This Is Racially Offensive to Progressive Asians?

THR‘s Abid Rahman is reporting that several social media psychotics from China, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong are hugely pissed about a recently posted Devil Wears Prade 2 clip that they regard as racially offensive. It’s a brief scene between Anne Hathaway‘s “Andy” and Helen J. Shen‘s “Jin Chao”, Andy’s new assistant.

The insecure Jin, fearful that Andy won’t like her, hurriedly recites her qualifications at a machine-gun pace: “I did go to Yale, 3.86 GPA…lead soprano of the [Yale singing group] Whiffenpoofs, and my ACT score was 36 on the very first time.”

One Japanese ayehole called the footage “blatant anti-Asian racism.” Another hair-trigger offense-taker tweeted “we are in 2026… what made them think we’ll find this kind of racism funny?”. A hyperbolic Korean tweeted “all the East Asians are fucking pissed off, and the fact that a few quotes from those living in the West are turning it into ‘overly sensitive snowflakes’ is the perfect finishing touch.”

HE to Asian twitter hysterics: “You guys think Shen’s dialogue is offensive? You need some 1962 Angela Lanbury Manchurian Candidate dialogue to toughen you up:

Mid-19th Century Ancestor

Oil-on-canvas portrait of Herman Eldridge Wells (1797-1871), painted by famed portraitist Thomas Sully sometime around 1835.

This is actually an AI creation by Surrealium…if I want to pay for a version that doesn’t have “surrealium” stamps across it, I can do that.

This was created within two minutes. If some rando software program had done this for free ten or even five years ago, it would have been a moderately big deal. Now it’s almost a ho-hummer. Surrealium is a legit Millenial operation out of Stockholm.

Smooth Operator

Honestly? Twice I’ve sat down and tried to watch Bernard Wicki‘s Morituri (alternately called Saboteur: Code Name Morituri), and both times I’ve lost interest and turned it off. Maybe I’ll give it another looksee.

The best thing that came out of this 1965 film was a short documentary about Marlon Brando giving interviews to junket whores during the Morituri junket, which happened at Manhattan’s Hampshire House (150 Central Park South), in the late summer of ’65.

Meet Marlon Brando was shot and edited by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. It’s a great Brando personality piece, and a reminder that he was quite the flirt (he charmingly hits on a pair of young female journalists plus a pretty Puerto Rican female passerby with a young son), and that nothing ups your chances like being famous.

Boilerplate: “After having appeared in a series of box-office disappointments, Brando agreed to promote Morituri for 20th Century Fox by participating in a day-long press junket at the Hampshire House in New York City. Brando was praised for his performance in Meet Marlon Brando by critic Howard Thompson, to wit: “The actor was never more appealing than in this candid-camera cameo, his best performance.”

The documentary premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1966. Since then, it has aired on French television but was not shown in its entirety in the United States until Fandor made it available on 11.15.13.

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Could Someone Possibly Translate This Into Plain English?

A week into the filming of The White Lotus‘s season #4, creator-director-writer Mike White decided that Helena Bonham Carter‘s character was “not aligning,” whatever the hell that means.

Deadline‘s Nellie Andreeva: “As production started and Carter shot her first scenes, White, who writes and directs each episode, felt that her character as originally conceived was not what it should be, sources said. With the role believed to be central to the Season 4 story, a decision was made to rework it and recast it.”

If I was a major producer or showrunner on this show…if I had asked why HBC has suddenly left the shoot and was told that her character was “not aligning”, I would say “okay, yeah, sure…but what actually happened, without the bullshit?”

White went to the trouble of landing Helena Bonham Carter for a central role in the latest series and then, after a week of shooting, went “uh-oh…not working”? Either White didn’t write HBC’s character as fully or exactingly as he should have, or HBC couldn’t get a handle on the character, or it was a combination of the two.

Boiled down, either White screwed things up or Carter couldn’t bring whatever he was looking for.

Please tell me of any theatrical film or major limited series that cut loose a major actor because things weren’t “aligning” or blah-dee-blah. I’m not saying this hasn’t happened before — I just can’t think of any particular instances.

Trump Is Deeply Grateful For White House Correspondents Dinner Shooter, A Bungler Who Wasn’t Even Close…Luck Once Again Intervenes…Sympathy Bump Assured

Sunday morning aftermath, 8:26 am: As I said last night, those lobby gunshots gave Trump a sympathy bump, especially among the none-too-brights who decided he was an indestructible messiah after the 2024 Butler shooting. Because they temporarily dissipated the Iran quagmire cloud over his head & gave him an opportunity to look cool, casual and confident…they bestowed a ‘60s Steve McQueen aura…an unruffled, in-command cool cat.

“Thank you, Cole…your ineptitude did me a solid. I’m certainly in better shape this morning, image-wise, than I was last night as I was donning my tux prior to leaving for the dinner. Somebody up there likes me.”

N.Y. Post: The would-be assailant was Cole Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from Torrance, a South Bay suburb of Los Angeles.

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“Michael”’s Perverse Aura of Denial Will Be Nothing Compared To Avoidance Syndrome in Forthcoming Sequel

Given the Jackson estate’s refusal to acknowledge, much less dramatize, the late Michael Jackson’s penchant for pedophilia, which resulted in 16 years of investigations, prosecutions, lawsuits, payoffs and media reportings (1993 until his death in 2009), Michael 2, the screenplay for which reportedly hasn’t been written yet, will have no choice but to play the same bizarre denial game that the just-opened Michael does.

Solution: Ignore the last 16 years of MJ’s life and start with the Bad era (when Michael ends) and move onto the 1988 purchase and construction of Neverland ranch, cruise into 1991’s Dangerous, “Black or White” and “Remember The Time”, roll into MJ’s January ‘93 Super Bowl half-time performance and his February ‘93 Oprah interview, and then slam on the brakes and screech to a halt with the summer of ‘93 Jordan Chandler allegations.

That’s a five-year chapter in Jackson’s life, one that yields more than enough to fill a feature film.

Ryan O’Neal Had An Inkling

[During Barry Lyndon filming in ‘73] “If this is so awesome, and it obviously is…I almost can’t believe I’m actually starring in a Stanley Kubrick film…I mean, this obviously puts my career into a whole ‘nother realm…but if this is so awesome, why do I have this odd queasy little tickly feeling that after this film opens, my career heyday will be over and I’ll never get back to the salad days ever again?”

Ryan O’Neal’s Five Untouchable Years”, HE-posted on 8.4.19.