I’m sorry but for the last few months I’ve been under a distinct impression that everyone hates the obnoxiously aggressive Blake Lively for trying to destroy the life and career of poor Justin Baldoni.

So what’s going on here? “Accusations of sexual harassment” are “legally protected”? But trying to destroy a man’s career with questionable claims and agitated #MeToo hyperbole is cool?

Will someone please explain this dismissal to me in “regular guy standing on a sidewalk and eating a hot dog” terminology? Like I’m a six year old? King Henry II to Thomas Becket: “I’m an idiot then! Talk to me like I’m an idiot!”

Being a mostly rational adult, I understand and accept the rationale behind Lorelei Lee-styled money–whoring. Way of the world since time began, the nice things in life, girls just wanna, etc.

But in my heart of hearts and as unrealistic as that Picnic finale may be (i.e., Kim Novak deciding to take a flying leap with penniless William Holden), I want to believe in the unreliable, idealistic, non-transactional coupling of hearts and dreams. Teresa Wright and Dana Andrews at the finale of The Best Years of Our Lives…that kind of thing.

Money-whoring is to be expected, yes, but it’s bad for the soul.

I do, however, trust Variety’s Owen Gleiberman:

And the aging process, especially after the big six-oh, is rarely a kind or compassionate thing. But it cuts some of us a slight break.

Those favored with good genes, I mean, and who haven’t overly abused their bodies and souls with drugs and alcohol. If you at least half-resemble the person you were at age 21, you have reason to give thanks.

Consider what the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley and Mission San Fernando in particular looked like in 1873. I somehow never knew until this morning that the remains of Bob Hope, his wife Dolores and other Hopes are buried in a Mission-adjacent garden.

What the San Fernando Valley needed back then was water, but it took a visionary sociopath like Noah Cross** to make it all happen.

** Kidding — I meant to say William Mulholland.

HE to easy-lay types who recently saw and loved F1:

Please guys…please let me know who dies in F1 (6.27, Warner Bros.). You’ve all presumably seen Grand Prix so you know what happens to Yves Montand’s race-car driver. Death is built into this sport. It constantly hovers.

It can’t be Damson Idris because POCs aren’t allowed to die because the filmmakers would surely be accused and most likely found guilty of racism…they’d be tarred and feathered and run out of town.

So that leaves Pitt, but nobody (with the possible exception of Shi Joli) wants poor Brad to buy the farm so who dies? Surely not Javier Bardem or Kerry Condon.

The all-media screening happens on Tuesday, 6.24, only two days before the first commercial showings on Thursday, 6.26

There’s an earlier screening next week for “special people”.

Snapped last night inside the big Danbury AMC, prior to catching Ballerina. Obviously the people behind Fantastic Four: First Steps (Disney, 7.25) have no shame. Has Pedro Pascal ever said no to anything or anyone? And the gingered Joseph Quinn, who will play the physically dissimilar George Harrison for Sam Mendes later this year…this, ladies and germs, is whoredom personified.

The first story appeared today (6.3.25) in the New York Post. After a seven year-old boy was killed in a traffic accident in Gastonia, North Carolina, his parents were charged with involuntary manslaughter for having allowed the boy to walk to a nearby store with his 10-year-old brother — basically for failing to helicopter.

The second story is an HE account of an episode that happened when I was eight years old — an adventurous, six-mile hike I embarked upon with a seven-year-old girlfriend.

That’s chicken feed!

And how many of these films did Yahoo Entertainment’s Kelsey Weekman write about as she went along? Anyone can watch films on the Côte d’Azur in mid-May, but you also have to man up and journalistically explore cinematic meaning while plumbing the very depths of your soul.

Weekman isn’t so much a proverbial suffering scribe as an on-camera personality who does breezy lah-lah videos. (Light on the soul-plumbing.) She did, however, file a few video reports in Cannes so no harm nor foul.

My own modest tally of 22 films over 11 days paled alongside Tomris Laffly’s Herculean ordeal of catching 40 films within the same time frame, but how many of those 40 did Laffly-the-screening-slayer bang out 500-word reviews of? Screenings plus timely filings are what separate the men from the boys and the women from the girls.

Plus what about catching Directors Fortnight films deep in the bowels of the J.W. Marriott, Kelsey?

And you and your husband (what’s his story?) blew out of town before Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, easily the best of the festival, began to be shown? And you missed (or had no interest in) Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague? And you liked the grimly agonizing Sound of Falling? Good God in heaven…why?

Otherwise you should live your life, manage your affairs and achieve your goals cold sober. There’s really no other way.

I kinda like floating around on Ketamine from time to time but I wouldn’t touch Adderall or any other speed-like substances with a ten-foot pole.

Elon Musk to himself: “I can do what I want as long as I stay lucid and keep it together and, you know, maintain a respectable front.”

You may see a casual shot of Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds and David Wayne on the set of The Tender Trap (‘55). I see that also, of course, but my eyes go right to Sinatra’s elevator heels, which may or may not have added two and 1/2 to three inches. Sinatra stood between 5’7” and 5’8” just out of the shower. Wayne was also 5’7”; Reynolds stood 5’2”.

…but Netflix is probably a fitting home for Richard Liinklater’s Nouvelle Vague, which the streamer has reportedly acquired for $4 million.

It was one thing for Cannes cinephiles who saw this reverent, affectionate tribute to the French New Wave and the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in particular…it was one thing for that crowd to go “whoopee!” But what the odds that Joe and Jane Popcorn would care, much less pay to see it theatrically?

Here’s what I wrote hours after seeing Nouvelle Vague in Cannes:

The toughest, cruelest, most unsentimental comment was posted yesterday in response to Jordan Ruimy’s story about the Netflix deal:

Nouvelle Vague is not “embarrassing fan fiction”. It’s a clever, spirited time trip…a mild-mannered, light-hearted, generally effervescent revisiting of the Breathless legend. This aside, what Doeberman wrote is reasonably accurate.