Three days ago I stated that Jamie Dack‘s Palm Trees and Power Lines, a Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Competition entry, is among the festival’s three best films.

I actually didn’t convey my true, deep-down feelings, which is that in the realm of stories about young girls dealing with predatory relationships and the sexual issues that always come with that, Dack’s film is one of the most shocking and upsetting that I’ve ever seen — period.

I’ve already reported that it’s about a hugely creepy relationship between a fatherless 17 year-old (Lily McInerney) and a 34 year-old opportunist and latent scumbag (Jonathan Tucker), and that what happens would make any decent person gag. Without divulging specifics I should add that the film contains what I regard as the most odious and grotesque sex scene in motion picture history. And the ending is completely shattering.

A friend doesn’t believe the ending, which again I can’t be specific about. But I can at least state that each and every dude in this film is either a dog or a beast. We’re talking implications of sexual cruelty, brutality and animality in every scene featuring a male of any age.

I recently described the plot to a female friend with a 20something daughter, and she said, “This is basically how younger Millennials and GenZ see all white cis men…they think they are all rapists and assaulters.”

I’m not disputing that many if not most younger males (late teens to mid 30s) are animals in terms of their sexual behavior. This view or judgement is certainly out there, so it wouldn’t be the craziest thing in the world for Dack to share this opinion.

The shocking part of Palm Trees and Power Lines is the degree to which McInerney’s character is seemingly off-balance and emotionally starved for paternal attention and affection. Because right away you’re wondering how and why McInerney would go out with Tucker in the first place (there are all kinds of red flags). By the end of the film you’re left with an even more perplexing question. I thought McInerney might be safe at the end, and then she does something that made me go “oh my God!”

You can argue that what she does is not entirely believable, but for me the dramatized horror outweighs the credibility.

Friendo to HE: “I could totally buy that [McInerney] is damaged and would get seduced by this guy’s tricks…all of it. But as the movie portrays it, what she goes through in that motel room is so horrific, and in both that scene and the aftermath she is so filled with fear, that I just thought: The fact that she’s got daddy issues is going to transcend that?

“Her mother” — a good performance by Gretchen Mol — “seemed nice enough, not perfect but loving. Why would she be so alienated from that home situation?”

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Is there some reason other than virtue-signaling that the organizers of this Zoom chat have a sign-language person while they also have subtitles, which YouTube puts on automatically?

Why does this feel like a meeting of super-loyal Stalinist apparatchiks in the 1930s? The “safe” alpha woke-think vibes coming out of this thing are sorta kinda suffocating.

This Guillermo del Toro snap was taken in the hallowed aisles of Laser Blazer — the Pico Blvd. location, I mean — sometime in ’00, possibly in ’01. Guillermo had either just finished shooting The Devil’s Backbone or was preparing to do that or…oh, hell, I can’t specifically recall. I could be off by a couple of years. It could have been ’04 or ’05.

Laser Blazer was where my heart was…it was my home, my soul haven. It began in ’88 just as laser discs were starting to happen; it finally died in ’11.

Speaking as a Joe Biden supporter, it has to be acknowledged that if he can’t get his approval numbers to significantly improve by, say, the spring of 2023 or certainly by the summer, he has to consider the option of cutting bait.

Biden saved our country from a second Trump term, but God help us all if he runs again and Trump somehow wins. Or if the Trump forces manage to cheat or coup d’etat their way back into the White House. Plus, as was noted earlier today, no one is really cool with the idea of a U.S. President being only four years shy of 90, which is what Biden would be by late ’28.

And what if, God forbid, Biden gets re-elected in ’24 but doesn’t live out the full term? (This is a reasonable question to ask.) Nobody but nobody wants Kamala Harris moving into the Oval Office. The fall-out would be catastrophic.

Bret Stephens, from “Joe Biden Would Like to Know What Your Problem Is,” posted on 1.24.22: “If the fourth year of the Biden administration resembles the first, particularly when it comes to inflation, I’ll be hard-pressed to vote for him. And so, I suspect, will many of the people who supported him last time.

“Which brings me to my latest hobby horse, which is to get Biden to announce early that he won’t run again so other Democrats can start exploring a run. Critics of the idea think it turns him into a lame duck, but I think it would look statesmanlike and actually strengthen his hand.

“Isn’t every re-elected president an automatic lame duck, because they can’t run for a third term? Biden can still get a lot done in 35 months, without sitting on the rest of the Democratic Party like a wet blanket on a cold day. And we can all stop pretending that we’re totally okay with the idea of an 86-year-old president, which is what Biden would be at the end of a second term.”

I didn’t watch season #4 of The Crown (the one with Emma Corrin as Lady Diana Spencer) until last summer, but once I’d gotten through it I felt sated and satisfied. My basic attitude was “that was pretty good…actually very good, but I think that’ll do.”

But then I was obliged to sit through the big Spencer screening at Telluride and endure all the subsequent hype and hoopla (Kristen Stewart for Best Actress). And then came the Diana doc, “The Princess,” at Sundance ’22.

And it’s still not over. Sometime later this year we’ll have to sink into The Crown‘s fifth and sixth season with Elizabeth Debicki and Dominic west as Diana and Prince Charles.

Debicki is 6’3″, of course, and West is six feet even. That means he had to adopt an Alan Ladd approach — i.e., stand on boxes or wear lifts when sharing close-ups.

You’re richer than Croesus and famous, and have lived a large, swaggering life for 15, 20 years now…you’re a kind of lunatic eccentric and everyone sees that…you turned into a Trump homey in ’17 and then ran for President in ’20, all the time flirting with mental instability.

Now, post-Kim Kardashian, you’re hopping around with Julia Fox, and have announced that your new, legally-changed name is “Ye” (pronounced “yay“). You’re such a moody, impulsive shape-shifter that you can’t even settle into your own name upon hitting your mid 40s? You’re still flirting, wondering…still not sure?

This isn’t Cassius Clay becoming Muhammud Ali, which signified a religious conversion. At age 35 in 1993, the late Prince changed his name to a love symbol but that was part of a legal dispute with Warner Bros. No, this is your thing. If it had been my call? I would’ve become “Ye–Ye” — sounds cooler somehow.

The MPAA’s rating system is about protecting sensitive and/or under-age viewers from disturbing film content (violence, sexuality). But protection from ideological propaganda should also be a matter of concern.

Friendo: “We need some kind of a ‘woke’ database (along the lines of the Bechdel Test) that lets people know if a movie is pushing doctrine or whether it’s not. A ‘W’ rating label at the beginning of each appropriately-labeled film might also work.”

I’ve forked over $20 for a Sunday Sundance viewing of Oliver Hermanus’ Living, a British period remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (‘52). Watching it as we speak. The great Bill Nighy inhabits the terminally ill public works bureaucrat, who was played 70 years ago by Takashi Shimura.

The descriptive terms so far are “low-key,” “no hurry,” “tonally and visually accurate” (it’s set in 1952 London) and “quietly affecting emotional undertow.”

One quibble: Whenever old-school British bureaucrats of yore sat down in their first-class train compartments and unfolded their newspapers, they took their bowler hats off. Not so in Hermanus’ film.

I’m pleased to report that Living is framed in a 1.37 aspect ratio.

Last night and for the first time in 40 years, I watched Robert Benton‘s Still of the Night (’82). Which isn’t very good. A cautious, understated Hitchcockian homage without much of a raison d’etre of its own. Awkward, under-written dialogue. It has a certain interesting tension at first, then it loses that. Not awful and sometimes almost “there”, but never gripping.

Roy Scheider, Meryl Streep, Jessica Tandy, Joe Grifasi, Sara Botsford and Josef Sommer costar.

I read Pauline Kael’s mini-review after it ended. There’s a passage that’s fairly amusing in a mean-girl sort of way, and it hit me a second later that in this era of #MeToo solidarity female critics aren’t really allowed to make snide observations about actresses. Certainly nothing that cuts too close to the bone.

“Meryl Streep plays the icy hot woman suspected of murder,” Kael wrote, “and her performance is all about her hair. It’s platinum-white, it hangs bone straight like a curtain, and part of her face is hidden behind it; from time to time she peers up and shakes it back a little.

“This femme fatale is meant to be guileful and slinky — a woman with neurotic wiles. But Streep’s high-strung emotionality isn’t fun in the way that Faye Dunaway‘s has often been. She seems pale and gaunt, and more zombified than anything else.”

Consider Judith Crist‘s putdown of Elizabeth Taylor‘s performance in Cleopatra, and imagine what would happen if a female critic today were to describe certain aspects of, say, Lady Gaga‘s vocal delivery in House of Gucci as “fishwifey”:

For me, Hardy Kruger really stood out in only two films — the model-plane engineer in The Flight of the Phoenix, of course, and Cpt. Potsdorf in Barry Lyndon. Kruger was always a convincing actor, but he never blew the roof off. Which is fine. He was who he was, stood his own ground.

I think it’s important to post this portion of his Wiki page, for clarity’s sake:

“From 1941 [when he was 13], Kruger attended an elite Adolf Hitler School at the Ordensburg Sonthofen. At the age of 15, Hardy made his film début in Alfred Weidenmann‘s The Young Eagles.

“In March 1945, Krüger was assigned to the 38th SS Division Nibelungen and was drawn into heavy combat. The 16-year-old Krüger was ordered to shoot at an American squad. When he refused, he was sentenced to death for cowardice, but another SS officer countermanded the order. Krüger described this experience as his break with Nazism. He afterwards served as a messenger for the SS, but later escaped and hid out in Tyrol until the end of the war.

“He was a member of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and frequently spoke publicly against extremism and for democracy, citing his own experiences.”