The arc experienced by Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone’s in The Godfather, Part II is quite the downer, but it somehow feels right or even fulfilling at the finale — a powerful, frosty, crusty man, stuck in a spiritual hole that he can’t get out of, gradually digs himself in deeper, and then confesses to his mother that he’s trapped, and then doubles down on his demonic paranoid nature (tosses out wife, kills brother) and ends up in a colder, lonelier place than when he started. Yeah!!

..but at least she understands where Luca Guadagnino‘s After The Hunt is coming from. At least that. This declaration of disdain and skepticism against the wokey forces out there is the groundwater basis for my embrace of the film. On top of which Goldberg’s week-old article (10.13) doesn’t use the usual N.Y. Times scare quotes around the word woke…progress!

Kissinger, the three-hour American Experience PBS documentary on Henry Kissinger (1923-2023), is just around the corner. It will air in two parts — Monday, 10.27, and Tuesday, 10.28, at 9 pm eastern. The film will be available to stream on PBS.org and on the PBS app, etc.

Kissinger was quite the influential diplomatic maestro during the Nixon and Ford administrations, but his bottom-line reputation has been disdained or at least debated for many decades, particularly by aged and traumatized residents of Cambodia and Chile and their descendants.

My own brusque opinion is that Kissinger was a brilliant, audacious, cold-blooded chess player whose initiatives and achievements were generally unaffected by humanitarian concerns.

Many of us would be interested in any solid, verified reporting about Kissinger’s dalliances with high-powered industry women back then….Shirley MacLaine, Jill St. John, Marlo Thomas, Candice Bergen, Liv Ullmann, etc.

In the forthcoming “American Canto”, Olivia Nuzzi will reportedly write about her “digital affair” with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

This is fair game, of course, but sharing personal intimate messages feels a tad icky. To me, at least.

There’s titillation in sharing private texts, of course, but not much personal honor. I’m no fan of RFK Jr.’s thinking about vaccines and whatnot, but revealing allegedly intimate texts that he sent to Nuzzi is ethically questionable or, if you will, a bit slimey. (It would be different if Nuzzi had somehow obtained transcripts of texts that RFK, Jr, had sent to another would-be digital lover…that’s a different deal.)

Roughly the same thing happened to me when the careless James Mangold forwarded a private email that I’d sent to him. Out of the emailed 15-paragraphs my thoughts contained a single paragraph that touched very briefly on private voyeurism. Embarassing, yes, but also private. Mangold in turn sent it to Lionsgate’s Tim Palen, who in turn forwarded it to Nikki Finke because she wanted to “get” me because I had shared a relatively minor anecdote about Finke with some N.Y. Daily News guys back in’94.

It was a cheap and callous move on Mangold’s part, because it was meant for his eyes only and yet he violated that trust without blinking an eye. Mangold could have copied and pasted the content of a single live-wire paragraph in my email that he figured Lionsgate would want to know about (i.e., I’d spoken with Elmore Leonard about Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma) but naaahh….too much trouble, right?

Last night I watched the first three episodes of Patrick MacManus‘s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, a new eight-episode Peacock series about the infamous serial killer from a suburb northwest of Chicago.

Gacy was a fat, gay sociopathic beast who had an amiable personality and liked dressing up like a clown, but who also murdered around 34 young men in the ’70s (mostly during the Jimmy Carter era)…he buried most of his victims in a crawl space under his home, and some under his garage’s cement floor. And he dumped a few in the Des Plaines river.

As long as McManus sticks to the Gacy investigation by the Norwood Park cops (and then the prosecution in the later episodes), Devil in Disguise is aces…gripping and fascinating and appropriately gloomy. It has story tension, realism, a strange Midwestern eeriness.

But when it starts veering into the lives of some of the victims and the anguish of their families after they’ve disappeared, you can feel the tension dissipating more and more…you can feel the narrative padding slowing things down.

HE to MacManus: We’d rather not familiarize ourselves with the young gay victims, and we really, really don’t want to deal with the grief of their parents. Bohhr-innnng! If you’d just stuck to the cops and the prosecutors and cut all the dramatic flotsam and jetsom, you’d have a perfect miniseries. Read the “investigation” section of Gacy’s Wikipage…it sucks you right in.

The girthy Michael Chernus, whose Gacy perf sorta kinda reminds you of John Candy in Uncle Buck and Planes Trains and Automobiles, is fairly great as this suburban monster. The last time I wrote about Chernus was when he played the extra-marital boyfriend of Stephanie Allynne in a glum 2015 Sundance comedy called People Places Things. My basic thought was “why would the pistol-hot Allyne want to cheat on her husband with a not-all-that-handsome overweight guy?”

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In a sharply worded response to Owen Gleiberman‘s 10.19 Variety piece that disputes the notion that One Battle After Another celebrates radical militant lefty agitation, Breitbart.com’s John Nolte states a fair, neutral-minded observation about Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Bob Ferguson, the film’s grungy, bathrobe-wearing, start-to-finish protagonist.

Nolte observes that Leo doesn’t do anything — not one fucking thing — to affect the fate of his kidnapped daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti)

Nolte: “What [Gleiberman] doesn’t tell you is that DiCaprio’s Bob is a moron. Why? Because One Battle After Another only portrays white people as either useless idiots or evil racists. Director Anderson is so exacting with this agenda that every single member of the military (ICE) is white.

“What’s more, unlike Perfida, DiCaprio’s Bob has no redemption arc. When we meet him, he’s a child-like beta male to Perfidia’s oh-so competent girlboss. When we leave him, he’s looking at his new iPhone like a confused chimpanzee. From A to Z, Bob is so useless, you could literally remove his character from the movie and the plot would remain exactly the same (but blessedly shorter). Because he’s white, Anderson will not allow Bob to shape or move any of the action, even though he’s supposed to be our protagonist.

“The only competent and decent people in Battle are racial minorities — especially all the girlboss black women.”

Here’s an actual discussion that happened an hour or two ago between HE and a very adamant friendo…

Friendo: “Leo is the hero of the goddamn movie! And he undergoes a Hero’s Journey that is so classic, it’s practically Old Hollywood. He rescues his daughter from an army of government killers, and redeems himself in the process.”

HE: “He actually doesn’t rescue her. She rescues herself by shooting the Chistmas Adventurers assassin on that hilly desert road. And then Leo arrives and talks her out of shooting HIM when he says, ‘Willa…it’s okay…I’m your dad.’”

Friendo: “If Bob had not embarked on that journey, Willa would be dead. That’s called rescuing.”

HE: “I saw the movie twice. Leo really, really doesn’t rescue her.  He just arrives after she’s killed the Christmas assassin, and then pleads with her and says ‘let’s go home, baby’ or whatever.  He makes a lot of clumsy, anxious, stumbling-around moves during the film, but he does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to resolve things or save the day.”

Friendo: “But doesn’t his BEING there at the climax count as a rescue? I get that PTA didn’t want to make a glorified Charles Bronson movie. He has gone to the ends of the earth for Willa, out of his devoted dad-hood.”

HE: “Yeah, he’s done a good devoted-dad thing.  But Leo hasn’t actually solved anything or made things safer. He hasn’t stopped the bad guys. He’s done nothing decisive or crucial. He doesn’t even have a big climactic moment with Sean Penn at the very end…nothing.”