The first viewing of a film is a date. The third viewing of the same film indicates definite interest, hot cinematic “sex” and a potential for going steady. The seventh or eighth viewing means you’re living together and still having good sex, but oh, those first three or four times! The fifteenth viewing means you’re married and locked in the long haul, but the thrill is gone.

HE to Owen Gleiberman: So much of life and living is propelled by illusion. But for me, Margaret Hamilton’s cackling, green-skinned witch is an absolutely genuine, real-deal figure of campy fun and wicked frolic. Matriarchy schmatriarchy!

https://variety.com/2025/film/columns/wizard-of-oz-wicked-feminism-patriarchy-critic-analysis-1236589628/

Political journalist Ryan Lizza felt betrayed, naturally, when he discovered five years ago that journalist Olivia Nuzzi, his live-in fiancé at the time, had done the gasping slurpy nasty with former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, whom she had profiled for New York magazine in late ‘19.

Four years later came Nuzzi’s second affair of sorts — not an actual slippin’ and slidin’ thing, Nuzzi has written, as it was all about sexting — with an older politician, the hoarse-voiced Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. , Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Except in his second Substack piece about Nuzzi’s outre sexual entanglements, Lizza has posted a salacious excerpt from a “poem” that RFK allegedly sent to Nuzzi — one that not only challenges her “American Canto” account of an allegedly non-sexual involvement with RFK (whom she alludes to in the book as “the politician”) but graphically alludes to a pulse-quickening blowjob he may or may not have received from Nuzzi during their 2024 mess-around…hey, I’m just reporting this stuff.

Lizza has described “American Canto” as “a largely fictitious and self-serving account” of her thing with RFK. The honesty factor or lack thereof is between Nuzzi, her publisher and her readers, but it’s icky and rather vicious of Lizza to have posted RFK’s alleged account of…this is really distasteful in more ways than one…the adoring Nuzzi swallowing his “river” without spilling a drop.

Lizza’s (and possibly RFK’s) odious excerpt:

Even if Nuzzi did provide exceptional pleasuring last year to the nation’s current Health and Human Services honcho, Lizza’s attempt to publicly humiliate an ex-girlfriend reflects poorly upon his own character and temperament. Deciding to post that sliver of a b.j. “poem” was mean and toxic.

Lizza excerpts:

Lizza on discovering Luzzi’s Sanford betrayal — a note that alludes to more swallowing

A couple of months ago Nuzzi landed a West Coast editor position with Vanity Fair. Will Lizza’s posting RFK’s possibly genuine or possibly fanciful b.j. “poem” lead to VF cutting her loose? I say keep her on.

Nuzzi is obviously a tiny bit wacko, but she’s also a memorable “character” in the tradition of Isadora Duncan or Tallulah Bankhead or Marlene Dietrich, and who among us doesn’t enjoy colorful accounts of reckless, go-for-the-gusto living and yaddah-yaddah? Does each and every female political reporter or columnist have to radiate astringent, button-down posturing and no-monkey-business professionalism? The system can’t allow for an occasional free-spirited sensualist, just to liven things up?

It takes all sorts to make a world.

…and they are selling such books (I read them to Sutton last night), why not create children’s books based upon The Wild Bunch and The Towering Inferno? Hell, why not go real-world? Tyke books based upon the 9/11 catastrophe, the Kennedy assassination and the Cambodian genocide of the ‘70s, say.

Howard Hawks, Paul Newman and HE are now a power-sharing, chrome-steel triumvirate.

From this point on the guiding light perceptions of HE (all high-quality films feature a late-second-act pivot), Hawks (“three great scenes and no bad ones”) and Newman (Newman’s Law of 15 at the front and back) comprise the core of our movie-assessing philosophy.

Hawks, Newman and HE are hereby resolved to move forward in this moviegoing life based on the clarity and radiance of shared perceptions and accumulated life wisdom (i.e., long is the way and hard that, out of darkness, leads up to light).

Poor Lindsey Halligan, 36, is suffering a career setback over mishandling the government’s vindictive (i.e., revenge-driven) prosecution of former FBI chief James Comey. Two months ago President Trump appointed Halligan as interim United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, despite her lack of experience. Now she’s dropped the procedural ball, and the Commey case may be thrown out as a result.**

But if you know anything about rightwingers in general or Trump in particular, you know they all tend to hire model-pretty women who exude a certain Charlie’s Angels vibe. It goes with the territory. This is not suggest or imply that the dishy hires can’t necessarily handle the job on its own terms, but their attractiveness is certainly a key factor as far as their career ascensions are concerned.

For what it’s worth, 30 years ago I tried to help a pretty, dark-haired 20something woman — a good egg in my book — get a job interview with producer Don Simpson. I began by telling Simpson that she was sharp and well-educated with a disciplined social manner.

Then I made the mistake of telling him she was good-looking. “In my experience that’s a negative,” Simpson replied. “Pretty women are accustomed to being flattered and catered to in certain ways. They’ve been told all their lives that the world will often defer to them or bend the rules to some extent, and so they’re not as hard-working and soldier-like as women who are are equally qualified but less attractive.”

I rarely spoke with Simpson about women or sex or anything in that realm; I loved talking to him because he was so shrewd and whip-smart about all the Hollywood players — who they were deep down, what their basic personalities and mindsets were, etc. I’ve mentioned the prejudice he had about interviewing attractive women for office or production jobs to point out that at least Simpson, who’s been dead for almost 30 years now, was no Brett Kavanaugh.

A 9.20 Guardian article reports that Yale Law School professor Amy Chua, who has strongly endorsed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, privately told a group of law students last year that it was “not an accident” that Kavanaugh’s female law clerks all “looked like models.”

The story reports that Chau has suggested to female students who wanted to work for Kavanaugh that they should “dress to exude a ‘model-like’ femininity.”

The article adds that Chau’s law-professor husband, Jed Rubenfeld, “told a prospective clerk that Kavanaugh liked a certain ‘look'” — a presumed allusion to a fashionably-dressed, hot-to-trot “fuck me” appearance.

Which indicates that the adult, judicially-focused Kavanaugh was looking for a certain atmosphere of tumescent arousal in his law office, and that right now he’s probably a middle-aged version of the 17-year-old horndog who tried to drunkenly have his way with Christine Blasey Ford back in the early ’80s.

Then again working with hotties is a standard Republican thing. We’re all aware that powerful right-wing guys tend to hire foxes — sexy, slender, alluring — and in many cases icy Nordic blondes, which is the template for pretty much every female Fox News employee.

Consider a 2.20.17 Guardian piece by Hadley Freeman called “Why Do All The Women on Fox News Look and Dress Alike? Republicans Prefer Blondes.”

Freeman notes that right-wing women (i.e., Kellyanne Conway, Scottie Nell Hughes, Tomi Lahren, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Ivanka Trump) all present “a uniform vision of girlishly long bottle-blond hair. [And they] all dress exactly the same, which is to say, mainstream feminine — dresses, not trousers; heels, not flats; no interesting cuts, just body-skimming, cleavage-hinting, not-scaring-the-horses tedium. These are the kind of women who take pride in saying things like ‘I’m not into fashion — I like style’, and by ‘style’ they mean ‘clothes that men like me to wear.'”

So yes, Kavanaugh is apparently a dog, but he isn’t an outlier — he’s just looking for the same kind of tingly stimulation from his female law clerks that Roger Ailes wanted from female Fox News staffers.

** In November, a federal judge heard Comey and James’s challenges to the legality of Halligan’s appointment. Days later, a magistrate judge, William E. Fitzpatrick, found that Halligan may have committed misconduct by falsely stating that the Fifth Amendment precluded Comey from avoiding to testify at his trial. Fitzpatrick added that Halligan had told jurors that the Department of Justice had additional evidence that would be revealed at trial and noted the discrepancy between the indictment presented and the indictment approved by the grand jury. Halligan later told judge Michael S. Nachmanoff that the foreperson in the grand jury proceedings for the Comey case had approved a second version of the indictment that had not been seen by the grand jury.

The headline for Chang’s review in the New Yorker print edition (dated 12.1.25) is “To Die, To Weep”, which sounds fitting if lacking in terms of the usual urban edge and smart-assery. And yet, oddly, the online edition’s headline defaults to the commonly used “grief porn” dismissal.

During a summer day-trip to Washington, D.C., my young sister Laura and I experienced a short period of bathroom panic as we drove around with our mother, Nancy, at the wheel. Nancy said it was partly because of all the large fountains…all that gushing water was weakening our resolve.

It follows that millions of Los Angelenos felt the same psychological pressure yesterday due to the city coping with constant rainfall.

HE to Cozzalio: One “potty” break during the screening of Nouvelle Vague, and then another during a subsequent showing of Breathless?

So no attending to business BETWEEN these films, as some of us might do. Instead you sit down and watch both films and then in the middle of each one you go “whoops!…sorry, heh-heh, excuse me!” Then you get up and miss maybe three or four minutes of each film.

What is that? This is not serious movie-watching. Godard would have sneered at this. Ask anyone. Ask Scorsese or DeNiro.

So you go through your daily life submitting to bathroom breaks…what, six or seven times each waking day, not counting waking up at 2 or 3 am (or 3 or 4 am) to take a whiz or a dump?

Forgive me for making a coarse assumption, but “potty break” sounds to me like sit-down action. It’s basically a child’s term like “I went poopie” (I have a four-year-old granddaughter so don’t tell me) or, if you’re standing up, “I went pee-pee” or “wee-wee”.

I would have gone for more oblique terminology like “I used the facilities” or “I hit the head” or “I heeded the call of nature”, all of which allude to or allow for the possibility of stand-up action.

I shudder at the idea of hitting a bathroom this many times per day. It sounds like a form of tyranny.

Speaking of “sit-down action”, I posted a related piece 14 years ago.

[Posted on 9.19.11] Last night Jett, his roommate Sonya and I caught a 7:50 pm screening of Drive at Brooklyn’s UA Court Street Stadium plex. My second viewing. Great film.

I hit the smallish bathroom after it ended. Two urinals and a toilet stall with six or seven guys lined up. I should have bailed right then and there, but I was looking for a little sit-down action and wasn’t sure of my alternate options.

A guy left the stall and a 30something black dude took ownership and, like, didn’t come out. Three, four minutes. Five minutes. Six. Could he be undergoing self-administered surgery? Filling out a mortgage application?

Then, still on the pot, he began talking to his girlfriend on his cell, flirting with her, settling in. “How ya doin’? Movie’s over…yeah. You wanna eat somethin’?,” etc.

If I had any balls I would have knocked on the stall door and, just like Tom Cruise in Collateral, said, “Yo, homey!” I didn’t, of course. I just stood and waited like a sap, listening to this jerkoff go on and on. The idea of showing consideration to others simply hadn’t occurred to him.

Around the seven- or eight-minute mark I gave up and went outside and used the facilities at a nearby Barnes and Noble.

It’s simply a matter of culture and manners. Let’s face it — some people are low-lifes.

I’ll be attending an invitational screening of George Clooney‘s The Ides of March at the Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday. If I happen to hit the bathroom after it ends I can absolutely guarantee that nobody will sit in a toilet stall for several minutes, ignoring the fact that several others are waiting, while chit-chatting with a girl. I’ll put $100 on this right now. I’ll bet anything.