Out Of Their Heads

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Industry friendo: “So why is it so hard to find any AMPAS members, whom I speak with from time to time. who don’t love Emilia Perez? Riddle me that, big boy.”

HE to industry friendo: “I don’t want to sound cruel, but the evidence (including your own testimony) indicates that they’re simply lacking in taste, or the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. I wouldn’t want to call them rubes, but that’s what they more or less seem to be.  

“This is proven by the fact that even in 2025, they’re STILL in thrall to kneejerk wokeism. I sympathize with wanting to tell Trump to shove it, but they’re slitting the Academy’s (and indirectly Hollywood’s) own throat by celebrating a far-fetched, bordering-on-ludicrous, trans-identity musical that 75% of the Joe and Jane Popcorn RT community doesn’t care for very much, and which is pretty much hated in Mexico.  

“To repeat an old phrase, they’re committing cultural suicide.  This is why so many popcorn megaplexers think Academy members have lost their minds. On a raft and heading for Niagara Falls…

“The Academy has to wake up, smell the coffee and stop giving Oscars to woke instructionals that celebrate this or that identity cause. Joe and Jane have have had it up to here with this crap. Anora, A Complete Unknown, Conclave…step back from the insanity brink and embrace the crafty good stuff that is blessedly free of ideology. Okay, two out of three.”

Ready Or Not, Here We Go Again

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I felt a certain degree of excitement about the original Richard Donner Superman reboot (‘78) and even the gradually declining early ‘80s sequels. And I’ll admit to feeling a vague revival of this when Bryan Singer‘s Superman Returns came along in ‘06.

But Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel shat the bed, I felt — it was covered in gloom sauce, and left me with a splitting headache. Snyder’s Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (‘16) really put a nail in it.

And now James Gunn has directed and delivered still another one, God in heaven, and is calling it just plain old Superman. I suppose we should all be thankful that David Corenswet‘s Clark Kent / Supie hasn’t been re-imagined as trans. (Corenswet, 31, is straight and married.)

Where does Gunn get the chutzpah to drag out Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) yet again? Where is the shame? How can Gunn glance at himself in the bathroom mirror?

For What It’s Worth, HE Empathizes With Team Baldoni

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During the scriptwriting or script-polishing phase of It Ends With Us, Justin Baldoni really went to town — emotionally, therapeutically, performance-wise — as he kissed Blake Lively‘s ass in a phone message. 2 am, six minutes and 49 seconds — “I am so sorry…sorry that you went through what you went though…you’re the secret sauce.”

Words of Conviction

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From Echo Chamberlain‘s “Emilia Perez: Woke Trainwreck with 13 Oscar Nominations“:

“Musicals can be great when they’re, you know, designed to be musicals. But [Mexico’s] real-life narco culture context is gritty and unsparing — death, incarceration, brutality, gothic violence and despair. And Emilia Perez having that as a template from which there springs forth musical numbers is mind-blowingly absurd.”

“And You’re Vain and Selfish”

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Roughly three weeks until the 2.16 debut of Season 3 of The White Lotus…creator Mike White once again exploring the shallowness, self-absorption and occasional venality of a crew of wealthy tourists on holiday, this time in Thailand and more particularly Ko Samui — a sizable-but-not-huge island to the east of the southern Thai peninsula (i.e., Gulf of Thailand).

Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins (miserable), Sarah Catherine Hook, Jason Isaacs, Lalisa Manobal, Michelle Monaghan, Sam (son of Alessandro) Nivola, Lek Patravadi, Parker Posey (shallowest of all?), Natasha Rothwell, Patrick (son of Arnold) Schwarzenegger, Tayme Thapthimthong and Aimee Lou Wood.

How many will die?

Wiki page: “Until the late 20th century, Ko Samui was an isolated, self-sufficient community, having little connection with the mainland of Thailand. The island was without roads until the early 1970s and the 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) journey from one side of the island to the other could involve a whole-day trek through the mountainous central jungles.

“Ko Samui’s economy now is based primarily on a successful tourist industry, as well as exports of coconut and rubber. Economic growth has brought not only prosperity but also major changes to the island’s environment and culture.”

If There’s One Thing I Know About Life

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…it’s that the final destination (be it financial, political, geographical, spiritual or what-have you) is anecdotal at best. For what truly matters, what stays in the mind and truly sticks to the ribs is the rough-and-tumble of it all…the journey, man…the journey is everything.

Epilogue: The First Architecture Biennale:

“In 1980, a retrospective of László’s work is held in Venice. The exhibition includes the community center, finally completed after a decade’s hiatus. A now-adult Zsófia, accompanied by her young adult daughter (who is the spitting image of Zsófia) and an aging László, gives a speech highlighting how the Van Buren community center was designed by László to resemble the concentration camps that imprisoned the Toths, and functions as a way of processing trauma.

“She ends by recounting what Laszlo once told her: ‘No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.’”

The Brutalist director-cowriter Brady Corbet is three months younger than my older son, Jett.

The Wigs! The Wigs!

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When it came to male wigs in big-budget epics of the mid 20th Century, the general rule was that men’s hair could never be thin or even thinning — it always had to be thick and wavy and perfectly combed with the application of cans and cans of hair spray. And the styling had to have a kind of high-pompadour, be-bop-bah-luah, James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause attitude.

Consider E.G. Marshall‘s breathtaking wig in this scene from Cecil B. DeMille and Anthony Quinn‘s The Buccaneer. Not to mention Charlton Heston‘s Andrew Jackson wig — white as snow like Jim Jarmusch‘s hair, but much, much thicker. But neither Marshall nor Heston could hold a candle to the black wig worn by Bonanza‘s Lorne Greene….utterly ludicrous.

Marshall played Louisiana governor William C. Claiborne. Inger Stevens played his daughter, Annette. The film went with a fictitious love story between Annette and Yul Brynner‘s Jean Lafitte. Brynner’s wig was not a wavy, high-pompadour thing, but was modestly styled and curled.

The Buccaneer‘s supervising hair stylist was Nellie Manley; she was assisted by Lenore Weaver.

CIA Officially Joins Lab-Leak Fraternity

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Every semi-intelligent person out there believes that the origin of COVID-19, which exploded stateside in March 2020 and wasn’t fully put to bed until early ’22, came from a Wuhan Institute of Virology lab leak.

Persuasive, reasonable-sounding reporting about a suspected Wuhan lab leak began to emerge from reputable websites and print publications (including The Wall Street Journal) in May 2021. (Here are links to several HE copy-and-paste stories about same.)

So it’s not exactly a big deal that the CIA, citing a just-released analysis, is now saying it too believes in lab leak theology.

N.Y. Times reporting by Julian Barnes: “The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.

“But the agency [has] issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.

“The analysis…is based in part on a closer look at the conditions in the high security labs in Wuhan province before the pandemic outbreak, according to people familiar with the agency’s work.”

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