“There is a dark part of the American soul, and Donald Trump appeals to that…” — political strategist Chai Komanduri.

Faced with a choice between a sane, somewhat middling but far-from-dangerous ex-prosecutor with a good heart and a deranged, brain-fart, authoritarian criminal who cares only about himself, America chose the criminal. More than half of the country voted this way, and not by a whisker. It was a blow-out.

My Trump-supporting friends and family members excepted, I really hate last night’s majority mindset. I completely respect the process — it was a fair election — but I loathe the rank stupidity and the refutation of common sense that resulted in Trump’s victory. I’m not exaggerating here — I despise many of the progressive wokester things that Trump supporters despise, but voting to put that animal back into the White House was truly insane. It was a horribly destructive and nihilistic thing to do, and may God protect us all.

Unfair as this sounds in the immediate wake of Kamala Harris‘s electoral tragedy, which marks the eighth anniversary of Hillary Clinton’s striking loss to The Very Same Beast, I’m presuming the Dems will not be especially keen on another female standard-bearer. Not in ’28, at least.

They need to nominate Gavin Elster, the San Francisco shipping tycoon…sorry, Gavin Newsom. You know he’ll be able to skillfully debate J.D. Vance, who will almost certainly be the 2028 Republican nominee. Face it — too many voters in this country are misogynist ayeholes. Plus Gavin is 6’3″. Plus he has three years to erase his overly-friendly-to-bums-and-thieves image.

She found out he was voting Trump pic.twitter.com/nM3C9delDY

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) November 6, 2024

I am thoroughly ashamed and disgusted this morning. Ashamed to be a nominal citizen of a country that has re-elected an unmistakably dangerous, authoritarian-minded, foam-at-the-mouth criminal sociopath as president. I am catatonic. I am empty. I spit in the faces of the American hooligans who did this to us.

There is really and truly no common sense, no sanity, no elemental decency out there. Not in Bumblefuckland, I mean. We’re now so fucked I can’t even breathe, much less calculate. The temple walls are tumbling down around us. Sewer water is pouring into our lives.

Joe Biden was the principal architect of our doom by refusing to get out of the race until last July, and may that withered Irish banshee roast on a spit in hell for at least the next thousand years.

The sane and sensible (if admittedly somewhat mediocre) Kamala Harris ran a generally excellent campaign, but — be honest — she almost certainly torpedoed herself when she declined on “The View” to even partially throw Joe under the bus. That was beyond ridiculous. What was she thinking?

The disgruntled under-45 dudes whom progressive Democrats have identified as a proverbial social problem (including your Millennial-aged blacks and Latinos) have had their revenge, and the rural bumblefucks have won also. And the sensible, practical-minded blue urbans who were deeply, morally, logically and quite appropriately horrified by Donald Trump’s run-at-the-mouth candidacy simply didn’t have the horses.

We’re living in a sinking horror film right now. The obese, obviously declining Joker has won, the progressive loonies (including your career-cancelling wokesters and elementary school drag-show proponents) are shrieking in their bathrooms right now, and decent people everywhere are so stunned and doubled over they can’t even weep.

So many pollsters got it wrong once again.

The progressive pundits who wrote that enraged women (including white, older, Nikki Haley-supporting moderates) who were determined to reclaim control of their lives and bodies would save us…wrong.

The ugliness of the MSG fascist rally, the late-in-the-game shitshow that was going to decisively hand the presidency to Harris-Walz —- didn’t happen.

The floating island of garbage line apparently didn’t hurt Trump all that much — good God, it may have even helped him.

We’re really and truly The United States of Regressive Social Suicide right now. The ghost of John F. Kennedy still resides among us, and he is appalled. He is vomiting, dude.

Who are we? What are we? Dear God in heaven, I think we know the answer.

11:50 pm: What an absolute tragedy. We’re all heading to hell. A louche, indecent, fascist-minded sociopath will be running the country between January ‘25 and January ‘29, and the damage to our democratic system will be considerable. Is there a chance Harris can eke out a win? Not much of one. She’s almost certainly lost. I feel so drained and deflated I can’t even cry.

11:15 pm: Harris will probably lose Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and that’s all she wrote. This is the beginning of a second national nightmare under Trump. I’m disgusted by the corroded moral values and lack of common sense among the rural voters who brought this about. I’m ashamed to call these degenerates fellow citizens. Good ole Joe Biden is back in the villain’s circle — he brought this about. If he’d bailed in late ‘23 or early ‘24 a better candidate might have emerged from a primary system. Thanks, Joe!! Remember how Frankie Pantangeli died in the bathtub at the end of The Godfather, Part II? Think it over!

10:37 pm: Trump is slightly ahead of Harris in Pennsylvania, and if he wins in the Buckeye state he’ll win the Presidency. The Pig Beast may actually bring about a second national tragedy! I’m devastated. But maybe Harris will eke out a slight Pennsylvania win…maybe. Please? But right now she’s also behind a point in Wisconsin. I feel weak, bruised. This is AWFUL.

10:26: Selzer got it wrong…booo!

10:16 pm: I’ve said all along that Harris would probably squeak through. Barely. That seems likely as we speak. I’ve been studying the returns for about three hours, but it feels like five or six. I’ve aged about three months. I’ve grown four or five new gray hairs.

10:04 pm: Decisive battleground numbers still not in…still hovering.

9:47 pm: Okay, Wisconsin is looking okay for Harris. Ditto Michigan, Pennsylvania. No longer freaking the fuck out, but I still don’t like this.

9:28 pm: Harris has won New York State…expected. Pennsylvania is looking good for Harris, but Wisconsin sort of isn’t. (Right now) What is this? I’ll tell you what it partly is — Harris and the progressive Democrat party has pretty much written off the dude vote, and right now they’re feeling the terrible result of that prejudice. That plus garden-variety misogyny, I’m thinking.

9:04 pm: Aacckk! Aaacckk! I’m so on edge about the drip-drip-drip uncertainty that I haven’t even felt the effect of that Oxy I dropped an hour ago. Harris isn’t pulling in votes like Biden did four years ago, and Trump is doing a little better than he did in ‘20. Trump is five points ahead in North Carolina…yeesh. Millions of people are knowingly voting for a monster. My stomach is flooded with acid.

8:48: I feel nothing but nerves, anxiety, tension. This is as close of a race as everyone has been predicting. No unexpected Harris surge…that’s for sure.

8:41 pm: How many days is this going to drag on? Will it be finally decided on Thursday or Friday?

8:36 pm: Florida independent voters have gone bigger for Trump this year than in ‘20. A concerning sign?

8:20 pm: Harris obviously isn’t going to prevail in Georgia. Oh, dear God…I feel so scared. All the usual patterns are kicking in, exactly as presumed. Bumblefuck states going for Trump, etc. I’m just not feeling the “phenomenal surge of women voters” thing. I’m scared, Auntie Em…I’m scared.

8:14 pm: Kirk Douglas in heaven: “Ladies and gentleman, there have been times when I’ve been ashamed to be a member of, for lack of a better term, whitebread American dude nation, and this is one such occasion.”

Colonel Saito in The Bridge on the River Kwai: “You will be punished!”

…in order to alleviate my election-day anxiety, which is so intense right now I can barely stand it. I’m thinking, however, that it might not be such a bad thing if I pop an Oxy. Three and a half houre until 8 pm, which is when I’ll start live-blogging. God help us all if…

Clint Eastwood‘s Juror No. 2 is a smart, somber, adult-angled jury deliberation drama that holds you start to finish. Alas, it leaves you with an unsatisfied feeling at the very end.

It’s about a reasonable, sensible 30something dude (Nicholas Hoult‘s Justin Kemp, a married, ex-alcoholic magazine writer) trying to wriggle his way out of a tough moral-pressure-cooker situation.

There’s no good way out of what Kemp is facing, and yet we, the audience, would like to see this obviously decent protagonist find a solution regardless.

Serving as a juror on a murder trial, Kemp is devastated early on by a two-fold realization — i.e., the guy accused of killing his girlfriend (Gabriel Basso‘s James Michael Sythe) is not guilty, and that Kemp, of all the forehead-slapping coincidences, is accidentally guilty of having hit this woman with his car on a dark rainy night.

Kemp initially thinks he might have hit a deer, but he’s also not sure. He’s actually suppressing a terrible inkling. His car was damaged by the impact but he had the dent fixed and then he lied to his pregnant wife about where the collision happened.

So the film is basically held together by Kemp’s moral discomfort as well as our own.

How to solve this horrific situation? Kemp tries the Henry Fonda-in-12 Angry Men solution by trying to talk his fellow jurors out of finding a guilty verdict due to reasonable doubt. A hung jury won’t suffice as the case will just be retried.

Juror No. 2 lacks the tension and intrigue of 12 Angry Men, but it never bores and it certainly ends boldly. That’s all I’m going to say.

Our natural inclination is to want to see justice done, which in this case means Kemp has to come clean and face the music. But an attorney friend (Kiefer Sutherland) tells Kemp that because of his prior alcoholism no one will believe he was sober at the time of the accident, and that he’ll wind up doing serious time. Excerpt hie wife (Zoey Deutch) is about to give birth so there’s nothing but pain either way.

Without getting into specifics there’s a major plot hole that involves auto-body repair receipts. That’s all I’m going to say but this issue becomes more and more bothersome.

Billy Zane‘s forthcoming performance as Marlon Brando will be fun to savor, and yet the trailer tells us immediately why Bill Fishman‘s Waltzing With Brando has been a tough sell, distribution-wise.

It’s not a film about Marlon Brando’s whatever — acting talent, rebel spirit, career turbulence, sexual prowess, spiritual lassitude. It’s a fact-based saga about the building of an ecologically balanced, earth-nourishing resort on the atoll of Tetiaroa, which Brando purchased a 99-year lease for back in ’66 or thereabouts. So it’s basically a story about a rich, flaky eccentric…a story about fiddling around in paradise, trying to do right by nature, gazing at the horizon, etc.

Written and directed by Fishman, and adapted from the late Bernard Judge‘s “Waltzing with Brando: Planning a Paradise in Tahiti,” etc. It could make for an interesting documentary, but dramatically speaking it sounds like a snooze.

The costare are Jon Heder (as Judge), Richard Dreyfuss, Camille Razat, Alaina Huffman, Tia Carrere and James (son of Mick) Jagger.

White–haired septuagenarian: “Trump’s the man.”

HE: “Okay, but do you guys think there’s a slight chance you might go to hell when you die?”

While–haired septuagenarian (chuckling): “Heh, not a chance.”

HE: “Satan is his father, not Fred! He came up from hell and begat a son of mortal woman. He will overthrow the mighty and lay waste their temples!”

I actually didn’t say any of this Roman Castevet stuff, but I said it inwardly. I didn’t have the courage to say it verbally.

Ever since the marketing klutzes at Apple TV+ blew off debuting Steve McQueen’s Blitz at the Venice, Telluride, Toronto or New York film festivals and went instead for a London Film Festival debut, the clear indication was that McQueen’s film was some kind of not-quite-there curio or shortfaller.

And then came confirmation of same from a recent smattering of negative reviews. A 76% RT rating doesn’t say “wipeout” but it does suggest the drag-down effect of certain issues and concerns.

Bullshit!

I saw Blitz last night, and I’m telling you that Apple should be completely ashamed of itself for all-but-burying — are you ready? — this superbly composed, oddball period war fantasy — an exquisitely crafted, richly imaginative, occasionally horrific, constantly engrossing “adventures of a young lad” movie.

And the critics who’ve panned it need to fall on the church steps and beg forgiveness from the Movie Godz.

Blitz is a violent cousin of Disney’s Toby Tyler (‘60) with a racially eccentric, super-woke casting approach plus a little Empire of the Sun seasoning, amounting to something that almost feels a little Wizard of Oz-y — a multi-chaptered child’s adventure flick that blends (during the third act at least) Coppola’s The Cotton Club with Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.”

Partly because of the musical ingredients, I mean. Blitz has a strong, excitingly intrusive score (Hans Zimmer) and a fair amount of tunes that are sung — yes, sung! — with such spunk and warmth, it’s almost (but not quite) a kind of musical. It’s open-hearted and super-carefully composed in a way that vaguely reminded me of Spielberg’s 1941, if you substitute the tone of beardo’s failed comedy for the occasional jolts of brutal realism that punctuate John Boorman’s Hope and Glory.

You almost expect one of the kids whom Eliot Heffernan’s George runs into during his perilous, days-long, trying-to get-back-home-while-dodging-bombs adventure…you almost expect one of the boys he befriends to sing “Consider Yourself,” the 60-year-old tune from B’way’s Oliver!

I’ve been griping about presentism for years, but McQueen’s commitment to re-imagining and recreating the racial composition of 84-years-old London is so surreal and unbridled and fantasy-soaked that you have to give him credit for saying “fuck it” and just taking the damn plunge.

I mean, if you leave out Brixton and similar nabes, London wasn’t this black even in the mid ‘70s or early ‘80s — I was there back then so don’t tell me — and Blitz, of course, is set in ‘40 and ‘41, when there was one person of color for every 3800 palefaces.

Here’s what I tapped out on the train last night:

“Wow….Blitz is much better than I expected…a grittily imaginative, superbly composed Swing Shift meets the London Blitz meets ‘Oliver Twist’ meets Spielberg’s 1941 within a multicultural fantasyland that the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock and Alexander Korda would be totally flabbergasted by if they could somehow see it…

“McQueen is such a great, ballsy filmmaker…this is what brave, phenomenally skilled artists do…they swan-dive into their own, self-created worlds.

“It’s almost a musical & is fairly amazing altogether and yet some half-panned it for being too square and conventional! What the fuck! All of that music and spirit & impressionistic imagery & a general current of adventure as seen and felt by a young lad…it’s a great smorgasbord of 1940s magical realism…it’s brutally realistic and quite violent at certain junctures and yet it almost feels at times like an old Disney film, and that’s what’s bold and robust about it.”

Friendo: “I didn’t see any of what you saw and got off on. I saw a movie that just kind of sat there, and I suspect it’s going to be a MAJOR commercial dud. I don’t think anyone is going to go see it.”

HE reply: “No argument there. Apple did as little as possible for Blitz. They suffocated whatever commercial potential it had.”