Throughout my semi-adult life I’ve always admired legendary New York City columnist and novelist Jimmy Breslin. His writing, I mean. That bluntly phrased, straight-from-the-shoulder street prose that he never fancied up. A regular guy who wrote for regular guys. I was from Fairfield County, Connecticut and the son of an advertising copywriter, but I got it. The stuff Breslin wrote was always real-deal. He never tip-toed or pussied around. Well, he probably did from time to time but his legend said otherwise.

Breslin’s rep was that of a guy who could be brusque at times but was always fair and honest and respectful of the people he covered, who were usually (okay, almost always) working-class New Yorkers who never led lives of leisure, and who could never be accused of being well-educated, much less refined. And now their hinterland counterparts have given us Donald Trump. Thanks, assholes! I didn’t mean to say that — it just slipped out.

Breslin also wrote about mob guys, most famously in his 1969 book “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” a roman a clef about Joey Gallo which was made into a 1971 film. In 1970 Breslin got clobbered by Jimmy Burke, the real-life model for Robert De Niro‘s Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas. Burke was pissed about something Breslin had written, some perceived slight or whatever.

Born in ’28 or thereabouts and 88 years old when he died earlier today, Breslin was best known for his N.Y. Daily News and Newsday columns. He was New York City personified in the same way that Sidney Lumet‘s New York films delivered that bad-coffee-and-shitty-pizza attitude and aroma, that thing that they make in the five boroughs and nowhere else. I first heard of Breslin in 1969 when he ran for New York City Council president along with mayoral candidate Norman Mailer (“No more bullshit”), their main platform being that New York City could and should secede from New York State and become the 51st State in the union.

Hey, Breslin…were you down with Hollywood Elsewhere’s idea of cutting the bumblefucks loose and forcing them to form their own separate country? What about green reeducation camps? You know in your heart that the country would be better off without them. Hell, you know that in your head.

I haven’t time to write anything now, but hats off to the father of rock ‘n’ roll, a guy who had it all and knew it all in the mid to late ’50s — a masterful singer-songwriter who played guitar like a ringin’ a bell, a guy who held mountains in the palms of his hands and owned it until…what, ’60 or ’61 or thereabouts? Okay, “Nadine” and “No Particular Place To Go” followed, but for the most part he cruised the nostalgia circuit from around that time on. He was the great Chuck Berry, after all — all he had to was show up, grin and perform “Maybeline”, “Sweet Little Sixteen”, “Roll Over, Beethoven” and “My Ding-a-Ling.” Play on, play on. Respect & condolences.

Speaking as a fan of Niki Caro’s Whale Rider and McFarland, U.S.A., I’m wondering why there’s zero buzz on The Zookeeper’s Wife (Focus Features, 3.31). I’m hearing nothing, feeling nothing — not even after the 3.8 premiere in Warsaw or a 3.12 Cinequest Film Festival showing. I’ll be attending the 3.27 premiere at the Arclight. Shot in Prague in late ’15 and based on the book by Diane Workman, pic costars Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Daniel Bruhl and an assortment of exotic animals. Based on a true story about the hiding of Jews from Nazis by Warsaw zookeepers Jan and Antonina Żabinski.

Richard Linklater‘s Last Flag Flying, a kind of long-throw, post-9/11 sequel to Hal Ashby‘s The Last Detail (’73), is being research-screened in Pasadena on Wednesday evening. If it’s good enough to test-screen, why not take a whirl on a Cannes Film Festival showing? This is precisely the sort of little film that could actually benefit from a successful Cote d’Azur showing. Based on Daryl Poniscsan’s 2005 novel, it focuses on a reunion between Badass Buddusky, Mulhall (a.k.a. “Mule”) and Larry Meadows, who were played in Ashby’s film by Jack Nicholson, Otis Young (who died in ’01) and Randy Quaid. Flying stars Bryan Cranston (Buddusky), Laurence Fishburne (Mule) and Steve Carell (a much shorter Meadows…maybe he shrank in the Portsmouth brig?).

(l. to r.) Last Flag Flying‘s Laurence Fishburne, Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell.

(l. to r.) Randy Quaid, Jack Nicholson, Otis Young in Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail.

A soldier shot and killed at Orly Airport? Okay, that’s it — cancel all flights! Bring the entire Orly travelling community to a screeching halt while we determine if this is part of a vast conspiracy, which of course it isn’t. Obviously. Bad guys have to be stopped, of course, but law enforcement’s highest priority when this stuff happens is to shut airports down. Update: Yes, Orly is now back in business but how many tens of thousands were affected? All because of one Muslim asshole (“I am here to die for Allah!”) who was on the terrorist watch list. Guys like this are always lone wolves.

“President Crazypants”, et. al. Jake Tapper (“I refuse to buy into that paradigm…there’s no bias when it comes to facts, and no bias when it comes to decency”). Barney Frank vs. Andrew Sullivan (“Boys!”), et. al. Friends, sane guys…Friday night comfort, an hour’s respite. Agreed — Gavin Newsom.

Jeff to Alejandro: “Hope you and your family are well & well-travelled. When, pray, will your Mexican immigrant virtual reality film (yours and Chivo‘s, I mean) be viewable by guys like myself? How will the viewings work? To view the Real McCoy I’ll have to strap on a VR unit, of course, but where and how?

“No offense, of course, but I don’t particularly want to to buy a VR viewer just to watch your short. Will there be a HD or better yet a 4K version that I can stream down the road on my Sony 4K?

“Secondly, why can’t I stream The Revenant in 4K off Amazon? You can buy a 4K Revenant Bluray, but I don’t yet own a 4K Bluray player. Why can’t I just stream a 4K version? Have you watched Lawrence of Arabia via Amazon 4K streaming yet? It’s probably only 2K or a bit more due to compression and upconverting, but it’s quite brilliant.”

Terrence Malick‘s Song to Song opens today. I’ve been reading a lot of reviews in recent days, mainly in search of the best put-downs. The following Pete Hammond line is my favorite thus far: “Malick, in a rare interview, told a SXSW audience that he actually had about eight hours of footage and that Song To Song could have been a miniseries. God help us.” Again, my 3.11 review.

Old-school Hollywood acting and writing used to operate on this level all the time, calling bullshit on itself at every turn. Kirk Douglas getting angrier and angrier, then ending his tirade at Lana Turner with “get out, get out…GET OUT!” Atrocious but delicious. With the influence of Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift peaking in ’52, this proscenium-arch approach to fake-sounding “dialogue” and soap-opera behavior was in its death throes, and yet in the context of a schmaltzy Hollywood melodrama like The Bad and the Beautiful it almost works. Okay, it works. Except there’s no believing it.

My loathing for the various imaginings of Damon Lindelof (Cowboys and Aliens, Prometheus, Tomorrowland, this godforsaken HBO series) won’t go away — it’s growing, spreading, metastasizing. If I could make Lindelof disappear from the planet by clapping three times, I would clap three times.

I’m not sure about doc footage mixed with renactments, but you tell me. The Playboy brand stopped being a hip thing…when, in 1966 or ’67? And yet Hugh Hefner‘s legend is safe and sound. He was a revolutionary in his time — a hugely successful publisher, entrepeneur and cultural game-changer. A pajama-wearing, pipe-smoking smoothie, a man who was probably blown 10,000 times, the king of the nascent sexual revolution of the ’50s and early ’60s. To have been an honored celebrity guest in Hefner’s Chicago mansion during the Eisenhower, Kennedy or early Johnson administrations! 20-something years ago I sat down with Hef at the L.A. mansion for a magazine piece about celebrity poker games. No babes, no boobs…just an interview on his living-room couch. Imagine if Hef was renowned as a master of cunnilingus in the same way Junior Soprano enjoyed that rep among his criminal cronies and sometime girlfriends. A little more than a decade ago I read a screenplay for a musical based on Hef’s life. I thought it was good but not quite there.