Three significant films will open on Wednesday, 12.25 — Christmas Day — minus the sound of jingle bells, joyful carolers and deer hooves on the roof. Which is interesting.

James Mangold‘s A Complete Unknown, first and foremost — Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Dan Fogler, Norbert Leo Butz, Scoot McNairy.

Nosferatu, a jolting vampire film from Robert Eggers and costarring Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin and Willem Dafoe.

And Hailja Reijn‘s Babygirl, an allegedly worthwhile pervy relationship film with Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Sophie Wilde and Antonio Banderas.

That’s a fairly nifty-sounding holiday trio!

Two other noteworthies are opening on 12.25 — Rachel Morrison‘s The Fire Inside, a fact-based female boxing flick with Ryan Destiny and Brian Tyree Henry, and Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz‘s Los Frikis, which no one will flock to.

“…give me your real estate broker’s number…we don’t live there.”

Real clarity here from @SRuhle

pic.twitter.com/FXsB4iaxos

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) September 21, 2024

In a 7.14 Atlantic essay titled “The Gunman and the Would–Be Dictator,” David Frum wrote the following:

I would be lying if I said that for a few brief seconds last Saturday my heart didn’t skip a beat when I heard that Trump had been shot (i.e., ear–pierced).

The truth is that a feeling of mixed adrenaline (shocked by the implications of chaos and hate but at the same time thinking “does this mean no more Trump toxicity?”) rifled through my system.

Anyone from the sensible, semi-thoughtful, non-MAGA crowd who claims they were only horrified by the sight of blood and the whizzing of AR-15 bullets is (be honest) a bit of a coward and a liar.

One of those cowardly liars is Jack Black, who has just cancelled Tenacious D’s tour because Kyle Glass briefly confessed to having succumbed to calloused, knee-jerk thinking and to being a harsh judge of the bumblefuck social cancer that The Beast unleashed eight years ago.

Another liar is Late Show host Stephen Colbert, who shared the following during last night’s broadcast:

I don’t doubt that Colbert was, like everyone else, alarmed by the shooting and grief-struck for that poor fireman and family man, Corey Comperatore, who was killed by one of Thomas Matthew Crooks’ bullets.

But I don’t believe for a second that Colbert was relieved that Trump’s mustard gas wasn’t removed from social influence. Colbert said that because he had to — what Glass admitted to can never be even half-acknowledged by a big-time network TV talk-show guy.

I’m not proud of my pulse having quickened oh-so-briefly last Saturday afternoon. I feel chagrined by that ugly gut-feeling moment. But I can’t lie and say I didn’t taste it.

When I read about Crooks, I muttered to myself that the trans community is undoubtedly breathing a huge sigh of relief that the shooter wasn’t from their ranks. A friend with several POC pallies confessed that “there’s great relief that the shooter wasn’t black. Otherwise it would’ve been hunting season.”

Author of “Battle For The Soul“, Edward-Isaac Dovere is a senior reporter for CNN, covering politics and the Biden administration:

“Part of the dynamic here ie that the Obama-Biden relationship is much more complicated than people often understand it to be. They are friendly [but] they are are not friends.

“One person close to the situation said to me a couple of years ago, ‘Neither one of these [men] really has friends, and they’re really not friends with each other.’ They have not been in contact over the last couple of years as people might think. They’ve talked a couple of times.

“Barack Obama has forever been skeptical about Joe Biden‘s chances as a presidential candidate. [Biden has written in his book that] Obama was not encouraging. Obama is not prone to getting involved here. And every time people have reached out to him and said ‘save us, Barack Obama,’ his response has basically been ‘I’m going to stay right here…I’m not saying anything.'”

Not trying to personally persuade Biden to drop out is one thing, but Obama staying silent while pally George Clooney says, with Obama’s consent, what Obama believes to be true is another.

The looming existential threat of Donald Trump‘s likely victory hasn’t gone away. Every sensible person on the planet realizes that Joe’s cognitive diminishment, which is in and out depending on the moment, has only one way to go and that’s downhill.

Every American voter knows this also, and yet Obama would rather let Trump win than stand up and plead for a more hopeful outcome. That’s cowardly. That’s smug. That’s shameful.

…the wavering Black fence–sitters — i.e., the 2020 Joe voters who’ve been nursing doubts about firmly standing by him a second time and have even flirted with Trump alignment — will, in greater numbers, simply stay home on 11.5.24.

Joe committed political suicide last Thursday night, and there’s no undoing this. The sand is draining out of the hourglass and it can’t be replaced

And this will mean the death of Joe in the battleground states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania). We all saw him — he’s a withered old nag on his way to the glue factory. The Beast will win, and democracy as we’ve known it will exist mostly as a memory.

“Challe” is not a word in any language, but it reminds me of chattle, which basically means movable goods. The second word could be some kind of shortened slang abbreviation or cryptic allusion to people who come from Niger, the landlocked West African country.

Remember that climactic boardroom scene in The Social Network when Mark Zuckerberg says to Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (aka “the Winkelvi”) — “If you could’ve invented Facebook, you would’ve invented Faceook“?

Yesterday Tatiana Siegel’s shocking 3.9.24 Variety story explored a claim by Frisco author Simon Stephenson that The Holdovers director Alexander Payne and/or the film’s screenwriter, David Hemingson, plagiarized portions of Frisco almost on a scene-by-scene, line-by-line basis.

Hollywood Elsewhere’s response to Stephenson: “If you could’ve written The Holdovers, you would’ve written The Holdovers.”

HE read a 2013 draft of Frisco this morning, and I’m not claiming that Stephenson is totally out to lunch on this matter. Yes, there’s a cetain thematic similarity and similar story strands shared by Frisco and The Holdovers.

Frisco is essentially a spiritual rebirth story in which Jeff Willis, a morose 50something Seattle pediatrician, is reawakened by Amy Morrison, a 15 year old terminal cancer sufferer, and how it all comes together during a brief shared trip to San Francisco.

In certain ways The Holdovers tells the same kind of story — Paul Giamatti‘s Paul Hunham, an ascerbic classics professor at a private Massachusetts boys school, experiences a spiritual reawakening while looking after a bright but contentious senior, Dominic Sessa‘s Angus Tully, and how it all comes together during a late-second-act trip to Boston over the Christmas holidays.

And yet Frisco and The Holdovers are also strikingly similar to (a) Johanna Spyri‘s Heidi (i.e., young girl reawakens the humanity of her grumpy grandfather), (b) Gus Van Sant and Mike Rich‘s Finding Forrester (’00 — a talented young writer of color reawakens a hermit-like, J.D. Salinger-like writer, and (c) Martin Brest and Bo Goldman‘s Scent of a Woman (’92 — private-school kid reawakens the heart and soul of a bitter retired military man).

Another similarity that hit me this morning was (d) Morton DaCosta, Betty Comden and Adolph Green‘s Auntie Mame (“Live a little!”) except this time the Rosalind Russell role is handled by Amy, the cancer kid. But the mission is basically the same.

Just as Mame eventually saves Patrick Dennis (author of the original 1955 book, and played by Roger Smith) from a life of conservative suffocation, Amy the cancer victim saves the morose and timid Willis from a life of terminal resignation and boredom.

For me, the key difference between Frisco and The Holdovers is that the latter is wise and well written and recognizably human and specific in dozens of different ways while Frisco is somewhat generic and plodding, not to mention awkwardly written here and there and occasionally speechy in a way that almost makes you groan.

I was a script reader in the mid to late ’80s, and I’ve read hundreds of interesting but not-quite there scripts in my time. Frisco is definitely one of these.

It’s not awful but it is, I feel, on the mediocre side. It needs a major rewrite or whatever. And it’s really whorish, I feel, to use a terminally ill teenager as the driving spiritual engine of the piece. And to throw in the lore of San Francisco beat generation mythology (City Lights bookstore, Jack Kerouac, Neal Casady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Howl”) as icing on the spiritual cake….well, okay, but it struck me as a bit precious.

Frisco is primarily composed of a series of vaguely awkward, on-the-nose, “this is who I am and what I want or need” scenes…essentially a lot of cliched material about a midlife crisis of the spirit (including an impending divorce) and how a 50ish guy is gradually rescued.

The on-the-nose theme of Frisco is “stop being morose, celebrate your time here on earth, we’ll all be dead soon enough.”

If you have compassionate feelings about the current plight of God knows how many tens of thousands of Gaza residents and the likelihood that many of them will be killed when Israeli troops finally invade…if you recognize that the number of hardcore Hamas cadres who murdered 1400 Jews on 10.7 and who absolutely have to pay the price for this genocide…when you allow that these fanatics almost certainly represent a modest fraction of the total Gaza population…there has to be some way of saying “don’t slaughter innocent Gaza residents” without sounding like an anti-Semite…there has to be some way to do this.

This is apparently what Dave Chappelle tried to say in Boston the other night, but he’s being attacked for anti-Semitism regardless.

Oscar Poker urgency — Jeff and Sasha lamenting the Biden 2024 campaign situation & the suppression of Woody’s Coup de Chance, plus handicapping Hottest Best Actor & Actress Contenders, urging on Sunday’s Maher+ Carville kick–around, etc.

Here’s the link, man…go for it.