It always bothers me when old-time Hollywood guys use the word “called” in a certain context. Older actresses and foreign-born filmmakers never do this — it’s only and always the former big-shot males of age 70 or older. Guys whose careers have slowed down a bit and who are looking to gently remind the listener that they were once flush with success. It happens when they mention a famous film, play or TV show that they had something significant to do with. Instead of saying “and then we put our heads together and made Coming Home,” they’ll say “and then we put our heads together and made a film called Coming Home.” “Called” is code for “the film/play/TV show had a huge impact and our lives were greatly enhanced as a result, even to this day.” Nothing criminal in a little boasting — it’s just irksome. It’s classier to avoid the embellishment. Listen to Martin Scorsese when he talks about the old days. He’ll never say “and then we made a film called Mean Streets” — he’ll just say “and then we made Mean Streets.” No biggie.

“Bad behavior online is so common that it has generated its own typology of abuse. ‘Flaming’ is to engage in a deeply personal and angry war of words across an online discussion. ‘Griefing’ is repeatedly to torment someone, mostly through abuse in an online forum. A ‘troll’ is someone who intentionally disrupts online communities, most often under a pseudonym, and the activity of ‘trolling’ is so widespread that the online Urban Dictionary lists dozens of rival definitions — ‘being a prick on the internet because you can is the most succinct.” — from a 5.23 Financial Times piece by John Sunyer. I’ve been flamed a few times and even griefed once or twice, and Lord knows HE has seen its share of pricks and trolls. But things haven’t been too bad around here lately, which is nice. Truly malignant commenters have been relatively few and far between. I’ll zotz someone every so often but that’s par for the course.

I was going to catch Bryan Singer‘s X-Men: Days of Future Past at the Pathe Wepler tonight but I think I’ll wait until tomorrow — too popular, long lines, sold-out houses, etc. $90.7 million domestic by tonight, $110 million by tomorrow night (bigger than Avatar), $171 million foreign, $261.8 million worldwide. There’s almost a 20-point difference between the 91% Rotten Tomatoes score vs. the 74% Metacritic rating. That means there’s a little grumbling going on so what’s the HE verdict? It’s okay to rave, of course, but does anyone hold with Amy Nicholson’s view that “there’s not a line of dialogue that isn’t exposition, as though screenwriter Simon Kinberg feared that if he stopped drilling home his messages about peace, love, and social panic, we might think we were simply [looking] to have fun…it’s like discovering your box of Milk Duds is really chocolate-covered vitamins.” Or Robbie Collin’s opinion that it “squanders both of its casts, reeling from one fumbled set-piece to the next…it seems to have been constructed in a stupor, and you watch in a daze of future past.” A stupor?

Not long before Friday night’s Isla Vista mass killing, 22 year-old Elliot Rodger apparently sent a 106,000-word biography called “My Twisted World” to a Santa Barbara TV station. Here, apparently, is the document. It makes for very creepy reading. Sad, curious, at times horrifying. A tolerable writer, Rodger relates his story in relatively clear terms. I’ve never read an explanation of a mass killing quite as personal or elaborate as this one.

Rodger was very much a child of the entertainment industry and no stranger to occasional privelege. Hotshot industry dad (documentarian, second-unit director, photographer) and an actress stepmom. Even his shrink, Dr. Charles Sophy, is an author who’s appeared several times on the tube.