Based on Stephanie Land‘s “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother’s Will to Survive“, Molly Smith Metzler‘s Maid is a grim but compelling 10-part series about a single mom (Margaret Qualley) barely getting by somewhere in the northwest. Damp, rainy, ferries.

I’ve only seen episodes #4 through #7, but the sad fate of Qualley’s “Alex” character, it seems, is to be disappointed and undermined by those around her, On one hand she’s emotionally damaged goods, and yet she’s living on a sort of heroic noble island and therefore quite alone and isolated. 25 years old and struggling and perhaps stuck there until further notice.

She comes from a dysfunctional family (formerly brutal alcoholic dad, presently flaky hippie mom), has had a child with a sober dude who began drinking at age nine and who may fall off the wagon again. She’s treated brusquely by her cleaning business employer, and state assistance reps are their own odd trip except for the kindly woman who runs the abused women halfway house. Life is no picnic.

And yet — this is the interesting part — Alex constantly sidesteps romantic overtures from gentle, good-looking Nate (Raymond Ablack), a stable guy and a single dad of Middle-Eastern descent. Nate is easily the best option in terms of potential boyfriend material. The problem is that Alex doesn’t want to fuck him, apparently because he’s too stable and financially secure. Because she feels queasy about getting into an unequal relationship. Plus she doesn’t feel it.

There’s a moment where it appears as if Alex might be receptive to Nate’s delicate overtures. But nope.

Female Connecticut Friendo to HE: “I couldn’t escape the feeling I was watching someone who sees herself as a victim but actually isn’t. I really don’t buy Qualley in the role. She’s too pretty and too smart to only have the one option of cleaning homes. Like she could stay with her dad. She has that option. She chooses not to. She’s whining about not getting help from the government but she has options.”

HE to FCF: “Her dad was an angry alcoholic shit when she was a young child, but now he’s sober and it’s foolish to not give dad a second chance.”

FCF to HE: “She could get a job at the daycare place. They obviously need workers. She doesn’t have to clean toilets. It’s almost like she’s doing this shitty work so she can write that book.”

HE to FCF: “And she’s a monk. She not only rebuffs Nate’s advances but seems TERRIFIED by the idea of possible sex with him.”

FCF to HE: “And not to put too fine a point on it but when you’re a single mom like that you can’t just go around and be picky about everything. Hell, I’d go for that guy. He’s cute. He’s nice. Her daughter could have a home, a dad. She seems to only want to be on government assistance.”

HE to FCF: “She’s leading a tough life because that’s the idea behind the series. The series needs her to suffer and regard all men as bad eggs of one kind or another, and to abstain from sex. Until the end of episode #7, when she inexplicably fucks Sean. But she also blows off Nate, and this reminded me of a basic law of life, which is that if you’re a nice guy who likes a pretty girl, you can’t ‘nice’ your way into a sexual relationship with her. You need to BE ‘nice,’ of course, but ‘nice’ alone doesn’t get it.”

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In a new IndieWire poll, 137 critics have cited 15 films as the best they saw at four recent fall festivals — Venice, Telluride, TIFF and NYFF.

I am telling you straight and true that the failure of said critics to include Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard is incontestable proof that a significant percentage of these critics are living deep inside their own heads and anal cavities. Because King Richard, trust me, connects, and will almost certainly become a top Best Picture contender. The critics also included Spencer (a surreal, all-but-unendurable immersion into the misery of Lady Diana), Red Rocket (a respectable Sean Baker film that traffics in depravity and Texas trashitude), Bergman Island and Dune.

The #1 critics pick, Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog, is going to be hated by Average Joes and Janes. I called it “a chilly and perverse cattle-ranch drama that insists over and over that it’s a very bad thing for toxic males to suppress their homosexuality. Campion is a top-tier filmmaker but Dog‘s milieu is grim and stifling and melancholy, like the dark side of the moon. Yes, Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as the enraged and closeted Phil.”

IndieWire critics hot 15 (:

1. The Power of the Dog
2. Titane (HE says distinctive, respectably self-owned, overpraised by Cannes jury)
3. The Worst Person in the World
4. Drive My Car
5. Petite Maman
6. Memoria
7. Dune (HE alert)
8. Red Rocket (HE horror horn)
9. Bergman Island (HE alert)
10. The Tragedy of Macbeth
11. Spencer (HE horror horn)
12. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
13. Parallel Mothers
14. C’mon C’mon
15. The Lost Daughter

If Hillary Clinton had won in ’16 she’d probably be in her second term now. The noise on the right would have been horrible every step of the way. But would we be three years away from a more-than-likely rightwing coup d’etat?

Overheard: “As Bill Maher, Robert Kagan and others have now demonstrated with far more eloquence than I have, Trump’s takeover is all but guaranteed. American democracy ends in January 2025. Because the fascist left and the fascist right are now working together. They are both cults that despise freedom of thought, and they both, increasingly, despise reality.

“The right is ahead on the reality score. On the 1 to 10 scale (1 being reality, 10 being total wingnut through-the-looking-glass fantasy), they’re at about an 8. The left is now a 4 creeping up on 5. (As Andrew Sullivan captured in his revelatory column this week, the trans issue is what’s pushing the left to a 6, 7, or 8.)

“But the bottom line is that they’re united. They both want to kill American freedom (just by different means). They are colluding, and they will succeed.”

Or, as a friend put it this morning, “HAHA!”

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Yesterday’s Daily Beast takedown piece on TheWrap editor and CEO Sharon Waxman arose from complaints by whiney ex-employees.

“Regional Friendo” piped in with a gripe about abusive bosses and how gentle bosses are much better, and how respect is a two-way street.

HE to Regional Friendo: “I prefer mellow to agitated as well. But this is a tough town and snappy bosses are lamentably par for the course, at least in some corners. You basically have to man up, grim up and take it. Life in the big city.

“You remember Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?, of course. Imagine if Sammy Glick had hired a team of snowflake employees. What a Daily Beast article that would make! ‘Sammy is a real prick and he’s hurt our feelings…waahhh!’

“Except they didn’t have sensitive snowflakes back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Well, they did but nobody voiced any complaints, certainly not to magazine reporters.”

Journalist Friendo: “LOL at Daily Beast trying to knock out a successful competitor. Fuck these crybabies. Go work somewhere else. Sharon is gruff and direct but you have to be to win in this town. She owns her own business so she can tell them to fuck right off.”

I was left with mixed feelings after catching George Clooney‘s The Tender Bar last weekend. Set in Manhasset and Connecticut in the ’70s and ’80s and featuring a steady, trustworthy performance from Tye Sheridan and an amiable supporting one from Ben Affleck, this is a warmish, working-class family saga about the usual dysfunctions and obstacles…in this case a fatherless kid nurtured in a bar + romantic college-age yearnings + toil and trouble + struggling to make it as a journalist.

The following day I ordered a copy of J.R. Moehringer‘s same-titled life saga, published in 2006 and the basis of William Monahan‘s screenplay.

Moehringer is a relaxed, colloquial, straight-up honest writer. The book is well sculpted, easy to read, no speedbumps or detours. It’s a compelling tale of a Manhasset kid who grew up fatherless (his radio talk-show dad was an absentee alcoholic asshat) but who was nurtured along by some surrogate dads at a Manhasset watering hole called The Dickens (later Publicans), and eventually went on to a Yale education and a career as a journalist with the N.Y. Times, Rocky Mountain News and L.A Times.

The film is not as good as the book, but it’s an agreeable, sometimes affecting in-and-outer. It keeps everything personal and local, and is basically a “this happens and that happens and then this happens” type of thing. I wasn’t levitated, but I wasn’t annoyed either. I went with it and so did Tatiana, who insists that Clooney’s film will affect people in the same way that Kenneth Branagh‘s Belfast, another turbulent family drama, did during Telluride.

Actually I was a bit irked from time to time.

Affleck charms as Uncle Charlie (no allusions to Joseph Cotten‘s doppleganger in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt), and despite playing this amiable bartender with a somewhat broad “Long Island accent,” which struck me as needless. Ben is an authentic Boston guy, and he doesn’t need to pretend. On top of which all Charlie does is hang out and share pearls of working-class wisdom. Nothing develops or builds with the guy.

There’s a father-son event at young J.R.’s school, and you naturally expect that Charlie will fill in for the absent asshat dad (Max Martini).  Affleck stepping up to this plate would have meant something to us. But no — J.R.’s crabby, white-haired grandfather (Chris Lloyd) puts on a tie and attends instead. Which struck me as hugely unsatisfying.

And there’s a cancer scare subplot involving J.R.s mom (Lily Rabe) that goes nowhere.  One minute Affleck is admonishing a young woman for even asking about Lily’s disease, and a scene or two later she’s older and cancer-free and completely out of the woods. And it’s like “whut?”

And I regret to say (and I hate having to spit this out, being an ardent admirer of Clooney, one of the better human beings in this town) that The Tender Bar is partly undone by a surreal casting decision that makes the first 40% of the film feel seriously out of whack.

I’m speaking of the casting of young Daniel Ranieri, a kid from an apparently Middle Eastern family (the last name is Italian but the lineage appears to be Lebanese, Iranian, Jordanian…somewhere in that realm), as the 10 year-old version of Sheridan, who, like Moehringer in actuality, is the biological son of a German paleface couple (Rabe and Martini). It would be one thing if Ranieri was adopted, but there’s NO WAY IN HELL this kid grows up to be Tye Sheridan.

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I’m looking forward to the first YouTube report about the Academy Museum that at least mentions the fact that the “apology for 100 years of white Hollywood” angle constitutes a good 80% of the museum’s content, above and beyond the Miyazaki exhibit. The people who’ve covered it so far are all gladhanders.

Seriously, how could any fan of North by Northwest not be a little thrown by the “Backdrop: An Invisible Art” exhibit, which all but indicts Alfred Hitchcock, Ernest Lehman, Cary Grant and others who helped make this 1959 thriller for crimes against the Lakota nation?

And yet the Fox 11 reporter [below] waltzes in with her camera crew and goes “oh, what a paradise for movie fans! And there’s Bruce the shark!”

“…who’s not a parasite, and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.” — “Visions of Johanna,” Bob Dylan, 1966.