Dylan and I have decided to risk death by driving down to Rockport, a beach town to the northeast of Corpus Christi. I’ve never once seen the Gulf of Mexico from Texas soil although I once swam in it when my ex and I visited Belize in ’90.

Tomorrow night we’ll stay in Laredo, which I haven’t seen since visiting the set of Eddie Macon’s Run for a N.Y. Post Kirk Douglas interview, way back in ’82. We’ll head back to Austin early Monday morning.

“…like brute beasts.”

I believe that Murray Melvin‘s performance as Reverend Samuel Runt is almost entirely about brittle innuendo, and that his officiating words in the wedding ceremony scene are mildly hilarious. A constricted and self-loathing ascetic portrayed to satiric extremes.

Keep in mind that the marriage ceremony between Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) and Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson) happens in this clip around the 50-second mark, and that 110 seconds later he’s blowing smoke in her face. That’s not much of a honeymoon. It’s also one of the ugliest martial moments ever portrayed in a major motion picture.

As I pointed out 13 years ago, the smoke in the face moment kills Barry Lyndon‘s sense of muted joie de vivre (such as it is) and in fact signals the beginning of the “dead zone” section. It lasts for a good 40 to 50 minutes until the duel scene comes along and saves the film from itself.

I was all but unanimously slapped down after posting this opinion during the late Dubya era.

What kind of troglodyte would create a racism-deploring twitter poster using these ludicrous dayglo colors? (Alyssa Milano posted it, but I can’t believe she designed the art…I mean, good effing GOD.) The way to present this message, obviously, is to do it Woody Allen-style — white Windsor Light font against a black background.

At the same time, a certain distinction. Yes, it does seem vaguely racist to call COVID-19 a “Chinese virus”, as the coronavirus is obviously international at this stage. And yet there’s no denying that the virus is widely believed to have originated in a open-air wildlife market in Wuhan, and specifically from bats. That’s not racism — that’s almost certainly what happened.

Nor is it racist to acknowledge that the Ebola virus partly originated in Yambuku (Democratic Republic of the Congo), “a village near the Ebola River from which the disease takes its name.” Or to say that the Zika virus came “from the Ziika Forest of Uganda, where the virus was first isolated in 1947.” Or to say that the West Nile virus “was discovered in Uganda in 1937 and was first detected in North America in 1999.”

Nor is it an anti-white-people legend to state that Lyme disease “was diagnosed as a separate condition for the first time in 1975 in Old Lyme, Connecticut.”

WATCH: @Yamiche presses President Trump on the decision to downsize the White House national security staff, eliminating jobs addressing global pandemics.

The president calls it "a nasty question" and asserts that "I didn't do it." pic.twitter.com/ENFgvLGlfd

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 13, 2020

When I think of the sets and backdrops in Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women I think of (a) rural Massachusetts (woods, trails, fields), (b) various domestic interiors in that region, and (c) 1860s New York City. I realize there’s a scene on a beach, but why use a beach backdrop for the Bluray? It’s not Woman In The Dunes or Portrait Of A Lady On Fire. Imagine issuing a 50th anniversary 4K UHD Bluray of Lawrence of Arabia and going with, say, a closeup of Peter O’Toole against a backdrop of downtown Cairo.

Why is Betty Gilpin‘s Hunt character named Crystal? That’s a girly-girl name like Fawn, Tiffany or Serenity, and not a good fit for a tough, quietly seething, physically fearsome character who’s more or less cut from the Clint Eastwood cloth. I found her performance irritating because she’s playing an attitude more than a recognizable human being — an attitude fed by barely controlled anger and not much else.

Crystal is naturally infuriated that Hillary Swank and her wealthy liberal cronies have arranged to hunt a few unlucky deplorables for fun and sport…I get it, of course, who wouldn’t be? But she’s so enraged she can’t be real and basic about it. She’s all twisted up.

It’s satisfying to see Gilpin bring pain and death to these liberal douchebags, but her behavior feels over-calculated. She seems acutely aware of the camera each and every second. Especially when she’s so angry that she hums. And I didn’t think her big womano e womano fight with Swank was anything special either.

I was also hugely annoyed by the resilience of the Hunt characters who are beaten, stabbed and shot within an inch of their lives. No matter what happens they all manage to somehow recover within seconds and rebound back to life, like they’re human tennis balls or something.

I realize that bad action movies began ignoring biological reality decades ago, roughly around the time of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard and certainly with the advent of John Woo-styled X-treme violence in late ’80s band early ’90s. The fact is that a severe beating or shooting or stabbing will stop most people in their tracks and leave them moaning on the ground, and that it usually takes hours if not days to recover.

Forgive me for being unable to buy into the bullshit, but that’s what it is.

Every time I watch a film I’m always looking for actors who are just simply “there” and centered and behaving in a dead-real manner, and the others who are acting their asses off with all kinds of over-conveyed tells and twitches and facial indications. Actors who “act” are lethal.

Except in those very rare cases (many of them in Stanley Kubrick films) when a clearly “acting” actor is so brilliantly in command of his/her excessive behaviors that you just succumb and go with it. George C. Scott‘s performance in Dr. Strangelove, for one. Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer or Sleuth or Khartoum. Daniel Day Lewis‘s in There Will Be Blood.

Incidentally: In ’77 I saw Dick Cavett perform the lead role in Simon Gray‘s Otherwise Engaged. Stage acting is a whole different deal, but Cavett, I distinctly recall, tried to play it way, way down. The idea was to convey emotional detachment, and he wasn’t bad in that regard. But he wasn’t a gifted performer either. No one expected anything stupendous, and he didn’t disappoint. Rumor had it that Alan Bates and Tom Courtenay were better.

Watching Contagion is fascinating, but at the same time oddly comforting. Because unlike what we’ve seen from the Trump White House, it’s largely about sane, scientific-minded, non-ideological CDC people dealing with the virus spread as best they can, in a relatively calm manner, and persistently. And it’s about a virus that’s much more deadly than the one we’re coping with now. We may be looking at a million U.S. deaths before this is over, but the Contagion virus death count is in the tens of millions.

Whether or not Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has tested positive or not for the coronavirus, it’s ludicrous for White House spokesperson Stephanie Grisham to have stated that President Trump and Vice-President Pence, who dined and shook hands with Bolsinaro last weekend (along with his communications director Fábio Wajngarten, who’s definitely tested positive), “do not require being tested at this time.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, who attended the Trump-Bolsinaro dinner in Mar a Lago, is self-quarantining as we speak. Sen. Ted Cruz announced today that he’s extended his self-quarantine after meeting in his D.C office with Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s Vox Party who tested positive this week.

And yet Trump, who should obviously be setting an example, isn’t even planning to submit to a COVID-10 test. Worse, he “has disregarded the advice of medical and public health professionals to stop shaking hands,” according to a CNN story filed earlier today by Clare Foran.

Early this evening I risked exposure to COVID-19 by going to a mediocre film (The Hunt). I Ubered to the AMC Barton Creek, which cost around $15. There was a fair amount of traffic on the way — many Austinites were risking death like myself. The theatre is inside a typically lavish mall, and I didn’t see a single person there over the age of 30. No middle-aged or white-haired couples, no little kids — just 20somethings.

At best the movie is tolerably blah. Too much in the way of kidding and arch behavior. Bite is smaller than bark.

Plus I hated watching it with tight plastic surgical gloves on my hands and that stupid N95 mask around my neck. What a ghastly thing it is to be afraid of infections and surfaces in everyday life, to be afraid of death and disease at every turn. I washed my face and hands four times — once after the screening, twice while wandering around Austin, again at a gas station on South Congress.

I took a city bus to downtown Austin, and was a bit surprised to discover how different it looks and feels compared to six years ago, when I was last here. Many big new buildings, a little more corporate, a bit less in the way of native personality.