Earlier today I came across an old DVD of Brian Koppelman and David Levien‘s Solitary Man (’10), a Michael Douglas drama about an immature, self-absorbed sexaholic who betrays and disappoints women he ostensibly cares for.

For nearly 25 years Douglas specialized in playing men who, in David Thomson‘s words, were “weak, culpable, morally indolent, compromised, and greedy for illicit sensation without losing that basic probity or potential for ethical character that we require of a hero.”

Douglas’s last role of this kind was Liberace in Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra (’13).

What threw me this afternoon was the fact that I couldn’t (and still can’t) recall a single damn thing about Solitary Man…nothing. Not a scene, not a line.

I’m fairly certain I caught it at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival in Toronto, and if not there then certainly at a Manhattan all-media screening a few months later. I can almost always recall something. I can’t figure it.

Please name any film released within the last 15 or 20 years that you’re dead certain you saw and yet your mind is a blank.

The vast majority of us (99.5%) accept and live by the idea of deferring or side-stepping to avoid any sort of physical conflict. Let it go, head down, duck and cover, etc. Alas, the below video falls under the heading of “regrettable but understandable racism.” Honest question: How is this young woman’s defiant, looking-for-trouble attitude substantially different from the attitude of young Liam Neeson during that notorious incident in the early ’80s, give or take?

Race obsessed tiktoker films herself walking around “not moving out of the way for white people” as a form of “reparations.” pic.twitter.com/iTWwbDCuPj

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 27, 2022

Last night in front of a huge Cinemacon crowd inside the Caesar’s Place Colisseum, Don’t Worry Darling director Olivia Wilde was legally served with custody papers. The papers were from Jason Suidekis, her ex-partner and father of their two kids. The actual process server, probably a local, was presumably hired by Suidekis’s law firm.

I seem to recall that David O. Russell‘s officially-titled Amsterdam (20th Century, 11.4) was being referred to as Amsterdam a couple of years ago. Not in trade stories but in unofficial circles. And then came that perplexing, all-but-meaningless title of Canterbury Glass. And now we’re back to Amsterdam.

The long-gestating 1930s period drama, fortified with a cavalcade of big-name costars (including Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Rami Malek, Zoe Saldaña, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Timothy Olyphant, Michael Shannon, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alessandro Nivola, Taylor Swift) and a story involving fraud and skullduggery…I don’t know what I’m saying but I should admit that I feel a wee bit concerned. I know nothing at all. Just an insect antennae signal.

I have to be honest: When I read earlier today about Amber Heard’s alleged personality disorders, I immediately wondered if I suffer from any such maladies. Or if some of the HE regulars do. I don’t think I have any debilitating personality issues, but I had to look in the mirror and ask myself “well…do you?”

Guardian story: Shannon Curry, an expert in intimate partner violence, testified that her evaluation of Amber Heard revealed two psychiatric diagnoses –– (a) borderline personality disorder and (b) histrionic personality disorder.

“Curry said that Heard, 36, displayed a “reactive”, “overly dramatic presentation” and used words like “magical” and “wonderful” to describe events. Heard, she said, flitted between “princess and victim”.

“As sophisticated, “cute and girlish” as such people may present, Curry said, they “may in reality be very destructive”, “dramatic, erratic and unpredictable” and possessed of an “underlying drive to not be abandoned but also to be [the] center of attention”.

“Curry said borderline personality disorder represented an unstable personality, alert to rejection, with little access to self-regulation and marked by “a lot of anger, cruelty toward people less powerful, concerned with image, attention-seeking and prone to externalizing blame, a lot of suppressed anger that may explode outwards”.

The View‘s Sunny Hostin on Elon Musk‘s Twitter takeover: “When Elon Musk says this is about free speech, [he seems to be saying] that this is about the free speech of straight white men.”

Are you listening to this? Hostin is more or less saying that free speech for straight white men shouldn’t be a concern because we’re in a revolution right now, and straight white men need to sit their asses down in the back of the bus and shut the eff up…because they need to listen and learn. The world was run by straight white men for centuries, Hostin is more or less saying, and they’ve had their chance. Now it’s time for women, LGBTQs and people of color to reshape the world into a fairer, more considerate social environment, and if straight white men don’t agree with the new woke program that’s too damn bad.

Imagine the reactions if a famous straight white guy were to complain about free speech for women, LGBTQs or people of color.