The N.Y. Times, formerly the “paper of record” and a bastion of woke Stalinism for the last five or six years (certainly as far as the usual woke-kneejerk issues are concerned), has actually posted an editorial that warns of the dangers of cancel culture, pushed by left-progressive absolutists since the new Robespierre terror began.

The editorial is titled “America Has a Free Speech Problem.” The authors didn’t have the courage to dump this problem on the lap of the radical left; they’ve used the old “both sides” tactic to claim the right is just as bad in this regard. The Trumpist-nutter righties are evil, of course, but 95% of the scolding and repression these days is coming from the left.

HE regulars are hereby advised to read the comments.

It’s not cool and not fair for Lia Thomas, the 22 year-old transgender swimmer who yesterday won the women’s 500-yard freestyle race and thereby became the first transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming championship, to compete against women who were born that way.

Thomas’s natural athletic superiority — built like a dude, taller, stronger, big shoulders — clearly give her an advantage over female competitors. The NCAA honchos who paved the way for Thomas and others like her to compete are helping to destroy women’s sports. It’s really not right.

Thomas is like the robot pitcher in that 1960 Twilight Zone episode, “The Mighty Casey.” Imagine if a race of human-resembling aliens with extraordinary athletic abilities had landed on earth and decided to complete in men’s sports, and started winning everything — this is what Thomas is doing.

She’s not a “woman” — she’s a dude who’s taken hormone therapy and announced that she’s trans. but still enjoys the advantage of her natural male strength.

“It means the world to be here.”

Lia Thomas spoke about swimming in the NCAA women’s championships. pic.twitter.com/aP0afVA0KE

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) March 18, 2022

Three or four years ago it was noted that among the new crop of Academy and SAG members, “representation isn’t an important thing — it’s the only thing.”

To say that we’re living in weird, obsessive times is putting it mildly. Chris calls people who are obsessive about representation “narcissists.”

40 or 50 years hence Millennials and Zoomers will be written about in the same way that historians today write about Hollywood’s anti-Communist rightwing brigade (John Wayne, Adolph Menjou, Robert Taylor, Cecil B. DeMille, Ward Bond) who did what they could in the early to late ’50s to destroy the lives of screenwriters and directors who had flirted with Communism in the 1930s, when the general consensus was that American capitalism had failed the working class.

I love the moment when O Lucky Man! director Lindsay Anderson swats Malcolm McDowell across the side of his head with a notebook. He’s trying to shake McDowell’s character, Mick Travis, out of despair. Anderson has asked Travis to smile, and he says “why?…there’s nothing to smile about.” I smiled myself when the swat happened. I couldn’t help it.

And I mean especially the day drinkers on St. Patrick’s Day, who prompted that Beverly Hills checkpoint thing on Santa Monica Blvd.

Click here to jump past HE Sink-In

If you wanted to keep it simple, you would call King Richard a first-rate sports drama. Which it is.

If you wanted to be a little more specific, you could call it a disciplined, highly motivated sports drama by way of a family relationship film. Which it is.

And if you wanted to really get down in the weeds, you could call it an inspirational, true-life portrait of a willful, obstinate, never-say-die sports dad (Williams) who insisted that his daughters work their asses off it order to become world-class tennis superstars. Which they did.

What emerges are three films in one. A tennis-boot-camp-run-by-a-tough-dad family film. A strong-mom family film, due to the knockout performance by Aunjanue Ellis. And among the most realistic, down-in-the-trenches competitive tennis films ever made.

King Richard is not a story of good fortune changing the lives of the main protagonist(s) by way of luck or God’s grace. It’s about work and focus and devotion and absolutely no relaxing or kicking back. It’s about “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” It’s about “only the strong and gifted who get up early and go to bed at a reasonable hour succeed.”

King Richard is arguably the most spiritually thrilling family film of the 21st Century. Partly because it avoids the usual usual — not so much emotions and endearing interludes and God’s good fortune, but family teamwork and discipline. It’s an adult family film without (or certainly not limited to) the usual family film bromides.

Will Smith’s performance has reminded a friend of Paul Newman’s character in The Verdict — “the same kind of slow burn in which someone whom everyone overlooks or under-values is redeemed at last. This is the best way I can see him. Characters who aren’t listened to and then finally are vindicated. That’s what makes his character compelling. Underneath it all he’s fighting the good fight.”

The single-minded Richard is partly an inspirational Malcolm X figure, partly F. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, partly an SOB with a heart of gold.

And yet much of King Richard is about other tennis coaches, managers and marketers (Tony Goldwyn‘s Paul Cohen, Jon Bernthal‘s Rick Macci, Kevin Dunn‘s Vic Braden, Dylan McDermott‘s Will Hodges) expressing annoyance with Richard’s egoism and stubbornness and general refusal to accomodate other viewpoints.

Richard may be irascible, but he’s fighting for his daughters — fighting to build their skill, fighting for their success, and also for their integrity and their roundedness as human beings. And through it all, he’s fighting to remake what is basically a racist American system of sports image-making.

It was 6:45 pm and I didn’t want to be late for my 7 pm screening of Aaron and Adam Nee’s The Lost City (Paramount, 3.25). But the traffic along Santa Monica Blvd. near Beverly Hills City Hall was just inching along. After a block or two I read a sign: cops were checking for driver’s licenses and to see if anyone had been drinking.

Who gets shit-faced before 7 pm on a Thursday evening? And if the bulls want to spot-check drivers, why fuck with people during rush hour? Why not do it starting around 9 or 10 pm?

You know what I did? Hung a right on Foothill, left on Carmelita, drove seven or eight blocks, left (south) on Walden, right on SM Blvd. and over to Century City…checkpoint dodge! And I don’t even drink.

If you were Pete Davidson, what circumstance could possibly persuade you to back out of a Blue Origin space jaunt? Did he get cold feet? Was it some prior commitment? Did Jeff Bezos fire him? Nobody slated for such a voyage has ever backed out. Image-wise, this is horrific. Because it feels like a failure of nerve.

Last night I caught the first five episodes of Elizabeth Meriwether‘s The Dropout, and I have to say that I found Amanda Seyfried‘s performance as the discredited tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes a tough pill to swallow. Not because it’s a “bad” performance, but because it’s so damn weird.

That’s because Seyfried/Holmes is too much of a freak — one of the strangest looking and sounding people I’ve ever encountered in fiction or real life. Seyfried’s imitation of Holmes’ facial expressions and manner of speaking is fairly exacting, but it’s still unsatisfying to watch this bizarre robot woman interact with all those Silicon Valley heavy-hitters.

I kept asking myself “who would be stupid enough to go into business with this creepy character…a woman who, had she been born in the 1940s, could have played an alien on The Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man”? Or Ray Walston‘s alien girlfriend in My Favorite Martian?”

Meriwether’s dialogue is reasonably pro-level for the most part, but I can only reiterate that I couldn’t believe in the story I was seeing because I found it impossible to believe in Seyfried’s Holmes. She’s just too looney-tunes, too “off the planet.”

Rotten Tomatoes Average Joe whom I mostly agree with: “There must be something wrong with me because I truly don’t understand how there are so many 4 and 5 stars. I literally cringed while watching this. Someone commented that ‘the dialogue is utter garbage’ and ‘there are so many things that have nothing to do with the story.’ I absolutely agree. Nothing is believable. The acting is absurd. It almost seems like a Three Stooges-type comedy. There’s no possible way someone with such silly, childish behavior would be accepted in the business world. I can go on and on about the silly scenes.

“What I do know is [that] Holmes duped many very smart people. What I can’t believe is that it went down anything close to the way it’s been portrayed, or perhaps it’s just so exaggerated to the point of ridicule. What am I missing?”

Tatiana makes an appearance in episode #5:

Several months ago I watched the first episode of The Last Movie Stars (HBO Max, 7.21), a six-part Ethan Hawke documentary about Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward that seemed, based on episode #1, to be a celebration piece — a doc that says what a wonderful, cooler-than-cool, super-glorious relationship they had.

I posted my understanding of the doc series around 10 days ago.

Paul and Joanne first met in ’53 or thereabouts, got married in 1958 and stayed together for 50 years, parted only by Paul’s death in ’08.

Hawke’s admiration for Newman-Woodward is upfront and unfettered, and his fascination with the transformative acting world of New York in the 1950s is fully conveyed. But this seems to basically be a valentine doc, and having dug into Shawn Levy‘s “Paul Newman: A Life” (’09), a very thoroughly researched and written biography…I shouldn’t say more but Hawke’s basic approach seems to have been very admiring.

I’ve since been told that this isn’t the case. I’m told that Hawke doesn’t mention the name of a journalist, Nancy Bacon, with whom Newman had an affair in ’68 and ’69, but that the affair is definitely mentioned. It’s also acknowledged that Newman was a functioning alcoholic, and that the booze was a real problem for a while. Woodward even kicked Newman out of their Westport home at one point, or so the story goes.

So I’ll be marathoning it starting tomorrow.

Newman made around 12 films in the 1950s, and none of them really hit the mark. No, not even Robert Wise‘s Somebody Up There Likes Me (’56). Because Newman was playing someone else, which isn’t his metier. Newman had to play Paul Newman-ish characters, and that didn’t really start until he lucked into Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler (’61). Between The Hustler and The Road to Perdition (’02), Newman starred in roughly 40 films, and ten of them were really good. Okay, 16 if you want to be liberal about it.

Creme de la creme: The Hustler (’61), Hud (’63), Cool Hand Luke (’67), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (’69), The Sting (’73), Slap Shot (’77), Fort Apache, The Bronx (’81), The Verdict (’82), The Color of Money (’86) and The Road to Perdition (’02) / 10.

Good to Pretty Good: Sweet Bird of Youth (’62), Harper (’66), Sometimes a Great Notion (’70), The Mackintosh Man (73), The Towering Inferno (’74), Nobody’s Fool (’94) / 6.

Four first-rate films in the ’60s, two in the ’70s, three in the ’80s and one in the aughts.

Woodward’s career peaked between the late ’50s and late ’60s. Her best were A Kiss Before Dying (’57), The Three Faces of Eve (’57), The Long, Hot Summer (’57), The Fugitive Kind (’60), Paris Blues (’61), The Stripper (’63), Rachel, Rachel (’68), The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (’72), Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (’73), The Glass Menagerie (’87) and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (’90) / 11.

Newman took a crack at writing his autobiography, we’re told, but the project stalled or went stale in his head, and he wound up burning all the taped audio interviews. But the tapes had first been transcribed, and we get to hear certain portions from these. Several hotshot actors voice the various players. George Clooney does Newman, and Laura Linney reads Woodward’s tapes.

Employment Counselor: Can I help you, sir?
Sonny Corleone: Yeah, I’m here for…I wanna job for the summer.
Employment Counselor: How old are you?
Sonny Corleone: Sixteen.
Employment Counselor: Do you have any work experience?
Sonny Corleone: I’ve done stuff for my family, but…uh, I wanna work somewhere else.
Employment Counselor: A family business?
Sonny Corleone: I worked for my father.
Employment Counselor: And what did you do for him?
Sonny Corleone: Aaahh…stuff. Boring stuff.
Employment Counselor: Okay, no problem. But before we get started, I’d like you to fill out this form. It’s about gender preference.
Sonny Corleone: About what?
Employment Counselor: About your gender identity.
Sonny Corleone: My what?
Employment Counselor: It’s not a big deal. Just fill it out and we’ll go from there.
Sonny Corleone (readying the form): Fuck is this?
Employment Counselor: Just mark the appropriate term.
Sonny Corleone: This…WHAT THE FUCK?
Employment Counselor: It’s just a form. If you’re straight, just check cisgender.