I’ve respected Wicked‘s wallop factor from the get-go, but please God, no…don’t let it win the Best Picture Oscar.

To improve its reputation among the Joe and Jane Bumblefucks who’ve had it up to here with elite leftist instruction, the Oscar-bestowing community has to get with the emerging new current…the “put down the wokey DEI playbook, and maybe ease up on queerish messaging” program.

And I’m saying this, mind, as a rapt admirer of Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer.

Wicked is basically a high-impact racial parable with songs, magic and lesbian sauce. It’s about an unjustly feared and despised woman of color (i.e., green) and the wicked superficial whitey-whites who are determined to socially ostracize and excommunicate her, and thereby leave her no choice but to evolve into Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked Witch of the West.

And that’s fine as far as it goes. Just leave the Best Picture Oscar out of the equation.

Obviously industry people love Wicked and I’m not saying they’re wrong for leaning this way, but given that average Americans have been saying “enough!” and “whatever happened to real movies?”, it’s clear that cinema has to turn the corner or else…films have to get real, step off the soapbox, put their feet on the ground and ease up on the progressive instruction narratives…really. Honest stories that touch bottom. Anora, Conclave, that line of country.

We all know it’s been a weak year and I don’t mean to abruptly switch objections, but HE also wishes a double ixnay upon The Brutalist.

An hour ago I checked with domain.com and discovered that www.stopwicked.com, stopwicked,org and stopwicked.net are available.

Posted a few hours ago by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Seth Abramovitch:

“A week into its release, Wicked is starting to shape up as a serious contender. Elphaba isn’t flying off to the Western sky with statuette in hand quite yet, but there’s no denying that Wicked has a lot going for it in its bid to win best picture.

“Let’s start with the obvious. Academy members don’t just like Wicked — they love Wicked. At the Directors Guild, PGA and SAG screenings in both Los Angeles and New York, as well as at the Academy screening, capacity crowds burst into applause after many songs and gave the film a rapturous standing ovation after the cliffhanger finale.

“Guild members are known to give standing Os — they did last year for Oppenheimer when Christopher Nolan emerged for his Q&A — but according to those in attendance, the effusiveness for Wicked has been at another level.

“Then there’s the damn grosses. We are coming off a near extinction-level event for cinema — i.e. the COVID-19 pandemic, during which small streaming-friendly films like CODA and Nomadland won best picture.

“But in the post-plague era, some voters seem to be hungry for spectacle. Last year, Oppenheimer was the perfect mix of IMAX-sized visuals and weighty subject matter — a billion-dollar earner the Academy could proudly point to and say, ‘This is the cinematic gold standard.’ That bodes well for Wicked.”

Wicked is a ride, all right, but “cinematic gold-standard” is a whole ‘nother realm.

…are probably doomed to repeat it.

Three of us ordered breakfast this morning inside Raymond’s of Montclair, an obviously storied, 20th Century establishment that may (I say “may”) have begun serving food as a Swedish smorgasbord eatery called The Three Crowns back in the 1930s or before. I’m not really sure.

It obviously began life as an old-time, pre-war restaurant of some kind. It’s the sort of place that James Stewart’s George Bailey or Gig Young’s Martin Sloan or Fredric March’s Al Stephenson may have visited with their families during the holidays.

Before doing my research I asked three waiters at Raymond’s if they knew when this spiffy yesteryear joint (excellent food, beautifully maintained, well-weathered under the surface) began serving food. Two weren’t sure; our own waiter said 1979. (Note: I found out later that the place apparently began as a breakfast and lunch place in ’89, and the current upscale version was created roughly 20 years ago.)

“That can’t be right,” I said to her. “Maybe the owners began in ‘79 but this place was obviously designed and built in the 1920s or ‘30s..something like that.”

She shrugged her shoulders and said that’s all she knew. Translation: “To me a place that began serving 45 years ago is old, old, old, and that’s about as far back as I can navigate from my Millennial or Zoomer viewpoint.”

Alternate translation: “We don’t really care that much. We’re waiters, not historians. You’re not going to give us bigger tips if we can recite this place’s history chapter-and-verse. We’ve never even heard of It’s a Wonderful Life or The Best Years of Our Lives, much less seen them. To us, Gig Young is about as relatable to our culture or way of seeing things as the pharoah Amenhotep.”

Our waiter told us there are black-and-white photos hanging upon a rear bathroom-adjacent wall, and that’s where I picked up on The Three Crowns.

People born after 1980 don’t particularly want to consider the way things were during the Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt or Truman years, or even the Eisenhower or Kennedy era. It’s all going to be washed away down the road. 20something or 30something mutants don’t want to know. Out of sight, out of mind.

AI Overview: The history of Raymond’s in Montclair, New Jersey, includes the following events:

Raymond’s Coffee Shop

Raymond Badach opened a small coffee shop in 1989 on Church Street.

Raymond’s Restaurant:

In 2004, Badach and Joanne Ricci opened a larger restaurant in the same location. The restaurant was designed with a 1930s diner/brasserie look by artists Ian McPheely and Christian Garnett. Chef Matt Seeber created a menu that was part diner and part bistro.

Roman Polanski haters have kept English-subtitled Blurays of An Officer and a Spy (aka J’Accuse) off the market for the last four-plus years, and no English-sub streaming options have surfaced in the U.S. or Europe either (except via pirate sites). And yet a beautiful all–format Russian Bluray with English subs has been kicking around on eBay for a year or two. It took me a long time to wake up to this. I’m now a proud owner.

…I’d never even heard of Salmon P. Chase, the seventh Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1864-1873) whose facial features adorned the $10K bill, which was printed between 1878 and 1934.

$1K bills were printed between 1861 and 1954; the small-sized Grover Cleveland version was issued in 1928 and 1934. Since 1969 banks have been required to forward $1K bills to the government for destruction.

William McKinley $500 bills were also printed between 1861 and 1945.

$100K Woodrow Wilson bills were printed by FDR’s administration “in response to hoarding of gold during the Great Depression.” 42,000 went through the printing process.

Man, would I love to carry a couple of McKinley or Cleveland bills in my elephant-hide wallet, just to watch people’s eyes pop out of their sockets…boinnnng!

Sutton Francis Wells, 11.29.24, 11:45 am:

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…for everything, all of it. Especially delighted that I finally own an English-subtitled Bluray of Polanski’s J’Accuse. Heartbroken that the hooligan bad guys are about to take charge and that the degradation of so much is about to kick in.

Otherwise I’m grateful for the hundreds of small pleasures and comforts and nourishments that constitute daily life…I could write a book. Good wishes and heartfelt greetings to everyone, even my comment-thread enemies…even those I’ve wished cancer upon.

Friendo:

I’d forgotten that before Clint’s Dave Garver slugs Jessica Walter’s knife-wielding Evelyn Draper — pow! — and sends her plunging to a rocky seaside death, Walter gives Donna Mills’ Tobie Williams a severe haircut.

That has to be one of the ugliest and creepiest things a cinematic serial killer has ever done to a victim — “Before I stab you to death I’m going to chop off half of your Jane Fonda-in-Klute hair.”

Clint was a young-looking 40 when he directed and starred; Walter was 29, Mills was 30 or 31, and John Larch, who played the amiable, well-dressed, Martin Balsam-like detective, was in his late 50s.

Evelyn and Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest are birds of a feather. Evelyn is a bit more manic and unhinged —almost an AIP horror film character — but they both slash their wrists in Act Two and threaten the hero’s significant domestic other during the climax.

The sexual ethos of Play Misty For Me (‘71) presents Dave, a KRML deejay who drives an Austin Healy and lives in a cliffside bungalow, as an innocent libertine. By 2024 standards mellow Dave is almost the bad guy — a handsome, low-key hound who gets laid whenever and with whomever (pick of the litter!) with a general understanding that casual, no-big-deal affairs are part of the no-strings nookie game of the Nixon era. No internet or social media spears or frowning feminist currents — an exotic world as different from our own as Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

I’m not saying that if either Wicked, Emilia Perez or The Brutalist win the Best Picture Oscar, it’ll feel like an apocalypse to me personally. Actually I am kinda saying that, to be honest.

If either Perez or Wicked win, I’ll feel the next morning like I did on 11.6.24.

THR’s Scott Feinberg recently wrote that a vote for Perez and/or Karla Sofia Gascon could be seen around town as a fuck-you vote against The Beast, and that this symbology could be a determining factor.

Please don’t do this, Academy. On a certain level movies like Emilia Perez and the attendant wokey influenza within are among the reasons that Trump won.

The bumblefucks didn’t so much vote against Kamala Harris as they voted against men competing in women’s sports. Please don’t make things worse by doubling down on this shit. Please consider backing away from radical gender fluidity and transitioned six-foot biomales competing againet female swimmers, and come down to the normal earth amidst the mindsets of Joe and Jane Popcorn.

Al Kooper needs to be re-saluted for his guerilla commando raid during the 6.15.65 recording of “Like A Rolling Stone”. I’m suggesting this because a highly abbreviated version of this session is included in A Complete Unknown. Kooper is played by Charlie Tahan, but Kooper’s personal recollection of what happened is, like, ten times better.

If unusually frank words had been exchanged between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on Sunday, July 21st, and if Harris had followed through on this frankness, the presidential race might have turned out differently. Maybe.

Harris: “So you’re doing this? You’ve firmly decided?”

Biden: “If I don’t fold the tent and pass the torch, Pelosi and the gang will further challenge and undermine me, and I’ll almost certainly wind up losing to Trump by an even greater margin than previously projected, and I’ll go down in history as an even greater villain…a withered, stubborn old coot who surrendered the country to MAGA facism, and all because of my Irish, bone-headed arrogance.”

Harris: “I’ve always supported you. I participated in the general gasllghting about you being mentally alert and fully able to continue doing the job, and I’m supporting you now…I respect and support your decision to withdraw.”

Biden: “So it’s on you now, Kamala. Do your best and go with God. You’ll need to hit the road running. I presume you and your team have been preparing for this all along, and particularly since my absent-minded debate performance last month.”

Harris: “Actually, no, we haven’t.”

Biden: “You haven’t?”

Harris: “We’ve been in kind of a holding pattern, waiting to see what you’d do.”

Biden: “Since 1.20.21 you’ve been one heartbeat away from the Presidency, and you haven’t done a single thing to prepare, policy-wise and contingency-wise, for the possibility of taking over if something, God forbid, were to happen to me? You’ve just been plotzing?”

Harris: “We didn’t want anyone saying that we were preparing to take over prematurely. That would’ve looked ugly and craven.”

Biden: “Jesus, man!”

Harris: “What’s important now, Joe, is that I’m going to be the Democratic candidate. I’m grabbing the reins, and…well, please don’t take this the wrong way but I have to speak frankly to you, and more importantly to the voters between now and November 5th.”

Biden: “Uh-oh, here it comes.”

Harris: “If I’m going to have even a prayer of winning, I’ll need to throw you under the bus a little bit. I can’t run as Kamala Biden…I can’t be a rubber-stamp successor. If I do that, Trump will win. Your numbers have been in the toilet for a couple of years so let’s cut the shit. I have to be able to say two things. One, the vice-presidency is a ceremonial position without any real agency of its own. Every vice-president except Cheney has acknowledged this and said as much to journalists and historians. I was obliged to be loyal to you and that’s how I played my cards up unti now.”

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Obviously Earl Holliman‘s career peaked in the mid to late ’50s, and if you ask me his absolute top-of-the-heap moment was his solo performance in “Where Is Everybody?“, the debut episode of Rod Serling‘s The Twilight Zone. The episode aired on October 2, 1959.

Otherwise Holliman almost always played unsophisticated or doltish none-too-brights and second bananas — The Bridges at Ioko Ri (Mickey Rooney calling out “Lester! Lester!” when Holliman was shot by North Korean troops), The Rainmaker, I Died A Thousand Times, Forbidden Planet, Giant, Sergeant Bill Crowley in Police Woman, etc.

Until today I never knew Holliman was gay but whatever. Successfully closeted for decades…fine. An Advocate piece outed him in 2015. His husband was Craig Curtis.

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The Taschen folks have issued a Dr. No coffee table book, and they’re charging $850 for it.

Boilerplate: “This detailed companion explores the making of Dr. No (1962), the film that first introduced the world to the cinematic 007. With over a thousand images, excerpts from the original script, and stories from the cast and crew, this book offers unrestricted access, etc.”

I would love to have this lying around but c’mon…