You’d be hard pressed to find an upcoming film weirder than “Rumours.”

The biting commentary on the emptiness of political statements and the performances politicians put on starts off as a straight political satire focusing on the G7 world leaders, but then slips into a world of slow-yet-terrifying zombies; a mysterious, giant brain found in the middle of a forest with unexplained origins; and an AI chatbot bent on sexual entrapment.

It goes from provocative to absurd within a few short scenes, with the G7 leaders no longer the subject of criticism, but the butt of the joke.

And that’s kind of the whole point, according to its star and executive producer, Cate Blanchett.

“We’re all in such a state of heightened anxiety and fear with what’s going on with climate, what’s going on with the global political situation. We feel like we’re on the precipice of a world war and there’s a lot of people in positions of power who seem to be relishing that moment,” Blanchett told The Associated Press.

She plays a fictional chancellor of Germany named Hilda Orlmann, the host of the conference who’s more focused on optics than action.

“I think the audience will come to it with a need for some kind of catharsis. And because the film is ridiculous and terrifying … I think they’ll be able to laugh at the absurdity of the situation we found ourselves in. I think it’s a very generous film in that way,” she said.

The three directors, Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, said they wanted the film to feel like it had a “generic wash of political disrespect” and to include some resonant critiques, but they didn’t want viewers to feel like they were leaving a lecture hall as they walked out of the theater.

“I’m preachy enough when I talk to people. I don’t want to make a movie that’s preachy, you know? I just favor movies that aren’t that. That just hit me with a little mystery of … ‘What are you doing or seeing? What am I experiencing?’” Evan Johnson, who wrote the script, as well as co-directed, said.

As for the more absurd plotlines, Maddin said he and his collaborators share “a compulsion to come up with an original recipe.”

And original it certainly is. In its straightforward opening act, leaders from the Group of 7 meet for their annual summit and try to draft a provisional statement for an unnamed crisis. Then, as the evening goes on and they struggle to string together a couple, meaningful sentences, they find themselves abandoned and subject to attack from “bog people,” or well-preserved mummified bodies from thousands of years ago. Hijinks — and hilarity — ensue from there.

Nikki Amuka-Bird, who plays the fictionalized British Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt, said that while reading the script, she kept asking herself, “What’s happening?” But the ridiculous plotline — including the apocalyptic invasion of zombie-like “bog people” — was only part of the reason why she took on the project.

“This kind of total courage to genre splice in this way takes away any kind of apprehension or fear you might have about it because their (the directors’) tongues are firmly in their cheeks the whole time,” Amuka-Bird said. “It’s a really imaginative exercise and it’s just fantastic to work with directors who can be that bold and take chances like that.”

The cast is rounded out by a starry ensemble: Roy Dupuis is a melodramatic Canadian prime minister, Charles Dance is an American president with an inexplicable British accent, Denis Ménochet is a paranoid French president and Alicia Vikander makes an appearance as a frenetic leader from the European Commission.

The title of the movie, Blanchett said, is meant to invoke the revered Fleetwood Mac album of the same name, which was made at a time when the bandmembers were reportedly “all sleeping together and bickering and breaking up,” she said.

“What was surprising about it is you think, ‘OK, this is a film about the G7,’ but it’s like a sort of a daytime soap opera with these sort of trysts and liaisons and petty squabbles,” Blanchett said. “It was such an unusual way to look at the mess we’re all in and the leadership that’s led us here.”

Kamala Harris ‘ interview with Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier on Wednesday is the latest indication that Democrats during this campaign are increasingly willing to engage with a network well-stocked with supporters of opponent Donald Trump.

Since the party’s convention in August, roughly twice as many Democrats have been on Fox than during the same period in President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, which itself was more often than when Hillary Clinton was the nominee in 2016, according to the network.

Whether to ignore Fox or seize opportunities to change the viewpoints of some audience members has long been a subject of internal debate among Democrats. Biden didn’t make a Fox-specific appearance during his campaign. Clinton made one appearance during her primary campaign and another in mid-summer 2016.

“The vice president, Governor Walz and our campaign believe it is important to speak to all Americans, wherever they are getting their information or entertainment, so they can hear directly from us — not through a filter — who Vice President Harris is, what she stands for and what she’s running to do,” said Ian Sams, Harris campaign spokesman.

Trump grumbled on his social media feed this week about Sams, who was interviewed Wednesday on Fox by Dana Perino, Tuesday by Martha MacCallum and Monday by Neil Cavuto. Trump said Sams “virtually owns the network.”

“It’s not worthwhile doing interviews on Fox because it all just averages out into NOTHING,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Fox News has totally lost its way.”

Trump on Wednesday appeared on Fox, hours before Harris, in a pre-taped town hall meeting featuring female voters and hosted by Harris Faulkner.

Baier’s interview with Harris was combative, starting with a discussion on immigration and touching on the economy, the Biden administration and polls showing Americans think the nation is on the wrong track. At times they seemed to be talking past each other.

Donald Trump is embracing perhaps Hollywood’s most memorable drill sergeant to portray his vision of a hardened military and mock the Biden administration’s embrace of the LGBTQ+ community serving openly.

Trump’s recent rallies have featured a video with clips of R. Lee Ermey as Marine Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 classic Vietnam War film “Full Metal Jacket.” Ermey’s character was known for his vulgar and at times racist outbursts as he taunts and bullies recruits.

Those clips, captioned “THEN,” are juxtaposed against clips of people expressing support for LGBTQ+ rights and drag performers, captioned “NOW” and “THE BIDEN HARRIS MILITARY.”

The video ends with a shot from the movie, a scene before the recruits were sent to Vietnam, captioned with “LET’S MAKE OUR MILITARY GREAT AGAIN.” The video was shown at several Trump rallies before he posted it on social media on Saturday.

Trump often rails against the growing acceptance of transgender people, including the use of pronouns and transgender women in women’s sports, drawing some of the biggest applause lines at his rallies by pledging to restrict them.

Trump earlier this month hailed the performance by Ermey, who served in the Marines as a drill sergeant before acting.
“He was supposed to get the Academy Award,” Trump told his audience in Wisconsin, saying he was denied the honor because “he wasn’t part of the establishment.”

In using the movie to illustrate Trump’s ideal military, the campaign borrowed from what is recognized as an anti-war film. Never mind that the film is about Vietnam, for which Trump received medical deferments, despite having attended high school at New York Military Academy.

Vivian Kubrick, the late filmmaker’s daughter, said she believes her father would have embraced Trump and forgiven his use of an anti-war film to make his point about building a powerful military.
“That’s primarily what FMJ is about, the shocking and complicated paradoxes of human nature,” Vivian Kubrick wrote Sunday on the social media platform X.

“And thus, on this tooth and claw planet, you need a very strong military — so I’m going to stick with the idea that FMJ footage was used primarily because of its powerful, realistic portrayal of boot camp, juxtaposed with the entirely demoralizing and inappropriate injection of WOKE ideology into the USA military,” she added. “Which I agree with myself and which I’m certain my father would have agreed with.”

Ermey’s “Full Metal Jacket” co-star Matthew Modine, who played Private Joker in the film and is in some of the clips included in Trump’s video, saw things differently.

“Ironically, Trump has twisted and profoundly distorted Kubrick’s powerful anti-war film into a perverse, homophobic, and manipulative tool of propaganda,” Modine told Entertainment Weekly.