Wait…The Husband Is a Diabolical, Double-Dealing Sociopath?

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Yes, another Blue Velvet of sorts, right?…another take on the dark underbelly of an idyllic American picket-fence domesticity?…a midwestern Diary of a Mad Housewife? Obviously something in that realm. Older white male = perverse-to-the-max bad guy…shocker!

The folks at Amazon MGM are presenting. Nicole Kidman, Gael García Bernal, Matthew Macfadyen (whose Succession performance landed him this role), Jude Hill, Rachel Sennott.

Debuting before the South by Southwest whores in 3.9.25 (Austin cineastes will heartily shriek over anything), followed by some kind of release on 3.27.25.

“Racist Attacks” on Snow Zegler? Since When?

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I’ve said repeatedly that Disney’s seemingly woked-up Snow White (3.21) is almost certainly going to be an instructive (read: punishing) militant feminist fantasy by way of a manifesto…not my cup but fine, whatever.

But rightwing notions that star Rachel Zegler (of Columbian-Polish descent) is somehow an inappropriate choice for the titular role…these slags are ridiculous. Zegler is a beautiful, fair-skinned, dark-haired actress with an excellent singing voice…where’s the problem in that?

Nonetheless The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield has apparently been persuaded that conservative gripes about Zegler not being “white” enough…Rushfield thinks this is some kind of major narrative out there. Well, not to my fucking knowledge…

The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield, posted on 2.25.25: “A studio calling out criticisms of Rachel Zegler’s ethnicity as the disgusting filth it is, is not a studio ‘going woke,’ but rather making a basic stand for decency and refusing to be dragged into the dark places where much of the world seems determined to go.”

Posted on 12.3.24:

“And following in the path of Glenn Powell‘s character in Twister, relegated to the sidelines during the action-packed climax, there ain’t no savior prince in the new Snow White (Disney, 3.21) — this is apparently a militant, storm-the-barricades show aimed at progressive women of all ages. (The script is by Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson.) Okay, there’s the kind-hearted, mild-mannered Jonathan character (Andrew Burnap) as well as the Huntsman (Ansu Kabia)), but, like Powell, these are second-banana characters.”

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Insensitive Obit Plague Gathering Steam

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That snarling, hyperventilating army of HE readers who constantly put me down when I mention the word “peaked” in one of my HE obits…these same people need to start circulating an online petition that calls for the immediate termination of Variety‘s Chris Morris.

Morris needs to be slapped down but good for using the “p” word in a 2.24 report about the passing of the once-great Roberta Flack.

Paragraph #5 in Morris’s story reads as follows: “[Flack] reached her peak with the 1974 pop and R&B smash ‘Where Is the Love’, which claimed the apex of both charts.” If the HE firebrands want this shit to stop, they have to nip it in the bud…seriously.

HE sincerely mourns Flack‘s passing. She had a glorious three-year run in the early ’70s (’72 through ’74). Clint Eastwood put her on the map when he used “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” in Play Misty For Me (’71).

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Super-Rich, Anti-Fanboy, Franchise Destroyer Finally Exiting

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Kathleen Kennedy, the long-embattled Lucasfilm exec and mediocre anti-visionary who decimated the Star Wars brand and the intense loyalty of the worldwide community by trying to woke-icze and feminize the nearly 50-year-old galactic franchise…Kennedy, destroyer of worlds, is finally taking a hike!

Kennedy’s just-announced departure is many years overdue, of course…the faith is pretty much gone and the franchise with it. Kennedy turned it into a 21st Century political-cultural anti-machismo, up-with-DEI thing…a progressive/feminist Star Wars crusade dedicated to diminishing and in some cases the outright de-balling of a once-proud mythology…a once-devotional theology gone south.

The only good things that came out of the Kennedy regime were Tony Gilroy‘s Andor and Gareth Edwards‘ Rogue One.. Otherwise, forget it…implosion, dilution, a woke-product-in-the-pipeline mentality.

My favorite Kennedy bonehead move was the ghastly miscasting of the beady-eyed, reedy-voiced, small-shouldered Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo…that in itself was a firehouse alarm. Other Kennedy wrongos include The Acolyte, the chubby Kelly Marie Tran fan revolt, Moses Ingram‘s Baltimore accent in Obi Wan kenobi, multiple director firings (Lord & Miller, Josh Trank, Colin Trevorrow), the Boba Fett movie, the stalled Rian Johnson trilogy…all of it.

Back in ’21 or thereabouts Tatiana and I were about to begin one of our Sulllivan Canyon hikes, and there was Kennedy walking toward us on the same horse trail. I nodded at her but said nothing.

A Fate Worse Than Death

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Apologies to Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman in advance for inserting the HE term “Mondo Bondo” and well as the word “prepare”…

“Now owned by a company, Amazon MGM, whose essential mission is to convert movies into streaming content, the Bond series will likely be “expanded,” spun off into sideline franchises (‘The Reign of M‘, ‘The Blofeld Chronicles‘, ‘Young Bond: License to Drive‘), maybe serialized, and generally milked.

“The exact same thing will happen to Mondo Bondo, in other words, that happened to the Star Wars franchise after George Lucas relinquished control of that to Disney: It will be expanded so much that it will, in an essential way, be watered down, and the more that that happens, the more the producers will scramble to make up for the mistakes they’ve made, which can only mean one thing: Even more content!

“Prepare for the strip-mining of the mystique…killing the golden goose by exploiting it into oblivion.”

Clint Didn’t React Quickly Enough

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When the first shot rang out in Dealey Plaza, JFK immediately reacted. Both arms went up, hands near his throat. Did secret service agent Clint Hill immediately spring into action by leaping upon the presidential limo and using his body to shield JFK? No — he cooled his jets, waited until the third shot had blown half ot Kennedy’s head into shards. THEN he sprang into action.

That’s why Hill (RIP at age 93) was so guilt-ridden all his life.

Basic Instinct,” posted on 4.17.23:

The 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination will be upon us before we know it (concurrent, by the way, with the 11.22.23 opening of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon) and I’m asking myself something.

Why after all this time has no one ever suggested that Lenny Bruce may have been on to something when he suggested that Jackie Kennedy was simply, immediately terrified about being shot herself (as anyone would be) and was following a blind instinct to avoid a similar death by getting the hell away from the line of fire by climbing out of the back seat and onto the limousine trunk?

That has always seemed to me like a very natural and default kneejerk response — haul ass in order to save your own terrified, freaked-out ass.

And yet every last person who’s ever analyzed what happened during those fateful seconds in Dealey Plaza…they ALL say she was trying to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull that had been blown onto the trunk. And maybe she was, but why has no one ever suggested that Bruce’s interpretation was at the very least a reasonable possibility?

If so, Jackie wasn’t behaving in some cowardly or ignoble fashion. She’d just seen half of JFK’s head — very close, only inches away — explode into blood and skull and brain matter and vapor — soaking her gloves bright red and all that cranial flotsam spraying upon her own face. Naturally she came to a split-second realization that she might be next and immediately thought about saving herself from a similar fate and, not incidentally, staying alive in order to care for her two children.

Would that have been such a terrible instantaneous reaction?