Around 5:20 pm on Monday, 4.11, drivers of black, expensive, late-model cars slammed into each other at high speeds near the southwest corner of Fairfax and Willoughby. Look at the decimated auto on the right…total junkyard. Who was the bad guy? The one who was speeding, that’s who. Whomever got hurt had presumably been taken to a hospital by the time I got there. Cracked windshield, air bags.

Facebook discussion from Monday, 4.11:

In Senior Year (Netflix, 5.13), Rebel Wilson‘s “Stephanie Conway” awakes from a 20-year coma at age 38 or thereabouts, and decides to return to high school in 2022 to finish her senior year.

You can tell by the lame-ass humor in the trailer (jokes about Madonna vs. Lady Gaga, the relentless Fast and Furious franchise) that the senior creatives were terrified of doing the obvious.

The obvious would have been to create a fish-out-of-water comedy about a woman from 2002 suddenly grappling with woke Stalinism.

Wilson and her colleagues were too scared, in other words, to focus on the horror of Twitter, totalitarian safe spaces, the revolutionary consciousness overhaul brought about by #MeToo, the prohibition of certain terms, the dismissal of nearly all over-40 white males, Variety apologizing to Carey Mulligan for a single sentence in Dennis Harvey‘s review of Promising Young Woman, CRT and equity in schools, trans activists calling the shots (and therefore the triumph of Lia Thomas and the grooming of three-year-olds so they’ll understand the particulars of all the various genders), all people of color regarded as hothouse flowers and given sainthood status, celebrating obesity in underwear ads, etc.

There was a 1989 Cheech and Chong comedy called Rude Awakening — late ’60s hippies hiding in Central America and suddenly returning to the U.S. in the late ’80s and confronted with yuppie culture. Similar.

HE salutes Wilson, by the way, for dropping 77 pounds between ’20 and ’21. She’s still “ample” but within reasonable proportions.

Jimmy Kimmel-like excerpts from David Rooney’s THR review of Robert Eggers’ The Northman (Focus, 4.22):

Variety‘s Clayton Davis has never been to Europe much less to the Cannes Film Festival, but that’s about to change next month. Congrats and safe travels.

HE to Davis: Your tickets are already purchased, you’ve said, but I’m hoping that you’ve arranged to schedule a brief stop-over in Paris (which you’ve also never visited) on the way back. After every Cannes Film Festival I’ve attended (my first was in ’92) I’ve always downshifted in Paris, Rome, Prague, Berlin, Barcelona, Lauterbrunnen, London, Ireland, etc. It would be almost sinful, I feel, to ignore this post-Cannes opportunity. But that’s me.

As previously noted I am tingling with excitement about watching Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s obviously and totally my kind of movie. But before the viewing happens, I have to at least salute the brilliant one-sheet.

Sam Elliott has apparently been told by his agent to walk back his Power of the Dog diss for political reasons. I don’t know for a fact that industry Robespierres have decided that Elliott is anti-progressive or sexist or something in that vein, but many probably have. And as a result they might’ve diminished Elliott’s appeal as an actor-for-hire. Maybe.

Apologizing for a previously expressed opinion is Elliott’s right, of course, but we all know what the shot is here.

Deep down Elliott is almost certainly saying “c’mon, man…I can’t express an opinion that you don’t like because my career will be hurt if I don’t walk it back? And you think…what, that it’s a good thing that incorrect opinions, as you see them, are being squelched in urban blue environments by wokesters? Okay, guys — I get it. You guys are HUAC-style wolves dressed in humanist-diverse clothing, but I’m nonetheless ‘sorry’ for my transgression. And in the meantime, perhaps some of you might to watch Ken Russell‘s The Devils.”

I’m posting this out of respect for Elliott, of course, and partly from my own experience last year.

Sam Elliott apologizes for his controversial comments he previously made about ‘The Power of the Dog’ #DeadlineContenders pic.twitter.com/XZ86wCAXmL

— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) April 10, 2022

In April ‘62 JFK derided steel executives for raising steel prices by $6 a ton, and thereby showing “utter contempt” for the interests of average Americans. Right now big oil is showing the same kind of disregard by using the Ukraine War as a rationale for sending gas prices through the roof. Lefties are calling them on this, but has President Biden said anything? This is what the bully pulpit is for.

And by the way, on his recent trip to Europe why didn’t Biden visit Kyiv and do a walk-around with Zelenskyy, like British PM Boris Johnson has just done?