“The Outpost is a tough movie with heart, an immersive war film that honors the men who fought in Kamdesh while making it clear that their superiors had put them in an impossible situation on a base hemmed in by mountains.

“The battle itself, during which eight Americans were killed and for which two would win the Medal of Honor, is the harrowing and extended climax of the film.

“Director Rod Lurie and writers Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson spend enough time establishing the geography of the camp and the personalities of the soldiers who man it that when all hell breaks loose, we know what’s happening and care about who it’s happening to.

“And just as important, the film includes some quieter notes in the aftermath of the battle, adding a lovely emotional coda to the story. — from Steve Pond‘s 3.13 Wrap piece about Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost.

I woke up late this morning, thinking only of my curious failure to arise at the usual 6 am or thereabouts. A minute or two later I was in front of the sink, a bit foggy and no coffee yet.

And then it hit me. A diluted version of Wolfgang Petersen‘s Outbreak is unfolding outside. Maybe not so much on the South Texas coast but elsewhere. A variation of Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion, as we’ve all been reminding ourselves of, and fleeting paranoid flashes of Danny Boyle‘s 28 Days Later, George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead, Stanley Kramer‘s On The Beach and any other dystopian drama you can think of.

I’d forgotten that the quarter-century-old Outbreak isn’t very good. Over-cranked. Certainly compared to Contagion.

I remember normality**. It was what life felt like three or four weeks ago, and for all the troubles that went with it, it wasn’t that bad.

“40 years too young, 38 years too gay.”

Pete Buttigieg would obviously be a perfect, brilliant compliment to Joe Biden in ways that I don’t need to go into again. One of them being his ability to speak with respect and empathy to Bumblefuck voters. But Bernie bros would sit on their hands, and Democratic women voters would never accept a second white male.

Wiki excerpt: “Aransas Bay is situated on the southeastern Texas gulf coast, approximately 30 miles (48 km) northeast of Corpus Christi, and 173 miles (278 km) south of San Antonio. It is one of seven major estuaries along the Gulf coast of Texas. There is a rich history of settlements on the bay, including ancient Native American campgrounds dating back millennia, 19th-century European immigrant towns such as Lamar and Aransas, and the present day cities of Rockport, Fulton and Aransas Pass. Resources such as shrimp, fish, oysters and oil are found in or near the bay, and contribute to the local economies.”

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.