And a part of me will never forgive AOC for having a funny-looking, galumphy, red-haired boyfriend with huge feet, a tiny-eyed “bin racoon” who was obviously not her match…a woman can’t run for president if the appearance of her boyfriend/husband is a topic of negative conversation.

I’d be surprised if film-loving Millennials and Zoomers had the slightest awareness of Peter Medak‘s The Ruling Class (’72). It’s too British, too mid-20th-Century and too propelled by class hatred (iconoclast British lefties despising old-school Whitehall elites) to connect with 21st Century viewers, but very few films fiddled with murder, sex, notions of universal love, vaudevillian music-hall humor and demonic horror like this one did. It may be the only film that successfully mixed these elements.

Peter O’Toole wore a straw-blonde Jesus wig during the first 65%, but his slightly reddish, honey-colored hair during the final 35% is a real trip….gleaming, eye-filling.

Economically, it is the lot of Average Joes and Janes to eat shit and take it up the ass from their social betters. Not fair but the way of the world, sad to say.

Gail Collins: “I admit price controls would be a tough plan to get through, politically speaking. But Kamala Harris is trying to lay some of the groundwork for her overall agenda, which on the fiscal side includes redistributing some of the mega-wealth of the upper class to folks who are struggling to reach the middle. I do like that scenario.”

Bret Stephens: “The best thing that can be said about her promise to go after price ‘gouging’ is that she knows it has no hope of passing and that she understands that every serious economist on the planet will warn her that the consequences of price controls would be shortages, hoarding and, soon enough, black markets. In fact, my only hope for Harris is that her agenda is for campaign purposes only and that she’ll become a normal Democrat once in office.

“On the other hand, as Catherine Rampell of The Washington Post pointed out last week, if your opponent is going to call you a ‘communist,’ it might be wiser not to propose legislation worthy of Venezuela. Or is there some political logic at work here that I’m missing?”

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He was a good, smart, theatrical fellow. Pushy but in a good way. Straight-from-the-shoulder questions. But I can’t decide on his peak period. Between the late ’80s and ’90s?

Let’s pretend that Bill Murray got hit by a truck yesterday and that it’s time for an obit. If I had an hour to grind one out I would insist that the most glorious year of Murray’s life happened 31 years ago — 1993 — when he delivered his two greatest performances — a sardonic Chicago loan shark named Frank “The Money Store” Milo in John McNaughton and Richard Price‘s Mad Dog and Glory, and a sardonic TV weatherman in Harold Ramis‘s Groundhog Day.

Murray was around 42 when he shot both.

Murray”s third-best performance happened five years later in Wes Anderson‘s Rushmore, in which he played Herman Blume, a wealthy Houston businessman (also sardonic) who falls in love with a grade-school teacher (Olivia Williams), and in so doing ignites a feud with a 15 year-old romantic rival, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman).

Some thoughts about Milo, which I posted three years ago:

“Mad Dog and Glory is about a curiously touching friendship between Milo and Robert De Niro‘s Wayne — a timid, lonely Chicago cop who specializes in forensics and crime-scene photographs. Milo is a Chicago mob guy who becomes a big brother and ‘friend’ of Wayne’s after the latter saves his life.

“Milo is a lot like Murray in many ways, just not internally. He’s angry and doesn’t really like himself or his friends or his life. He wants to be somewhere else. He’s seeing a therapist to try and deal with the hostility, and he performs a stand-up comedy routine at a place called the Comic-Kaze Club, which he owns. But he doesn’t want to lose the gangster life either.

“Frank and Wayne’s connection begins when Wayne — joshingly called “‘Mad Dog’ by his cop pals — saves Frank’s life during a grocery store holdup by calming down a jittery holdup man and sending him away without bloodshed.

“Frank is initially appalled (‘You’re a cop?’), but the next evening, realizing what Wayne actually did and starved for a friend, Frank tries to reciprocate by getting friendly over drinks. The next day he sends Glory, who works at the Kamikaze Club, over to Wayne’s place, the idea being for her to stay with him and take care of whatever for seven days.

“The wrinkle comes when Wayne and Glory fall in love, and Wayne decides he doesn’t want her being Frank’s ‘favor girl’ any longer. But Frank won’t let her go (Glory has offered her services in order to save her brother from being killed over a debt) unless Wayne coughs up $40K…fat chance.

“The theme of the film is, basically, ‘no guts, no glory.’ That sounds like macho crap, but it’s well sold.

“I don’t know where Price’s script ends and Murray’s improvs begin, but Mad Dog and Glory is full of little Murray doo-dads. There’s his lounge-lizard rendition of ‘Knock Three Times,’ crooned at the beginning of a tense scene. His addressing De Niro as ‘ossifer’ (a term I hadn’t heard since I was a kid in New Jersey). The way he holds an air bugle to his lips and does a cavalry-charge bugle sound when De Niro’s cop friends come to his rescue at the finale.

“There’s a scene in a diner in which Frank’s intellectually challenged top goon, Harold (Mike Starr), who’s sitting nearby with a supermarket tabloid, points at a middle-aged man sitting at the counter and whispers to Milo, ‘Hey, Frank? Isn’t that Phil Donahue?’ A shot of the guy in question proves otherwise. Murray half turns in his seat and says, ‘Put the magazine down, Harold, before you hurt yourself.’

“Consider the melancholy in Murray’s eyes after his fight scene with De Niro at the finish. Frank is a predator, yes, but a bright and sometimes funny one, and the tragedy of his life is that he wants out and knows he won’t get there. He pulls a loose tooth out of his mouth, gestures at the gaudy Cadillac he’s sitting in and the gorillas he’s riding with, and says with a look of pure disgust, ‘This is my life.'”

2:25 am at JFK, approach to Terminal 4. I’m almost perversely enjoying this wee hour nightmare. My inner Lee Marvin is brusquely defying the discomfort. Whatever life throws at me, I’ll take it in stride.

…but I absolutely love radiating negative piss vibes in the direction of cancel-culture fanatics like Osgood Perkins….seriously…eff you, Ozzy. Oh, and by the way? Longlegs was way, way overpraised.

Joe Biden‘s big farewell address happens tomorrow night (Monday, 8.19) at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He’s going be showered by loyalist love and cheer, but never forget what a deranged, unhinged sonuvabitch he sounded like between that catastrophic debate performance on 6.27.24 and his blessed withdrawal from the race on 7.19.24.

For 24 days Joe Biden showed the civilized world that he’d become one of the most selfish and obstinate Oval Office pricks in the country’s 250-year history.

For three and a half weeks doddering Joe insisted on a fantasy that everyone knew was hopeless — that he could beat Donald Trump on 11.5.24. Don’t buy the lie. Biden didn’t withdraw because he saw the light and decided to put his country’s welfare above his own political ambition…bullshit. He withdrew his candidacy because he was heavily pressured to do so. Otherwise this egoist would be running today and taking the country to doom and ruin. He’s a bastard.

— from Maureen Dowd‘s “The Dems Are Delighted, But a Coup Is Still a Coup,” posted on 8.17.24.

I have basked in the glow of Alain Delon for decades. His aloof vibe, youthful beauty, gangster coolness. He’s as big of a 20th Century world cinema legend as Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, etc. He’s as eternal as it gets, and now he’s gone at age 88.

The progressive left decided to hate him several years ago for the crime of becoming an anti-feminist and an anti-immigrant right-winger. I’m sorry he went there, but old guys tend to be less tolerant and more hair-trigger. We all know this.

Delon’s peak period lasted 17 years (’60 to ’76), beginning with Rene Clement‘s Purple Noon (’60), continuing with Jacques Deray‘s Borsalino (’70) and ending with Joseph Losey‘s Mr. Klein (’76).

Other highlight films include Luchino Visconti‘s Rocco and His Brothers, Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Eclisse, Luchino Visconti‘s The Leopard, Jean Pierre Melville‘s The Samurai and Le Cercle Rouge, Jack Cardiff’s The Girl on a Motorcycle and Deray’s La Piscine.

Last night I finally caught Doug Liman, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck’s The Instigators (Apple+, 8.9), and during the first 20 minutes I knew for a fact that the Rotten Tomatoes naysayers (critics plus Joe Popcorn) had been mostly clueless and certainly small-minded in their pissy reactions.

For this downbeat Boston noir comedy is a true American original —- The Friends of Eddie Coyle meets deadpan screwball fatalism.

Despite the downish tone of this heist-gone-wrong ensemble chase thriller, it’s fundamentally a low-key noir comedy…sardonic sarcasm meets “fuck our lousy luck and Jesus, have we fucked things up or what?” meets a kind of loser Keystone Cops squad of half-assed, not-smart-enough “bad” but not altogether disreputable guys, principally played by Damon (who produced through Artists Equity) and Affleck (who co-wrote the script with Chuck Maclean). Their performances are sweet, sublime, spot-on.

I was truly delighted by this existential crime sitcom, which is darkly hilarious without ever quite announcing that’s a hah-hah “comedy”. It’s certainly too smart and cool for the idiots out there who hate the idea of mixing humor and loser-stamped noir. It almost delivers the same kind of tonal balancing act that Pulp Fiction was about.

And the supporting cast is aces — Hong Chau, Paul Walter Hauser, Michael Stuhlbarg, Ving Rhames, Alfred Molina, Toby Jones, Jack Harlow, etc.

The only thing that doesn’t work is the title. If it was my show I’d call it I’ve Been Waiting All My Life To Fuck Up Like This.

They haven’t seen Blitz…they’re just coasting along, playing it by ear…a wing and a prayer.