Seven and two-thirds years ago or more precisely during the May 2007 Cannes Film Festival, I took my dp friend, Svetlana Cvetko, to a special cool kidz party at the Carlton. I forget what the promotional deal was but only Gael Garcia Bernal had a film playing at the festival that year — i.e., Deficit. Alejandro G. Inarritu had screened Babel there the year before, and his follow-up, Biutiful, didn’t play at Cannes until 2010. Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men had opened the previous December. Giullermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labrynth, one of his finest, had screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. I’m not sure if this was taken with a cell-phone camera or not, but remember how crappy phone photos used to look back then? The very first iPhone had been unveiled by Steve Jobs only four months before this shot was taken, and the first models went on sale in the U.S. on 6.29.07.

The finale of Madmen will be upon us before you know it, and once again Don Draper‘s refusal to grow even modestly-proportioned sideburns is driving me up the wall. I said this last year and I’m saying it again — nobody who worked in any kind of creative circle in the late ’60s wore their hair exactly as they did in the early days of the Kennedy administration. Nobody. Not even seriously constipated, butt-plug guys like Draper avoided sideburns. Even the worst of us keep up appearances, and appearances in the late ’60s demanded a slightly fuller, hairier look…period. The no-sideburns thing has now become a huge Matthew Weiner affectation or hang-up or whatever. It’s out of time and almost surreal. It’s almost on the level of one of the Big Chill characters still wearing a late ’60s hairstyle in 1984 or Matthew Modine‘s Private Joker going through basic training with longish civilian hair. Not quite but almost.

Last night I popped in the Criterion Bluray of Terrence Malick‘s Days of Heaven (’78), intending to watch a half-hour’s worth before crashing. But I couldn’t stop watching. It’s only 94 minutes long but it feels “longer” in the richest sense of that term. The story is as much of an American tragedy as anything Theodore Dreiser ever wrote. I remember how floored I was after seeing it for the first time at Cinema 1 on Third Ave., and how a week later the bartender at the Spring Street Bar & Grill (where I was working at the time) was frowning and calling it piss poor. It’s a masterpiece — one of the saddest, earthiest and most visually ravishing films ever made. Imagine if Malick…no, don’t imagine it. The guy who shot this film in mid to late ’76 and then worked on the editing nearly all of ’77 and half of ’78 is gone…over the hill and into the next county. Malick will never blend his visual sense and editing techniques with a real (i.e., involving) story and compelling characters ever again. Okay, it’s theoretically possible but artists don’t backtrack — they can’t go home again.

To hear it from Variety‘s Jay Weissberg, Saverio Costanzo’s Hungry Hearts goes nuts around the midway point. Pic does engagingly enough when focusing on the beginnings of a serious relationship between the spirited Adam Driver and the nowhere-near-hot-enough Alba Rohrwacher, but when a baby comes along…look out.

As things turn weird and then malevolent, “viewers will begin to notice all the absences,” Weissberg notes. “The lack of friends, the fact that Mina doesn’t have a job, or that Jude never seems to be at his. Jude’s deferral to Mina’s peculiarities, at the risk of his son’s life, beggars belief, given how long it takes before he wakes up, and the ending is especially disappointing.

There was a period between my 20th and 21st birthday when I had no job or goals or academic engagement…nothing. I was in my Bhagavad Gita mystical phase, no fooling, except the constant urge to party and frolic and basically pursue the spiritual pretty much dominated everything. Partying and then recovering the next day so I could party again the next night…well, there was actually more to it than just that. It’s not that I didn’t try to have a kind of “life.” I would land a job I hated and then lose that job. I read the New York Times every day but I ingested a lot of substances and did a lot of sleeping and day-dreaming. I dabbled as a dealer of pot and hallucinogens. Occasional tripping, hitchhiking, chasing girls, wherever the day took me…bars, parties, music and especially (this was huge) lying totally ripped on a floor with two smallish Marantz speakers on either side of my head.

Chance Browne painting of Seir Hill Road in Wilton, Connecticut. My parents’ home was around the bend and down the road a piece.

At some point my parents decided to strongly communicate their disfavor. They wanted me to understand that this lifestyle had nowhere to go but down so they kicked me out of their comfortable Cape Cod-style home in Wilton, Connecticut. I would crash here and there but occasionally I’d have nowhere to go. So I’d show up at the Cape Cod around midnight or 1 am and throw pebbles at my sister Laura’s window. To keep me out every night my father would lock the garage basement door plus the dining-room door that led to the basement stairs, so I needed Laura to let me in. After a couple of taps she’d come to the window and then meet me downstairs. I remember I had to raise the sliding garage doors one inch at a time so as to not make any noise. Laura and I would tiptoe upstairs in pitch black and I’d sleep inside the closet in my room. My parents both worked during the day and gone by 9 am so I’d come down around 10 am or so and get some breakfast, etc.

Apologies for not posting a note of lament and respect yesterday for the late Lesley Gore, and particularly for the ballsy instinct that led to her recording “You Don’t Own Me,” a 1963 chart-climber than came to be regarded as a landmark feminist anthem. Quoting from an app.com piece that popped yesterday: “In an era when being a silent girlfriend to the football captain was a teenager’s dream and the feminist movement was still underground, Gore’s ‘You Don’t Own Me‘ in 1963 became a girl-power statement of confidence, independence, and sexual rebellion.”

I’ve thought it over and I respect all the “down to the sea in ships” Oscar handicappers (13 on Gold Derby) who are still predicting a Boyhood Best Picture win. I get it. I’ve been there a few times myself. The old Masada impulse. Better to go down with your pony than to suck it in and say “okay, the other movie will win,” as Sasha Stone did yesterday. Sugar: “Water polo…isn’t that terribly dangerous?” Junior: “I’ll say. I had two ponies drowned under me.”