Last May the understanding was that Apple + had chickened out of releasing Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith’s Emancipation, the fear being that Smith’s Oscar slap incident would overshadow the film, at least in terms of award-season recognition.

But yesterday’s THR report about yesterday’s screening in Washington, D.C. strongly indicates that the Apple team has changed its collective mind. Sounds good to most of us! Bring it on, boys.

Delaying this film for a year wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference, damage-control-wise.

In a 10.1 Air Mail piece about Italy’s newly elected Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (“They’re With Her”), George Pendel laments three warning signs — “conspiracy theories about immigration” (whatever that means), Meloni’s “perpetual use of anti-Semitic dog whistles” (obviously odious if true) and “her screeds against political correctness” (what’s wrong with that?…more power!).

The best thing about the article, however unfair or malicious it might be, is Harry Greb’s illustration of Meloni as the evil queen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

A part of me  genuinely sympathizes with Jordan Peterson’s tearful empathy for incels, and I therefore agree to some extent with Megyn Kelly’s “screw you” dismissal of Don’t Worry Darling‘s Olivia Wilde along with, to some extent, Matt Walsh‘s impressions of all of this, but we have to face facts about incels. 

Various understandings of who and what they are may be flawed, but there’s a certain common ground.  My understanding (take this with a grain) is that incels are lonely guys who are both (a) unattractive to women and who (b) haven’t made a great effort to be attractive to women. 

This is mainly (or at least partly) because they’ve given up.  They tend to live in their own realm (not a lot of socializing) and spend an inordinate amount of time at home with their computers.  They exist, of course, but they clearly don’t want to to be “in the game.”  And they don’t seem to want to take hints about how to fix this.

By all appearances incels don’t eat healthily, they don’t work out (i.e., are overweight) , they’re probably medicating too much (alcohol) and they tend to groom and dress horribly — the usual beardface thing, contemptible flannel shirts, baggy shorts, ugly T-shirts, lace-up sneakers with black socks (or no socks), backwards baseball caps and all the rest of that awful garb.  And their absorption in online forums and superhero realms verges on the neurotic, if not the diseased.

If I was a reasonably attractive straight woman I would run in the opposite direction and I wouldn’t stop running until I ran out of breath, and then I’d hail an Uber or a Lyft to put even more distance between me and these fucking guys.  

With a less desirable genetic inheritance and an even more punishing upbringing and minus the deliverance of movies and journalism, I could have been an incel.  I’m not indifferent to their plight.  But c’mon, man…God helps those who help themselves.

Don’t Worry, Darling, by the way, plummeted 75%  this weekend.  That means people really don’t like it.  And it’s not the craft levels — it’s a reasonably well made film and that’s obviously on Wilde.  The problem is with the third act, which leaves you with nothing and jettisons the whole “social focus on the ’50s” and the granddaughter’s inheritance from Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment. 

Don’t Worry Darling has earned $33 million so far.

Paul Schrader’s The Master Gardener, the final chapter in his “lonely haunted man with a certain history writing his thoughts in longhand while sitting at a clutter-free desk” trilogy, is a “Southern fable,” as Schrader put it earlier today.

It’s actually a redemption-seeking love story. Redemption by way of acceptance, submission, renunciation, devotion and violence.

The only truly difficult part for me was Joel Edgerton’s “Hitler youth” haircut — absolutely no one looks good with one of these godawful things. They smell of fear and repression and a form of cowardice and self-loathing.

I’ll leave it there and tap out an HE review sometime tomorrow as it’s 8:34 pm and I’m standing in line for a 9 pm viewing of Triangle of Sadness (which I saw in Cannes last May) at Avery Fisher Hall.

HE’s big office romance…I’m sorry, I meant to say the emotionally devastating extra-marital affair that I fell into during my time as an in-office freelancer at People magazine and which continued until her husband found out a couple of years later…it was almost the emotional death of me. (The actual span was between early ’98 and the early fall of ’00…call it 32 months.) No relationship had ever brought so much heartache, hurt or frustration. Graham Greene and Tom Stoppard had nothing on us. I was a man of almost constant sorrow. I was so upset by one of our arguments that one afternoon I made a reckless left turn on Pico Blvd. and got slammed by a speeding BMW, and for weeks I told myself it wasn’t really my fault — it was the married girlfriend’s. Definitely a form of insanity.

Bones and All director Luca Guadagnino speaking at the Zurich Film festival, as reported by Variety‘s Marta Balaga: “The idea the U.S. wants to give to the world has a lot to do with the imagery they create about themselves. We have been sold this imagery like dope. I tried to go [to the States] and do what the great foreign filmmakers of the 1930 and 40s did. They immersed themselves into it.”

Guadagnino said he “doesn’t believe in looking for chemistry between the performers, calling it ‘American stupidity…it’s so ridiculous. The only chemistry has to be in the mind of a director towards his actors.”

Teasing his upcoming tennis movie “Challengers” and “An Even Bigger Splash,” now clocking in at over three hours, Guadagnino wondered if his characters are always driven by passion, not reason.

“I like Election by Alexander Payne. [Tracy Flick] is stubborn and knows what she wants, which is fantastic, but I don’t know if I could make a movie like that or be with a character like that.”

Luca’s next two films are Challengers, a Boston-shot tennis flick with Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, and An Even Bigger Splash, which Balaga says is “now clocking in at over three hours.”

HE is sorry to report that Nicholas Stoller and Billy Eichner‘s Bros, billed as the first mainstream gay romcom, is already dead. The wide release is under $5 million for the weekend, and not expected to earn much more than $12 million domestic. I wrote a mostly approving review two nights ago and it reportedly played half-decently in the big cities, but most of the country (especially the deep hinterlands) wasn’t into it, bruh. Everyone likes a good romantic tale, and Bros is just as good (and certainly as well written) as any Tom Hanks or Billy Crystal romcom from the ’90s, and most auds approve of frisky sexual behavior but…well, perhaps not so much in the realm that I’m afraid to identify in this sentence for fear of being called homophobic. The collapse of Bros shows that Joe and Jane Popcorn are not all that keen about wading into a sexual-emotional realm that is not theirs to have and hold. If you count Zoomers the U.S. gay population is somewhere around 6% or 7% — do the math.

The common consensus is that whatever you may think of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, a dryly farcical ‘80s period drama set in an Ohio college town, the final sequence — an ambitiously choreographed dance sequence featuring shoppers at an A & P supermarket — is the highlight.

The sequence affirms the film’s basic theme about nearly everyone turning to all kinds of distractions (including food) to avoid contemplating their own mortality.

Though brilliantly staged, the dance number is undercut by Baumbach’s decision to use it as a closing credits backdrop. Here’s how I put it to a friend:

“The LCD Soundsystem ‘New Body Rumba’ finale could have been great if Baumbach hadn’t decided to overlay it with closing credits. I almost shouted out loud ‘Oh no!! He’s blowing it!!’

“I’m saying this because once the credits begin we instantly disengage as we tell ourselves ‘okay, the movie’s over so the aisle–dancing is just a colorful bit, a spirit-picker-upper…whatever.’

“If Baumbach hadn’t given us permission to disengage, the dancing could have been wild and mind-blowing in a surreal Luis Bunuel-meets-Pedro Almodovar way. It could have been a mad slash across a wet-paint canvas…a Gene Kelly consumer-orgy crescendo.

And then it could have segued into a closing credit crawl. Alas…

This morning a Geek Squad tech guy was visiting the condo. Problems resulting from competing internet systems (Optimum vs. eero) were being addressed.

The first thing the GS guy did was call an Optimum agent about establishing a bridge connection. (Don’t ask.). The street address and account # had been verified, but the Optimum agent also needed to verify the name of the account holder (Joanne Jasser) and the corresponding phone #.

The latter was provided but I told the rep that the principal’s first name was a colloquial Jody rather than the more formal Joanne. Her response: “We don’t have an account holder by that name.”

It was soon after explained that Jody and Joanne were one and the same, but until that moment of clarity the Optimum rep was ready and willing to stop exchanging info. Everything but the first name had synched. The Optimum rep was being extra precise, of course. It could also be argued that she wasn’t the brightest bulb. I’ll let it go at that.