One anecdotal allegation stands out. The second-hand allegation, I mean, about a 14 year-old girl having allegedly “bitten” a 40something Donald Trump “while performing oral sex.” She was then allegedly “hit in the face” after laughing about the biting.

There are so many uncorraborated, unverified stories. And there are many more. Most of them creepy as hell. Demonic.

N.Y. Times, posted on 1.30.26:

Ten months ago I mentioned that the four actors who will soon be playing the Fab Four in Sam Mendes’ quartet of Beatle flicks (due in early ‘28) are, being in their early 30s, are simply too old to inhabit the original fellows.

The Beatles were in their early 20s when things ignited, and their late 20s when they broke up.

You can film-flam and tapdance all you want, but unless the four films are set during the ‘69 and ‘70 downturn period, when the lads were a bit older and three of them had beards, it’ll be simply, biologically impossible for Paul Mescal, Harris Dickinson, Barry Koehgan and Joseph Quinn to become Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, respectively.

My concern was slightly lessened yesterday when I glanced at the four officially released photos. “Yes, all right, maybe,” I told myself. “Mendes is indeed focusing on their closing Get Back / Abbey Road chapter.”

But wait…wait!…not as far as that photo of Mescal’s Macca is concerned. It has him wearing a standard 1964 soup-bowl cut and one of those high-collared Carnaby Street shirts that they all wore in the late ‘63 / early ‘64 break-out period. When McCartney (dob: 6.18.42) was 22. Mescal looks older than his years right now..,he’s 30 but looks 36 or 37.

Reid Rosefelt on Facebook: “Even though I don’t know her, it pains me to see Blake Lively being attacked with snarky comments online by people who have never had any direct encounter with her. If there is somebody who had an issue with her on a movie, well, okay, let them have their honest say. But a lot of what I read is anonymous people on the internet. Just piling on, being mean. Because they can.”

HE to Rosefelt: Blake Lively is deeply loathed for trying to use a good portion of her (i.e., principally Ryan’s?) considerable wealth and power to try and murder the career of the far less famous, much less powerful Justin Baldoni.

Was her cut of It Ends With Us more commercial than his? Apparently so, but she certainly steamrolled and dragon-ed and butch-bossed her way into basically snatching away Baldoni’s film. They rubbed each other the wrong way? Apparently so, but this happens from time to time. Sensible people usually say “okay, THAT happened” and move on with their lives. But not Blake.

All I know is that Lively has almost certainly earned whatever grief she may be coping with now. She’s been using pumped-up #MeToo hyperbole as her knife or cudgel, and has scarred herself as a troublemaker. And now she’s basically “unemployable”, as a recent trade headline stated.

Who would be so clueless or reckless as to want to work with Blake now? If she had any practical sense she would have let this battle go last year and just moved on. Her point had certainly been made, but she’s STILL hammering away as we speak. (Team Baldoni also.) The Manhattan court date is four months away, and then the appeals will kick in. God help us all.

Posted on 10.8.12: If you want to know how radiantly aware and plugged-in Blake Lively is, read this excerpt from Ben Affleck‘s Details interview with Mark Harris:

“When I was doing The Town, I’d tour the actors around Boston,” Affleck tells Harris. “I was with Blake [Lively], and I saw Matt’s childhood home. And I said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s where Matt grew up.’ And she said, ‘Who?’ And I said, ‘Matt Damon.’ And she said, ‘Oh my God! You know Jason Bourne?!’ She really didn’t know. And I thought, ‘There it is. The first age of people who are adults who missed the whole Matt-and-Ben propaganda campaign!’ Mostly, it just made me feel old.”

Lively, born in August 1987, was ten when Good Will Hunting came out and also when Affleck and Damon won their Best Screenplay Oscar, so she wasn’t paying attention. But she never once heard or read about their collaboration and friendship in the years that followed? And when she got hired to be in The Town (which came out in ’10), she never went online to learn about Affleck’s past? Even if she’s not engaged or curious enough to do online searches, her agent or manager never gave her the rundown? Breathtaking.

The last 25 years of moviegoing…okay, the last 15 or so…have taught me that I’m part of a shrinking fraternity…a diminishing HE collective that, outside of film festival fare, is always looking for but rarely getting a semblance of human realism in movies…stories and characters that add up to some kind of understandable motivational reality…even (or should I say particularly?) in comedies…films with stories and characters that present at least a vague semblance of the behavior that we’ve all come to understand from real-life humanoids.

Sam Raimi‘s Send Help, which I twitched and spasm’ed through last night, is aggressively anti-realist. Hell, the script (co-written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift) pisses upon the HE fraternity.

The story, if you want to call it that, is a kind of extremist, wink-wink, feminist farce by way of an old-time formula that first launched way back with The African Queen (’51) — an antagonistic man and woman, both willful and stubborn, are forced to survive on a tropical island or in some remote locale after being shipwrecked or plane-wrecked or war-wrecked, and then gradually warm to each other.

Lina Wertmuller‘s Swept Away (’74) comes to mind, only that time it was a primitive working-class guy (Giancarlo Giannini) who took command, only to end up with his heart broken. Ditto Ivan Reitman‘s Six Days, Seven Nights (’98) and, most recently, Ruben Ostlund‘s Triangle of Sadness (’22).

Send Help is a Survivor thing with a turning of the the tables that we’re not supposed to see coming. But if you know Raimi, particularly his disregard for believable behavior and his generally perverse horror instincts, you know Send Help is going to go all wackazoid and nonsensical by the halfway mark.

It’s basically a revenge-horror flick about bringing pain and suffering to the proverbial bad guys (i.e., typically arrogant and ultra-privleged Millennial and Zoomer snots), and trust me when I tell you that watching it is like lying on salty beach sand while Raimi, Shannon and Swift lean over and vomit in our faces.

Alternate analogy: It’s also like Raimi, Shannon and Swift sawing the tops of their heads off, taking their brains out of their heads and mashing them together into a big mushy wad and flinging the pink brain matter upon a stone wall…splat!…gaaaahhh!

It starts out as a crudely exaggerated portrait of a meek 40something mouseburger named Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) who despises her haughty, to-the-manor-born boss, Bradley Preston (the 34 year-old Dylan O’Brien), primarily for having passed her over, promotion-wise.

But anyone who looks and behaves like Liddle would almost certainly suffer the same fate in any slick office environment.

Does it make any sense at all that a woman working in a chilly corporate realm wouldn’t make an effort to keep herself ultra-tidy and cosmopolitan and well-groomed as possible, as well as behave in a politically advantageous way with her co-workers? No, it doesn’t, but McAdams ignores these basic rules anyway and is shocked — shocked! — when she suffers politically for her Mrs. Gooch appearance and for being a private weekend drunk and eating smelly tunafish asandwiches at her desk, etc.

Linda and Bradley are, of course, the only survivors of a Pacific Ocean plane crash. (The CG is fairly awful, by the way.) Once they arrive on the verdant island, Linda not only enjoys the upper hand as far as basic survival skills are concerned, but becomes a much more physically beautiful person. She blooms into a kind of nature goddess, and this, unquestionably, is the most enjoyable section of the film. I actually started to feel hopeful. Go, Linda!

But then, Raimi being Raimi, Send Help goes stark raving mad around the 45-minute mark, certainly by the end of the first hour. And then McAdams breaks the fourth wall at the very end, looking straight into the camera lens as she delivers a winking message to the millions of Linda Liddles out there, and it’s like “WHAT?”

Written a few years back: Last night I watched a high-def stream of Sam Raimi‘s A Simple Plan (’98), which still seems like his finest film ever — the best written (by Scott Smith), the best acted (particularly by Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda), the most thrillingly plotted, and certainly the most morally complex.

I hadn’t seen it for 15 or 16 years. It holds up and then some. A filthy lucre film on the level of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Fargo, Macbeth (particularly when you think of Fonda’s Lady Macbeth-like wife), Of Mice and Men, etc. But it got me to wondering why Raimi never again came close to making anything like it.

For The Love Of The Game followed A Simple Plan, and then The Gift. And then, for the last couple of decades, web-casting and fantasy — Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Drag Me to Hell and Oz the Great and Powerful. Raimi mades his bones in cult horror (Evil Dead flicks, Darkman, Army of Darkness), and then seemed to step into the world-class, award-calibre league with A Simple Plan, and then…you tell me.

A New Beverly tribute to the Eros, a stroke-house that operated out of the same auditorium between ‘70 and ‘77, will launch on Monday, February 2nd. A grim place but mere tumescence has always been a tonic in itself. The films are mostly hard-R grindhouse fare, all released in the ’70s.

The Eros became the Beverly Cinema in ‘78 or so. Quentin Tarantino took ownership in 2007, rechristening it as the NewBev.

Of the 23 films showing throughout February, HE approves of relatively few.

Marco Vicario‘s Wifemistress (’78) with Laura Antonelli (a sublime object of desire for relatively well-educated thinking men of the ‘70s) and Marcello Mastroianni.

Nagisa Oshima‘s In The Realm of the Senses (’76), of course.

Roger Vadim‘s cynical and depraved Pretty Maids All In A Row (’71)…Angie Dickinson has a couple of fetching nude scenes, or is it just one? And she was just turning 40 to boot. (Dickinson reached inside and truly touched the heart of Junior Soprano, aka “Johnny Ola”.)

Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Arabian Nights (’74) isn’t all that good, but it’s not bad.

Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione‘s Caligula (’79) is trash.

Deep Throat (’72) is absolute garbage…I felt so sorry for poor Linda Lovelace being “coerced” into blowing all those low-rent, homely-ass guys.

There’s one thing worse than saying something clueless or silly in the presence of a famous actor or celebrity, and that’s failing to recognize them. Nothing is worse than this. They’ll never forgive you.

Have I ever failed to spot someone? Or failed to act cool and casual if the occasion arose? Never. But people I’ve been with…

A lady and I were walking along Blvd. St. Germain in ’02 or thereabouts, sometime in the early evening. Lo and behold we came upon Tim Roth and a significant other, sitting at a cafe table and people-watching, etc. I smiled and introduced myself, explained that I’d just been in Cannes, complemented Roth on something or other, etc. The woman I was with didn’t know Roth and asked what he did. Roth gave her a death-ray look. The mood went south.

Way back when I attended a Bette Midler concert in Berkeley. Her flamboyant “Divine Miss M.” phase…flaming red hair, flashy apparel, the Harlettes. After the show I joined a small crowd outside the rear stage door. My girlfriend and her younger sister Donna stood to my left. After a longish wait a woman with her face scrubbed and hair pulled into a tight bun came out. She said something to someone and everyone knew it was Midler. Except for Donna. “Who’s that?” she barked. Jumping into a waiting limo, Midler had heard. I felt mortified.

The best policy when you run into someone famous is to stand mute. Don’t even look at them. Okay, you can glance but that’s all. My policy all along.

Last Friday Bill Belichick, the eight-time Super Bowl-winning coach, learned the high price of having a 20something, hot-bod, gold-digger girlfriend. The high resentment factor, I mean, shared by other older dudes.

A gut feeling tells me that Jordon Hudson is the main reason why Belichick is not a first-ballot Hall of Famer. He’ll eventually be admitted, of course, but this was his first year of eligibility for induction to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and damned if he didn’t fall short of the necessary 40 out of 50 votes.

Hall of Fame voters who didn’t vote for Belichick, muttering to themselves and to Belichick telepathically: “You’ve heard from us, Bill, and now you know. We haven’t had a hot girlfriend ride us like a bucking bronco in decades, and this is your punishment. And guess what? You’re gonna take it and like it.”

ESPN: “Several sources who spoke with the coach over the weekend described Belichick as ‘puzzled’ and ‘disappointed’ by his inability to secure support from at least 80% of Hall committee members.”

HE to Belichick: “Puzzled”? Ask your dick. If your live-in girlfriend was in her 40s or a bit older, you’d be in like Flynn.

The turn-down was probably also about Spygate and Belichick being a Trump supporter prior to 1.6.21. I’m not saying the vote had anything to do with Belichick having worn that grotesque maroon sport jacket, but it might have been a slight factor.

The first ballot shut-down wasn’t a flat-out vote condemnation or any kind of stark rejection. Belichick will get past this. It was simply a slap-on-the-wrist vote.

Nine months ago:

…but they’re certainly not paying attention. They’re probably determined (or have been conditioned) to assess power and politics through a gender lens, no matter what. And in this sense their timing is really, heavily off. If there’s one unavoidable and overwhelming realization that has settled into everyone outside this 31% bubble, it’s that Kamala Harris will never happen again on a national scale…ever. I’m saying this as one who voted for Harris 14 months ago and Hillary Clinton in ‘16.

Why the political vessel of its own ideological girlboss design called One Battle After Another…this, thanks to recent tragic events and Greg Bovino in particular, is why PTA’s film is even more locked than before to win the Best Picture Oscar.