I was wondering when the N.Y. Times would run an article about the gulf between film critics’ damnation of Michael, paretly if not largely for ignoring the pedophilia angle in Michael Jackson’s life, and the general indifference to the various child molestation charges that Joe and Jane Popcorn seem to be okay with.

The paper of record finally ran that piece today (4.27.26), and boy, is it soft! Total cottonball.

Reported by Derrick Bryson Taylor, it’s called “Michael Fans Danced in the Aisles, Critics Be Damned“. It boils down to Taylor quoting two or three naysayers (including MJ’s daughter Paris), but mostly quoting some Michael patrons at a Union Square-area theatre where the film was playing last weekend.

There’s a concise, spot-on quote that recently ran in The Hollywood Reporter, spoken by Finding Neverland director Dan Reed, basically stating that typical moviegoers simply don’t care about how many kids MJ hay have diddled. Taylor doesn’t mention this observation,.

The forehead-smacker arrives when Taylor quotes youngish Michael fan Necia Blanc, who says that movies are for entertainment, and that only documentaries should deal with child molestation. This is an obvious opportunity for Taylor to (a) remind Blanc that Reed’s Finding Neverland, which premiered on HBO in 2019, had explored the MJ allegations via the testimony of two fully grown male victims, and (b) ask Blanc if she’d seen this doc or at least heard of it. He doesn’t mention Reed’s film and Blanc never says squat about it. Nobody does, in fact.

If a joke lands, it lands. If it doesn’t land, that’s showbiz. If it offends DJT and Melania, off with the joke-teller’s head!

Jimmy Kimmel was alluding to Trump’s advanced age and the possibility of Melania enjoying good sex again, but sometimes the best jokes are the cruelest. Cole Allen, the would-be assassin, had nothing to do with it.

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THR‘s Abid Rahman is reporting that several social media psychotics from China, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong are hugely pissed about a recently posted Devil Wears Prade 2 clip that they regard as racially offensive. It’s a brief scene between Anne Hathaway‘s “Andy” and Helen J. Shen‘s “Jin Chao”, Andy’s new assistant.

The insecure Jin, fearful that Andy won’t like her, hurriedly recites her qualifications at a machine-gun pace: “I did go to Yale, 3.86 GPA…lead soprano of the [Yale singing group] the Whiffenpoofs, and my ACT score was 36 on the very first time.”

One Japanese ayehole called the footage “blatant anti-Asian racism.” Another hair-trigger offense-taker tweeted “we are in 2026… what made them think we’ll find this kind of racism funny?”. A hyperbolic Korean tweeted “all the East Asians are fucking pissed off, and the fact that a few quotes from those living in the West are turning it into ‘overly sensitive snowflakes’ is the perfect finishing touch.”

The former assistant’s new assistant.

Watch a new clip from The Devil Wears Prada 2 and experience the film only in theaters May 1. Get tickets now: https://t.co/BJd5wLTnLS pic.twitter.com/f2w0NWr8q5

— 20th Century Studios (@20thcentury) April 16, 2026

HE to Asian twitter hysterics: “You guys think Shen’s dialogue is offensive? Youneed some 1962 Angela Lanbury Manchurian Candidate dialogue to toughen you up:

In the matter of last names ending with an “s”, a possessive apostrophe followed by a second “s” looks visually, fundamentally wrong. Submental even. I don’t care what the grammar rulebook says.

An all-but-forgotten Lenny Bruce skit. Recorded in ’58 or ’59. The interviewer (I think) is Ray Goulding, of Bob and Ray fame. Bruce authentically voices the sullen, soft-spoken musician, but doesn’t sound like himself at all. This is a truly hilarious bit if you listen to it ripped.

Oil-on-canvas portrait of Herman Eldridge Wells (1797-1871), painted by famed portraitist Thomas Sully sometime around 1835.

This is actually an AI creation by Surrealium…if I want to pay for a version that doesn’t have “surrealium” stamps across it, I can do that.

This was created within two minutes. If some rando software program had done this for free ten or even five years ago, it would have been a moderately big deal. Now it’s almost a ho-hummer. Surrealium is a legit Millenial operation out of Stockholm.

A week into the filming of The White Lotus‘s season #4, creator-director-writer Mike White decided that Helena Bonham Carter‘s character was “not aligning,” whatever the hell that means.

Deadline‘s Nellie Andreeva: “As production started and Carter shot her first scenes, White, who writes and directs each episode, felt that her character as originally conceived was not what it should be, sources said. With the role believed to be central to the Season 4 story, a decision was made to rework it and recast it.”

If I was a major producer or showrunner on this show…if I had asked why HBC has suddenly left the shoot and was told that her character was “not aligning”, I would say “okay, yeah, sure…but what actually happened, without the bullshit?”

White went to the trouble of landing Helena Bonham Carter for a central role in the latest series and then, after a week of shooting, went “uh-oh…not working”? Either White didn’t write HBC’s character as fully or exactingly as he should have, or HBC couldn’t get a handle on the character, or it was a combination of the two.

Boiled down, either White screwed things up or Carter couldn’t bring whatever he was looking for.

Please tell me of any theatrical film or major limited series that cut loose a major actor because things weren’t “aligning” or blah-dee-blah. I’m not saying this hasn’t happened before — I just can’t think of any particular instances.

If Lena Dunham rebooted Girls in 2026 pic.twitter.com/qqEKZLmHR2

— Charles Curran (@charliebcurran) April 24, 2026

Given the Jackson estate’s refusal to acknowledge, much less dramatize, the late Michael Jackson’s penchant for pedophilia, which resulted in 16 years of investigations, prosecutions, lawsuits, payoffs and media reportings (1993 until his death in 2009), Michael 2, the screenplay for which reportedly hasn’t been written yet, will have no choice but to play the same bizarre denial game that the just-opened Michael does.

Solution: Ignore the last 16 years of MJ’s life and start with the Bad era (when Michael ends) and move onto the 1988 purchase and construction of Neverland ranch, cruise into 1991’s Dangerous, “Black or White” and “Remember The Time”, roll into MJ’s January ‘93 Super Bowl half-time performance and his February ‘93 Oprah interview, and then slam on the brakes and screech to a halt with the summer of ‘93 Jordan Chandler allegations.

That’s a five-year chapter in Jackson’s life, one that yields more than enough to fill a feature film.