[T]his is the manifesto of Sunset Boulevard and all its awful children. The female star, with her autonomous gifts, is just too threatening to be adm… - Tanya Gold

Still, on he goes, glibly, hearing nothing he does not want to hear, and seeing nothing he does not want to see: a god in tiny rooms.

Hollywood is greedy and prone to self-mythologising to conceal that simple greed: the very faults that [Citizen] Kane satirized. The town's treatment of Kane, the definitive account of American desire and corruption on film, is as ludicrous – and sensitive – now as then.
Mank, David Fincher's fictionalised account of the creation of Kane, is up for 10 Academy Awards this weekend. If it equals, or even surpasses, its creation myth, it will be a bleak joke: one that both [Orson] Welles and [Herman J. Mankiewicz] would get or, if they had the chance, would have written themselves. (Welles died in 1985; Mank in 1953.) It is, consciously or not – and I would guess not - theft masquerading as tribute and that is the only profound truth it tells. This is a bad habit in Hollywood, and one to which it is increasingly addicted.

[At Gold's third visit to Russell Brand's Trews Musings event] There is a deep vein of savagery inside Brand, something completely animalistic, but its twin is there too: something much softer, and terribly vulnerable. Watching these Brands fight it out is, in totality, his allure. His cult is based on the premise that individualism is destroying us. But he cannot shrug off his own ego. It is a very noisy dichotomy.
At the end, he loiters. He has long, slow closed-eye hugs with men and women; the air is damp with lust masquerading as political intent. The Trews is not a political experience, not at all. Brand has founded a small religion, and it will not outlive him. He is an addict populating a space vacated by conventional politics; he is a symptom of the very ennui he hates. And he couldn’t swing an election.