In a 6.2 article Rolling Stone ‘s Tatiana Siegel refers to Aziz Ansari’s Being Mortal as “scandal-plagued”. But how is it even remotely scandalous if it all began with costar Bill Murray angering a costar or co-worker (possibly Keke Palmer, possibly not) by inappropriately joking around on the set?

The actual scandal is not so much that Mortal has failed to resume filming after several weeks of shutdown, but that things have seemingly stalled over (wait for it) hurt Millennial feelings. Even in the wake of a sincere Murray apology…not enough!

Has this incident become the all-time winner of the Hollywood Mountain-Out-of-a-Molehill award or what? Hasn’t Palmer-or-whomever’s offense-taking compounded this minor situation beyond any concept of rational behavior or sensible scale?

This, of course, is the famous Few Good Men money scene…the climactic Tom Cruise-vs.-Jack Nicholson testimony dispute that many know by heart, because it’s almost perfectly written and beautifully directed by Rob Reiner.

Except the first 40 seconds are atrocious — a phony-ass tease in which Cruise seems to choking or otherwise freezing up…until he suddenly isn’t.

This same device was used in Shan Heder’s CODA and Mimi Leder’s On The Basis of Sex. No more of this — just saying.

Posted after the August ‘21 release of CODA:

Posted this morning (6.3) by Nellie Bowies, columnist for Common Sense with Bari Weiss;

The third paragraph partly alludes to what intrepid HE friendo Sasha Stone has been going through over the last three or four years. Courage is a rare commodity. Respect should be paid.

Andrea Peyser N.Y. Post column, posted last night (6.2):

Earlier today another Toronto-to-LaGuardia Air Canada flight was cancelled — HE’s second in 24 hours. Over bad weather, they said. And I guess I just snapped. I trudged through customs for the fourth time, found my suitcase and booked myself on a Flixbus — a ten-hour journey from downtown Toronto to midtown Manhattan (10 pm to 7:30 am)

A 6.2.22 N.Y. Times piece by A.O. Scott stirs an old pot of porridge — classic, decades-old notions of Hollywood being a liberal town with (many of) the studio-era films routinely espousing conservative, community-friendly values, at least up until the late ‘60s.

It’s titled “Are The Movies Liberal?”, and it struck me as noteworthy as I observed a similar thing in a 1995 Los Angeles article, called “Right Face.”

Compare two paragraphs from the Scott piece…

…to a couple of paragraphs from my Clinton-era probe:

We love Air Canada!…delays, weather phantoms, seemingly chickenshit excuses. How are things in Queens as we speak? WeatherBug says cloudy.

Beware of anyone who claps his or her hands as a way of getting your attention in a crowded room. One clap = you get up and leave.

…for decades if not centuries, right up there with Andy Warhol‘s “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”

In a 6.122 THR article by Borys Kit, Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman is described as “an expensive vanity project.” The statement is Kit’s own, and I’m sorry but it’s bullshit.

The Irishman is easily one of the greatest films of the 21st Century, and the last 30 or 40 minutes delivers perhaps the most devastating passage about grief, regret and facing the end of one’s life in the history of movies.

For the 47th time, “Wild Strawberries with handguns.”

Parasite is a toy movie…a toy movie about class conflict, made by a serious, super-crafty cineaste and blah blah. Don’t crank me up again about the drunken con-artist family letting the fired maid into the house, etc. History will not be kind.

If there’s a general consensus about the Depp-Heard verdict, it’s probably something like “it’s finally over…let it go…whatever the truth of it, Depp seemed more honest than Heard plus he’s certainly more likable…it’s gone on long enough…let it go.”

From “Why We Love to Watch a Woman Brought Low,” a 5.20 N.Y. Times essay by Jessica Bennett:

“One might have thought — or, at least, I might have thought — that we’d be in a more enlightened place by now. And yet despite the public reckonings of #MeToo and the recent reexaminations of pop culture figures — Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, Janet Jackson and others — there is precious little introspection over the widespread hatred of Ms. Heard.

“This trial seems to have exposed some of the rhetorical weaknesses of #MeToo. ‘Believe women’ for example — a phrase that was meant to underscore how rare it is for a woman to lie about her own abuse — had somehow morphed into ‘believe all women,’ which left no room for the outlier. That has apparently become, as the comedian Chris Rock put it this week, ‘Believe all women…except Amber Heard.’

“The intent of that early slogan was, in part, to encourage the public to treat women who speak up with basic dignity and respect, however messy and imperfect they or their stories may be. Yet none of that seems to have trickled down here.”

@gamethinkingtips Initially, I believed #amberheard. Then I watched the trial, saw the evidence… & realized that I’d been CONNED 😡 @gamethinkingtips #justiceforjohnnydepp #deppvsheard #johnnydepp ♬ original sound – Amy Jo Kim