HE to Mark Caro: What “manned a grill” means is that some beefy or bearded or broad-shouldered dude (i.e., someone like me in the latter case) strapped on a clean white apron and commandingly assumed responsibility for grilling meats of one kind or another during am outdoor 4th of July party. Melted butter and sauce brushes. He “took over” the grill and, you know, handled the chore of grilling stuff with a certain confident panache…exerting a Dwayne Johnson– or Ben Affleck– or John Wayne-like sense of authority. Not a complex concept.

Teary-eyed wokester girlymen (i.e., Ben Whishaw in Women Talking) could never and will never be accused on “manning” a grill.

Friendo: “Mark Caro is a reasonable guy, not a wokester. He’s basically saying that the idea of ‘manning’ anything isn’t cool…that it’s a trigger term that’s only looking for trouble. It’s bizarre how there’s an ongoing effort to eliminate masculinity. On the left obviously. Good lord, a healthy society needs men to be men. Which means that our current society, at least as represented in many urban blue regions, is somewhere between moderately unhealthy and unhealthy as fuck.”

In order to convincingly portray Nike marketing guy Sonny Vaccaro in Air (Amazon, 4.5), Matt Damon had to either (a) fatten up or (b) wear a fat suit. (Not sure which.) Director, producer and costar Ben Affleck insisted upon this.

And I’ll tell you right now I wish Damon had played Vaccaro as a relatively slender guy. I don’t give a shit if the real Vaccaro was on the beefy side and neither does anyone else.

HE Rule #17: Never, ever fatten up for a movie role unless the intention is to look appalling or grotesque a la Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.

During yesterday’s CBS Sunday Morning interview Damon said that upon seeing the finished film his wife Luciana Bozán said, “The movie is great but you look like shit.” Why would anyone out there feel differently? Name one fattened-up performance that really worked…that really lent an extra dimension of realism or whatever. Charlie Sheen in Wall Street?…wrong.

In explaining why an actor wasn’t cast to play Michael Jordan, Affleck told CBS Sunday Morning that “the only actor who could play Jordan was a little old to play this part and we probably couldn’t afford him” — who’s he talking about? I’m guessing that Affleck was fibbing with flattery and actually meant that the unaffordable actor was Mahershala Ali, who, currently 48, is more than twice as old as Jordan during the time of the Nike deal. Who else could he be referring to? Somebody lithe and tall.

Affleck: “This is a movie about an icon, about somebody’s who so meaningful that the minute I show you somebody and say ‘that’s Michael Jordan’ you’re gonna say ‘no, it’s not’ and then the rest of the movie is fake.” Fair enough, but why have at least 18 actors played JFK in various dramas over the years? None of them got him right, not really…none of them really captured the voice or the hair or anything. But they did it anyway because the gig was there and the money was good.

Burying visual information in a shroud of unnecessary darkness is not only perverse but diseased. Willfully submitting to this kind of monochrome mud makes no sense, and yet there it is…the only possible rationale for a film-noir lover to buy the new Shout! Factory Bluray of Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (‘48).

Decades of resentment, irritation, alienation and suppressed rancor fell away today when I paid a visit to my dad’s gravesite. Hillside Cemetery, plot #1522. He’s not actually there but a veteran’s org planted the stone a few weeks after he passed.

I’ve been too critical of him over the years. He was no day at the beach but a decent human being as far as it went. A clever ad man, hard working, witty, thoughtful, well educated, responsible.

The axe-throwing wasn’t so bad. I didn’t want to do it due to fear of failure. But I managed a few decent throws, even a couple of bull’s-eyes.

There are two wood-handled axe sizes —I was happier with the smaller, less weighty one. I tended to lightly lob rather than throw hard.

The baked-in-Bloomfield atmosphere is emphatically lower-middle-class — the Montclair swells keep their distance and then some. But I shrugged it off. We’re all bumblefucks underneath our pretensions.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Lovia Guarkye (spell that last name!) approved in a slightly mixed way, but Variety’s Peter Debruge was 100% sold and the closing-night SXSW crowd was reportedly oogah–boogah and ape-crazy.

HE won’t be seeing Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Alex Convery’s Air until Wednesday evening so all good things in their immaculate time and proper proportion, but thank God something has come along to flush out that horrible EEAAO after-taste. It’s almost like the Beatles arriving in the wake of the JFK assassination.

Two days ago (3.16) I took a shot at listing 2023’s likeliest Best Picture contenders. Nine in all. No hopefuls or maybe-level contenders — strictly serious only, “safe bets,” no pikers, etc.

The following day Variety’s Clayton Davis ran his own ‘23 rundown, generously allowing (as he usually does) for any and all possibilities from the Clayton realm. and that’s fine. Then again including The Marvels, Spider–Man: Across The Spider–Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 speaks for itself.

…it’s no good. I’m sorry but in my book coarse, common, not-quite-there horror has never cut it. It has to be Watcher– or Midsommar or Babadook or Repulsion or Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby or Lighthouse-level or not at all.

Ixnay to Pearl, Get Out (racially-stamped, hand-me-down Ira Levin), The Black Phone, Knock at the Cabin, Nope, M3GAN, Bones and All, etc. The Menu was and is an approvable half–and–halfer, but no jumping up and down.

I’m sorry but HE knows pedigree like the back of its hand. Martin Balsam’s Arbogast: “If it doesn’t jell it isn’t aspic…”

The five above-the-line Oscars won by Milos Forman and Ken Kelsey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (‘75) need to be rescinded because watching this movie causes pain to wokesters.

One of the unprosecuted charges against Jack Nicholson’s Randall P. McMurphy was statutory rape involving a 14-year-old girl (i.e., she declined to testify). And the film portrays him as a heroic rebel figure? Unacceptable. Plus all the mental- clinic guards are Black — negative stereotyping. And what about those racist Indian jokes directed at Will Sampson’s “Chief” Bromden? Plus all the patients are white.

Attempting to hide the $130K Stormy Daniels payoff was a violation of NY campaign finance laws, and is definitely something that Orange Plague will have to answer for. HE supports any legalistic claim or prosecution that might hurt or deter Trump.

But the Stormy thing doesn’t strike me as all that dastardly or horrific. Ditto holding on to classified documents in Mar a Lago.

Inciting the Jan. 6th Capitol riot, illegally trying to overturn Georgia vote tallies…those, to me, are serious crimes. Ditto raping and slandering E. Jean Carroll.

8:15 am: No time to write about Matt Ruskin‘s Boston Strangler due to my New Jersey axe-throwing engagement (leaving in less than an hour), but last night I said the following about the hugely annoying color scheme: “A subdued palette of grayish green (or is it greenish gray?) mixed with mud, mist and slurpings of lentil soup.”

Could the dp, Ben Kutchins, be the new Bradford Young?

I tried re-watching Richard Fleischer‘s The Boston Strangler (’68) a couple of nights ago, but it’s been pulled.

Both are gone now. The redoubtable David Carr in actuality (passed on 2.12.15) and Scott because the person he was ten years ago no longer “exists”, in a certain sense. Because he went over to the woke side sometime around ’19 or ’20, and in so doing jettisoned the 2013 version — a guy I really liked and admired and lament the absence of.