How long did the “Bill Gates was a randy, risque fellow because he tried to get going with certain women by using his wealth and power“….how long did that last? Two days, if that?

Robert Connolly‘s The Dry (IFC Films), an Australian mystery thriller, opens today. A huge hit in Australia after opening last January (as of 3.23 it had become the 14th-highest-grossing Australian film of all time) and based on a same-titled 2016 book by Jane Harper, pic costars Eric Bana, Genevieve O’Reilly, Keir O’Donnell and John Polson.

On Oprah Winfrey‘s new doc series “The Me You Can’t See”, Prince Harry says that the death of his late mother, Princess Diana, was essentially caused by unscrupulous media jackals. “The ripple effect of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices ultimately took her life,” he claims.

The predatory media certainly did what it could to make Diana’s life anguished and miserable, and shame on them for that. But as I explained in August 2017, the primary cause of her death was Dodi Fayed, the millionaire asshat whom Diana had been involved with for a few weeks.

Excerpt: “I was working at People when Diana began seeing Fayed in July 1997. Two or three of us were asked to make some calls and prepare a file on the guy. Within three or four hours I’d learned that Fayed was an irresponsible playboy, didn’t pay his bills on occasion, lacked vision and maturity and basically wasn’t a man.

I know most HE readers won’t watch this four-month-old Ryan Chapman anti-wokeness video. Yes, Chapman does go on, but he’s obviously well-informed, and he speaks clearly and concisely.

“Wokeness is a run-away idea that’s not under anyone’s control…why do these woke films that keep coming out, and keep crashing and burning, keep getting made?…the woke playbook is always about abolishing something…to use the force of their movement to bend people or society, against their will but in some kind of direction that will end oppression.”

The same analogy was explained last July in a newdiscourses piece called “The Complex Relationship between Marxism and Wokeness,” by James Lindsay.

The only stylistic speed bump is the way Chapman tilts his head rightward from time to time and in so doing gives the camera a vague come-hither look.

According to MSNBC’s Joy Reid in one of her “Absolute Worst” essays, Republican-backed legislation that would ban critical race theory has been introduced in “nearly” a dozen states. Reid says that critical race theory is a “decades old” concept, but in fact it’s a relatively recent education-system additive that explains the history of systemic racism in this country (which no semi-educated, fair-minded person would argue with).

It follows, unfortunately, that CRT has also metastisized into a woke belief system that says white Americans are fundamentally stained and poisoned by their history, and so they need to detoxify themselves by picking up a copy of Robin D’Angelo‘s “White Fragility” and work at cleansing themselves of a shameful past. They also need to absorb and accept the theology of The 1619 Project, which states that racism is the fundamental definer of the American experience.

However enlightened or well-intentioned this kind of re-educational process might be, it is believed in many corners of this country (including the better-educated cities) that critical race theory advances a new form of racism (“bad whitey needs to atone and be strictly schooled”) in order to counter historic racism.

I think we all understand that Average Americans (including liberal parents in big blue cities) are not going to go for this, and that CRT will be flayed as a campaign issue in ’22, you bet. I hate that my own distaste for and discomfort with critical race theory puts me in the same camp as a lot of horrible Republicans, but what can I do? All I can say is, you don’t have to be a crazy Republican to have arguments with CRT.

From a 1.27.21 Bari Weiss column: “Critical race theory is a threat to the most basic foundations of American life, including, but not limited to, equality under the law. It asks us to define ourselves by our immutable characteristics” — i.e., skin color. “It pits us against one another in an endless power struggle. It rejects Enlightenment tools of reason and scientific discovery as tainted. And it undermines our common humanity.

“[It holds that] America was born for the purpose of upholding white supremacy and it remains irredeemably racist. It claims that our founders were not primarily political geniuses but slaveholders who wanted to find a way to hoard their property. And while [last year’s George Floyd] rioters may have gotten a little out of hand, they weren’t wrong to target statues of men like Lincoln.”

I greatly fear the ’22 verdict on this issue from American voters.

I was startled this morning by a snap of 20-year-old Paul Schrader in the spring of ’67, taken “in a Quonset hut at Iowa’s Writers Workshop.” “Startled” because he was nearly the spitting image of my son Dylan at roughly the same age. Almost the same brown eyes, definitely the same nose and hair. It appears to be a photo of a photo, hence the odd Rubber Soul album cover effect.

I’ve almost become accustomed to reading Indiewire articles and reviews for the amusement factor. Because whatever they post, eight times out of ten it’s tainted by skewed or myopic political-cultural attitudes (Indiewire being more or less Woke Central) or extremely supportive, staunchly non-judgmental reviews of any indie film at all with a Sundance imprimatur, a #MeToo, POC or LGBTQ stamp, or a general woke-agenda vibe.

So I was almost startled to read what looked like a tough, declarative, Vanity Fair-sounding piece about how Hollywood is no longer a studio-controlled industry and how the struggling exhibition industry has painted itself into a corner.

Written by Anne Thompson and Dana Harris-Bridson, it’s called “This Was the Week That Movie Studios Finally Lost Control of the Industry.” The ostensible trigger was attending “The Big Screen Is Back”, a Century City gathering intended to promote the the return of theatrical, but the big news was AT&Ts decision to turn tail and abandon the movie distribution business. Last Monday the communications behemoth announced that WarnerMedia (CNN, TBS, TNT, Warner Bros. film and Tv + HBO slash HB0 Max) and Discovery are merging into one, and that head of this new company will be Discovery CEO David Zaslav.

Key paragraph #1: “We have reached a point where ‘major movie studio’ has begun to sound like an anachronism. Certainly, Warners and Universal and Paramount and Disney and Sony remain premier global suppliers of films that generate billions — but the studio bosses occupy a lower position on the power charts because it’s no longer the movie business that drives the industry.”

HE retort: Maybe so, but “the movie business” has always had a river running through it, and that river is know as the Grand Tradition of Movie Catholicism — a current that drives the heart and spirit of this town, at least among people with a soul. The more that unfaithful dilletante product assemblers and marketers ignore this basic spiritual current the less “Hollywood” this community will be.

Key paragraph #2: ‘Slammed by global lockdowns, the biggest theater chains are also the victims of their overspending, debt burdens, real-estate deals, and mostly, denying reality. Before the pandemic, they could have struck better terms with the studios on shorter windows and revenue sharing. They held out too long.”