Going with monochrome seems like an odd call. If I had chosen the poster, I would have created an AI image (full color) of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis as their car plunges off the cliff, excited and terrified and yet decisive, and therefore somehow triumphant.
HE: I have trouble thinking of Jerry Orbach as a musical performer. To me he’s narco detective Gus Levy in Prince of the City and Lenny Briscoe in Law And Order.
Friendo: Orbach starred in The Fantasticks, and was the original singer of this classic tune. There’s a soundtrack album. It’s interesting because we don’t usually think of him as a musical artist but he was. This clip is from a 1982 special, “Night of 100 Stars.”
HE: I think of him as Levy.
Friendo: I think of him as Lenny in Law And Order. And a murderer in Crimes And Misdemeanors.
HE: Orbach didn’t play a “murderer” in Allen’s film. I mean, he did but he wasn’t the actual killer. He played a brother who did an ugly favor for an older brother. He didn’t kill Anjelica Huston — he pushed a button on her. There’s a difference.
Friendo: AI begs to differ on whether Jerry Orbach played a murderer. Check your email.
HE: Obviously he facilitates the killing of his older brother’s ex-girlfriend, but he’s removed from the actual act of murder. Pushing a button isn’t the same as wielding an ice pick. Did Vito Corleone actually cut off the head of Khartoum, the Hollywood horse? No. Orbach made the murder happen…yes. This isn’t an exact analogy, but he pushed the button in roughly….okay, this is a stretch….but almost in the same way that Lyndon Johnson pushed several successive buttons that brought about the deaths of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers. Was Johnson an actual murderer? No.
Friendo: Vito killed Khartoum, period. I don’t think horse lover Tony Soprano would have appreciated Vito’s role. Obviously there’s a legal distinction between a President’s actions and facilitating a common murder.
HE: Kennedy probably would not have facilitated the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers. That was a difference netween him and Johnson.
It’s such a shame that the Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni court case, currently slated for 5.18.26, won’t be televised. Federal courts don’t allow cameras to record or broadcast. If broadcasting was allowed the trial could be a media-circus reboot of Johnny Depp-Amber Heard case, and it could be glorious.
And the reason he’s apologizing is over his profound discomfort with Israel’s Gaza holocaust and Benjamin Netanyahu…right?
I’ve always equated the conspiracy nuts who believe that the Butler-Trump shooting was faked with…I don’t know, the Truthers who believe that 9/11 was an inside job. But Carlson, it appears, may be on that train car. He mentions it in this conversation.
TUCKER CARLSON: “I’ll be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected. And I want to say that I’m sorry for misleading people.”
This is a very humble and honest statement. Big respect to Tucker. pic.twitter.com/dyMgrsRAP8
— Stew Peters (@realstewpeters) April 21, 2026
IndieWire’s Kate Erbland has said something astonishing in her 4.21 Michael review.
“IF you’re someone who’s ABLE to separate the art from the artist”???
Art and artists have always been separate entities or propositions. Artists, being human and therefore flawed or worse, are never as noble and beautiful and radiant as their art.
Artists inevitably draw from their own trials and tribulations in the creation of this or that song or sculpture or poem or performance, but at the end of the day they’re basically conduits — great art comes from some mystical truth galaxy but it only becomes “art” by passing through them like lightning.
Polanski’s art has always been greater than Polanski the man. Obviously. And — hello? — they’re not the same.
Erbland seems to regard this understanding with suspicion. She seems to be saying that anyone who can separate art from the artist — to basically see them as separate and unequal — is some kind of uncaring sociopath.
I love the current and the spunk and the edgy technique that Jackson used to create those songs and bust out those brilliant dance moves. I can compartmentalize. I can put the child molesting in a steel suitcase and leave it in the trunk of the car while watching Michael in a theatre.
@marvengabriel Moonwalking at the @michaelthemovie Premier🕺🏽✨ @Universal Pictures De @Lionsgate #michaeljackson #michaelmovie #michaelbiopic #moonwalk #dance ♬ origineel geluid – StarRewind
@etalkctv From Colman Domingo finally responding to Paris Jackson’s critiques of the ‘Michael’ biopic to Janet Jackson reportedly fighting with Jermaine Jackson, here’s everything we know about the drama surrounding the Michael Jackson biopic. 👀 #ParisJackson #ColmanDomingo #JanetJackson #JermaineJackson #MichaelJackson ♬ original sound – etalk
@bendunningtattoo This is 20 minutes immediately after the Michael Jackson Movie ended….people did NOT want to leave!!! 🐐👑 I was lucky enough to see the Biopic 2 weeks early at the Global Fan Event in Berlin at the weekend! It’s amazing! You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and for for you won’t stop moving!!!! You need to watch it when it releases on the 24th April!!! #mj #michaelmovie #biopic #michaeljackson #thriller @michaelthemovie @Universal Pictures @Lionsgate UK @Lionsgate @Uber Platz ♬ original sound – Ben Dunning
@russellhustleinc @michaelthemovie is INCREDIBLE🔥 Had to keep the party going to the parking lot!! @Lionsgate Did you guys get tickets yet???@Demetre @Furillo. @A.R. @Brittany Perry-Russell @IsaiahRussellBailey #RussellHustle #Dance #MichaelJackson @IMAX #imax ♬ You Rock My World – Michael Jackson
Anxious, financially struggling younger types or even 40somethings rubbing shoulders with older, fairly loaded types in a flush, exotic vacation setting of some kind. Have-nots (or have-not-enoughs), tinged with envy, loathing or spiritual deflation, resentful about nearly everything, trying to con or seduce or merely suck up to the swells.
That’s more or less the White Lotus formula, no?
In their own way the blase, chilly, indifferent rich are almost as miserable as the have-nots, but no matter which way anyone turns, resentment and distrust are stovetop flames that boil all pots while generating endless twitching confusion and fickle-ass vibes blah blah.
I’ve never watched season #1 of Lee Sung Jin‘s Beef, which unfolded in April 2023, but the eight-episode season #2, which I’ve watched three episodes of, is a chip off the old Lotus block.
I can’t figure where the Monte Vista Point Country Club is located, but apparently it’s somewhere in California. Posssibly Montecito, the Big Sur area, La Jolla…who cares?
This is a darkly satirical nest-of-vipers ensemble piece that’s well acted and very precisely written…everyone exudes performative, nimble-minded hostility…every episode is damp with feelings of entrapment…it’s intriguing as far as it goes, although it makes your stomach feel acidic.
I felt no allegiance or comfort with anyone. Anyone could have died and I would’ve been “okay, whatever.”
The four lead characters are (a) antsy, self-loathing, almost-flirting-with-killing-himself Josh (Oscar Isaac), the club’s general manager; (b) Josh’s miserable, brittle-featured, inwardly collapsing wife Lindsay (Carey Mulligan); (c) an aspiring, partly-Korean, would-be personal trainer named Austin (Charles Melton)…a guy who’s basically an empty Coke bottle with a buff bod and a dopey-looking moustache; and (d) Austin’s significant other Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), a variation upon a standard issue twitchmouse, anxiety and uncertainty also being her daily bread and burden.
Their Korean betters are the chilliest of all. The cold-eyed Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), the billionaire owner of the MPCC, is a brusque and soul-less beast. The zoomer-aged Woosh (Matthew Kim), a tennis instructor, is another nothingburger nothinggperson. I didn’t get a read on Song Kang-ho‘s Dr. Kim, Chairwoman Park’s second husband and a Seoul plastic surgeon…I just muttered to myself “oh, the Parasite guy again.”
Seoyeon Jang‘s Eunice, an assistant-interpreter to Chairwoman Park, is the only Korean character who seems to be dealing straight, open-hearted cards. I liked her.
I’d really rather not write any more about this show. I feel drained just thinking about it. Do I want to watch the remaining five episodes? Yeah, I guess so but I’m certainly not hot or hungry to do so.
With Miles having agreed to slip into the house to retrieve Jack’s wallet, it’s 85% certain that he’ll be running out a few minutes later with that big gorilla right behind him.
Obviously Miles should have told Jack to keep the engine running and the driver door open so Miles can hop right in and gun it. But no — as Miles runs out Jack has fallen asleep, the car is shut off and the driver door is closed.
In real life Miles would’ve never been made it, and that big, naked, blue-collar ape would’ve grabbed him and pounded away.
Five years before Sideways opened in ‘04, The Limey’s Terrence Stamp, knowing he’ll be leaving Peter Fonda’s afternoon soirée in a hurry, tells Luis Guzman, behind the wheel of his modest white car, to “keep it runnin’’” and then says “oy!…point it downhill.”
20-plus years ago I came across an out-take of this Sideways scene. A second or two after Miles yanks the door latch and jumps into the driver’s seat, the giant naked ape slams into the car window and it shatters into a thousand shards. A shocked Giamatti yells “whoa!” as he pulls away.
This played better than the version in the finished film — wild, unexpectedly startling, believably chaotic. Director Alexander Payne should have approved it.
The term “blockbuster” means “important, heavy-hitting, big-studio powerhouse film that everyone has to see theatrically…an expensive, eye-filling, big-swing spectacle that not only earns a ton of money but feels like a cultural touchstone in hindsight.”
The term does not, however, necessarily mean “rooted in otherworldly CG fantasy.”
Steven Spielberg’s somewhat realistic, 51-year-old Jaws, for example, was a blockbuster. Jim Cameron’s Avatar (‘09) and Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer, for sure. Was David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) a blockbuster? In a certain cultural sense, yeah. Mike Todd’s Around The World in 80 Days (‘56) was a blockbuster; ditto Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (‘56). It is HE’s humble opinion that the richest and most resonant big-scale blockbuster of all time was David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (‘62).
Try telling this to Collider ‘s Diego Pineda Pacheco, who believes that within the realm of the last 50 years, only teen-friendly CG fantasies qualify.
Worse, Pacheco believes that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) sits at the top — the greatest blockbuster flick of the last half-century. To which HE responds by going “eccch!” and spitting on the sidewalk. Jackson was an over-rated flash in the pan, and is pretty much sidelined now; if you ask me the Rings trilogy was an endurance test before and it certainly is now. I’ll never sit through those films ever again.
If the greatest blockbuster of the last 50 years has to be a big-budget, geek-franchise fantasy, The Empire Strikes Back easily rules the roost.
It appears as if Michael (Lionsgate, 4.24) is more into avoiding than lying. I’m sure it blows smoke up its own ass in various ways, but it mainly seems to be about re-creating Michael Jackson’s ‘80s career highs while dodging the deep-down serpents who slither in the soft mud.
Michael ends around ‘88, I’ve read somewhere. The first little boy molestation accusation, the Jordy Chandler thing, broke in ‘93.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/us-celebrity-news/heartbreaking-life-first-child-accuse-34774912.amp
It sounds as if potential Michael viewers, before buying the popcorn and sitting down, will have to put the “sleeping with attractive little boys within the sanctum of Neverland for years on end” stuff into a steel lockbox and put the box into the trunk of their car out in the parking lot. After seeing Michael some may decide to leave the box in the trunk for an indefinite period.
I myself can double-track it. I can enjoy the secular ‘80s euphoria (Thriller, moonwalking, white socks) while at the same time accepting and respecting Leaving Neverland, which scalds hard.
“Fine Film, Wrong Title” — initially posted on 2.20.20:
“William Nicholson‘s Hope Gap (Roadside, 3.6) is an intelligent, fully felt, nicely layered domestic drama about the sad end of a nearly 30-year marriage in a small coastal town in England.
“Annette Bening and Bill Nighy play the 60ish couple, and the gist is that they don’t part by mutual agreement — Nighy has fallen in love with a local woman (a somewhat younger widow) and proceeds to lower the boom on Bening over tea.
“Both are excellent in a carefully proportioned and ruefully miserable sort of way, Bening in particular with her nicely vowelled British accent.
“The story is based upon the breakup of Nicholson’s own parents when he was somewhere in his early 20s, and how he found himself in the position of the anguished counselor and referee. Nicholson is played by Josh O’Connor (The Crown), who’s fully up to the level of his costars.
“I was pleasantly surprised by how much the film stirred and engaged me, especially given the sappy-sounding title. Hope Gap sounds like some kind of contact-high film — a spirited feel-gooder about things working out for the better. That’s not what this is.
“A much, much better title is The Retreat From Moscow, which is what Nicholson called the play version when it opened in late ’99 at the Chichester Festival Theatre. (Four years later it opened at Broadway’s Booth Theatre with John Lithgow, Eileen Atkins and Ben Chaplin in the lead roles.) Why it took Nicholson 17 or 18 years to film it is anyone’s guess.
“Why was it called The Retreat From Moscow? Because it alludes to acts of cruelty that allow the living to survive. In 1812 Napoleon’s once-huge army was decimated by the Russian winter along with a lack of food and sufficient clothing — only 27,000 troops survived. Those who fell by the roadside were stripped by their comrades and left to die naked in the snow, and drivers of wagons carrying the French wounded sped up over bumpy road in hopes that they might fall off.
“By the same token Nighy’s Edward sits down at the kitchen table and tells Bening’s Grace that they’re done — that he intends to move out because he’s fallen in love with Sally Roger‘s Angela. By any measure this is a brusque and hurtful move, but it also puts an end to a dry, unsatisfying union while allowing for a measure of newfound happiness between Edward and Angela.
“When Grace angrily strolls into Edward and Angela’s home in Act Three, she asks the younger woman what she thought she was doing when she and Edward began to become involved. Angela replies, ‘I think I thought there were three unhappy people, and now there’s only one.’ Whoa.
“Some critics have complained that Hope Gap feels too ‘written’, too much like a filmed play. Except the writing is quite good. All the angles and regrets and after-thoughts emerge in just the right way. I suppose some will find it a bit too solemn and dreary, but when the dialogue is this well-honed and the acting is this affecting, I don’t see the problem.”
From Mark Binelli‘s “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Michael Jackson,” a N.Y. Times Magazine piece posted on 4.14.26:
“For the Michael Jackson estate, leaning into the warts-and-all approach would require a wholesale refutation of the abuse allegations. Graham King and Antoine Fuqua‘s Michael (Lionsgate, 4.24) avoids the issue entirely by embracing the iconic version of Jackson and ignoring the unsettling later stage of his career.
“In trailers and footage of the film that have been released, Jaafar Jackson moonwalks into an uncanny valley of indisputably glorious pop-culture events — the ‘Motown 25’ special, the videos for ‘Thriller’ and ‘Beat It,’ the recording of that indelible high-pitched woooo 15 seconds into ‘Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough’ — and maybe here the gulf opened by the simulacrum will subconsciously comfort viewers, making it possible to enjoy those moments without the queasy feelings stirred by their actual creator.
“Mark Anthony Neal, a professor at Duke University who teaches a class on Jackson, has noticed that students in recent years have been more focused on ‘the Michael Jackson who was the subject of a documentary about pedophilia, the Michael Jackson who has done something to his face and who feels to some of them anti-Black.’ He’s curious to see how Michael will be received ‘specifically in a Black cultural lens: post-Bill Cosby, post-R. Kelly, post-Sean Combs.’
“With so much on the line, it is perhaps unsurprising that there was something of a circling of the wagons around Michael. The Lionsgate publicist handling the film abruptly ceased all contact regarding this article after an initial email exchange, and King also declined to be interviewed. Last year Jackson estate co-executor John Branca told The Financial Times that he “sensed a wavering” among the first people attached to the movie after the release of Leaving Neverland.”
“He went on: ‘Unless you understand that Michael’s innocent, we can’t have you.’
“The estate has also been back in court in recent months to answer challenges from Jackson’s daughter, Paris, who is objecting to bonus payments of up to $1.75 million to outside law firms, while also demanding greater transparency from the executors and questioning the decision to become so closely entangled with the biopic.
“Paris was blunt in her criticism in a series of Instagram posts last fall. Claiming her notes on an early script draft were ignored, she said: ‘The thing about these biopics — it’s Hollywood. it’s fantasy land, it’s not real.” She crumpled her face and mimed adjusting a knob with her finger. ‘The narrative is being controlled, and there’s a lot of inaccuracy and there’s a lot of just full-blown lies, and at the end of the day, that doesn’t really fly with me. I don’t really like dishonesty. I spoke up, I wasn’t heard, I [expletive] off.”
“But even she recognized the likely unstoppability of the movie, given the nature of her father’s fame. ‘A big reason I haven’t said anything up until this point is because I know a lot of you guys are going to be happy with it,’ she said in another post. ‘The film panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in the fantasy. And they’re going to be happy with it.”
