Category: Entertainment
Sore Liu-ser: Multimillionaire ‘Kill Bill’ star gripes about ‘Caucasian’-heavy Hollywood
Boo-hoo, Lucy Liu.
The veteran actress is in the awards season mix for “Rosemead,” the tale of an immigrant grappling with a troubled teenage son. That means she’s working the press circuit, talking to as many media outlets as she can to promote a possible Best Actress nomination.
No more peeks at Erivo’s extended, Freddy Krueger-like nails or Grande waving away a helicopter overhead as if it were about to swoop down on them.
If you think political campaigns are cynical, you haven’t seen an actor push for a golden statuette. That may explain why Liu shared her victimhood story with the Hollywood Reporter.
Turns out the chronically employed star (123 acting credits, according to IMDB.com) hasn’t been employed enough, by her standards.
I remember being like, “Why isn’t there more happening?” … I didn’t want to participate in anything where I felt like they weren’t even taking me seriously. How am I being given these offers that are less than when I started in this business? It was a sign of disrespect to me, and I didn’t really want that. I didn’t want to acquiesce to that … I cannot turn myself into somebody who looks Caucasian, but if I could, I would’ve had so many more opportunities.
Liu has had the kind of career most actors would kill to duplicate. That doesn’t play on the identity politics guilt of her peers though. Nor is it fodder for a “woe is me” awards speech …
Rest for the ‘Wicked’
That’s a wrap!
The “Wicked: For Good” press push got the heave-ho earlier this week when star Cynthia Erivo reportedly lost her voice. Co-star Ariana Grande pulled out of her appearances in solidarity.
Yup. Not remotely suspicious.
The duo made way too many headlines last year during their initial “Wicked” press tour. Why? It was just … weird. Odd. Creepy. The stars’ emaciated appearance didn’t help, but their kooky, collective affect was off-putting, to be kind.
Even the Free Press called out the duo’s sadly emaciated state.
They trotted out more of the same for round two, and someone had the good sense to yank them off the stage before the bulletproof sequel hit theaters Nov. 21.
No more peeks at Erivo’s extended, Freddy Krueger-like nails or Grande waving away a helicopter overhead as if it were about to swoop down on them.
Any publicity is good publicity, right? Not when it’s wickedly cringe …
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Vertical
Face for radio
John Oliver thinks it’s 1985.
HBO’s far-left lip flapper is furious that the Trump administration stripped NPR of its federal funding. Who will ignore senile presidents and laptop scandals without our hard-earned dollars?
Think of the children!
Never mind that Americans have endless ways to access news, from AM radio to TV, satellite, cable, and streaming options. Heck, just pick up a $20 set of rabbit ears, and you’ll get a crush of local TV stations in many swathes of the country.
You have to live in a bunker a hundred feet below the earth to avoid the news.
Oliver, to his credit, put his money where his mouth is. Or at least, your money. He set up a public auction to raise cash for NPR stations.
Why? Because we’re all going to croak without it. That’s assuming you didn’t die following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the lack of net neutrality.
“Public radio saves lives. The emergency broadcast system. Without it, people would die.”
A second-rate satirist might have a field day with anyone pushing the “you’ll die without X, Y, or Z” card. Alas Oliver doesn’t warrant that ranking …
‘Running’ on empty
Rising star status ain’t what it used to be.
Glen Powell seemed like the next Tom Cruise for a hot minute. Handsome. Affable. Unwilling to insult half the country. He stole a few moments during “Top Gun: Maverick” and powered a mediocre rom-com — 2023’s “Anyone but You” — into a $220 million global hit.
So when Hollywood handed him the keys to the “Running Man” remake, the industry assumed he had finally arrived. Give him his “I’m on the A-List” smoking jacket.
That’s until the remake’s opening weekend numbers came in. Or rather trickled in. That $16 million-plus haul just won’t cut it.
Now Powell’s next film is under the microscope. The project dubbed “Huntington” just got a last-minute name change to “How to Make a Killing.” The film follows Powell’s character as he tries to ensure he’ll inherit millions from his uber-wealthy family. That’s despite getting cast out of the clan’s good graces.
The movie now has a Feb. 20 release date, hardly a key window for an A-lister like Powell.
Then again, his time on the A-list may have already expired.
‘A House of Dynamite’: Netflix turns nuclear war into an HR meeting
Netflix’s thriller “A House of Dynamite” very much wants to teach us something about the folly of waging war with civilization-ending weapons. The lesson it ends up imparting, however, has more to do with the state of contemporary storytelling.
The film revolves around a high-stakes crisis: an unexpected nuclear missile launched from an unspecified enemy and aimed directly at Big City USA. We get to see America’s defense apparatus deal with impending apocalypse in real time.
It seems the best Ms. Bigelow, Mr. Oppenheim, and the team at Netflix can offer up is a lukewarm ‘nukes are bad, mmkay?’
Triple threat
“Revolves” is the operative word here. The movie tells the same story three times from three different vantage points — each in its own 40-minute segment. From first detection to the final seconds before detonation, we watch a bevy of government elites on one interminable red-alert FaceTime, working out how to respond to the strike.
This is the aptly named screenwriter Noah Oppenheim’s second disaster outing for the streamer; he recently co-created miniseries “Zero Day,” which features Robert De Niro investigating a nationwide cyberattack.
That series unspooled a complicated and convoluted conspiracy in the vein of “24.” “A House of Dynamite” clearly aims for something more grounded, which would seem to make accomplished Kathryn Bigelow perfect for the job.
And for the film’s first half-hour she delivers, embedding the viewer with the military officers, government officials, and regular working stiffs for whom being the last line of America’s defense is just another day at the office … until suddenly it isn’t. The dawning horror of their situation is as gripping as anything in “The Hurt Locker” or “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Then it happens two more times.
On repeat
In Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” Duke Orsino laments a repetitive song growing stale: “Naught enters there of what validity and pitch soe’er, but falls into abatement and low price.”
Or put another way, the tune, not realizing its simple beauty, sings itself straight into worthlessness.
And somehow, this manages to be only part of what makes “A House of Dynamite” so unappealing. Our main characters — including head of the White House Situation Room (Rebecca Ferguson), general in charge of the United States Northern Command (Tracy Letts), and the secretary of defense (Jared Harris) — offer no semblance of perspicacity, stopping frequently to take others’ feelings into account before making decisions, all while an ICBM races toward Chicago. From liftoff to impact in 16 minutes or less, or your order free.
Missile defensive
So thorough is this picture of incompetence that the Pentagon felt compelled to issue an internal memo preparing Missile Defense Agency staff to “address false assumptions” about defense capability.
One can hardly blame officials when, in the twilight of the film, we’re shown yet another big-screen Obama facsimile (played by British actor Idris Elba) putting his cadre of sweating advisers on hold to ring Michelle, looking for advice on whether his course of action should be to nuke the whole planet or do nothing. The connection drops — she is in Africa, after all, and her safari-chic philanthropy outfit doesn’t make the satellite signal any stronger. He puts the phone down and continues to look over his black book of options ranging “from rare to well done,” as his nuclear briefcase handler puts it.
And then the movie ends. The repetitive storylines have no resolution, and their participants face no consequences. The single ground missile the U.S. arsenal managed to muster up — between montages of sergeants falling to their knees at the thought of having to do their job — has missed its target.
Designated survivors — with the exception of one high-ranking official who finds suicide preferable — rush to their bunkers. The screen fades to black, over a melancholy overture. Is it any wonder that audiences felt cheated? After sitting through nearly two hours of dithering bureaucrats wasting time, their own time had been wasted by a director who clearly thinks endings are passé.
No ending for you
If you find yourself among the unsatisfied, Bigelow has some words for you. In an interview with Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, she justified her film’s lack of a payoff thusly:
I felt like the fact that the bomb didn’t go off was an opportunity to start a conversation. With an explosion at the end, it would have been kind of all wrapped up neat, and you could point your finger [and say] “it’s bad that happened.” But it would sort of absolve us, the human race, of responsibility. And in fact, no, we are responsible for having created these weapons and — in a perfect world — getting rid of them.
Holy Kamala word salad.
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Photo by dikushin via Getty Images
Bigelow-er
For much of her career, director Kathryn Bigelow has told real stories in interesting ways that — while not always being the full truth and nothing but the truth — were entertaining, well shot, and depicted Americans fulfilling their manifest destiny of being awesome.
That changed with Bigelow’s last film, 2017’s “Detroit,” a progressive, self-flagellating depiction of the 1967 Detroit race riots (final tally: 43 deaths, 1,189 injured) through the eyes of some mostly peaceful black teens and the devil-spawn deputy cop who torments them. “A House of Dynamite” continues this project of national critique.
But what, exactly, is the point? It seems the best Ms. Bigelow, Mr. Oppenheim, and the team at Netflix can offer up is a lukewarm “nukes are bad, mmkay?” This is a lecture on warfare with the subtlety of a John Lennon song, set in a world where the fragile men in charge must seek out the strong embrace of their nearest girlboss.
It’s no secret that 2025 carries a distinct “end times” energy — a year thick with existential threats. AI run amok, political fracture edging toward civil conflict, nuclear brinkmanship, even the occasional UFO headline — pick your poison. And it’s equally obvious that the internet, not the cinema, has become the primary arena where Americans now go to see those anxieties mirrored back at them.
“A House of Dynamite” is unlikely to reverse this trend. If this is the best Hollywood’s elite can come up with after gazing into the void, it’s time to move the movie industry to DEFCON 1.
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‘Nuremberg’: Russell Crowe’s haunting portrayal of Nazi evil
Say what you will about Russell Crowe, but he has never been a run-of-the-mill actor.
At his best, he surrenders to the role. This is an artist capable of channeling the full range of human contradictions. From the haunted integrity of “The Insider” to the brute nobility of “Gladiator,” Crowe once seemed to contain both sinner and saint, pugilist and philosopher.
In a time when truly commanding leading men are all but extinct, Crowe remains — carrying the weight, the wit, and the weathered grace of a bygone breed.
Then, sometime after “A Beautiful Mind,” the light dimmed. The roles got smaller, the scandals bigger.
There were still flashes of brilliance — “American Gangster” with Denzel Washington, “The Nice Guys” with Ryan Gosling — proof that Crowe could still command attention when the script was worth it. But for every film that landed, two missed the mark: clumsy thrillers, lazy comedies, and a string of forgettable parts that left him without anchor or aim. His career drifted between prestige and paycheck, part self-sabotage, part Hollywood forgetting its own.
Exploring the abyss
But now the grizzled sexagenarian returns with “Nuremberg” — not as a comeback cliché, but as a reminder that the finest actors are explorers of the human abyss. And Crowe, to his credit, has never been afraid to go deep.
In James Vanderbilt’s new film, the combative Kiwi plays Hermann Goering, the Nazi Reichsmarschall standing trial for his part in history’s darkest chapter. The movie centers on Goering’s psychological chess match with U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who becomes both fascinated and repulsed by the man before him. Goering, with his vanity, intelligence, and theatrical self-pity, is a criminal rehearsing for immortality.
The film unfolds as a dark study of guilt and self-deception. Kelley, played with that familiar, hollow-eyed tension of Rami Malek, sets out to dissect the anatomy of evil through Goering’s mind. Yet the deeper he digs, the more he feels the ground give way beneath him — the line between witness and accomplice blurring with every exchange.
Disturbingly human
Crowe’s Goering is not the slobbering villain of old war films. He’s disturbingly human, even likeable. He jokes, he reasons, he charms. He’s a man who knows how to disarm his enemy by appearing civil — and therein lies the horror. It’s a performance steeped in Hannah Arendt’s famous concept of the “banality of evil”: the idea that great atrocities are rarely committed by psychopathic monsters but by ordinary people made monstrous — individuals who justify cruelty through bureaucracy, obedience, or ideology.
Arendt wrote those words after watching Adolf Eichmann, another Nazi functionary, defend his role in the Holocaust. She was struck not by his madness but his mildness — his desire to be seen as merely following orders. Crowe’s Goering embodies that same terrifying normalcy. He doesn’t see himself as a villain at all, but as a patriot — wronged, misunderstood, and unfairly judged. It’s his charm, not his cruelty, that unsettles.
The brilliance of Crowe’s performance is that he resists caricature. He reminds us that evil doesn’t always wear jackboots. Sometimes it smiles, smokes, and quotes Shakespeare. It’s the kind of role only a mature actor can pull off — one who has met his own demons and understands that evil seldom announces itself.
It is also, perhaps, the perfect role for a man who has spent decades wrestling with his own legend. Crowe was once Hollywood’s golden boy — rugged, brooding, every inch the leading man — but the climb was steep and the fall steeper. Fame, like empire, demands endless victories, and Crowe, ever restless, grew weary of the war.
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A bygone breed
With “Nuremberg,” he hasn’t returned to chase stardom but to confront something larger — the unease that hides beneath every civilized surface. Goering, after all, was no brute. He was cultured, eloquent, even magnetic — proof that wisdom offers no wall against wickedness. And in a time when truly commanding leading men are all but extinct, Crowe remains — carrying the weight, the wit, and the weathered grace of a bygone breed.
At one point in the film, Goering throws America’s own hypocrisies back at Kelley: the atomic bomb, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the collective punishment of nations. It’s a rhetorical trick, but it lands. Crowe delivers those lines with the oily confidence of a man who knows that moral purity is a myth and that self-righteousness is often evil’s most convenient disguise.
The film may not be perfect. Its pacing lags at times, and its historical framing flirts with melodrama. But Crowe’s performance cuts through the pretense like a scalpel. There’s even a dark humor in how he toys with his captors — the court jester of genocide, smirking as the world tries to comprehend him.
Crowe’s Goering is, in the end, a mirror. Not just for the psychiatrist across the table, but for us all. The machinery of horror is rarely built by fanatics, but by functionaries convinced they’re simply doing their jobs.
Crowe’s performance reminds us why acting, when done with conviction, can still rattle the soul. His Goering is maddening and mesmeric. He captures the human talent for self-delusion, the ease with which conscience can be out-argued by ambition or fear. “Nuremberg” refuses to let the audience look away. It reminds us that every civilization carries the seed of its own undoing and every human heart holds a shadow it would rather not confront.
Russell Crowe is back, tipped for another Oscar — and in an age when Hollywood produces so few films worthy of our time or our money, I, for one, hope he gets it.
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