Over the last two nights I re-watched Wolfgang Petersen‘s In the Line of Fire (’93), which I hadn’t seen in over three decades.

Clint Eastwood was 62 during filming, and he looks like a fit-as-a-fiddle 54 or 55, at most. Such a good looking hombre, in such good shape (the old-guy exhaustion bits are just fake acting) and with such a great haircut. The camera loves him.

He’s playing a kind of Clint Hill figure named Frank Horrigan — a haunted Secret Service agent who was riding right behind JFK in Dallas on 11.22.63, and who can’t shake the likelihood that after the first shot he could’ve leapt on top of the Presidential limo and saved the day by taking Oswald’s head-shot bullet.

Did I just say that? Yes, I did. The brain-matter blowout shot didn’t come from the grassy knoll.

Frank, in any event, finally puts that Dallas nightmare to bed at the very end.

Horrigan is an old-school sexist who thinks of Renee Russo‘s Lilly Raines, a fellow Secret Service agent, as political “window dressing.” No film made today would even flirt with using a character like Frank, who even in the early ’90s was skirting the edge of uncoolness.

Lilly sees Frank for the dinosaur that he is, but she still finds him charming and even fuckable. (Not an incongruent notion, Russo being 38 at the time.) They don’t quite “do it” in the course of the film, but they’re together at the finale.

Bill Clinton had just been elected when ITLOF began filming in late ’92, and that was a long time ago, you bet. The technical aspects feel quite creaky and analogue-y. The computer screen fonts are positively prehistoric.

John Malkovich, 39 during filming, has enormous fun playing the bitter, unhinged, wackjob assassin, alternately known as Mitch Leary, Joseph McCrawley, James Carney and Booth. There’s a great bit in a third-act scene in which he’s getting dressed for a swanky black-tie party at L.A.’s Hotel Bonaventure. Petersen and dp John Bailey (who became AMPAS president) deliver an insert shot of Malkovich’s hairy pot belly, and he slaps it twice…pohp, pohp!

In The Line of Fire is a flush-looking, slightly above-average, big-studio action thriller…nothing more or less than that. A diverting, highly competent popcorn thing.

…in her video plea to her mom’s kidnappers[s]. By affectionately praising her mom’s character and kindness, Guthrie was appealing to the humanity of the kidnappers. Exactly like Diane Baker‘s Sen. Ruth Martin did in her video appeal to Buffalo Bill, her daughter’s kidnapper. I want credit, I mean, for having recognized the Lambs dialogue but allowing myself to get sidetracked by other stuff and eventually forgetting it. I want credit for this.

Diane Baker is still with us at age 87; her 88th birthday is on 2.25.26.

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Not even Donald Trump‘s Truth Social account, I reasoned, would post something as ugly and rancid as this. But it’s real.

Update: It was deleted around 1:30 pm.

“When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post more than a decade ago, journalists inside and outside the newsroom were cautiously optimistic. But those hopes were dashed on Wednesday, when the paper carried out widespread layoffs. The Post has jettisoned more than 300 journalists…a bloodbath. The Post also eliminated its sports section, one of the last bastions of great sportswriting.” — from “Bezos Guts The Washington Post,” posted on 2.6.26 by N.Y. Times.

“The Washington Post is dying not in darkness but by the light of noon, and by its own hand. Over the past few months, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has shed a large part of the paper’s workforce, asserted control over the management of its newsroom, spiked a presidential endorsement for the first time in the paper’s history, and driven out some of its best writers and editors. On Wednesday, Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion pages will exclude views that contradict his own libertarianism.” — The Atlantic‘s George Packer, 3.1.25

“The American way….pay as you go…everyone contributes”.

Ashleigh Banfield appears to be onto something in the matter of the recent Nancy Guthrie disappearance, and the thing she appears to be onto is the possible involvement of Rolo Tomassi….sorry, Tomasso Cioni, Nancy’s son-in-law and the husband of Annie Guthrie, the older, shorter, dark-haired sister of TODAY‘s Samantha Guthrie.

Annie and Tomasso also live in Tuscon, about four miles from Nancy’s home. They reportedly went to dinner with Nancy last Saturday night and then dropped her off, shortly before her home was invaded and she was abducted. Blood drops were found inside the home and just outside the front door.

Yesterday the Tuscon cops were all over Annie and Tomasso’s place, reportedly grilling them hard for a couple of hours. The cops also towed and impounded their vehicle and who knows what else? The walls are closing in, and if this bizarre caper is reminding anyone of anything, it is surely Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Fargo**.

Cioni has stated that he studies “lizards.” Also that he plays electric bass (as opposed to an old-fashioned stand-up bass?), makes homemade pasta and writes “when I get the chance.” HE lowdown: A person who claims to write “when they get a chance” is obviously not a writer — he’s a dabbler, a doodler, a dreamer, a mental wanderer. HE is guessing that Tomasso Cioni’s life is a leaking rubber raft upon heaving seas.

Best guess: Real-life Tuscon counterparts of the characters played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare in Fargo may be the culprits here. Guys who know or have at least conversed with Cioni. Perhaps Cioni worked out the kidnapping with them in advance or maybe they did it on their own after listening to Cioni talk about his mother-in-law, etc. But the two security cameras in Nancy’s home were smashed, which suggests they were told to do so by someone with inside knowledge.

** Full disclosure: I stole the Fargo analogy from Sasha Stone.

HE salutes Kristen Stewart for having recently bought the century-old Highland theatre (5604 No. Figueroa in Highland Park). The post-pandemic slump closed the place down in early 2024, but soon it’ll be a going concern…great!

Stewart’s plan, naturally, is to spruce the place up (it’s actually a triplex) and start showing movies there again. Decades-old movie theatres are obviously nutritious for L.A. culture and a nice boost to whatever particular neighborhood they’re located in. A good thing all around.

David Fincher filmed portions of The Adventures of Cliff Booth in the Highland Park area last summer, and Stewart’s theatre was part of the landscape…also cool.

But if I was still living in WeHo I would never drive all the way to effing Highland Park to do anything, much less see a film.

Highland Park is popular with Millennials and Zoomers because of cheaper rents, but driving there from, say, Sunset and Doheny is a grueling experience. Roughly 40 to 45 minutes but only if you stay well clear of rush hour…it’s a 12- to 14-mile drive through traffic-congested streets (Hollywood, Silver Lake) or, alternately, north on Laurel Canyon to the 134 east, and then halfway to Pasadena and then south on a major boulevard or down the Hollywood Freeway (101)…God!

I feel worn out just thinking about this. Driving to Highland Park dilutes your blood and drains the soul.

On top of which Stewart has said “we want to make it a family affair, something for the community…it’s won’t be just for pretentious Hollywood cinephiles.”

In other words she’s going to show a fair amount of popcorn crap.

We can at least be thankful that Lee Kline, Criterion’s very own in-house teal monster, had nothing to do with the forthcoming Ben-Hur 4K UHD Bluray. Thank God Almighty for that!