Last night I decided to give Boogie Nights another try. I was somewhere between moderately upbeat, mixed and mezzo-mezzo when I first saw it 28 and 1/2 years ago, but I’m afraid it’s gone down in value. Sorry but it has.

The tension-filled, third-act drug deal scene is still terrific, but otherwise I found myself losing patience early on. The basic reason is that director-writer Paul Thomas Anderson show/ so little respect for his San Fernando Valley porn-world characters, and you start to lose patience as you ask yourself, “Jesus, is there anyone in this film who isn’t a figure of ridicule…who isn’t thoughtlessly smug or a dumb-ass, an asshole, a dupe or some kind of none-too-bright?

Yes, okay..there are several exceptions. Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore and Heather Graham‘s “Rollergirl” are okay hangs, plus the reasonably sensible second-fiddle characters played by Don Cheadle, Philip Baker Hall, Robert Ridgely and Nina Hartley as well as Thomas Jane‘s moustachioed, coked-up macho guy who loses his mind during the climactic drug deal with Alfred Molina.

But so many others are portrayed as foolish, stupidly vain, naive, not very sharp…gullible or goofy or indifferent 818 yokels who are lacking in fundamental smarts, taste and class. I just got tired of their one-dimensional banality.

I knew the drug deal scene was coming, of course, so I hung in there but man oh man…

Boogie Nights basically makes cynical, snide fun of this low-rent porn demimonde in the same way that Robert Altman‘s Nashville (’75) made fools and hicks out of all its characters except for Keith Carradine, Lily Tomlin and Allen Garfield.

Yesterday (2.10) Variety‘s Zack Sharf reported on a recent Chris Nolan and Timothee Chalamet discussion about this and that. One of the topics was the reception to Nolan’s Interstellar (’14). The spaced-out space saga costarred Chalamet, made a ton of money ($681 million worldwide) but was deeply despised by people of taste when it opened in the fall of ’14, and is still hated today.

Nolan’s analysis of the dislike for Interstellar completely avoided the sound-mix issues. He didn’t even mention the sound. Here’s what he said instead:

“You’re trying to be polite. The film was received in a slightly ambiguous way. It was a little bit sniffy. Some of the responses were a bit sniffy from critics and a little from audiences. It made very good money around the world. There was a sense of people not quite being…it sounds egotistical to say they weren’t ready…but [critics] weren’t ready for it from me.”

Not “ready” for it? Much or most of the dialogue was buried in a whomp=thromp sound mix that drove sensible people nuts.

From HE’s 10.27.14 review: “I was saying to myself as I sank into the second hour, ‘If I could hear more of the dialogue I might be into this a bit more, but all I’m really hearing beyond the odd word or phrase of occasional sentence is the whomp and the romp and the stomp. Given my limited comprehension of the dialogue due to this shitty sound system I have to say that I really hate hate HATE movies that make me feel dumb. And this film is making me feel like an effing moron. McConaughey and Hathaway and Damon are in hell on the ice planet of Hoth, and I’m in hell in the TCL Chinese.”

“What Sex With Chris Nolan Must Be Like,” a College Humor riff posted in 2014.

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Today’s grilling of Attorney General Pam Bondi has been, by any fair standard, thrilling television. The back-and-forth bickering, the hectoring and the insults have all been first-rate…acidic, bombastic, filled with spite and loathing.

N.Y. Times: “Bondi has accused the Democrats of ‘theatrics’ in her appearance at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. But the attorney general has been, by far, the loudest voice in the room. She has insulted several Democrats and has been repeatedly, if gently, blocked by Jim Jordan, a Republican and the chairman of the committee, from shouting over her questioners.

“An uncomfortable and dramatic moment. Under pressure from Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat, Bondi refuses to apologize over her actions in the case to victims of Jeffrey Epstein who are in the hearing room. Bondi, who appeared caught off guard, pivoted to attack Jayapal for trying to drag her ‘into the gutter.'”

It seems to me that the mainstream media is doing what it can to discreetly modify or otherwise play down particulars about yesterday’s mass school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia (ten dead including the wackjob trans shooter, 17 year-old Jesse Strang), largely because reporters and editors are afraid of casting any kind of negative shade upon the trans community.

The teenaged, now-dead Strang also killed his trans-supporting mother, Jennifer Strang.

The MM is also obeying the woke rules ny not speaking plainly about the now-dead Strang (jesseboy347), who, being 17, was born male in 2008 but had all kinds of issues, and began stating a preference for she/her pronouns in 2023, when he was 15.

N.Y. Times: “An early alert issued by the police had described the person believed to be behind the attack as a ‘female in a dress with brown hair,’ but they have not since provided any more information on the person’s identity.

X.com, I Meme Therefore I Am: “According to now-deleted Reddit posts by Strang, he had used psychedelic mushrooms, nearly set his house on fire, and ended up in a mental hospital. After he was released, he was reportedly seeking other psychedelic substances.”

🚨"He is a MAN. He is a boy. It is a MALE crime. But you wouldn't know that from watching the BBC, ITV or Sky News."

Julia Hartley-Brewer's scathing message to media outlets for telling the public "lies" about the sex of the suspect of the Canadian school shooter. @JuliaHB1 pic.twitter.com/uHzdzIaQ9O

— Talk (@TalkTV) February 11, 2026

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Snapped in the fall of ‘87…a two-bedroom, top half of a hillside home at 8682 Franklin Ave., hundreds of feet north of the Strip (corner of Sunset and Kings) with coyotes galore…my very first desktop computer outside of any workplace…the software was Wordstar, and it really wasn’t easy to figure out at first.

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“When was the last year that the internet felt good to you? I think everybody has different answers to this. Mine, I think, go fairly far back, maybe to the heyday of blogging. ‘Words and getting up to 40,000 hits on his blog a day’. At least before the moment when Twitter and Facebook went algorithmic.” — Ezra Klein‘s intro for “We Didn’t Ask for This Internet“, which was posted on 2.6.26.

I feel so grateful that I was around and column-ing back in the internet heyday of the late ’90s and early aughts. Every day I felt such a profound sense of peace and well-being…a sense of being plugged in and belonging to a soothing, crackling worldwide fraternity, and never did I feel so good about internet life as I did in the early to mid aughts, and particularly when I visited Paris internet cafes. There used to be dozens of them all over town. Some are still in business even today, although mainly for gaming.

One of my all-time favorites was located on rue Raivgnan, maybe a block north of rue d’Abesses. From 2000 to 2007 or ’08 it felt like one of the happiest places on the globe. Heavenly. I would plop down in front of a large screen with a good speedy modem and a just-purchased cappucino on a nearby table, and I wouldn’t leave for three or four hours. All was well. Ten years before the woke terror plague, which was triggered by #MeToo. No fear, only freedom. Connectivity itself felt like a wonderful Neverland paradise…a place for constant intrigue and adventure, and without algorithms or predatory extraction schemes.

Multiple persons of interest, are there?

Go to 13:40:

Was the roly-poly fathead kidnapper alone? Was he / she wearing mascara?? Where are the accomplices?

N.Y. Times, posted on Wednesday, 2.11.

HE comment: The unnamed food delivery guy from Rio Rico, a truck-stop town located 100 miles south of Tuscon…a marginal hand-to-mouther who was detained and questioned by the fuzz last night over the Nancy Guthrie disappearance…this unassuming fellow told reporters he’d never heard about the Guthrie hoo-hah? How thick of a gelatinous membrane do you have to be living inside to have never heard of a recent event that everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) is at least vaguely aware of? The man is either lying or out to lunch.

I can’t wait to hate-watch Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (Warner Bros., 2.13). I’m tasting the resins as we speak. Nobody despises 21st Century woke presentism in English historical dramas (i.e., the Bridgerton syndrome) more than yours truly. I almost feel tumescent about this.

THR’s David Rooney:

The New Yorker’s Justin Chang:

JB Pritzker will not push Gavin Newsom aside in the 2028 Democratic nomination race because deep down American voters (even the corpulent ones) just can’t settle into electing a serious beefalo chunkbod for U.S. President.

Before Donald “Jabba the Hut” Trump the last seriously overweight Oval Office occupant was William Howard Taft. The relatively trim aesthetic lasted all the way from Teddy Roosevelt to Joe Biden. There’s a reason for that.

HE to Joseph McBride (Facebook, early this morning):

At the beginning of his big angry red-felt pool table explanation rant, Sydney Pollack twice repeats the word “let’s.” Three times in all. He says “okay, Bill, let’s…let’s…let’s cut the bullshit, okay?”

And you left out that odd spitty sound…that Bix Beiderbicke pursed-trumpet-lips “pyht!”…call it a conclusive emphasis sound…Pollack says “her door was locked from the inside, the police are happy, end of story…pyht!”

Posted four or five hours ago: “Veteran homicide investigator Paul Ciolino, who has worked with 48 Hours and CBS News as an on-air expert, says key elements of a true kidnapping aren’t present in the Nancy Guthrie case. With more than 25 years appearing on hundreds of programs across major U.S. and Canadian networks, Ciolino points to the lack of negotiations, forensic evidence, and planning signs as major red flags.”