I cant find any YouTube excerpts from Johnny Mandel‘s mournful, low-key score for The Last Detail (’73), so I shot the outdoor picnic scene from Act Three. The tone of sadness and resignation…God! This isn’t music that instructs you what to feel but is sitting right beside the viewer, experiencing the same journey in exact synchronicity.

…but if I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Caitlin Jenner, this is how I might look. If I were to pull the trigger, I’d probably rename myself Jessica Wells. Honestly? I don’t think I look too bad.

I was going to ignore Channing Tatum and Reid Carolin‘s Dog (UA releasing, 2.18). I love dogs but movies looking to “get” me with emotionally simplistic strategies…later. Then I was told that Dog has an anti-woke streak, and I said “really?” Because you’d never know this from reading the reviews — not the slightest mention of any left-skewing political-cultural attitude. Then I stumbled upon Kyle Smith‘s National Review assessment (2.18), and lo and behold…

“The politically asymmetrical nature of which Americans dismiss veterans is not lost on Carolin and Tatum, and much of the movie amounts to walking a gauntlet through the craziness of Progressive America.

“When Briggs (Tatum) leaves Lulu the dog in a cool, safe car at night, an animal-rights twerp seeks to break a window with a rock to let in some air, until Briggs advises him why this would be a bad idea. ‘Of course you threaten violence, you redneck!’ says the self-appointed animal savior. ‘You’re the one with a rock!’ replies Briggs, and the scene is a wonderful distillation of 2020s progressive mania.

“Briggs (Tatum) goes to a bar to try to pick up a date, but instead he gets an earful from every young wokette: ‘So at what point did you realize you were just a pawn of Big Oil?’ asks one.

“In San Francisco Briggs gets arrested for a hate crime because the dog attacks a Muslim. The cop who processes him, played with impeccably unearned arrogance by the excellent Bill Burr, brags that he, too, served, but it turns out that he was…an M.P. Briggs clearly thinks of these guys as the hall monitors of the military, practically the Hillary Clinton Brigades. “Oh, you were an M.P.?” he says nonchalantly.

Tatum, who in 2017 starred in a hilarious Amazon Prime series, Comrade Detective, that did to Communism what Lulu does to Taliban fighters, gives off a strong sense that he’s turning right these days, at least culturally speaking.

“In a recent interview, he chafed at the suggestion that he was making a movie for middle America. ‘I would not call myself a liberal. I would not call myself a Republican or a Democrat. I’m not political,”’ Tatum told the Associated Press. ‘I do believe that the stereotypes and the generalizations can get us in trouble.

I felt lulled and charmed by Lisa Hurwitz‘s The Automat, which I caught at last September’s Telluride Film Festival. It’s just a memory-lane trip, but smartly assembled and a very pleasant watch.

It’s an easy thing, it turns out, to rekindle the lore of those fine, professionally prepared food dishes and exceptionally good cups of coffee (not to mention slices of pie and cake) at popular prices, accessible through those little window slots that you’d drop coins into.

Call it a slightly melancholy saga about a great, enterprising idea that had its day — a franchise business that caught on, thrived, peaked between the ’30s and ’60s, and then started to go away in the ’70s and ’80s.

Managed by the Horn and Hardart company but located only in New York (40 locations!) and Philadelphia, automats were also great hang-outs for office workers, students, book readers, job seekers, workers on the go, poetry writers and the financially pressed.

Remember Dustin Hoffman sharing a fond Automat recollection with Justin Henry in Kramer vs. Kramer? Hollywood’s best Automat recall can be savored in Delbert Mann‘s That Touch of Mink (’62), a bizarre sex comedy about the priggish Doris Day struggling (at age 39!) to avoid having unwed sex with Cary Grant. There’s an Act One scene in which Day’s best friend (Audrey Meadows) slips her free food through the automat windows. There’s also a beautiful evening shot that captures one of the franchise’s midtown facades with that luscious red neon lettering.

The Automat is now playing at Manhattan’s Film Forum, and at three Laemmle theatres locally including West L.A.’s The Royal (which hasn’t been “royal” for quite a few years).

Max Seddon (https://www.ft.com/max-seddon) is the Moscow Bureau Chief of the Financial Times.

As we all know, Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling was cancelled a couple of years ago by the trans community. Her sin was having said that biologically-natural women (i.e., women born with female genitalia and raised as a female) have a certain gravity or authority over trans women — “”If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased,” Rowling wrote. “I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.”

Trashed as a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) who had “attacked” the trans community, Rowling was trans-hated before David Chappelle took her place last year.

Three days ago “T. Greer” tweeted these images from a N.Y. Times video ad being displayed in the Washington, D.C. metro — imagine the deranged chutzpah of the Times advertising team to actually come up with this ad. [HE to readership: This is not a joke — this is a real ad.]

From “Somehow, Trump Is a Tough Act to Follow,” a Gail Colins-Bret Stephens chat (2.21.22) (“The Conversation”):

Gail Collins: “On the domestic front, for all my paranoia about Covid, I’ve been remembering when I was a kid and everybody was terrified of polio. First-graders hearing stories from their parents about all the children who died or were disabled for life. Then the terrible, terrible time when AIDS seemed to be a potential death sentence for so many in the gay community. And when it comes to many less dire illnesses, science also found new cures, or at least effective ways to control them.”

Bret Stephens: “Very true. But here’s what’s depressing: When the Salk vaccine came out, nearly everyone celebrated and got vaccinated, and polio all but disappeared from the developed world. When scientists developed antiretrovirals to manage H.I.V., people living with the virus embraced the new medication as the lifesaver it is. Yet here we are with a vaccine that can save you from dying or going to the hospital with Covid, and tens of millions of people refuse to help themselves by taking it. Which goes to prove that no pandemic is deadlier than stupidity.”

Here’s a portion of a hand-written “aerogramme” that I wrote to my parents on 5.3.76. I was living with girlfriend Sophie Black (now a renowned poet and Columbia University prof) in a small studio at 9 rue Gregoire du Tours. I was only three and a half years old at the time.

…if a semblance of All In The Family could return as a present-tense social-issues Hulu series, except Archie could be…well, a bit like myself…sensible liberal older guy, perhaps an editor & founder of an online publication or web business of some kind, grappling with the pressures of HR woke terror in the workplace, clashing with Millennial or Zoomer daughter and BIPOC son-in-law who are living with him while they save for a house…basically Hollywood Elsewhere meets Norman Lear…except Archie Wells wouldn’t be as smug or under-educated as Carroll O’Connor was…it could write itself.