I don’t like buying Twilight Time Blurays because they’re always jacking up the price — TT always charges $30 for Blurays that should, according to God’s benevolent scheme, be priced at $20. Which is why I chose to purchase the recently popped British Bluray of Hal Ashby‘s The Last Detail for 15 pounds, or $18.72 U.S. I watched the movie a couple of weeks ago — definitely the best it’s ever looked or sounded. Then again I haven’t seen the UHD 4K streaming version, which you can actually buy via British Amazon.

Alexander Payne as he appears in Robert Fischer’s “About a Trip: Alexander Payne on Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail“

Last night I watched a supplementary Bluray video containing Alexander Payne‘s thoughts and ruminations — “About a Trip: Alexander Payne on Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail,” and it’s almost worth the price in itself. Charming, open-hearted, highly intelligent.

Here is an audio excerpt in which Payne (a) describes his favorite scenes in this 1973 film, (b) laments the absence of long, slow dissolves in today’s films (along with the use of zoom shots and voice-overs), (c) flat-out calls The Last Detail “a love story,” which of course it is, (d) mentions that he was very impressed with Daryl Ponicsan‘s script for Last Flag Flying, and was thinking about directing it back in ’10 or thereabouts, and (e) further mentions that the plot hangs on the three characters (Buddusky, Mulhall, Meadows), now in their 60s, getting together to deliver the body of Meadows’ son, killed in the Iraq War, to his mother or to a funeral service or something along those lines.

Richard Linklater wound up directing Last Flag Flying. It costars Bryan Cranston as Buddusky, Steve Carell as Larry Meadows and Laurence Fishburne as Mulhall. The Amazon release will probably open sometime in the fall.

Update, clarification: My initial reaction to yesterday’s United Airlines bloody-beat-down episode (which happened in Chicago on Sunday evening, or the night before last) was not that David Dao, the bespectacled Vietnamese doctor, wasn’t entitled to keep his seat, but that he became a screaming two-year-old once the security guys tried to throw him off. And that his bizarrely repeated chant of “I have to go home, I have to go home, I have to go home” indicated some kind of obsessive, primitive mentality.

The United guys obviously caused the trouble and are taking the hit, but at the same time I can’t throw in with people who howl like bobcats. The entire twitterverse has condemned United — 100% agreement. But nobody will acknowledge, much less react to, Dao’s primal screaming.

I saw the first episode of Jill Soloway‘s I Love Dick, an Amazon series that begins on 5.12, at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. I liked Kevin Bacon‘s titular character, a studly, cigarette-smoking Thomas McGuane-type guy out of Marfa, Texas, but I really, really didn’t like anyone else. I didn’t care for Kathryn Hahn‘s character, who is closely based on original author Chris Kraus, and I absolutely, definitely didn’t want to watch any sexual scenario involving Griffin Dunne, who plays her graying, saggy-bellied husband. Nor did I care for costars Roberta Colindrez, Adhir Kalyan, India Menuez and Azita Ghanizada…no offense. Kraus’ 1997 book was especially popular with feminists. Bacon’s depiction excepted, I felt a general vibe of contempt and distaste for men in general. A sassy, jaded, cynical vibe — get me the hell out of Marfa. (Episode #1 is currently streaming for Prime members.)

I’m sorry but when airline employees regretfully inform you’ve been bumped from a flight, that’s it. You’re not going to stonewall them into changing their minds — you’re taking the next flight. And if you howl in protest when they insist you have to give up your seat and then make them drag you off the plane, you’re the asshole, not them. This incident happened last night on a domestic United flight (Chicago to Louisville) that was about to leave. United decided at the last minute that four seats on this fully-booked flight had to be given to airline employees — bad idea. When no one accepted their offer of $800 in vouchers plus a hotel stay in exchange for a seat, they chose to eject four passengers at random — even worse. The unbalanced Asian guy (“I have to go home, I have to go home”) was among them but he refused to deplane, apparently persuaded that he’d been singled out because he’s Asian. All kinds of mayhem broke loose when security tried to drag him off.

In late ’85 I caught Jose Quintero‘s Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill‘s The Iceman Cometh, in which 63-year-old Jason Robards played Theodore “Hickey” Hickman. Quintero and Robards were the original fathers and life-givers of this play, which had opened in October 1946 and closed after only 163 performances. Their 1956 Off-Broadway production, staged just after O’Neill’s death, bestowed the proper lustre. The ’85 revival was a kind of half reunion, half celebration of this feat. I remember that Robards dyed his hair brown as Hickey was supposed to be somewhere in his early 40s. Barnard Hughes and Donald Moffat costarred. It was a really long sit (the 1973 John Frankenheimer film version ran 239 minutes) but Robards, man…wow. Glad I was there.

Does anyone remember Music Plus, the music-video retail chain? Sometime in late ’89 Music Plus management, inspired by the success of Tower Records’ in-house publication Pulse, decided to publish their own in-house magazine promoting CD and VHS titles. I was eventually hired by self-styled publisher Jeffrey Stern to be the senior editor, and we came up with the name Prime. Our fledgling publication, which Music Plus management liked but did almost nothing to promote in their stores, was TV Guide-sized. We worked out of offices in Santa Monica near the corner of Ocean and Wilshire, and then out of an Ocean Park Blvd. office building. I forget how many monthly issues we produced (eight or nine?) before relations between Stern and I started to go south. I worked for him for maybe 15 or 16 months, something like that. I began as an Entertainment Weekly stringer in the spring of ’91, and it’s been nothing but fun and games since.

Why am I posting a 26 and 1/2 year-old magazine cover (it was dated December 1990) in April of 2017? Last weekend the SRO cleaned out the bedroom closet and dumped a lot of stuff. This is one of the publications I saved.

This awful “aaahh” idea started with one person working for HBO, and then it spread to another and another. And now millions have been subjected. HBO’s “aaah” anthem actually isn’t an “aaah” but more of an “ohm” mixed with the eerie Martian choir out of Invaders From Mars. The Invaders score was composed by Raoul Kraushaar.

A recent Born in China trailer suggested it might be a cut above the usual Disney hash (cutesy, sanitized, kid-friendly). It seemed to promise compelling, rough-and-tumble stories about three families in the hills and mountains of southern China — a snow leopard and her two cubs, a mommy panda and her cub, and a snub-nosed monkey clan. So last week I caught a screening in the Disney Animation building, and within five minutes I knew I’d been film-flammed.

Born in China is the same old stew. Stunningly beautiful, drop-dead photography. Adorable animals (especially the monkeys). Folksy-kindly narration (voiced by John Krasinski) aimed at eight year olds. But with much of the sadness, harshness and occasional brutality of nature sidestepped or flat-out ignored. Because the kiddies have to be shielded from the realities. Raise them in McMansions, give them sedentary lives in front of screens, gently poison them with fast-food diets but never let them see what real life is really like. There’s plenty of time for that later. Keep them in fantasyland for as long as possible.

Wells to Disney corporates: YouTube is filled with hundreds of videos of hyenas, wild dogs and lions eating the intestines of still-living zebras, antelopes, gazelles, wildebeests and buffalos. Are you under an impression that kids don’t watch this stuff?

When I was eight and nine I was dying to know what life was really like outside of the suburban membrane my parents raised me in. All I remember about the regimented, rule-following aspects of my life back then was that I was dead bored. My parents shielded me from all the fascinating things happening in the news. Which is why I liked movies so much because at least they offered a taste of life outside the gulag — adventure, color, risk and danger. My childhood was an enforced system of mind and behavior control that all but suffocated my spirit and drained my juices. I died a thousand deaths sitting through Sunday morning services inside our local Episcopalian church.

Thank God for my hunger and curiosity. I was leafing through nudie magazines when I was eight. I remember an older kid shooting a park pigeon with a bow and arrow and soon after getting cuffed by the cops. When I was nine I remember watching a YMCA instructor (I was sent there for swimming lessons and summer recreation) stepping in a pile of gooey dog shit as he was talking to a colleague, and not realizing it and all the kids giggling and elbowing each other. I was busted for shoplifting around then, and I remember begging the supermarket manager not to turn me over to the cops. I was playing touch football one afternoon with friends when I was ten or so, and we all happened to see a major car crash — WHAHM! — less than a block away. We all ran over for a closer look, and one of the drivers, a guy in a convertible, was groaning and moaning as he reclined in the front seat.

No one will watch Thor: Ragnarok (Marvel, 11.3) — they’ll sink into it like a swamp or a mudbath. Thor: Beverly Hills Hairstyling. All of these powerful, satanic characters so devoted to the killing of Thor, and yet none of them can quite manage it. Handsome paychecks for Chris Hemsworth, Cate Blanchett (kids’ higher education, third home, investment portfolio), Mark Ruffalo (Hulk), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Jeff Goldblum, Idris Elba, Karl Urban, Anthony Hopkins, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sam Neill…vacuum my soul, bathe me in toxic waste.

In a Thursday, 4.6 interview with N.Y. Times columnist Nicholas Kristof at Tina Brown’s Women in the World Summit, Hillary Clinton said the following about her loss to Donald Trump: (a) “Certainly misogyny played a role…that just has to be admitted”; (b) She characterized the mindset of Trump voters as “I don’t agree with him, I’m not sure I really approve of him, but he looks like somebody who’s been president before”; (c) she noted that many other factors contributed to her loss, including her own mistakes but that (d) part of her problem was that many voters were already struggling with tumult in their lives “and [when] you layer on the first woman president over that, and I think some people, women included, had real problems.”

The truth: It wasn’t misogyny as much as Hillary. Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren would have won. Hillary fucked herself with her private email server — fairly or unfairly it fed the notion that she was an elitist with a secretive, guarded nature — and then she double-fucked herself by choosing Tim Kaine, no one’s idea of a change agent, as her vp. The Russian/Wikileaks revelations about Hillary’s DNC loyalists doing what they could to screw Bernie over didn’t help. If Bernie Sanders hadn’t been deep-sixed by black voters and won the nomination, he would’ve squeeked through to a win over Trump. I voted without hesitancy for Hillary’s brains and maturity, but deep down not enough people were okay with the idea of a peevish substitute teacher who collapses like a sack of potatoes when she’s tired. Plus that braying speaking voice.

During Cinemacon I met with director Aaron Salazar, who’s in his mid 20s and trying to get over. We went out for some Asian food one evening and shot the shit. He’s sharp and knowledgable, and loves Call Me By Your Name as much I do, and therefore has excellent taste. Last year his short film, Gas ‘n’ Go, was shown in Cannes under the aegis of the Court Metrage program. He plans to attend again this year.

I’ve never made a short film, much less had it accepted at a major film festival, so my respect for Aaron is in no way blurred or diminished by my mixed reaction to his short: “Cool concept but I hated the soundtrack. You should have used shallow bubblegum music. Why did the hoodie-wearing bad guys shoot the T-shirt-wearing fat guys? And what kind of candy-ass runs away when he finds two bodies?”

Aaron’s response: “Looking back on it, there’s a lot of things I’d do differently. It’s been a year since I made it. I’ve seen it too many times. I know everything that’s wrong with it. Perhaps one day I’ll remake it with an actual budget and some behind-the-camera help.”

I asked Aaron for a basic rundown — here’s what he sent: “I’m glad I was able to help you see some culture in Las Vegas. As you know I’m a student. I work full-time in the fast-food industry. When I’m not working or at school, I’m reading and writing and working on getting my next project off the ground. I’ve written two features. As you know I wrote and directed a short that was accepted at the Cannes Film Festival’s Court Métrage program last year. I attended and was instantly overwhelmed by all that I didn’t know. I’m attending this year in hopes to make better, lasting connections.

My annual early-May landing in Nice used to light me up every time. Bright sun, blue skies, sparkling blue Mediterranean, the aroma of sea air (or the anticipation of it)…welcome to the Cannes Film Festival in Cote d’Azur vacationland! I haven’t done this in four or five years, or since I became accustomed to hitting Paris a few days before the festival and then taking the Tuesday morning train. But moments like this are worth their weight in gold.