Imagine the sense of sanity and stability if this country could manage to elect its own version of Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern, the 40th Prime Minister of New Zealand and leader of the Labour Party since 2017.

“We’re just having a bit of an earthquake here”: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern barely skipped a beat when a quake struck during a live TV interview. https://t.co/tKLFX9Kn5a pic.twitter.com/n97xbTGaRu

— ABC News (@ABC) May 25, 2020

Somewhere in the middle of Die Hard (’88) John McLane (Bruce Willis) says he’s “kinda partial” to Roy Rogers as a walkie-talkie handle. That’s because McLane was a boomer who’d watched The Roy Rogers Show (’51 to ’57) as a toddler. No GenXer, Millennial or Zoomer would have a clue who Rogers was if it wasn’t for that one line in Die Hard. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

This morning I found a Rogers-related sentiment on Facebook, probably written by some crusty codger: “We [boomers] were born at the right time. We were able to grow up with these great people even if we never met them. In their own way they taught us about patriotism and honor. We learned that lying and cheating were bad, and that sex wasn’t as important as love. We learned how to suffer through disappointment and failure and work through it. Our lives were drug-free. So it’s good-bye to Roy and Dale, Gene and Hoppy (Hopalong Cassidy), the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

“Farewell to Sky King (and Penny) and Superman and Sgt. Joe Friday. Thanks to Capt. Kangaroo, Mr. Rogers and Capt. Noah and all those people whose lives touched ours, and made them better. Happy Trails. It was a great ride through childhood.”

The words “drug-free” brought me up short. What kind of boomer who lived any kind of life went through his or her teens and 20s without at least a touch of pot or hashish or, if they were truly adventurous of spirit, without dabbling in psychedelia?

HE reply: Boomer kids who marinated in the lore of the above-named TV heroes were also raised under the suffocating influence…I’m sure you guys remember this…of a tidy, suburban, rule-dominated culture that Robert Redford, an unhappy teenager in the mid ‘50s, once described as “the bland leading the bland.” (Not an original quote but we’ll let that go.)

This is why “the ‘60s” happened…right? The steam pressure had gathered and gathered, and it finally just blew the doors open, starting sometime in ‘64 (or perhaps more precisely on 11.22.63) and certainly by ‘65 and especially with the release of “Rubber Soul.”

In ‘71 a Don McLean song tried to spell it all out. Billy Joel took a more mundane stab at the same dynamic in “We Didn’t Start The Fire.”

Captain Kangaroo, the Lone Ranger, Ward Cleaver, Sgt. Joe Friday and other totemic figures of that era were about decency and kindliness and a certain kind of conservative, modestly measured approach to life — I get that. And what about the influence of Elvis, James Dean, Little Richard, Marlon Brando and Jerry Lee Lewis?

The plain hard truth (sorry to be the bearer) is that Sky King, Superman, Ozzie Nelson and others in that hallowed realm (and I’m trying to put this gently) were basically kind-hearted prison guards. And here you are saying “ohh, those kindly and morally upstanding prison guards…they raised us with the right kind of values!”

And I guess they did to some extent, but boomers (who became the “We generation” only to turn into the “Me generation” and then Reagan-era yuppies and then the most destructively selfish generation ever in terms of totally ruining the economy for Millennials and Zoomers) were never about “sex isn’t as important as love.” If I recall correctly, the anthem of the late ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s was “sex is just as important as love, and above all women need to learn to own their own orgasms.”

I’m sorry but as soon as I read the above I felt I needed to open the French windows and air the place out…no offense and have a happy Memorial Day.

Seven or eight years ago I watched the 2012 Jaws Bluray, which of course represented an HD upgrade. It was entirely pleasing — robust color, ultra-detailed, excellent sound.

How much better can the 4K be? If you’re watching it on a 65-inch 4K HDR screen, which is what I own, the difference between the 1080p Bluray and 4K HDR is not really that huge. The colors will probably be stronger, but that’s all.

For the first time in 17 or 18 years, I got rip-roaring stoned last night. By way of a single cannabis gummy bear, manufactured by CAMINO. It was a steady. bump-free high, but my God, the strength of it! It was like I was suddenly atop a galloping racehorse, but the horse knew the realm and was fairly cool about it. And it was like I’d been shot…shot with a diamond bullet, right through my forehead. (Kidding.) On the other hand I was scared that it might be too much for my psyche to handle (I’m basically a candy-ass in this realm), and this was why I decided to drop a Tapentadol to mellow things down.

All I know is that my senses and my free-associating mind and especially my imagination became more and more alive and attuned, and yet I was concurrently sensing how frail and delicate everyone is, myself included. I was doing everything I could to speak as softly and gently as possible. Music, colors, aromas, our Siamese cat…everything suddenly had an extra quality. If you’ve ever galloped on a horse, you know that it’s all about becoming one with the charging steed and not fretting about falling off…you have to be fearless and go with it. Last night I was half-fearless and half “uh-oh”, at least until the Tapentadol kicked in.

I’m basically saying that the THC in my system felt, from my vantage point at least, very, VERY strong for a while. I was half amazed that I’d allowed myself to get this ripped (which was actually Tatyana’s fault — she popped one of the candies into my mouth and I meekly went along with it), and half intrigued that this kind of cannabis high was a lot smoother and stronger than the pot I used to suck down in the ‘70s. It was quite the ride — lemme tell ya.

From “Don’t Monkey Around,” posted on 11.29.15: I stopped getting high as a rule in the mid ’70s, partly because I’d begun to hate the sense of weird isolation I was feeling when fully ripped. Pot is not a social drug — it’s about having giggly fits about tickly notions that are mostly in your head alone. And then it’s about spiralling down through the looking glass and becoming a flying monkey. And then about succumbing to the munchies.

I stopped getting high decades ago because pot opened the door to “the fear” — that mounting panic anxiety state that led to wild inconsolate hell and nerve-jangled insanity from which there could be no return. During a visit to Cinevegas in ’02 or ’03 I stupidly ate a super-potent pot brownie and got so ripped I had to down an entire fifth of Jack Daniels to keep the anxiety at bay.

But I really loved my early experiences of getting seriously baked, and particularly that odd time-loss thing that would happen every so often. I would be riding in the backseat of a friend’s car and just leave the planet for places unknown, and then I would suddenly awake and be somewhere new…how did I get here? I could have been space-tripping for five minutes or five seconds — I couldn’t tell but I had left the realm. I’ll never forget that “whoa, what just happened?” feeling.

The scourge of Batman. The curse of the cowl. Rodrigo meant to type “spiritually.”

In the summer of ’64 suburban New Jersey was hit by hundreds of millions of “periodic” cicadas. They were absolutely everywhere. I’ll never forget the sound of “singing” male cicadas, a kind of courtship whine that they create by “vibrating membranes on their abdomen.” And I’ll never forget the crunching sound when you walked upon them on hiking trails and along neighborhood sidewalks.

Nor will I ever forget a kind of makeshift cicada torture chamber built by my younger brother Tony and three of his friends. They invented a cicada guillotine with a small stone and a Gillette razor blade, and a kind of body-crushing contraption. They also invented a cicada electric chair with an electric transformer that had been used for an electric train set. They would insert positive and negative copper wires into the cicada’s body and turn on the juice. The current would make the cicada’s wings flap a thousand times a second.

I realize that children who pull the wings off flies are commonly regarded as junior-grade sociopaths, but this was different. We were living through an Egyptian plague. Those awful cicadas were a pestilence, worse than swamp mosquitoes.

George Harrison and Paul Simon, acoustic. A Saturday Night Live appearance. The lens covered in vaseline. Guessing from Simon’s hair style, this happened sometime around ’77 or ’78.

Michael Winterbottom‘s The Trip to Greece is the fourth luxuriously quirky travel doc costarring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon…exotic climes, duelling impressions, expensive gourmet dishes, cryptic insult humor.

I loved the first installment (2010’s The Trip, mainly because of their great duelling Michael Caine impressions), enjoyed the second (The Trip To Italy) and didn’t see the third (The Trip to Spain). But I adore Greece, which I saw last night. The island scenery, to-die-for food, biting guy humor, diseased laughter, pine needles and a slight sense of gnawing reality.

Maybe the pandemic helped, but cruising through sunny, colorful Greece (which I’ve never visited) did wonders for my spirit, especially in glorious HD.

God, I miss roaming around Europe so badly. Sometimes it hurts to think about it, and other times not. But generally my heart aches.

One, Greece made me laugh out loud four or five times, and that’s highly unusual for an LQTM type.

Two, their impressions of Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier doing the “is it safe?” scene from Marathon Man melted me down like cheese, particularly Brydon’s imitation of a dentist drill.

Three, I’m not sure what to trust or distrust but interesting stuff happens in this one — Coogan gets laid, Brydon feels a touch of trepidation about his wife, Coogan’s dad dies, Brydon’s wife joins him at the end, etc.

And four, Brydon (who stands all of 5’7″) has gotten his gaping bald spot repaired (did he visit my Prague micro-plug guy?). I can’t tell you how gratifying it was not to contemplate that empty patch.

The trip follows the route of Homer’s Odyssey. It starts in Troy (which is in Turkey) and moves on to Kavala, Lesbos, Pelion, Athens, Hydra, Mani and Ithica.

Brydon mentions at the end of one meal that the tab is 300 euros. Tatyana, having been to Greece and Cyprus, says you can eat magnificent meals in that region for much, much less.

Quibble: Coogan, 54, is now silver-haired for the most part. Brydon, I have to say, uses a little too much kindness when he says that Coogan is aging well. He’s aging okay, but his hair is way too short — he needs to grow it out, Byron-style. (Or did when they were shooting last year.)

The Trip to Greece is such an upper I’m planning to watch it again tonight. How’s that for an endorsement? I’m also thinking of re-watching The Trip to Italy.

Brydon: “What would you say is the thing you’re the most proud of?” Coogan: “My seven BAFTAs.” Brydon: “For me, it would be my children.” Coogan: “Yeah, well, that’s ’cause you haven’t got any BAFTAs.” Brydon: “Though you have got children, which is interesting.”

I’d like to be able to watch the whole Trip to Greece series, which used to be purchasable on DVD. The series ran 168 minutes; last night’s feature stopped at 103.

I’m sorry to report that Gregor Jordan‘s Dirt Music (Samuel Goldwyn, sometime in July) got roughed up last September by Toronto Film Festival critics. And yet Tim Winton’s 2002 source novel, an Australian road romance between a free-spirited woman named Georgie Jutland and a poacher named Luther Fox, is widely respected and won a slew of literary prizes.

Garrett Hedlund and Kelly Macdonald play Luther and Georgie. At the very least Sam Chiplin‘s cinematography seems appealing. We all understand that some books simply don’t translate to the screen, and sometimes they’re not adapted in quite the right way.

Either way you can’t help but wonder what might have happened if the original Dirt Music team — director Philip Noyce, costars Heath Ledger and Rachel Weisz, and screenwriters Justin Monjo and John Collee — had made their version a decade or so ago.

Phillip Noyce (l.) discussing Dirt Music with Tim Winton (center) and Justin Monjo. Sydney, June 2004. 

Noyce had been working on a Dirt Music flick even before Winton’s novel became an Australian best-seller in ’02. He had the option to make a film version for roughly 11 years, from before publication until sometime in 2012. Noyce had wanted Rachel Weisz to play Georgie — she wound up being attached to the project for several years. In February ’07, with the project very much alive and ready to roll, Noyce ran into his leading man.

“One morning, walking with my coffee in Sydney, a Range Rover pulled up at a pedestrian crossing,” Noyce recalls. “Down came the window, and there was Heath Ledger. We agreed on the spot to shoot the film in Western Australia eight months later with Rachel.”

But the usual delays occured, and then Ledger died of an accidental overdose on 1.22.08. He was 28 years old.

“And I could never find the same spark for making the film with anyone else,” Noyce laments. “Not with Colin Farrell nor with Russell Crowe. No one could be the Luther Fox that Health showed me that morning in Sydney.”

In November 2011 Noyce asked Chris Hemsworth to play Luther for a shoot that would have begun in March 2013. That didn’t pan out either. Noyce’s option expired.

Along came Gregor Jordan. Jack Thorne (The Eddy) was engaged to write a new script. In August 2018 Hedlund and Macdonald were announced as the costars. Filming eventually happened in Kimberley, Western Australia, as well as Perth and Esperance.

Nervous Nellie blogger addressing the possibility of an all-streaming Oscar season (in comment thread): “When Damien Chazelle’s The Eddy hit, no one cared. It didn’t even cause a minor ripple. That seemed odd to me. We know Netflix built their house out of bricks and with Lisa Taback pushing the films they might reign supreme. But what will the competition be, and what will people care about, and why would anyone bother caring? My prediction is that it will go either way — either an uplifting musical like West Side Story might revive lethargy or something dark, political and angry might. I’m just wondering how bad it’s going to get, and how I’m going to make a living this year.”

Deadline‘s Pete Hammond: “I can only use the Emmy season so far as an example and it seems to be ‘business as usual’ this year. Print pubs are likely to be hit hardest as Netflix has announced it is going digital in terms of ads. I don’t get involved on the sales end, but if the studios can get content released, I am sure the usual hullabaloo will follow in all its forms. Content, as always is KING. That is the one potential factor separating Emmy season from Oscar this year. But assuming the movies are there (they really need just ten decent Oscar pics), the industry will find a way.”