Richard Beymer couldn’t and so Jimmy Bryant dubbed him. I wasn’t sure Elgort really had the pipes to handle the upper registers, but he sings with confidence and range.

Rude, crude…insulting people on Twitter
Sees everything as transactional
Has no loyalty but to himself and family
Seems pathological in his desire to undo what Obama did
Doesn’t speak about many people with respect
Obama called him a “bullshitter”…check
Sees everything in terms of the deal
Uses the phony schtick of a salesperson, a tendency to exaggerate and lie
Antagonizes almost everyone
Only seems to care about his base
He really hasn’t accomplished anything
A monkey could have passed tax cuts with a Republican congress
Doesn’t read, isn’t wise, speaks like a child
Antagonizes allies; denigrates international organizations
Doesn’t think things through
Unpresidential in use of Twitter and many other ways
Cruel
Goes back on his word, can’t be trusted
Simplistic
Constantly revolving door among staffers
I dislike the divisions he has caused or hasn’t helped

Steve Martin, Jon Stewart, Martin Scorsese, Anderson Cooper, Ted Danson, Larry David, Patrick Stewart, Drew Pinsky, Sam Elliott, Mark Harmon, David Byrne, Tim Robbins, Baz Lurhmann, Jay Leno, Richard Gere, John Slattery, Michael Douglas, Barry Bostwick, James Brolin, Mike Myers, Wolf Blitzer, Harvey Keitel, Jim Jarmusch…who else?

If I saw these Tim Burton-ish goblins on my roof (as a Fairfield County friend did a few days ago), I would take this is an omen. Buzzards serve the natural ecology, I realize, but everything is a metaphor.

The basic, boiled down thrust of Owen Gleiberman‘s latest Variety think piece is that while the Big Disney Colossus now owns the two biggest mythologies (Marvel + Star Wars), their franchise value has already been tapped and exploited to near exhaustion. Meanwhile Disney is gorging on their reanimated CG synthetic remakes but where will they go when the well is dry and they’ll have no alternative but to (aagghh, please…not that!) come up with some original 21st Century creations of their own?

The forthcoming Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is “the last film whose narrative DNA will be tied, in a fundamental way, to the revolutionary film that George Lucas released in 1977,” Gleiberman notes. “For some of us (and, I believe, for many fans), this series has already dragged on too long, feeding on fumes of nostalgia. The audience response to Solo: A Star Wars Story was not encouraging [and] didn’t bode well for the spinoffs, the divergent byways, the new sagas to come.

“As for Marvel, the end of the Avengers saga is no small thing. Black Panther and Captain Marvel are off to fantastic starts, pointing to a comic-book movie future of triumphant diversity. But if there’s an eternal truth in the film industry, it’s that all genres fade. I’m sure Disney is already planning out their reboots (who will be the new Magneto?), but the magic of the MCU, rooted in multiple overlapping generations of collective comic-book memory, has gone on for a quite a while, and it’s my feeling that it will be a challenge for Disney to sustain it on that level.

“And the [CG] animated remakes? Disney is going through them like chocolate-covered peanuts.”

This is now a five-person race…period. If and when Bernie Sanders withdraws (which he will definitely, absolutely do sooner or later), where will his supporters go? Some to Harris and Buttigieg, I’m guessing, but mostly to Warren. Where else? Typewriter Joe…what a drag, so deflating, zero excitement, big droop.

Scarlet Johansson doesn’t make perfect career decisions (who does?) and sometimes wavers a bit (like all of us), but for my money she has a pair of cast-iron cojones. Because she’s stood up to the wokester thugs by going her own way on Woody Allen and by recently repeating her view that political correctness can get (and in fact has gotten) in the way of creative freedom.

“I recognize that in reality, there is a widespread discrepancy amongst my industry that favors Caucasian, cisgendered actors and that not every actor has been given the same opportunities that I have been privileged to,” Johnasson said in a statement after her views were misrepresented, she claimed, in an interview with As If magazine.

In the As If piece, Johansson said that she continues “to support, and always have, diversity in every industry and will continue to fight for projects where everyone is included. [But] as an actor I should be allowed to play any person, or any tree, or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job. I feel like it’s a trend in my business and it needs to happen for various social reasons, yet there are times it does get uncomfortable when it affects the art because I feel art should be free of restrictions.”

In a 7.3 HE piece called “Ciswashing” I assessed the criticism that Johansson was getting at the time for wanting to play real-life trans massage parlor owner Dante “Tex” Gill in Rub & Tug, a crime drama that would have been directed by Ghost in the Shell helmer Rupert Sanders.

“The trans-twitter community apparently feels that only a real-deal trans actor should play Gill (who transitioned from being a woman to a man),” I wrote. “They presumably regard Johansson’s casting in the same light that Native Americans probably saw the casting of Henry Brandon as ‘Scar’, the Comanche villian in John Ford‘s The Searchers (’56).

“Let’s back up and consider how this could have been avoided. Actors in top-tier Hollywood films are typically cast by producers and directors with two goals in mind — (a) find the most gifted actor to play a given role for the benefit of the film, and (b) preferably an actor with name recognition among the hoi polloi, in order to help boost ticket sales. So in a perfect world Johansson would have declined and Sanders would’ve found a gifted trans actor instead…fine. But who would that be?

Posted last year by HE commenter “Adam”: “This is just the latest outrage from ScarJo. She played an alien in Under the Skin for crying out loud when every single person knows full well she’s from Earth. And then there was The Other Boleyn Girl nonsense in which we were expected to believe she was British royalty! I mean, you can’t make this stuff up! And don’t get me started on her Black Widow character…I’ve seen her try martial arts in real life and it’s all totally fake — she can’t fight for shit. So I’m glad someone finally called her out for the fraud she is.”

Here‘s what Deadline‘s Mike Fleming and Peter Bart had to say about p.c. Stalinists a la Donald Sutherland in the final shot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.