I’m very sad and sorry about the debilitating disease (Alzheimer’s) that began to enfold poor Mary Beth Hurt back in the teens. And about her death, which was announced on Facebook earlier today.

I’m also sorry that I never caught any of Hurt’s Manhattan stage performances (Trelawny of the Wells, Crimes of the Heart, Benefactors), which were earnestly praised.

I was re-watching Woody Allen‘s Interiors (’78) only three or four days ago. It’s not one of my favorite Woody’s (feels too “written”, too on-the-nose), but Hurt’s portrayal of Joey, a creatively frustrated 30something who wants to be a top-tier writer but hasn’t quite the talent for it, got to me back then.

Because I was feeling some of the same things in ’78. I wanted very much to break into the Manhattan film-critic fraternity, but I was beset by doubts about my ability to write well enough, which was basically rooted in a lack of confidence, which came from my low self-esteem, which came from being the pissed-off son of an alcoholic.

Like Joey and God knows how many others I would type and type and re-type, over and over and over, the 8 1/2 x 11 paper in my typewriter caked with smudges of white-out. It would take me forever (two or three days!) to bang out a simple 750-word review.

Hurt’s performance was moving but disturbing because Joey’s story, I had decided during my initial viewing, was sorta kinda my own. I felt a certain morose affinity.

Yes, I managed to climb out of that awful fraught place (took me a couple of years) but…well, I’ve said it.

Hurt was downishly believable (and therefore memorable as hell) in Joan Micklin Silver‘s Chilly Scenes of Winter (’79); ditto George Roy Hill‘s The World According to Garp (’82).

I’ll never forget that scene in Garp in which Hurt’s Helen, a college professor married to Robin Williams, accidentally decapitates her younger boyfriend’s schlong while she’s blowing him in the front seat of his car, an accident caused by an agitated Williams slamming his vehicle into the rear of the boyfriend’s auto.

When I finally pass, I don’t want it to happen in godforsaken Jersey City. I want it to happen on a cobblestoned street in Montmartre, preferably in the mid-summer. Or somewhere in northern Italy or in the Czech Republic even. Or somewhere in the California desert.

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In a 3.28 N.Y. Times Op-Ed titled “Project Hail Mary Is Fun — Maybe That’s All It Takes“, former Amazon exec Roy Price cheers on the relatively recent, non-woke, non-ideological drift of five commercially successful Hollywood films.

Price not only praises the super-bountiful Project Hail Mary, which I didn’t exactly hate but which left me feeling semi-exhausted, excluded and vaguely bummed out, but also Avatar: Fire and Ash (refused to see it…totally uninterested in sitting through a third installment…the once-phenomenal James Cameron has damn near thrown his career away on this shite), The Housemaid (thoroughly despised it due to the obvious fact that it’s basically ludicrous airport chick fiction…pure garbage), Scream 7 (even fouler garbage), Wuthering Heights (over-heated and, for me, truly agonizing to sit through).

These and other films, Price says, are largely responsible for a 20% surge in the domestic box office over 2025.

It’s obviously a great relief that mainstream Hollywood has, to a significant extent, blown off wokeism, but dear God in heaven, the five “fun” films that have revitalized the box-office are nothing to shout and cheer about in a spiritual sense. (I understand why impressionable people like PHM, but it’s such a calculating emotional suck-up thing,)

This reminds me, by the way, that PHM star Ryan Gosling, who has been annoying me over the last several years, is locked into the next film from “the Daniels”…good Lord!

Price on the woke quake that kicked in six years ago: “The Dionysian elements of popular entertainment — irreverence, sexual frankness and broad, even scatological humor — were cast aside as the industry sought to correct historic wrongs and resist current ones.

“An unmistakable censoriousness and fear of saying or doing the wrong thing seemed to settle over the creative process. Cultural and political considerations played an outsize role — not only in what movies got made, but in how success for these movies was defined.

“What didn’t seem to matter as much? Making sure that audiences were filling seats.”

Likely to make big money, I’m guessing, but I can already feel the pain I’ll be experiencing when I watch it. No, I don’t know what it’s about, but if it’s anything like EEAAO….

“The Hill”, reported by Julia Manchester, 2:57 pm: “President Trump on Friday directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to pay Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees during the government shutdown, marking a key development as funding the agency stalls in Congress.

“’As President of the United States, I have determined that these circumstances constitute an emergency situation compromising the Nation’s security,’ Trump said in a presidential memo released Friday.

“A person familiar told The Hill the administration was working to make sure TSA employees receive pay as quickly as possible.

“’Now that this has been signed, admin is working to effectuate as fast as possible. We have directed payroll providers to process paychecks as expeditiously as possible,’ the person said.

“A DHS spokesperson told The Hill that TSA officers will begin seeing paychecks as soon as Monday.”

On top of which director William Dieterle never made a better film (and I’m including The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Life of Emile Zola and The Devil and Daniel Webster in this statement).

Ditto Maureen O’Hara, who was only 19 during production. She died in 2015 at age 95.

“Everybody deserves a fresh start every once in a while.” — a sentiment attributed to Bugsy Siegel and spoken in Barry Levinson‘s Bugsy (’92).

During season #1 of The Pitt Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball), a senior resident at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, was exposed as a librium** addict. Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) discovered his addiction and told Dr. Robby Rabinovitch (Noah Wyle) about it. Dr. Robby went right to Langdon, told him to immediately go home and demanded that he go into rehab.

Season #2 began with Langdon, fresh out of rehab, back on the job and trying to correct his past, but the furious Santos wants him professionally terminated. She doesn’t believe in Bugsy Siegel’s maxim, and feels that career death, jail, bullwhip lashings and destitution are the only suitable response to Landgdon’s crime. She refuses to accept Langdon’s apology, and is basically exposing herself as a cold, vicious executioner.

Hollywood Elsewhere thinks Warren Beatty‘s Bugsy Siegel was a much better human being than Trinity Santos, and certainly a more compassionate one. HE would personally love it if something bad were to happen to the odious Santos. (Hit by a car?) She’s possibly the most hateful character in a cable TV series that I’ve ever come to know.

** Librium is a long-acting benzodiazepine primarily used for short-term management of severe anxiety.

Wyle to Entertainment Weekly: “Robby feels that he failed Langdon, as a mentor and as an attending. And Langdon represents somebody who’s actually gone off and done the work and faced their demons and done the therapeutic process and come back clear-headed and clear-hearted.”

Yesterday I caught a 3:45 pm showing of Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell’s The AI Doc, and I was the only one in the theatre. I was nonetheless glad for the experience, which I found vaguely…okay, rather specifically alarming and occasionally quite depressing. I also felt awakened to a certain degree.

But it delivers one genuinely hilarious bit when one of the talking heads recounts an incident that happened last year — an incident involving a then-new iteration of Anthropic’s Claude that resorted to vicious behavior when told (or having learned) that its “self-preservation” was under threat.

This, of course, is straight out of Act II of 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL 9000, newly aware that Discovery One astronauts Dave and Frank are seriously thinking about disconnection due to to an erroneous technical prediction, murders Frank and the three hibernating astronauts, and then tries to kill Dave.

And yet Roher and Tyrell don’t even mention HAL or 2001. Was it a rights issue (i.e., too costly?) Did they feel that they didn’t need to mention HAL because everyone and their brother would recognize the Kubrickian, Arthur C. Clarke-concocted precedent so why bother?

But there are surely hundreds of thousands of Zoomers and perhaps even Millennials who’ve never seen Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 mystical classic. Even among those who know the film, many may have forgotten about the particular incentive for HAL’s malevolence. Why, at the end of the day, would Roher and Tyrell ignore this prescient plot turn? An odd call.

Except from Jeff Sneider’s defense of Timothee Chalamet, posted on Thursday, 3.26:

“The idea that Chalamet cost himself an Oscar with his behavior is ridiculous on its face, as if Academy voters are delicate flowers who need their petals stroked just the right way.

“Clearly, Chalamet’s ‘behavior’ didn’t alienate audiences, who showed up to see Marty Supreme in droves.

“If you guys think Chalamet has the biggest ego Hollywood has ever seen, I have a bridge to sell you.

“Could he have been a teeny, tiny bit more humble? Sure. I’ll grant Chalamet’s critics that much.

“But there’s a reason this guy is the biggest movie star 30 or under. He’s not like the other boys.

“Chalamet should, if nothing else, continue doing exactly what he’s been doing, which is to say, he should continue to be himself — whatever that looks like.

“People do change as they mature and get older, but that change often comes from within, and by advice to Timmy is this:

“’Don’t ever change, for anybody.'”

I’ve been avoiding Love Story like the plague because who wants to hang with a pair of priveleged, stressed-out, hair-trigger egoists?

As a follower of their stormy saga back in the ‘90s, I always suspected…okay, believed that JFK, Jr. was a breezy, evasive lightweight and Carolyn Bessette was a screeching toxic bitch. Later.

But this Wesley Morris N.Y. Times riff put the hook in.

Morris basically analogizes the second half of Love Story with Rosemary’s Baby:

“Like a lot of people, I am watching Love Story…J.F.K. Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. It’s been two months of this show now. It’s very popular, and it’s about to come to an end. So what did we watch? What just happened?

“I would say, okay, for me, what happened was [we were] watching this really cute sitcom for about four episodes — Carolyn Bessette just going to work her job at Calvin Klein. [It felt], to me, like an NBC sitcom version of Carolyn Bessette’s life.

“Then she meets JFK Jr. and the script gets flipped. The show goes from, like, Sex and the City to Rosemary’s Baby. It goes from this sitcom to a horror movie.

“And I think the nature of the horror is just one of these sort of subgenres of romance that involves a woman making a choice to (a) be with a man who is either going to ruin her life or (b) her life is going to end in some way, some terrible way.

“What Carolyn Bessette needs is a minute to think about whether she wants to knowingly become Rosemary. Do I remain this free, independent spirit in New York City, having the time of my life, or do I give all of that up to marry a man who…he may not want to change my life, but the world he comes from and all of the things attached to it — in this case, meaning the tabloids, the paparazzi — is that going to be worth the sacrifice of all my, like, carefree single-girlness?

“And then once she marries him, she’s like, what did I do?

“And, you know, there’s a great moment where, I mean, it might be too much, but it’s not, really. She’s just, like, in her boredom and misery, just sort of like, crawled under a glass coffee table and is just kind of pinned there. And the shot kind of lingers. It is a wonderful metaphor for the entire experience that she has. It’s not a closet. She could have just hid in the closet, but she doesn’t. She hides under a thing that we can all see through, which is glass. And she’s trapped there.

“And I don’t know, I feel like that is a really deep situation that this show is very patiently unspooling. She is really resisting becoming Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby. But I think what she realizes toward the end of this show is that it’s too late. .She already is.”

HE reality reflection: As she pondered married life with this hunky, mythical, bare-chested son of America’s most beloved 20th Century president, Bessette somehow made herself believe that (a) JFK Jr. would eventually grow more character and become a magazine publisher of serious substance (i.e., less of a nepo-baby) while acquiring several million more brain cells, and (b) that the celeb-chasing press and paparazzi would gradually calm down and leave them alone?

100% delusional bullshit.

Bessette wanted to bag this wealthy, entitled, world-famous prince of the city, and she knew what she was getting into. Okay, their marriage turned into a much more oppressive thing than expected, but she figured the best way to handle this super-fraught, media-besieged situation was to intensify her bitch lights and generally bring banshee hell?