#michael begley

[lostinmac]

Strange Darling (2024)

Dir. JT Mollner

[gilliverse]

Better Call Saul — Season 6 Gag Reel

[brokehorrorfan]

Strange Darling will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on November 5 via Magenta Light Studios. Hailed by Stephen King as "a clever masterpiece," the 2023 thriller is currently available on Digital.

Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner star with Madisen Beaty, Steven Michael Quezada, Bianca Santos, Barbara Hershey, and Ed Begley Jr. JT Mollner (Outlaws and Angels) writes and directs.

No special features are included. Read on for the trailer.

Nothing is what it seems when a twisted one-night stand spirals into a serial killer's vicious murder spree.

Pre-order Strange Darling.

[blackscarabfilmz]

Michael Tries: SPAM Parmesan (from M*A*S*H)

[moviemosaics]

Strange Darling

directed by JT Mollner, 2023

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Kevin (KAL) Kallaugher

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 23, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 24, 2024

On Thursday, Moody’s Analytics, which evaluates risk, performance, and financial modeling, compared the economic promises of President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. Authors Mark Zandi, Brendan LaCerda, and Justin Begley concluded that while a second Biden presidency would see cooling inflation and continued economic growth of 2.1%, a Trump presidency would be an economic disaster.

Trump has promised to slash taxes on the wealthy, increase tariffs across the board, and deport at least 11 million immigrant workers. According to the analysts, these policies would trigger a recession by mid-2025. The economy would slow to an average growth of 1.3%. At the same time, tariffs and fewer immigrant workers would increase the costs of consumer goods. That inflation—reaching 3.6%—would result in 3.2 million fewer jobs and a higher unemployment rate. 

Trump’s proposed tariffs would not fully offset his tax cuts, adding trillions to the national debt. 

Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said that Trump’s tariff policy “would be bad for workers and bad for consumers.” Chief Economist of Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi said: “Biden’s policies are better for the economy.”   

In the New York Times today, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute at the Yale School of Management, debunked the notion that corporate leaders support Trump. Sonnenfeld notes that he works with about 1,000 chief executives a year and speaks with business leaders almost every day. Although 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans, he wrote, Trump “continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.”

Among Fortune 100 chief executives, who lead the top 100 public and private U.S. companies ranked by revenue, Sonnenfeld notes, not one has donated to Trump this year. 

While they might not be enthusiastic Biden supporters, unhappy with his push to enforce antitrust laws and rein in corporate greed, the president has produced results they like: investment in infrastructure, repair of supply chains, investment in domestic manufacturing, achievement of record corporate profits, and transformation of the U.S. into the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world. 

In contrast, they fear Trump. The populist plans that thrill supporters—like hiking tariffs and taking financial policy away from the independent Federal Reserve Board and putting it in his own hands—are red flags to business leaders. Such positions have more in common with the far left than with traditional Republican economic policies, Sonnenfeld says. Those policies reflect that Trump has surrounded himself with what Sonnenfeld calls “MAGA extremists and junior varsity opportunists,” while the more senior voices of his first term have been sidelined. 

On Saturday, Trump spoke in Philadelphia with a message that The Guardian’s David Smith described as “light on facts, heavy on fear.” He appears to be trying to overwrite his own criminal conviction with the idea that Biden’s immigration policy has brought violent undocumented migrants to the United States, creating a surge of crime. He told rally attendees that murders in their city have reached their highest level in six decades, while in fact, violent crime in the city is the lowest it’s been in a decade. 

In February, Trump pushed Republican lawmakers to reject a strong bipartisan border bill so he could use immigration as his primary issue in the election. That focus on immigration was key to the rise of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to power, and it is notable that Trump’s picture of the United States echoes the rhetoric of the authoritarians hoping to overturn democracy around the world.  

On Friday, during a podcast hosted by venture capitalists, Trump blamed Biden for starting Russia’s war against Ukraine by calling for Ukraine’s admission to NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that resists Russian aggression. This statement utterly rewrites the history of Trump’s support for Russia’s annexation of the same Ukrainian regions it has now occupied: as Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort testified, the Kremlin helped Trump’s 2016 campaign in exchange for the U.S. permitting Russian incursions there.

More significant in this moment, though, is that Trump, who is running to become the leader of the United States, is siding against the United States and parroting Russian propaganda. Mark Hertling, a retired lieutenant general of the United States Army who served for 37 years and commanded U.S. Army operations in Europe and Africa, wrote: “This statement is—to put it mildly—stunningly misinformed and dangerous.”

Trump told host Sean Spicer that the U.S. is a “failing nation,” claiming that airplane flights are being delayed for four days and people are “pitching tents” because their flight is never going to happen. In reality, as Bill Kristol pointed out, with 16.3 million U.S. flights, 2023 was the busiest year in U.S. history for air travel, and the cancellation rate was below 1.2%. This was the lowest rate in a decade. 

Trump is insisting at his rallies that crime is skyrocketing under Biden. In reality, crime rose rapidly at the end of Trump’s term but is now dropping. From 2022 to 2023, according to the FBI, the only crime that went up was motor vehicle theft. Murders dropped by 13.2%, rape by 12.5%, robbery by 4.7%, burglary by 9.8%. The first quarter of 2024 showed even greater drops. Compared to the same quarter in 2023, violent crime is down 15.2%, murder down 26.4%, rape down 25.7%, robbery down 17.8%, burglary down 16.7%. Even vehicle theft is down 17.3%. 

Trump’s negative picture might play well to his die-hard supporters, but portraying the U.S. as a hellscape has rarely been a recipe for winning a presidential election.

President Biden and Trump are scheduled to debate on Thursday, June 27, and Trump’s team is trying to lower expectations for his performance. He became so incoherent in Philadelphia that the Fox News Channel actually cut away while he was talking. The Biden-Harris team has taken simply to posting Trump’s comments, prompting Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo to note: “It’s pretty bad when one candidates rapid response account just posts the other guys quote verbatim with no explanation at all.”

After months of insisting that Biden is mentally unfit, now Trump and his surrogates are saying Biden will perform well in the debate because he will be on drugs. There is no evidence that Biden has ever used performance-enhancing drugs, but curiously, Trump’s former White House physician Ronny Jackson (whom Trump repeatedly misidentified as Ronny Johnson last week) gave Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo a very detailed list of drugs that could sharpen attention and clarity. One of the ones he mentioned, Provigil, was on the list of those widely and improperly distributed by the White House Medical Unit in the Trump White House. 

Jackson said that he was “demanding” that Biden take drug tests before and after the debate. A White House spokesperson responded: “[A]fter losing every public and private negotiation with President Biden—and after seeing him succeed where they failed across the board, ranging from actually rebuilding America’s infrastructure to actually reducing violent crime to actually outcompeting China—it tracks that those same Republican officials mistake confidence for a drug.”

With the evaluation that Biden is better for the economy and Trump’s apocalyptic vision of the U.S. is not based in reality, it jumps out that on Thursday, a filing with the Federal Election Commission showed that the day after a jury convicted former president Donald Trump on 34 criminal counts, billionaire Tim Mellon made a $50 million donation to one of Trump’s superpacs. Since 2018, Mellon has contributed more than $200 million to Republicans, giving $110 million to Republican candidates and funding committees in the 2024 election alone. He has also given $25 million to independent candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. 

In a 2015 autobiography, Mellon embraced the old trope that “Black Studies, Women’s Studies, LGBT Studies, they have all cluttered Higher Education with a mishmash of meaningless tripe designed to brainwash gullible young adults into going along with the Dependency Syndrome,” saying that food assistance, affordable health care “and on, and on, and on” had made Americans on government assistance “slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam.” “The largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass,” he wrote. 

It is this trope that the Biden administration has smashed, returning to the idea that the government should answer to the needs of all its people. The last three years have proved the superiority of this vision by creating a roaring economy; rebuilding the country’s infrastructure, supply chains, and manufacturing; cutting crime rates, and reinforcing international alliances. 

As Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and chief executive officer of the energy company Canary, told Wall Street Journal reporter Tarini Parti about Mellon: “He’s clearly terrified of Biden remaining the president.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[lobbycards]

Billion Dollar Brain, Italian lobby card (fotobusta), Italian theatrical release 1968

[randomrichards]

STRANGE DARLING:

A chase through the woods

Told in disjointed chapters

How to stop killer

[letterboxd-loggd]

Strange Darling (2023) JT Mollner

October 2nd 2024

[rookie-critic]

Amsterdam (2022, dir. David O. Russell) - review by Rookie-Critic

Amsterdam has been receiving criticism way too harsh for how much it does right. David O. Russell is an incredibly competent director that knows how to frame shots, draw good performances out of his actors (even if he was abhorrently verbally abusive towards talent in the past. Hopefully he's grown as a person since that Lily Tomlin outburst on the set of I Heart Huckabees), and create a great atmosphere. Amsterdam does all of these things right and its message is topical and gone into with the best intentions. I think where the film starts to lack is in its indecisiveness. Russell has a lot of things he wants to say and the cast is so massive and packed with big names that about halfway through the film you start to think that he didn't quite know how to wrangle everything he wanted out of this film into one cohesive story line. Another problem the film has is that I never quite got used to how the main trio just loves to repeat each other. You could chalk this up to the general quirkiness that comes along with a lot of Russell's work, but it was being done in a way that felt unintentional and awkward. Again, this could be just a matter of personal preference, but I found it more distracting than engrossing.

Parroting aside, I will applaud Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington for their excellent performances as well as a lot of the supporting cast, but most notably Robert De Niro and Chris Rock. While every actor in the film was at least good, I found Andrea Riseborough and Mike Myers' performances to be a little cartoonish in comparison to the, again, more grounded-but-still-quirky performances the rest of the cast gives. However, I don't really hold that too much against the film because that almost feels like a nitpick. I am very pleasantly surprised by the entertainment value Amsterdam brings, and can recommend it to a general audience as something, I feel, a wide range of moviegoers will enjoy, even if it tries to wear too many hats during its stay on the screen.

Score: 7/10

Currently streaming on HBO Max.

[onenakedfarmer]

Watching HorrorFest 2024

STRANGE DARLING JT Mollner USA, 2024

[stuff-diary]

Strange Darling

Movies watched in 2024

Strange Darling (2023, USA)

Director & Writer: JT Mollner

Mini-review:

I must admit this movie didn't surprise as much as people have been saying (I saw the twist coming almost right away), but I loved the nonlinear structure. It forces you to pay attention to every single detail, and it did keep me guessing even without the shock of the twist. Beyond that, the other thing that makes this film special is Willa Fitzgerald's performance. She was really good in The Fall of the House of Usher, but her work here is on a whole other level. To put it simply, it's a starmaking performance and I'm expecting to see a lot more of her from here on out. Anyway, Strange Darling is a smart thriller, even if it wasn't as wholly unpredictable as I expected.

[moviesandmania]

MEET THE APPLEGATES Sci-fi dark comedy horror - review and free on YouTube

‘Insects are human too’ Meet the Applegates is a 1990 sci-fi dark comedy horror film about a colony of huge insects that move from South America to the United States. The shapeshifting bugs themselves after an idyllic cookie-cutter suburban 1950s family. Their mission is to cause a nuclear holocaust and human extinction. It was also released as The Applegates. The movie was directed by Michael…

[blackscarabfilmz]

Michael Tries: SPAM Parmesan (from M*A*S*H)

[spryfilm]

Blu-ray review: “Billion Dollar Brain” (1967)

“Billion Dollar Brain” (1967) Drama Running Time: 111 minutes Written by: John McGrath Directed by: Ken Russell Featuring: Michael Caine, Karl Malden, Ed Begley, Oscar Homolka and Françoise Dorléac Col.Stok: “I suppose a young man like you wouldn’t know the pleasure of removing a tight collar.” Harry Palmer: “I thought Lenin called such comforts “momentary interest.”” Col.Stok: “Don’t…

[lobbycards]

Billion Dollar Brain, Italian lobby card (fotobusta), Italian theatrical release 1968