Charles Durning, drafted at age 20, was 21 on D-Day (6.6.44). Durning’s Lieutenant Snyder in The Sting (’73) and his Jack Amsterdam in True Confessions (’82) were gutsy, snappy performances but this recollection is as real as real got for Durning…his own horrific story.
Month: June 2026
What Kind of Weenie Suburban Husband…
.. goes to his wife and says “oh, mommy, a scary prostitute offered to give me a blowjob inside a parked car at the Norwalk Walmart, but I resisted…I kept my honor”?
What kind of a man would even think of running to his wife and going “waaahhh, I was almost sexually compromised”? You babygirl. You pathetic little mouse.
This apparently actually happened today.
“You’re So Pusillanimous….Oh, Yeah”
Someone who lacks courage, resolution, determination…an implication of cowardice, faintheartedness, or being overly timid when faced with a challenge.
It’s Over for Spencer Pratt…Edged Out, Finito
Nithya Raman, a 44-year old woke chairholder within the Los Angeles City Council and a Kamala Harris lookalike and sound-alike, has nudged Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral primary.
Raman, who has a weak speaking voice, will face the current mayor, 72 year-old Karen Bass, in the general election. Bass will most likely lose because of having been in Africa when the Palisades fire started….period.
Some righties (Trump included) have claimed that vote-count fraud has influenced this election…I don’t believe that.
Spencer Pratt on what he’ll do if Karen Bass or Nithya Raman wins the mayoral election pic.twitter.com/VCUuTZwMXG
— The Adam Carolla Show (@AdamCarollaShow) May 16, 2026
Middle-Aged White Guys Haven’t Been Allowed…
…to behave this rebelliously in a dry, cool, fuck-it, smart-ass way in many, many years…Hollywood doesn’t even allow them to be moderately approvable cyphers. They have to be selfish, malignant takers and abusers…full stop.
“Don’t Jinx The Knicks Run”
…you fat egoistic fuck. If the Knicks lose it’ll be totally your fault…period. Mess with the juju at your own peril.
Marshall Fine: “At some point in the game, they’ll show Trump on the Jumbotron and the crowd will boo him lustily. The finals are on ABC, which has been having FCC troubles because of Kimmel and The View. Will ABC have the courage to broadcast the boos? Or, like NBC w/the US Tennis Open last fall, will they mute the sound so the boos don’t go out over the airwaves, to protect the sensitivities of Fearless Leader and his followers?”
Humdrum Statement of Fact
A night or two ago I happened to watch about 20 minutes’ worth of From Russia With Love via HD Criterion streaming. It looked a tiny bit soft, and even flirted with fuzzy here and there. Criterion is doing it no favors.
Tonight I re-watched this 1963 Terence Young film via Bluray, and it was almost astonishing how much sharper, razor specific, bountifully colored and more richly textured it was. I’m not saying anything new here, but there’s just no comparing Bluray and streaming. Physical media forever.
From Russia With Love was the last film JFK saw at the White House (the evening of 11.20.63…a Wednesday).
Spielberg’s Aliens Can’t Help But Underwhelm
I don’t see how Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure Day (Universal, 6.12) is going to blow that many minds.
Daniel Kellner (the jug-eared Josh O’Connor) wants the entire world to know that non-humans have been hanging out and more or less hiding (forcibly hidden?) on earth for decades, and decides to go full whistleblower. He finds a spiritual ally in weather reporter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who’s been inexplicably tuning into alien hum signals and aural sub-currents.
Naturally the shadowy, glum-faced Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the CEO of Wardex Corporation and prime architect of the cover-up of alien sub-habitation all along, wants this earth-shaking news suppressed…business as usual. Colman Domingo‘s Hugo Wakefield, a Wardex defector, is a big advocate for disclosure blah blah.
It goes without saying that Daniel and Margaret, like Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon in the nearly half-century-old Close Encounters, don’t become romantically involved. Mr. Jug Ears is putting it to Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), a former nun. And Margaret’s “partner” is a dude named Jackson (Wyatt Russell).
Are the aliens cousins of the original Kanamits, who 65 years ago were looking to “serve man”? That would be the most enjoyable scenario, of course, but you know this won’t happen.
Give me one good reason why visiting aliens would be kept under wraps or imprisoned or disguised or whatever the deal is. What’s the point, Colin and other powers-that-be? To prevent everyday humans from experiencing “cultural shock and disorientation”? What are aliens going to convey at the end of the long dreary day? The scientific means to produce greater amounts of food? That they’re spiritual emissaries from some holy faraway place who are looking to turn us on in a Timothy Leary way? Mass illumination?
Okay, so there are other civilizations out there just like ours…big deal.
Wait…Daniel and Margaret finally realize they’re aliens themselves, their memories having been somehow suppressed or wiped clean by Wardex when they were kids. Right? Will it also be revealed that Dario Amodei is an alien? (I’m just winging it here.)
He-Man Went Limp and Soft At The Plexes
In the view of Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro, young fellas who were fans of the Masters of the Universe action figures and animated series in the 1980s…these guys, born in the early to mid ‘70s, are now wheezing, over–the–hill “old men.”
These totally pathetic, beard-stubbled, pot-bellied geezers, burping and belching and farting and scratching their sweaty balls and probably pissing in their pants half the time, repped the largest demo that saw Masters of the Universe this weekend.
Alas, the MGM/Amazon release sorta kinda died domestically with a lousy $29.3M.
Pelley’s Tears of Rage and Lament
The 60 Minutes way of looking at power and politics has always been cautiously rebellious or at least iconoclastic in a decorous sort of way. They’ve almost always represented the proverbial elite liberal Manhattan newsroom view of things. (Which I’ve mostly agreed with over the decades so no problem.) All hail Al Pacino‘s Lowell Bergman!
But in this sense 60 Minutes has always had its own thumb on the proverbial scale. The show has always espoused a branded 60 Minutes attitude or mentality.
That said, I don’t think Bari Weiss is the devil, or that she’s out to Trumpify or smother this show in any appalling way. She wants to modify the elitism and the entrenched upscale midtown Manhattan narrative, but she’s no Trump stooge.
Bill Maher last Friday: “I watch 60 Minutes every week. I have since I was a kid. If I hadn’t heard all the buzz in the media about the recent rancor, would I ever notice that [the show] was in any way different? I don’t think I would. [And] I don’t feel that Scott Pelley is a national treasure. I never liked him…sorry, I just never did. And companies change hands all the time. I feel like we see everything through such a partisan lens.”
Fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley to N.Y. Times‘ Lulu Garcia-Navarro: “My impression at the time [of the postponement of the CECOT El Salvador prison segment] was that Bari Weiss was representing…that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the [Trump] administration….just constantly looking out for the views of the president, which we had reported but it was never enough…for the first time in my career, the balance was off.
“But the inexperience and incompetence was the bigger problem.”
Garcia-Navaro: “Do you think Bari Weiss needs to be removed?”
Pelley: “Oh, gosh, yes! She brings an ideology into [this situation] that is just anathema [to 60 Minutes culture], and a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen before. There is no democracy without journalism. It cannot be done. It is possible to land this plane. But right now, in my view, CBS News is on fire.”
Panahi’s Next Film Is Hereby Guaranteed to Collect Another Palme d’Or
Press release received this morning from Mansour Jahani, an independent and international film journalist: “Jafar Panahi, the Iranian director whose most recent film, It Was Just An Accident, won the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, was sentenced to one year of imprisonment and a two-year ban on leaving the country for the crime of propaganda against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“Branch 26 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Tehran, headed by Judge Iman Afshari, has rejected the appeal and confirmed the absentia sentence.”
Panahi’s lawyer Mostafa Nili: “According to the initial verdict, Jafar Panahi was sentenced to one year in prison on charges of propaganda against the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was also banned from leaving the country for two years and banned from membership in political and social groups and organizations.”
“The evidence for this verdict, as stated in the indictment, includes the following: making an underground and problematic film against the government, supporting some security convicts including Fatemeh Sepehri, Raheleh Rahemipour, Hossein Ronaghi, Mohammad Nourizad, Mehdi Mahmoudian, Abolfazl Ghadiani, and… Supporting the protests, supporting the slogan ‘Women, Life, Freedom’, signing and publishing a statement about the truckers’ strike, blackening the situation in the country, and republishing a clip featuring the singing of the anthem ‘O Iran’ in protest against the issuance and execution of death sentences.”
It goes without saying (I hope) that HE deplores this repressive sentence.
The Wokester Executioners’ Song
In a nine-day-old New Yorker piece titled “Backrooms, Obsession, and Hollywood’s Zoomer-Horror Renaissance”, Justin Chang celebrates the bottom-of-the-barrel cinematic taste buds of audiences (mainly Zoomers) who’ve made these two recently-released horror films into box-office legends.
Is it a good thing that Obsession and Backrooms have caught on and made so much dough? Yes, of course — any theatrical hit these days is good for the goose and the gander.
But what do these twin successes say about 2026 movie culture in general as well as the aesthetic or spiritual lives of the under-45 set?
They say that (a) a certain kind of subversive, high-octane element has risen out of YouTube (a good thing), but also that (b) Obsession fans, a group of whom I sat with in a theatre a few days ago, aren’t especially hip or discerning. Some of them, no offense, sounded to me like under-educated serfs. A couple of dudes sitting behind me sounded like outright mongrels.
And I love this Chang sentence that appears at the top of paragraph #11:
Uhhm, Justin? The vast majority of dramas released in this country within the past two or three years (as well as a healthy percentage of those shown during last month’s Cannes Film Festival) highlighted white male cisgender villains…dudes “whose unexamined selfishness turns out to have horrific consequences for others.”
Straight white males are the reigning dramatic ogres of our age…objects of untethered mass loathing…clobbered recipients of ultra-negative judgments from an urban wokester generation that celebrates, in some circles at least, the babygirl aesthetic.
A John Lithgow quote from Jesse Green‘s three-month-old N.Y. Times profile of the 80-year-old actor…a compassionate, fair-minded thought if I’ve ever heard one:
“Good people are capable of bad things.”
What Lithgow meant when he said “bad” was behavior, thoughts or tossed-off twitter posts that elite know-it-alls regard as coarse or questionable or unsavory.
Is there one aspect of the woke-mob philosophy that even briefly considers this viewpoint? No, there is not. During their tyrannical reign of peak terror (2018 to 2024), wokeys believed in dunking the witch in the pond until dead…period.
I somehow missed, by the way, Lithgow’s admission in his 2011 book, “Drama,” that in 1977 he revelled in a year-long affair with Liv Ullmann. (It happened when they were costarring in a B’way revival of Anna Christie.) Lithgow was 32 and married; Ullman was 38 or 39. Imagine the acrobatic throbbing! Imagine the unhooked pots and pans clattering on the kitchen floor!