“What I do know is there are people in the United States Senate who are not saints…I can tell you that.” — Sen. Bernie Sanders, six days ago.

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In the early ‘80s I worked as a part-time projectionist at South Norwalk’s Sono theatre. I was licensed and everything. I knew from editing and tape-splicing, aperture plates, “eight at the gate”…all that good stuff.

I always tried to keep a film in perfect focus, of course, but if a focus adjustment was requested it took seconds to manually implement. One, two…done.

I caught Disclosure Day last Thursday afternoon at my local Westport AMC. But during the pre-feature, pre-Nicole Kidman trailers the focus was distinctly, unmistakably blurry…not horrifically but slightly. I was on my feet and off to the lobby within seconds to politely complain; the other 30 or so patrons sat there like sheep or more precisely potted plants.

With projectionists a distant memory I knew that manual re-focusing was out, but I figured some kind of automated tech re-set might solve it.

But the manager didn’t know how to do this. He put in a call to AMC tech management for instructions. I went back to my seat and waited three, four minutes — no change. Back to the lobby…”the fuck, dude?” The manager hadn’t gotten through, he said. He offered a refund; I said I just wanted to watch focused images. The sheep sat through five or six additional blurry trailers.

And then Disclosure Day began and the focus was finally right. Thank you.

Above and beyond the woke bullshit Lupita-as-Helen of Troy factor, I’m probably going to vaguely dislike The Odyssey. This dark, out-of-focus snap of Tom “Telemachus” Holland in convo with Robert “Antinous” Pattinson is triggering.

I’ve never been a die-hard sports hound or an NBA fan and I hadn’t watched any of the previous four games in the Knicks-Spurs series, but I watched the entirety of game #5 last night and good effing God, what a ride, what a nail-biter, what a stunning, rousing fourth-quarter turnaround.

Jett’s first-quarter advisory: “The Knicks are always a fourth-quarter, come-from-behind team. They’re always sloppy at first, and then they rally in the fourth. That’s their pattern.”

I won’t bore the readership with any pedestrian play-by-play recollections, but I sure as hell got to know the 29-year-old Jalen Brunson last night; ditto the Spurs’ Victor Wembenyana, 22. I tried all through the game to remember his last name without stumbling; I finally gave up and defaulted to “Wemby.”

”She’ will talk to you, listen to you, remember everything about you. She’s not a doll any more.”

But you have to be wealthy. Which is how it’s mostly been anyway, historically-speaking.

@aimyikigai Test robot DIY … wait … What? #irc #robot #humanoid #explorereels #viralvideos ♬ оригинальный звук – ai.myikigai

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“This is a guy whose whose whole sad life, in a sense**, is The Hangover. But get used to it. Our society is not healthy, We create broken people, so don’t expect politicians to suddenly become Lincolnesque again.”

** Bill didn’t say “in a sense” — I stuck that in. I had to.

The sharp-witted, mustachioed, frizzy-haired Gene Shalit, the Today movie critic for 40 years, has passed at age 100. Sympathies and salutations.

I have mostly agreeable memories of the guy. Always “candid”, cheerful, devotional, politically obliging, and oh, those deliciously groan-worthy puns.

But did this boundlessly jovial fellow ever voice an opinion about a film that was on the renegade side? Did Shalit ever stick his neck out by saying that a film that almost everyone loves isn’t very good? Did he ever champion an unusual or eccentric film that everyone else was ignoring or putting down?

I don’t recall Shalit ever standing alone with an opinion that wasn’t widely shared. I’m not saying his opinions were always safe and chuckly, but they always seemed to be shrouded in general consensus. Am I misremembering? I’m asking.

Shalit was a spirit-lifter first and living-room film critic second…I get that. And his copy was always robust and sophisticated. But, as Bob Dylan once wrote, sometimes “even the President of the Yoo-nited States has to stand naked.”

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Jordan Ruimy asked last night for my five most admired films of 2026. Good effing God.

If I’d been allowed to choose from my nine Cannes favorites, I’d be totally fine.

But I could only choose from commercial releases. And that left me with…

Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake, Francois Ozon’s The Stranger, John Carney’s Power Ballad, Curry Baker’s Obsession and Daniel Roher’s Tuner.

The more I think back upon Project Hail Mary, which I “respected” but didn’t much care for when it opened last March, the more I spit phlegm upon the memory.

All hail HE’s Hal Incandenza for pointing out yesterday’s Hollywood Gadfly Substack piece — an examination of how Hollywood’s identity cautions and concerns, which began to morph into woke Maoism starting in the late teens and certainly by the George Floyd summer of 2020, has made many dramas boring and predictable.

This is the kind of “this is the truth of things and let the chips fall where they may” article that The New Yorker’s Justin Chang, an identity-code enforcer and celebrationist of the strictest order, could and would never write.

Who is Hollywood Gadfly? Perhaps an agent or a production exec, more likely a screenwriter. A discerning guy, obviously. Older and engaged and therefore with some perspective.

A few excerpts:

SPOILERS AHEAD: The general critical verdict about Steven Sielberg‘s Disclosure Day is somewhere between “pretty good” and “woo-woo good.”

A good guys-vs.-bad guys drama about an underground effort to stop suppressing information about alien visitors, DD is fast-moving, diverting and imaginative as far as it goes. I agree with the “pretty good” consensus, and I’m especially down with the final 35 or 40 minutes, which is all about (surprise!) crescendos and emotional payoffs and (what else?) generous servings of Spielberg-alien-awe face. But I wouldn’t trust the woo-woos.

So let’s not get carrried away. Disclosure Day is fine or even better-than-fine, but aside from one or two high-energy spurts it feels a bit..what words apply?…mid-range or cerebral or subdued or something. It’s never dull but…well, it just never got my blood going. Not really, I mean. Except at the end.

When it comes to lopsided, holy-shit car-chase thrillers, which is what the first 105 minutes of Disclosure Day basically is, HE has one ironclad requirement: the sympathetic hunted guys can’t make any stupid moves. If they screw up in some bullshit, boneheaded way, I tend to get angry and alienated and am soon exhaling loudly in my seat.

Emily Blunt‘s Margaret Fairchild, a TV weather girl based in Kansas City, and her boyfriend, Wyatt Russell‘s Jackson, get chased around by dozens of baddie-waddies in slick black cars (i.e., faceless goons under the command of Colin Firth‘s Noah Scanlon and employed by Wardex Corporation, which is basically about suppression of alien information) but they handle themselves reasonably well.

Blunt does more than that when she becomes a master of suggestion or, if you will, a practitioner of Alec Guinness-styled Jedi mind tricks.

But Josh O’Connor‘s Daniel Kellner, a former Wardex man who’s become devoted to the free and open sharing of alien information and, to that end, is carrying several flash drives that contain 79 years of visual data that proves the existence of alien visitors, screws up in two significant ways.

Kellner is too trusting of his slightly chubby girlfriend, a former nun called Jane (Eve Hewson) who feels that sharing alien info with the general populace will somehow undermine their spirit or diminish the importance of God or some such rubbish. (Only an idiotic God-believer would imagine that His/Her domain doesn’t include the entire universe.) Because Jane sympathizes on some level (subconsciously or otherwise) with the Wardex suppressionists, she winds up betraying Daniel not once but twice.

HE to Daniel: “She’s bad news, bruh! Love is blind but she’s not a realist and you can’t trust her. Cut her loose.”

After Jane’s second betrayal (i.e., alerting the Wardex guys to a remote location where she and Daniel have been hiding out), Josh steals one of the many Wardex cars that are parked near the hideout and drives right toward the others…brilliant!…smashing into this and that auto.

I was shaking my head back and forth and almost moaning with frustration. I really can’t give my support to a fellow who’s too dumb not to drive away from the villains. Then Daniel grabs Turncoat Jane and shoves her into his car. The man is hopeless.

Eventually Spielberg tires of the chase stuff and shifts focus to the big finale, whch includes the metaphorical alien spirit animals…a red cardinal, a fox, an elk (or is it a large-antlered deer?). And then, around the 115- or 120-minute mark, comes the big moment in which Daniel’s flash drives are finally uploaded to the TV station where Margaret does her weather-girling, and before you know it the whole world is wise to the entire alien-visitation portfolio.

And then Fairchild, sitting in an anchor chair, gives a gentle, thoughtful speech to the world about the meaning of what’s been revealed. Her very last line is “listen”, which is a variation on the final line in Howard Hawks’ The Thing (`1951): “Watch the skies”

There’s no question that Blunt does a LOT of strenuous acting in Disclosure Day. She blathers, yelps, convulses, cries out, shudders, shrieks. She really delivers in terms of vigorous “acting.”

Belfast police arrested the victim, a white native, of a three-day-old stabbing while allegedly coddling the Sudanese assailant, at least initially.

This, at least, is the internet legend going around.

Mob violence was triggered after authorities charged Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese man, with attempted murder in the afore-mentioned stabbing attack, prompting calls from anti-immigrant activists for protests amid heightened tensions in the United Kingdom over immigration.

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