I can’t be led around on a leash during the mid-November Vietnam visit. It was okay last year as I didn’t know anything, but not again. I’ve told the Vidotour guys that I want my freedom for at least one day, due respect. “The basic idea is that I do not want to fly from Danang to Nha Trang on Thursday, 11.21,” I told the chief rep. “I want to either drive or at least take a train between Hoi An/Danang and Nha Trang.

Sandra Nettelbeck‘s Last Love is a gentle, agreeably low-key relationship drama, set in Paris, about a platonic affair between a widowed, 80-something professor (Michael Caine) and a younger French lady (Clemence Poesy). Nettelbeck directed and adapted Francoise Dorner‘s “La Douceur Assassine” into a screenplay. Justin Kirk and Gillian Anderson play Caine’s somewhat snide and snippy kids, and Jane Alexander plays his deceased wife (i.e., she pops in for an occasional ghost scene). Being a fan, I called Nettelbeck in Berlin yesterday morning to chat for a bit.

Last Love director-writer Sandra Nettelbeck.

Deadline‘s Mike Fleming is reporting that Paramount and Skydance execs are “sweet” on Attack The Block‘s Joe Cornish to direct the third Star Trek film. A great payday for Cornish if it happens, but the the ability to be a kind of visionary traffic cop on a costly, CG-laden Trek film is exactly what Cornish has shown he’s not adept at doing. He’s looking for a big-time career and that’s fine (he co-wrote fucking Ant Man), but when I think of Cornish I think of a guy who was clever enough to make a good monster-invasion film on a nickle-and-dime budget.

I’m about to sit down with a screener of Dheeraj Akolkar‘s Liv and Ingmar: Painfully Connected, which was first seen 13 months ago at the 2012 New York Film Festival. The doc is set to open on 12.13 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe on 65th Street in Manhattan and in Los Angeles at Landmark’s Nuart. I have to say that the gentle piano music on the trailer soundtrack has me worried. Akolkar “directed” and “wrote” but the film is obviously Liv Ullmann‘s recollection of her long relationship with Bergman and not, say, some impartial God’s-eye view. A woman’s film, in short, about one of the most worshipped filmmakers of the 20th Century who…oh, yes, that’s right, was quite depressed and gloomy and neurotic for much of his life. And he liked the ladies.

The general attitude is that you don’t want people watching your film at home if you can help it. Too many distractions, too easy to pause or fast forward. You want them fully engaged in a theatre, staying with it, in it. But I felt a bit distracted when I saw In A World in a theatre, and I’m wondering if this is the kind of film that almost plays better on a disc because you can cantake a short break when a sluggish moment happens and then come back to it 20 or 30 minutes later without losing anything. Lord knows that are films that have to be seen in a theatre (Gravity, All Is Lost, 12 Years A Slave), etc. You know that when older Academy members pop in 12 Years A Slave at home they’re just going to fast-forward through the rough parts.

All I do with this column, day after day after effing day, is lay it out there as honestly and openly as I can. Knowing full well that the p.c. brownshirts will be after me with baseball bats for a good portion of whatever I post. It goes in waves and cycles. Sometimes I just shrug it off and other times it gets to me. Lately I walk around in fear. I’m so terrified of the next trauma that I’m almost wimpishly polite with everyone. If I can order a cappucino at Le Pain Quotidien and pay for it without somebody looking at me cross-eyed I almost weep with relief. If I have to step around a dog I say “excuse me.” I don’t step on cracks in sidewalks or on rocks of any kind because they could be land mines or camoflauged anacondas or boa constrictors.

I’m getting really sick of arguing all the time with guys like Kris Tapley. (Tapley is the new David Poland these days — surly, dismissive, knows it all.) Last night two friends of that gay guy who lives upstairs and loudly giggles and cackles every morning like clockwork around 7 am called to complain that I had hurt his feelings. “But I didn’t identify or even vaguely allude to who he is,” I replied. “I just wrote that the giggling was incessant and that it was driving me nuts.” That awful, awful episode when I reported about that kid with some kind of debilitating condition who couldn’t control himself in that Manchester, Connecticut theatre…it took me two or three days to recover from that one. If I had it to do over again I wouldn’t have used the word “platypus” in the comment thread but otherwise I was simply stating that theatres are churches and movie-watching is like Holy Communion and that everyone needs to respect that. The mob hate…Jesus!

Corey Feldman has written a tell-all book called “Coreyography.” About halfway through his HuffPost chat with Ricky Camilleri, Corey Feldman responds to his reputation as a “Poster Boy For Fallen Child Stars.” Quote: “I don’t blame anybody. I don’t blame myself. Life is what life is. Things happen the way they’re meant to [happen]. And at the end of the day, I’m eternally grateful that I’m still here, that I’m still working [and whatnot]. I’m eternally happy. I feel like a blessed man. You have to keep moving forward, keep reinventing yourself, keep recreating yourself.” It gets better around the 15-minute mark. “Michael Jackson [wasn’t] a child molester”? Really?