Any Fairfield County resident who would place a pair of iron lions on stone pedestals at the entrance to his driveway…I’m sorry but this person (who exists and lives in the Weston-Georgetown area) really doesn’t get the Fairfield County aesthetic. This is the kind of thing you might expect to find in the downmarket regions of New Jersey. You can’t bully people into showing a little taste in the way of landscaping and driveway design. Either you were raised by parents who lived with restraint and displayed a modicum of class in this regard, or you weren’t.

If I’m driving on a mostly-level but older blacktop highway just after a fairly heavy rainstorm, and I’m going 40 or 45 or 50 mph along with everyone else and I happen to notice a large shallow puddle (i.e., the kind that’s almost a small pond, and is possibly more than an inch deep) near the side shoulder, I will probably swerve over to the right so I can hit that pond straight and true and send tens of thousands of water droplets flying.

It goes without saying I wouldn’t do this if any people were standing nearby (especially nuns, schoolkids, old folks, people in wheelchairs, safe-space wokesters), but if the coast is free and clear I would go for the big splash. I’m sorry but it’s fun, and anyone who denies this is lying.

This is Kamala Harris‘s first big, tough, high-profile decision — will she stand up to the progressive left? Not just about picking Josh Shapiro for vp, but about anything. This is not just Marc Halperin‘s view, but also my own. She has to govern sensibly and moderately, and that means occasionally telling the woke wackos to modify their demands, and if they can’t do that to go fuck themselves.

In the thread for yesterday’s Angelina Jolie hit piece, HE’s own Bobby Peru wrote the following:

“Quit sucking Brad Pitt’s small dick long enough to be objective. You obviously know nothing about [Jolie’s] parenting style or who she is as a person. You’re just obsessed with Mr. Movie Star. That’s your entire game here. From what I know, she runs rings around him both as an actress, filmmaker and as a parent.”

HE response #1:

“It’s not about sucking Brad’s wang. It’s about sharing a deep-down regard for and understanding of the many burdens and joys of fatherhood. Serving as a father and showing the necessary devotion at all turns is an absolutely holy and primal thing, and no woman of any decency would actively try to poison the vibes between a dad (unless he’s a child molester or mass murderer or political terrorist or fentanyl dealer) and his children.

“Boiled down, Angie is giving an excellent performance as Lucreatia McEvil.”

HE response #2:

“As a director who chooses or sculpts her own preferred material, Jolie has repeatedly demonstrated a preference for stories about innocents suffering horribly under the yoke of evil forces.

“Does that, like, uhhm, tell you anything about her basic emotional state? Or, you know, her basic psychology? Maybe a little something?

”In The Land of Blood and Honey (’11) focused on a Bosnian muslim woman (Zana Marjanovic) coping with the Serbian genocide.

“Unbroken (’14) was largely about an American soldier being sadistically brutalized in a Japanese prison camp.

“In ’15 Jolie was talking about directing a film about the poaching of elephants with Brad Pitt intending to play poacher-fighter Richard Leakey.

”Then came First They Came For My Father, which deals with the Khymer Rouge’s genocide of Cambodia in the mid ’70s.

”Her latest is Without Blood, which I haven’t seen but is said to be cut from the same torture-porn cloth.

“Four movies about innocents suffering the pains of hell under the yoke of evil forces, directed by the same person within the last 13 years. That doesn’t tell you anything?”

Not to mention the funniest Scorsese film since After Hours, and the best Scorsese short film since The Big Shave.

And it’s called Bleu de Chanel. I love the paradox…an ad spot for Bleu de Chanel that has absolutely nothing to do with Bleu de Chanel…not even a wee bit.

What’s it about then? The hotshit angst and sputtering spigot of super-famous and super-wealthy Timothee Chalamet.

It’s basically Chalamet and Scorsese riffing on the kind of rapid-fire life that Leonardo DiCaprio‘s superstar brat was coping with in Woody Allen‘s Celebrity (‘98).

Best bit: Chalamet being rejected by that hot chick in the dressing room…the one who slams the door in his face.

Tom Shone, posted a day ago: “The 28-year-old Chalamet was reportedly paid $35 million to promote Bleu de Chanel — more than the salary for every film of his up to this point in his career combined, including Wonka ($8 million), Dune ($2 million) and Dune: Part Two ($3 million).

“And the ad [itself is] different. Witty, self-conscious and meta…more like [a] mini-movie.”

I am in friendly but fervent opposition to anyone on ANY campus who picks up a microphone and says they feel “actively victimized” by ANYthing except by real, actual, legitimate threats (i.e., possibly being raped, harmed in some physical way or killed).

Sensible, real-world, non-woke opinions are not threats. They simply represent an aspect of the normal rough and tumble of political dispute, which is par for the course if you (ahem) live off-campus.

The phrase “actively victimized” is a woke cliche used by people who fetishize the threat of victimization in order to display their woke bonafides.

Life IS hard and sometimes even scary. It’s not a walk in the park, certainly in the case of woke wimps and candy-asses. It IS a good idea to toughen your hide and maybe wear a helmet. I despise campus wussies and their litany of complaints about everything that doesn’t look, sound or feel “right” or “safe” to them.

Imagine the settlers in a John Ford western going up to Scar, the hostile Comanche chief in The Searchers, and saying “your war paint is not cool…you guys are making us feel actively victimized, and we really don’t feel safe…waaah.”

The eight-year war between the still not-yet-fully-divorced Brad Pitt and Angelica Jolie has devolved into something truly sick and diseased.

And the proof in the pudding are those smug-ass, Village of the Damned Jolie-Pitt kids…their Val Lewton-ish, zombie-like submission to Angie’s “Brad is truly evil and therefore must be shunned” belief system.

What kind of deranged mom indoctrinates her kids (natural and adopted) into this kind of hate theology? This is fucking cult behavior. This is Manson family stuff.

Who in the world believes that Brad is as “bad” as she seems to believe, or that he’s even “bad” at all? As in unredeemable, deserving of damnation, etc.

Has anyone in the history of Western Civilization ever waged a Mexican standoff war over divorce terms and child custody that lasted eight feckin’ years?

Did Pitt do something ghastly and demonic? Answer: Not by normal people standards. Not if you’re coming from a place of mental health.

Whatever happened to “we’re sorry you let alcohol turn you into a different person eight years ago, dad, but we‘re also glad you embraced sobriety so let’s construct something new…let’s open our hearts, move forward and take it one day at a time”?

I believe that Jolie is definitely the bad guy here.

Pitt’s David Mills character in Se7en: “She’s a nutbag.”

Can kids “catch” emotional dysfunction from their mother? Like mumps or the measles?

Try to flush this out of your mind as you watch Pablo Larrain’s Maria in Telluride.

Page Six’s Sara Nathan:

I’m looking very much forward to seeing Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson (Netflix, late ‘24). Because the writing will be excellent —- that I know. An adaptation of August Wilson‘s revered 1987 play, pic stars John David Washington (who also starred in a 2022 Broadway revival of same) and was directed and co-adapted by Malcolm, his brother. Denzel Washington and Todd Black have produced.

I’m presuming The Piano Lesson will screen at Telluride before playing Toronto.

John David Washington needs a leg up as performance-wise he hasn’t really connected thus far. If you ask me he was fairly blah or so-so in Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman (’18). Chris Nolan‘s Tenet (’20), which wasn’t an acting platform for anyone, offered no acceleration. Then JDW suffered a one-two punch with his mac-and-cheese wolfing scene in Malcolm & Marie (Netflix, 1.19.21), followed by another flat performance in David O. Russell‘s Amsterdam (’22), which caused me great anguish.

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, which began streaming yesterday on Max, is an attractive, watchable gloss that plays it safe and tidy at every turn. It’s a valentine — nothing funny or nervy or the least bit impudent. No Larry Fortensky jokes. No clip of John Belushi‘s “Liz choking on chicken bones” skit. Not so much as a glance at Ron Galella‘s Fat Liz photo.

Director Nanette Burstein deserves a certain kind of cynical credit for sanding every possible edge off the legend of La Liz. So much material has been ignored. Too damn friendly.

Even the brief mention of Taylor’s suicide attempt during her marriage to Eddie Fisher feels somehow soft, mainly because it doesn’t make sense.

Sometime in ’79 or ’80 I saw Elizabeth Taylor in the flesh. She was standing about ten or twelve feet away in a dense crowd of guys at an after-party at the Roxy, the popular Manhattan roller disco on West 18th. I managed a glimpse or two of her eyes, and was slightly surprised to discover that they really were as beautiful as I’d been told. I was mesmerized. I think I actually said out loud, “Wow.”

I’d been looking at Taylor in film after film all my life, of course, but those real-life peepers had an extra-glistening, pools-of-passion, send-your-hormones-to-the-moon quality that I’d never quite gotten from a live female before. And they actually did seem to be violet colored, as legend had it.

Screenshot

The once-legendary Taylor hit her career peak between ’51 (A Place in The Sun) and ’60 (Butterfield 8). This was also when she seemed the most erotically enticing.

I heard and read a lot about her over the decades, and gradually became persuaded that she was tough and real and super-loyal to her friends…although I never understood why she befriended that freak known as Michael Jackson.

I had read once that Taylor saved Montgomery Clift‘s life just after his 5.12.56 car crash by extracting a dislodged tooth that had been stuck in his wind pipe. By all accounts she was a good person to know and share time on the planet with, and also that she was feisty and steady and reliable and no fool. And she liked to drink and have fun and laugh through it all….hah!

I think, in short, that she might have been a better person than she was an actress.

I’m not dismissing her very good ’50s performances in A Place In The Sun, The Last Time I Saw Paris, Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Butterfield 8. But she was seriously miscast in the lusciously miserable Cleopatra, and with the exception of her brilliant, possibly all-time best performance in Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, she stopped getting the good roles after that and just wasn’t a very interesting presence in the ’60s and ’70s.

Taylor was pretty much out of the game by the early 80s.

Her golden time was the 1950s, period, and she was at her hottest back then also. She started to put on weight after Butterfield 8 (i.e., after she hit her early 30s), and the hard truth is that she looked vaguely plump in Cleopatra, and that roundish, slightly boozy and besotted look never went away after that. I’m sorry but that’s how it pretty much was. But those eyes of hers were givers of rapture and splendor.

My only other first-hand connection with La Liz came with my numerous sleepovers at the Nicky Hilton-Elizabeth Taylor house on Route 102 in Georgetown, Connecticut, as the guest of the late cartoonist Chance Browne. It’s a small cottage where Hilton and Taylor stayed for a period in 1950 during their brief rocky marriage before she sued for divorce (she complained of spousal abuse) — local legend says Hilton threw Taylor out a window during one of their drunken fights.

There’s really not much feeling in Burstein’s film. It’s too admiring, too subservient to generate anything that truly hits home.

It’s possible, I suppose, that a few old biddies will be shocked to learn that Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s attorney husband of ten years, cheated on ex-wife Kerstin in 2009 with nanny + elementary school teacher Najen Naylor, who was 32 at the time.

The prospective First Gentleman has admitted to the episode. Even the N.Y. Times has reported on the matter.

Big deal, right? Professionally prominent husbands blowing up their marriages by fucking the family nanny…isn’t that a cliche in the annals of affluent domesticity? Didn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger do the same with housekeeper Mildred Baena?

Naylor and Baena both got pregnant and gave birth, but Naylor apparently didn’t keep the child.

Fucking the help is, of course, a passive-aggressive way of dissolving a marriage as the betrayed wife will inevitably sniff things out sooner or later.

Boiled down, Emhoff has been exposed as having been an imperfect human specimen 15 years ago…an average, sexually frustrated fellow who succumbed to temptation, got busted, apologized, accepted responsibility and moved on.

Emhoff met Harris on a blind date in 2013; they were married the following year.

This matter obviously has no bearing upon Harris’s presidential campaign. We all understand that men in their frisky prime (Emhoff was 45 when the affair occurred) are fundamentally dogs.

What I personally find surprising is the fact that Kerstin, the 57 year-old chief of a “creative think tank” called PRETTYBIRD, is clearly a hotter number than Naylor. My first thought after glancing at a recent photo of the 47-year-old Naylor (posted by the Daily Mail) was that whomever or whatever she may have been at age 32, the last 15 years have taken their toll.

Top photo (l. to r) : Kerstin Emhoff, daughter Ella, Doug Emhoff.

Middle photo: Najen Naylor (recently)

Bottom photo: Naylor in 2008 or thereabouts.

[Initially posted six years ago — 8.12.18]

If there’s one thing film twitter wants you to abandon, it’s your comfort zone. Be brave, step over the fence and experience the exotic, uncertain, challenging realms that exist outside of your little piddly backyard. Of course!

Hollywood Elsewhere agrees that people who refuse to step outside of their c.z. are missing so much and absorbing so little in the way of life-giving nutrients or eye-opening realizations. I’ve been in rooms with people who don’t want to see what they don’t want to see, and it’s not pretty. The wrong kind of vibe.

On the other hand I’ve always defined “comfort zone” in a different way. To me a comfort movie is one that presents three basic things.

One, semi-recognizable human behavior (i.e., bearing at least some resemblance to that which you’ve observed in your own life, including your own something-to-be-desired, occasionally less-than-noble reactions to this or that challenge).

Two, some kind of half-believable story in which various behaviors are subjected to various forms of emotional or psychological stress and strain. (This should naturally include presentations of inner human psychology, of course, as most people tend to hide what they’re really thinking or scheming to attain.)

And three, action that adheres to the universal laws of physics — i.e., rules that each and every life form has been forced to submit to since the beginning of time.

The physics thing basically means that I can enjoy or at least roll with superhero fantasy popcorn fare, but on the other hand these films have a way of delivering a form of profound irritation and even depression if you watch enough of them.

There are, in short, many ways of telling stories that (a) contain recognizable human behavior, (b) engaging stories and (c) adhere to basic laws of gravity, inertia and molecular density.

I’m talking about tens of thousands of square miles of human territory, and movies that include Her, Solaris, Boyhood, Betrayal, Children of Men, Leviathan, Thelma and Louise, Superbad, Cold War, Across 110th Street, Shoot the Piano Player, Them!, A Separation, The Silence, Se7en, Holy Motors, Silver Linings Playbook, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Hold That Ghost, The Miracle Worker, The Wolf Man, Ikiru, Crossfire, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Duck Soup, Moonlighting, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, the better screwball comedies of the ’30s, The Blob, First Reformed, Ichi the Killer, The Equalizer 2, Adaptation, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, Punch Drunk Love, Out Of the Past, Danton, Some Like It Hot, The Big Sky and God knows how many hundreds or thousands of others.

But if a movie presents human behavior that I regard as completely unrecognizable or nonsensical, that insists on ignoring the way things are out there (or “in” there), I tune out. And if you don’t like that, tough.

A movie about tomatoes, carrots, apples and cucumbers longing to experience more exciting or fulfilling lives or at least looking to avoid being picked, cooked and eaten by humans….fine. But a movie about supermarket hot dogs, hot dog rolls and other processed foods having the same human dimensions and desires…get outta here.

Another way to explain my c.z. concept is a series of concentric-circle realms that I use to measure and calibrate.

The innermost realm is my own life story, my own limitations and weaknesses, the forces and personalities that I’ve personally known and dealt with (or have run away from).

The second realm is defined by the experiences of others — friends and family, characters I’ve read about or come to know in movies or plays, anything that has crossed my radar screen and/or intruded into my turf that has seemed to make at least some kind of basic sense.

The third realm is one of odd happenstance or surreal imaginings or derangements or mystical wonder — anything weird or extra-spiritual or wackjobby or beyond-rational that doesn’t “add up” but is nonetheless an aspect or outgrowth of our life on this planet (or other planets…what the hell).

Anything that comes from the fourth, fifth or sixth realms (don’t ask me to define them) may or may not work for me. I’m theoretically open to these realms, but I’m only human and am therefore partial to the first three. This is one reason why I have a problem with films directed by Michel Gondry. Sorry.

What does it mean when the mere idea of posting a well-crafted sentence or two feels like agony…a steep hill that I can barely think of climbing?

When you feel exhausted and depleted with your muscles slightly aching?

But you can’t sleep more than four or five hours and the “sleep” you’re experiencing is barely worth the name, and that’s after popping half an ambien.

I’ve had full-blown Covid twice so I know the symptoms.

I’ve had six or seven Covid vaccine shots (the most recent administered in March or April) so that’s probably a modifying factor in what I’m going through.

My Covid infection periods have all lasted 48 to 52 hours.

Can’t sleep, no hunger or thirst, not much energy, can’t concentrate, a constant feeling of the gas tank being mostly empty.

A close friend says a fresh wave of Covid is ”going around.”

HE response: “So it’s like we’re all back in ‘20 and ‘21? Covid is roaring away and causing all kinds of trouble and sickness? And vaccines haven’t diminished the effects or the pace of recovery?”

David Mamet: “I say no to that. I refuse to submit to a Covid siege mentality.”