…that I don’t want to hang with a 40ish therapist (Jason Segel) dealing with severe grief. (I’ve been grieving my whole life about what a shit sandwich life often tastes like.) If you’re a therapist and you feel swamped with grief because you’ve lost your wife, you need to bury it during work hours — it’s that simple. Weep and moan and act out all you want, but only on weekends and in the evenings. When you’re at work, keep that shit to yourself.

Because you don’t want to “breach ethical barriers” by telling your patients exactly what you completely think (which is a notion borrowed from Warren Beatty‘s Bulworth). I basically don’t want to hang with a big beefy crybaby. Or, if you will, a whineybaby.

Harrison Ford seems cool, and I especially like his pale green sweater. I presume the producers paid Ford an arm and a leg to do this.

An Apple+ TV series, Shrinking will debut on released on 1.27.23. The first two episodes will debut together, and the remaining eight will stream on a weekly basis.

Ford: “Nobody gets through this life unscathed.” Wait, is that another version of “into every life, a little rain must fall“?

I know nothing but a voice is telling me “beware the three top creatives on this series — Brett Goldstein, Bill Lawrence and Jason Segel.” I can smell trouble.

Two days ago Megyn Kelly attributed the following line to Jesse Kelly, whom I’m not a particular fan of: “I don’t mean to mock the MLK sculpture — every man wants to be remembered this way.”

…and they told me to state my pronouns, I would write Eat / Me. Okay, that’s fairly vulgar but I’d probably feel better about that designation than He / Him, which seems overly compliant.

Would it be fair to observe that casting-wise there’s a certain diverse-centric approach on view here? A determination to virtue-signal by un-Wonder Breading the brand…right?

There are two or three fleeting glimpses of social congregations, and yes, I’ve noticed a couple of younger Millennial- or Zoomer-aged revelers who could be accused of having a problematic heritage, but otherwise the idea seems to be about playing it safe. Would that be fair to say?

I somehow missed a four-day-old report that Barack Obama had re-issued his Best Films of 2022 list as a tribute to Andrea Riseborough‘s searing performance in To Leslie. A gesture of respect, acknowledgment. Somehow this alters everything. In my head, at least. I’d interpreted the enthusiastic and orchestrated praising of Riseborough’s performance by a long roster of actor buddies as…well, expressions of loyalty and love. But Barack joining in changes things somewhat. He’s part of the cabal. Repeating: HE endorses Riseborough’s performance despite the film’s first hour having driven me up the wall. I feel much greater enthusiasm for Olivia Colman‘s performance in Empire of Light.

Given the basic sinking-into-the-swamp dynamic that’s been evident for some time now…

Artist Hank Willis Thomas obviously isn’t stupid. He knew that “The Embrace,” his recently unveiled Martin Luther King-Coretta Scott King sculpture, would be derided by the meat-and-potatoes crowd as an image of four hands and arms gripping a giant brown schlong or resting upon a huge turd.

Literalists are always voicing the same beef — “this work of art isn’t literal enough!”

Then again why did he create a 19-ton sculpture that looks like four hands and arms gripping a giant schlong, etc.? HWT knows the game. He knows that the proletariat masses always have the final say.