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.”

Will someone explain what’s so friggin’ Oscar-y about Geeta Gandbhir‘s The Perfect Neighbor (Netflix), which premiered 9 or 10 months ago at wokey-woke Sundance?

It’s a very compelling, skillfully edited police-bodycam-footage doc of a boilerplate racial-animus-in-a-neighborhood killing. Hate-driven, agitated-by-noisy-kids Karen (who probably drinks) pulls a gun, loses control, plugs her POC neighbor in the chest…par for the course in Ocala, a boondocky burgh in northern central Florida …a downmarket tabloid American town.

An unfortunately commonplace occurence these days, but on the other hand (a) what’s the big deal?, (b) what else is new? and (c) so what?

What about a Netflix doc about Iryna Zarutska, the innocent young Ukranian blonde who was recently stabbed to death by that mentally unstable black dude, Decarlos Brown, in the Charlotte area?

Or about that 2023 NY subway episode in which Daniel Penny restrained the mentally unstable Jordan Neely and inadvertently choked him to death?

No way, Jose. One, no documentarian operating within the iiberal Hollywood filmmaking bubble would dare make a doc about either incident. And two, neither Sundance nor Netflix would ever screen either one, mainly because of content that would inevitably reflect negatively on DOCs (dudes of color).

I’m obviously not defending that seemingly scabrous Ocala woman who shot her neighbor point blank. But docs about real-life killings have to cast frowning judgment upon paleface aggressors.

I must admit that I was impressed by Zohran Mamdani‘s razor-quick mind and general debating skills the other night. He’s obviously going to be the next NYC mayor, but his seemingly pro-Muslim, anti-cop, anti-Jewish agenda…I guess I shouldn’t say stuff like this. Give the guy a chance, right?

But his mayoral administration will probably be, I’m guessing, a little bit like London Breed‘s term as San Francisco mayor (2018 to 2025), and you know how that fucking turned out.

Mamdani wants to make bus service free for hard-working plebes struggling to make ends meet…fine. But you know who’s going to become a permanent fixture on those buses, right? Bums. Smelly, drooling bums.

This Indecent Proposal scene was written by Amy Holden Jones, who was around 40 when this not-all-that-great Paramount film was released. But Robert Redford‘s subway car recollection is a wee bit devastating. Because I’ve been there myself.

I’ve lost count of how many brief eyeball romances I’ve had with women on the NYC subway, or on the Boston MTA or the Paris Metro. When I was young or youngish, I mean. Each and every one was at least a little bit heartbreaking.

Loss hurts, and that includes lost opportunity. “Of all words by thought or pen, none so said as ‘it might have been.'”

In the immediate wake of poor Diane Keaton‘s death it would’ve been bad form to share my completely honest view of her interpretation of Louise Bryant in Warren Beatty‘s Reds, but I guess I can share it now.

My view is that Bryant is irritating — during the first hour she’s always seething and pouting — because she’s angry about not being talented enough to measure up to Jack Reed.

A friend said that her resentments weren’t really period-accurate — that Keaton/Bryant’s anger was primarily fed by the fires of 1970s feminism. I agreed but added that early feminism and the suffragette movement and free love were certainly starting to bloom in the early teens — it wasn’t as if there was nothing resembling ’70s feminism going on before World War I.

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For six long years I’ve been waiting for the demise of Taika Waititi, or, you know, for his streak to run out of gas. At least that.

And now, to go by the Critical Drinker, it finally has. I’ve been secretly hoping for the Waititi torch to go out since sitting and suffering through JoJo Rabbit, which I called “a stylistic wank-off and about a quarter-inch deep” in September 2019.

Only now can it be told: In my 9.25.19 JoJo Rabbit review I reported that “there was a seasoned industry guy sitting behind me who couldn’t stop laughing, and heartily at that. At one point I half turned in my seat as if to say ‘what the fuck?’, but I didn’t turn all the way around.” That industry guy was no one else but Jeff Sneider.