I’m so sick of The Last of Us, which is to say the draining, dispiriting genre of disease, rot and decay…dystopian finality ain’t what it used to be, you see.

I’m more or less okay with Pedro Pascal‘s Joel Miller, I suppose, but I really, really don’t care for the company of 21-year-old Bella Ramsey, who plays the brittle, glaring, strange-looking Ellie (really weird icy eyes).

Ellie is certainly “a lot.” And not just because she’s something of a Jackson Hole rock star in this godawful end-of-everything realm because she’s immune to the Cordyceps infection.

Early on Ellie and Dina (Isabella Merced) go after some growling zombies inside a warehouse of some kind, but instead of relying on firearms for protection Ellie decides upon wrestling and knifing them to death. Absolute 100% lunacy.

Ellie and Dina are sexually aroused by each other (of course! what else?) and gradually decide to make out on a dance floor during a community celebration. This prompts a local homophobe to bark and complain and call them “dykes.” And then right away Joel steps in and decks the guy, which naturally angers Ellie…such a snarly-face.

I’m not saying Ramsey is an unskilled actress or anything; I’m saying I don’t like her frosty, edgelord vibe. And I really do dislike the branding of actors who refer to themselves as “they/them” (i.e., sexually fluid or ambivalent) while wearing breast-binders and oddly identifying as Christian and autistic / neurodivergent, not to mention being a former pescatarian as well as a onetime victim of anorexia nervosa, and being sorta kinda “vegan-ish.”

Bella is so bold, so brave. If only Cary Grant or Kate Hepburn had mustered the courage to be fully and unapologetically non-binary…if only Kate had broken out of confinement and worn her hair in a tight bun along with some chest-binders while playing Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story. Did Grant hide his autism? How long and hard did he struggle with his they/them-ness?

They, they, they, they, they, they….

Ellie’s youth and immunity mean viewers are unfortunately stuck with her unless the producers read the writing on the wall. But of course they won’t / can’t because Bella Ramsey is such a heavily branded Zoomer — an autistic they/them lesbian who’s worn breast-flatteners, etc.

Some actors have eyes that radiate and reach in and establish an immediate emotional rapport. You want their characters to win through or at least not be crushed by tumbling tides. I for one would be delighted if Bella were to vanish like that…poof! Her eyes are hard and frosty and oddly feral on some level. She’s almost like a new hybrid species. She’d actually be effective as some kind of fang-toothed daughter of Dracula.

Earlier this month I experienced a mixed reaction to Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne‘s Adolescence (Netflix). My reaction was basically “okay, an absorbing, blistering British social drama about a family dealing with their 13-year-old son being accused of a knifing murder of a teenage girl, an incident that seemingly stems from a virulent culture of incel-shaming and toxic masculinity (i.e., the influence of Andrew Tate) among teenage boys.

And yet I had heard that statistically-speaking, the Andrew Tate white-kid incel/manopshere factor in England wasn’t as much of a pervasive social malignancy as Adolescence had contended. I had heard, in fact, that immigrant kids from broken families were a much greater problem in terms of teenage stabbings.

I dismissed this allegation because I hadn’t seen any stats that backed this up, but more fundamentally I knew that if I were to post reliable stats that supported this view, I would immediately be slandered as a racist scumbag by the HE commentariat.

Yesterday I came upon a London.gov.uk press release from 2.10.22 — 38 months ago. It stated that as far as the city of London was concerned, the following was statistically true at the time: “Despite making up only 13% of London’s total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London’s knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators and 53% of knife crime perpetrators.”

Granted, Adolescence was inspired by the 2024 Southport stabbings as well as other 2023 and ’24 teenage stabbings in the U.K. Two, the statement doesn’t offer specific stats about teenaged perpetrators in the British equivalent of junior and senior high schools. And three, it doesn’t speifically argue with an allegation that a certain percentage of teenaged perpetrators are white, possibly Andrew Tate-influenced manosphere incels from normal mom-and-dad families.

We know, of course, why Thorne and Graham’s Netflix miniseries didn’t come within 50 miles of the london.gov.uk statistic in question. I don’t think I need to explain why.

I realize that the usual HE haters are going to say that only a racist at heart would allude to the London.gov statistic, and that the smarter thing would be to simply blow it off and go on my merry way. But Adolesence has stirred a lot of concerned-citizen discussion (“what should parents do about this ghastly problem?”) in recent weeks, and nobody has alluded to the possibility that teenage stabbings might have been caused or provoked by anything other than the angry incel-Andrew Tate factor. Have I missed something?

…who was born exactly 100 years and one day ago.

I know which Steiger performances I’m expected to praise, of course. On The Waterfront’s Charlie, the original lonely butcher in Delbert Mann’s televised Marty, Sergio Leone’s Duck, You Sucker, Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, the cultured serial killer in No Way To Treat A Lady (my second favorite), and, of course, the Dr. Pepper-sipping bohunk sheriff in Norman Jewison’s In The Heat of the Night.

And yet the Steiger performance that always comes to mind first and foremost is the cynical, perverse, sophisticated and ruthless Victor Kamarovsky in David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago.

I chatted with Steiger during a press schmooze at the ‘97 Montreal Film Festival (late August). A man of vague sorrow, unassuming, meditative, dressed in black. The death of Princess Diana (8.31.97) so upset Steiger that he got up and delivered an impromptu scolding that night about the motorbike paparazzi who had chased her and Dodi Fayed. Hey, man, don’t look at me…I’m Otis Ferguson with a touch of Neal Casady.