Bill Maher: “Yeah, the R-rated comedy, Naked Gun…”

Michael Rapaport: “They fucked it up. They fucked the R-rated comedy up. I liked the Liam Neeson remake of Naked Gun, but the R-rated comedy went out with cancel culture.”

Maher: “Yeah, but don’t you think there’s a different vibe now?”

Rapaport: “I don’t think it’s different.”

Maher: “All right, woke is not [entirely] dead.”

Rapaport: “It ain’t dead. Every move you make, every step you take…if you screw up they’ll dump on you. All that old-school stuff…Farrelly brothers…awesome but they won’t make ’em.”

Maher: “Very politically incorrect except for the one I so love…I just watched it again…Green Book. The Peter Farrelly film. That’s an adult movie. It won the [Best Picture] Oscar, but the woke shit on it…it was a movie that they should have loved…ten years ago they would have come all over it because it’s about racism and has all the right moves…the black guy is way smarter than the white guy…but it was directed by a white guy so it had to be [trashed].”

Last weekend I got into a spirited discussion about the spelling of a young girl’s first name.

When spoken it rhymed with the last name of My Lai murderer William Calley…”CALL-ee”. My first reaction was that it was probably spelled like Callie Khouri, the screenwriter of Thelma and Louise.

No, I was told — the spelling starts with a “k.” Okay, I replied, but the origin of that name would be spelled Kali or Khali— the name of a major Hindu god, “primarily associated with time, death and destruction.”

A third option is that the girl’s mother called her CALL-ee because of a simple fond memory of California…no link to Callie Khouri or Gunga Din or Eduardo Cianelli’s guru.

I did a quick Google search of “Kali” on my phone and tried to present it as validation of that spelling. I was told that the Hindu spelling was immaterial because the young girl in question is black. Huh? She could be violet with pink polka dots, I muttered to myself, and Kali would still be a term of Indian or Hindu origin.

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Matthew Miele‘s Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words, a highly absorbing 95-minute doc, first surfaced on 7.27.25. I finally sat down and watched it this evening on HBO Max.

Mr. Chayefsky is the only writer to win three Oscars for solo, non-collaborative screenwriting: the adapted Marty (’55), and the written-for-the-screen The Hospital (’71) and Network (’76).

I fell in love with the man when I first saw The Americanization of Emily (’64). Despite Marty‘s vaulted reputation I didn’t actually sit down and watch it until sometime in the ’90s.

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What magnificently concise writing…straight to the point, not a single superfluous word or syllable. And yet they’re read by a kind of magical sorcerer…a wonderfully soothing, calming voice from the great Alec Guinness…sublime.

“The young woman known as Alexandra Borisovna Ostrakova is your daughter. You arranged for her illegal departure from Russia by pretending she was a secret agent of the Thirteenth Directorate. You stole public money and misused the resources of your service. And you caused the murders of two men, the first in England and the second in West Germany. I do not ask what you did to the wretched Oleg Kirov.

“Any one of these offenses would be enough to ensure your death at the hands of your rivals in the Collegium.

“There is also the open question of what may be done with your daughter, here, now that her true identity is known. It is possible that she is curable, I am told, with the right treatment here in the West. In the East it is different, as you know. But what will happen once she is deprived of money and proper papers? She will become a perpetual and ailing exile, ferried from one public hospital to another. I do not need to imagine her solitude, or yours. I have seen her.

“When we met in Delhi, I urged you to come to the West. I promised you, within reason, a decent life. If you do that now, if you cooperate in your interrogation, you will be resettled in the usual way, and your daughter’s future in the West will be secure.

“By your actions, you have disowned the system that made you. You have placed love above duty. The ground on which you once stood is cut away. You have become a citizen of no man’s land. I send you my greetings.”

Jeff Goldblum is the only Wicked: For Good cast member I personally relate to, and his character (the Wizard of Oz) is fairly villainous for the most part.

You can’t say Goldblum didn’t have the best line in the original Wicked: “I think it’s a bit much.”

But never let it be said this is not a “safe”, positive-minded, wholesomely diverse cast. They cover the woke waterfront.

What kind of 21st Century ensemble cast do I relate to? Dozens upon dozens. How about the Spotlight guys? The Sentimental Value family? Or the Zero Dark Thirty-ers? Or the Manchester By The Sea pain-bearers? Or the Weapons community? Or Team Irishman? I could go on and on.

What if you have issues with diverse identity brandishing but you don’t consider yourself a MAGA mouth-breather? What if you’re more of a sensible centrist?

From David Brooks N.Y. Times column, posted on 10.30.25:

From Politico’s Elena Schneider, dated 11.2…as if everyone didn’t already know that Democrats have all but slit their own throats over woke issues and trans stuff in particular.

Proles to Dems, Part 2: “Sorry to break it to ya, ayeholes, but J.K. Rowling had it right all along.”

I loved the tension of the last two or three innings, but I was generally focusing upon player appearances. I decided that Bo Bichette is the most Hollywood of them all, certainly hair-wise.

It’s over. Zohran Mamdani in a walk. Curtis Sliwa is too much of a narcissist to drop out.

A discussion recently raged about which films have the best shot at winning the Best Picture Oscar on 3.15.26.

“In a perfect world, Weapons,” I said, “but I don’t want to even hear about Sinners. I don’t wanna hear that word! Nominations but no big wins. Right now it’s One Battle After Another vs. Hamnet, except smart Academy members know they can’t hand the gold crown to Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film as doing so would brand the filmmaking community as unregenerate, hyperventilating lefty wombats who live on their own full-tilt island. So the problematic Hamnet will proably prevail at the end of the day. Despite the indisputable fact that…”

Friendo: “Yes?”

HE: “Despite the indisputable fact that Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value is far and away the best of them all…an honest, drillbitty, perfectly written and performed, Ingmar Bergman-esque family drama that deals straight cards, top to bottom.”

Friendo: “There’s no way a European-made, foreign-language film will win the Best Picture Oscar this year.”

HE: “It’s actually bi-lingual — an English-language title, of course, and performed in a mix of English, Norwegian and apparently a little Swedish. The English-speaking Elle Fanning plays a crucial supporting role (a major American actress) in her native tongue. It’s mostly in Norweigan, but there’s certainly enough English to qualify the film as bilingual and then some.

“In any event what about a little Korean-language film called Parasite? Took the Best Picture Oscar in 2020.”

Friendo: “That was a woke one-off. The younger Academy members refused to embrace Scorsese’s The Irishman, and fell for the then-fashionable notion of awarding a stringent social satire about poor people of color hustling rich people of color. Plus Bong Joon-ho relentlessly worked the town like a pro. Plus the Academy refused to deal with the hustlers letting the fired maid into the house during that rainstorm.””

HE: “So it’s not the foreign-language factor. Not really. You’re saying Sentimental Value can’t win because it’s mostly about a white Norweigan family. Not diverse enough.”

Friendo: “Parasite made $53 million at the U.S. box office, and over $253 million worldwide. I love Sentimental Value as much as you, but it’ll be lucky to make $5 million domestic. Americans are too thick to really get behind it.”

While driving home last night around 1 am, I had NBC’s coverage of the RFK assassination (6.5.68) on the headphones. Excerpts, I mean. It lasts 102 minutes.

At exactly the 45-minute mark, RFK’s crowded-together supporters, having just celebrated the New York Senator decisively winning the California Democratic primary inside L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, start to realize that something terrible has apparently happened in an area behind the ballroom stage.

Shock, alarm and panic begins to ripple through the crowd…an eerie cacophonus shrieking starts to fill the room, getting louder and louder.

This ghastly symphony reminded me of an observation shared 25 years ago by former NBC correspondent Robert MacNeil during a Television Academy Foundation interview. The 18-minute segment is all about how MacNeil reported the tragic events of 11.22.63 in Dallas.

Seconds after the Dealey Plaza shooting, MacNeil jumped off the press bus, he says. At the 8:55 mark he recalls the following: “The air was filled with the most incredible screams I’ve ever heard…it was as though there were a bunch of choirs, all deliberately shrieking out of tune, cacophonously…an hysterical, unbelievable sound echoing off all these [Dealey Plaza] buildings.”