Well, you certainly can’t hide, so you try what you can.

I will say, however, the reporting on this situation has been so scattershot that I’m starting to get skeptical. Where did the claim that she could get jail time and lashes come from? Did anyone verify it? Is it at all likely in the Iranian system that someone who’s accused of defaming a famous person as a plagiarist…

Yeah, but he now has a cult’s worth of MRA-types feeding his persecution complex online, him not acting like an asshole off-screen seems highly unlikely. I mean, he couldn’t quite do it when he was on top of the world and people were rolling barrels of Jack Sparrow money at him.

Agreed on the lashes and prison for badmouthing someone, but the “ignoring a contract” part is nonsense. People make unenforceable contracts all the time. A court that refuses to enforce an unenforceable contract is simply doing its job.

Yeah, I have the feeling that Johnny Depp, the actor, is still in there, somewhere. Before he became a toxic guy with an even more toxic fandom, I kept hoping he’d have a late-career comeback in serious roles where he wasn’t a cartoon.

Probably also couldn’t make it due to the fact that lots of celebrities are running away from Rowling like she was a fart in an elevator.

Like Zhang Yimou, I think that we discount a lot of the propaganda in their work—and more pointedly, their silence on topics that would anger censors—as the price of doing business for a great artist who happened to have been born and lived under a repressive regime. That situation is not Trump and Putin at all,…

Yeah, it’s a very “Way to make the Japanese cast so much more appealing than the Western cast” move. I’ll tune in for Ken Watanabe and Rinko Kikuchi, not so much for Elton Anselreich and Ella Rumpf.

In this case, local broadcast television deserves a “good job.” The fact that it wound up on the Internet is kind of incidental, but I’ll take it, since being on Youtube means I don’t have to live in the Twin Cities to see it.

Ah. I completely misinterpreted that one. Who’d have thought the Broncos’ Super Bowl MVP would be the Miami/Dade vice squad?

There’s a video on Youtube where Smith tells the story of the first scene he shot with Willis and Tracy Morgan on Cop Out. It was the start of the trouble between them, according to Smith, because Morgan started the scene on-script, but Willis kept on staring out the window and doing weird, dated ad libs that he…

Thank you so much for this. So much awesomeness:

Getting nominated is, IIRC, the most direct way to be invited to join. The other routes involve being nominated for membership by other members, I think.

This makes me envision AVC LA leadership as Michael Lerner in Barton Fink, “You think you’re the only one that can give me that Sean O’Neal feeling?”

The Academy rules are clear: you can have a sanctioned fight, so long as there’s a referee and a medical team to patch Colman up afterward.

Honestly, Serena should’ve started yelling “Keep my family’s name out of your f***ing mouth!”

Honestly, if Will Smith’s in memoriam photo/clip is anything but him slapping Chris Rock, it’ll be a huge disappointment.

Not sure who the puking woman or the Atlanta Falcon are, although given the many politicians who succeed these days despite equal or more serious misbehavior and the many, many NFL athletes who the league welcomes back with open arms after they serve their doping suspensions (and who don’t get their awards taken away),…

The story I’d heard is that Willis had bad experiences with directors who didn’t know their craft, and Smith, being largely self-taught, didn’t know/remember the names of the various lenses they’d use while shooting. He’d apparently go to his DP, indicate the size of the lens he wanted with his hands, and the DP would…

I’ve had relatives who suffered cognitive disorders, so I kind of feel where he’s coming from. Once you hear that someone’s been diagnosed with a medical condition which can result in changes to their personality or ability to comprehend things, it throws your past interactions with them into question. You start…