Almost everything was awful in ‘20, ‘21 and early ‘22…peak wokeism + the pandemic…the dreariest and darkest years of our lives.

One of the lowest, most despairing episodes in my industry-covering life was watching the beyond-awful Union Station Soderbergh Oscars — people still shudder at this memory, an epochal event that convinced the moviegoing public that progressive filmmakers were giving the finger to ticket-buyers …that they were committed to the guilt-tripping, misery-spreading business like never before.

But then three months later (July ‘21) along came David Lowery’s The Green Knight…a dank, sodden enterprise that stood up to the Soderbergh lethargy and said “hold my beer….you don’t know what a misery pit is.” And then Leos Carax’s Annette opened a month later, plunging movie culture into an even blacker realm.

Lo, a swirling devil cloud had descended, and only now can we understand that it was this four-month nightmare (April to August ‘21) that more or less slit the throat of the movie industry…that convinced Joe and Jane Popcorn that modern cinema was up to something menacing and awful and deeply insane.

Posted on 8.19.21…

Like a strange virus I had absorbed but hadn’t yet settled into my system, I could feel my latent loathing for David Lowery‘s The Green Knight early on. I didn’t watch it when it first came out because I “knew” (i.e., strongly sensed) I would hate it.

I finally streamed this fucker late last night, and I felt smothered in thick, swamp-like boredom within seconds. Drugged, oxygen-starved, submerged in medieval muck, and facing a terrible two-hour slog.

I will never forget The Green Knight, and I will never, ever watch it again. It’s an exacting, carefully crafted, “first-rate” creation by a director of serious merit, and I was moaning and writhing all through it. I can’t believe I watched the whole thing, but I toughed it out and that — in my eyes, at least — is worth serious man points.

The Green Knight is a sodden medieval dreamscape thing — a trippy, bizarre, hallucinatory quicksand movie that moves like a snail and will make you weep with frustration and perhaps even lead to pondering (not my idea but the film’s) the idea of your own decapitation.

What would I rather do, I was asking myself — watch the rest of The Green Knight or bend over and allow my head to be cut off? Both would be terrible things to endure, I reasoned, but at least decapitation would be quick and then I’d be at peace. Watching The Green Knight for 130 minutes, on the other hand…

It’s a kind of Christmas movie or, if you will, about a game of strange beheadings. Dev Patel‘s Gawain is one of the Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table — a drinking, whoring fellow who sweats a lot and often smiles when spoken to and regards much of what he sees with his mouth half open.

It must be said that Gawain splashes water onto his face and hair a lot…he’s often dripping.

The film more or less begins with the Green Knight, a intimidating ghostly figure, appearing at King Arthur’s court on Christmas Day and declaring — bear with me here because this makes no sense — that anyone can cut his head off as long as the head-chopper will agree to let his own head be sliced off by the Green Knight a year later, at the Green Chapel.

What kind of blithering moron would say “okay!” to a suggestion this ridiculous?

Why is Patel, the son of British-residing Indian Hindus, playing Gawain, a medieval Englishman with the usual Anglo-Saxon characteristics? You could just as well ask why Patel was cast in the lead role in Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield (’20). Because in today’s realm it’s cooler to embrace “presentism” than to adhere to any sense of general historical reality, or at least the historical reality that filmmakers tended to prefer before anti-white wokester Stalinism became a thing. Call it subversive casting, if you want.

Everything that happens is dream-logical. None of it adds up or leads to anything else. You could claim that Lowery’s film is about character and morality and karma and facing the consequences of one’s own actions, and I would say “okay, sure…if that works for you, fine.”

There’s a talking fox. There are giant bald women seen in the misty distance. Patel’s head explodes in fire at one point…whoa.

Barry Koeghan, an Irish actor with tiny rodent eyes and a deeply annoying swollen nose, plays a scavenging asshole of some kind. Alicia Vikander plays two roles, a commoner with a Jean Seberg-in-Breathless haircut, and a married noblewoman who has sex with Gawain at one point. You’re thinking “gee, she’s bringing Patel to orgasm…am I supposed to give a shit one way or the other?”

DECAPITATION SPOILERS: There are three beheadings in The Green Knight, and a promise of a fourth. The big ugly Green Knight (played by Ralph Ineson) loses his head early on. A ghost character named Winifred (Erin Kellyman) loses hers at the midway point. Patel’s Gawain, the ostensible hero, loses his at the end. And then he wakes up and realizes he’s been dreaming, but then is asked to submit to an actual beheading…this is presented as some sort of satisfying ending.

The finale is a complete failure, a wipe-out. It’s so completely off and miscalculated that it inspires you to mutter “seriously….that‘s the ending?”

Five minutes after The Green Knight began I understood why Average Joes have generally given it poor reviews. It’s obviously a visually inventive, high-style smarthouse thing about ultra-peculiar realms, made by a director who believes in imaginative leaps of fancy and fantasy, but watching it makes you feel fucking awful.

I can’t tell you how depressed I was at the half-hour mark when I realized I had 100 minutes to go.

Film critics generally don’t acknowledge audience miserablism. For most of them visual style is 90% to 95% of the game. If a director shoots a film with a half-mad, child-like sense of indulgence with a persistent visual motif (i.e., everything in The Green Knight is either muted gray or brown or intense green)…bathing the viewer in mood and mystery and moisture (filmmakers like Lowery adore mist, fog, rain, mud, sweat, rivers, streams)…that’s it and all is well.

There are dozens of details I could get into, but I’m not going to because what’s the point?

I had read several reviews, of course, but before watching Lowery’s film I read the Wiki synopsis of the source material, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a 14th Century epic poem. Right away I was muttering “dear God…no, please.”

I’m completely mystified why British film director Stephen Weeks would make two films based on the Sir Gawain legend — Gawain and the Green Knight (’73) and Sword of the Valiant (’83).

Friendo: “The best reviewed movies of the year so far are The Green Knight, In the Heights and Pig. We are fucked. American cinema is dead.”

Last night I re-watched my Criterion Bluray of Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America, and I wish I could say I had a good time. Alas, the viewing didn’t quite work because this 1985 film is too well remembered. I knew all the dialogue before it was spoken, verbatim:

“I chose an orange tile, burnt orange”…”And by the way our hairpiece secret is off”…”I can’t hear ya”…”I heard you say that, schmucks come see Wayne Newton…I like Wayne Newton….that makes me a schmuck?”…”Santy Claus took care of everything”….”You couldn’t change your life on 100,000 dollars?”

Not to mention the opening Rex Reed-on-The Larry King Show riff about suggestive sexuality in King Vidor‘s The Fountainhead (’49).

You can’t “enjoy” a film when you know each and every line. You’re wasting your time.

Plus it was vaguely depressing to consider the fact that Brooks, one of the smartest and sharpest 20th Century funny guys and film directors in Hollywood history, never made anything better than Lost in America, and I really, really wanted to revel in what might have happened in its wake.

In her 4.18.85 review, Pauine Kael announced that “Brooks is on to something: satirizing the upper middle class from within, he shows the nagging terror along with the complacency.

“If he could pit [his ad agency character, David Howard] against a few other people as driven and talkative as he is — if a David had to fight for screen time and space with people every bit as competitive — there’s no telling what comedy heights Brooks could scale.”

As it turned out Brooks’ best-ever performances were as Howard and Broadcast News‘ Aaron Altman — a mid ’80s one-two punch that he never repeated or even came close to approximating again. At the end of the day Brooks-the-director had four peak achievements over a 15-year period — Modern Romance (’81), Lost in America, Defending Your Life (’91) and Mother (’96).

“Coddled” was originally published in The New Yorker on 4.18.85; later reprinted in Kael’s “State of the Art” [1985, E. P. Dutton]:

“As David, the L.A. advertising whiz who’s the protagonist of Lost in America, Albert Brooks is only a slightly exaggerated specimen of a large number of rising young businessmen and professional men — the insecure successes, the swollen-headed worriers. He’s the baby that we see inside those prosperous individuals.

“David has a bland moon-face surrounded by an aureole of tight, dark curls; it’s as if he wore his brains on the outside. He looks soft but he isn’t fat — just too well fed. If he were a contented man — say, a musician in a symphony orchestra who picked up extra income from the recording companies — he might be a likable dumpling. But David is an obsessive careerist who agonizes over every detail of his life.

“On the night before he expects to be made senior vice-president of an ad agency [he’s been with for several years], he lies awake wondering whether he and his wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty), the personnel director of a department store, have done the right thing in putting down a deposit on a four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar house.

“David still harbors the dream of dropping out– of taking to the road, like the heroes of Easy Rider. He’s torturing himself with anxieties, and he keeps waking the exhausted Linda to tell her his misgivings and be comforted by her reassurances.

“David has gotten himself so keyed up for the vice-presidency and has put so much energy into worry about whether he’s picking the right house, the right Mercedes, and the right boat to go with the big job, that when he’s finally in the boss’s office and is offered a different kind of promotion (a big new account that involves a transfer to New York) he doesn’t have the flexibility to deal with it.

“And so he becomes unhinged; he’s like an outraged infant. He howls, he rants. If he can’t have the title he wants, he doesn’t want anything. His explosion comes in waves: he quiets down for a second or two, and then his nasal whine starts up again.

“By the time the scene is over, David has insulted the boss and been fired from his hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job, and is in a state of shock that’s also a state of exaltation, of triumph. He rushes over to his wife’s store, demands that she quit, too, and wants to celebrate this moment of liberation by having sex right this minute on her desk in her glass-encased office.

“Lost in America is a satirical comedy about upper-middle-class infantilism and obnoxiousness — everything that David incarnates.

“Brooks, who directed the film and co-wrote the script (with Monica Johnson, who also worked on his two earlier projects, the 1979 Real Life and the 1981 Modern Romance), has developed a cool, balanced attitude toward himself as performer. The self-absorbed, ingrown David is quite different from the character that Brooks has played in other directors’ movies. Brooks was Cybill Shepherd‘s officious political co-worker in Taxi Driver; he was the unromantic bridegroom who collapsed on his wedding night in Private Benjamin; he was the driver in the prologue to Twilight Zone – The Movie; and he was close to inspired as the symphony conductor’s manager in the 1984 Unfaithfully Yours.

“Brooks is a remarkable comic actor — remarkable enough, perhaps, to delude people into thinking he’s just playing himself in Lost in America. It’s true that the camera often seems to be staring at David, revealing his innermost weakness. (He’s always sorry for himself.) And Brooks may have conceived this character because he saw the possibilities for this kind of maddening twerp in himself, but David is a fully created obsessive fool. He’s a highly verbal jerk who half knows he’s behaving like a jerk but can’t stop himself — he’s a self-conscious, pesky toddler at loose in the world.

“But though he’s tiresome to everybody in the movie he isn’t tiresome to us. David’s lines have been sharpened to a fatuous fine edge — he keeps us laughing at him. And Lost in America doesn’t dawdle; it makes its comic points and moves on.

“Hagerty is an ideal choice for David’s mate: you listen to her Linda and you know why she puts up with him. Her little-girl breathiness tells you. And the dim stress and panic of her gaze sugges that somewhere in the past she has been frightened and David is the Teddy bear she clutches. (These two are endlessly apologizing to each other; they do it so automatically they might be apologizing in their sleep.)

“Linda is bleakly pretty; she’s gaunt and hollow-eyed and wispy — she seems to be disappearing. David’s aggressiveness and his near-loony dependence on her don’t faze her. Life fazes her. She’s bored to depression by being cooped up in her office in the department store; she’s depressed by her whole conformist existence. But she’s too timid and worn down to come right out and express her resentment.

And yet curly-headed David, who’s crazy about Linda — kissing her and complimenting her ritually (if nothing else it occupies his mind) — never guesses at her feelings. When these two sell off their property, buy a luxury motor home, and, with the security of a nest egg of roughly a hundred and forty-five thousand, set out to find themselves and get in touch with the real America, the picture has the promising overtones of a Preston Sturges comedy.

“The movie makes a honey of a transition — a cut from the farewell party that David and Linda’s friends give them to a shot of David looking minuscule behind the wheel of the disproportionately large motor home as they leave L.A. The best visual joke in the picture is simply the recurring image of these two people who think themselves dropouts and Easy Riders as they move across the country encased in their thirty-foot Winnebago.

“Along the way, Brooks has a couple of sustained showpiece scenes where he plays off someone who can’t quite believe that this guy is actually saying what he’s saying. After the meek Linda blows their nest egg at the Desert Inn Casino, in Las Vegas, David goes to see the pit boss (well played by Garry Marshall, the director of The Flamingo Kid) and, using his advertising-man skills–and here he’s flexible–tries to persuade this smart, tough fellow to give back the money.

“The most ingenious of David’s gambits is that returning Linda’s losses can be good for business — that the occasion can thus be publicized as a casino with heart, one that periodically plays Santa Claus to losers. Spritzing one proposal after another, as if he’d been hired to prepare a campaign, David beams at the pit boss, he cajoles him; he doesn’t grovel, but you know he would if he thought it would have any effect. And his adversary is amused by the agility of David’s thought processes. (In a Preston Sturges comedy, the pit boss might have gone loco and actually adopted the Christmas-casino idea.)

“David also has an interview scene with an employment agent (Art Frankel) in a desolate small town in Arizona; when David tells the agent how much he was earning, the old guy is infatuated with the numbers and can’t resist tweaking him by repeating the amount over and over.

“David and Linda’s experiences in the real America turn out to be a two-week vacation, and the movie has a nice, quick wrap-up. In terms of David’s character, the end says all that needs to be said. And probably there’s no way for Brooks to develop the plot any further, because he sees David as hopeless–as upper-middle-class in every soft fibre of his anxious, coddled being.

“But the movie needs another turnaround, because although the ending is right for David, it isn’t right for Linda. Once she’s away from her hated job, she becomes prettier and more bouncy. She is perhaps even too adorable at times, but not glaringly. (Hagerty may look like the old-fashioned girl that suitors would bring nosegays to, but she’s a gifted, sexy comedienne.) Linda’s losing the money seems to free the movie, to open it, and she herself relaxes a bit. David becomes more compulsive than ever. His worst terror has been realized, and his mind never shuts down. He tries to hold his anger in, but when he’s looking out over Hoover Dam he can’t help yelling about the money, and once again the joke is in the disproportion between him and the physical setting.

“David keeps going over what has happened. He picks at it; he bleeds. But Linda, having done the unthinkable, is able for the first time to laugh at him. And there’s the suggestion that her blowing the money wasn’t a totally subconscious protest: in her tiny, touching voice, she maneuvered David away from his plan that they go to the Silver Bell Chapel to renew their marriage vows, and got him to take her to the Desert Inn. Afterward, her only explanation to David is ‘I held things in for so long I felt like I was going to burst.’ By talking her into quitting her job, David has unloosed something in her that Brooks and his co-writer don’t quite know what to do with.

“The movie is so good that it needs to flower; it’s like a Sturges idea that runs dry. But it’s still a nifty, original comedy.”

The “Free the Menendez Brothers” wokeys believed that that alleged sexual abuse of Erik Menendez by his murdered father Jose Menendez…the wokeys and their chief advocates, former Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon along with Kim Kardashian and Monsters producer Ryan Murphy, should have changed the game.

The wokeys were basically saying the brothers probably wouldn’t have killed Jose and and their mother Kitty if Jose hadn’t severely traumatized Eric by fucking him in the ass a few times. So what the hell…let bygones be bygones and allow the boys to (heh-heh) slide, so to speak.

“Whoa, whoa, hold up there”, current DA Nathan Hochman said on Thursday, 2.21. “Jose may or may not have fucked Eric in the ass,” Hochman more or less said, “but Eric and his brother Lyle still shotgunned their parents to death in 1989, plus they’re proven liars and hucksters so fuck the wokey rationale — these guys aren’t going anywhere…they’re going to stew in jail for decades to come, and the wokeys who wanted the brothers to be paroled are fucking ass-wack sickos.”

The wokeys, in short, basically believed that if you’ve been sexually abused you’re almost not guilty of murdering your abuser[s]. Or, you know, that your guilt has been mitigated by the trauma of being ass-fucked. They believed that Erik and Lyle having done 25 or 30 years in jail…well, that was enough.

“Inside the ‘Blood Sport’ of Oscars Campaigns,” a N.Y. Times piece by Irina Aleksander, appeared this morning at 10:55 am.

It covers a realm that HE is deeply familiar with, but rather than post a sweeping assessment here are four or five stand-out portions of the article, and in most instances my reactions to same:

1. End of the 2nd paragraph: “The [Andrea Riseborough] campaign was described as organic and grass roots, but some celebrities had posted suspiciously identical language, describing “To Leslie” as “a small film with a giant heart.” That Viola Davis (The Woman King) and Danielle Deadwyler (Till) were not nominated despite predictions to the contrary made it look as if a bunch of actors campaigned on behalf of a white actress, leading to the exclusion of Black actresses.”

HE reaction: This is the same old “sore loser” response that Davis, Deadwyler and the directors of their films, Till‘s Chinonye Chukwu and The Woman King‘s Gina Prince-Bythewood, voiced in the wake of the Oscar nominatons.

From “Andrea Riseborough + Duelling Concepts of Meritocracy vs. Equity,” posted on 2.15.23: “In their minds they all got blanked by embedded white elitism or misogynoir or some other racist variant.

“In response Everything Everywhere All At Once‘s Michelle Yeoh, a Best Actress nominee, suggested that they should cool their jets and wait their turn.

“Prince-Blythewood: ‘There is no groundswell from privileged people with enormous social capital to get behind Black women. There never has been.’ Deadwyler: ‘We’re talking about misogynoir. It comes in all kinds of ways. Whether it’s direct or indirect, it impacts who we are.’

“The essence of the lament seemed to be ‘we’re looking for some equity here and we haven’t received it…progressive Academy members know that the BIPOC narrative is about giving us the respect and adulation that is our due for the work but also in a payback sense, considering the decades upon decades of racist exclusion in this industry…we know we delivered first-rate work and yet we got shut out…some of you won’t say what happened but we can smell it in the wind…Andrea Riseborough‘s white supporters pushed her though but perhaps at our expense, or so it seems.”

2. Bottom of the third paragraph, also about the Riseborough campaign: “’I don’t believe academy members should be posting about how they’re going to vote,’ Oscar strategist Cynthia Swartz said, ‘or urging others to vote in a certain way.’ Tony Angellotti, a consultant on The Fabelmans, put it less mildly. ‘There are very specific rules about direct outreach…clearly, here, those rules were broken.’

“Neither To Leslie‘s director [Michael Morris] nor his wife [Mary McCormack] are members of the academy. But consultants I spoke to said it didn’t matter. A couple joked that it was a little like the Jan. 6 insurrection: President Donald Trump may not have personally stormed the Capitol, but he encouraged others to do so.”

HE reaction: Though smirk-worthy, offering an analogy between the Riseborough campaign and the Jan. 6th uprising is somewhere between absurd and slanderous, and it further establishes that the Times, a woke-minded, POC advocacy newspaper if there ever was one, strongly sympathizes with the sore losers.

3. Top of the ninth paragraph: “Negative narratives are usually attributed to the diabolical workings of rival strategists: the stories about abusive directors, overblown budgets, whether the real people behind biopics should really be celebrated. (See: A Beautiful Mind.) ‘They try to change someone else’s narrative by adding dirt to the layer,’ Angellotti told me, citing the old rumor that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck didn’t really write Good Will Hunting.”

HE reaction: I was involved in that Good Will Hunting rumor right up to my neck, and the rumor wasn’t as Angelotti describes — i.e., that Matt and Ben didn’t really write it. The rumor was that the late William Goldman has done a polish of their screenplay. Nobody was whispering Matt and Ben didn’t write it, only that Goldman spritzed it up. I was the one, in fact, who passed the rumor along to Goldman, and he in turn called the Good Will Hunting team and said, “Hey, this rumor is making the rounds…I just heard it from Jeff Wells.”

The Oscars have been withering on the vine for the last six or seven years due to woke politics and are pretty much all but toast, but in the view of the Los Angeles Times editorial board and an editorial they posted on 12.27, they’re not toasty enough.

“Let’s really stick a fork in this sad, dying annual celebration of movies,” a 12.27 LAT editorial essentially says. “Let’s urge AMPAS and the TV academy to kill gender-based acting Oscars in order to satisfy the political goals of the trans community and their progressive allies.”

Everyone understands that the lore of the Academy Awards telecast is all but finished. The viewing audience been shrinking over the last several years, especially among Millennial and Zoomers and double especially since the disastrous, pandemic-sieged Soderbergh Oscars of April 2021.

My heart is broken over this. I used to feel joyful during Oscar shows; now there’s almost nothing. James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Billy Wilder, Cary Grant, Ernest Borgnine, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, William Wyler and William Holden are weeping in heaven and taking turns pounding the refrigerator door.

But in order to finalize the death process, the show needs one more kitchen knife shoved between the ribs, and the gender neutral acting initiative might just be the dagger point that does the job.

On 8.23.22 the Spirit Award honchos decided to abandon gender categories for acting awards, more or less following the lead of the Gotham Award guys. Two months later (on 10.12.22) a woke cabal within the Los Angeles Film Critics Association adopted the same policy, despite nearly half of LAFCA being opposed to gender neutral.

And now this L.A. Times editorial has gotten into the act.

I said this last August and I’ll say it again: “If the Academy decides to go gender-neutral with the Oscar acting awards, the eclipse will be total and absolute, and I mean beyond the level of anything dreamt of by Michelangelo Antonioni.

“In a populist cultural sense as well as aesthetically, the Oscars will have announced to the Joe and Jane Popcorn public that after six or seven years of fiddling around with secular woke passions and priorities, the Oscars are truly no longer about engaging even a semblance of a mass audience, or certainly in any way that seems to matter.

“Yes, Virginia, the Oscars are about wokesterism, secular industry politics and (this is key) elbowing older, insufficiently progressive white guys aside…about a tiny cabal of progressive fanatics who are determined to de-popularize not just the Oscars but movies themselves.

If AMPAS manages to eliminate gender-based acting awards, Average Joes and Janes will simply walk away and stay away…the more impassioned among them (i.e., the Oscar torch-bearers and sentimentalists) will raise their fists and voices and say “stop this insanity, stop this bullshit…outside the woke realm men are men and women are women, and they generate different moods and expressions and ways of living and processing the ups and downs of living…stop this bullshit and come down to earth.”

All hail the death of the great American art form called movies…right? All hail the political instruction that has overtaken a significant portion of mainstream movies and the casting process altogether. The Oscars were launched in the late ’20s and are now, 95 years later, on the verge of completely erasing themselves from mass public consciousness. All hail presentism!

And why? Several reasons and factors are behind this, but in today’s context it boils down to this: the non-binary trans community wants to strengthen its political influence and power. And to accomplish this goal, one of the most populist, mass-outreach, Joe and Jane Popcorn aspects of the Oscar telecast — gender-based acting categories, which have been with us for nearly a century and in fact for hundreds of years beforehand — has to be dissolved.

What the overwhelming majority of movie lovers might prefer is not important. The aims of a small activist minority is what counts.

An article in the January 2023 issue of Empire dishes about de-aging tech used for the still-untitled Indy 5 flick, which stars the 80 year-old Harrison Ford in the title role.

The slam-bam prelude opening is set in 1944 — six years after the events in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade took place in 1938, and 13 years before the 1957 adventure that unfolded in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I’ve always understood that Jones was born sometime around 1900, and so Ford (roughly 38 or 39 during the shooting of Raiders of the Lost Ark) will be inhabiting the 44 year-old archeologist in the forthcoming James Mangold film (Disney, 6.30.23).

Are we clear so far? In Indy 5 Jones will start out as a 44 year-old, or roughly six years older than he was in Last Crusade, which took place in 1938 and was released in 1989, when Ford was 47. Even I’m a bit confused.

The Indy 5 prelude is set in an old castle and involves Nazi antagonists. A blend of old footage plus anti-aging tech was used to make Ford look 44, or roughly how he appeared in Witness (’85) and The Mosquito Coast (’86). Ford was born in 1942.

Ford to Empire: “This is the first time I’ve seen [de-aging technology] where I believe it. It’s a little spooky. I don’t think I even want to know how it works, but it works.”

After the opener, Indy 5‘s story will advance 25 years to 1969, when Jones is supposed to be roughly 69. So Ford will be playing ten years younger than his actual age, which shouldn’t be a problem.

Speaking as a longtime honorary (i.e,. self-proclaimed) member of “the tribe”, I’m semi-astonished that within the community of decent, well-brought-up Americans (i.e., outside the realm of MAGA lunatics) that even a shred of anti-Semitism still circulates in the bloodstream of this nation.

Ken Burns‘ The U.S. and the Holocaust reminded that anti-Semitism was an unmistakable horror in the 1930s and ’40s, but haven’t we jettisoned all that, especially over the last 50 or 60 years? Among decent folk, I mean**?

Perhaps not. Or at least, apparently or allegedly, among a certain subset of Black Americans. Kanye West spit out some of the ugly not long ago, and was severely pounded and punished for it. Dave Chapelle spoke of the Kanye slapdown on SNL two nights ago, and David Poland spoke of tribal animus yesterday in his Substack Hot Button column (#255):

“I have never really understood how this thing between Blacks and Jews took such hold,” he wrote, [but] I am also aware, from living a long time, that many of my Black friends believe in a lot of false tropes about Jewish people, which is also true in reverse.

“My best friend in the world still makes a comment anytime I order pork of any kind. Jews are ‘them,’ meaning not only are we in the category of entitled white oppressors, but we are also hyper-entitled by perceptions of wealth, political prowess, and higher levels of education.”

I for one have never ordered a pork dish in my life — not once — although I’ve written more than once about one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received in my life. In the late ’70s a smart and wise Jewish friend and fellow cineaste told me I had more Jewish guilt than he did. That was the beginning of my honorary Jewhood, which thrives to this day. I also regard myself an honorary gay guy, in a vaguely metrosexual sort of way.

I am grateful that my alleged or supposed honorary status among Jews and gays, however legit or illegit it may be, is at least a discussion point because it gives my life a certain dimension that would not otherwise exist.

Poland #1: “[Jews and Blacks] have been held down, exiled, slaughtered, and suffered attempts to remove what is uniquely [theirs] in the world. It is somewhat insane to compare atrocities, but personally, I believe the Black Holocaust of slavery is a step worse than the Jewish Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews because slavery not only killed and demeaned and tortured Blacks, it sought to homogenize away any cultural history away from them.”

Poland #2: “I guess it’s a little like having a friend you love who is abusive to women (short of violence) or who is a little bit racist. We all have them or have had them. And most of us know people of some small group that looks down on another small group without breaking the bar on what we believe makes them a racist. Once you become an adult, the world gets complicated. Dave Chappelle is complicated.”

I’ll make it simple — no one who aspires to even a semblance of honesty will claim that race consciousness doesn’t exist in every human. Race acknowledgement is what we all feel in our gut while racism is a judgment call — a suspicion that there may be something a little bit preferable about our tribe vs. the others. Everyone has muttered this to him or herself at one time or another, usually when young and ignorant due to the influence of under-developed people in our families or communities — “our thing seems a little better and perhaps is a little better, at least according to standards that we’re familiar with.”

I’m speaking of under-our-breath acknowledgments, of course. Nobody will say this stuff out loud. We all know how to adhere to what’s expected of us, and we all say the right things in order to get along, etc. The best of us understand the cosmic universality of everything, and act accordingly.

What I can’t stand about finger-pointing, holier-than-thou types like Poland (i.e,” Rabbi Dave”) is that they’re constantly sniffing the air for whiffs of people who may be “a little bit racist,” and who, once identified, need to be bitchsmacked and name-called and shoved around and so on. We’re all vaguely, subliminally conscious of racial separatism under the skin, but those us with even a smidgen of heart and soul dismiss those subliminals on a regular basis while summoning the better angels of our nature. That’s how things have always worked on my side of the court, at least.

** The Charlottesville primitives are not included in this category.

All hail the truth-telling, no-holds-barred, non-ass-kissing Scott Mantz…a movie-obsessed Colossus of Rhodes among men!

Mantz #1: “WAKANDA FOREVER isn’t as good as BLACK PANTHER (I mean, how could it be?), but even so, it’s still a mixed bag. The first half is slow, hard to follow and lacks focus, but it gets better as it goes [along], and the last 30 minutes are great with an emotional payoff.”

Mantz gave WAKANDA a B grade but we all know what that probably means, given the usual “let’s be polite since we were invited to the premiere” factor — it means C for “not bad but sorta kinda faintly blows except for the ending.”

Scott Mendelson, Forbes: “WAKANDA FOREVER entertains but spends way too much time setting up future MCU projects and coping with its non-fiction tragedy. It also often feels like a mix-and-match of prior (frankly inferior) Marvel movies. Works best when it’s just allowed to be Black Panther 2”

I’d like to ask the HE faithful a question, and while I understand that wokesters are incapable of actual honesty, I’d really appreciate honest answers from the East Berlin truth-tellers. Are you sincerely interested in hauling your blubbery asses down to a megaplex so you can immerse yourself in “a beautiful study of grief” that lasts 161 minutes?

The only film I felt completely elevated by at the ’22 Telluride Film Festival was Sam Mendes‘ Empire of Light (Searchlight, 12.9). I was actually amazed that I fell for it as I was more than somewhat skeptical going in.

Empire is set roughly 42 years ago in rural England (it was shot in Margate) and is primarily about an unstable, somewhat schizzy movie theatre manager named Hilary Small (Olivia Colman, brilliant as always) and a brief, furtive affair she has with Stephen (Michael Ward), a theatre employee of color who’s exceptionally good looking and at least 20 years younger than Hilary.

Colin Firth is a crusty theatre owner who exploits Colman sexually, casually, off and on. But this eventually goes south, partly due to Stephen and partly due to Hilary going off her meds.

As I wrote on 8.24, I found it initially difficult to believe that Hilary-Stephen would happen in such a racially volatile period (I visited London in ’76 and ’80 and could absolutely smell the enraged skinhead vibes).

“However unbalanced and erratic, Colman’s character would have had to nurse a streak of serious self-destruction to engage in a May-December affair like this,” I wrote. And why, I added, “would a smart, good-looking dude like Stephen be interested in an unstable white lady on the far side of 45? What about all those foxy 20something girls running around town? I don’t get it.”

And yet the relationship gradually seems palatable and even endearing, and you start to realize as the film unfolds that Empire is about more than just Stephen-and-Hilary, an affair that doesn’t last all that long anyway. For it’s also a misty, memory-lane valentine to moviegoing and a golden, long-eclipsed era and, if you will, a certain kind of spirituality and way of life, even, for cinema devotees.

It dawned on me after seeing Empire that Mendes, born in ’65, had partly based it on his own hopes and dreams and movie-related experiences as a 15 year-old in 1980 and ’81, but that (and I’m guessing here) he decided the story would seem more au courant (i.e., woke) if Hilary’s lover wasn’t a pale-faced teenager but a 20something black dude, and from there he was off to the races.

Wokester critics have been shitting all over Empire of Light because of the Hilary-Stephen dynamic, which they certainly don’t approve of. They’re not buying the idea of even a brief sexual attraction between the two, and they resent the notion of an older, unstable, jagged-edge Hilary peering into Stephen’s soul and vice versa. White wokesters, after all, have been put on this earth to defend the dignity of POCs and to indict any white-male-created scenario that doesn’t say or do the right thing in their regard.

But Hilary and Stephen are both outsiders in a sense (Hilary of the temperamental variety and Stephen of a bruised and guarded shade due to white nationalist fervor) and that’s the basis for their mutual understanding. I bought it. It worked for me.

I realized within 15 minutes of the beginning that Empire of Light was an exquisitely composed yesteryear film, so perfectly acted and calibrated and moving. (I was especially blown away by Tanya Moodie‘s brief performance as Stephen’s mom.) The sorehead critics still have the upper hand, but once it starts showing around everything will change — trust me.

Empire is easily one of the best films of the year, and a just-posted review by Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson supports this view.

Empire of Light is “a humble little tale of human connection,” he writes. “[It’s] the director’s most delicate, a wistful short story about two people seized by circumstance who help one another find their way through life. It’s an achingly lovely film — the best Mendes has yet made.

“Whatever Mendes’s [personal] connection to the material, he’s made something humane and nourishing, a picture of rare thoughtfulness and decency.

“Viewed from some angles, the film looks rather strange: as Hilary loses her grip on her well being, Empire of Light takes on surprising new dimensions. It’s a shock to see the movie break its dreamy spell, as Colman suddenly turns the volume of her performance way up. Mendes’ calm and steady film stays upright throughout these jarring thrashes — and as Stephen is violently thrashed at — building toward a conclusion of staggering poignance.

“What remains [at the end] is a deep and refreshingly heart-on-its-sleeve compassion, a humbled and awed appreciation for the majesty of learning from another person.”