Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review of Sam Raimi‘s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness delivers not just an explicit warning, but a confirmation of what I’ve been sensing from the get-go, and why I decided against attending last Monday’s all-media screening in Los Angeles.

Doctor Strange “may do temporary damage to your central nervous system,” Lane writes, “yet it’s not unenlightening. For one thing, it clarifies the purpose of a multiverse. (I was startled to find the word being used by the poet and critic Allen Tate almost a century ago, in 1923: ‘I suppose Keats was insincere in his letters because he exposes a multiverse.’ Don’t tell the Scarlet Witch.)

“This has nothing to do with astrophysical speculation and plenty to do with the special-effects teams, for whom the multiverse means party time. It gives them carte blanche—which never bodes well—to dish up anything they fancy. The one smidgen of wit, as opposed to visual overkill, is the sight of a storm in an actual teacup, complete with raging waves.

“Raimi’s movie could also be of interest to sociologists. What stirred the fans around me, causing them to levitate in their seats, was not the film’s emotional sway (for it has none) but the miraculous visitation of characters from other Marvel flicks, many of them played by embarrassed-looking British actors, whose every entrance was met with ejaculations of joy.

“The cinema, at such moments, becomes a place of worship. I sat there, strewn with popcorn rubble, lost in the liturgy, jealous of the true believers, and baffled by their incomprehensible gods.”

The outcry triggered by the Frank Langella Fall of the House of Usher incident — i.e., getting whacked for mild crossing-the-line offenses — boils down to an issue of degree. How to deal with questionable on-set behavior that isn’t that bad within the greater scheme of things?

Nobody wants silence or indifference if an actress believes she’s been violated to some degree, even if the violation was a matter of small potatoes. If an actor does something that most of us would regard as vaguely uncool while performing a scene, appropriate measures should ensue. The vague offender should be taken aside and told in respectful but direct terms to stop being vaguely uncool or overly familiar or whatever the complaint is about. If an actor is any kind of pro they’ll listen and acknowledge and adapt.

But when is it appropriate for an actress with a legit complaint to “go nuclear” over a relatively minor transgression? That’s what Langella’s costar allegedly did — she “walked off the set” and didn’t return, according to Langella’s account.

This is also what Keke Palmer allegedly did when costar Bill Murray pulled her pigtail (or something in that general nyuk-nyuk, horsing-around realm) on the set of Being Mortal. Palmer was apparently inconsolable and is possibly still feeling that way. How else to interpret the fact that Being Mortal was shut down two weeks ago (on 4.20.22) and yet producers still haven’t announced that the film is resuming production? How many weeks of fretting does an actress need to recover from on-set joshing around when the josher has solemnly apologized?

Under these circumstances was “going nuclear” really necessary? Any professional actor will confirm that there’s a certain take-it-as-it-comes, turn-the-other-cheek, rough-and-tumble quality that comes with working with other thesps under the usual professional pressures. Something unexpected or unwelcome might occasionally happen, but sometimes it’s the better part of wisdom to just roll with that shit, as in water off a duck’s ass.

As we speak the presumption is that Langella may now be regarded as a risky hire (if not a cautionary tale by way of persona non grata) because of what “happened.”

But ask yourself this: If you were a producer would you want to hire an actress who has gone nuclear over her leg being touched or being hugged or having heard an off-color joke of some kind? Put another way, if you were a producer could you imagine saying to your casting colleagues, “You know that interesting actress whose complaint led to a temporary shutdown of a Netflix show and re-casting a major role and re-shooting weeks’ worth of material? I really want to hire her for my next film. She just has a certain quality that is perfect for a certain character. What do you guys think?”

And what about the idea of an actor submitting to the reality of a character and going with that, at least as far as a scene in question is concerned? The offended actress was playing the “young wife” of Langella’s Roderick Usher character, right? Let’s imagine what Langella and the actress in question were professionally obliged to imagine on that fateful day (3.25.22) — that Usher and his wife are real people involved in an actual marriage, and involved in some sort of physically intimate moment.

If you were Rodrick Usher’s wife would you freak out if your husband touched your leg or gave you a hug or said something a little bit rude or uncalled for? All marriages encounter rough patches and dicey situations, and a certain flexibility or tolerance is necessary to weather them.

From Sasha Stone‘s “Frank Langella and the Climate of Fear,” posted today [5.6.22] on Awards Daily:

“If there is more to the story, let it be told. If it was more than an actress upset that Langella broke rules that the ‘intimacy coordinator’ laid out, then fine — let’s hear it. But if this was IT**? If this really was the whole thing? The actress [who went nuclear] on the set of The Fall of the House of Usher really should not be an actress. She is in the wrong business. Acting requires you to access authentic humalk behavior. If a man and a woman are doing a love scene and he has to be told where to put his hands, it is not going to look authentic. It’s going to look artificial and stupid.

“If we’re talking about Last Tango in Paris or Don’t Look Now when going for authenticity really did blur the lines, that’s one thing. Here, they were both fully clothed. If THAT is too much for this actress, if she is THAT fragile…? She should do something else, or play a different part. She should look at the script and say ‘a love scene with a grown male?…oh, I’m not strong enough to do that because I’m easily triggered by hands on my body.’ That is called protecting yourself.

“But having to pull back on authenticity because the actress can’t handle it? Netflix should film a series about THIS story. I can promise you it would be a lot more interesting than one frozen in fear with intimacy coordinators scurrying about.

“At some point, we have to stop treating grown women like children, or like they’re made of glass. Actors this nervous should not be actors. I would not even want ‘intimacy coordinators’ on set. I don’t like ‘sensitivity readers.’

“The problem is that young adults [Millennials, Zoomers] seem to have been raised to believe that the world must be safe for them. But guess what, folks? That isn’t how it works. Take a look at Ukraine. Do you think any of those young people have a world made safe for them? The world is not a safe place. It is a dangerous place. Micromanaging art to accommodate overly sensitive feelings renders art useless.

“Someday there will be great books and great movies written about this moment. No one is ever going to believe that we once lived through a time when a famous and talented actor was fired because he touched a woman on the leg during a love scene where both were fully clothed.

“The truth is, Langella wasn’t fired for that reason. It was because he didn’t apologize, or, in effect, confess as a witch and live. To have apologized, he would have sold himself out, and admitted he’d done something ‘wrong.’

“Every young person should be told that the world is never going to be made safe for them. They have to become strong to survive it. Strong inside, strong outside. The last thing we need is writers, directors, comedians, and yes, actors to play it safe. We need art to express authentic human experiences — good, bad, and ugly so that they can be wrested from our own hearts. We need this to prevent madness. Frank Langella knew that. Edgar Allen Poe certainly knew that.”

** off-color jokes, a single instance of leg touching, cavalier boomer vibes.

Humor has to be simultaneously accessible to the dumbest sector of the audience, and at the same time enjoyed by the sharpest and most ahead-of-the-curve tools in the shed. Fuxley covers are satirical but not nonsensical. So what’s the idea here? The horse has been ramming the flannel-shirt guy and is now suspicious that he’s being cheated on with the guy and the dishy blonde about to have a little hey-hey in the hayloft? If that’s not it, I’m honestly stumped as to what the title could mean.

Why did Isaiah Lee, 23, attack Dave Chappelle the other night? Rolling Stone is quoting his 31 year-old brother, Aaron Lee, who says, almost anecdotally, that Isaiah “has been in and out of Los Angeles homeless shelters for the past decade and struggles with mental illness.”

Aaron added that Isaiah “doesn’t have any type of animosity toward [Chappelle] that I know about…it could have definitely been a factor, but I really don’t know.”

I’ve just been through a grueling moving period, and it hasn’t ended yet.

Attending to endless details and packing endless boxes in WeHo and taking them to the post office, sending the VW Passat back east on a big hauling truck, and then flying with Anya and a wailing Katya on an Alaskan Airlines red-eye last Tuesday night, and without a wink of sleep.

My system was knocked flat by this. Now I’m consumed by unpacking. Fatigue, lack of mental focus, sudden nap attacks.

Try doing all this crap and see how productive you are with a daily column, ya pricks ya.

That aside, I’ve been genuinely terrified of sitting through Everything Everywhere All At Once, and I’m certainly not paying good money to see it. (No streaming options as we speak.) Plus I would rather shove razor-sharp Exacto knives into my eyes rather than see the new bullshit Dr. Strange flick.

I apologize for not seeing Vortex, the latest Gaspar Noe which screened in Cannes last July but has only just shown up theatrically. (There’s no trusting the 90% Rotten Tomatoes score, of course.) I’ll catch it this weekend in Manhattan.

The next significant screening will be Top Gun: Maverick, on the morning of Tuesday, 5.10. I leave for Cannes on Sunday, 5.15.

99.4% of the time, a woman is a human born with XX chromosomes, a uterus, female sexual organs (i.e., no schlongola), smaller feet and a mellower, more humanistic, less territorial attitude about life.

I’m sorry if that upsets a certain percentage of well-meaning persons out there.

Geraldo Rivera on “The Five”: “Shame on Neil Gorsuch, shame on Amy Comey Barrett, shame on Ryan Kavanaugh” for saying they would uphold Roe in confirmation hearings and then doing the opposite…”they lied.”

I never thought I’d be praising a Rivera opinion voiced on Fox News, but this is one such occasion.

Gerardo’s rant begins around the 3:10 mark:

I know that the general view is that Johnny Depp & attorneys have presented a better case than Amber Heard and counsel, at least as far as public opinion is concerned. But Heard’s testimony today struck me as earnest and compelling.

So who’s partly lying and who’s mostly telling the truth? Watch Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. My presumption is that neither Depp and Heard are as pure as the driven snow.

After being bruised and body–slammed during last night’s show (Tuesday, 5.3) at the Hollywood Bowl, the intrepid Dave Chappelle joked that his assailant was “a trans man.”

Or not. The perpetrator might simply be a maladjusted, garden-variety impulse performer. The world’s full of such fellows.

Nobody knows anything except that (a) Chappelle was definitely assaulted by a dude of color (THR reports that Chappelle referred to his assailant with the “n” word), and that (b) the attacker was subsequently roughed up by either Chappelle’s bodyguards or the HB security guys or both.

I’m not speculating about motive but c’mon, do the math. That or Will Smith’s Oscar slap unleashed something primal in the populace. Or perhaps last night’s altercation was caused by a combination of both.