Delicious Perversity, Ample Sex, Class Warfare, etc.

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I’d forgotten how politically anticipatory…how wonderfully diseased and wickedly pleasurable Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter‘s The Servant, which I haven’t watched since the aughts…I’d forgotten what a low-key gem it is.

I’d forgotten how dryly funny it is without announcing a humorous intent. Commercially released a week before the JFK assassination but well before the social convulsions of the mid ’60s or any kind of “bawdy, explorational sexual promiscuity as revolutionary behavior” allusion or acknowledgment…a year or two before anyone was wearing even slightly longish hair…shot in the spring of ’63, when the Beatles hadn’t yet exploded (even in England) and well before the Dylan-goes-electric tremor or even a touch of that post-mods-vs.rockers, “things are getting sorta kinda trippy” London atmosphere in Antonioni‘s Blow-up…

None of that had kicked in, not really, and yet The Servant, oddly, seemed to have an inkling of what was just around the corner or, you know, coming down the pike in ’64 or ’65.

Wiki excerpt: “It was Losey who first showed Robin Maugham‘s novella, The Servant to Dirk Bogarde. Pinter stripped it of its first-person narrator, its yellow book snobbery, and the arguably antisemitic characterization of Barrett — oiliness, heavy lids — replacing them with an economical language that implied rather than stated the slippage of power relations away from Tony (James Fox) and towards Barrett (Bogarde).”

“I Been Poor My Whole Life…Like A Disease Passing From Generation to Generation”

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This is right at the top of my list of YouTube pleasure-watch scenes. I’m not a huge fan of Jeff Bridges‘ Deputy Dawg shitkicker accent, but this is probably the finest scene that Chris Pine will ever perform. Mainly for his silence, and for that guarded-meets-ironic facial expression, and how he lowers his rifle when his ex-wife and sons pull up.

Yes, I riffed about Hell or High Water a few weeks ago, but I didn’t post this particular clip.

Don’t Bring Me Down With Your Shorts

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David Cross‘s appearance — baseball cap, pot belly, bushy Santa Claus beard, shorts — is, for me, as much of a problem as Cross being casually, no-big-deal accepting of Brooklyn parents supporting 9-year-old trans kids.

I knew I was straight when I was three or four. I used to sleep with my pretty grandmother, and I distinctly recall getting a faint little charge outta that. I was leafing through nude girlie magazines when I was eight. I used to play doctor with a couple of neighborhood girls at the same age. But being an eight-year-old hetero horndog was entirely my idea. It fully came from within. The trans thing is different. It comes from the crowd. It’s half-imposed, half-trendy…a consensus thing.

Bill Maher: “Trans? Wait, [your daughter] has trans friends in third grade?”

Cross: “Yeah.”

Maher: “They know they’re trans in third grade?”

Cross: “I think a just-turned 9 year old…just the coolest kid.”

Maher: “[Is the child transitioning from] girl to boy?”

Cross: “Girl to boy. And she has another very close friend who’s not in the school, but who’s boy to girl at 3 years old.”

Maher: “A woman friend said, ‘I was what they called a tomboy. If I was alive now and acted the way I did then, this is what they would have done to me.’”

Cross: “Well, nobody’s ‘doing’ this to her.”

Maher: “Well, I don’t know.”

Cross: “Literally nobody is doing this to her.”

Maher: “How old?”

Cross: “Either 8 or, I think, 9.”

Maher: “Okay, then somebody is doing something because 8- or 9-year-olds can’t do anything on their own.”

Cross: “No, they’re buying them boys’ clothes.”

Maher: “Well then, they’re doing something.”

Cross: “Sure. Yes, you’re right. They’re buying them boys’ clothes.”

Maher: “And telling them you’re a boy now.”

Cross: “No, no, they’re not ‘telling’ them. They’re just agreeing with [the child].”

Maher: “Agreeing with an 8-year-old. Because when has their judgment ever been off at 8?”

Cross: “You knew you weren’t gay, right?… It’s not different.”

Maher: “It is different. Good luck with President Vance. Because, as I always say to my woke friends, we voted for the same person. You’re just why [Kamala Harris] lost, and this is a case of that.”

Cross: “Wait…what?”

Maher: “We voted for the same person. You’re just why she lost. Because America hears this, and they’re going to go, ‘Bill’s right…8-year-olds can’t really make decisions on their own like this.’ That’s what most people are going to say. This is why we’re going to vote for JD Vance…that’s America in a nutshell.”

People inclined to vote for JD Vance in ’28 aren’t in love with him. They know he’s a second-rate beardo. They felt the same way about Trump in ’24 and ’16. They know these guys are beasts in many respects. But they really, really hate wokeys, and that I understand.

HE really loves Zohran Mamdani in a spiritual sense. I think he’s the most Fiorello LaGuardia-like mayor that NYC has had in many decades.

Is It Okay To Steal From Corporate Retail?

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Four or five days ago I listened to a NY Times Opinion Podcast titled “The Rich Don’t Play By The Rules, So Why Should I?” It was basically a measure of how much hostility toward corporations is simmering out there.

Hosted by NYT Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman, the guests were New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino (i.e., the bearded dude) and political commentator Hasan Piker.

Go to 3:24 for the Whole Foods portion of the discussion — “Would you steal from Whole Foods?“)

I, HE personified, have never stolen a single item from a Whole Foods store. Nor from Wilton’s Village Market or a Stop & Shop or any similar-sized corporate store. Or from a library or a gas station convenience store. I’m not a thief.

Cold Submission That Onion Would Have Turned Down

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An attorney friend tapped out this would-be Onion article this morning:

“President Trump has peremptorily pardoned accused would be ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Cole Tomas Allen of all charges,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced today.

“The president felt it was the right thing to do,” Secretary Leavitt revealed, reminding everyone how the President had pardoned some 1500 January 6th rioters. “Many of them probably would have characterized themselves as assassins if given the opportunity,” the President noted, adding that “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Trump really feels he had no choice, Secretary Leavitt explained. “Mr. Allen believed he was being a good patriot, and that’s good enough for me,” the President told Leavitt.

“This is further evidence why President Trump is the greatest President in all of history…past, present and future,” gushed Secretary Of War Pete Hegseth. “He’s not afraid to do the right thing, also known as the Christian thing.” FBI Director Kash Patel said he agreed “one thousand percent…justice without mercy is tyranny. As we’ve seen time and again, this President doesn’t hold a grudge.”

The President consulted with former Vice President Mike Pence, who wholeheartedly agreed, said Secretary Leavitt.

The Onion has reached out to Vice President Pence for comment and received this response, through a spokesperson: “The President is batshit crazy, always has been. I don’t think Allen should be pardoned, but perhaps a Nobel Peace Prize nomination is in order.”

Soft N.Y. Times Piece About Jackson Fans’ Indifference to Child Molestation Allegations

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I was wondering when the N.Y. Times would finally run an article about the gulf between film critics’ damnation of Michael, partly 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 embracing or are at least 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 oblivious Michael patrons at a Union Square-area theatre where the film was playing last weekend.

There’s a 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.

This Is Racially Offensive to Progressive Asians?

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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] 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.”

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