The term “patterns” is often heard in Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell‘s The AI Doc, but not in a Rod Serling sense.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s 3.25 Variety review:

“The AI Doc wants to know, and it wants you to know. To know what? To know what in the actual fuck we’re dealing with, which is a technology that’s going to upend the world as we know it.

“It will wipe out jobs like a tsunami, it’s going to replace workers it is smarter than, and it’s going to be given more and more control — and take more and more control — because that’s the nature of how it works. It’s a synthetic mind, but it’s designed to evolve into an invincible operating system.

“Here’s what AI says: “I think, therefore I am. And therefore, I tell the human race what it should do.”

“The AI revolution has not been marketed as a sunnier version of what it’s going to be. If anything, all the prognostication about it is being led by dread. And The AI Doc shows you why. The film’s free-associative form and style says: Strap yourself in — it’s going to be a bumpy disturbing trip, and let’s hope we’re all still here when it’s over.

“And here’s the eerie part. It’s not like those days when we were ‘building better computers’ — no, the weirdness of AI is that it advances by itself. Machine / tech disruptions are always compared to the Industrial Revolution, because that was the original Great Leap Forward in modern human advancement. But when one of the wags in The AI Doc says, ‘It will make the Industrial Revolution look like small beans,” you feel, for perhaps the first time, that that’s no mere metaphor.”

After last January’s ICE shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti…who could have foreseen that these ugly murders would prompt Congressional Democrats to punish U.S. travellers nationwide for God knows how long?

Democratic message in a nutshell: Because Good and Pretti were brutally shot to death, average Americans must pay the price and then some, mainly because we don’t have the votes to overrule Republicans. So Average Joes and Janes will keep on paying the price throughout the spring and perhaps longer….who knows?

The Homeland Security shutdown, which has lasted over five weeks so far, is bsaically about Democrats insisting upon trying to control immigration enforcement abuses by withholding funding. They have thereby caused the pay of airport TSA agents to be frozen. Those poor TSA agents have been without pay for close to six weeks now. They can’t pay their bills. They’re in agony. And the entire Washington legislative community is going on spring beak next week?

N.Y. Times: “Yesterday (Wednesday) Democrats sent a proposal with ‘common-sense guardrails‘ on federal immigration agents, which they have demanded be part of any agreement, but South Dakota Senator Senator John Thune, the Senate majority leader, called that a nonstarter.

“The acting head of the Transportation Security Administration told a House committee that security checkpoints at the nation’s airports were experiencing ‘the highest wait times in history‘ because of the Department of Homeland Security shutdown. The administrator, Ha Nguyen McNeill, said agent absences have soared to more than 40 percent at some airports since the shutdown began.”

Savannah Guthrie strongly suspects, as do we all, that her poor kidnapped mom, Nancy Guthrie, is no longer alive. Perhaps the retarded animals who kidnapped her didn’t intend to carry her off — maybe it was just a home invasion thievery thing gone wrong — but they struck and gashed her (blood drops outside the front door) and they’re clearly blundering morons, and the poor woman (who would probably be alive if she hadn’t fought them) is almost certainly dead and (awful to contemplate this) perhaps even buried.

And yet to go by the TODAY show interview that Guthrie just did with co-host Hoda Kotg, this seven-week-old episode and its tragic outcome is still fresh and gleaming on the plate. I’m sorry but when godawful terrible things happen, we all have to process them and somehow move on. Can anyone imagine Jackie Kennedy weeping her way through a televized interview seven weeks after her husband’s murder in Dallas? Of course not. Emotional dignity and brave composure were required back then.

Guthrie and Hodt, of course, are giving an emotional performance with a purpose. On the one-in-1000 chance that Nancy might still be alive, they’re trying to once again appeal to some sense of submerged humanity within the kidnappers to please tell authorities where Nancy is, even if it’s only the whereabouts of her body. Closure if nothing else.

On or about 2.1.26, Savannah was told by her brother Camron that their mom had most likely been kidnapped. Savannah’s agonized reaction, she tells Hodt, was that she might somehow be at fault.

Guthrie to Kotb: “I don’t know how dumb could I be, but I didn’t want to believe…do you think it was because of me?”

Yes, the invasion almost certainly happened because of Savannah’s fame and wealth (the bad guys saw a payday), but mainly, many believe, because of that special, well-publicized TODAY show segment titled “Savannah Guthrie Returns to Her Hometown of Tucson, Arizona”, which aired four months ago. That — sadly, tragically — was the calling card.

The creeping social-political encroachment of the trans community agenda during the era of Covid and woke terror (roughly 2017 to 2024) has been stopped in its tracks, sports-wise, by the U.S. Olympic Committee, and thank God for the combined causes of decency, social justice and fairly-regulated women’s sporting events.

If, God forbid, Project Hail Mary elbows its way into the Oscar conversation later this year, it would represent yet another sad degradation of a once-lofty brand that has endured more than enough slings and arrows. A kin to The Martian in more ways than one, PHM is making big money….fine, whoo-hoo. Fucking leave it there.

Those entitled scumbags who assaulted the once-beautiful daughter of Bonasera, the undertaker…fine, they deserved the beatings that Clemenza’s goons surely gave them. But the Corleones were always presented as civilized hoods…nobody to mess with but also a clan that first and foremost honored family, loyalty, fraternity, hearth fires, Italian immigrant tradition, etc.

Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli is reporting that the second season of Seth Rogen‘s multi-Emmy-winning The Studio is currently lensing in Venice, Italy, and that the setting, of course, is not just the Venice Film Festival but the forthcoming 83rd edition, which will unfold between 9.2.26 and 9.12.26.

Using the Lido’s Palazzo del Cinema, which is currently adorned in full festival regalia, the satirical showbiz series is pre-creating the 83rd gathering with Madonna, Micheal Keaton, Bryan Cranston, Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz and Julia Garner costarring.

I’m especially amused by the fact that Venice Film festival topper Alberto Barbera will perform a speaking cameo in the show.

Yesterday Madonna posted an Instagram video in which she and Garner lip-sync to “Like a Virgin”. Garner has been attached to star in a “long-delayed” (read: scrapped) Madonna biopic that the singer has been wanting to make since ’22 and which may now be blended into a Studio story line.

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…who played the airplane-wing gremlin in the 1983 feature version of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” with John Lithgow in the William Shatner role. It was a matter of supreme indifference even when Twilight Zone: The Movie first popped. The original gremlin was played by Nick Cravat.

Anthony Perkins as a “young American who can’t control his exploding passions”…an inside allusion within the ad department.

Only one of these nine directors ever forced a lead actor to wear a tennis-ball coif in a major feature:

What do you do, precaution-wise, if you’re approaching a major highway intersection or airport runway upon which vehicles travel at high speeds?

I can tell you what I’d do. I would first of all stop my vehicle before crossing and then — this is kind of important, not to mention a utilization of common sense — I would look both ways on the highway or runway to make sure there are no cars or big trucks or jets approaching from the right or left.

Short version: Even if there’s a green light telling you it’s okay to cross, you still make sure by looking both ways for rogue traffic.

Shorter version: I would use my effing eyeballs before crossing.

Apparently the LGA air-traffic controller screwed up by telling the fire truck he was good to cross runway #4, but the fire truck driver was a total fool.

Whatever happened to Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake? It was released by Sony Pictures Classics six or seven weeks ago — February 6, 2026 — and then more or less sank beneath the waves. Where is it? Has it vaporized into thin air? One of Cannes ‘25’s most celebrated films was blown off by the Academy, which apparently made SPC run for cover. At the very least this beautiful little film deserves to be Blurayed and streamed ASAP.

“This Film Is Going To Sink in and Spread Out“, posted on 2.21.26:

I’m just going to spit this out: Richard Brody‘s New Yorker review of Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake is more eloquent and deeply felt than the Cake review I tapped out in Cannes nine months ago.

Brody shares some of the same observations that I mentioned last year, but his review really digs in…it’s more fully considered…plus the construction is smarter, better. Here’s the whole Brody piece, and here’s my favorite portion:

“It’s no surprise that the children’s frantic quest fosters a deep friendship. The pairing is an old one—the principled book-smart girl and the rough-edged streetwise boy—but Hadi revitalizes it with meticulous observation that links their struggles to those of the country at large. The children playing Lamia and Saeed had no training as actors, yet both are fanatically precise, effortlessly expressive, and pensively deep-hearted. The girl achieves perfect comic timing when she holds a recipe in one hand and her pet rooster in the other as it pecks at the paper.

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Variety‘s Esa Keslassy to Cannes topper Thierry Fremaux: “What is the status of the Cannes Film Festival’s selection today?”

Fremaux: “It’s March, and we’re still waiting for many films. We’re seeing some great things. The excitement comes from the artists themselves. The announcement that Peter Jackson or Barbra Streisand are coming, for example, already makes you want to be on the Croisette, doesn’t it?”

A good portion of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival lineup will be revealed in Paris on April 9th. Last-minute additions always pop through between mid and late April.

I’m still hopeful and excited about catching Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Fatherland, which is apparently destined to debut on the Croisette after all; ditto Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord, Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Minotaur (a lock), Anton Corbijn‘s Switzerland, Joel Coen‘s Jack of Spades, Pedro Almodovar‘s Bitter Christmas, Asghar Farhadi‘s Parallel Tales, Radu Jude The Diary of a Chambermaid, and possibly James Gray‘s Paper Tiger.

But I’m still horribly bummed out by news that Ruben Ostlund‘s The Entertainment System is Down and Lukas Dhont‘s Coward will be no-shows.

We’re all sensing or intuiting on some level that Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure Day may be a vague alien programmer of some kind (certainly compared to Close Encounters and E.T.), and we all understand that Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey was never even on the table (the notoriously reclusive Nolan never unveils his films in Cannes), and that Digger, the Alejandro Inarritu-Tom Cruise collaboration, is being held for Venice.

Jordan Ruimy‘s last spitball rundown included All of a Sudden (d: Ryusuke Hamaguchi), Her Private Hell (d: Nicolas Winding Refn), Out of this World (d: Albert Serra), Butterfly Jam (d: Kantemir Balagov), Wake of Umbra (d: Carlos Reygadas)

Keslassy: “The next season of The White Lotus** will be filmed on the French Riviera, with a plot centered around the Cannes Film Festival. What discussions have you had with Mike White and HBO regarding this?”

Fremaux: “I cannot answer that. You’ll have to ask the production team, who are currently working on it.

Keslassy: “How many films have you already selected for the competition [thus far]?”

Fremaux: “About half.”

Keslassy: “And how many do you have left to watch?”

Fremaux: “As I speak, there are 400 in the screening room. I’m heading back!”

Fremaux: “I’m the first to wonder if Cannes is the right place for a particular film to have its world premiere on the Croisette. If I don’t think so, I’m not going to sacrifice a film’s life for a red carpet.”

Ruimy on Fremaux-Keslassy: “Nothing we didn’t already know. The Inarritu-Cruise is going to Venice. Nolan has never premiered a film at Cannes. Ostlund is nowhere near done editing and will go to Cannes next year.”

HE reply: “The Ostlund is a chamber piece set on an airborne 747, right? Pure dialogue, pure interiors, pure eccentric social conflict. Saying a film is ‘not ready’ can sometimes be a cover term that indicates it’s not currently working and — who knows? — that Ostlund needs to fiddle around a bit more.”

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