Jimmy Kimmel will resume his late-night ABC talk show tomorrow night (Tuesday, 9.23), a Disney statement has announced.

Perhaps Disney’s decision had more to do with trying to arrest the Disney-subscriber-bleeding and less to do with Disney honcho Bob Iger showing a little moxie…you tell me.

Kimmel was suspended last week after making an odd, bordering-on-clueless remark during a monologue…a remark that seemed to question the conventional narrative about accused Charlie Kirk murderer Tyler Robinson may have been motivated by his feelings for a live-in transgender biomale furry “girlfriend” named Lance Twiggs…let me start again.

For some reason Kimmel’s monologue remark avoided or sidestepped a prevailing (if unproven) view that Robinson pulled the trigger because he was enraged by what he and others believed were hateful, dismissive attitudes toward the LGBTQ and/or transgender communities from Kirk.

One presumes that Donald Trump, his kneejerk-acolyte brute squad and FCC chairman Brendan Carr are seething and punching the refrigerator as we speak.

How will the Nexstar-owned affiliates react to this?

Disney statement quoted by N.Y. Times reporter John Koblin:

“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country.

“It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

I’m presuming that the financial situation is still not good for Kimmel’s show (ditto the situation regarding CBS’s Late Night with Stephen Colbert) as far as a cost-vs.-earnings comparison is concerned. But against all odds and despite the repressive, sabre-rattling, authoritarian bully-boy maneuvers of the Trumpies, Disney clearly wasn’t comfortable with the free-speech-blowback reaction that was activated by the Kimmel suspension.

Question for Kimmel: Did you honestly think that if it turns out that Robinson is in fact guilty…did you honestly suspect or believe that he wasn’t motivated by rage over Kirk’s statements about the LGBTQ and trans communities in particular?

Bari Weiss‘s five-day-old FP interview with Woody Allen delivered, for me, a wonderful current of calm…a soothing and settled feeling of luscious well-being. It made me feel as if I understand everything…all of it. I felt like I was cruising on a Lemmon 714. I could have listened to a three- or four-hour version.

The only thing I didn’t care for was Allen’s refusal to condemn the woke insanity wave of 2019 to 2024…five or six fucking years of red-book-waving, career-destroying terror, and to this day 90% of the perpetrators STILL don’t even acknowledge that it happened. Of all the cancelled people in the world, Allen shrugs it off and says that “doesn’t affect me” or words to that effect. It does, of course — Allen mined his anger and outrage over the Mia-and-Dylan accusation quite throughly in “Apropos of Nothing“. But he doesn’t want “that” conversation to color his mind, mood or basic attitude, so it gets tossed.

Earlier this morning I watched two Charlie Rose Show interviews with the late, great Lou Reed — a 2003 interview that included his wife Laurie Anderson, and a 1998 solo interview. More bliss.

If I was still living in West Hollywood I would have definitely have driven to Las Vegas by now to see the Las Vegas Sphere presentation of The Wizard Of Oz. It began showing about a month ago. Ticket prices are punishing ($140 or $150 for one decent seat — close to $300 for two people without popcorn, and closer to $400 if you’re buying through a greedy broker).

They’re not even showing the whole, original 102-minute 1939 film — the Sphere version runs only about 70 minutes. But it’s reportedly worth it.

Sphere Oz began showing on 8.28.25, and has earned $55 million so far…in one theatre. The cost of transforming the original 35mm Oz into Sphere’s stunning 16K dimensions took about $100 million. Although the arena seats over 17000 when full, Oz showings only offer the middle section, or roughly a third of its capacity. Two to three shows a day (why not four or five?), nearly every day, through the end of March 2026, with a ticket price that starts at $114 for shitty seats.

Sphere theatres should obviously be built all over the country, but which films should be Sphere-icized? Please, please don’t suggest the fucking Harry Potter films…no!

In HE’s realm the obvious calls would be the classic big-screen spectacles — Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back (but not the prequels!), Apocalypse Now, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, Titanic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the original 1933 King Kong…which others?

I would particularly love to see North by Northwest in this format. Image the crop-dusting sequence with all the directional sound and dust and the aroma of dirt and corn crops and a slight whiff of pesticides, and that magnificent blue sky above.

How can any sensible, Democracy-respecting person be against Gavin Newsom‘s Prop. 50, which will try to counterbalance the perversely pro-right gerrymandering of Texas by Donald Trump and Texas governor Greg Abbott? Who could actually support the rogue tilting the electoral map in favor of MAGA brutalism? Note: I’m saying this despite being in limited league with Trump’s anti-woke leanings — the anti-woke stuff is fine, but the repressive authoritarian stuff obviously isn’t.

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…and yet when it finally began streaming last weekend, I “forgot” to watch it. Because the reviews have been so shitty.

Friendo who watched it yesterday: “Eden is no one’s idea of good.”

HE: “Owen Gleiberman called it ‘terrible.’”

Friendo: “There’s a surreal scene in which Sydney Sweeney’s Margret Whitmer, all alone in a cave, goes into labor just as her cabin is being robbed by Ana de Armas’s boy-toy lovers.

“On the brink of birth a pack of dogs arrive and begin to attack Sweeney. Cut to the two robbers escaping with canned foods, and then just as the baby drops Sweeney screams at the dogs until a rescuer artives with a gun and starts shooting them. All of this happening at once — a scene that lasts nearly ten minutes. The dogs!”

HE: “My bad for not watching it. I knew it would give me annoyance and frustration, and my spirit wilted. But I’ll sit through it later today or tonight.”

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.
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Kogonada and Seth Reiss‘s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has failed so completely — tank RT scores with both critics and ticket-buyers, a lousy $3.5M haul in 3,330 theaters — that I suddenly feel sorry for it.

Surely a few HE regulars saw it this weekend — did anyone even half-like it or, you know, find at least some merit in it?

Four days ago (9.17) I mentioned that I had seen Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin‘s Splitsville (Neon, now playing), a freestyle, marital infidelity, fuck-everything-and-everyone sitcom.

I didn’t exactly “like” it because the schlubby-looking, bordering-on-homely Covino and Marvin play the two sexually active male leads, and that’s a stopper right there. Especially with their significant others being played by the seriously fetching Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona, who in real life wouldn’t give guys who look like Covino and Marvin the time of day, much less kiss or fuck them.

You can’t expect an Average Joe with a suburban upbringing and more or less conventional standards (i.e., me) to watch an indie sex farce of this sort and go “yeah, I can relate to these half-ugly, dweeby-looking guys in their early 40s…that could be me up there!…show me a curly-haired guy in a pair of dorky-looking brown shorts and sneakers and a moss-green polo shirt…a guy who takes a shower early on, allowing us to contemplate his milky white skin, narrow shoulders, slight pot belly and prosthetic schlong…you can’t expect me to relate to this shit, man…you can’t!

“Because in my head I’m Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor or at least I used to be that in my prime, and that’s the kind of guy I want to see married to the thirtysomething Dakota Johnson or engaged to Adria Arjona.”

Boiled down, I don’t want to know about homely guys in any sexual context at all. Fair?

But I did laugh with Splitsville a few times, particularly during a sloppily destructive, drawn-out fight scene between Covino qnd Marvin…an exquisitely clumsy fight scene that could’ve been choreographed by a Buster Keaton wannabe in the mid ’20s. And I did find Splitsville unusual and semi-diverting and therefore tolerable. I certainly didn’t dislike it.

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Initially posted on 11.6.07: Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood is one of those legendary, go-for-broke, fiercely psychological big-canvas art movies that you need to see twice — the first time to go “whoa!” and recoil and get all shaken up and bothered about, and the second time so you can reconsider and see what a masterwork it is, despite your feelings about the malignant emotional content.

If you’re a film maven of any kind you can’t let your piddly emotions get in the way of recognizing diseased greatness.

Daniel Day Lewis‘s portrayal of the remarkable Daniel Plainview — a driven, increasingly manic and misanthropic oilman who builds an empire in the early 20th Century — is historic. It’s one of the most riveting and demonically possessed performances ever put to film — more feverish than any monster played by Lon Chaney or Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi — and yet human and vulnerable-seeming enough to stir a certain recognition. He’s playing John Huston, after all, by way of Noah Cross. Or is it vice versa?.

Plainvew is a Count Dracula who spews oil rather than sucks blood. He starts out as a hard-working miner, then a flinty businessman, then a religion-hating misanthrope, then a father who abandons his son, and finally a full-out fiend.

Lewis has a Best Actor Oscar nomination in the bag, of course, but the moral matter of what he and Anderson have brought into the world may give pause to some.

I’m imagining Anderson and Lewis holding a miniature infant version of Daniel Plainview in baby blankets, fresh out of the womb and wet with afterbirth and yet adultly proportioned (as he is in the film), and saying to us all, “Come see our child! He’s a monster, no question, but he came from our ribs and our souls and we love him…God help us but we do. We realize you can’t love him — he’s not constructed that way — but can you respect him at least? Can you at least see that he’s where some of us — perhaps more than a few of us — have come from? Or is a person that, God help us, some of us may actually be?”

No one in the world will argue that the musical score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood isn’t a major mind-bender. It’s boldly intrusive, brassy and manic, pushy, crazy-man symphonic. It expresses Plainview’s psychological state, of course, but it’s also a character unto itself. It keeps saying “listen to me…no, no, listen to me!” And you do, and you can’t help but think and think about it afterward. It’s a guaranteed Oscar nominee.

I really don’t know what to say about Blood‘s chances of being Oscar-nominated for Best Film, or Anderson’s for Best Film or Adapted Screenplay (based as it is on Upton Sinclair‘s “Oil!”).

My first reaction was that it’s too cold for the Academy types to embrace it, but I’m starting to wonder. I really don’t know if my first reaction is the one to trust or the reaction I’m feeling now, having seen it a second time last night at San Francisco’s Castro theatre with a huge crowd, and admired it all the more.

“Does it have a chance of being named Best Picture by a critics group?,” I wrote a week and a half ago. “Conceivably. Does it have a chance in hell of being nominated for Best Picture by the Academy? I really doubt this. A film this black and misanthropic has never played with the Academy. Compared to Anderson’s film, No County for Old Men is a fairly gentle and kind-hearted thing, at least in terms of Tommy Lee Jones‘ lawman character.

I was wowed but mixed after seeing There Will Be Blood on 10.25. There was no question I’d just seen a masterfully well-honed psychodrama about a two-pronged figure — a snarly, self–made oil tycoon and a creature from the black lagoon — in early 20th Century California.

I also knew this was a powerfully convincing portrait of what a rough, backbreaking thing it was to get oil out of the ground 80 and 90 years ago, and a seriously strange but fascinating look at the primal influences of big oil and evangelical Christianity — religions that obviously still prosper today.

It was also clear there was a strong, somewhat plagued psychological engine at its center. I’m speaking principally of Anderson’s sardonic, dark-leaning world view (portions of Punch Drunk Love aside) and, I strongly suspect, his feelings about his late father, big-time announcer Ernie Anderson, who was allegedly a fierce personality with very dark leanings himself.

People are going to be talking about There Will Be Blood‘s closing line — “I’m finished” — for a long time to come. As well as those first 15 or 20 minutes of dialogue-free story-telling and atmosphere absorption. It’s obviously a work of a first-rate filmmaker delivering a very high-end art epic, at times stunningly so.

There is nothing but realism in There Will be Blood — there isn’t a fake line or moment in the entire 2 hours and 38 minutes — but it’s also an embodiment of a very creepy psychology. Black as night, black as oil, blacker than the bottom of a sealed-up well. My girlfriend hated it. The thought occured to me during the first screening that it’s probably going to make as much as The Assassination of Jesse James…if that.

I respect this film enormously. I admire each and every part. But it leaves you with nothing but the taste of bile in your mouth at the end. Bile and ashes that you want to spit on the pavement as you’re heading out to the parking lot, and at the same time you want to keep with you because they came from a strong and penetrating film.

The day after first seeing it I wrote that Anderson “has a heart of darkness inside him that would make Joseph Conrad tremble and turn pale. I don’t know anything, but There Will Be Blood doesn’t seem like a movie for audiences to watch and delight in as much as a therapy session for Paul to work out his rage and anger at Ernie.”

Lewis’s “Bill the Butcher” in Gangs of New York was a grand guignol psychopath, but Plainview is even more diseased as he lets no light in whatsoever. No gentleness, humor or warmth (except for the love he shows his young adopted son during the first hour). A shrewd survivor, but consumed by utter greed and calculation. A man looking for love and loyalty, and yet ready to kill or abandon those he feels have betrayed him or let him down. Not a character as much as a kind of demonic force of nature.

A week and a half ago I wrote “there is no way — no way in hell — that rank-and-file Academy members are going to embrace this performance, forceful and amazingly intense as it is, enough for Lewis to win. I support his being nominated because I know what great acting is, but no way in hell does he win. Forget it.”

Now I don’t know. Last night’s viewing turned me around somewhat. I feel less emotional and more sure of the greatness at work here.

Within its own heavily male, oil-soaked, organized religion-hating, misanthropic realm, There Will Be Blood is brilliant.

But (and I’m talking about the first viewing, not the second) it’s about as hateful as a quality film can be — hateful in that there’s no one to care about except for the young son (and his adult incarnation at the end), and not that much to think about. Most women viewers will probably despise it, and yet it’s easily one of the year’s best made films.

I haven’t mentioned the fall-on-your-knees quality of Robert Elswit‘s widescreen cinematography or Jack Fisk’s production design. I’ll get into the other fine performances by Paul Dano, Ciaran Hinds, Dillon Freasier and Kevin J. O’Connor down the road. It’s primarily a Lewis show from start to finish, and it’s hard to focus elsewhere for the time being.

Anderson is saying, I think, “Don’t let yourself be like this guy….but if you are like this guy, don’t turn to religion to cure your ills because God is a foolish superstition, and religions are run by money-grubbing hypocrites.”

There Will Be Blood is a cautionary tale — beware of the Daniel Plainviews in your life, and the ones living inside you. Is it worth two hours and 38 minutes of experiencing a seething misanthropic cauldron to absorb this message? Yes, it’s worth it…definitely. It passes along a kind of insanity, but it does so with absolute greatness.