This is right at the top of my list of 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.
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 q couple of neighborhood girls at the same age. But being an eight-year-old hetero horndog was entirely my idea. It genuinely came from within. The trans thing is different. It comes from the crowd. It’s imposed…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-rater. 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.
— Sammy Breakfast (@sam_thraxx) April 27, 2026
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.
David Cross: "I’m politically more Democrat Socialist."
Bill Maher: "You’re plainly to the left of me if you even say you’re a socialist."
David: "Well, I said Democratic Socialist."
Bill: "I know what Democratic Socialist is, that’s Mamdani. Who’s a straight up communist." pic.twitter.com/f9nuVQFbRo
— Joe Rogan Podcast News (@joeroganhq) April 28, 2026
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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? You need 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.
Honestly? Twice I’ve sat down and tried to watch Bernard Wicki‘s Morituri (alternately called Saboteur: Code Name Morituri), and both times I’ve lost interest and turned it off. Maybe I’ll give it another looksee.
The best thing that came out of this 1965 film was a short documentary about Marlon Brando giving interviews to junket whores during the Morituri junket, which happened at Manhattan’s Hampshire House (150 Central Park South), in the late summer of ’65.
Meet Marlon Brando was shot and edited by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. It’s a great Brando personality piece, and a reminder that he was quite the flirt (he charmingly hits on a pair of young female journalists plus a pretty Puerto Rican female passerby with a young son), and that nothing ups your chances like being famous.
Boilerplate: “After having appeared in a series of box-office disappointments, Brando agreed to promote Morituri for 20th Century Fox by participating in a day-long press junket at the Hampshire House in New York City. Brando was praised for his performance in Meet Marlon Brando by critic Howard Thompson, to wit: “The actor was never more appealing than in this candid-camera cameo, his best performance.”
The documentary premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1966. Since then, it has aired on French television but was not shown in its entirety in the United States until Fandor made it available on 11.15.13.
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.
