Reviews of David Fincher‘s Mank broke today so here’s a rehash of two recent HE Mank posts, compressed and crammed together:

Mank is quite the smarthouse thing — gently or obliquely emotional but mostly a Hollywood lore head-trip movie, And it’s aimed almost solely at seasoned, well-educated film sophistos. Which is one reason why guys like San Francisco Chronicle critic Bob Strauss are doing cartwheels.

Brilliant and specific and steeped in a glorious monochrome vibe, Mank is mostly about the ways of genius mixed with the rigorous discipline of writing, the slow ways of alcohol poisoning and the complexities of studio politics.

As such it’s obviously a brilliant, highly accomplished virtuoso act, and totally locked for several Oscar noms — Picture, Director (Fincher), Best Actor (Gary Oldman), Best Supporting Actress (Amanda Seyfried), Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, etc.

It hopscotches all around in a non-linear way, which of course is a tribute to the Citizen Kane scheme. I adored the use of clackety-clack scene descriptions dropping into the frame. And I loved re-hearing the line “it’s not the heat, it’s the humanity.” (Which apparently wasn’t written by Herman J. Mankiewicz but Alan Jay Lerner for Brigadoon.)

The nutritional value of the dialogue alone (written by Fincher’s late dad, Jack, in the mid ’90s, and then rewritten by his son and Eric Roth) should not be under-celebrated. Altogether the film didn’t quite levitate me off the ground, it did put me into a kind of subdued swoon mode — a certain form of aesthetic rapture that leaves you quietly stirred and pacified. That’s a fairly rare thing.

What’s the Mank arc? Basically that even for a self-destructive boozer like Herman J. Mankiewicz, life took a turn for the better when Orson Welles came calling. And that despite the political intrigues and whatnot, things worked out very nicely for an all-too-brief period. And at the end of the path came a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

Boozing issues aside, Mank is depicted in each and every scene as a humanist and a good guy — a man who sides with the weak and unlucky, with the less fortunate and downtrodden. He’s good company.

Oldman is wonderful. I was initially not looking forward to spending over two hours with a pot-bellied drunk, and the fact that he looks like a bloated 62 year old rather than a plump, dessicated 43 year-old didn’t thrill me. But Oldman’s charm and particularly that thin, raspy little voice tossing off one witticism after another…he simply won me over. I just fell for the whirling patter and verbal derring-do.

According to a recently posted N.Y. Times story by Katie Glueck, Mark Landler, Marc Santora and Michael Cooper, Joe Biden‘s flip of Pennsylvania and Georgia is decisive and growing. As of Friday evening his Keystone State lead over Trump was higher than 14,500. His Georgia advantage had been whisper thin, but by Friday evening Biden had tallied 4000 more votes than Trump.

In Arizona, the Times reported, Biden’s advantage shrank slightly “but not by as much as Republicans had hoped.” In Nevada today, Biden “nearly doubled his lead” over Trump to roughly 20,000 votes.

The trends aren’t going to change. The data overwhelmingly indicates that Biden’s leads back east are going to increase; ditto Nevada and Arizona. So why is the Times refusing to admit the obvious by declaring it for Biden-Harris?

And why are they continuing to post that infuriating electoral map in which Biden is still at 253 electoral votes and Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania are still color coded as undecided — and I mean not even leaning toward Biden-Harris with light blue tints.

If you didn’t know better you’d think it’s still a “who knows?” situation.

And why are the major networks refusing to call it? They know exactly what’s going on, but — I don’t want to sound rash or intemperate but there’s no other way to put it — they seem to be afraid of what the Trump loonies might say or do.

Another way of putting it is that they’re chickenshit.

“Looking at the bigger picture, Democrats were done in by extreme voices that Mr. Trump was able to link to their party. Defunding the police will never be popular outside a few lefty precincts. The whiff of socialism helped kill Democrats in Florida.

“In California, voters rejected ballot measures that would have delivered a return of affirmative action and a bill to expand rent control. The result was a wake-up call for the overly woke.

“In battered Portland, Ore., where violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement have brought terror to the streets, a candidate who embraced Antifa lost to the more moderate mayor, Ted Wheeler.

“The violent fringe on the left helped Mr. Trump. The violent fringe on the right, sadly, did not appear to hurt him.” — from Timothy Egan’s “American Democracy Survives Its Brush With Death“, N.Y. Times, 11.6.

If I were part of a big snowball fight in 1897 Lyon, myself and maybe 10 or 12 others, I’d stick to the basic universal snowball fight rule. I would throw snowballs only at combatants — at those who were throwing them at me or at anyone in this particular throng who had declared themselves to be more or less fair game.

If a friend or a co-worker had happened along and I wanted to invite him to take part, I might hit him with a snowball or two — that would be okay. As long as the harmless violence stays within the fraternity, so to speak.

It goes without saying I wouldn’t throw snowballs at, say, an elderly woman or a couple of small kids who happened to be walking nearby. Or an innocent dog who’d strayed into the vicinity. Or a guy who was riding a bicycle and just trying to get through.

But in this high-deffed, colorized, smoothed-out Lumiere Bros. clip, the snowballers attack a passing bicyclist with a kind of strange, stupid fury. They pelt the poor guy again and again and knock him off his bike, and one of them even briefly snatches the bike — “It’s my bike now, deepsheet! Hah!”

If I’d been the bicyclist and especially after I’d hit the show-covered pavement, I might have taken a swing or two at someone. “Jesus…fuck’s wrong with you, man?” As in, knock yourselves out but what’s this got to do with me? If I’d been one of the attackers, I certainly wouldn’t have been surprised if the bicycle guy had let one of us have it. Ignore the rules of civilization, and you shouldn’t be surprised if someone pushes back.

The snowball fight was posted on YouTube on 3.20.20, but yesterday The New York Times‘ Sam Anderson posted it along with a few paragraphs’ worth of reactions.

“This is my favorite film of 2020,” Anderson wrote. “[It’s] a tiny masterpiece that perfectly distills not only our current mayhem but also, more profoundly, our baffling displacement in time.” The sequence lasts 52 seconds.

The Lumière brothers were, of course, among the world’s first cinematographers and editors. The footage was originally captured in jumpy, rickety monochrome, of course. It’s amazing how nowadays footage this old can be made to look this good. Check out the 1896 footage of the little girl and the cat [after the jump], which looks especially fresh and real due to the high frame rate (60 fps).

Along with the ascendant respect and celebrity of MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki, ex-SNL-er Leslie Jones has graced his rep with a brilliant analysis.

Jones allegedly left SNL last year to host a Supermarket Sweep reboot, a role in the Coming to America sequel, another opposite Kristen Bell in Queenpins and a Netflix comedy special.

I be hope I got his name right but I’m sure I didn’t! But I like him! He look like the only who is as worried as me lol!! pic.twitter.com/2WvOC0ofJn

— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) November 6, 2020

With Joe Biden having taken slight leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania, Fat Donny is almost certainly finished. As in fuhgdedaboudit. As in the clouds have parted and beams of sunlight are streaming down upon the crop.

No, we haven’t arrived at an absolute, definitive, N.Y. Times-certified victory moment for Biden. He was less than 1,000 votes ahead of Trump in the land of Joe-gia, peaches and Stacey Abrams, and a mere 5,500 votes over Trump in the Keystone state. And of course recounts and bullshit legal challenges will ensue.

But you can pretty much take it to the bank on a 98% basis — the foulest, lying-est, and most horrific President in U.S. history has lost his bid for re-election. Thank God in heaven and may all the angels sing in harmony as we drop to our knees in gratitude.

If you think I’m being delusional or incautious, ask Vox — they called it for Biden early this morning.

Watching Real Time with Bill Maher this evening is going to be absolutely jubilant.

Translation: Cancel culture fanatics need to apologize for their epic awfulness and then STFU forever. Or commit ritual seppuku…whatever works.

Andrew Yang says Democrats need to improve their appeal to the working class: "In there minds the Democratic party unfortunately has taken on this role of the coastal urban elites who are more concerned about policing various cultural issues than improving their way of life." pic.twitter.com/UljmEH0sEn

— The Matt Skidmore Show (@ZachandMattShow) November 6, 2020

Fox, AP and Politico have declared Joe Biden the winner in Arizona, which gives him 264 electoral votes. So even without Pennsylvania or Georgia, which could tip Biden’s way, he’ll have 270 when the Nevada count is finally settled.

Chart courtesy of BBC.com

Wow — things got real at Trump’s unhinged press conference tonight!! 😳 pic.twitter.com/xByO6OhyoB

— Jon Cooper 🇺🇸 (@joncoopertweets) November 6, 2020

To not connect the below logo with the spirit of Howard Beale and the special (though now anachronistic) energy and poetry of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network is to truly miss the point of…Jesus, where do I start?

Peak Beale described himself as shatteringly alive, at one with nature and the universe and a vessel of crackling electrical energy. He claimed with some conviction to be imbued with the cosmic spirit that Hindus call “prana” —a state of knowing and being that is spaceless and timeless and aglow with “oh, such loveliness.”

For like anyone touched by satori, Beale had recognized he was merely a conduit for that which flows and surges through every living atomic particle in the universe, humming and throbbing with eternal energy and attuned to the cosmic altogether.

Herman Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, John Lennon, George Harrison, Donovan, Timothy Leary…they all knew and recognized Howard as one of their own.

Donald Trump is, was and always will be a craven, Queens-born real-estate hustler, and approximately a quarter-inch deep; Beale is, was and always will be a well-educated, thoroughly establishment media figure who stumbled into spiritual transcendence by way of low ratings, alcohol and despair.

I feel Beale-ishness within me. I always have. I say this as a survivor of alcoholism (in myself, my dad and his father before him) and a grateful graduate of the LSD school of the Baghavad Gita.

If I’d known last year or even last January that life as I knew it for decades and decades, a life that involved occasional joy and parties and adventure and travel and great restaurant meals and watching movies inside first-class theatres…if I’d known all of this would suddenly come to a crashing halt as of last February and that it would stay that way for many subsequent months…if I’d known this was in the cards I would have savored life as it used to be a lot more. I would’ve said to myself and to friends over and over, “I know this sounds sappy, but from a certain perspective our lives are fairly wonderful right now.”

The opening Mexico City action sequence in Sam Mendes‘ Spectre (’15) is arguably the coolest and certainly the most visually ambitious in the entire Bond canon. But there’s a dividing line.

If you’re a serious film monk you prefer the opening four minutes, which is purely about exciting design and atmosphere, perfectly executed choreography and dazzling camerawork — a grade-A Scorsese moment. And if you’re a popcorn-level goon you’ll prefer the second clip, which goes crazy with CG and outlandish action starting at the 1:50 mark.

I don’t know the exact figures but the goons probably outnumber the cineastes by an approximate ratio of 20 to 1, and that’s why action films are made the way they are these days. But kudos to Mendes for at least delivering the opening four.