The storied Asbury Park carousel is seared into my emotional history…my DNA even. Because it marked me…an innocent renegade incident that branded my childhood and teen years.

I wrote about it a couple of years ago…

It was a late summer evening, and my now-departed mom (her name was Nancy) and I were roaming up and down the more-than-a-century-old boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey. One of the evening’s highlights (in my mind at least) was the famous Asbury Park merry-go-round.

After going on a ride and eating some cotton candy we made our way south (or was it north?). At least a mile, maybe two. Then I somehow slipped my mother’s grasp and disappeared. Gone.

For the first time in my life I had decided that it would be more exciting and fulfilling to go on a solo boardwalk adventure rather than stay with mom.

Nancy freaked, of course. She found a couple of uniformed cops and asked for their help. They all looked, searched, asked all the merchants…no luck. The trio finally made their way back to the merry-go-round and there I was — staring, bedazzled.

This incident put the fear of God into both my parents. From then on they decided I had to be kept on a short leash and monitored extra carefully. The result is that I began to feel that my life was being lived in a gulag, a police state. Rules, repression, “no”, time to go to bed at dusk, “because I said so,” “you’re too young,” etc.

But Gavin is dead fucking wrong when he says “all this anti-woke stuff is just anti-black…period, full stop.”

HE fully agrees with WaywardGreg: “Being anti-woke isn’t racist. Quite the opposite, actually. People who are anti-woke simply don’t want immutable characteristics being used as a criteria for judging human value.”

HE sez: If you’re black, you’re not necessarily an angel…you might be but not necessarily because of your ethnic identity. And if you’re white, you’re not necessarily a demonic force for racial cruelty…you might be but not necessarily because of your Wonderbread pigmentation.”

…by director Robert Aldrich having told the supporting players to hop up and down and go “whoop-dee-doo!” and “yee-hah!”…it could have been magnificent if the actors had been told to hold it down and act like men and not like five-year-olds, but Aldrich was couldn’t summon the character.

My first viewing of Manhattan was on opening day — Friday, 4.25.79. (Movies didn’t open on Thursdays back then.) I couldn’t wangle a ticket to the big premiere at the Zeigfeld on 4.18, so I saw it at a modest-sized theatre that I can’t recall the name of, but it was located on East 34th street, perhaps near Third Avenue or Lexington but definitely not as far east as Second Ave.

I waited in line a good 45 minutes or so, enjoying the expectant vibe, and what a surge when the crowd finally began to shuffle indoors. The almost quaalude-like high that rippled through the audience during the opening George Gershwin-meets-Gordon Willis montage was ecstatic, shattering — one of the greatest surges of pure cinematic feeling that I’ve ever experienced.

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Please listen to this N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine story by Susan Dominus (10.22.25). It’s about women taking testosterone, and getting high off it. Rhapsodic sexual awakenings! 40-plus women having sex six times a week, and loving it. It’s really well written, and oddly infectious.

From The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield….

I’m personally afraid (very afraid) of female-created films that appear to be anguish- or pain- or persecution-driven. I’m speaking of a longstanding dread of mute-nostril-agony films that hurl me to the bottom of a terrible black pit. You know…films about this or that woman suffering from this or that oppressive situation a la Mary Bronstein‘s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Mascha Schilinski‘s Sound of Falling, Lynne Ramsay‘s Die My love, Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee, Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking, Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman….that line of country.

Does this mean I only want to see buoyant, ironic-happy-face, patty-cake Barbie movies from women directors or about female characters? Of course not. I’m a huge fan of Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette, Magnus von Horn‘s The Girl With The Needle, Ridley Scott‘s Thelma & Louise, Darren Aronofsky‘s mother!, etc. There are dozens upon dozens more in this vein.

Once upon a time the Manhattan-based Gotham Awards, generally known for their lunatic wokey leanings, were more or less the east coast version of the Spirit Awards, and this meant that eligible films had to have been produced for $35 million or lower. (The Spirit budget cap is $30 million but close enough.) But the Gotham budget cap was removed in 2023 to allow for “a more inclusive submission pool” of potential nominees.

Which is how and why the masssively expensive, progressive-left-leaning One Battle After Another has been nominated for a Gotham Best Feature award. The other nominees are Bugonia, East of Wall, Familiar Touch, Hamnet, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You? (a mute nostril agony film if I’ve ever seen one), Lurker, Sorry, Baby (HE’s personal preference to win!), The Testament of Ann Lee and Train Dreams.

Sessue Hayakawa’s Colonel Saito: “I hate the Gotham Wokeys! They have no shame about praising woke bonafides and identity credentials while giving secondary consideration to achievements in film that are primarily merit-based…no shame about this! In 2023 they gave May December‘s Charles Melton their Best Supporting Actor award because of his half-Asian ancestry (his mother is Korean), and then they lied about this in the aftermath!

“The Gotham Wokey gangbangers are stubborn mules but they have no pride. They endure but haven’t the courage to stand up straight and tall for cinematic art. Plus they’ve blown off gender-based acting categories. I hate them…they’re propagandists!”

On top of which the Gotham Wokeys have failed to nominate Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value for their Best International Feature award…WHY? The nominees are Jafar Panahi‘s It Was Just an Accident (not good enough– won in Cannes for political reasons), Park Chan-Wook‘s No Other Choice, Richard Linklater‘s Nouvelle Vague (this should win!), Mascha Schilinski‘s Sound of Falling (another mute-nostril-agony contender) and Bi Gan‘s Resurrection.

The Outstanding Lead Performance Gotham Award will almost certainly go to Hamnet‘s Jessie Buckley, and the Outstanding Supporting Performance Gothamn trophy should be handed to either Sentimental Value‘s Stellan Skarsgard, One Battle After Another‘s Benicio Del Toro or Jay Kelly‘s Adam Sandler.

And that unalterable fact means that I’ll be obliged — okay, forced — again and again to sit through high-aspiring films that Variety ‘s Guy Lodge will praise to the heavens but which will also try my patience, at the very least, and may, in all probability, compel me to endure serious anguish and perhaps even misery.

The next film by Mascha Schilinski, director of the agonizing Sound of Falling, will probably subject me to great viewing difficulty. The next Park Chan–wook film will almost certainly cause some degree of suffering. Ditto the next cinematically ambitious smarthouse film from Brutalist helmer Brady Corbet, and definitely the next equally ambitious effort from Mona Fastvold, whose The Testament of Ann Lee put me through the ringer a couple of months ago at the Venice Film Festival.

Who are the other guaranteed pain-giving directors? All I know for sure is that they’re out there, waiting to lower the boom. And as William Holden’s Pike Bishop said in The Wild Bunch, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Because grade-A film festivals, of course, are generally dependable forums for the richest, most far-reaching and most delightful films emerging at a given moment. You can’t have one without the other. Suffering and deliverance go hand in hand.