Jesse

“Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” star Jesse Eisenberg may soon one-up the film franchise’s Robin Hood-esque Four Horsemen in the giving-back department.

This December, the Academy Award nominee and longtime blood donor will give one of his kidneys to a complete stranger, he said Thursday on the “Today” show. He slipped the news into a conversation with host Craig Melvin about a recent show-sponsored blood drive.

As Melvin and his co-hosts reacted in disbelief, Eisenberg said, “I really am [donating].”

“I don’t know why. I got bitten by the blood donation bug,” he said, adding that he was “so excited” to make the nondirected (a.k.a. “altruistic”) donation, wherein a living donor is not related to or known by the recipient.

According to the National Kidney Registry, approximately 90,000 people in the U.S. are currently in need of a kidney transplant, while roughly 6,000 people donate kidneys each year. Less than 5% of those already slim donations are nondirected.

Eisenberg said he suspected that if people knew how safe the process was, those numbers would go up.

“It’s essentially risk-free and so needed,” Eisenberg said in a separate interview with Today.com. “I think people will realize that it’s a no-brainer, if you have the time and the inclination.”

“The Social Network” alum added that prospective donors need not worry about forking over a kidney and later facing a situation wherein a family member urgently needs one.

“The way it works now is you can put a list of whoever you would like to be the first [relative] to be at the top of the list,” he said, referring to the National Kidney Registry’s family voucher program. The program launched in 2019, preceded by an earlier “standard” iteration that required the voucher donor to name a voucher holder who had some form of kidney impairment. (The standard voucher option is still available to donors as well.)

“Not only does this remove an important disincentive to living kidney donation, but it is the right thing to do for the generous people who are donating a kidney to a stranger. Donors can now donate a kidney and still provide security for their loved ones should they need a kidney transplant in the future,” Dr. Jeff Veale, who helped pioneer the voucher system, said in a statement at the time of the program update.

Recovery is also a non-issue for most kidney donors, who on average return to daily activities within a few weeks of the surgery, per the Mayo Clinic.

“Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” hits theaters Nov. 14, nearly a decade after the previous installment in the franchise premiered. Eisenberg stars alongside returning cast members Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson and Dave Franco and newcomers Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa, Ariana Greenblatt and Rosamund Pike.

“Harper & Hal,” premiering Sunday on the cinema-centric streamer Mubi, is a gorgeous, generous limited series that has nothing to show you other than people, how they are and how they do or do not get along. Its elements are not unfamiliar, because they’re drawn from life, rather than from the movies — or just from the movies, as they’re subjects to which the movies have often turned.

But, like this year’s “Adolescence,” which it (differently) resembles in its mix of naturalism and artifice, the series, written and directed by and starring 28-year-old Cooper Raiff — writer-director-star of the indie features “Shithouse” and “Cha Cha Real Smooth” — demonstrates that something fresh can still be done in an oversaturated medium.

While the story spreads out over eight episodes, the cast is compact. Harper (Lili Reinhart) is the daughter of Mark Ruffalo’s character, credited only as “Dad”; Hal (Raiff) is her younger brother. Alyah Chanelle Scott plays Jesse, Harper’s longtime girlfriend; Havana Rose Liu is Abby, Hal’s shorter-time girlfriend; Kate (Betty Gilpin) is Dad’s girlfriend. The company is completed by Audrey (Addison Timlin), divorced with two small children, who shares an office with Harper, and Hal’s roommate, Kalen (Christopher Meyer).

In scenes set in the past, Reinhart and Raiff play their younger selves, a la Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle’s “Pen15,” with less overt comedy, though Raiff’s performance as very young Hal, whom no one in the series describes as hyperactive (though I will — not a doctor) is often funny. It’s not a gimmick but a device — much as the one-shot production of “Adolescence” was not performative cleverness, but the right fit for the material — both in the sense of the child being the parent of the adult, and because it allows for a different, deeper sort of performance than one is liable to get from a first or a third grader. (As spookily good as small child actors can be.) Significantly, it unifies the characters across time.

A confluence of events triggers the drama. The house Hal and Harper grew up in — and which Dad, who spends much of the series seriously depressed especially, can’t let go — is being sold. (Harper and Hal are in L.A.; the house, and Dad and Kate, are elsewhere.) Kate is pregnant; there’s a chance the baby might have Down syndrome, which leads Dad to reflect that with “a disabled kid … you gotta meet them where they are every day” and that he might have been a more present parent to his older children. Jesse has a job offer in Texas and wants Harper to come with her. Hal, a college senior who isn’t pointed anywhere in particular, though he likes to draw, breaks up with Abby after learning — when she tells him she’d like them to become “exclusive” — that up until then they hadn’t been. And Harper has become attracted to Audrey.

The loss of their mother and their father’s unresolved grief has made Hal and Harper unusually close; she’s a caretaker to her brother, who, even though he’s grown, sometimes wants to crawl in bed next to her; at the same time, Harper’s internalized the feeling that she’s holding everything together, which makes it hard to move on. They’re on an island together.

“Are we friends?” young Hal asks Harper.

“We’re brother and sister,” she replies.

“Not friends.”

“I guess we can be friends, too.”

There is an almost complete absence of expository dialogue. The characters are not afflicted with speechifying; silences allow the viewer to enter into the spaces between them, and to let their experience echo with one’s own. (If you’ve lived long enough to be reading television reviews, you’ve felt some or all of these things.) There’s no wall of declaration erected between the viewer and the viewed, but the actors, Reinhart and Gilpin especially, can destroy you with a look. (Although some writers and actors love them, there’s nothing that feels less true to life than a long monologue.)

Though the story feels organic, it’s also highly structured, stretching the length of Kate’s pregnancy, shot through with resonances and reflections — “I Will Survive,” sung by adult Harper at karaoke and in a flashback as part of a children’s chorus, or a precocious young Harper reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” “It’s about this family where everyone’s super lonely,” she tells Hal, shining a light back on her own, “but then it gets even worse because they withdraw and they became selfish and so miserable. But maybe it gets better.” (We see her often with a book.) There’s a slow-fast rhythm to the cutting; short scenes alternate with long; memories explode in montage. Just as Raiff doesn’t bother overmuch with explanations, he eliminates transitions. We’re here, then we’re there. You won’t get lost.

Once or twice, I fretted Raiff might be steering his ship to some cliched dark outcome, but I needn’t have worried.

Bomb the United Nations headquarters. Or maybe gas it. Fox News host Jesse Watters had plenty of ideas about how to punish the U.N. after President Trump’s humiliating visit to the organization’s New York headquarters Tuesday.

Trump’s arrival at the General Assembly meeting with First Lady Melania Trump began with the pair stranded at the bottom of an escalator that stopped just as the couple stepped on. The hijinks continued when he stepped behind the lectern to speak and the teleprompter was not working. Trump decided to wing it, leaning into his impromptu-diatribe skills with threats, boasts, mentions of assorted global thingamabobs and something about ending seven wars.

The “from the heart” address did not appear to impress the gathering of world leaders, especially the part where he said, “Your countries are going to hell.” Here’s where I imagine Norway leaning over and whispering to Oman, “At least our escalators work.”

But one man’s technical glitch is another man’s conspiracy theory, as Watters showed Tuesday on Fox News’ talk show “The Five.” He asserted that Trump’s troubles were the result of sabotage and that those malfunctions were in fact “an insurrection.”

“What we need to do is either leave the U.N. or we need to bomb it,” Watters joked. Co-hosts Dana Perino and Greg Gutfeld groan-laughed, if there is such a thing.

Watters then said, “[The U.N. headquarters] is in New York, though, right? Could be some fallout there. Maybe gas it?”

“Let’s not do that,” Perino said.

Watters acquiesced, then said, “OK, but we need to destroy it. Maybe can we demolish the building? Have everybody leave and then we’ll demolish the building.”

He continued: “This is absolutely unacceptable, and I hope they get to the bottom of it, and I hope they really injure, emotionally, the people that did it.”

The comments did not come from a liberal late-night host, which probably explains why there were no Mafioso-style threats from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr calling for Fox and Watters to tone it down — or else.

Like Watters, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt smelled escalator sabotage and said as much in an X post: “If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately.” She shared a screenshot of a Sunday article from the Times of London with reporting that said U.N. staff members had “joked that they may turn off the escalators” and “tell him they ran out of money so he has to walk up the stairs.”

Then guess what everyone is now posting about? That would be former VP hopeful and current Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s response to Leavitt’s post: “Not only do they need to be fired, they need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. It’s a miracle the President ever made it up the stairs.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who on X has been mocking Trump’s social media approach for months, zeroed in on the 79-year-old president’s careful climb up the stationary set of stairs Tuesday. “DOZY DON WAS DEFEATED BY THE ESCALATOR, POOR GUY! THE ENTIRE WORLD IS LAUGHING AT THE LOW IQ ‘PRESIDENT.’ NEXT STOP: THE BEST ROOM AT MEMORY MEADOWS RETIREMENT RESORT. TYLENOL INCLUDED. ENJOY YOUR STAY, DON! — GCN.”

Leavitt said the U.S. Secret Service is among the agencies deployed to investigate the escalator whodunit.

But the escalator perpetrator may be closer to home than Trump’s inner circle and his supporters in the media imagined. According to a spokesperson for U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, Trump’s videographer may have been responsible for jamming the escalator when he ran ahead of the president, potentially triggering a safety mechanism.

As for the teleprompter, the Associated Press reported that the White House was responsible for operating the teleprompter for the president. And a person with knowledge of the situation revealed to the Daily Beast that delegations are allowed to bring their own laptops and teleprompter operators, and the U.N. was not running it for Trump’s speech. The source said that the White House had its own laptop and U.N. technicians were not in the booth for the president’s address. A separate anonymous source also told ABC News that the teleprompter was being operated by someone from the White House, not a member of the U.N. staff.

Watters’ “blow up the U.N.” joke was not funny, especially in our current climate of deadly attacks on political figures by troubled men with guns. But his dangerous strain of humor was soon overshadowed by what another TV personality had to say that evening.

In Jimmy Kimmel’s first opening monologue since his show was pulled last week by ABC, he asked that Americans fight censorship, not each other. The host’s long-running show was indefinitely pulled by the network a week ago after conservative outcry over his remark that “the MAGA gang [was] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

On Tuesday, Kimmel teared up when he spoke of Kirk’s death and said he never meant to make light of a young man’s killing. The host also reiterated that liking him or his show was not the point. “This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this,” he said, emphasizing the value of free speech.

The ousting of Kimmel, a longtime critic and target of the president, was the most high-profile test yet of protecting the 1st Amendment right to free speech in the face of an administration that has weaponized the FCC against its detractors. Upon his return Tuesday, the host was greeted with a standing ovation by his studio audience. Kimmel’s monologue then amassed 11 million YouTube views in its first 12 hours online and is now poised to set a record for being the host’s most-watched opening monologue ever.

Kimmel’s comeback was yet another unfortunate turn for Trump on the Worst Tuesday Ever, and it can’t be explained away as the act of a teleprompter terrorist. But the MAGA-verse is doing its best to make the case, or when it comes to Watters, joking about blowing up places that offend their leader, proving there’s more broken in America than just a U.N. escalator.