I carefully tied my mail-order foxtail onto the rear of the bike last Wednesday, or 6.27. Yesterday someone tore it right off. I was told this would happen, but I never figured it would happen so quickly. It lasted four days.

I trusted the action in John McTiernan‘s Die Hard (’88). I didn’t “believe” it, but it was disciplined and well-choreographed for the most part, and it mostly avoided the outrageous. Now it’s all outrage, all absurdity, all Coyote vs. Roadrunner. Cliffhanger moments in 21st Century action thrillers are always solved with a half-second to spare. The hero grabs the rope, shoots the guard dog, ducks out of danger or figures out the bomb-defusal code at the very last instant. Every damn time. Thrillers have been using this last-second-solve device for decades, of course, but nowadays it’s almost all on this level. 59 years ago the dangling Eva Marie Saint losing her footing at the very instant Cary Grant grabs her wrist (at the 57-second mark) was cool, but if 90% of the damn movie is about a woman losing her footing, the audience will eventually get irritated and then more irritated and then mad.

Jeremiah Zagar‘s We, The Animals (The Orchard, 8.10) is an imaginative, altogether excellent film about an unusual ’80s boyhood in upstate New York. Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn called it “this year’s Moonlight.” The analogy is not Moonlight, I feel, but magical realism, Beasts of the Southern Wild, flying above the trees, animated drawings, Malick-like impressionism a la The Tree of Life, family conflict, dreamscapes. The gay factor is incidental, almost negligible. It’s the levitation, the book of drawings, the careful editing, the apartness, the challenges faced by a ‘different’ artistic kid…the Malick of it all. Pic is based on Justin Torres’ 2011 autobiographical novel.

Quinnipiac poll, 7.2: By a 63% to 31% margin American voters agree with the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion — men 61% to 32%, women 65% to 30%. Republicans disagree with Roe v. Wade 58% to 36%, but “every other listed party, gender, education, age and racial group agrees.”

Guess what’s going to happen to Roe v. Wade when Trump’s unannounced, arch-conservative Supreme Court nominee is confirmed and sworn in?

On one hand a strong majority of American voters (65% to 24%) would like to see the U.S. Supreme Court be a check on President Trump. Even a slight majority of Republicans (48% to 37%) are in favor of this. And yet 46% say the Senate should consider Trump’s nominee before the elections — a move that will all but eliminate any chance of the Supremes checking Trump and will probably wind up killing Roe v. Wade. 48% of American voters believe that the U.S. Senate shouldn’t vote on Trump’s nominee until after the November elections.

Repeating: Two-thirds of American voters support Roe v. Wade while 48% want the Supreme Court to act as a check on Trump, but nearly half (46%) believe that the Senate should confirm Trump’s right-wing nominee before November, which will nullify the Court’s ability to check his policies and set the stage for an overturning of Roe v. Wade. Brilliant!

Last February the legendary columnist and author Cynthia Heimel died — here’s my obit. Six days ago Stephen Saban, Heimel’s nocturnal partner-in-crime and droll columnist for the Soho Weekly News and Details in the late ’70s and ’80s, died from pancreatic cancer. I don’t know what my deficiency is, but I only heard today.

Saban and Heimel were major Manhattan scenesters in that overlapping Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan era. They visited every hot Manhattan club, knew everyone, partied’ till the end. I knew and liked Stephen as far as it went; we were always trading notes in Manhattan screening rooms. He moved to Los Angeles sometime in the mid to late ’90s, but he wasn’t at all communicative when I reached out three or four years ago. I tried again after Heimel died…zip. Saban and Heimel were joined at the hip back in the day, but late in life they more or less dropped each other by mutual consent. People can be odd that way.

Details columnist Stephen Saban, Linda Evans in 1985.

Here’s a Saban tribute piece by Michael Musto, excerpted from his 1986 book “Downtown“:

“Stephen Saban, one of the founder/editors of Details and its nightlife columnist as well as a former club doorman, was actually the first to give the downtown scene credibility. (Some say he created the scene so he could write about it.) In 1985, as Details, the monthly New Testament of downtown, grew from a free mailout to a newsstand magazine that reaches over 40,000 readers (grossing in the neighborhood of a million dollars that year), Saban started to reap the rewards of his dedication to 14th Street and below. He became recognized as ‘the Boswell of the night‘ by New York magazine and ‘the Noel Coward of the ‘80s’ by Newsweek. Publicists started returning his calls, though he didn’t always return theirs, and people started recognizing the ‘nobodies’ he insisted on writing about as nobodies worth knowing.

“Saban goes out every night of the week, only rarely awarding himself a night off, which means going to only one or two parties instead of the usual three to five. He’s one of the few predictable facets of New York nightlife — you know that at every major event, no matter what else happens, you’ll find him there, skulking around and observing with a crisp understatement. Saban doesn’t need to make a spectacle of himself; the spectacle is all around him, and his job is to report it, drawing the line only when he feels the information might interfere with his readers’ future fun. Sometimes Saban seems like Marcello Mastroianni in 8 1/2: besieged by swooning and pleading people cooing his name as he calmly tries to figure his next creative move.

Greta Gerwig‘s decision to direct a period-piece adaptation of Louisa May Alcott‘s Little Women strikes me as less than fully exciting, mainly because it seems as if too many others have gone down this path.

There was a recent TV adaptation of Little Women — a poorly-reviewed miniseries that debuted last month on PBS, having begun on the BBC last December. A faithful historical costumer, set in Massachusetts and New York between 1868 and 1871.

There’s also a forthcoming present-day indie version with Lea Thompson, opening in late September.

Add to these the Gillian Armstrong, Mervyn LeRoy and George Cukor versions (released in ’94, ’49 and ’33 respectively) and you have a total of five Little Women adaptations.

Gerwig’s version, reportedly to he produced by Sony/Columbia and costarring Emma Stone, Meryl Streep, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh and Timothee Chalamet, will be the third recent effort and the sixth overall.

I’d be lying if I said the Gerwig project didn’t deflate me to some extent. A recent draft of her script, dated May 2018, is pure Alcott and pure period.

On one hand I’m presuming that the Lady Bird helmer, at the peak of her powers right now, will do well with the material. Her Little Women will naturally get much more attention and will easily dominate the other three in terms of likely critical respect, theatrical bookings, promotional backing, etc.

Early yesterday I had been given bad info that her version would be contemporary and set in Sacramento a la Lady Bird — another ensemble, a less singular story, broader scope. I liked that concept but it was quickly debunked.

A producer friend said this morning, “Why is Greta making a third version of Little Women on top of the other two?” A couple of HE commenters said the same thing.

You’re a famous, relatively flush industry bisexual, and you figure “why hide it?” So you mention it in an interview…done. Congrats to Tessa Thompson for laying her cards face up. Janelle Monae (who described herself two months ago as pansexual) is Thompson’s significant other…cool. But I’m trying to imagine making any kind of effort to explain my emotional feelings in this regard to a journalist. The scribe in this instance is Porter‘s Jane Mulkerrins. I wouldn’t hide what’s going on if asked, but I certainly wouldn’t share in any kind of detailed, deep-down way. If pressed I would cut my descriptions down to an absolute bare minimum, and even then I’d probably feel funny about it. I’m trying to think of the last time a fairly well-known actor or actress said to a top-tier journalist, “I’ve really flipped for this person and so here’s an attempt to describe how passionately I feel about him/her.”

Eugene Jarecki‘s The King (Oscilloscope, now playing) “is a nonfiction chronicle of the life and career of Elvis Presley, but it’s really a documentary-meditation-essay-rhapsody, one that captures, as almost no film has, what’s happening, right now, to the American spirit. What’s new — and revelatory — about The King apart from the soulful dazzle of Jarecki’s filmmaking, is that it asks, at every turn, a haunting question: When you take a step back and really look at what happened to Elvis Presley, what does [that] say about the rest of us?

“The King says a tremendous amount. In a way that no film has before it, The King captures how Elvis, while he was blazing new trails as an entertainer, was being eaten alive by forces that were actually a rising series of postwar American addictions.

“The healthy desire to be successful, and even to stay on top, evolved into an over-the-top lust to break the bank. Elvis started as a true artist, but in Hollywood his movies made a spectacle — almost a debased ritual — of commercial compromise. (You could chortle at a cheese doodle like “Blue Hawaii,” but you couldn’t argue with it, because it was the earliest incarnation of The Blockbuster Mentality.) And as an individual, Elvis, even as he remained a superstar, became the ultimate consumer. He ate and drank and ate some more, and sat on his gold toilet throne, and sealed himself off from the real world, like Howard Hughes on a junk-food binge that never ended. High on Dilaudid (i.e., opioids), Elvis shot out his TV screen with a gun. Today, he’d be on an all-night video-game bender.

“[Early on we’re shown] an inky-haired young rebel, who may have been the most handsome man of the 20th century, bring a vibratory erotic-ecstatic energy into the world (he didn’t invent that energy, but he channeled it, blended with it, and redefined it), and in doing so he changes the world overnight. He tilts it on its axis.

I reached out yesterday to author and 2001 costar Dan Richter, whom I hadn’t spoken to since profiling him in the L.A. Times “Calendar” section some 26 years ago. I wanted to know if he agreed with my concerns about the yellow-teal Chris Nolan version of 2001 that’s been playing in theatres. Writing from Provincetown, Dan said he hasn’t yet caught it theatrically but he did examine a YouTube comparison video that I sent him. “Nolan’s version seems to have a yellow cast to it,” he noted, “and lacks the cold, clear look of what I recall as the original.”

As I mentioned yesterday, my late father became friendly with Dan in the late ’80s. In July ’92 I visited Dan at his home near Pasadena, and then wrote that piece a couple of weeks later. Dan has written two books — “Moonwatcher’s Memoir” (’02) and “The Dream Is Over” (’12)

Dan Richter as “Moonwatcher” in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The current jacket art for Warner Home Entertainment’s forthcoming 4K UHD Bluray of 2001: A Space Odyssey is muddy and noirish looking — an arterial red close-up image of Keir Dullea’s Dave Bowman. Which is almost an exact visual opposite of the previous jacket art design that appeared last March, an image of the red-suited Bowman walking through a bright white passageway aboard the Jupiter-bound Discovery.

Why did WHE change the jacket art? My guess (just a guess) is that the glarey white-and-red cover was deep-sixed because it doesn’t agree with the subdued yellow-ish image from the same scene in the Chris Nolan-approved 4K version of 2001, which will “street” on 10.30.

If you haven’t been keeping up, Nolan’s yellow-teal “nostalgia” version elbowed aside a previous 4K UHD version of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1968 classic. 70mm prints of Nolan’s version opened in theatres a while back. The gleaming white 4K jacket-art image speaks for itself. Directly below is a grab from the scene in question as found on WHE’s 2007 Bluray. Below that is the same scene in Nolan’s un-restored version, which is the basis for the new 4K Bluray. The subdued yellowish tint is obviously darker and more subdued than the 2007 Bluray image, and is dramatically darker than the gleaming bright image from the three-month-old 4K jacket image. Do the math.

Following a limited 6.8 debut, Morgan Neville‘s Won’t You Be My Neighbor (Focus Features), a beloved doc about Fred Rogers, opened in 654 theatres this weekend, and took in nearly $3 million. As we speak the total gross is $7,488.082. It’ll crest the $10 million mark soon, probably within less than two weeks. Likewise Betsy West and Julie Cohen‘s RBG (Magnolia), their acclaimed doc about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has grossed $11,522,362 after 59 days in theatres.