I’m wondering why Fernando Leon de Aranoa‘s Loving Pablo, the Javier Bardem-Penelope Cruz film, never opened stateside. Not even as a streaming title….nothing. Yes, it got lousy reviews — 33% Rotten Tomatoes, 44% Metacritic. And yes, many of us feel Pablo-ed out (Narcos, Medellin, Escobar: Paradise Lost). It’s playing in various European territories as we speak. Update: Loving Pablo is allegedly available on demand through Universal Pictures Home Entertainment (uphe.com). Except UPHE’s partners are not the widely known Amazon, Netflix, Vudu or ITunes. Instead you need to watch it via the following:

…and this was an upcoming release, I’d definitely pay to see it.

I carefully tied my mail-order foxtail onto the rear of the bike last Wednesday, or 6.27. Yesterday someone tore it right off. I was told this would happen, but I never figured it would happen so quickly. It lasted four days.

I trusted the action in John McTiernan‘s Die Hard (’88). I didn’t “believe” it, but it was disciplined and well-choreographed for the most part, and it mostly avoided the outrageous. Now it’s all outrage, all absurdity, all Coyote vs. Roadrunner. Cliffhanger moments in 21st Century action thrillers are always solved with a half-second to spare. The hero grabs the rope, shoots the guard dog, ducks out of danger or figures out the bomb-defusal code at the very last instant. Every damn time. Thrillers have been using this last-second-solve device for decades, of course, but nowadays it’s almost all on this level. 59 years ago the dangling Eva Marie Saint losing her footing at the very instant Cary Grant grabs her wrist (at the 57-second mark) was cool, but if 90% of the damn movie is about a woman losing her footing, the audience will eventually get irritated and then more irritated and then mad.

Jeremiah Zagar‘s We, The Animals (The Orchard, 8.10) is an imaginative, altogether excellent film about an unusual ’80s boyhood in upstate New York. Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn called it “this year’s Moonlight.” The analogy is not Moonlight, I feel, but magical realism, Beasts of the Southern Wild, flying above the trees, animated drawings, Malick-like impressionism a la The Tree of Life, family conflict, dreamscapes. The gay factor is incidental, almost negligible. It’s the levitation, the book of drawings, the careful editing, the apartness, the challenges faced by a ‘different’ artistic kid…the Malick of it all. Pic is based on Justin Torres’ 2011 autobiographical novel.

Quinnipiac poll, 7.2: By a 63% to 31% margin American voters agree with the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion — men 61% to 32%, women 65% to 30%. Republicans disagree with Roe v. Wade 58% to 36%, but “every other listed party, gender, education, age and racial group agrees.”

Guess what’s going to happen to Roe v. Wade when Trump’s unannounced, arch-conservative Supreme Court nominee is confirmed and sworn in?

On one hand a strong majority of American voters (65% to 24%) would like to see the U.S. Supreme Court be a check on President Trump. Even a slight majority of Republicans (48% to 37%) are in favor of this. And yet 46% say the Senate should consider Trump’s nominee before the elections — a move that will all but eliminate any chance of the Supremes checking Trump and will probably wind up killing Roe v. Wade. 48% of American voters believe that the U.S. Senate shouldn’t vote on Trump’s nominee until after the November elections.

Repeating: Two-thirds of American voters support Roe v. Wade while 48% want the Supreme Court to act as a check on Trump, but nearly half (46%) believe that the Senate should confirm Trump’s right-wing nominee before November, which will nullify the Court’s ability to check his policies and set the stage for an overturning of Roe v. Wade. Brilliant!

Last February the legendary columnist and author Cynthia Heimel died — here’s my obit. Six days ago Stephen Saban, Heimel’s nocturnal partner-in-crime and droll columnist for the Soho Weekly News and Details in the late ’70s and ’80s, died from pancreatic cancer. I don’t know what my deficiency is, but I only heard today.

Saban and Heimel were major Manhattan scenesters in that overlapping Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan era. They visited every hot Manhattan club, knew everyone, partied’ till the end. I knew and liked Stephen as far as it went; we were always trading notes in Manhattan screening rooms. He moved to Los Angeles sometime in the mid to late ’90s, but he wasn’t at all communicative when I reached out three or four years ago. I tried again after Heimel died…zip. Saban and Heimel were joined at the hip back in the day, but late in life they more or less dropped each other by mutual consent. People can be odd that way.

Details columnist Stephen Saban, Linda Evans in 1985.

Here’s a Saban tribute piece by Michael Musto, excerpted from his 1986 book “Downtown“:

“Stephen Saban, one of the founder/editors of Details and its nightlife columnist as well as a former club doorman, was actually the first to give the downtown scene credibility. (Some say he created the scene so he could write about it.) In 1985, as Details, the monthly New Testament of downtown, grew from a free mailout to a newsstand magazine that reaches over 40,000 readers (grossing in the neighborhood of a million dollars that year), Saban started to reap the rewards of his dedication to 14th Street and below. He became recognized as ‘the Boswell of the night‘ by New York magazine and ‘the Noel Coward of the ‘80s’ by Newsweek. Publicists started returning his calls, though he didn’t always return theirs, and people started recognizing the ‘nobodies’ he insisted on writing about as nobodies worth knowing.

“Saban goes out every night of the week, only rarely awarding himself a night off, which means going to only one or two parties instead of the usual three to five. He’s one of the few predictable facets of New York nightlife — you know that at every major event, no matter what else happens, you’ll find him there, skulking around and observing with a crisp understatement. Saban doesn’t need to make a spectacle of himself; the spectacle is all around him, and his job is to report it, drawing the line only when he feels the information might interfere with his readers’ future fun. Sometimes Saban seems like Marcello Mastroianni in 8 1/2: besieged by swooning and pleading people cooing his name as he calmly tries to figure his next creative move.