…when you star in one really good film, and then you refuse to even try to star in another one as good for the rest of your life. This. Is. What. Happens.

Diesel costarred in Rob Cohen‘s better-than-decent The Fast and the Furious (’01) and yes, he had a good supporting roles in Boiler Room and Saving Private Ryan. But Find Me Guilty was the peak, and that was 15 years ago.

HE is not grief-struck about anything. I’m just saying that the bottom visual is, from my perspective, a fairly accurate depiction of what reality feels like on a moment-to-moment basis. Not any specific dominant color…nothing too precise or cleanly compartmentalized but a fluid, scattered jumble of impressions and decisions, nine or ten colors at once, several balls in the air.

I’m still persuaded that (a) Breaking The Waves has the greatest ending (and is among the greatest endings of any film, ever), (b) Dancer in the Dark is the most lyrical, rhapsodic and emotionally devastating (not to mention one of the finest musicals ever made), (c) Dogville is the most severe and socially condemning, (d) Melancholia is the least memorable, (e) the two Nymphomaniac films are the most didactic and the least startling, (f) Manderlay is underwhelming and (g) Antichrist and The House That Jack Built are tied for being the most despairing or dispiriting. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never seen Europa, The Boss Of It All, The Idiots and The Five Obstructions.

The other day Paul Schrader posted that photo of his 20-year-old self from the spring of ’67. Given the current mindset of the community of friends and collaborators that he runs with, Schrader felt obliged to disparage the rural-white-kid look that he had at the time.

Facebook: “This is [what] white living in Michigan can make you and there was nobody to say, ‘Man, you’re white'”

As in “man, you’re hopeless…that look on your face, that smug Columbia T-shirt….you need to get out in the world and rumble it up and suffer some hard knocks and see what’s what.” Which all young people need to do.

The under-implication wasn’t just that the Schrader of ’67 needed to learn and grow and mature — the implication was that his Michigan whitebread background was an expression of inherent blindness and perhaps worse. He was a flawed human being because of his skin shade, his family heritage.

Which, of course, is the current view everywhere — white folk are inherently rotten apples unless proved or re-educated otherwise. And so I just posted the following (which no Hollywood liberal-progressive would dare share in a workplace):

Speaking as a bruised victim of attempted Twitter jackal Stalinist wokester cancellation, I should be the last person in the world to advocate for anyone’s cancellation for some political-cultural offense.

I would nonetheless be delighted to see Marjorie Taylor Greene get cancelled, censured, bitchslapped, tarred and feathered, etc. For the sheer emotional pleasure of it. Partly because of that rancid face-palm analogy between enforced mask-wearing and Jews being forced to wear yellow-star badges by Nazis, but also because I loathe the twangy downmarket sound of her voice.

Yes, I know she’s playing a game called “wind up the libtards.” If she was a cockroach, I’d squash her flat.

Pete Davidson during last night’s “Weekend Update”: “[Masks weren’t a refuge] because everyone can still recognize me from my eyes. When you see someone who looks like he just woke up and hasn’t slept in days, it’s me.”

With these words Davidson, whom I’ve regard as a great, nakedly honest, world-class actor-writer-comedian since catching his performance in The King of Staten Island, acknowledged that he’s not Cary Grant, and that he radiates a basic mood medication-meets-Staten Island strangeness. And so he was encouraged (told) to grow out or otherwise “normalize” his hair for Judd Apatow’s film.

But since King opened, Davidson has been rockin’ a tennis ball, despite the universally accepted maxim that guys with extreme facial features need to modify this with a little hair flow…a little follicle smoothitude.

Davidson seemed to be saying last night that he’ll soon be leaving Saturday Night Live. Presumably so he’ll be free to play supporting oddballs in DC and Marvel films. What he needs to do is star in another King of Staten Island-type feature, but without the stoner friends or the Staten Island backdrop. He needs to play the witty, sexy, unbalanced guy of the 2020s…to play “Pete Davidson” in a long series of real-deal, here-and-now, cultural-state-of-things comedies, romantic and otherwise. He needs to be a new strain of the Woody Allen thing.

PD: “AIDS is just like SNL. It’s still here, except no one has gotten excited about it since the ’90s.”