Early Sunday evening we visited Masala King (Park Ave. and 34th Street), easily one of the best Indian restaurants I’ve ever patronized.

HE truly respects George Clooney for playing Edward R. Murrow in the Broadway stage version of Good Night and Good Luck.

It must have been hugely intimidating as Clooney’s last stage performance was in the 1986 play Vicious, in which he played a prostitute and drug dealer.

A portrait of Sex Pistols’ star Sid Vicious, it premiered at Hollywood’s The Complex theatre (6476 Santa Monica Blvd.).

That said, HE slightly disagrees with Clooney’s 2022 assessment of Paul Newman‘s decision to play an alcoholic attorney in Sidney Lumet‘s The Verdict (’82).

Clooney: “Newman figured out that he was a character actor, and he accepted that role. He didn’t fight it or try to get his face done [in order to] look younger. He just said,’Okay, that’s who I am now’, and in doing this he changed expectations a little bit.”

Born in 1925, Newman was around 56 when he starred in The Verdict, and he looked fantastic, of course — intense blue eyes, beautifully cut gray hair, lean physique, not even a hint of a neck wattle. Lumet guided Newman into playing a certain down-at-the-heels, frayed-at-the-seams vulnerability, but Newman was clearly projecting a movie star aura in that film. Plus he got to fuck 35 year-old Charlotte Rampling.

So Newman was not playing a grubby, seen-better-days character — he was playing a gleaming silver fox with a receding drinking problem.

Hollywood Elsewhere is proudly announcing that last week’s GoFundMe Venice Film Festival campaign has not only reached its goal but has brought in enough dough to cover principal expenses for both the 2025 Cannes and Venice film festivals.

I’m hustling to submit my Cannes press credential application as we speak, and I’ll be doing the same for Venice very soon. Thanks to everyone (a couple of exceptionally generous fellows in particular) who stood up and pitched in…really meant a lot, opened great emotional floodgates.

The toxic pisshounds (two of whom I admittedly wished cancer upon earlier this year…regrettable emotional statements on my part) were full of dire predictions about how the GoFundMe thing might not work out, but these proved unreliable. I really despise a small number of HE comment-thread uglies. Wokeys mostly. All they want to do is urinate over everything.

I am otherwise ecstatic and extremely grateful that everything panned out. I’m trying to find a Venice pad as we speak. I’ll be sharing a THX-1138 Cannes pad with Jordan Ruimy.

…isn’t necessarily a bad idea, and yet I’m not sure. The optics of a Maher-Trump handshake and some kind of amicable discussion…I honestly don’t know how I feel about this.

An X-factor boomer with a well-established cut-the-crap attitude, Maher comes from a sensibly Democratic, JFK-admiring, middle-class New Jersey culture, as I did, and he’s made it clear that he loathes woke fanatics as much I do, and perhaps more so. He’s been equally clear that he thinks Trump is a crude demagogue…an unstable, egoistic authoritarian with no respect for the norms of a healthy democracy.

And yet he’s motivated by his belief that sensible, practical-minded Democratic centrists need to take charge of the Democratic party and…okay, perhaps not kick the wokeys totally off the bus but firmly explain to them that the Great Cultural Revolution insanity of 2018-to-2024 (nonwhite-identity-festishing, white-male loathing, DEI meets 1619 Project, biomale trans athletes competing in women’s sports, anti-normie gender-switch trans theology in schools) made for an electoral disaster, and that they have to put that shit away and embrace the tenets of sensible moderate left-centrism.

Forget the cults of Kamala and AOC strongly influencing the 2028 Democratic pitch…not happening. Gavin Newsom‘s talk-to-righties podcast indicates that he’s into pivoting toward the sensible center, etc.

So it’s not necessarily a terrible idea for Maher to meet Trump, but it’s also fraught with a potential for image trouble. Maher certainly has to be careful about looking like he’s kissing the MAGA ring on some level. He would never do that, of course, but the optics could be tricky.

“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting.

I was told the story strands were going to begin to tighten up, but they’re just lying there in repose. Flaccid, lazy.

Two more episodes to go, and if episode 7 is as weak as 6 was tonight, everyone will say the whole thing was a bust.

SPOILERS FOLLOW: Before episode 6 began, series creator Mike White had only three hours to go. It’s obviously time to up the drama and intensify things (David Chase knew how to gradually turn the screws and tighten the strands in The Sopranos, not to mention deliver occasional dramatic crescendos) and he’s basically pissing away the time. In episode 6 White essentially says one thing: “I’ll deal with all this stuff later.”

When is Jason Isaacs going to finally DO something? Or at least BLURT SOMETHING OUT? His character is a terminally boring fraidy cat, enveloped in silent anguish, hopelessly inarticulate, buried in self-loathing. I’ve been watching this shallow-ass guy lie to his family as he shudders and trembles inside for five episodes now.

All White does is (a) show us two fatalistic shooting fantasies (it was interesting that he imagined killing Parker Posey before shooting himself) and (b) asks the spiritual guru guy what it’s like to die, and is curiously moved by the Buddhist cliche about life being a fountain and we’re all drops of water, etc. Who hasn’t heard that one?

It’s actually a line from a joke I heard back in the ‘70s. A spiritual seeker endures a long and arduous journey in trying to find the hallowed and supreme guru and thereby divine the essential secret of life, and when he finally finds him is told “my son, life is a fountain.” The seeker is stunned, outraged. “That’s IT?”, he barks at the guru. “I’ve spent months trying to find you, enduring all kinds of pain, danger, exhaustion and hardship, and all you can tell me is that life is a fountain?” Supreme guru, taken aback: “You mean life ain’t a fountain?”

And Parker Posey has been married to Isaacs for…what, 25 or 30 years and she can’t intuit that he’s seriously melting down and going to hell inside over something very scary? She can’t confront him about stealing her pills? She can’t put two and two together and deduce that something has gone horribly wrong with his investment portfolio? All she can say to Isaacs over and over is “what’s going on?” How many times has she fucking asked him that? A financial shark or hotshot of some kind, Isaacs has presumably been up to some sketchy, slippery stuff and knows, being the cagey type, that the regulatory authorities might conceivably get wind of this or that financial crime, and he hasn’t figured ways of hiding assets and socking away cash in hidden foreign bank accounts on a just-in-case basis?

What’s he looking at…several months or a year or two in a country-club prison? And he can’t get started again after serving his term? He doesn’t have friends and allies who might rally round and help him out? All he can do is think about killing himself because his wife is a fragile, drug-addled zombie? Pathetic.

There’s no insight or articulation or imagination in Isaacs’ character. His frozen-in-fear, “I can’t move or even breathe” psychology is dramatically suffocating, and hanging out with this guy is driving me nuts. I’ve really and truly run out of patience.

Over the last couple of months HE has been observing that the DEI/pro-trans/equity-over-meritocracy/identity-crazed wokies have fled into the forest.

In a 3.20.25 N.Y. Times piece titled “Snow White and the Seven Kajillion Controversies,” Brooks Barnes suggests why.

“[On the Snow White front], Disney hoped that prominent voices on the left would step up to deliver a pushback to the pushback. But it didn’t happen.

“’Really never, but especially right now, no studio wants its movie branded as a D.E.I. lesson,” said Martin Kaplan, who runs the Norman Lear Center for entertainment, media and society at the University of Southern California.

“Disney largely managed to avoid this critique as recently as 2023, when it remade The Little Mermaid with a Black actress in the title role; defenders were plentiful. But last month, when Disney released Captain America: Brave New World, with a Black actor in the title role for the first time, the company had a harder time.

“It’s not an entirely new phenomenon: Think of the male-internet uproar over the all-female Ghostbusters from 2016, or the ongoing fan vitriol around Disney’s efforts to bring diversity to the “Star Wars franchise.

“‘But the ‘anti-woke right’ has grown more powerful‘, Mr. Kaplan noted, while defenders on the left have grown quieter, either because they feel cowed or frustrated or because even they have come to see Hollywood’s aggressive diversity efforts as clumsy.

“’I’m not sure anyone could have predicted that a reactionary force could so quickly and dramatically reverse the cultural winds, but that is certainly what has happened,’ Mr. Kaplan said. “What once were uncontroversial or proud decisions are suddenly somehow un-American.”

The twisted green-teal perversion of color schemes on certain Criterion 4k/Blurays continues apace. What is mentally wrong with the Criterion engineers who’ve been pulling this teal shit since 2018 or thereabouts? Are they on drugs? Have they gone whacko?

DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze (recently posted): “The new Criterion 4K/Bluray disc (3.25.25) is uncomfortably green and blue-ish, [and] will court controversy.

“It is also much darker than the previous digital editions. Why the heavy green-ish-blue? With its neo-noir atmosphere of disillusionment and ambiguity, this Criterion disc might have been graded with cooler/darker tones (blue-green) to enhance its moody, melancholic feel, especially in the Florida Keys scenes where water and night settings dominate. I’m not quite sure why. Fans may continue to appreciate the brighter Warner HD presentation [released on 8.15.17].”

Bluray.com’s Svet Atanasov [recently posted]: “The new 4K Criterion makeover of Night Moves is disappointing. While it boasts very healthy and wonderfully detailed visuals, all with terrific density levels, it introduces some pretty dramatic color adjustments that effectively alter the film’s native period appearance.

“I have Warner Archive’s original Blu-ray release, which offers a very solid and accurate presentation of the film, and did not even feel the need to do extensive comparisons with it. In some areas of the new 4K makeover, there are entire ranges of primaries and supporting nuances that are eliminated and replaced by variations of turquoise/cyan, creating pretty striking anomalies. To be clear, these anomalies are of the kind that also appear on the recent 4K makeovers of The Hitcher and Mean Streets, adding harsh neon-esque qualities to skies and interiors that destabilize even some background nuances. On this 4K makeover, they are simply significantly exaggerated, doing a lot more to alter the native color temperature of the visuals. Needless to say, this is very unfortunate.”

The second half of yesterday’s chat between myself and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone was about Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (’72), which — I’m guessing here — the vast majority of under-45 viewers have probably never heard of, much less seen. But God, it feels so nourishing to recall the richest, most provocative (the butter scene was just one thing) or saddest portions of this landmark film.

The discussion began with Sasha skimming over a projection about which 2025 films will wind up being Oscar favorites. The idea of Wicked: For Good becoming a Best Picture favorite…don’t say this! And Paul Thomas Anderson, bless him, doesn’t make Academy=friendly films….never has, never will.

HE to N.Y. Times culture desk profiler Marc Tracy, author of today’s (3.23) Sasha Stone profile:

“Your Sasha profile is intelligent, tightly phrased, judiciously written. I know you worked long and hard to get it just right. Full respect.

“I’ve read the article twice, and found it a completely fair and even-handed profile, but — but! — it’s a vicious hit piece by way of those two photos — they make Sasha look like a chilly woman with fearsome, Medusa-like eyes.

“Her perceptive intelligence and tough-minded assessments aside, Sasha’s essence has always been her everyday personableness…her warmth, humility, kindness.  She’s the kindliest earth momma I’ve ever known in my life. These photos absolutely negate that.  

“The editor who chose them apparently doesn’t like Sasha’s political, anti-woke allegiances. He/she chose these photos as a way of saying, ‘This woman is a judgmental hellion‘ — a really shitty thing to do.

“There are ways of visually flattering a subject, of disguising this or that flaw, of emphasizing this or that aspect of a personality.  The right kind of Vittorio Storaro-like lighting can accomplish wonders. The person who chose these photos decided to make Sasha look like someone you really don’t want to to run into in a back alley….period.

“What a feeling it must be to be visually assassinated in the paper of record!

“Anyway, very good job on your end….cheers.”

Sasha Kurtz to N.Y. Times photographer Jennelle Fong: “Are you an assassin?”

Fong to Stone: “I’m a photographer…I was sent to do a job.”

Stone/Kurtz to Fong: “You’re neither. You’re an errand girl sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.”

The scalpers, I mean.

Indications are that Paul Feig‘s The Housemaid, based on Freida McFadden‘s three-year-old novel, a feminist potboiler that has since grown into a multi-book franchise, is going to be a bit of a groaner…perhaps even a forehead-slapper.

All feminist airport fiction is based upon a single premise, which is that the principal male character is a toxic piece of shit who has made his own bed and deserves all the bad karma that’s sure to come his way.

It certainly seems unlikely that Feig’s film will deliver the intrigue and complexity of Im Sang-soo‘s The Housemaid (’10), which I recall as being half-decent.

Both versions have vaguely similar plots with the husband banging (or at least looking to bang) the housemaid, and the wife freaking out and the usual blowback kicking in.

The Housemaid costars Sydney Sweeney as the titular character; Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar (the bearded, nice-guy suitor in It Ends With Us) are her wealthy employers.

Feig began filming The Housemaid only a couple of months ago; Lionsgate will open it on 12.25.25.

Fake dialogue: “I may not belong here, but I’m not leaving without the truth.”

This stripped-down performance, posted three months ago by “Deirdre”, was recorded 58 years ago. Paul McCartney‘s sublime bass-playing can be more fully appreciated without his lead vocal track. That’s all I’m saying. Eliminating lead vocals can do wonders for an old song.