Gal Gadot

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most annoying of them all? The answer, it seems, is Rachel Zegler, the new Snow White, who has managed to turn herself into an international hate figure because she can’t keep her progressive political views to herself. The upshot is that Disney’s $350 million remake of one of its most famous films is flopping at the box office. It generated $45 million in ticket sales in its opening weekend. That sounds a lot, yet it’s a lot less than other recent Disney adaptations brought in, even including other woke disasters such as 2023’s Peter Pan & Wendy. Reviews of the new Snow White have been overwhelmingly negative, too.

As Israelis around the world face cultural boycotts, it was uplifting to see Gal Gadot, an eighth-generation Israeli on one side and the granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor on the other, honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Tuesday. “I think it’s going to take me time before I even realize that it’s real,” she told Variety. What won’t take time to realize – because by now we know the drill all too well – is that her ceremony was disrupted by pro-Palestinian activists wielding signs ranging from the pathetic to the downright chilling. “Heroes Fight Like Palestinians,” “Viva Viva Palestina,” “Up up with liberation, down down with occupation” and “Not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for Israel’s crime.

This summer will mark the tenth anniversary of The Avengers, the superhero mash-up film that arguably kicked off the endless rolling shenanigans that now dominate our multiplex screens year after year. Nonetheless, it remains one of the more entertaining examples of its kind, thanks to its witty script by writer-director Joss Whedon. One might expect to find Whedon and company reunited for various examples of backslapping bonhomie over the next few months, except that the filmmaker is now persona non grata to the highest extent. The stories about his downfall are well known, and include allegations of bullying, sexual exploitation and general maltreatment of colleagues and former employees alike.

There is a classic Simpsons episode in which young Bart falls down a well. Local celebrities, with the aid of guest star Sting, decide to band together to do something about it. Their magnificently useless contribution is to band together to perform a song in which they ‘send their love down the well’. ‘We can’t get him out, so we’ll do the next best thing, go on TV and sing, sing, sing.’I am surely not the only person who thought of this scene when Gal Gadot, Will Ferrell, Sarah Silverman and others performed a rendition of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’.