N.Y. Times editorial board on 9.30.24:

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