May 26, 2026

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Production Hell — Megalopolis. 

I feel badly for Francis Ford Coppola having spent decades ruminating over the film and investing a fortune into it, only to have this be the result:

But as the Drinker notes, “no matter what else you might think about this film and the man who created it, I have to admit I kind of respect Coppola just for getting the thing made. The man had an artistic vision, that’s for sure. And he was willing to sacrifice half his life and all of his accumulated wealth pursuing it. And in a world of creatively bankrupt studio slop like the Mandalorian and Grou, maybe Hollywood could use a few more Francis Ford Coppolas these days.”

This was my take on the movie from October of 2024, after taking the above photo at a Fort Worth Studio Movie Grill: Megalopolis: Making Sense of Francis Ford Coppola’s Fever Dreams.

Posted at 5:46 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOOD ADVICE:

Posted at 5:37 pm by Stephen Green

WHY IS ROLLING STONE INSULTING ITS OWN READERS?

Hey, not everyone can be totally cool and dreamy like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev:

Or Charles Manson:

As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner [who would then have been about age 24–Ed] leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”

Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’ ”

* * * * * * * *

Meanwhile, a lawyer in the DA’s office, believing he was doing a favor for a friend of [David] Felton’s at the Los Angeles Times and that this hippie rag from San Francisco was a benign nonentity, brought Felton [then-recently hired away from the L.A. Times by Wenner] and Dalton into the office to show them the crime scene photos of the butchered bodies of Manson victims — including a man with the word war etched in his stomach with a fork. Dalton blanched when he saw the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” painted in blood on a refrigerator, instantly recalling what Dennis Wilson told him about the coded instructions Manson heard in the Beatles songs. “It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” said Dalton. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.” Jann Wenner changed the headline.

And not everyone can afford to leave their city after the leftist politics that Rolling Stone has been promoting for 60 years now began to make it a hellhole:

Jann Wenner said it was [his then-wife] Jane who ultimately catalyzed Rolling Stone’s move to New York. Her paranoia and anxiety had spiked to uncomfortable levels in the wake of the Patty Hearst episode. “San Francisco got very tricky at one point, because you had the Zodiac, the Zebra, and the SLA,” she said. “It was too small. There were too many people that were just too closely removed from the SLA and the Mansons…there was something creepy happening at that point.”

Related: The staffers at Variety no doubt have “unfathomable levels of self-confidence” as well, even as they lie about Karen Bass, or know nothing about her past:

Posted at 5:23 pm by Ed Driscoll

CORN, POPPED:

Posted at 5:18 pm by Stephen Green

IT LOOKS LIKE THE FERRARI FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T LIKE FERRARIS: This Is Ferrari’s First EV: The Luce.

Also: ‘The market has spoken’: Ferrari shares fall after carmaker unveils first fully electric vehicle. “The highly anticipated model marks a departure from the aesthetic of typical Ferraris and comes even as other luxury car manufacturers, notably Porsche and Lamborghini, have scaled back on plans to launch their own EVs due to weak demand.”

Related (From Ed):

Which is pretty astounding considering that “the expression ‘copyright infringement’ doesn’t translate terribly well into Mandarin,” to coin a phrase:

 

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT:

Although these days, it’s fair to ask whether Platner is really all that far to the left of the typical Democrat office-holder.

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

ED DEPT DEFINES INSANITY: You know the maxim, doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Well, a new data deep-dive by Open the Books shows the Department of Education illustrates the accuracy of the maxim.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Mark Tapscott

APPARENTLY BECAUSE OF HIS PRO-AMERICA AND PRO-TRUMP YARD SIGNS:

Posted at 4:03 pm by Stephen Green

THE END OF STATINS? Eli Lilly says Verve’s gene editor lowers cholesterol levels in early study. “Eli Lilly said Monday that a high dose of its gene-editing therapy reduced cholesterol levels by 62% in participants in a clinical trial, an early but encouraging test of whether a one-time treatment may one day help people seeking to lower their LDL, or ‘bad,’ cholesterol.”

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

HE ISN’T VERY BRIGHT, IS HE?

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

ASTROTURF ALL THE WAY DOWN:

Posted at 3:02 pm by Stephen Green

NAILED IT:

The cause is always the same: Other people’s money.

Posted at 2:31 pm by Stephen Green