Celebrities

Over the past couple of weeks, two expensive, auteur-driven films with big stars have been released at the American box office, both conscious throwbacks to the kind of Seventies cinema that isn’t supposed to be made any longer. In the case of Paul Thomas Anderson, his Leo DiCaprio-starring Thomas Pynchon fantasia One Battle After Another seems to have been a success by the skin of its (yellowed) teeth: it has already made over $100 million worldwide, helped by excellent reviews and strong word of mouth. But in the case of another A-lister, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the critical and commercial reception of The Smashing Machine has been rather more muted, suggesting that audiences know what they want from Johnson, and it sure as hell isn’t arthouse fare.

Ellen DeGeneres, the former queen of American daytime television, says she escaped the social turmoil of the United States by finding a $29 million farmhouse in the English countryside. And she would very much like the rest of us to take note. She and her wife, Portia de Rossi, reportedly arrived in Britain the day before the 2024 US election. When the results came in, accompanied, she says, by a flood of sad-face-emoji-laden texts from anxious friends, the couple made their decision: they wouldn’t be going back. Now they’re happily settled in the Cotswolds, that beautiful part of southern England where celebrities, rockstars and former politicians play out their fantasies of rural living.

A British film fan recently took to social media to share an unusual experience that had happened to her while visiting the Picturehouse cinema in central London. She was standing in the foyer, watching the trailer for the forthcoming superhero picture The Fantastic Four: First Steps, when she became aware of a middle-aged man standing next to her, enjoying the same preview. He then said, in apparent surprise, “Look! I’m in that!” She turned to him, expecting to see some character actor with a one-line role, and it was none other than Pedro Pascal: film and television star, self-appointed nemesis to J.K. Rowling and “the internet’s daddy.

In the end, the verdict in the most talked-about trial of the year, perhaps the decade, came in far quicker than most commentators had expected. Judge Arun Subramanian had wisely suggested that he wanted a unanimous verdict on the charges that Diddy had been arraigned on and that he wanted this verdict to come in before the 4th of July holiday. Many had assumed, given the sheer weight of evidence against Diddy (real name, as we were informed many times, Sean Combs), that it would take at least a week to sort through the often sordid and distressing material that the jury were presented with over the course of the seven-week trial. In the end, however, it took just over a day of deliberations.

Late last week, the New York Times once again floated the idea that President Trump could become the fifth head on Mount Rushmore, to the right of Abraham Lincoln (that’s for sure). He’d be like the fifth Beatle, but yuge. While it’s true that Trump has brought peace to Africa and the Middle East in the last week, and has done an excellent job lining the Oval Office with gold filigree, maybe we should hold off on carving his visage into a mountainside until we see the final fate of the Big, Beautiful Bill. For Trump’s a jolly good fellow, and what nobody can also deny is that there’s available rock space in South Dakota. The President likes nothing more than a good real-estate deal on undeveloped land. But let’s hold off on clearing headspace for the Donald just yet.