“If there had been a bunch of American mothers in the corridor [outside the classroom where the killing was taking place], they’d have been in there right away.” — British author Douglas Murray on last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

Yesterday’s news, of course, but I’ve only just seen this exchange between former TMZ employee Morgan Tremaine and Amber Heard attorney Elaine Bredehoft. Bredehoft tried to belittle Tremaine by suggesting that he was testifying for the Depp side in order to enjoy his 15 minutes of fame, but he turned it right around by saying “pot calling the kettle black.”

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.