But when THR’s David Rooney stated that much of Cannes ‘26 was gay, gay, totally effing gay, nobody said boo. Because Rooney is a member of the tribe, and therefore shielded.

This recent below photo aside, Donald Trump, Jr. is apparently an inch taller than Bettina Anderson, whom he recently married (and vice versa) at a ceremony in the Bahamas.

But what if the sizes were reversed? Taller women-shorter men relationships occasionally happen, of course, even though we’ve all read or heard about hetero women routinely discriminating against shortish guys on dating apps.

I don’t regard myself as a size-ist (I dealt with a certain amount of pushback from classmates when I was young for being a “giant”) but it’s quite rare to see a husband or boyfriend who can obviously be beaten in a wrestling match by his wife or girlfriend. I do know that no dude wants to date a woman whose feet are bigger than his own. This is certainly true in my case.

Did anyone ever cast a tall, leggy actress opposite Alan Ladd or Dustin Hoffman in their respective heydays? It’s not a male-ego thing — it’s a reality thing. Yes, runty guys occasionally hook up with tallish women 5’11” Nicole Kidman was four inches taller than Tom Cruise, and Katie Holmes was two inches taller. But generally this doesn’t happen mcuh. Not in 7-11 land, it doesn’t.

Owned by Bettina Anderson:

Melissa McCarthy vs. Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann in the school principal’s office is easily the best scene in Judd Apatow‘s This Is 40, which I rewatched last night and….what’s the phrase?….had an uproarious time with.

“Fuck you, Jill…you’re a horrible fucking woman…this is why everybody hates you…this kind of shit…fucking ineffecitve bullshit hair, and I’m glad your husband died’cause you’re a fucking asshole….he probably killed himself”:

Here’s a phone interview I did with the great Albert Brooks in the run-up to the opening of This Is 40. Brooks’ best years, performance-wise, happened between Real Life (’79) and Mother (’96)…a 17 year run…his career peaked, of course, with the one-two punch of Lost in America (’85) and Defending Your Life (’91). But he was pretty damn good in Apatow’s 14-year-old film, and he wasn’t half bad as a retreating governor in 2025’s Ella McCay,

Again, the HE-Brooks mp3.

Wells to Apatow (12.6.12) letter — honest injun reactions to This Is 40, which are 60-40 but mostly positive:

“Here’s my positivity, my admiration, what I liked: ‘Get through the first 75 minutes so you can savor the really good final 50 minutes.’

“Marriage is hard, marriage is a grind, it’s not easy to keep the fires going, etc. Your film honestly deals with all that stuff, warts and all. And it honestly states that teenage girls (even the ones sired by the director-writer) can be whiny, abrasive and self-absorbed and dismissive of their parents. I just didn’t buy the quirky oddball humor in the first hour (particularly any material related to anal probes) and I didn’t buy the Graham Parker/music business material. But the final 50 minutes is not just pretty good stuff but fully approvable.

“I have to say that being 40 is a pretty easy thing, Judd, if you don’t mind my saying. It’s officially the start of middle age but the ‘uh-oh’ feeling doesn’t really kick in until your mid to late 40s. I’ll tell you this: I look at photos of myself when I was 40 and I think to myself, ‘Wow…almost a spring chicken! Okay, a little bit of wear and tear has started to show by that point but very little, really.’ 40 is when your face begins to acquire a little character, and when moms enter the MILF stage. It’s pretty hot when you get right down to it. So I don’t get the angst.

“What guy is dumb enough to tell his wife or girlfriend that he took Viagra or Cialis before making love to her? It’s not only printed on the warning label. I think 15 year-olds know that when they get older they’re not supposed to tell their girlfriends that they’re taking it. It’s almost on the level of ‘go when the light is green and stop when it’s red.’

“Albert Brooks kills it in every scene he’s in. Melissa McCarthy is really great because she’s committed to the anger and never goes for the laughs. John Lithgow is too pursed and pinched at first, or so I thought, but then he saves it at the very end, especially in that scene between he and Leslie.

“This Is 40 takes off and finds the groove and kicks into gear around the 75-minute mark. Starting with the scene in which Rudd is weeping in his BMW, which directly follows the scene in which he realizes that Graham Parker is not going to save his company financially. Of course, this is something that everybody in the audience knows from the get-go, but which takes Rudd over an hour to figure out.

“But after this point the anger and the fighting and the resentments really let loose, and that’s when the movie starts to really work.

“So much of the hassle and the tension of things comes from the Graham Parker situation, and that just didn’t fly for me. It’s hard to root for anyone who’s so blind to the realities of the music market that he’s pinning his hopes for survival on the ascendancy of Graham Parker and the Rumor. Rudd’s character has done pretty well for himself in the music business (as you have in the film business), obviously, but suddenly he’s an idiot who thinks that he can sell Graham Parker in a big enough way so that his financial pressures will be alleviated? And the solution at the end is representing Ryan Adams, another getting-old guy?”

…is a character-destroying tragedy…..a retreat-from-reality strategy or surrender that obviously reenforces already established antagonistic behavior patterns. We’ve all read that mating-age American women have more or less had it with youngish men, and that 20something or 30something dudes reportedly feel the same way. “Younger people aren’t hooking up” has become the social plague of the 2020s.

But older dudes of means striking up a relationship with an intelligent sexbot or homina-homina droid…if you’ve lived a full life and have been around the block with several live, organic women with the usual contentious traits and real-world attributes, where’s the harm? If, that is, a dude can afford it (one model costs $175K, more or less). A little bot action never hurt anyone over the age of 45 or 50.

1. Moya by DroidUp (rice: $173,000Features: Unveiled by the Shanghai-based robotics firm, Moya features realistic synthetic skin layered over a bionic lattice muscle system. She maintains a natural body temperature to (36 degrees Celsius), tracks eye contact, and walks with a gait that is reportedly human-like. Details: More information on her internal robotics can be viewed on the TechRadar feature coverage.

2. Aria by Realbotix: $175,000. Features: A flagship in social robotics, Aria boasts patented silicone skin, microscopic eye cameras for eye contact, and 17 facial motors. Her AI integrates with platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini to recall past interactions, recognize faces, and carry out multilingual, emotionally adapted conversations.

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…a few Memorial Day thoughts while watching Judd Apatow’s This Is 40 (2012) last night, but then the old Euro jet lag kicked in around 9 pm (3am in Cannes / Oslo time) and I was out like a light.

I share only a few of these groaning maladies and observations, but Keith Sullivan, age 45, woke me up this morning at 6:40 am….”mentally I’m still 25 but you couldn’t pay me to go to a club.”

After a grueling eight-hour SAS flight from Oslo to JFK, our plane sat on the tarmac for 55 minutes before we were allowed to park at a gate…thank you so much!

And yet no more passport lines. You stand before a camera and they identify you solely by facial features. Roughly a kin of the digital procedure that 2001’s Dr. Heywood Floyd submitted to when he arrived at the orbiting space wheel.

After waiting way too long for my suitcase and finally reporting it missing via an online system (remember those lost-and-found offices of yore, conveniently located not far from the carousels?…gone), HE’s dark-gray, hard-plastic Samsonite finally turned up…the last lonely bag on the carousel, nearly an hour after we first entered the baggage claim area.

For years my bag had an identifying bright blue tag for instant recognition, but the animals who work in baggage handling in Oslo or JFK stole it.

Plus it was sprinkling outside with big puddles everywhere, and the temps were flat-out chilly. Oslo was at least 10 degrees warmer when I left — high 60s or thereabouts, zero wind. When I finally arrived at Jett’s home in West Orange it was moist scarf weather, technically 57 but more like the high 40s.

Thank you, northeast tristate corridor for transforming traditionally warmish May weather into a miserable mid-March atmosphere.

Put simply, it felt like brutal treatment and was therefore depressing as hell to be back here. I’ve felt this way each and every time I’ve returned from Europe. Fun’s over, fella. Back to grim reality…the enveloping gray salt mines of the soul. I was so happy over there. Oslo and Cannes are great towns, quality-of-life-wise. Oslo is expensive, true, but everything is spotless and gleaming and super-efficient, and the natives are so friendly and obliging

West Orange upside: The trees are fully in bloom, and the luminous green of it all is lovely.

But whitesides are nonetheless a problem. They really are.

I’ve emphasized two or three times that last night’s awarding of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or to Cristian Mingiu‘s Fjord was fully deserved.

I regretfully felt that Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Minotaur, an anti-Putin, anti-Ukraine War makeover of Claude Chabrol‘s La Femme Infidel (’69), was a bit rote or even humdrum. It lacks, for one thing, the silky, sensual intrigue of Adrien Lyne‘s Unfaithful, the first Chabrol remake, and Dmitriy Mazurov‘s dull, cuckolded husband can’t hold a candle to Richard Gere.

But I was nonetheless glad for the jury handing Andrey the Grand Prix award, or the second-place prize. The Minotaur win was driven, I believe, by two sentiments: (a) “Good for you, Andrej, for slamming Putin’s demonic war” and (b) “We’re very heartened, Andrej, that you’ve recovered from your horrible Covid illness and that you’re back on the stick.”

I’m kind of appalled that the Best Screenplay trophy went to Emmanuel Marre for A Man Of His Time, an indisputably flat saga about Henri Marre (the director-writer’s great-grandfather) playing the bureaucratic go-along game under Marshall Petain‘s Vichy regime in early 1940s France.

Splitting the Best Actress award between All Of A Sudden costars Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto was one of those “our hearts and spirits are soaring and so we’re locking arms in solidarity” thing. The female jury members — Demi Moore, Chloe Zhao and Ruth Negga — were so exceptionally moved by the confessional, open-hearted dialogue between Efira and Okamoto (Jessica Kiang’s Variety review will give you a taste) that they ignored the fact that their performances have zero dramatic energy or any kind of constructive strategy — their characters do nothing except give voice to meditative musings about facing death with grace and insight as well as the infinite importance of caring and nurturing.

Splitting the Best Actor trophy between Coward costars Emmanuel Macchia, whose wet-behind-the-ears performance is thuddingly one-note (he mostly does a zombie stare while occasionally slightly grinning), and the excessively cloying and wildly irritating Valentin Campagne, whom I wanted to strangle minutes after his initial appearance, was flat-out ridiculous. In so doing the jury more or less spat in the faces of the far more deserving Javier Bardem (The Beloved) and Rami Malek (The Man I Love).

Yesterday’s incident makes four, right? The Butler ear-piercing. The guy at the golf course. The recent White House Correspondents dinner. And now this. The shooter, 21 year-old Nasire Best, is in Valhalla now.

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Yesterday, in a Facebook post by Yale film research scholar Oksana Chefranova, B. Ruby Rich, for many decades a respected film critic (Chicago Reader, old friend of Roger Ebert) and current editor of Film Quarterly, passed along a second-hand observation that calls Cristian Mungiu‘s Palme d’Or-winning Fjord “the MAGA film.”  

This, trust me, is a bluntly inaccurate view, not to mention a combative one. Yes, Fjord does characterize a cabal of Norwegian woke lefties who persecute a Christian couple as villainous, but it doesn’t spray buckshot. There’s nothing rash or intemperate about it. It’s very carefully composed, restrained, measured and precise.

Rich said she’d lifted the “MAGA film” observation from “an esteemed U.S. curator.”  So the progressive critical elite pushback that I predicted yesterday has definitely started.

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No Cannes ‘26 film made HE’s bell go ring-a-ding-ding like Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, and now it’s won the Palme d’Or!

And not a single American critic at Cannes will acknowledge what “Fjord” is actually about — i.e., not Norwegian wokeness but the American and British and French kind also. Or why Mingiu’s film is such a wrenching achievement.

I’m obviously rejoicing, but I’m also dreading reading the flood of “Why ‘Fjord’ Is More Ambiguous Than It Looks” think pieces that will be used to diminish if not torpedo the film’s commercial prospects and awards chances.

Incidentally: I’m heading into Oslo on a nice smooth bus as we speak. It’s 10:07 pm and dusk is only just starting to settle in. I love this!