Jane Mayer’s 12.1 New Yorker expose, based on a Concerned Veterans for America whistle-blower report from 2015, all but certifies that Fox and Friends weekend cohost Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s Defense Department nominee, is the new Matt Gaetz.

Edward Berger’s Conclave finale was cooked up by author Robert Harris in 2015 (the book was published in ‘16), or well before the trans wokey thing (another factor that tarnished Biden and helped to ruin Harris in the eyes of bumblefuck voters) kicked into gear in the early ‘20s.

I feel soul-sick myself but the Great Woke Legend is that straight men are generally broken and corrupted and bad news, and that it’s time for women (and in one particular situation a cardinal with a uterus) to step in and call the shots.

Obviously a slight majority of voters disagreed with that scenario on 11.5, and so here we are…totally fucked as a nation and about to endure the pains of MAGA fascism.

I blame the wokeys. I really do. They brought this about. Right now they’re understandably searching for tall grass.

And I solemnly believe it would be wrong, wrong, wrong for John M. Chu’s handsome, uber-industrial pile-driver of a musical to take the Best Picture Oscar. Because if you put aside the musical numbers it has no great scenes.

Some Facebook dude wrote this:

But you’re a black sheep and a wrong one, and you fucked up repeatedly so ya gotta do the time, man. Really. No skating. It’ll build character. You’ll be a better, tougher person at the end of your sentence. It’s a growth opportunity.

HE comment: I think President Biden pardoned his bad-seed son Hunter out of resignation and despair.

Joe’s inner dialogue: “Obviously I’m reversing myself but my reputation is in the toilet anyway. Future generations will be taught to despise me as I’m the obstinate old coot who surrendered our nation to MAGA fascism because I wouldn’t collapse my ill-conceived campaign for a second term until it was way too late.

“You might be horrified by the return of Donald Trump but I’m the deluded scumbag who blew open the border and ushered in his second term so what difference does it make? History hates me now and will certainly hate me going forward.

“At the end of the day I’m defaulting to an age-old sentiment when it comes to broken-down fathers and weak sons: ‘The heart wants what it wants.’”

Cheryl Hines posts video of RFK Jr in the shower to promote her line of “MAHA” branded candles, body sprays, and creams. pic.twitter.com/jd4DwQFOmL

— PatriotTakes (@patriottakes) November 30, 2024

One of the sexiest dance moves ever, and then they stroll out of the joint with ultra-rightwing Walter Brennan carrying the bags.

I’m sorry but Martin Scorsese and Dave Tedeschi’s Beatles ‘64 (Apple +, now streaming) is decent at best and shortfally at worst. It never quite rides the whirlwind.

The 106-minute doc tries to convey or suggest the spiritual-emotional endorphin highs that were surging through the fans in February ‘64, and it achieves that here and there, yes, but mostly it feels likes a spotty, half-assed, catch-as-catch-can affair. A catchy quote or an energy surge every now and then, but then it peters out. A bit lazy.

I own a mid ’90s DVD of the original Maysles tour doc, and we’ve all seen various snippets before, of course. So I wanted more, better, extra…something new that would get me going.

I wanted a gleaming, straight-from-the-lab, totally grain-free enhancement of the 60-year-old footage, but what I saw looked merely acceptable…nothing to jump up and down about. I wanted a stronger music track with heightened thrompy bass lines….nope. I wanted footage from the Saturday rehearsal session at the Ed Sullivan Show…nope.

No mention of the bizarre fact that the Beatles’ sets (in February ’64 they played inside a boxing stadium in Washington D.C. and at Carnegie Hall) were only about 20 or 25 minutes or so.

I wanted to hear about what surely went on between the lads and those few girls who were shrewd or persistent enough to penetrate security and meet them…stuff that nobody reported about back then, but c’mon…are you telling me nothing happened?

I have a vague recollection of a rogue photo taken during the August ’64 tour. I can’t find any evidence of it, but I recall the photo having appeared in Confidential or some like-minded scandal sheet. It was a flashbulb shot of a laughing, seemingly drunken John Lennon prowling around on his hands and knees and playing horsey to some floozy in black underwear…riding him like a stallion, riding crop in hand. You can accuse me of imagining this and maybe I did, but an inner voice says otherwise. **

Being especially receptive to the delicacy of Sutton these days, my heart went out to all those excited, screaming, jumping-up-and-down girls in their mid teens who surrounded the Plaza hotel (Beatles bunker) like General Santa Anna’s troops surrounded the Alamo. I wouldn’t have wanted them to be riding Lennon or anyone else. I just wanted them to get home safely.

You know what would have been far more interesting? An in-depth doc about the Beatles August ’65 tour (8.15.65 to 8.31.64), which happened right smack in the middle of their drug-experimentation heyday. This doc could’ve included the fellas hanging with Bob Dylan at the Warwick, not to mention the Peter Fonda encounter in Benedict Canyon when everyone was tripping (“I know what it’s like to be dead”).

At 5’8″ or thereabouts, Ringo Starr was the shortest of the fab four. But Beatles ’64 includes recent color footage of him speaking to producer Martin Scorsese, and Ringo is significantly taller.

Three months ago Edward Berger‘s Conclave played at Telluride Film Festival’s Werner Herzog theatre (8.30.24)…glorious. I sat in the second or third row…elated, throttled, tumescent. Now I’m watching it with headphones on my 15″ Macbook Pro…parked inside an under-heated food court cafeteria on the northbound 95 in Darien. I love it no less and am very happy that I own the Amazon digital file, but you know Berger is quietly weeping as he reads this.

Before last night I’d never watched Holiday Inn (’42), the Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire romantic musical that introduced “White Christmas” and “Happy Holiday.” I found it a wee bit silly and even boring at times, but then the Abe Lincoln minstrel show sequence began.

My jaw fell on the floor. Has to be seen to be believed.

Wiki excerpt: “Beginning in the 1980s, some broadcasts of Holiday Inn entirely omitted the ‘Abraham’ musical number, staged at the Inn for Lincoln’s Birthday, because of its depiction of a blackface minstrel show incorporating racist images and behaviors.

“Turner Classic Movies nonetheless screened the film with the ‘Abraham’ number intact; AMC also aired the film intact before it became an advertiser-supported channel.”

https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/?s=Mangold-Chalamet+

Variety’s Elsa Keslassy from Marrakech:

We all understand what Luca is saying here. We all understand who the proponents of industrial taste are, the easy lays and the obsequious whores, not to mention the lazy rubes and slowboats who support big shitty franchise movies and tumble all over themselves when films like Wicked (which is not so much problematic as overwhelming in a blitzkrieg, Jon M. Chu-like way, which is what makes it industrialized) come along.

HE to Clemmy: You really do need to consider the possibility that you simply don’t have a sufficient brain-cell count.

HE supports the cinematic art of the obviously gifted and indisputably great Roman Polanski.

HE does not and never has supported the notion that anyone proven guilty of sexual abuse or assault should skate. Crimes of the loins have penalties. Nobody’s disputing this.

Then again are you telling me that Polanski hasn’t been made to suffer and submit to the proverbial lash for the last 47 years?

Are you telling me that Polanski’s kids, Morgane and Elvis, live in a state of perpetual fear and horror about what their allegedly monstrous dad may do to them?

We’re talking about two twains here, two separate boxes.

History is flooded with accounts of great artists who didn’t behave well at certain points in their lives, or who behaved abusively or with cruelty or callousness.

Enlightened art scholars have long argued and understood that at the end of the day you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

#MeToo ideologues will never understand or accept this. Their basic creed is “if the bathwater smells bad or is tainted in some way, the baby must either submit to the sword or be banished to the desert.”