Gus Van Sant‘s masterful Drugstore Cowboy opened 30 and 1/2 years ago. I just bought a rental as it’s been a while. Matt Dillon‘s “Bob Hughes” will always be his finest role.
He was 24 or 25 during filming, and his career wasn’t exactly surging at the time.
Dillon’s debut performance in Jonathan Kaplan‘s Over The Edge (’79), performed when he was 14 or so, put him into orbit . Through the ’80s he was a solid marquee attraction, but the vitality had been ebbing. And then along came Drugstore Cowboy in the fall of ’89, and Dillon was right back on top.
Now he’s 56, and boy, does time fly.
My second favorite Drugstore Cowboy character? James Remar‘s “Gentry”, a narcotics detective. Followed by Kelly Lynch‘s “Diane.” And William S. Burroughs‘ performance as himself…perfect.
For my money Spike Lee‘s 3 Brothers short, which debuted last week on CNN, is as emotionally effective as Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (Netflix, 6.12). After watching it two or three days ago I saw the below photo of Muhammud Ali and the quote that goes with it, and that got me also. What a magnificent figure of bravery Ali was…such a champion in all respects.
The tragic experience of Bill Nunn‘s “Radio Raheem”, who was choked and killed by the bulls in Lee’s Do The Right Thing (’89), was of course a forerunner of the murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd.
Raheem’s fate was based upon the real-life Michael Stewart, who died in the custody of NYC police in 1983 after being arrested for spray painting a subway wall.
Do The Right Thing is about a cultural conflict in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy, between two or three Italian pizzeria guys and their African American customers.
Raheem’s ghetto blaster is a trigger. In the view of Raheem and friends, assaulting passersby with ear-splitting music was a celebration of identity and culture, but to most New Yorkers back then (and I’m speaking as an ex-resident who lived in Manhattan fom ’78 to ’83) ghetto blasters were a scourge.
Is it racist to say that those obnoxious, suitcase-sized devices made life occasionally hellish for Manhattanites, and especially for Central Park visitors on warm weekends? Because it’s true. A friend once told me about a kid on a bike who was blasting sounds near an open pasture in southern Central Park, and somehow the kid lost his balance and the blaster fell and shattered and was silent. A few people leapt to their feet and started cheering.
Posted on 8.13.12: “It’s still Jaws. It’s still that mid-level, beach-read, good-enough-but-don’t-get-carried-away movie that made all kinds of money, blah blah. I watched about 40 minutes’ worth [of the 2012 Bluray] and found it fine. It’s clever and crafty and obviously engrossing. But it’s just okay. I can’t for the life of me understand why people hop and down about this thing and go ‘wow, great film!’
“At the very beginning the young blonde girl who’s about to get eaten is running along the beach with a drunk guy following, and rather than act like any normal or semi-normal human being on the planet earth, she takes her clothes off the Spielberg way. She yanks her sweatshirt off and drops it on a grassy sand dune to the right. Then she runs a bit more and pulls one of her sneakers off and throws it to the left. And then the other sneaker. And then her jeans. By the time she’s running into the water she’s scattered her clothes over a 100-foot stretch of beach.
“Nobody would do that. They just wouldn’t. In the real world even a drunk girl would drop her clothes in a rough pile of some kind, but not in Spielbergland. Spielberg always finds some way of pulling you out of a film with unnatural human behavior.”
A couple of days ago the below copy appeared within Abid Rahman’s 6.9 Hollywood Reporter story about HBO Max [temporarily] removing Gone With The Wind from the streaming service. The erroneous info was quickly deleted.
Mistakes happen, but this was a whopper. The first half of Gone With The Wind takes place before and during the Civil War, of course, and the second half in the war’s aftermath. And who ever heard of a plantation “in” Atlanta?
Because a 4K disc of a large-format film (Spartacus was shot in the VistaVision-like Technirama process) that’s been drawn from a 6K harvest promises to look extra rich and detailed, and because restoration guru Robert Harris, who oversaw the original 1991 restoration as well as the 2015 4K digital restoration (which again was harvested from the 6K scan), supervised the finessing of the 4K disc.
If the 4K Spartacus Bluray doesn’t deliver an unmistakable bump, there’s gonna be trouble. That’s all I’m saying. I won’t take well to being burned twice.
The exact 99th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre happened just under two weeks ago — 5.31 and 6.1. It’s nonetheless astounding that in the wake of the nationwide George Floyd marches, Donald Trump has slated a political rally in Tulsa, of all places, and of all dates on 6.19 or “Juneteenth“, an African American holiday that celebrates the end of slavery.
The symbolism couldn’t be plainer. Trump is more or less announcing the following: “To honor the 99th anniversary of the mob murder of dozens of black citizens in 1921 Tulsa, I will stage my first post-COVID shutdown rally in this very same city, thus ensuring that my racist bumblefuck supporters will attend in droves…you know what we’re saying and why we’re gathering in Tulsa…long live the greatness of redhat America!”
President Trump is holding his next hate rally on Juneteenth … in Tulsa, the site of the 1921 race massacre.
The worst single incident of racial violence in US history occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma. pic.twitter.com/76SoqDmIZx
The theme is the “complete collapse of institutional authority” along with a “major cultural crack-up” in media-journalist circles.
Herzog/Singal: “Bari Weiss did some tweets about how there is a generational divide at The New York Times that is, in her view, hampering the paper’s ability to publish quality commentary and journalism. In response, a sizable cohort of her colleagues LITERALLY devoured her (metaphorically, on Twitter). In their most frustrated episode yet, Katie and Jesse explain why Bari was fundamentally right. The fact that so many journalists think Bari is making this up is pretty insane given the rampant evidence for it.”
Insignificant Quibble: Herzog and Singal are so sharp and fleet-minded and ultra-knowledgeable that it’s almost difficult to listen to them. Especially because they speak in “vocal slur fry”, and I hate that shit as a rule. But they’re otherwise cool.
…for being Celeb Virtue Signallers. Especially Tennisballhead.
Is there any social ill that celebrities can’t fix, or at least point the way toward fixing?
Seriously: When I was young there were times when I tolerated or winked at racist words, jokes, stereotypes, etc. I’m very sorry for having looked the other way when this happened (and I’m talking maybe four or five times), but I will never allow that shit in my presence again.
Speaking as a daily columnist who is genuinely terrified of SJW wokester cancel-culture types, I take total responsibility for the content of Hollywood Elsewhere over the past 16 years, although I am greviously sorry and do humbly apologize for…oh, six or seven columns that I didn’t express or sculpt in quite the right way. And anything else that landed with a thud.
I’m imperfect. Sometimes it comes out wrong. And I hate using more words than necessary. but I’m mostly an X-factor, hard-working, cut-through-the-daily-bullshit samurai truth-teller, and I truly believe in decency and compassion for all. Except for cats who pee on my pillow.
