Hollywood Elsewhere

From Christine Emba‘s “The Reason Gen Z Isn’t Dating,” posted in the N.Y. Times on 3.3.26.

“Multiple studies show that young people aren’t dating, having sex or forming partnerships.

“A recent survey of young adults from the Institute for Family Studies and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that only 30 percent of its respondents were actively dating, despite about half of them indicating that they were interested in finding a relationship. They cited a lack of confidence in what the researchers termed ‘dating efficacy’: Fewer than 40 percent believed themselves to be attractive to potential partners or felt comfortable discussing their feelings with them.

“Only around a quarter felt confident in approaching a potential partner or in their ability to stay positive after a dating setback — a rejection, a bad date or a breakup.

“If trends continue, one in three adults currently in their 20s will never marry, contributing to an epidemic of loneliness that is already generationally acute.”

Scott Galloway has been Paul Revere-ing this lonely and isolated state of affairs for the last few years, of course.

Renata Adler‘s N.Y Times review of 2001: A Space Odyssey, published on 4.4.68:

“Even the MGM lion is stylized and abstracted in Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film in which infinite care, intelligence, patience, imagination and Cinerama have been devoted to what looks like the apotheosis of the fantasy of a precocious, early nineteen-fifties city boy.

“The movie, on which Kubrick collaborated with the British science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, is nominally about the finding, in the year 2001, of a camera-shy sentient slab on the moon and an expedition to the planet Jupiter to find whatever sentient being the slab is beaming its communications at.

“There is evidence in the film of Clarke’s belief that men’s minds will ultimately develop to the point where they dissolve in a kind of world mind. There is a subplot in the old science-fiction nightmare of man at terminal odds with his computer. There is one ultimate science-fiction voyage of a man (Keir Dullea) through outer and inner space, through the phases of his own life in time thrown out of phase by some higher intelligence, to his death and rebirth in what looked like an intergalactic embryo.

“But all this is the weakest side of a very complicated, languid movie — in which almost a half-hour passes before the first man appears and the first word is spoken, and an entire hour goes by before the plot even begins to declare itself.

“Its real energy seem to derive from that bespectacled prodigy reading comic books around the block. The whole sensibility is intellectual fifties child: chess games, bodybuilding exercises, beds on the spacecraft that look like camp bunks, other beds that look like Egyptian mummies, Richard Strauss music, time games, Strauss waltzes, Howard Johnson’s, birthday phone calls.

“In their space uniforms, the voyagers look like Jiminy Crickets. When they want to be let out of the craft they say, ‘Pod bay doors open,’ as one might say ‘Bomb bay doors open’ in every movie out of World War II.

“When the voyagers go off to plot against HAL, the computer, it might be HAL, the camper, they are ganging up on. When HAL is expiring, he sings ‘Daisy.’ Even the problem posed when identical twin computers, previously infallible, disagree is the kind of sentence-that-says-of-itself-I-lie paradox, which — along with the song and the nightmare of ganging up — belong to another age.

“When the final slab, a combination Prime Mover slab and coffin lid, closes in, it begins to resemble a fifties candy bar.The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science-fiction detail, that it is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring. (With intermission, 2001 is three hours long.)

“Kubrick seems as occupied with the best use of the outer edge of the screen as any painter, and he is particularly fond of simultaneous rotations, revolving, and straight forward motions—the visual equivalent of rubbing the stomach and patting the head.

“All kinds of minor touches are perfectly done: there are carnivorous apes that look real; when they throw their first bone weapon into the air, Kubrick cuts to a spacecraft; the amiable HAL begins most of his sentences with ‘Well,’ and his answer to ‘How’s everything?’ is, naturally, ‘Everything’s under control.’

“There is also a kind of fanaticism about other kinds of authenticity: space travelers look as sickly and exhausted as travelers usually do; they are exposed in space stations to depressing canned music; the viewer is often made to feel that the screen is the window of a spacecraft, and as Kubrick introduces one piece of unfamiliar apparatus after another — a craft that looks, from one angle, like a plumber’s helper with a fist on the end of it, a pod that resembles a limbed washing machine — the viewer is always made aware of exactly how it is used and where he is in it.

“The special effects in the movie — particularly a voyage, either through Dullea’s eye or through the slab and over the surface of Jupiter-Earth and into a period bedroom—are the best I have ever seen; and the number of ways in which the movie conveys visual information (there is very little dialogue) drives it to an outer limit of the visual.

“And yet the uncompromising slowness of the movie makes it hard to sit through without talking — and people on all sides when I saw it were talking almost throughout the film. Very annoying. With all its attention to detail — a kind of reveling in its own I.Q. — the movie acknowledged no obligation to validate its conclusion for those, me for example, who are not science-fiction buffs. By the end, three unreconciled plot lines — the slabs, Dullea’s aging, the period bedroom — are simply left there like a Rorschach, with murky implications of theology.

“This is a long step outside the convention, some extra scripts seem required, and the all-purpose answer, ‘relativity,’ does not really serve unless it can be verbalized.”

Sinners star Michael B. Jordan is the second actor in film history to be Oscar-nominated for playing twin brothers. He plays the Smokestack twins, the older Elijah “Smoke” Moore and the younger Elias “Stack” Moore, both of them skillful at cunnilingus.

The first dual-character performance to be Oscar-nominated (and, so far, the only one to win an actual statuette) was, of course, Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou (’65). He played the comically alcoholic gunslinger Kid Shelleen as well as Shellen’s tin-nosed brother Tim Strawn, who was also played for chuckles.

My God…a bolt-of-lightning perception just hit me! Sinners could have not only hit the jackpot but also become an artistically bulletproof film if — I’m getting the chills just typing this — director-screenwriter Ryan Coogler had decided to treat the material with a comedic attitude…if he’d shot it like a black comedy.

The moral current about rural old-South racism and KKK yokels wouldn’t have been diluted in the slightest if he had. Ditto the musical portions and the ties to the legend of Robert Johnson and the Delta blues. Ditto the cunnilingus sex scenes. But the over-the-top vampire stuff would have played much better if Coogler had gone for laughs. Cat Ballou meets From Dusk to Dawn, something in that vein.

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Boilerplate Republican harassment of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton during last week’s House Oversight Commitee’s Epstein probe…flatline. Nothing to see or hear…please move on.

What impressed me, sadly, is (a) Bill’s shocking physical and mental decline, based on the last time I saw him speak at length about 10 years ago, and (b) how much sharper and spunkier Hillary is.

Bill and Hillary are both roughly the same age, born in the mid 1940s (Bill in August ’46, Hillary in October ’47). But Hillary is tough and feisty and sharp as an axe blade while Bill is a doddering, hoarse-voiced guy sitting in a lounge chair at an assisted living facility. I’m very, very sorry to see this. Bill seems weak and drained…he might as well be 85 or 90, and has pretty much become drooling Joe Biden. Hillary, on the other hand, is like snappy, never-say-die Bernie Sanders.

We all have slightly differing constitutions, and we all age at different paces. It’s all in the genes.

And the proof of this HE proclamation is Jamie Lee Curtis having recently posted an “attagirl…so proud of your artistic courage!” tweet for Bride director Maggie Gyllenhaal.

The Bride! (Warner Bros., 3.6) needs to be handled with kid gloves. Don’t slap it around. Go easy, man. It’s already a dead herring in the moonlight so don’t waste your energy. Hold back, conserve.

If at all possible, the film I really want to get my hate on for is Project Hail Mary (3.20). I can’t wait to trash his bullshit Millennial fantasy from Lord & Miller, if warranted. The review embargo lifts Tuesday. Critic friendo: “Me no like.”

Jamie Lee Curtis:

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s #TheBride is wild, audacious, & dgaf if you like it. Buckley & Bale thrill in a movie that feels like what JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX desperately wished it was. Gyllenhaal’s script has a lot of threads it doesn’t weave in perfectly. unlike anything out there. pic.twitter.com/EtQCaUe1NJ

— Kristen Lopez (@kristenklopez) February 26, 2026

Here’s the entire interaction in one clip.

Before she threatens to k*ll me, I asked her a series of questions:

1. At what age is a girl mature enough to have top surgery?

2. How did you feel about your body changing as you were going through puberty?

3. Do you think it’s… pic.twitter.com/um7LU9eY1B

— Beth Bourne (@bourne_beth2345) March 2, 2026

BREAKING – The woman who threatened to “hunt down and kill” parental rights activist Beth Bourne at a Democrat convention in San Francisco has been identified as UCSF Administrative Director Madeline Mann. Give their employee relations number a call and ask if this is acceptable. pic.twitter.com/0E5B3EpfRn

— Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) March 3, 2026

If things work out as the U.S. and Israel governments are hoping they might, regime-change-wise, Jafar Panahi‘s problems with the Iranian government might be over.

Both Panahi and Asghar Farhadi are liberals and generally not regarded as allies or even vague supporters of Trump or Netanyahu, but the fact is that many if not most of the educated, independent-minded Iranians over there are, for the time being, overjoyed about the murdering missiles that rained down upon Iran last weekend.

This puts Panahi and Farhadi, allegiance- and reputation-wise, between a rock and a hard place. It boxes them in.

Sean Penn to Greg Bovino: “Just to be clear, I don’t respect you or any of the other ICE thugs who brought about murder and mayhem on the streets of Minneapolis in recent weeks. But I may as well be honest and acknowledge that you’re the reason I won a Best Supporting Actor award at BAFTA last weekend and last night at the SAG Actor awards.

“Lord knows I’m not ‘thanking’ you, but I can’t pretend you didn’t have anything to do with this. Had it not been for you I probably wouldn’t have won in London and Los Angeles. I’m just being honest with myself and, fuck it, with the world at large. My OBAA performance was not considered strongly competitive a few weeks ago, but now I’m going into the Oscars as the frontrunner at this point, dammit. For the wrong reasons, I mean.

“Sentimental Value‘s Stellan Skarsgard gave a much richer performance than I, but he can’t compete with the Greg Bovino factor. I’ll be winning thanks to you. I regard you as a macho fuckhead, but the situation is the situation.”

…if he’d blurted out the following upon winning SAG’s Best Actor award last night:

“Yo…whoa. I can’t…okay, I’ll just spit it out. This is about last weekend in London, right?

“Don’t get me wrong — I’ll take it, I love it. I think I gave a rock-solid, kick-ass performance in Sinners, and that guy shouting what he shouted when Delroy and I were on-stage at the BAFTAs…it’s okay, man, but let’s cut the shit. The guy has a condition but what he said came from inside. You know it, I know it, Jamie Foxx knows it and that’s probably why I’m standing here right now. You guys want to feel good about yourselves. I get it, and, like I said, I’ll take it.

“Do you guys really think I’m a more deserving recipient of this award than Ethan Hawke or Timothee Chalamet? Of course you don’t, but you want to feel good about yourselves and that’s fine. From my perspective, a win is a win is a win.”