If you were Pete Davidson, what circumstance could possibly persuade you to back out of a Blue Origin space jaunt? Did he get cold feet? Was it some prior commitment? Did Jeff Bezos fire him? Nobody slated for such a voyage has ever backed out. Image-wise, this is horrific. Because it feels like a failure of nerve.

Last night I caught the first five episodes of Elizabeth Meriwether‘s The Dropout, and I have to say that I found Amanda Seyfried‘s performance as the discredited tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes a tough pill to swallow. Not because it’s a “bad” performance, but because it’s so damn weird.

That’s because Seyfried/Holmes is too much of a freak — one of the strangest looking and sounding people I’ve ever encountered in fiction or real life. Seyfried’s imitation of Holmes’ facial expressions and manner of speaking is fairly exacting, but it’s still unsatisfying to watch this bizarre robot woman interact with all those Silicon Valley heavy-hitters.

I kept asking myself “who would be stupid enough to go into business with this creepy character…a woman who, had she been born in the 1940s, could have played an alien on The Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man”? Or Ray Walston‘s alien girlfriend in My Favorite Martian?”

Meriwether’s dialogue is reasonably pro-level for the most part, but I can only reiterate that I couldn’t believe in the story I was seeing because I found it impossible to believe in Seyfried’s Holmes. She’s just too looney-tunes, too “off the planet.”

Rotten Tomatoes Average Joe whom I mostly agree with: “There must be something wrong with me because I truly don’t understand how there are so many 4 and 5 stars. I literally cringed while watching this. Someone commented that ‘the dialogue is utter garbage’ and ‘there are so many things that have nothing to do with the story.’ I absolutely agree. Nothing is believable. The acting is absurd. It almost seems like a Three Stooges-type comedy. There’s no possible way someone with such silly, childish behavior would be accepted in the business world. I can go on and on about the silly scenes.

“What I do know is [that] Holmes duped many very smart people. What I can’t believe is that it went down anything close to the way it’s been portrayed, or perhaps it’s just so exaggerated to the point of ridicule. What am I missing?”

Tatiana makes an appearance in episode #5:

Several months ago I watched the first episode of The Last Movie Stars (HBO Max, 7.21), a six-part Ethan Hawke documentary about Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward that seemed, based on episode #1, to be a celebration piece — a doc that says what a wonderful, cooler-than-cool, super-glorious relationship they had.

I posted my understanding of the doc series around 10 days ago.

Paul and Joanne first met in ’53 or thereabouts, got married in 1958 and stayed together for 50 years, parted only by Paul’s death in ’08.

Hawke’s admiration for Newman-Woodward is upfront and unfettered, and his fascination with the transformative acting world of New York in the 1950s is fully conveyed. But this seems to basically be a valentine doc, and having dug into Shawn Levy‘s “Paul Newman: A Life” (’09), a very thoroughly researched and written biography…I shouldn’t say more but Hawke’s basic approach seems to have been very admiring.

I’ve since been told that this isn’t the case. I’m told that Hawke doesn’t mention the name of a journalist, Nancy Bacon, with whom Newman had an affair in ’68 and ’69, but that the affair is definitely mentioned. It’s also acknowledged that Newman was a functioning alcoholic, and that the booze was a real problem for a while. Woodward even kicked Newman out of their Westport home at one point, or so the story goes.

So I’ll be marathoning it starting tomorrow.

Newman made around 12 films in the 1950s, and none of them really hit the mark. No, not even Robert Wise‘s Somebody Up There Likes Me (’56). Because Newman was playing someone else, which isn’t his metier. Newman had to play Paul Newman-ish characters, and that didn’t really start until he lucked into Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler (’61). Between The Hustler and The Road to Perdition (’02), Newman starred in roughly 40 films, and ten of them were really good. Okay, 16 if you want to be liberal about it.

Creme de la creme: The Hustler (’61), Hud (’63), Cool Hand Luke (’67), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (’69), The Sting (’73), Slap Shot (’77), Fort Apache, The Bronx (’81), The Verdict (’82), The Color of Money (’86) and The Road to Perdition (’02) / 10.

Good to Pretty Good: Sweet Bird of Youth (’62), Harper (’66), Sometimes a Great Notion (’70), The Mackintosh Man (73), The Towering Inferno (’74), Nobody’s Fool (’94) / 6.

Four first-rate films in the ’60s, two in the ’70s, three in the ’80s and one in the aughts.

Woodward’s career peaked between the late ’50s and late ’60s. Her best were A Kiss Before Dying (’57), The Three Faces of Eve (’57), The Long, Hot Summer (’57), The Fugitive Kind (’60), Paris Blues (’61), The Stripper (’63), Rachel, Rachel (’68), The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (’72), Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (’73), The Glass Menagerie (’87) and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (’90) / 11.

Newman took a crack at writing his autobiography, we’re told, but the project stalled or went stale in his head, and he wound up burning all the taped audio interviews. But the tapes had first been transcribed, and we get to hear certain portions from these. Several hotshot actors voice the various players. George Clooney does Newman, and Laura Linney reads Woodward’s tapes.

Employment Counselor: Can I help you, sir?
Sonny Corleone: Yeah, I’m here for…I wanna job for the summer.
Employment Counselor: How old are you?
Sonny Corleone: Sixteen.
Employment Counselor: Do you have any work experience?
Sonny Corleone: I’ve done stuff for my family, but…uh, I wanna work somewhere else.
Employment Counselor: A family business?
Sonny Corleone: I worked for my father.
Employment Counselor: And what did you do for him?
Sonny Corleone: Aaahh…stuff. Boring stuff.
Employment Counselor: Okay, no problem. But before we get started, I’d like you to fill out this form. It’s about gender preference.
Sonny Corleone: About what?
Employment Counselor: About your gender identity.
Sonny Corleone: My what?
Employment Counselor: It’s not a big deal. Just fill it out and we’ll go from there.
Sonny Corleone (readying the form): Fuck is this?
Employment Counselor: Just mark the appropriate term.
Sonny Corleone: This…WHAT THE FUCK?
Employment Counselor: It’s just a form. If you’re straight, just check cisgender.

From “All Sizzle, No Steak” comment thread, posted this morning:

Yeah, that’s me — a Japanese soldier living in a jungle cave and refusing to give up the faith.

Within their own realm and their own conversations and celebrations, the promotional Oscar machine gang still delivers or represents a climactic “thing” — it’s just a much smaller and more secular thing, numbers-wise, than ever before in their over-90-year history.

The numbers are much smaller because over the last five or six years because the Oscar-focused community (filmmakers, producers, distributors) has more or less cut itself off from the middle-class mainstream by woke–ing itself to death — by largely blowing off the realm of sensible middle-class dramas and comedies and knockout spectacles (which were semi-dependable brands throughout the 20th Century and during the aughts and mid-teens, until ‘16 or thereabouts) by turning films into vehicles intended to reflect progressive values and bring about social change.

Movies that try to touch people’s souls in a gripping, accessible, non-political way (films like Manchester by the Sea) are no longer happening, and films like Spider–Man: No Way Home are considered irrelevant. In their place the industry-reflecting Oscars have become a show about elite progressive values — #MeToo, LGBTQIA, multiculturalism, identity politics & the general worldview of Rosanna Arquette.

“The erratic pursuit of sweeping, penetrating, soul-touching cinema (a rare achievement but one that has occasionally manifested over the decades) has been more or less called off, it seems, because such films or aspirations, in the view of certain #MeToo and POC progressives, don’t serve the current woke-political narrative.” — from “Wolfe Reminds, History Repeats,” posted on 3.22.21.

When the sociopathic Donald Trump was elected and the deplorable Harvey Weinstein was gored by #MeToo, The NY Times and Ronan Farrow, the Oscar-aspiring community committed itself to an “older white guys and the movies they used to make are bad news” theology. They decided to redefine Hollywood product by way of inclusion, equity, more #MeToo, more strong women, a greater variety of ethnicities, more gay, more trans, etc.

And by apologizing for almost everything that Hollywood represented and/or tried to create from 1915 until 2015, pretty much. Pay a visit to the Academy Museum (i.e., “Woke House”) and tell me I’m wrong.

The problem with all that, numerically speaking, is that 60% of the population doesn’t necessarily hold with the idea of de-platforming middle-class, high-craft films produced by older white guys. You could argue, in fact, that a much-larger portion (80% or 85%?) of the movie-loving public is on the normcore side of the cultural divide. You could argue, in fact, that the wokester-progressive community represents a relatively narrow slice of the overall pie.

Last April’s Steven Soderbergh Oscar telecast from Union Station was essentially a declaration of large-scale ritual seppuku. The Soderbergh show basically said “these awards are about us…about our narrow little community of wealthy elites. Joe and Jane Popcorn can watch or not watch…we don’t really care one way or the other.”

Six episodes of that good David Simon Baltimore hardcore ghoulash that so many HE loyalists swore by in the form of The Wire. Plus come classic Serpico slash Prince of the City soul-searching action. Jon Bernthal (much slimmer), Treat Williams, Wunmi Mosaku, Jamie Hector, McKinley Belcher III, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Josh Charles, Dagmara Domińczyk, etc. Directed by King Richard‘s Reinaldo Marcus Green. Launches on 4.25.

Daniel Craig‘s James Bond doesn’t really defeat Dave Bautista‘s Mr. Hinx — he gets some much-needed help from Léa Seydoux‘s pistol-packing Madeleine Swann, and then Hinx is accidentally yanked out of the train by a rope and some barrels.

Sean Connery gets some assistance from an exploding talcum-powder briefcase and a small knife, but otherwise decisively defeats Robert Shaw‘s “Red” Grant.

The From Russia With Love battle lasts 3 minutes and 40 seconds, and yet it seems shorter than Spectre’s train fight, which lasts roughly two minutes and 45 seconds.