Last night I blew off an invite to the LA Live premiere of Robert Rodriguez‘s Machete Kills in order to catch a Beverly Hills screening of the PBS doc Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train A Comin’…sorry. Who am I kidding, “sorry”? I can’t stand Rodriguez. Then I read Alfonso Duralde’s Wrap review and knew I’d made the right call. “Machete Kills opens with a fake trailer for a not-yet-produced third installment, then spends the next 100-plus minutes making a case for plunging a knife into the franchise’s heart,” his review begins.

I was about to do another shutdown riff via this new Jon Stewart clip, but it’s more important to mention something about TheWrap that’s been irking me for some time. The relentless pop-ups and automatic page refreshings are becoming more and more infuriating. Now with IOS 7 it seems even worse. Yesterday when I tried to read a Wrap story on my iPhone the page auto-refreshed itself a couple of times and then froze on some ad or whatever, hiding the content of the page under a dark gray shadow. The fuck? I tried eliminating the ad thing and failed. They need to jigger things so you can surf the site without all this ad crap. I haven’t time for this shite.

My heart surged when I noticed that the title of this 12 Years A Slave teaser is “Fight Back.” I presumed that meant it would show that slammin’ scene in which Chiwetel Ejiofor, as kidnapped free-man-turned-slave Solomon Northrup, stands up to Paul Dano‘s sadistic John Tibeats character and then pounds the shit out of him. This scene isn’t just cathartic — it’s ten times more satisfying than all of the bullshit payback scenes in Django Unchained rolled into one. But the teaser doesn’t show it. It’s just a standard montage teaser with a two-second clip of the beatdown scene (from 24 to 26-second mark). Why call it “Fight Back” then? 12 Years A Slave opens on 10.18.

In a just published issue of Vanity Fair, Mia Farrow “discusses her relationship with Frank Sinatra, telling Maureen Orth. that Sinatra was the great love of her life, adding that ‘we never really split up.’ When asked point-blank if her [alleged] biological son with Woody Allen, Ronan Farrow, may actually be the son of Frank Sinatra, Farrow answers, ‘Possibly.’ No DNA tests have been done. When Orth asks Nancy Sinatra Jr. about Ronan’s being treated as if he were a member of her family, Sinatra answers in an e-mail, ‘He is a big part of us, and we are blessed to have him in our lives.'”

One of my all-time favorite political thrillers is Phillip Noyce‘s Clear and Present Danger (’94), and for that I’ll always respect and admire the late Tom Clancy for his having written the 1990 novel that gave birth to the film. It always seemed ironic that Clear and Present Danger‘s basic plot seemed inspired by Iran-Contra, and yet Clancy was a classic Reagan-admiring NRA conservative who held Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in high esteem, or so I read. The guy was only 66.

I didn’t have much of a problem with Stephen Frears‘ Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight (HBO, 10.5) when I saw it last May in Cannes. I wasn’t moved to write about it (and that in itself says something) but it’s a nicely ordered, well acted (particularly by Christopher Plummer and Frank Langella as Justice John Harlan and Chief Justice Warren Berger), moderately mid-tempo account of how the Supreme Court dealt with Muhammud Ali’s 1971 appeal of his conviction for refusing induction after his local draft board rejected his application for conscientious objector classification based on his Muslim convictions. It was touch and go at first, but the Supremes reversed the conviction, finding that the government had failed to properly specify why Ali’s application had been denied.

Shawn Slovo‘s script tells us that the behind-the-scenes hero of this deliberation was Harlan’s assistant Kevin Connolly (Benjamin Walker). Harland at first didn’t see a lot of merit in Ali’s argument, and Berger, a staunch ally of President Richard Nixon, was foursquare against it. But fairness won out. This is an intellectually driven film, dealing with personal conflicts and corruptions from time to time but mostly focusing on the pro and con arguments. But because it’s basically a procedural about a hot-button issue (mixed in with a vague sense of the political tumult of the early ’70s), it feels oddly impassioned but constricted. Muhammud Ali never appears except in news footage. But it’s not half bad. Certainly by the standards of an intelligent, honorably crafted HBO film. Give it a pass.

I hate being late with whatever I’m trying to do. I hate procrastinating, but I seem to succumb…well, not every day but too damn often. There are always five or six general topics that everyone is riffing on, and I really hate that others have jumped into material that I’m just getting into. But on some days I can’t seem to make myself get up and do it. Damn.

My phone interview with producer and former studio chief David Picker came off without a hitch. The subject was “Musts, Maybes and Nevers“, his just-published book which was celebrated last night at a party in Beverly Hills. We kicked it around, of course, but it was mainly an excuse to hope from topic to topic. There was so much to get into. My admiration of Richard Lester‘s Juggernaut (’74), which Picker produced. My evolved opinion of Lenny and particularly Dustin Hofffman‘s performance. George Stevens‘ The Greatest Story Ever Told and the hardening of the creative arteries that happens to almost every filmmaker. The possibility that Paramount might boot Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street into 2014. Picker’s writing habits. Robert Altman, Stanley Kramer, et. al. Again, the mp3.

In a vitriolic 10.1 piece about the government shutdown, Esquire‘s Charles P. Pierce states that “the first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.” We did this? The Midwestern and Southern dumbshits who elected Tea Party wackos to the House of Representatives did this. The people who don’t know that the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare are one and the same did this. Rural ignorance did this.

Earlier this evening I attended a party for the legendary producer and senior studio exec David Picker and his just released tell-all, “Musts, Maybes and Nevers.” We’re scheduled to chat tomorrow around noon. The stories in Picker’s book are flavorful and well-shaped, and the prose is smooth as silk. Picker began at United Artists when Eisenhower was president. He brought the James Bond franchise into the fold with Dr. No in ’62; later A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Midnight Cowboy and Last Tango in Paris. In the early ’70s he produced Juggernaut, Lenny and Smile. As Paramount Pictures honcho from ’76 to ’70 he presided over Saturday Night Fever, Grease and Ordinary People. He then produced three Steve Martin films — The Jerk (’79) Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (’82) and The Man With Two Brains i(’83). As Lorimar Prods. chief in the early ’80s he oversaw S.O.B., Being There and Escape to Victory. And then at Columbia Pictures Picker greenlit Hope and Glory, School Daze, Vice Versa, Punchline and True Believer. He produced The Crucible for Twentieth Century Fox in 1996. Picker stands tall, looks great, seems undiminished.

(l.) producer Larry Mark; (r.) “Musts, Maybes and Nevers” author David Picker.

My new 60-inch Samsung plasma (PN60-F5300A) arrived today. I hooked it up and figured out all the complex (and occasionally frustrating) stuff myself. Okay, I called Samsung about a couple of things. Every Bluray I’ve popped in over the last couple of hours looks much, much better than before. A definite uptick from the 50-inch Vizio, which is now in the garage. And no gray windowbox bars — they default to black.

You’ll notice that these highly educated hinterland types are all saying “no” to Obamacare because of the word that precedes “care.” On top of which Affordable Care sounds more…well, affordable.