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Gus Van Sant‘s masterful Drugstore Cowboy opened 30 and 1/2 years ago. I just bought a rental as it’s been a while. Matt Dillon‘s “Bob Hughes” will always be his finest role.

He was 24 or 25 during filming, and his career wasn’t exactly surging at the time.

Dillon’s debut performance in Jonathan Kaplan‘s Over The Edge (’79), performed when he was 14 or so, put him into orbit . Through the ’80s he was a solid marquee attraction, but the vitality had been ebbing. And then along came Drugstore Cowboy in the fall of ’89, and Dillon was right back on top.

Now he’s 56, and boy, does time fly.

My second favorite Drugstore Cowboy character? James Remar‘s “Gentry”, a narcotics detective. Followed by Kelly Lynch‘s “Diane.” And William S. Burroughs‘ performance as himself…perfect.

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Against my better judgment and despite my disappointment with the Jaws 4K Bluray, I’ve ordered the 4K Spartacus (Universal Home Video, 7.21).

Because a 4K disc of a large-format film (Spartacus was shot in the VistaVision-like Technirama process) that’s been drawn from a 6K harvest promises to look extra rich and detailed, and because restoration guru Robert Harris, who oversaw the original 1991 restoration as well as the 2015 4K digital restoration (which again was harvested from the 6K scan), supervised the finessing of the 4K disc.

If the 4K Spartacus Bluray doesn’t deliver an unmistakable bump, there’s gonna be trouble. That’s all I’m saying. I won’t take well to being burned twice.

Four days ago Blocked & Reported‘s Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal posted a podcast titled “Bari Weiss Is Right.” Which is a good and welcome thing because Bari Weiss is right about the behavior of N.Y. Times fanatics during the Tom Cotton / James Bennet debacle.

The theme is the “complete collapse of institutional authority” along with a “major cultural crack-up” in media-journalist circles.

Herzog/Singal: “Bari Weiss did some tweets about how there is a generational divide at The New York Times that is, in her view, hampering the paper’s ability to publish quality commentary and journalism. In response, a sizable cohort of her colleagues LITERALLY devoured her (metaphorically, on Twitter). In their most frustrated episode yet, Katie and Jesse explain why Bari was fundamentally right. The fact that so many journalists think Bari is making this up is pretty insane given the rampant evidence for it.”

Herzog has been an HE favorite over the last couple of years. I especially enjoyed “Call-Out Culture Is a Toxic Garbage Dumpster Fire of Trash,” posted on 1.23.18.

Insignificant Quibble: Herzog and Singal are so sharp and fleet-minded and ultra-knowledgeable that it’s almost difficult to listen to them. Especially because they speak in “vocal slur fry”, and I hate that shit as a rule.  But they’re otherwise cool.

“Vocal Slur Fry Classes,” originally posted on 9.10.14.

And don’t overlook Damon Linker‘s “The woke revolution in American journalism has begun“…some of the same observations. And Steven A. Holmes‘ cnn.com piece, “I love The New York Times, but what they did was wrong.”

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My recently ordered Jaws 4K Bluray was on the doorstep when we returned last evening (7:45ish) from Mexico. I popped it into my Samsung 4K Bluray player around 9:30 pm, and almost immediately I was going “wait…what? This is it?”

Because I wasn’t seeing my #1 basic requirement when it comes to 4K discs, which is a moderately exciting bump or an agreeable change for the better compared to the most recently released 1080p version. Official HE verdict: The 4K upgrade of Steven Spielberg‘s sea-change classic is approvable but underwhelming.

Here’s how I explained it last night to a tech-savvy industry friend: “I watched the 4K Jaws tonight, and while it certainly looks crisp and clean and handsome enough, there’s no detectable enhancement compared to the eight-year-old 1080p Bluray version. Not to these eyes, at least.

“And please don’t start with your old ‘have your 4K player and TV been properly calibrated?’ question, which you throw at me every time there’s an issue. My set-up is close to dead perfect. Everything always looks great on it. I’ve never been happier with a TV in my life.

“But the 4K Jaws disappoints. We tend to forget that Bill Butler‘s cinematography was never intended to be eye candy. It’s a utilitarian small-town drama mixed with a monster flick. Butler delivered pro-level work, but the idea was never to get people to drop to their knees. Obviously shot with efficiency, but never an attempt to show off. Butler was unpretentiously serving the story while delivering natural atmospheric elements.

“We tend to forget that color-wise Jaws is just this side of slightly desaturated, and many of the exterior shots have a kind of hazy seaside humidity appearance. It’s almost a little soft-focusy, and it certainly looks misty in some daytime scenes. Which is fine in itself. I’m just saying that it looks and feels like the 2012 Bluray. Not a bad looking presentation, but it hardly ever jumps out at you. It never makes you say ‘wow, I’ve never seen it look this good.’

“The bottom line is that I feel burned. My feeling is that Universal Home Video hustled me. They sold me a bill of goods. They tied a tin can to my tail. They led me down a garden path. They flim-flammed me.”

Tech guy has also seen the 4K Jaws, and his assessment was more generous. “It’s very different from the 2012 Bluray,” he said. “A far more cohesive image. Solid colors. Nice HDR that actually works. Dolby Atmos, which you can play with a sound bar. And perfect grain levels.”

HE reply: “What about the forthcoming Spartacus 4K disc (7.21)? Have you heard if it delivers any kind of bump? I’m not sure I want to shell out for this. I’m feeling a bit swindled here.

“Remember that I’m a Bluray peon — I look and see and judge in peon terms. Your technical perspective and insight are reflected in what you wrote and are much appreciated, but it doesn’t look substantially different than the 2012 Bluray. Not really.

“No bump, no buy. That’s how peons see things when it comes to a potential 4K purchase.”

However, the 4K Jaws also contains that legendary two-hour “Making of Jaws” doc that stretches back to the laser-disc days. If you’ve never watched it, please do.

In a discussion with Steven Soderbergh on the beautiful, relatively recent Billy Budd Bluray, Terence Stamp is asked about his blonde angel appearance in this 1962 film, which was shot when he was 23 or thereabouts.

Stamp replies that “getting older is like being steadily, increasingly punished for a crime I didn’t commit.”

I’m not calling this any kind of profound universal truth, but it’s certainly a biological one. After a couple of drinks most once-beautiful lads and lassies with any inclination toward candor will admit to feeling this way deep down. Optimistic people claim that aging is not a “massacre”, as some have called it, but generally a good thing because sensible 45-plus lifestyles will usually nudge you into greater kindnesses, a mellower mindset and a deeper, richer spiritual awareness of the cosmic altogether.

Which is all true, but at the same aging thins your hair out or flat-out destroys it unless you seek a Prague remedy. It also makes your nose and ears look bigger, and your teeth smaller and less white.

On the other hand it’s nice to know that the Prague option is always there. I for one am glad I took care of some business in that fine, fair city. Plus it’s a great foodie town and one of the greatest places on the planet to just roam around endlessly minus any particular destination or game plan.

No defunding or disbanding but…? Significant portions of police departments are regarded as unrestrained brutalists who represent a kind of governmentally-funded Trumpian militia. So if you, the Hollywood Elsewhere administrator, were in charge of getting rid of “the bad apples,” how would you do it? Obviously the uniformed goons need to go, but how do we decide which goons are the worst? I’m asking.

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For about 22 years I’ve been a proud owner of a real-deal samurai sword, a Claymore sword from Germany, and what I’ve been told is an 18th Century Barry Lyndon sword. And they’re all in good shape. I had the samurai sword re-sharpened about 15 years ago and it’ll split a hair.

Two days ago Dylan called to suggest that I send the sword to Jett for his 32nd birthday, which was yesterday. Dylan and Jett were totally into swords during the waning days of the Clinton administration, when they were nine and ten.

Dylan’s idea was that the samurai sword would connect Jett to those days, and how we hung out and went on car trips and attended screenings, etc.. So I decided to send the samurai to Jett in Jersey City and the Claymore to Dylan in Austin.

Around 4:45 pm I took them to a UPS store but the guy said he’s not allowed to send weapons. “Well, they’re technically weapons, okay, but not really,” I said. “They’re mainly relics of a distant past. Only Mel Gibson would regard them as actual weapons.”

He suggested FedEx, which was just down the street. I had to pack them first, of course, or the FedEx guys would say the same thing.

The UPS guy sold me a couple of tall boxes and masking tape and a bag of styrofoam peanuts. But I couldn’t wrap them in the store, he said. Out to the parking lot. The wind was blowing and the peanuts were flying all over the place, but I eventually got it done.

The FedEx guys didn’t even ask what was in the boxes. A Thursday delivery was out of the question, but to ensure that the samurai would arrive at Jett’s Jersey City home by today I had to pay them $185 bills. And the box wasn’t even that heavy.

Jett’s text arrived today at 11:49 am: “Thanks for the gift…I guess. Lol.”

Last night I came upon an old NYC address book, circa 1980 and ’81. It was a replacement of an even better address book that I left in a phone booth just outside El Coyote. Four or five hundred names, street addresses, phone numbers, occasional commentary…all quaintly written with a pen. (I’m figuring the four-decades-old info couldn’t possibly apply in 2020…right?) And I was leafing through and feeling the vigor of those days. Yes, I was a shameless, never-say-die hound. But mostly I was terrified about money and worried about whether my meager writing skills would cut the mustard from a commercial standpoint, and what kind of life I might have in five, ten or twenty years. So I was poor and insecure and hugely intimidated, but somehow I had to keep going, keep pushing. Hence the necessary moxie of youth.

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We’ve now witnessed two recent episodes in which New and Old Guard journalists have been sharply at odds. Believers in wokester activist journalism, a Millennial and Zoomer thing that’s about exposing racism, pollution, corruption and all the other social ills and in some cases indicting and/or cancelling old-schoolers (and particularly Trump-aligned righties), have clashed with defenders of traditional liberal journalism — basically a generational rift.

Episode #1 was about wokester N.Y. Times staffers condemning the opinion section’s decision to publish a somewhat rash opinion essay by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton (“Send In The Military“) that basically said the military should be brought in to stop looters.

Wokester staffers tweeted that running the Cotton piece “puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger”…really? Most Americans believe that the looting has been horrible if not ruinous, and that it should be stopped one way or another.

N.Y. Times columnist Bari Weiss explains the clash as follows: “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes and the (mostly 40-plus) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. The New York Times motto is ‘all the news that’s fit to print.’ One group” — the 40-plussers — “emphasizes the word ‘all.’ The other, the word ‘fit.'”

“The New Guard has a different worldview,” Weiss went on. “They call it ‘safetyism,’ in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.”

Episode #2, which happened last night in Los Angeles, was about safetyism.

Variety editor Claudia Eller was forced to take a two-month administrative leave after a Twitter dispute with freelancer Piya Sinha-Roy about insufficient newsroom diversity. The flashpoint moment was when Sinha-Roy complained that “POC voices are constantly dismissed“, in response to which Eller took umbrage because she felt she and other Variety editors had conveyed an understanding of this complaint and a pledge to improve. “When someone cops to something why would you try and criticize them?,” she said to Sinha-Roy. “You sound really bitter.”

Eller surely understands that you can’t get into a Twitter dispute with any younger POC and hope to win the argument. Or at least, she surely understands that now.

American voters are starting to figure some things out also. Scratch an under-40 wokester-progressive and you may find an ideological Stalinist who’s convinced that change can’t happen without slapping a few people around or even deep-sixing them. A day or two ago I equated this crowd with Tom Courtenay‘s “Strelnikov” character in Dr. Zhivago. I’ve said 50 times that we’re living through a period that’s not unlike the French terror, at least within wokester circles.

We’re also living through a certain strain of liberal hypocrisy in which progressives had insisted for nearly three months that strict social distancing had to be observed for God knows how long. This was followed by the partial collapse of social distancing (certainly among protestors) when it came time to march against systemic racism in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

Drive though any major city now and you’ll see a whole lot of storefronts covered with plywood, plywood, plywood. Caused by looters but also by the George Floyd protestors who’ve given them cover. What kind of impact is this going to have on Average Joe voters? The vast majority is appalled by racially-driven police brutality and support the demonstrations, but at the same time they don’t like the way plywood has totally taken over.

What would be the right proportional makeup of a properly diverse newsroom, by the way? Should the racial makeup of a newsroom reflect last year’s U.S. census figures, which stated that whites comprise 60.4% of the population with other tribes close to 40% (African Americans 13.4%, Hispanic-Latino 18.3% and Asians 5.9%, etc.). Or is journalism a different kettle of fish? How should it work exactly?

In my view, Weiss is one of the few serious truth-tellers within the N.Y. Times community when it comes to wokesters vs. traditionalists.

I recently fell in love with an HE-thread comment about “lily-white anarchist cosplay riotbros**,” but now I can’t find the source. Either way this two-day-old CBS News story about a white Chicago guy, Timothy O’Donnell, having been popped for setting fire to a Chicago Police SUV in the Loop district last weekend fits the profile perfectly.

Because O’Donnell was wearing a Joker mask while igniting the vehicle, and was photographed in the act. A telltale neck tattoo (“PRETTY”) led to his arrest.

It would appear, in short, that O’Donnell was inspired as much by Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix as the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that followed, if not more so. The basic anarchist impulse was fueled, of course, by nearly three months of quarantined isolation. Without covid would street insurrections still be happening as we speak? Doubtful.

Poor Chicago…just starting to reemerge from quarantine a couple of weeks ago, only to be trashed and plywood-shuttered by the protests and especially by the looters. Same goes for Los Angeles, New York…all over, right?

Timothy O’Donnell in Joker mask.

Apparently lighting police van last Saturday.

** “Riotbros” being from the same temperamental family previously identified as “virusbros” and “Berniebros.”

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A June 3rd Guardian photo essay is celebrating the re-opening of Paris cafes.

Copy: “In Paris, contented customers sit outside cafes and sip their morning espressos for the first time in 11 weeks. There are, however, strict rules: bars and restaurants have permission to sprawl across pavements but tables must be one meter apart. In the rest of France, customers can now be served inside while observing the same distance.”

The Guardian‘s photographer is identified as “Martin” of AFP/Getty Images.

These photos literally melted me down. From ’07 to ’19 I was able to downshift and decompress in Paris (or Rome, Prague. Munich or Belgrade) following the Cannes Film Festival, and 2020 was the first time since the late George W. Bush administration that I was unable to do that.

These pics remind me that sipping cappuccino on a Paris sidewalk adjacent to a busy cafe or brasserie (early morning, late afternoon, evening) is one of the most gloriously alive activities available to human beings on the planet earth.

I’m not disputing the presence of a gay erotic current in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. But I worked as a freelance publicist for this film in the summer and fall of ’85, and I don’t remember the slightest remark at the time by any New Line staffers about Mark Patton (who was 25 or 26 at the time) being any kind of scream queen. Nobody said zilch about this, and the people I worked with in New Line publicity and marketing were very sharp and super-opinionated about everything.

From “Brief Shining Moment of Freddiemania,” posted on 1.17.15: “I’d like to take a brief bow for my efforts as a freelance public relations guy for New Line Cinema in ’85 and ’86, and particularly my promotion of Jack Sholder‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and even more particularly the semi-phenomenon known as ‘Freddiemania,’ which originated with spottings of movie fans dressed as Freddy Krueger a la Rocky Horror for midnight showings of Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84).

“There weren’t that many Freddy freaks to be found, to be perfectly honest, but it was an interesting and amusing enough story to persuade Entertainment Tonight and the N.Y. Times and other big outlets to run pieces on it and to speak with Sholder (who later directed The Hidden, one of the finest New Line films ever made) as well as Freddy himself, Robert Englund, with whom I became friendly and hung out with a bit. (Producer Mike DeLuca was a 20 year-old New Line assistant at the time.) One of my big Freddy promotional stunts was persuading Englund to march in New York’s Village Halloween Parade on 10.31.85 from Houston Street up to 14th or 23rd or something like that.”

I also wrote about this period in “New Line Memories,” posted on 3.3.08.

Directed by Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen, Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street is currently streaming on Amazon. It’ll also be released on SHUDDER, the horror streaming service, on 6.4, or two days hence.

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