Last year we got to a point in the woke-lunacy cycle where it had really gone too far, and Lia Thomas — the broad-shouldered, six-foot-four dude with washboard abs and an allegedly sizable kielbasa — swimming competitively against women like Riley Gaines…this was a demonstration or an incident of certifiable peak insanity, which is to say corporate sport overlords reflexively kowtowing to trans radicals, which led to every liberal person feeling obliged to skip to that rope for fear of being branded a transphobe.

Riley Gaines to Bill Maher: “We’re here…we’re in that place…now.”

Maher: “No, I agree.”

Gaines: “We’re living it, and it’s [gone] entirely too far. And this idea of this or that community being oppressed is silly. It’s silly. There are bad apples in any barrel, but people don’t see color any more. We’re not living in the 1960s. This is not true of every single person but…”

Maher: “I alway say let’s live in the year that we’re living in. We have come such a long way [over the last 50 or 60 years]…”

Gaines: “But you wouldn’t think so [to hear it from the woke] media.”

Maher: “Is racism still a malady in this country? Absolutely. But it’s like we’re using the bloodwork from 1990 to diagnose it, and that’s not where the bloodwork is now. Still an issue, and [of course[ there are lots of racist people, but most of it is ‘I went into a store and got a dirty look from [some cracker].’ Yeah, that happens to people of color, but the mainstream of Americans are just not racist like they used to be. It’s still out there and you can find it, and obviously the legacy [of racism] still lives with us in many ways so it’s not a non-issue. But I agree, the biggest problem that they have on the left is this obsession with race…chasing phantoms of racism that don’t exist any more [for the most part]…

Gaines: “Everyone just wants to be a victim [or comfort a victim].

Maher: “I was just gonna say that. The victim mentality. And that transcends race. Much more generational…that’s your generation.”

Last night Jett told me he recently re-watched Some Like It Hot (having seen it many times), and it suddenly hit him that (a) Tony Curtis‘s Joe character is a truly odious womanizer and (b) he doesn’t like him very much, and that Joe’s ugliness colored Jett’s basic attitude about the film.

I found this a familiar and even vaguely amusing viewpoint as this is a typical Millennial thing (moral condemnation + faint notions of cancelling directed toward a self-absorbed prick who wouldn’t fit into today’s realm).

My response: “But that’s the point of the character. Joe is ‘a liar and a phony’, as he admits to Marilyn Monroe‘s Sugar at the very end, but he gradually develops empathy and a conscience after putting on a wig and falsies and wearing a dress and thereby realizing ‘how the other half lives.’

“Joe feels so badly about lying to Sugar (i.e., pretending to be a Shell Oil heir) and then breaking her heart when he and Jack Lemmon‘s Jerry are forced to go on the lam in order to avoid Spats Columbo and his gang that he gives her the only item of value between them — a diamond bracelet that Joe E. Brown‘s Osgood Fielding had given Lemmon’s ‘Daphne’ (and which Joe has technically stolen).

“This is part of his third-act redemption,” I went on. “This plus Joe’s admitting to Sugar that he’s the same kind of thoughtless cad she’s been emotionally bruised by so often.

“Whenever a flawed movie character lets his guard down and admits to a significant moral failing, he’s taken a slight but significant step toward becoming a better human being.”

Example: The last-minute emotional breakthrough experienced by Anthony Quinn’s Zampano in Federico Fellini’s La Strada. A terrible brute throughout the whole film but at the very last minute he realizes who and what he is. His weeping on the beach symbolizes a kind of redemption. Small but noteworthy.

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After 21 months of scintillating baby vibes within a passive, moody or euphoric, in-and-out dynamic, the suddenly much-more-verbal-and-assertive Sutton actually called me “papa” a few times yesterday and two or three times motioned me to sit down next to her (patting the seat to indicate where I should plant my butt) and reached out and took my hand and led me around several times.

Her moods are rather moody as she’s now in her “terrible two” phase and giving her mother attitude (it began several weeks ago), but from my humble perspective it’s quite a thing when your granddaughter suddenly addresses you by name and urges you to do this or notice that with three- or four-word sentences.

Hundreds of billions have been through this, but it was the first time for this particular horse.

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Tip of the hat to World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy for digging into the recent Sound of Freedom smear that involved a clumsy mischaracterizing of alleged child-kidnapper Fabian Marta, who (a) is not a financier of the film but merely one of the film’s 6,678 crowdfunders and (b) is involved with some kind of child-custody mishegoss that apparently that has zip to do with child trafficking.

Marta’s lawyer Scott Rosenblum to Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro: “I don’t understand how they’re charging him with this…he has nothing to do with kidnapping anyone.”

I washed my hands of Sound of Freedom after that Bedminster Golf Club screening for Donald Trump, but a few slipshod media outlets (including Newsweek) jumped on the Marta story a day or two ago, seemingly energized by the idea of slandering the Angel Studios release because it’s a rightwing thing. This is not cool.

Titles can deceive. The Kill Room (Shouut!, 9.28) sounds primitive but the trailer indicates otherwise — it’s apparently a moderately sophisticated, smartly written dark comedy.

Directed by Groundlings and Funny or Die veteran Nicol Paone and written by Jonathan Jacobson, it’s about a hitman (Joe Manganiello) who accidentally becomes a sensation as a hip avant-garde painter.

Pic costars Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Maya Hawke (who also stars as Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat, co-written and directed by dad Ethan Hawke), Dree Hemingway and Debi Mazar.

The MI:7 shortfall has already been kicked around, but what in blazes is happening in this world? Aced out by Sound of Freedom, okay, but by anemic Haunted Mansion?

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman addressed the MI franchise situation earlier today.

Shakeman, Bloomfield Ave., Verona, N.J. —3:45 pm.

…for not just the diminished returns of Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Daryl F. Zanuck’s “monumental mouse” (Judith Crist’s term) but about the dwindling power of the old studio system itself.

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…who the bad guys are.

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This morning HE commenter Dean Treadway wrote something curious in the thread for “Annoying Beefalo on Baltic Beach.” He wrote “you must have been a terrible bully in school.”

Au contraire — it was often the other way around. During my horrible gulag youth I was occasionally victimized by bullies, both in fraternal and official realms. I was a provocateur, true, but the social punishment measures were brutal, even fiendish.

“Hardly a bully,” I replied. “I frequently felt alone and isolated and picked on. Mainly starting in my teens. Not always but often among rancid, herd-instinct groups in junior high and senior high (i.e., mainly in toxic New Jersey, hardly at all in Fairfield County).

“I consequently withdrew to some extent. I felt much more attached to movies and TV shows than to real life, which struck me as characterized by tiresome duty and drudgery and regulated boredom with very little in the way of discovery and adventure or, as Jim Morrison put it, “true sailing”.

And yet I had a perverse streak from an early age, rarely adhering to the straight and narrow. An instinctive oddball contrarian thing. Perhaps on some level an anarchist instinct, but more simply a healthy anti- authoritarian urge.

The first long word I learned to spell was anti–disestablishmentarianism.

Example: My Cub Scout group was hand painting fake-leather folders for personal diaries — we were simply supposed to try our hand at stylized caligraphy with the word “DIARY”’ front and center plus our names and birthdates at the bottom. I wrote the word “DAIRY” because I found it amusing.

I’m still pushing back against the bullies, except now they’re mainly from the ranks of Millennials and Zoomers.