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HE’s 2026 GoFundMe Campaign On The Home Stretch!…Another $3K and Done!

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Monday, 1.26 update:

HE’s 2026 GoFundMe Cannes / Venice campaign is doing relatively well and on the home stretch!

The briefly faltering campaign rebounded on Friday (1.16), and now the total is around $4.3K and on the final laps. .

The early January stall was my fault because (a) I launched the campaign too quickly after the holiday spending surge with (b) people just now paying off credit card debt and feeling understandably crunched and cautious about other potential spends.

Earnest, down-on-my-knees gratitude to the HE loyalists who coughed up…you saved everything! Hope is an elusive butterfly, but sometimes it just turns around and flies into the net.

I’ve got enough to chip in my share for the Cannes pad ($1500) plus buy the NYC-to-Nice air fare with $1300 or so set aside for the Venice pad. (The NYC-to-Venice air fare can wait.) I’ll keep the current campaign going until, say, Valentine’s Day and see where things are at that point. If the donations haven’t moved I’ll have to figure out the Venice situation in March or April. One step at a time, I’ll get there, etc. The campaign continues!

As it went last year, HE’s 2026 GoFundMe is a double-header. I’m trying to raise enough scratch to attend both the 2026 Cannes Film Festival (Monday, 5.11 thru Saturday, 5.23) and 2026 Venice Film Festival (Wednesday, 9.2 to Sunday, 9.12), and now HE’s 2026 GoFundMe page is up and rolling.

I’m looking to raise $4K per festival or $8K total. Rent, air fare, train fare, low-rent meals, cappucinos, baguettes, etc.

Please remember that I’m not “begging” for dough, as a few haters have claimed. I’m simply attempting to attract donations in a different, far less draining manner than the monthly method used by other webzines and columnists. I’m just asking for a one-off gimmee of $25 or $50 and whatever feels right. HE stopped paywalling this site a couple of years ago, and so the regularly refreshed content is entirely free and wide open, and this — this! — is the only pitch I’m making.

“It’s Fine, Dude…I’m Not Mad At You”

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After the shooting some unseen guy says “fucking bitch“, a spiteful reference to Renee. Was this Jonathan Ross or…?

Good’s wife, Becca Good, was about to open the passenger door, but Renee pulled out so quickly that Becca was left standing.

January 9, 2026

Been Running Into Abel Ferrara Since The Early ’80s

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And especially since the first interation of Hollywood Elsewhere began way back in ’98, but I’d been slacking off, Ferrara-wise, over the last three or four years.

Then the Rome-residing Ferrara surfaced as an angry, snappy mafioso in Marty Supreme. And then Alex Vadukul’s N.Y. Times profile appeared yesterday (1.7). And then I took notice of last year’s Turn in the Wound, which is now streaming on the Criterion Channel. And then I bought Ferrara’s memoir, Scene, which popped a couple of months ago.

What Would Have Been So Terrible…

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…if those ICE agents had simply let Renee Good, a 37 year-old Minneapolis resident and a lesbian mom with a partner, drive off?

Why did that ICE agent have to play it so aggressively by grabbing her door latch and saying “get out of the fucking car?” They had her plates and could have easily come to her home later and settled the issue, whatever it was.

Good was acting foolishly and irrationally, yes, but did that warrant a bullet in the head?

Why did Good panic when the ICE guys tried to open her car door? What’s the worst thing that could’ve happened if she’d submitted? Never, ever run from officers with guns.

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Tapper’s Tortured Expressions (Frustration, Impatience) Are Fairly Hilarious

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“What is the basis of Denmark’s territorial claim? Obviously Greenland should be part of the United States. Military action? Greenland has a population of 30,00 people, Jake.”” — Stephen Miller to Jake Tapper earlier today.

HE to Miller: Greenland’s actual population is around 56.5 thousand, give or take.

Wiki: “Most residents of Greenland are Inuit, and it’s the least densely populated country in the world. The population is concentrated mainly on the southwest coast. Greenland is socially progressive, like metropolitan Denmark; education and healthcare are free, and LGBTQ rights in Greenland are some of the most extensive in the world”…not if Trump takes over!

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Neville’s “Breakdown: 1975” Is Okay, But Aimed At Simpletons

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Last night I finally watched Morgan Neville’s Breakdown: 1975 (12.19.25), a 92-minute Netflix doc that hurriedly recaps and, in a sense, celebrates the fertile and provocative moviescape of the mid ’70s. Glorious times!

Except Neville doesn’t strictly focus on 1975 films. The doc covers ’74, ’75 and ’76, during which, Neville asserts, the real meat and marrow of New Hollywood came to fruition. But every so often the early ’70s pop through and then, at the end, the ’77 finale (Rocky, Star Wars) is heard from.

Plus anyone who had hit puberty by the late ’60s or who’s read Mark Harris‘s “Pictures at a Revolution” or Peter Biskind‘s “Easy Riders, Raging bulls” knows that New Hollywood was launched in ’67 with The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde.

So let’s cut the crap — Breakdown: 1975 is really about the whole span of the mythical New Hollywood era. Neville should’ve called it Rough-and-Tumble ’70s Free-For-All! or Hollywood Neverland: When The Inmates Ran The Asylum or something in that vein.

The problem is that Breakdown: 1975 is generally too fast and loose and simple-minded — it just skims along and barely gets into any nitty-gritty specifics. It’s primarily aimed at your none-too-bright kids who are too lazy or ADD-afflicted to have paid the slightest attention to what Harris and Biskind were on about.

Is it a good thing that Neville has made a dumbed-down primer for younger folks (Millennials, Zoomers, Gen Alpha) who haven’t a clue about films that were made before the 1980s? Okay, yeah, I suppose.

As I watched Neville’s doc I recalled that the same basic saga was concisely passed along in Spotlight on New Hollywood (‘24), a 15-minute Criterion Channel essay that was offered last summer as a supplement to Criterion’s streaming of The Graduate.

Alas, it has since been erased, at least according to a cursory Google + Criterion search.

Why can’t “Spotlight on New Hollywood” be offered as a stand-alone video essay on YouTube? That’s what I’m basically asking here. It would be terrific if readers of this piece could savor it.

The truth is that in 15 minutes Spotlight on New Hollywood delivers a much better, tighter, more sophisticated history of this fabled era than Neville, whom I know, respect and admire, manages in 92 minutes.

Such a shame that Harris’s 15-minute essay has been sent to the Criterion dustbin. Unless I’m missing something.

“He Just Doesn’t Like Her”

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Trump Mussolini likes N.Y. Mayor Zohran Mamdani (chemistry, paternal admiration for a young go-getter) but he has a gut dislike for Venezuela’s Maria Machado, the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner who won (by proxy) à landslide victory against Nicholas Maduro in 2024.

From Jonathan Blitzer’s “Who’s Running Venezuela After The Fall of Maduro?”, a 1.5.26 New Yorker article (posted at 9:40 am):