I’m sorry to report that the junket whores who were recently doing giddy cartwheels and back-flips over Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II…their ecstatic reviews are being disputed by…uhm, people who are not whores.

“Gladiator II is an absolute mediocrity,” a friend writes. “It pains me to say that Scott, at age 87, has lost his mojo. I don’t know how a studio can ever give Scott another big budget after this.

“And the over-rated Paul Mescal is absolutely terrible in the lead role. Denzel Washington’s supporting performance works, but that’s all.”

Friendo #2: “I thought it worked okay, but it’s no Gladiator.”

Don’t hang out in the woods near the facility that you escaped from, bruhs! Run for it and keep running!

If I were in the area I’d invite some of you to jump into my car so I could drive you south to Key West. We could listen to music, stop for occasional meals, etc,

The escapees are rhesus macaque primates. They were being held in the Alpha Genesis Sing Sing Primate Research Center in Yemassee, South Carolina.

I haven’t seen Babygirl, and obviously I’m spitballing when comes to A Complete Unknown. But otherwise here’s a rundown of the best of the best and/or the likeliest Best Picture contenders.

Kamala Harris’s electoral loss wasn’t a squeaker — outside of the northeast, the west coast and certain blue urban slivers she was totally clobbered.

I had hoped that her victory would usher in a sane, sensible, moderately constructive presidency…nope! I had been clinging to Michael Moore’s prediction that she had a decisive win in the bag…not so much! As it turned out Tuesday, 11.5 wasn’t so much a presidential preference vote as a national referendum on cultural resentment.

The bumblefucks didn’t so much vote for Trump as against woke progressives.

Lee Fang and Linda have said it all.

There’s only one way to straighten things out going forward…only one way to cleanse the Democratic Party of the wokester fanatics who apparently triggered the most devastating electoral landslide since 1988 or maybe even 1964, and that’s to recognize that these people did this.

What Linda has said hits home: “People didn’t vote for Trump — they voted against you.” Which means, arguably, that they voted against hoodie mobs ripping off department stores without anyone lifting a finger, against Lia Thomas, against the George Floyd vandalism riots of May and June of 2020, against elementary school drag shows, against the trans thing flooding the educational system, against presentism in historical films and the general woke consensus that younger white males are what’s wrong with this country.

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N.Y. Times columnist Pamela Paul, 11.7.24:

…Ukraine may get thrown under the bus by Trump. In which case Zelensky will most likely have to accept a permanent loss of territory (southeastern Donbas region?) to Russia. Roughly a million souls have ascended since early ‘22 — Ukranian and Russian soldiers including 20K Ukranian civilians. Victory over the Russian invaders obviously isn’t in the cards. The whole thing could have been avoided if the notion of Ukraine joining NATO hadn’t been floated.

Gary Marshall‘s Frankie and Johnny was released roughly 33 years ago, and I remember quite clearly never wanting to see it. I still don’t. Mainly because I don’t want to settle into a phoney conceit about the film’s glamorous, highly attractive costars who had played Mr. and Mrs. Tony Montana eight years earlier — Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer — living the pale lives of also-rans.

Terrence McNally‘s original 1987 off-Broadway play, Frankje and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, was about a pair of ordinary, middle-aged, worn-down homelies — F. Murray Abraham and Kathy Bates — falling in love within the grim confines of a studio apartme4=nt.

Critic after critic said Marshall’s version was too glammy — there was no way in hell anyone could accept that Pacino and Pfeiffer, aged 40 and 30 respectively, were schlubby, hand-to-mouth types, and that was all I needed to hear.

Movieline’s Stephen Farber: “Michelle Pfeiffer gives a very adept and winning performance in Frankie & Johnny, but she’s simply wrong for the part of a plain, world-weary waitress…anyone as gorgeous as she is has a lot more options than someone who looks like Kathy Bates (who originated the role on stage).”

Pacino fared no better with Washington Post critic Rita Kempley: “It’s just…well, imagine Kevin Costner as [Ernest Borgnine‘s] Marty.”

Casting the right actor or actress, in short, means never going too low or too high. Too much charm or physical attractiveness can throw a well-written, well-directed film out of whack.

I’ll tell you how Trump’s victory affects the Oscars. The approvable but less-from-masterful Emilia Perez, a musical about a male Mexican drug baron transitioning into womanhood, will surge to the front of the Best Picture competition. Jamie Lee Curtis and all the other progressive, ardently-trans-supporting lefties will want to stand up and embrace Jacques Audiard‘s film as a statement of defiance against Trump dystopia.

In so doing, of course, Curtis and friends will also in effect be saying “eff you” to the 71.7 million Americans who voted for this animal. (As of Wednesday morning 66.8 million citizens, myself among them, had voted for Harris.)

In line with this, I also suspect that in the Best Actress race Emilia Perez‘s Karla Sofia Gascon will now elbow aside Anora‘s Mikey Madison…same empathy motive. Madison’s performance totally blows away Gascon’s, of course, but the Trump factor may change everything. For me one of the glories of Anora is that it’s not in the least bit woke.

I’m not aware of Trump having expressed disdain for transitioned adults (he’s only against susceptible minors being dragged into the cult) but the Jamie Lee Curtis brigade will want to express up-in-arms support for Gascon regardless. Variety‘s Clayton Davis will no doubt be urging this upon his readers.

I also think that more people will suddenly want to stream Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice, a well-written, superbly acted drama about young Trump’s relationship with rightwing pitbull attorney Roy Cohn. If they have any respect for the grade-A artistry involved, they’ll certainly want to consider Best Picture and Best Director noms as well as a Best Supporting Actor nom for Jeremy Strong, at the very least.

I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s also…how to put this?…a sign-of-the-times, wokey, gender-fluid acceptance factor to be found in Conclave. Which should help it among the JLC “we all need to lock arms and tell Trump to go fuck himself” crowd. [Note: The Conclave thing has nothing to do with gender transitioning.)

…wouldn’t you be searching for tall grass right about now? I certainly would if I were in that camp.

I’m not in that camp, of course. As much as I despise Donald Trump and as much as I fear for the well-being of already-transitioned-and-just-living-their-lives trans folk, I think that Trump looking to make life difficult for academic or medical community pro-trans monsters (like those featured in Matt Walsh‘s What Is A Woman?) as well as trans-activist educators and pro-trans surgeons who have performed questionable gender-affirming bottom surgeries on minors…I’m not altogether unhappy that Trump feels this way about protecting vulnerable, susceptible minors from hormone blockers and gender-transition surgeries and whatnot, and will presumably act in concert with these views.

I’m sorry but I agree with some of this, partly because Trump’s attitude (he is not anti-trans as far as I know) and policies will probably help to protect my three-year-old granddaughter from trans activists within the educational, medical and social-activist communities. Maybe. I hope.

Posted by Forbes‘ Sara Dorn on 5.10.24: “Former President Donald Trump on Friday said he would undo a new Biden administration policy that will offer protections for transgender students under the Title IX federal civil rights law—his latest promise to restrict LGBTQ rights if elected to a second term.

“Trump said on ‘day one’ he would reverse the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX that will prohibit federally funded schools from preventing transgender students from using bathrooms, locker rooms and pronouns that align with their gender identities.

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“Trump told a crowd in Iowa in March he would sign an executive order to ‘cut federal funding” for schools pushing “critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.’

“In January, he released a video [below] detailing a range of policies targeting gender-affirming care for minors, including pressing Congress to approve a federal ban and several measures to restrict federal funding when it came to trans issues.

“Trump said he would block doctors who provide gender-affirming care from Medicare and Medicaid, forbid federal agencies from actions to “promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” and task the Justice Department with investigating the medical industry to see if they “deliberately covered up horrific long-term side effects of sex transitions in order to get rich.”

“In the video, Trump laid out additional plans for extending the restrictions to schools, promising ‘severe consequences,’ including potential civil rights violations, for educators who ‘suggest to a child they could be trapped in the wrong body.’

“In 2022 Trump told a crowd in Texas he would ban transgender individuals from competing in women’s sports, and attacked transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, weeks after her hotly debated record-breaking swim meet in Ohio while she was competing on the University of Pennsylvania swim team.”

“There is a dark part of the American soul, and Donald Trump appeals to that…” — political strategist Chai Komanduri.

Faced with a choice between a sane, somewhat middling but far-from-dangerous ex-prosecutor with a good heart and a deranged, brain-fart, authoritarian criminal who cares only about himself, America chose the criminal. More than half of the country voted this way, and not by a whisker. It was a blow-out.

My Trump-supporting friends and family members excepted, I really hate last night’s majority mindset. I completely respect the process — it was a fair election — but I loathe the rank stupidity and the refutation of common sense that resulted in Trump’s victory. I’m not exaggerating here — I despise many of the progressive wokester things that Trump supporters despise, but voting to put that animal back into the White House was truly insane. It was a horribly destructive and nihilistic thing to do, and may God protect us all.