For decades I’ve had this thing about big silver-looking coins jingling around in my pocket. JFK half dollars, Eisenhower “silver” dollars. For a couple of years in the late ‘90s a couple of actual silver dollars from the 1920s had joined the party. (Then I lost them.) The sound of them, how they feel, the weight…these relatively meaningless coins make me feel the alpha. Probably because they’re remnants of the past. Yeah, that’s it.

Or is that a bad idea because the Bumblefucks don’t care for Warren, and never have? I’d feel pretty good about this ticket — she’s obviously been more assertive than Biden about pushing for basic re-orderings of how things work. But what voters really want isn’t so much Bernie Lite as a return to decency.

I’ve always loved the ring of McCoy Tyner. It conveyed a certain fierceness or down-low intensity that always made me sit up and pay attention. If not a jazz pianist he would (or should) have been a baseball player. (A pitcher, I’m thinking.). Or a novelist. Or a Zane Grey gunslinger from the late 1890s. Great name.

I’m down with Home Before Dark because it stars The Florida Project‘s Brooklyn Prince. Logline: “A plucky, highly intelligent nine-year-old girl follows in her father’s footsteps by becoming a dogged crime reporter as she goes to work on a long-buried cold case.” The Apple streaming series (debuting on 4.3) is written and executive produced by Russel Friend and Garrett Lerner alongside showrunners Dana Fox and Dara Resnik. Jon Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In The Heights) directed the first episode.

Olive drab plus bright orange…the outdoor color combo from hell. For roughly 20 years Stanley Kubrick wore this same awful, warm-weather, bundle-up hoodie, all through Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut.

Apparel-wise Kubrick never seemed to give a damn. He always dressed with a minimum of fuss and a general aversion to fashion or even style (except perhaps “workaholic nerd style”). From the late ’50s to early ’70s he wore the same dark blue suit and white shirt. And then, sometime after A Clockwork Orange, came the olive-drab hoodie.

I’ ve hated the sight of this damn jacket for decades, and I just wanted to finally say it out loud. You could almost say (i.e., not really) that on a certain level I’ve never forgiven Kubrick for this aesthetic offense. If he had worn a dark blue windreaker with wolf fur, I would have been fine with that.

There’s nothing to prevent the one-time-only SXSW Streaming Film Festival from happening. It would be difficult but not impossible to set everything up in less than a week, and certainly worth a try. One of the major streamers needs to step up to the plate and say “let’s do this, Janet and John Pierson…let’s make it happen.”

I don’t know what I’d do if I was Jason Bateman‘s character, Marty Byrde. I’d probably spend half my time dreaming about what faraway tropical haven I could escape to, and the other half debating which method of suicide would be preferable. What a churning cauldron of greed and malice, and in a Missouri hellscape yet. Bumblefuck agony. Season 3 will deliver ten episodes, starting on 3.27.20.

I’m very sorry that Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost, which had been scheduled to debut at South by Southwest on 3.14 with a follow-up on 3.17, has taken a COV-19 torpedo along with the whole SXSW ship. Yes, Rod and I are friendly but this is nonetheless a strong, vital and worthy film, and it would have been suitably launched had things gone off as planned. Life is unfair.

Early last November I caught a not-quite-finished version. A U.S. forces-vs.-the-Taliban war flick based on Jake Tapper’s book, it’s a rousing, highly emotional drill into another tough battle that actually happened, and another example of the kind of combat flick to which we’ve all become accustomed — one in which the U.S. forces get their asses kicked and barely survive.

Tapper’s same-titled book, published in 2013, is about the ordeal of U.S. troops defending Combat Outpost Keating. Located at the bottom of a steep canyon and absurdly vulnerable to shooters in the surrounding hills, the outpost was brutally attacked by Taliban forces on 10.3.09. For a while there it was very touch-and-go. The base was nearly overrun. Eight Americans and four Afghans defenders were killed.

Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha and Specialist Ty Michael Carter (respectively played in Lurie’s film by Scott Eastwood and Caleb Landry Jones) were awarded the Medal of Honor.

The Outpost starts off, naturally enough, with a subdued queasy feeling of “okay, how long before the bad stuff starts?” What happens is that things start to go wrong vaguely, gradually, in small measures. Then it upshifts into unsettling (a name-brand actor buys it) and then bad to worse, and then worse than that. And then the bracing, teeth-rattling 30- to 40-minute finale.

Lone Survivor, Hamburger Hill, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, In The Valley of Elah, Platoon, We Were Soldiers, Pork Chop Hill — American forces go to war for questionable or dubious reasons and the troops engaged get shot and pounded all to hell. Those who barely survive are shattered, exhausted, gutted. War is bad karma.

It just occured to me that one of the things I loved about Zero Dark Thirty, which is not about the military but the intelligence community, is that it ends with a feeling of modest satisfaction — bad guy smoked, mission accomplished, all is well.

I know I was expected to feel a similar kind of satisfaction from Clint Eastwood‘s Heartbreak Ridge, but I didn’t.

Variety‘s Steven Gaydos, posted last November: “Thanks for calling attention to this terrific film that packs a wallop. Really an edge of the seat experience from start to finish and deeply moving as well. Very Charge of the Light Brigade in that ‘military intelligence’ once again proves oxymoronic and brave young souls are left to figure a way to save each other from catastrophe. Heroes.”

South by Southwest is the latest festival to fold its tent over fears of COVID-19. The annual film and music festival would have happened between Friday, 3.13 and Saturday, 3.21. How serious is the threat in Texas? Not very. It’s slight, in fact, but all those big companies panicked and bailed. Hollywood Elsewhere will boldly fly to Austin anyway to visit my son Dylan, who recently moved there from the Bay Area.

Following Thursday afternoon’s walkout the Hachette Book Group announced today that it has capitulated to the wokester Khmer Rouge by deciding to not publish Woody Allen’s memoir, “Apropos of Nothing.”

“The decision to cancel Mr. Allen’s book was a difficult one,” senior vp of communications Sophie Cottrell said in a statement. “At HBG we take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly. We have published and will continue to publish many challenging books. As publishers, we make sure every day in our work that different voices and conflicting points of views can be heard.

“Also, as a company, we are committed to offering a stimulating, supportive and open work environment for all our staff. Over the past few days, HBG leadership had extensive conversations with our staff and others. After listening, we came to the conclusion that moving forward with publication would not be feasible for HBG.”

Translation: “At HBG we obviously don’t take our relationships with authors all that seriously or we wouldn’t have deep-sixed Woody Allen‘s book. The bottom line is that we are open to cancelling books if the Khmer Rouge doesn’t approve of their content. We are living through a period of wokester blacklisting and career cancellings, and we feel it is better to try to get along with these totalitarian goons than to butt heads.”

Allen obviously needs to simply self-publish. It would almost certainly become a best-seller.