Honest HE rewrite under the eyes of a watchful God: “I can respond to all this by saying clearly and unequivocally: Because my obvious cognitive decline has become the central focus of the ongoing 2024 Presidential campaign (even though Donald Trump‘s authoritarian and fascistic views about presidential power, recently fortified by the Supreme Court, are far more threatening in a general sense), I am all but certain to lose both the popular and electoral vote counts on 11.5.24.

“In short, I am finished. My goose is cooked. But I am determined to run nonetheless because my life-of-Joe-Biden saga has always been about persistence, tenacity and never giving up.

“Will tens of millions of Americans suffer and howl and stamp their feet when Trump is re-elected? Will American democracy as we’ve known it take a spear wound or two and perhaps worse? Almost certainly. But as I said to George Stephanopoulos the other night, what matters in the end is how I feel and whether I’ve fought my best fight.

“’As long as I gave it my all,’ I said to George, ‘and did the best job I know I can do — that’s what this is about.’

“Translation: If the United States of America has to go down with me, so be it.

“So as your president and as a staunch fellow Democrat, don’t fret about Trump’s coming victory. What matters the most is how I, Joe Biden, feel about myself, and how Dr. Jill Biden feels about me and how my eternally disreputable, formerly addicted son feels about me, and how obstinate and mule-headed I’m willing to be. And as your president, trust me, I am more of a mule than Francis! (Go ahead — ask Donald O’Connor. No, wait, he died 20 years ago.)

“My Irish feet, trust me, are set in cement, and Biden cement doesn’t crack.”

After I began to think and write about Charlotte Wells’ listless Aftersun, which I saw in Cannes in ‘22 and will never see again, I discovered I was having difficulty remembering the name of Paul Mescal, who played the weepy dad.

It wasn’t just that I felt an instant animal dislike for this 20something Irish actor, but something about his last name just wouldn’t stay in my brain. It didn’t sound Irish, for one thing. Too mushy. So I decided upon a word association technique. I thought of him as a form of human mescaline (i.e., disorienting) and it worked. I simply decided that this watery-eyed sedative of an actor was the Carlos Castaneda mescalito guy, even though there was nothing the least bit trippy about him.

Problem solved.

…feel like gangbusters if your score it with “We Will Rock You.” Imagine this teaser coupled with “Tomorrow Never Knows“…that would be amazing. Or Handel’s “Messiah“…even better.

In response to HE’s “13 Best Revolution Dramas” (7.5), a journo friend suggested the addition of John Frankenheimer‘s Seven Days In May, which he says is “still unnerving today, especially now and with Project 2025 seeping into consciousness.”

HE response: “Seven Days in May is not a revolution movie — it’s a political suspense thriller about stopping a military insurrection.

“I love this film also except for the IDIOTIC NOTION that letters showing that Burt Lancaster‘s James Matoon Scott had heated sexual thoughts about Ava Gardner‘s Eleanor Holbrook and vice versa…the totally moronic notion that these letters would halt or hinder Scott’s military overthrow plot.

Sample letter: “Ellie — worshipping your pear-shaped ass is more important to me than money, good health, political power…I want nothing more from life than to carnally possess that luscious pear…perhaps after making exquisite love we can go out together for pear cake in the West Village?”

Last night I caught Greg Berlanti‘s Fly Me To The Moon (Sony, 7.12) at a local AMC plex — a ticket buyer’s sneak preview so all embargo bets are off. Any negative reviews or social media tweets you might read are probably harsh and unfair for this is definitely a reasonably decent romantic confection with perky performances (except for Channing Tatum‘s), some agreeably snappy, above-average dialogue and…okay, somewhat clumsy third-act plotting but not in a catastrophic sense.

Written by Rose Gilroy, Bill Kirstein and Keenan Flynn, it’s a lightweight romcom riff on the alleged faking of the 1969 moon landing legend — a decades-old myth — by way of early ’60s Rock Hudson and Doris Day movies.

It has a jaunty, vaguely farcical tone while being both accurate and oddly inaccurate in recreating the America of 55 years ago. But it also offers a slice of that same nostalgic feeling of national pride that Todd Douglas Miller‘s Apollo 11 (’19) conveyed. So it leaves you with wholesome emotions and a nice aftertaste.

I went right home and re-watched Apollo 11 on Amazon….an absolutely first-rate, visually beautiful documentary sans narration or talking heade.

Scarlett Johansson‘s Kelly Jones is the star of the show — glamorously presented, hoarding most of the clever lines, registering serious emotion. She’s a bit like Doris Day‘s advertising executive in Lover Come Back (’61), only much more savvy and Don Draper-ish and therefore more of an exercise in 21st Century presentism as women generally didn’t wield that kind of power a half-century ago.

Jones is hired by Woody Harrelson‘s Moe Berkus (i.e., the conniving bad guy) to commercially market the Apollo program and later to secretly organize the shooting of a faked moon landing in case the Apollo 11 mission doesn’t succeeed or ends tragically.

Channing Tatum‘s Cole Davis is an uptight NASA bigwig with a crush on Jones, a fat broomstick up his ass, acute feelings of guilt over the January 1967 launchpad deaths of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chaffee, and a strong distaste for Jones’ marketing of the Apollo program. He’s basically playing a chump — a secondary character who mostly reacts to stuff that he finds angering, confounding or surprising.

If Fly Me To The Moon inspires you to re-watch Miller’s Apollo 11, as it did me, you might want to play a little game with yourself. There’s a whole lot of pre-launch footage of NASA technicians, VIP NASA guests, and Average Joe tourists waiting to see the launch. The name of the game is “Find the Obese People.” Because in 1969 they were all but nonexistent. You might spot one or two NASA technicians who could stand to exercise a bit more, but no Lizzo or John Candy types.

Among the almost entirely white throngs of Cocoa Beach tourists it’s really hard to find even a moderately fat person, and damn near impossible to spot any serious Jabbas. It’s just the way things were back then.

“Weltschmerz of ’69 vs. Insanity of Now“, posted on 7.13.19:

Apollo 11 is truly great within its own realm — an immersive, suspenseful, larger-than-life, clean-as-a-hound’s-tooth revisiting of a momentous moment in world history. It’s moving and majesterial and as tightly wound as a Swiss watch — i.e., all the boring parts of an eight-day voyage removed for viewing pleasure.

Apollo 11 gets you emotionally in at least a couple of ways. In hindsight it’s almost sad to watch when you consider how good and unified everyone in the U.S. felt when the Eagle landed on the moon on 7.20.69. That feeling is gone for good now.

True, things were anything but peaceful in the summer of ’69 — the Vietnam War raging, the “silent majority” discomforted by anti-war demonstrations and a general loathing of President Richard Nixon plus counter-culture upheavals (pot, LSD, hippies, the Weathermen, Black Panthers, “whitey on the moon”, Woodstock, breakup of the Beatles). So life is never peaceful and strife and discomfort are often the orders of the day.

Nixon was a dark character but he wasn’t MAGA crazy. For all his dark currents and venal determinations Nixon at least understood and respected the system of checks and balances for the most part and, apart from “the plumbers”, generally operated within constitutional restraints. And he did push for environmental laws, a national health care system and the raising of labor wages. Five years ago Noam Chomsky opined that Nixon was “the last liberal president.”

As disturbing and discordant as 1969 was, it was a comparative garden of eden compared to what’s happening now.

Here’s a re-hash of HE’s best 2011 films along with the also-rans and stinkers…if you assemble the best (10), the very goods (16) and the generally approved (23), the tally comes to 49….a damn good year!

HE’s 10 Best of 2011 (in this order): Moneyball, A Separation, The Descendants, Miss Bala, Drive, Contagion, Win Win, Tyrannosaur, The Tree of Life, In The Land of Blood and Honey. (10)

Special “I Don’t Know Where They Precisely Belong But I Like ‘Em More Than Some Of The Others” Distinction (i.e., Close With Unlit Cigar): Attack The Block, Beginners, Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, Margaret, Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, X-Men First Class, Captain America, Hugo, 50/50, Young Adult, The Artist, Hanna, The Guard, Bridesmaids, Buck, Page One: Inside The NY Times, Rampart. (16)

Good & Generally Approved With Issues (in this order): Take Shelter, A Better Life, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Ides of March, Midnight in Paris, A Dangerous Method, Albert Nobbs, J. Edgar, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Applause, Melancholia, The Lincoln Lawyer, Another Happy Day, Source Code, Point Blank, Cedar Rapids, The Iron Lady, Happy Happy, Super, The Housemaid, Carnage, Another Earth, Le Havre. (23)

Frosty, Tiresome, Enervatingly Good: Shame. (1)

The Wrong Stuff: War Horse, Tintin, The Lie. (3)

Decent, Not Half Bad: Coriolanus, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, Insidious, The Last Lions, Warrior, Myth of the American Sleepover, Tabloid, Super 8, The Trip, Making The Boys (doc about Mart Crowley and The Boys in the Band), Jane Eyre, Paranormal Activity 3, Restless, Submarine, Take This Waltz, Thor, Meet Monica Valour, Rango. (19)

Approved But Lesser Almodovar: The Skin I Live In. (1)

Lesser Dardennes: The Kid With A Bike. (1)

Lesser Fincher: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Lesser Kiarostami: Certified Copy (1)

Respectable Intentions, Didn’t Get There: Meek’s Cutoff, London Boulevard, Texas Killing Fields, Warrior, Straw Dogs, The Way Back, Like Crazy, The Rum Diary, Sleeping Beauty, The Adjustment Bureau, The Company Men, White Irish Drinkers, The Devil’s Double, The Dilemma, We Bought A Zoo, Wuthering Heights, Anonymous. (18)

Meh, Underbaked, Less is Less, Insufficient: Rubber, Ceremony, Hall Pass, Bullhead, Fright Night, The Help, Magic Trip, Our Idiot Brother. (8)

Most Dislikable Sundance 2011 Film: Bellflower. (1)

Regretful Shortfallers: 30 Minutes Or Less, The Beaver, Higher Ground, Knuckle, Larry Crowne, Limitless, Priest. (7)

Acute Dislike, Blah, Nothing, Stinko: The Big Year, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Arthur, Bad Teacher, Battle: Los Angeles, Butter, The Caller, Cat Run, The Change-Up, Cowboy & Aliens, Colombiana, Crazy, Stupid, Love, Dream House, Fast Five, Final Destination 5, Five Days of War, Footloose, Friends With Benefits, The Green Hornet, Green Lantern, Hall Pass, The Hangover Part II, Hobo With A Shotgun, Horrible Bosses, Kaboom, Machine Gun Preacher, New Year’s Eve, One Day, Paul, Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Red Riding Hood, Sucker Punch, Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1, Tower Heist, Twixt, Water For Elephants, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Your Highness, The Zookeeper, Your Highness, Miral. (42)

Several years ago I stated that the following 15 films were the best of 2000, and in this order:

Yes, Ridley Scott‘s Gladiator is a worthy, grand-scale film, but I don’t think it was good enough to include among the top 15. I’m sorry but I don’t. Mainly because I found Joaquin Phoenix‘s Commodus an absurdly overwrought villain…a ridiculous man…Snidely Whiplash times ten.

So here are the new rankings…time brings improved perspective…here we go…

1. Kenneth Lonergan‘s You Can Count On Me (contains Mark Ruffalo‘s finest-ever performance — he was playing my late brother Tony).

2. Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic.

2. Cameron Crowe‘s Almost Famous (untitled director’s cut)

4. Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu‘s Amores perros.

5. Jonathan Glazer‘s Sexy Beast.

6. Stephen Frears‘ High Fidelity.

7. Christopher Nolan‘s Memento.

8. Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich.

9. Curtis Hanson‘s Wonder Boys.

10. Lars von Trier‘s Dancer in the Dark

11. Julian Schnabel‘s Before Night Falls.

12. Wong Kar-Wai‘s In The Mood For Love

13. Karyn Kusama‘s Girlfight.

14. Dominic Sena‘s Gone in 60 Seconds

15. Jenniphr Goodman‘s The Tao of Steve

Axios, earlier today: “The shit is going to hit the fan on Monday, when Congress returns,” a House Democrat told us. “People are scared about their own races. But they’re also worried about the country, and about democracy.”

“Every single person not named Biden,” or paid by the president, recognizes how deep a hole he’s in, said a top Democratic operative who’s talking nonstop to elected officials.

David Axelrod, former President Obama’s political architect, described Biden’s posture in an opinion piece Saturday: “Denial. Delusion. Defiance.” Axelrod said a growing chorus of Democrats is “fearful of an electoral disaster.”

During the 2010 Santa Barbara Film Festival (14 and 1/2 years ago) Quentin Tarantino re-told Brian DePalma‘s “there’s always Martin Scorsese!” story. It runs between :50 and 2:20. It happened during the Director’s Panel at the Lobero theatre. I was in the third row and shooting my own iPhone video, but this YTS Digital Films version looks and sounds better. Great racounteur, great humor, great everything.

I’m posting this because in 2010 Scorsese’s big Oscar win for The Departed had happened three years earlier, and yet two of his least satisfying films — Shutter Island and Hugo — were in the works, and yet his six-year golden renaissance period — The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman (aka “Wild Strawberries with handguns”) — was just around the corner and down the road a piece.

And then came Scorsese’s Waterloo, a film that a critic friend believes may be his worst ever — Killers of the Flower Moon.

What a perversion of the Scorsese legend! A Scorsese film that for the very first time wasn’t “a Scorsese film” but a woke film…a film that said “oh, dear Lord, it wasn’t just those conniving white-ass Oklahoma greedheads of the 1920s who were so deplorable, but all of our forebears really, all white people going back to the founding of America…plunderers, murderers, rapists, seeds of evil…oh, God, we must drop to our knees and atone and cleanse our souls…we must throw ourselves upon the church steps and beg for forgiveness before all Native Americans and Lily Gladstone in particular”…a film that could have been epic or at least muscular if Scorsese had chosen to shoot Eric Roth’s original screenplay adaptation of David Grann’s 2017 novel…If only Marty and Leo hadn’t lost their nerve…if only they hadn’t been so scared of provoking the wokesters and suffering their wrath, i.e., “We’re done with white heroes! Only racists-at-heart would tell David Grann’s tale!”

Sub-zero arctic refrigerated air-conditioning is a highly effective way to discourage online hobos like yours truly. Except I always order a double cappuccino and sometimes a little something to eat so I’m not really a “hobo” —- unlike most of the bum squad I always pay.

I do, however, tend to hang out for long stretches, typically filing three or four stories.

Removing electrical outlets has gotten rid of most of the Starbucks riff-raff nationwide, although Wilton’s Starbucks outlet is a blessed exception to the rule with six or seven usable outlets…pig heaven!

To balance this out, however, Wilton Starbucks management has recently introduced the kind of aching, bone-freezing air conditioning that would make an Alaskan huskie or James Arness‘s “The Thing” feel right at home. It’s so cold in that cafe I can’t even think of filing without wearing a winter parka, and who carries a winter parka around in July?

Congrats to Wilton Starbucks…the hobos are no more! At least until the weather cools.