You Don’t Have To Be Liberal To See Value In Marlon Brando

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Consider this highly perceptive Marlon Brando-as-Terry Malloy analysis by talk-radio guy Lee Habeeb, who’s a staunch rightie as well as a worsbipper of many good cinematic things. Plus he resides in Oxford, Mississippi.

“Those Were Miserable-Looking Human Beings,’ posted on 3.13.25:

I’m sorry but I’ve been watching this every so often for a good 15 or 20 years…something about Elia Kazan‘s words and way of speaking melts me down.

Perfect summary: “That one person should need so much from another person in the way of tenderness and all that…and we all do, don’t we? We all marry or hopefully marry or hopefully hook up with some lady who’s gonna make us feel that we’re okay or we’re better and all that…we search for it and want it and crave it, and sometimes it happens and sometimes it happens for a while. And something in that basic story is what stirs people. Not the social-political thing so much as the human element.”

“Let Us Both Be Damned”

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We’ve all fully understood for months that Emerald Fennell‘s Wuthering Heights (Warner Bros., 2.11) is going to deliver a fair amount of hungry, gasping, shuddering sexuality…fuck me hard and long, Heathcliff….slam my ham with overwhelming vigor, etc.

My first reaction to the trailer’s first closeup of 35-year-old Margot Robbie is that she’s too old to play Catherine Earnshaw, whom Bronte envisioned as a young lass in her early 20s. Plus she’s seven years older than 28 year-old Jacob Elordi, who plays Heathcliff.

Then again Robbie isn’t the first too-old Cathy — Merle Oberon played her in William Wyler‘s 1939 version when she was 38. Wyler’s Heathcliff, Laurence Olivier, was six years younger.

Plus Emily Bronte’s “Nelly Dean” is being portrayed this time by Vietnamese actress Hong Chau…a Vietnamese woman stirring the plot soup in the West Yorkshire moors in early 19th Century England?…I don’t think so! More bullshit presentism + nonsensical diverse casting for its own sake.

Felonious Criterion Teal-Poisoning…Busted!

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All hail the glorious menonfilmpod…@williammendoza, @adumbowerz, @Commihater, @ryancownie…brave men who are standing up to Criterion criminality as far as the teal-saturated Eyes Wide Shut 4K Bluray is concerned. HE to readership: Do you have eyes? Everything that was blue in previous versions is now tealed….even the formerly black cloaks of the orgy guys have been tealed….wake up!

,/p>

What Have Epstein Emails Revealed About Donald Trump’s Character and Behavior…

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…that hasn’t been widely “known” or certainly believed and presumed for several years now? What’s the big deal exactly? Trump = dog, animal, sociopath, crime boss. Is there something new here? What has changed?

Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Summers (2.28.17): “I have met some very bad people, but none as bad as Trump…not one decent cell in his body.” But what does that mean coming from Epstein, of all people?

Late to Changpeng Zhao Grift-Pardon

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Corruption in plain sight…no evasions or apologies. Par for the course…shrug, right?

Changpeng Zhao Wiki page excerpt: “Zhao resigned as the CEO in November 2023 after the U.S Department of Justice alleged he violated the Bank Secrecy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four months in prison in April 2024. Zhao completed his sentence by September of the same year. In October 2025, Zhao was given a presidential pardon by President Donald Trump. The pardon was given amid extensive business dealings between Binance and World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company owned by the Trump family.”

Again — No One Cares About Gacy’s Boo-Hoo Victims

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All murder victims and their families are proverbial ingredients in the same profoundly tragic equation. They wanted to live, and were horrified by the sudden malice and brutality that ended their existence, and their loved ones were gutted and devastated by the loss.

Thud.

Leo Tolstoy: “All murder victims are exactly alike, but each and every murderer is unique in this or that way.”

Posted on 10.20.25:

Last night I watched the first three episodes of Patrick MacManus‘s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, a new eight-episode Peacock series about the infamous serial killer from a suburb northwest of Chicago.

Gacy was a fat, gay sociopathic beast who had an amiable personality and liked dressing up like a clown, but who also murdered around 34 young men in the ’70s (mostly during the Jimmy Carter era)…he buried most of his victims in a crawl space under his home, and some under his garage’s cement floor. And he dumped a few in the Des Plaines river.

As long as McManus sticks to the Gacy investigation by the Norwood Park cops (and then the prosecution in the later episodes), Devil in Disguise is aces…gripping and fascinating and appropriately gloomy. It has story tension, realism, a strange Midwestern eeriness.

But when it starts veering into the lives of some of the victims and the anguish of their families after they’ve disappeared, you can feel the tension dissipating more and more…you can feel the narrative padding slowing things down.

HE to MacManus: We’d rather not familiarize ourselves with the young gay victims, and we really, really don’t want to deal with the grief of their parents. Bohhr-innnng! If you’d just stuck to the cops and the prosecutors and cut all the dramatic flotsam and jetsom, you’d have a perfect miniseries. Read the “investigation” section of Gacy’s Wikipage…it sucks you right in.

The girthy Michael Chernus, whose Gacy perf sorta kinda reminds you of John Candy in Uncle Buck and Planes Trains and Automobiles, is fairly great as this suburban monster.

The last time I wrote about Chernus was when he played the extra-marital boyfriend of Stephanie Allynne in a glum 2015 Sundance comedy called People Places Things. My basic thought was “why would the pistol-hot Allyne want to cheat on her husband with a not-all-that-handsome overweight guy?”

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One Hawks Analysis At A Time

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Let’s start with One Battle After Another. Identify the three great scenes. The final chase and shoot-out sequence on the rolling hills highway…that’s one. The French 75 assault on the migrant camp at the very beginning…that’s two. The failed French 75 bank robbery…that’s three.

But are there any “bad” ones? Hawks said you can’t have any. At all.

This Reminds Me

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Every year Hollywood Elsewhere subjects the leading Best Picture contenders to the Howard Hawks grading system. The legendary director is famed for having said that a really good movie (or a formidable Oscar-seeker) always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.”

Hawks also defined a good director as “someone who doesn’t annoy you.” I don’t want to sound unduly harsh or dismissive but I’m afraid that Ryan Coogler‘s writing and direction of the second half of Sinners…the blood-and-fangs section that begins with the arrival of the Irish vampires…I was increasingly annoyed all through that damn film. Honestly? I’m not a huge fan of the first half either.

How do the leading 2025 Best Picture contender films (numbering ten) rate on the Hawks chart? I’ll bang this out tomorrow.

I wish I could subject Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet to the Hawks test. All I’ve heard from admirers is that it ends with a really great scene (i.e., a performance of Hamlet inside the Globe theatre), but no one has mentioned two other standouts. Do they exist? I’d really like to know.

Feel-Good Messaging

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Sincere message to all the Facebook friendos who’ve been sending along good wishes…it’s always nice when this happens.

Message from ex-Manhattan girlfriend, received this morning: “Happy XX Birthday. I’ve actually kinda forgotten how old you are and even, for that matter, where you geographically might be now. But wherever that is, I hope you’re well and celebrating.”

HE reply: “Thanks, [name]! Happy birthday to you also, being another Scorpio.

“Have you guys seen Sentimental Value, by the way? Renate Reinsve plays [you] in your mid 30s.

“Rather than resort to standard fiction, let’s just say that age-wise I’m still being born. Go ahead and laugh, but I often…okay, I sometimes feel close to or even imbued with the Obi Wan Kenobi-ness of it all…a John Lennon universe, which is to say a realm that is age-less, time-less, and occasionally radiating ‘oh, such loveliness,’ as Paddy Chayefsky once put it.

“That loveliness dissolves into anxiety and defensivness, of course, whenever I read the thoughts of certain progressive HE commenters, battery-acid scolds, alarmists and shriekers. But Chayefsky also described this head-space as the ecstatic embrace of ‘what the Hindus call prana.'”

Ex-Manhattan girlfriend reply: “I have not seen Sentimental Value. Interesting comment. Now I have to see it, of course.”

Jeff Sneider: “Happy Birthday, Jeff! I’ll spare you any jokes, but rest assured that those of us with taste know you’re a real one. A daily read. I’ve read every word. Big respect. Enjoy the day, Monsieur Motherfucker.”

Prana is a Sanskrit word meaning “life force” or “vital energy” that is believed to pervade the universe and animate all living things. It is considered a vital principle in Hinduism and is closely associated with breath, as breathing is a primary way to take in this energy. Practices like yoga and meditation, particularly the art of pranayama, focus on controlling and expanding one’s awareness of prana to promote physical, emotional, and spiritual health.

Mel Gibson: “The Industry Is Dying….Some Kind of Atrophy”

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As revealed a month ago by a Brian Entin interview with Mel Gibson, Gibson needed to do a one-day reshoot, which he figured could’ve been handled in Los Angeles. No muss or fuss. But it finally made more sense to fly to effing Bulgaria.

Gibson: “It was cheaper — more cost effective — to fly the entire American crew…buy their air tickets, fly them to Bulgaria, house them and feed them for three days and do the shooting there, rather than just shoot for one day, locally, in Los Angeles, where they all lived.”

Critical Drinker, 7:22 mark: “There’s no avoiding this…Hollywood’s obsession with identity politics has been slowly klilling [the industry] over the past ten years…I’ve talked at length about the self-righteous actors who make it their business to lectue the worl dabout how to think and act. But now, it finally feels like the culture of Hollywood is slowly trying to distance itself from a culture war they’ve clearly lost.”

More To Life Than Tending To Bees

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Any film that ends, flippantly or sincerely or ironically, with the total obliteration of humanity is obviously selling a misanthropic view of things. We get it, we get it…conscience- free human beings are basically destructive cockroaches and better off exterminated.

But at least give Yorgos Lanthimos‘s Bugonia a measure of credit for sticking to its nihilistic doomsday guns and not copping out like Kathryn Bigelow‘s A House of Dynamite, which is too chicken to show the obliteration of a major city (i.e., Chicago) and doesn’t even end like Sidney Lumet‘s Fail Safe (’64), which only suggested the nuclear destruction of New York City with zoomed-in freeze frames.

Venice Film Festival review, posted on 8.28:

I saw Yorgos Lanthimos‘s Bugonia at 11 this morning, just after Jay Kelly. I guess you could call it an extreme hoot — a bloody, ultra-violent rant about nutters, aliens and environmental destruction, and is fittingly strange and crazy for the eccentric kidnapping saga that it is.

I completely agree with and support what the film says about the ecological ruination of the planet and how thoughtless humans pretty much deserve extermination.

Emma Stone is fine and fierce as a corporate snap-dragon, and Jesse Plemons, playing one of her two kidnappers, certainly commits to his character’s greasy grubbiness and his none-too-bright delusions and theories. Aidan Delbis‘s fat simpleton with the big curly Afro is irksome, of course. All such characters are.

Why, I wondered, did Plemons’ beekeeper, deranged though he was, decide upon this mentally handicapped fool for a close friendo?

Jerskin Fendrix‘s pounding musical score is certainly striking.

I didn’t much like Bugonia but I respected the aliveness. And ah-delia-delia-delia-delia-delia that’s all she wrote.

Funniest Feinberg Observation in Months

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From Scott Feinberg‘s latest Oscar spitball-predictions column (dated 11.11.25, paragraph #5)…

“Ella McCay (20th Century, 12.12) began screening last week, but reactions remain under embargo for social through Nov. 24 and for reviews through Dec. 10 — read into that what you will. It’s James L. Brooks’ first feature in 15 years.”

Any film that forbids the posting of reviews until 36 hours before a film’s commercial opening…the name of that tune is called “hide the ball.”

“Never crap a crapper” — Kirk Douglas on the set of Eddie Macon’s Run in Laredo, Texas — directly overheard by yours truly in the late summer of 1982.