I’m sorry but between :37 and :50 Sam Neill‘s eyes look fake. Oh, and I hate, hate, HATE the jowly, neck-beard ginger guy with the purple Xfinity golf shirt. If only a T-Rex could come along and make Mr. Xfiniti howl and scream like a warthog as his bones are snapped and crunched between the T-Rex’s jaws.

Antoine Fuqua‘s Michael pops on 4.24.26 — a bit less than 12 weeks hence. 29 year-old Jaafar Jackson seems assured in the titular role, but I’m especially interested in Juliano Krue Valdi as young Michael.

14 months ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit reported that Lupita Nyong’o had joined the cast of Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey (Universal, 7.16).

We’ve all since read the rumor that Nyong’o will play Helen of Troy and perhaps even a double role as Helen and her half-sister Clytemnestra, who was the wife of Agamemnon**, king of Mycenae.

We’ve also read that Elon Musk disapproves.

If Nyong’o has indeed been cast as Helen, we all know what this is — i.e., Nolan playing the diversity-for-appearance’s-sake game, or otherwise indulging in woke presentism.

Since the late teens Hollywood’s progressive comintern has been dictating that all historical films have to adopt the practice of presentism, meaning that all casts have to reflect social values as they should be in terms of inclusion and representation rather than how they actually may have been during the time of the story.

But let’s bend over backwards and consider the Nyong’o casting on its own historical merits.

First, the 42-year-old Nyong’o is too old to play Helen, who was a nubile 20something hottie when she ran off with Paris, the Trojan prince.

Secondly, historians seem to agree that ancient Greek culture wasn’t exactly racially enlightened, much less wokey-woke. Cruel or dismissive racial attitudes were apparently evident within ancient Greek culture, as they have been in many other cultures over the centuries. It’s been written that the Greeks had a term for POCs — Aethiopes (“Ethiopians”), which in Greek meant “burnt-faced ones.” Does that sound like a term of respect or elevation?

AI sez that “ancient Greek and Roman authors, including Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus, Ovid and Martial, perpetuated anti-black, xenophobic, and proto-racist attitudes that essentialized non-Greeks/Romans, particularly Africans, as inferior, exotic, or servile.”

According to most sources, including Homer‘s Iliad and Odyssey, Helen was the daughter of Spartan king Tyndareus and his wife, Queen Leda.

Mythology says Helen’s actual father was Zeus, who apparently had sex with Leda while inhabiting the body of a swan. How was that physically possible?

If Nyong’o is, in Nolan’s mind, Helen and her half-sister Clytemnestra is also of African (or Kenyan) ancestry, it would naturally follow that Tyndareus and Leda were themselves African. Find me the respected historian or chronicler of ancient Greek mythology who will support that notion.

An overwhelming majority of classic-minded film buffs subscribe to the idea that Helen of Troy resembled Rossana Podesta, who starred in Robert Wise‘s Helen of Troy (Warner Bros., 1.26.56). Brigitte Bardot played Andraste, Helen’s servant or handmaiden.

** You want oddball casting? Nolan’s Agememnon is played by, of all the actors in the whole wide world, effing Benny Safdie.

… is intended to discourage internet bums like myself from hanging around for too long. That’s the basic idea. Drive customers slowly crazy with moderately awful MOR music…mediocre love ballads sung by Karen Carpenter, Robert Flack, Luther Vandross, the Fifth Dimension….not so awful that patrons can’t tolerate the songs for a half-hour or so, but impossible to listen to for much longer as they gradually poison and putrify.

No, seriously….Aaron Couch’s 1.30.26 THR story sounds all too familiar, unfortunately.

The ADD fast-forward trend has been increasing over the last 12 to 15 years, and certainly over the last ten.

That said, I could probably come up with a fairly long list of acclaimed films that I’ve also had trouble sitting through, or have even dozed through portions of. Unlike the vast majority of snooty, know-it-all film crickets and essayists, I’m just being honest. This is mostly a failure on my part, of course, but in the case of, say, Mascha Schilinski‘s Sound of Falling or Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee…

I’m sorry but this is mildly effective as far as it goes:

@bryanjacoby This is what it would be like if the MSM of the United States existed in the Star Wars universe. #news #meme #starwars #unitedstates ♬ original sound – Bryan Jacoby

We all understand what Ethan Hawke is talking about here, obviously, but my first reaction, frankly, was that he could be talking about the climate of woke terror that began to permeate the Hollywood-journo realm in ’18.

The Robespierres finally began to weaken and dissipate in mid ’24, thank God, but they’re still with us to a certain extent.

Hawke’s 2026 words could be my own seven or eight years ago: “I never felt scared about what I was gonna say until ’18 or thereabouts. In which you feel, like, ‘oh, I have to be careful.’ There’s a fear in the air that I’ve never felt before. And it’s not America.”

Brett Ratner‘s Melania (Amazon MGM, 2.2.24) is about as empty and unrevealing and bland as a well-polished, kiss-ass documentary could possibly be.

It’s a cover-up thing — pure gloss and lacquer, no vulnerability or emotional honesty except for two moments…no sharing, no letting down the proverbial hair…gleaming surfaces, cliche-ridden narration, stiletto heels and fake eyelashes that never come off.

And I’m sorry but it is a little bit like Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest (A24, 2.2.24).

Glazer’s WWII film conveys the denial mindset of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig and their kids…sitting pretty in a spacious home next to the camp, separated by a 12-foot wall…a sizable kitchen, a horse stable, a nice garden, a nearby lake…a privileged, well–ordered life while Hoss manages the industrial–scale murder of hundreds of thousands.

Melania is also about denial and insulation. (Hell, I felt detached myself.) It’s basically a shallow and surface-y infomercial about a brief chapter in the life of Melania Trump — her last 20 days of being a semi-private citizen before the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. President on 1.20.25.

Separated from the real world by a thick membrane of limitless wealth, security guys in black suits, an abundant wardrobe, fawning assistants, tank-sized SUVs…you get the idea.

Buy your ticket and watch the extremely well-tended, exquisitely dressed Melania living a life of flush banality…maximum privelege and insulation while hubby makes plans for the persecution of wokeys, the rousting of illegal immigrants, the restoration of male-female simplicity, the implementation of authoritarian rule, the punishing of his political enemies by hook or crook, the weakening of the U.S. economy through tariffs and the general undermining of democracy.

Melania touches bottom when she recalls the death of her mom (Amalija Knavs) during an evening visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It also briefly connects when she sings along to Michael Jackson‘s “Billie Jean”. But that’s all there is.

At the very end, an exhausted Melania finally takes her stiletto heels off. Vulnerability at last!

One anecdotal allegation stands out. The second-hand allegation, I mean, about a 14 year-old girl having allegedly “bitten” a 40something Donald Trump “while performing oral sex.” She was then allegedly “hit in the face” after laughing about the biting.

There are so many uncorraborated, unverified stories. And there are many more. Most of them creepy as hell. Demonic.

N.Y. Times, posted on 1.30.26:

Ten months ago I mentioned that the four actors who will soon be playing the Fab Four in Sam Mendes’ quartet of Beatle flicks (due in early ‘28) are, being in their early 30s, simply too old to inhabit the original fellows.

The Beatles were in their early 20s when things ignited, and their late 20s when they broke up.

You can film-flam and tapdance all you want, but unless the four films are set during the ‘69 and ‘70 downturn period, when the lads were a bit older and three of them had beards, it’ll be simply, biologically impossible for Paul Mescal, Harris Dickinson, Barry Koehgan and Joseph Quinn to become Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, respectively.

My concern was slightly lessened yesterday when I glanced at the four officially released photos. “Yes, all right, maybe,” I told myself. “Mendes is indeed focusing on their closing Get Back / Abbey Road chapter.”

But wait…wait!…not as far as that photo of Mescal’s Macca is concerned. It has him wearing a standard 1964 soup-bowl cut and one of those high-collared Carnaby Street shirts that they all wore in the late ‘63 / early ‘64 break-out period. When McCartney (dob: 6.18.42) was 22. Mescal looks older than his years right now..,he’s 30 but looks 36 or 37.