Decades before woke-driven cancellations became all the rage in the late 20teens, arguably the first cultural death sentence was handed down to a pair of musicians — Lovin’ Spoonful singer, guitarist and co-founder Zal Yanovsky (12.19.44 – 12.13.02) and bassist Steve Boone.

Their crime was ratting out a pot dealer, Bill Loughborough, after they were popped for marijuana possession in San Francisco in May 1966. Fearful of being deported to Canada, Yanovsky (and also Boone apparently) fingered Loughborough. This led to Loughborough and certain members of the underground press ranting and raving over the uncoolness of such a move. It pretty much destroyed the group’s reputation.

I’m toying with an idea of seeing Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Eclisse at the Walter Reade this coming Saturday (6.6) at 8:30 pm. I’ve seen it on Bluray three or four times, but never in a theatre. I know that the projected Walter Reade version can’t hope to match the Bluray quality, but I’m thinking it might be….I don’t know, haunting in a way I’ve never quite experienced.

There’s a social distancing element in this 1962 film that gets me every time. We’re all living in an L’Eclisse-like world…a numbing, vaguely gnawing sense of isolation…an atmosphere of existential stillness and solitude…a portrait of angst and alienation. The 1962 classic is the climax of Antonioni’s alienation trilogy, the first two films being L’Avventura and La Notte.

Consider this excellent assessment of the film and the Bluray by The Dissolve‘s Scott Tobias.

In his My Voyage to Italy documentary, Martin Scorsese describes how this film haunted and inspired him as a young moviegoer, noting it seemed to him a “step forward in storytelling” and “felt less like a story and more like a poem”. He adds that the ending is “a frightening way to end a film…but at the time it also felt liberating. The final seven minutes of Eclipse suggested to us that the possibilities in cinema were absolutely limitless”.

Alfred Hitchcock‘s Jamaica Inn (’39), his last British-produced film before moving to Hollywood, was shot in immaculate black-and-white by Bernard Knowles (The 39 Steps, Sabotage, Secret Agent) and Harry Stradling (Suspicion, The Picture of Dorian Gray, A Streetcar Named Desire). And yet this colorized version isn’t altogether offensive. Because it has a certain beige-like, semi-drained quality — colors that appear soft, honey-toned, amber-ish — that was not uncommon in the early days of color. Or so I’ve been told.

A few years ago I was invited to share a nice West L.A. dinner with former Boston Herald critic James Verniere, whom I’ve known since the early ’80s. Verniere suggested Guido’s, an old-school haunt favored by over-50 types…the burnished spirit of Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles, red-leather booths, old-guy waiters, delicious garlic bread, etc. I loved it, and now I’m sad to report that Guido’s is history, finito, kaput, shuttered, dead as a doornail.

Verniere: “Yeah, I’m very upset. Guido’s was my hangout. I brought all my friends there. We had a farewell dinner a couple of weeks ago with my son and his girlfriend and several others. I got take-out on the last night it was open. Sad.”

Three and a half years ago a review of Seth Reiss‘s “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” a BlackListed screenplay, appeared on Scriptshadow.

The unnamed reviewer called it “500 Days of Summer meets La La Land meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets A Christmas Carol.”

Incomplete, misleading synopsis: “At the behest or suggestion of a magical GPS app built into a 1996 VW Passat, two thirtysomething strangers who’ve attended the same wedding — Margot Robbie‘s Sarah and Colin Farrell‘s David — embark on a Christmas Carol-like memory odyssey (okay, call it a ‘big, bold, and beautiful journey’ if you want) in which they both relive failed relationships and romantic encounters from their respective pasts.”

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (Sony, 9.19.25) is opening too early in “the season” to warrant serious intrigue or confidence. It costars Kevin Kline, Lily Rabe, Jodie Turner-Smith, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Billy Magnussen and Sarah Gadon.

This could be a commercial breakout for Kogonada, the South Korean-born, American-raised director (Columbus, After Yang).

The first story appeared today (6.3.25) in the New York Post. After a seven year-old boy was killed in a traffic accident in Gastonia, North Carolina, his parents were charged with involuntary manslaughter for having allowed the boy to walk to a nearby store with his 10-year-old brother — basically for failing to helicopter.

The second story is an HE account of an episode that happened when I was eight years old — an adventurous, six-mile hike I embarked upon with a seven-year-old girlfriend.

Recently arrived Venice Film Festival advice from a veteran journo…

“The festival adds two special vaporetto lines — Line 20 and Line MC — that you can use to get from the city to the Lido Casino. They will give you a card when you collect your press badge. This festival card allows you to ride free on these two lines during the entire festival. But ONLY on these two lines, not on any others — those you’ll still need to pay for.

Line 20 – https://lovevenice.net/vaporetto-routes-timetables/vaporetto-water-bus-line-20/

Line MC – https://actv.avmspa.it/sites/default/files/avm/navigazione/Actv_nav_linea_MC.pdf

“Because these lines only run during the 2 weeks of the festival, it’s hard to find specific info on them now. They only update in August. But they will show up on Google Maps. Line 20 runs regularly all day between the main island and the Lido. These are the only two lines that drop off at the festival location directly behind the Casino.

“All of the others drop off at the Lido S.M.E. station, which is a full 20-minute walk to the screening area plus you have to go through security when you get to the festival grounds, etc.

“From the Lido, Line MC goes to a station called Zattere, which is actually near where you guys live in Dorsoduro. However, Line MC only runs at night — from 6:30 pm until 1 am. It also runs during the day sometimes but not in the morning. And that schedule won’t be out until August.

“Secondly, Line 20 (which is the main line that runs all day) ONLY goes from San Zaccaria (at San Marco) to the Lido Casino and back. So if you want to catch this in the morning every day you have to get over to the San Zaccaria station, which is a good 30-minute walk from your Dorsoduro apartment. That or you’ll have to pay for another vaporetto line to get there.”

Update: I’ve just bought a one-week vaporetto pass, and I’ll probably get another one for the second week. All I’ll need to do to avoid the long walk is to jump on Line #1 at Ca Rezzonico. Line #1 goes from Ca Rezzonico to San Zaccaria every morning, and frequently…easy.

“The first screening usually starts at 8:30 am every day. Sometimes at 8:15 and sometimes at 8:45. The boat takes 20 minutes. The last morning boat you can take leaves at 7:45 am. If you catch the next one at 8:15 am you won’t make it to the screening on time. The first boats — 7:15, 7:30, 7:45 am — are ALWAYS full during the festival, and there is always a huge line of people, including students, just trying to catch the boats so they can get a good spot from which to stare at the red carpet all day.

“We’ve had fights with these gawkers and lookie lous because we can’t wait in the line and need to get to our screenings. There is also a very early boat at 6:45 am, but only one.

“I recommend to everyone coming to the Venice Film Festival to stay somewhere within a 10-15 minute walk to the San Zaccaria station. This way you won’t have to pay any extra money for extra vaporetto boats or won’t get caught in the wasted time going to/from your apartment all the way to the Lido island where the festival takes place. Everything happens there and there’s no other easy way to get there.

“After the morning rush it’s very, very easy to catch a boat any time of the day on Line 20. It’s just that early morning chaos and those giant queues that give us headaches every year.”

Last night I re-watched my Criterion Bluray of Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America, and I wish I could say I had a good time. Alas, the viewing didn’t quite work because this 1985 film is too well remembered. I knew all the dialogue before it was spoken, verbatim:

“I chose an orange tile, burnt orange”…”And by the way our hairpiece secret is off”…”I can’t hear ya”…”I heard you say that, schmucks come see Wayne Newton…I like Wayne Newton….that makes me a schmuck?”…”Santy Claus took care of everything”….”You couldn’t change your life on 100,000 dollars?”

Not to mention the opening Rex Reed-on-The Larry King Show riff about suggestive sexuality in King Vidor‘s The Fountainhead (’49).

You can’t “enjoy” a film when you know each and every line. You’re wasting your time.

Plus it was vaguely depressing to consider the fact that Brooks, one of the smartest and sharpest 20th Century funny guys and film directors in Hollywood history, never made anything better than Lost in America, and I really, really wanted to revel in what might have happened in its wake.

In her 4.18.85 review, Pauine Kael announced that “Brooks is on to something: satirizing the upper middle class from within, he shows the nagging terror along with the complacency.

“If he could pit [his ad agency character, David Howard] against a few other people as driven and talkative as he is — if a David had to fight for screen time and space with people every bit as competitive — there’s no telling what comedy heights Brooks could scale.”

As it turned out Brooks’ best-ever performances were as Howard and Broadcast News‘ Aaron Altman — a mid ’80s one-two punch that he never repeated or even came close to approximating again. At the end of the day Brooks-the-director had four peak achievements over a 15-year period — Modern Romance (’81), Lost in America, Defending Your Life (’91) and Mother (’96).

“Coddled” was originally published in The New Yorker on 4.18.85; later reprinted in Kael’s “State of the Art” [1985, E. P. Dutton]:

“As David, the L.A. advertising whiz who’s the protagonist of Lost in America, Albert Brooks is only a slightly exaggerated specimen of a large number of rising young businessmen and professional men — the insecure successes, the swollen-headed worriers. He’s the baby that we see inside those prosperous individuals.

“David has a bland moon-face surrounded by an aureole of tight, dark curls; it’s as if he wore his brains on the outside. He looks soft but he isn’t fat — just too well fed. If he were a contented man — say, a musician in a symphony orchestra who picked up extra income from the recording companies — he might be a likable dumpling. But David is an obsessive careerist who agonizes over every detail of his life.

“On the night before he expects to be made senior vice-president of an ad agency [he’s been with for several years], he lies awake wondering whether he and his wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty), the personnel director of a department store, have done the right thing in putting down a deposit on a four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar house.

“David still harbors the dream of dropping out– of taking to the road, like the heroes of Easy Rider. He’s torturing himself with anxieties, and he keeps waking the exhausted Linda to tell her his misgivings and be comforted by her reassurances.

“David has gotten himself so keyed up for the vice-presidency and has put so much energy into worry about whether he’s picking the right house, the right Mercedes, and the right boat to go with the big job, that when he’s finally in the boss’s office and is offered a different kind of promotion (a big new account that involves a transfer to New York) he doesn’t have the flexibility to deal with it.

“And so he becomes unhinged; he’s like an outraged infant. He howls, he rants. If he can’t have the title he wants, he doesn’t want anything. His explosion comes in waves: he quiets down for a second or two, and then his nasal whine starts up again.

“By the time the scene is over, David has insulted the boss and been fired from his hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job, and is in a state of shock that’s also a state of exaltation, of triumph. He rushes over to his wife’s store, demands that she quit, too, and wants to celebrate this moment of liberation by having sex right this minute on her desk in her glass-encased office.

“Lost in America is a satirical comedy about upper-middle-class infantilism and obnoxiousness — everything that David incarnates.

“Brooks, who directed the film and co-wrote the script (with Monica Johnson, who also worked on his two earlier projects, the 1979 Real Life and the 1981 Modern Romance), has developed a cool, balanced attitude toward himself as performer. The self-absorbed, ingrown David is quite different from the character that Brooks has played in other directors’ movies. Brooks was Cybill Shepherd‘s officious political co-worker in Taxi Driver; he was the unromantic bridegroom who collapsed on his wedding night in Private Benjamin; he was the driver in the prologue to Twilight Zone – The Movie; and he was close to inspired as the symphony conductor’s manager in the 1984 Unfaithfully Yours.

“Brooks is a remarkable comic actor — remarkable enough, perhaps, to delude people into thinking he’s just playing himself in Lost in America. It’s true that the camera often seems to be staring at David, revealing his innermost weakness. (He’s always sorry for himself.) And Brooks may have conceived this character because he saw the possibilities for this kind of maddening twerp in himself, but David is a fully created obsessive fool. He’s a highly verbal jerk who half knows he’s behaving like a jerk but can’t stop himself — he’s a self-conscious, pesky toddler at loose in the world.

“But though he’s tiresome to everybody in the movie he isn’t tiresome to us. David’s lines have been sharpened to a fatuous fine edge — he keeps us laughing at him. And Lost in America doesn’t dawdle; it makes its comic points and moves on.

“Hagerty is an ideal choice for David’s mate: you listen to her Linda and you know why she puts up with him. Her little-girl breathiness tells you. And the dim stress and panic of her gaze sugges that somewhere in the past she has been frightened and David is the Teddy bear she clutches. (These two are endlessly apologizing to each other; they do it so automatically they might be apologizing in their sleep.)

“Linda is bleakly pretty; she’s gaunt and hollow-eyed and wispy — she seems to be disappearing. David’s aggressiveness and his near-loony dependence on her don’t faze her. Life fazes her. She’s bored to depression by being cooped up in her office in the department store; she’s depressed by her whole conformist existence. But she’s too timid and worn down to come right out and express her resentment.

And yet curly-headed David, who’s crazy about Linda — kissing her and complimenting her ritually (if nothing else it occupies his mind) — never guesses at her feelings. When these two sell off their property, buy a luxury motor home, and, with the security of a nest egg of roughly a hundred and forty-five thousand, set out to find themselves and get in touch with the real America, the picture has the promising overtones of a Preston Sturges comedy.

“The movie makes a honey of a transition — a cut from the farewell party that David and Linda’s friends give them to a shot of David looking minuscule behind the wheel of the disproportionately large motor home as they leave L.A. The best visual joke in the picture is simply the recurring image of these two people who think themselves dropouts and Easy Riders as they move across the country encased in their thirty-foot Winnebago.

“Along the way, Brooks has a couple of sustained showpiece scenes where he plays off someone who can’t quite believe that this guy is actually saying what he’s saying. After the meek Linda blows their nest egg at the Desert Inn Casino, in Las Vegas, David goes to see the pit boss (well played by Garry Marshall, the director of The Flamingo Kid) and, using his advertising-man skills–and here he’s flexible–tries to persuade this smart, tough fellow to give back the money.

“The most ingenious of David’s gambits is that returning Linda’s losses can be good for business — that the occasion can thus be publicized as a casino with heart, one that periodically plays Santa Claus to losers. Spritzing one proposal after another, as if he’d been hired to prepare a campaign, David beams at the pit boss, he cajoles him; he doesn’t grovel, but you know he would if he thought it would have any effect. And his adversary is amused by the agility of David’s thought processes. (In a Preston Sturges comedy, the pit boss might have gone loco and actually adopted the Christmas-casino idea.)

“David also has an interview scene with an employment agent (Art Frankel) in a desolate small town in Arizona; when David tells the agent how much he was earning, the old guy is infatuated with the numbers and can’t resist tweaking him by repeating the amount over and over.

“David and Linda’s experiences in the real America turn out to be a two-week vacation, and the movie has a nice, quick wrap-up. In terms of David’s character, the end says all that needs to be said. And probably there’s no way for Brooks to develop the plot any further, because he sees David as hopeless–as upper-middle-class in every soft fibre of his anxious, coddled being.

“But the movie needs another turnaround, because although the ending is right for David, it isn’t right for Linda. Once she’s away from her hated job, she becomes prettier and more bouncy. She is perhaps even too adorable at times, but not glaringly. (Hagerty may look like the old-fashioned girl that suitors would bring nosegays to, but she’s a gifted, sexy comedienne.) Linda’s losing the money seems to free the movie, to open it, and she herself relaxes a bit. David becomes more compulsive than ever. His worst terror has been realized, and his mind never shuts down. He tries to hold his anger in, but when he’s looking out over Hoover Dam he can’t help yelling about the money, and once again the joke is in the disproportion between him and the physical setting.

“David keeps going over what has happened. He picks at it; he bleeds. But Linda, having done the unthinkable, is able for the first time to laugh at him. And there’s the suggestion that her blowing the money wasn’t a totally subconscious protest: in her tiny, touching voice, she maneuvered David away from his plan that they go to the Silver Bell Chapel to renew their marriage vows, and got him to take her to the Desert Inn. Afterward, her only explanation to David is ‘I held things in for so long I felt like I was going to burst.’ By talking her into quitting her job, David has unloosed something in her that Brooks and his co-writer don’t quite know what to do with.

“The movie is so good that it needs to flower; it’s like a Sturges idea that runs dry. But it’s still a nifty, original comedy.”

That’s chicken feed!

And how many of these films did Yahoo Entertainment’s Kelsey Weekman write about as she went along? Anyone can watch films on the Côte d’Azur in mid-May, but you also have to man up and journalistically explore cinematic meaning while plumbing the very depths of your soul.

Weekman isn’t so much a proverbial suffering scribe as an on-camera personality who does breezy lah-lah videos. (Light on the soul-plumbing.) She did, however, file a few video reports in Cannes so no harm nor foul.

My own modest tally of 22 films over 11 days paled alongside Tomris Laffly’s Herculean ordeal of catching 40 films within the same time frame, but how many of those 40 did Laffly-the-screening-slayer bang out 500-word reviews of? Screenings plus timely filings are what separate the men from the boys and the women from the girls.

Plus what about catching Directors Fortnight films deep in the bowels of the J.W. Marriott, Kelsey?

And you and your husband (what’s his story?) blew out of town before Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, easily the best of the festival, began to be shown? And you missed (or had no interest in) Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague? And you liked the grimly agonizing Sound of Falling? Good God in heaven…why?

I never knew “Cathy’s Clown“, released in April 1960, was solely written by the 23-year-old Don Everly, and that it was recorded live in a single take with Don and Phil Everly sharing a mike.

Born on 2.1.37, Don-the-tenor was roughly two years older than the soprano-ish Phil, who was born on 1.19.39.

“Cathy’s Clown” was certainly the Everly Brothers’ biggest-selling single, as well as the angriest and most emotionally grounded (not to mention the most self-loathing) of all their duets.

The lyrics describe a dude who is enraged and fuming about having been betrayed and humiliated by a duplicitous girlfriend.

The Everlys aside, the musicians included Hank Garland on guitars, Floyd “On the Rebound” Cramer on piano, Floyd Chance on bass and Buddy Harman on drums.

Phil became more and more of an arch-conservative as he aged. A heart ailment took him out on 1.3.14, at age 74. Don, an old-school liberal, passed in August 2021.

Maher vs. Mamet: The first 18 to 19 minutes of this discussion of Trumpism, bullshit, incredulity and criminality is fairly good stuff.

And yet Mamet still can’t pronounce Kamala Harris‘s first name properly — it’s comma-lah, for Chrissake. And his over-sized beret looks kinda dopey.

Agreed — Mamet-the-playwright was God in the ’80s and ’90s, but that cred is totally shot now. Okay, yes….just about everything Mamet says about the legacy media and drooling Joe Biden is fairly spot-on, but…

The whole discussion lasts just over 90 minutes.

I’ve been drawing water from my Wes Anderson past for over 25 years now. The glorious ’90s plus The Royal Tenenbaums, I mean.

The last time I was truly delighted, Wes-wise, was 11 years ago, which is when I first saw The Grand Budapest Hotel at the Berlin Film Festival. It’s been a rough decade since. For me, at least.

Budapest aside, I am a genuine, whole-hearted fan of only a handful of Wes’s films — Rushmore (which I’ve always adored like a brother), Bottle Rocket, the original black-and-white Bottle Rocket short, most of The Royal Tenenbaums. But I dearly love the Wes signage, specifically the shorts and parodies. The SNL Anderson horror film short is heaven.

I will always be on Team Anderson, and I will never resign. Partly because I’m…well, 85% to 90% certain that one day Wes will reach into his heart and decide to broaden his scope, or perhaps even re-think things somewhat. (Wes is still relatively young.) He has to — artists have no choice. I just hope and pray he’ll make more of an effort to blend his hermetic Wesworld aesthetic with the bigger, gnarlier, more complex world that’s been there all along.

For those who’ve never watched the original 13-minute Bottle Rocket short that played at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, please give it a looksee. It boasts some of that raggedy, roughshod quality that defined Wes’s aesthetic 32 or 33 years ago…a quality that will never return, of course, but it’s a nice contact high all the same.