Top Gun: Maverick is a totally square, totally flash, right down the middle, Tom Cruise-worshipping, un-woke, stiff-saluting, high-velocity, bull’s-eye popcorn pleasure machine….yeah, yeah, YEAH!

My call sign is MUSTANG, according to a Top Gun: Maverick press link. I’m sorry but my preferred call sign is COYOTE.

A more fully considered HE review will post on Thursday morning.

Why even bother with Bluray players? Because I own an impressive Bluray library (over 350, the finest films, 30 + Criterions) and I can’t abandon this history. I can’t and I won’t. Hence the purchase of a new Bluray player, which I figured would be fairly inexpensive with just about everyone ignoring physical media these days.

Two days ago I ordered a Sony BDP–S6700 4K Bluray player for $149 — a mistake as it turned out. It’s a lightweight unit that’s only a step or two up from a plastic Crackerjacks figure.

It seemed okay at first, but yesterday morning I had a sudden interest in listening to a George Gershwin CD. I popped it into the new Bluray player, which is connected to the TV sound bar, and why not? I’d done the exact same thing a few times back in West Hollywood with no issues.

Alas, the Sony BDP-S6700 had an instant seizure seconds after attempting to play the CD. The entire system froze — no music, no ejecting the disc, no movie app streaming, a complete meltdown.

I finally persuaded the unit to cough up the CD. I then inserted a Scarface Bluray to see if basic functions were okay. It froze again and then refused to eject the disc. The player has been returned to Amazon with Tony Montana stuck inside.

Thanks, Sony, for manufacturing a device made of cheap-ass plastic, nickle-and-dime tech, a couple of rubber bands and a micro-sized hamster wheel.

They can obviously be inventive, exciting, emotional, symphonic, etc. But we’re still talking about various kinds of formulaic sausage.

…he’d absolutely win. Because he’s a sane, mature, obviously brilliant, forward-thinking adult. And he’s not doddering or shaking hands with invisible guys. But he can’t run in ’24 because (a) Biden intends to run again and (b) a significant percentage of POCs won’t support him because he’s gay (it is presumed that older African Americans harbor homophobic attitudes) and because ten years ago, as Mayor of South Bend, Buttigieg fired a black police chief, Darryl Boykins, which of course meant that he was racist.

YouTube commenter “tommytiger666”: “America, when you say you’re going to elect a President, this is the kind of person we assume you’re talking about. This is what a world leader should sound like.”

Posted on 6.9.15: “Nancy Wells, my dear mom, passed Sunday night. She gave me everything — life, love, love of the arts (she turned me on to Peter Tchaikovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, John Updike, Frank Sinatra, George Gershwin…the list is infinite) and particularly love of theatre.

“She was the beating heart and balm of our family — 90% of the joy and spunk and laughter came from her, and she basically saved me and my brother and sister from my father’s alcoholic moodiness when we were young. (Not to diminish my dad’s influence too much — he gave me the writerly urge along with the barbed attitude, such as it is.) But I would have been dead without my mom’s emotional radiance and buoyancy.

“My mom loved show business, plays, films, music. She worked for NBC and BBC in the old days, acted in several plays in New Jersey (including Somserset Vaughn‘s The Constant Wife) and directed two or three plays at the Wilton Playshop. She was partnered in her own real-estate business in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

“She had been gradually slipping away for a couple of years (during my last visit in early May she didn’t even open her eyes). Now, at last, her peace is absolute.”

HE has always been about will and experience and egotism, about instincts and convictions and half-serious samurai values…the Nick Nolte as Ray Hicks kind, I mean. I once listened to a short speech by William S. Burroughs (delivered in Madison Square Garden) and I’ve never forgotten him saying that “some people are shits.” That goes double if not triple if you’re taking about the last four or five years…thanks, woke mafia!

HE, in short, feels like a never-ending series of “tells” (in the David Mamet sense of that term) and reviews and carvings and mood pockets, all dispensed from a moving train, and now and then (okay, semi-frequently) drawing the usual lashings and denigrations.

I’m not saying I’m incapable of being unfairly dismissive or blustery or asinine or too shoot-from-the-hip…I’ve occasionally gone there, and have been called out for said blunders (not to mention blinders) every damn time.

All that said and acknowledged, I was grateful yesterday to read the following, written by HE’s own Sasha Stone…yes, this is a humblebrag post. All I know is that it felt awfully nice to marinate in the warmth, exaggerated and emotionally biased as it may be, our being friends and all.

Originally posted on 8.19.15: “But Tony, with his impulsiveness and selfishness…he’s locked up in that fucking head of his.” — Junior Soprano (Dominic Chianese) in “The Knight in White Satin Armor,” the 25th Sopranos episode and twelfth of season #2, originally aired on 4.2.00.

When I first heard this line I laughed, and then I asked myself to what extent it applies to Scott Foundas or myself or George Clooney or Alejandro G. Inarritu or whomever.

I like to think of myself as a free man in Paris who’s just dropped a tab of mescaline, but the unfortunate truth is that I’m probably “locked up” as much as Tony Soprano or anyone else ever was. It doesn’t feel good to admit this, but it’s probably true.

I know that I’m theoretically open to the concept of an emotional and psychological jailbreak, and that I live for that possibility on a daily basis. I could name a lot of journalists in my circle who are totally locked up (or more precisely locked down) but what would that accomplish?

I know that the line struck me as hilarious when I first heard it, and I’m chuckling at it right now.

The sudden eruption of publicly-witnessed female sexuality in the mid ’50s…we get it. The damp, vulgar, pelvic-region kind. Which is why so many thousands of conservative-minded viewers of Elvis Presley‘s first-ever televised performance on The Milton Berle Show (4.3.56) wrote in to say how appalled and even horrified they were.

All-new clip from Baz Luhrmann’s #ElvisMovie, starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks. pic.twitter.com/DbREogMFCq

— Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) May 6, 2022