“Best of Enemies captivates with its detail and historical footage, and makes one long for the Golden Age of TV and the peak of public discourse when men with ‘patrician, languid accents‘ could trade rhetorical barbs with eloquence and panache. It also makes one mourn the track upon which this televised mud fight (which gained huge ratings) set the American media.” — from Matthew Odam‘s SXSW review.

I know the difference between agreeably diverting, reasonably commercial action fare and a shoot-em-up thriller that is more or less complete dogshit and a waste of time. The latter tends to wind up with Rotten Tomato or Metacritic ratings of 35 or less (sometimes a lot less) and the decent-but-not-top-tier films usually rank in the 50s, 60s or 70s. Or something like that. I know that if a film has a 21% Rotten Tomato rating it’s almost certainly not worth the price. And that, strangely, is the current RT rating for Pierre Morel‘s The Gunman (Open Road, 3.20), and I’m telling you this is completely excessive and unfair. Ditto the 42% Metacritic rating — too low. I can see some critics saying “not bad not good enough” but there’s no justification for pounding this thing into the pavement.

The Gunman is a hit-and-miss second-tier affair that will probably perform poorly this weekend, even though it’s a moderately satisfying, handsomely filmed, well-cut and believably choreographed old-school thriller with a not-great-but-not-too-fumbly screenplay. It’s trim and efficient for the most part and quite beautiful to just stare at, and I had a good time sinking into it as a kind of exotic atmospheric ride or a rugged, suspenseful high-style thing. I processed it as I would a brief vacation that I wasn’t paying for.

March and April are tough movie months, not so much for people who don’t know much but certainly for the rest of us. May and June can also be a problem. It’s no picnic. Mostly brown torpedos. I’ve just scanned the latest Movie Box trailers…wow. Deliver me from mediocrity. Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Transporter Refueled, Paper Towns, Poltergeist, Max, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, Barely Lethal, Furious 7, Insidious: Chapter 3, Pixels, Roommate Wanted, Harlock: Space Pirate, Lazer Team, Thunderbirds Are Go.

Macbook Pro laptops usually die after three years, but the one I’m currently using had been getting sick sooner than expected. I work my laptops pretty hard, and over the last two or three weeks this particular puppy had been operating at slower and slower speeds. It has 8 gigs of RAM but page loads were agonizingly slow. I tried the usual fixes and flush-outs with Mac tech support, but those guys will never level with you. Two days ago I took the 2012 unit to Stan’s Tech Garage in West Hollywood, and the guy at the counter told me the truth, which was that my Macbook Pro’s old-school hard drive (i.e., the kind that spins around like a 78 rpm record player) was probably dying. For $500 and change they installed a new SSD (i.e., solid state drive) and migrated all my programs and data. The laptop now runs much faster, and is of course part of the current technological realm. It feels so fleet and smooth that I’m actually thinking of taking it back to Stan’s in order to double the memory to 16 gigs.

This clip is over a day old, but Vin Diesel spoke last Monday night (3.16) prior to a fan screening of Furious 7 (Universal, 4.3) at one of the Arclights. He choked up when he mentioned the late Paul Walker, explaining that “I lost my best friend…I lost my brother.” I’m presuming he meant his best onscreen friend…right? Diesel then passed along a curious anecdote. Whenever he and Walker were at a screening of the latest Fast & Furious installment, Walker “would always tell me, Vin, the best is still to come.” Walker would “always” say that? Meaning what exactly? That the film they were about to see (or had just seen) wasn’t that great but the next one will be better or perhaps even “the best”? Whenever John Ford was asked which of his films was his favorite, he would always say “the next one.” That I get.

Diesel also called Furious 7 “a labor of love.” That term specifically refers to something you’ve busted your ass to get right even though it didn’t compensate all that well. You put your heart into it because you cared. I’m sure that Walker’s tragedy made the shooting of Furious 7 an emotionally tough ride for Diesel and everyone else, but “labor of love’ isn’t the right term to use. The salaries were huge on this thing, I’m sure, and the expected income when the film opens…forget about it.

M. Night Shyamalan was totally on top between The Sixth Sense and Signs, but things got bumpy for him with th one-two-three of The Village, Lady in the Water and The Happening. (Although I’ll always be a fan of Mark Wahlberg‘s “talking to the plant” scene, not to mention Andy Samberg‘s talking to animals routine on SNL…hilarious then and now.) Shyamalan has certainly been on a downswirl for the last six years, and now he’s got Wayward Pines, a summer series that feels kind of Children of the Corn-y or Wicker Man-ish with a little Twin Peaks undercurrent. Will M. Night ever again be “the guy” he was between ’99 and ’02? Or was that it? I’ll always respect the way he took his time building up to the payoffs in Signs, and that he wasn’t afraid to use silence from time to time.

Matt Dillon: “How do I get outta here?” Terrence Howard: “Well, I’m gettin’ outta here in June. Headin’ back to New York to play Lucious on Season Two of Empire, which is my main bread-and-butter these days. A chopper comes out and flies me back to Vancouver. But you? Sorry, man but you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”