HE’s 2026 Cannes Film Festival crash pad (shared) is significantly larger than last year’s hellishly small studio (i.e., the one that lost electric power…black as night, black as coal… when I delicately tried to retrieve a piece of pita bread from a toaster). Living room + bedroom, etc. It’s also more expensive, of course. In the Old Town section, up a hill.

Margot’s Got Money Troubles (Apple TV, 4.15) is basically about Elle Fanning‘s lead character using OnlyFans to generate much-needed extra income. Costarring Nicole Kidman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman (I’ll never, ever recover from that upstairs bedroom scene in The Last Of Us…don’t ask), Marcia Gay Harden, Michael Angarano, Greg Kinnear. OnlyFans subscribers are a fairly primitive bunch, no? They don’t respond to coy, costumey, role-playing presentations — they generally want basic stuff.

Luca Guadagnino on Timothee Chalamet’s ballet-and-opera-related faux pax: “I am not on social media and don’t understand how one [single] comment can become a planetary polemic. Maybe Timothée could have spared himself, but he’s young, smart and sensitive, and he fears that cinema could become marginal. And that’s exactly why every form of imagination should be nurtured. We must unite the arts, not separate them.”

I’ve always hated this photo because it makes me look like Richard “Jaws” Kiel.

Read more

Ezra Klein, founder and former editor in chief of Vox, is a prominent N.Y. Times opinion columnist and podcaster. His basic political-philosophical inclination is left-progressive. He’s certainly not a moderate or a “sensible centrist” in the HE mode — he’s an effing lefty. So it’s highly significant, I feel, that he included the following paragraph in a 4.12.26 essay called “Why There Is No Liberal Joe Rogan“:

HE translation: The woke cancel-culture brigade, which, during the height of woke lunacy (2018-2024), was primarily driven by the white-male-hating punishment instincts of urban Millennial and Zoomer women along with generally supportive sentiments from the trans community, wealthy suburban liberals and kowtowing corporate culture, has all but ruined the Democratic party brand.

Election-wise, 2024-wise amd Kamala Harris-wise in particular, wokeys have become the bane of Democrats’ existence. Many of them have been turning down the gas flame since the woke thing began to lose steam a couple of years ago, but the sooner these maniacs can be expelled from the Democratic community altogether, the better it’ll be all around. Joe Schmoe thinks they’re electoral poison, and so do I.

A divine and merciful Donald Trump blessing a resting (ailing? dying?) Paul Newman as Judge Roy Bean…what does this have to do with Trump’s criticism of Pope Leo?

And what’s with the winged, shadowy, flying monkey demon floating in the golden clouds behind Jesus H. Trump…the figure with the Statue of Liberty crown and flanked by two U.S. soldiers?

“To be happy, you must eliminate two things in your head. The fear of a bad future and the memory of a bad past.” — Seneca the younger.

I try to live with a loose-shoe, “everything’s everything”, be-here-now, zen-hepcat attitude, but I will never be free of the above. They will always haunt me. The only things that keep the HE boat afloat are (a) the love of great or very good or hugely enjoyable movies from the past and (b) unquenchable excitement about great movies yet to come.

Monday, 4.13 update: Rep. Eric Swalwell, under seige since last Friday over alllegations of sexual assault, has announced that he’ll be resigning from his Congressional seat.

Earlier: This isn’t about Eric Swalwell‘s presumed guilt or predatory self-destruction…this is about “who fingered him?”

I think there was a real concern among Calfornia Democrats that if Swalwell landed a nomination for governor against one of the Republicans (Chad Bianco or Steve Hilton) that it was possible that rightie operatives might uncover and then push those sexual harassment claims, thus causing Swalwell’s campaign to collapse. Which would leave either Bianco or Hilton as governor.

I think the Dems wanted Swalwell torpedoed for this reason. Safer for their own interests to take him down now rather than allow the possibility of those rightwing wolves finishing him off in the fall.

With Swalwell having just suspended his campaign, the last two standing Dems are U.S. Rep. Katie Porter vs. sensible billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer. I think Steyer will prevail.

Don Siegel‘s Dirty Harry aside, I never much cared for the Harry Callahan films. Simplistic plotting, crudely written characters, pulp foolery. But now I love this scene from Magnum Force (’73). I love the moral clarity aspect. I just wish the hijackers in this 1973 sequence were more believable. They look and behave like third-rate TV series villains. I don’t believe that their dialogue was written by John Milius and Michael Cimino. I think it was half-improvised.

Malcom in the Middle creator Linwood Boomer, 70, has been married to Tracy Katsky since…I’m not sure but a few decades, probably since the ’80s or certainly the early ’90s. They have four children, three of whom have announced as queer.

Best blended comment of the bunch: “Three queer kids out of four? Influenced by something none of us had never even heard of ten years ago? The majority of people don’t want to see this shit or have it shoved down their throat. If this was happening with fish, environmentalists would be asking questions about chemicals in the river water.”

"Three out of four of our kids are queer."

Wife of the creator of Malcolm in the Middle. pic.twitter.com/melCP4GRxh

— Gay Not Queer (@Gaynotqueer1) April 11, 2026

Sometimes bad (i.e., amoral, corrupt, predatory) people are instrumental in bringing about good things in a roundabout way, and sometimes not so roundabout.

Before watching this “New Rules” riff I honestly didn’t know that Saudi Arabian ruler Mohammed bin Salman, who enforces repressive authoritarianism and has abused human rights activists and women’s rights activists…before watching this I had never considered the apparent fact that MBS is not a total monster, and that he’s liberalized things to a certain degree. Life is complex and certainly not binary in terms of good and bad actions. Complex mixtures are often the general rule.

“Lapses in judgment”?

I have no way of knowing how valid or invalid the sexual assault allegations against Rep. Eric Swalwell may be, but his admission that he’s not perfect and may be responsible for errors of judgement indicates at the very least that Swalwell is a randy fellow who may have grappled with impulse control on certain boozy occasions.

It’s very, very hard to believe that a major Democratic legislator of Swalwell’s stature, a guy who’s inescapably attuned to the continuing power of the #MeToo movement and therefore knows how quickly and easily the professional life of a potential assaulter can be destroyed by accusers at the drop of a hat…it’s very hard to believe that Swalwell would be stupid enough to behave like a coarse Hungarian rapist.

It seems possible that the alleged liberties that Swalwell may have taken with his four female accusers were uncool but not strictly “criminal”, certainly not in a classic pre-#MeToo sense.

Forgive me for sounding like Ronald Colman‘s Professor Lightcap in The Talk of the Town, but back in the old days “sexual assault” literally involved physical assault and brute attempts to physically overpower a victim. That’s not the deal these days. Today’s definitions are much broader.

It sounds as if Swalwell may have behaved more or less like JFK did in the early ’60s with Fiddle (Priscilla Wear) and Faddle (Jill Cowen) and Mimi Alford and all the others.

Many Washington legislators who’ve had affairs and girlfriends on the side (i.e., guys like Gary Hart) have probably said to themselves “JFK did this and got away with it so why can’t I?”

Read more