No TV weather woman would freeze up like this, and the news show floor techs wouldn’t just stand there like frozen zombies. Seized by some kind of invisible force and not knowing why or how or anything, Emily Blunt would do her best to pretend that everything’s okay. She would improvise a little blah-blah, air some bullshit, etc.
Where are the UFOs, and where’s Carlo Rimbaldi when we really need him?
Jessie Buckley: “It’s chaos. But that’s our job.”
Colin Farrell: “To be in the mess. To lean into the mystery.”
Buckley: “The more I do this, the more I realize the job is to become more human. Take your hands off the steering wheel. How do you…?”
Farrell: “Drive hands-free? Foot on the gas.”
Buckley: “Waymo.”
Farrell: “Every time I see one of those…oh my God. Well done, humans! There’ll be 50,000 drivers unemployed within the next two years. Well done.”
— from Variety‘s latest “Actors on Actors,” 10.16.25.
Sources have told People that Nick Reiner was allegedly acting erratically with guests at Conan O’Brien‘s Christmas party last Saturday night. Source: “Nick was freaking everyone out, acting crazy, kept asking people if they were famous.”
Us Weekly was told that the 32 year-old drug-susceptible asshole behaved “creepily” at O’Brien’s soiree, while a third insider told TMZ that Nick looked out of place at the party, wearing a hoodie when the dress code was formal.
And yet the prevailing view among comment-thread predators in yesterday’s “Odious Aftermath” discussion was that if an obviously disturbed youth is fated to kill his or her parents, it’s better for the parents to just say “okay, we accept this…bring it on”.
I was in a not-great, probably-going-nowhere place for a certain period in my early to mid 20s, but writing and journalism gradually lifted me out of that hole. Maybe a three-year period, give or take. Okay, call it four years. Hell, make it five.
I just barely crawled out of that attitude, that downward swirl kind of life, but while I was “under the weather” I could feel the weight of my vague gloom getting a bit worse each succeeding year.
Yes, I was drinking and drugging back then (pot, speed, Coors beer and Jack Daniels-and-ginger-ale were my constant companions, my beloved hermanos) but not — or so I’ve long told myself — to the point of any kind of insane self-destructive addiction. Thank God I had a certain inner decency or resolution of some kind within…some kind of fortunate spiritual inheritance, probably from my mother’s side of the family. Call it luck or God’s grace.
But to have lived in this kind of sinkhole for 17 years like Nick Reiner apparently has?….for more than half of a 32-year span of life? Forget it. You’re sunk. I’ve seen and felt that downhead vibe in others who never found their way out of the pit…some who just couldn’t turn things around and make something good or half-promising happen.
After 17 or so years of anguish Nick Reiner has finally found his catharsis. He’s murdered the people who brought him into this world and loved and nurtured him as best they could but ironically (or in Nick’s all-screwed-up head at least) never stopped making him feel depressed and enraged. He’s clearly a self-hater of epic proportions…a demonic figure.
Earlier today I slipped on a small patch of ice, my calves and ankles went flying and I came crashing down…whummp…whooof! But I bounced right back. No aching rib cage, no sprained wrists, no bruised elbows, no aching knees or snapped bones…nothing. My resilience amazes me, I’m branded on my feet, etc.
What saved me? I didn’t fall on hard frozen ground or asphalt or gravel or rocks, but upon a soft mound of snow.
I wasn’t so lucky in mid-February 2019 when I slipped and fell on an icy slope in the Sierras. Nothing was broken but my ribs ached like a sonuvabitch for a good two or three weeks.
“Tarsem Singh’s ‘The Fall‘”, posted on 1.19.13:
I experienced a bulletproof moment last night. Fairly amazing. I fell on some ice and came crashing down on my right elbow, and nothing happened. I got right up and kept walking. My glasses were destroyed but no aches or scrapes, no bruises, no morning-after stiffness, no Advils…nothing. I could have theoretically busted my arm. A great feeling.
It was vaguely akin to that Pulp Fiction moment when John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are shot several times by a kid who bursts out of the bathroom and yet none of them are hit — all the bullet holes are in the wall behind them. This led Jackson to want to quit being a hitman and just “walk the earth” like Caine in Kung Fu, “meet all kinds of people, get into adventures.”
Three information bullets about the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele, which happened either yesterday morning or afternoon (Sunday) or late Saturday night.
Bullet #1: Nick, the alleged murderer, was living in a guest home at his parents’ sprawling Brentwood estate. Bullet #2: On Saturday night (12.13) Rob, Nick and Michelle reportedly got into a howling argument at a Christmas party at Conan O’Brien‘s Amalfi Drive home. Although Rob and Michele left the gathering soon after the blowout, one presumes that whatever the fight was about (what kind of parents bring their troubled, volatile son to a lah-lah industry soiree?) it continued at their home. Bullet #3: Rob and Michele weren’t stabbed to death Julius Caesar-style, or at least not conclusively — apparently their lives ended due to their throats being slit.
A 32 year-old dude grappling with raging, sputtering anger and major drug issues for 16 or 17 years (over half his life, endless rehab stints) is almost certainly not going to heal or fix himself. The odds are obviously against it. Some people are so stricken or cursed or generally miserable there’s just no basis for hope.
This is Monday-morning quarterbacking, of course, but if I’d been in Reiner’s shoes and clairvoyant besides, I might have tried to figure some way to ease poor miserable Nick off this mortal coil. Gently. Compassionately. Kevorkian-style. I might be anrrested and prosecuted, but I would be totally at peace with what I did. Because I could at least have spared my beloved wife from being murdered by this vile fuck, not to mention myself.
When you gain weight, grow a beard and shear your hair off, you’re saying something about your mental-emotional condition or world-view. Nothing good. Hollywood kids have it rough, so to speak. A crushing blessing-slash-burden.
Talk about psychotic and deranged behavior…President Trump has posted that “anger” triggered by the elder Reiner’s intense, years-long criticism of Trump’s policies and impulsive style of governing was somehow a factor in his killing.
Variety ‘s Todd Spangler:
Rob Reiner…good God. Murdered. Late Sunday afternoon the famed director, 78, and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, 68, were found stabbed to death in their flush Brentwood home on South Chadbourne Ave. (south of Sunset).
Reiner’s 32 year-old son Nick, who co-wrote Being Charlie, a decade-old, well-intentioned family melodrama, directed by the elder Reiner and based on Nick’s own teenaged struggle with drugs and homelessness, has been identified as the assailant. Being Charlie premiered at TIFF in September ‘15. Nobody saw it, a critical bust. streaming on Fandango.
YouTube link…this is getting more and more surreal.
10:45 am Monday: Talk about psychotic and deranged behavior…President Trump has posted that “anger” triggered by the elder Reiner’s intense, years-long criticism of Trump’s policies and impulsive style of governing was somehow a factor in his killing.
Two full hours of digging into Shampoo with The Rewatchables‘ Bill Simmons and Sean Fennessey, joined by special guest visitor Cameron Crowe…excellent stuff.
A Cameron Crowe nugget (or “easter egg”, as he puts it) about the making of Shampoo, starting at 10:38: “Paul Simon was, like, the hottest guy around, at that time, as far as doing a song for a movie. So Warren Beatty was really looking for a song to end Shampoo with, but he’s also looking for a score from Paul Simon. I gather it was quite a dance to get the new song from Simon or the new score. But ultimately all Simon came up with was ‘doo-dah-dooo-yeaaahh-yeah-yeah”, which plays through the movie in every possible way. It’s very strange.
“So meanwhile, I guess, Beatty is dating or about to date Joni Mitchell, and he asks Joni for a song. And she writes a song called ‘Sweet Bird’, as in ‘Sweet Bird of Youth.’ And it kind of references the iconography of Beatty and Splender on the Grass….it’a seriously insightful song about the Beatty persona and the George Roundy character, and Beatty heard the song and he’s like ‘uhn-uh, nah-nah, no-no….great song but not great for this movie.
“And if you listen to the song, and think about what the power of a song would have been over the last scene, it’s not about the proverbial bumbling guy [whom Beatty was playing in Shampoo and whom he seemed to be actuality, socially and sexually and whatnot, back then]. The movie would have conveyed that this was a persona, under which was incredible insecurity and doubt, but Beatty was like ‘no, no…don’t need that song in the movie.’ I’d rather have Simon’s ‘doo-dee-dooooo.'”
It’s such a shattering bummer that audiences are so primitive minded…so shallow and kneejerk vapid that the obviously schlocko Sinners, a 1930s musical vampire film that bears the stamp of Samuel Z. Arkoff and features main characters named “Smoke” and “Stack”, has pulled in $367.9 million while the obviously superior and so much richer and more artistically nourishing Sentimental Value has only earned $3,365,957 so far.
I am truly sickened by award-season handicappers who say Sentimental Value isn’t really in the game because it’s Norwegian with subtitles….God in heaven!
Scott Mantz is a case in point — he’s actually named Sinners as his all-time favorite of 2025. Would Mantz be this much of a Sinners booster if Clem Kadiddlehopper had written and directed it? And don’t forget that Mantz never even mentioned Criterion’s teal-tinting on the recently popped Eyes Wide Shut 4K Bluray.
Why hasn’t some YouTube hotshot mixed Bernard Herrmann‘s discarded Torn Curtain score onto the film’s soundtrack, just for experimentation’s sake?
“The supreme high point of collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann was on Psycho, but it laid the seeds for the disaster that would happen six years later in March of 1966 when Hitchcock went to hear the score for Torn Curtain.
“You couldn’t really hear a film score in those days before it was recorded, if it was written for an orchestra. Hitchcock showed up to the session wanting a miracle for this movie that he knew wasn’t particularly good. He heard that Herrmann had written a heavy, dark, sometimes lugubrious score that Benny thought would convey the sense of the Soviet Union…the Iron Curtain that the heroes are trapped behind. Benny thought Hitchcock would love that.
“I was able to hear the recording of the session, and you can tell that Benny has no idea what’s coming. He’s in a great mood, so he was absolutely stunned when Hitchcock listened to two cues and fired him on the spot and canceled the session.” — “Hitchcock & Herrmann” author Steven C. Smith in a discussion wityh Variety‘s Chris Willman.
For what it’s worth, I like Dimitri Tiomkin‘s scores for Strangers on a Train, I Confess and Dial M for Murder as much as Herrmann’s Hitch scores. Well, almost as much.
Otherwise the Sydney fuzz might have presumed he was with the bad guys and plugged him.
And by the way, why didn’t the Sydney fuzz respond sooner? Onlookers said the shooters were unchallenged for quite a while…15 minutes or longer. Early reports are hazy, but the general impression is that cops definitely weren’t Johnny-on-the-spot.
“For fanatics who have been led to believe that the Jewish state is the apotheosis of evil, killing Jews represents a twisted notion of justice. Even when the victims are unarmed civilians. Even when they are celebrating an ancient, joyful holiday.
“Though we’ll probably learn more in the weeks ahead about the mind-set of Sunday’s killers, it’s reasonable to surmise that what they thought they were doing was ‘globalizing the intifada.’ That is, they were taking to heart slogans like “resistance is justified,” and “by any means necessary,” which have become ubiquitous at anti-Israel rallies the world over.” — N.Y. Times columnist Bret Stephens, “Bondi Beach Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like,” posted on 12.14.25.
