Who wouldn’t invest a great effort to haul off something big that falls into your lap? The pizza slice could be a beautiful woman, a bag of cash left on a park bench…anything. This enterprising rat is doing nothing you or I or Glenn Kenny wouldn’t do in a similar situation. So I’m not understanding the huge viral response.

J. Davis‘s Manson Family Vacation (Netflix, 10.6) is about how a Los Angeles family man (Jay Duplass) not only plays host to his no-account hippie-weirdo-dipshit brother (Linas Phillips) but gets dragged around to all of the significant Manson murder sites. Well, I don’t how to say this but this is precisely what I did when I first came to Los Angeles back in the ’70s. I visited the Polanski-Tate house (a beautiful Robert Byrd-designed ranch house which stood at 10050 Cielo Drive before it was destroyed in the  mid ’90s), the LaBianca house (3311 Waverly), the Spahn ranch (23000 Santa Susanna Pass Rd., Chatsworth), etc. Three years ago I revisited the Polanski-Tate abode to contemplate the throughly disgusting McMansion erected in its place, and owned by Full House producer Jeff Franklin. Note: The IMDB says that the film was written by J. Davis and J. Davis.

Before you see Robert Zemeckis‘ The Walk, rent James Marsh‘s Man On Wire. Please. It’s been five or six years since I’ve seen this Oscar-winning doc, but I definitely intend to re-watch it this week. The Zemeckis film has been shown to select L.A. press and will screen here concurrent with the 9.26 New York Film Festival press screening. By the way: I don’t recall anything about the wire strung between the two World Trade Center towers suddenly slipping or re-adjusting while Phillippe Petit was walking on it. I’m mentioning this because we see this happen in the Walk trailer. Did this really occur or did Zemeckis throw it in to jack up the thrills?

There’s no question in my mind that James Vanderbilt‘s Truth (Sony Pictures Classics, 10.16) is Best Picture material. It’s brilliantly acted, tightly assembled and cut from the same thematic cloth (i.e., corporate-minded news org dilutes or dismisses important news story) and shaped with the same finesse that produced Michael Mann‘s The Insider. But it’s already taken a torpedo in the form of an unusually early opinion piece posted last Thursday by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, and if a couple more attack articles from reputable journos come out between now and mid-October Truth will almost certainly come to be regarded by the rank-and-file lazybrains as controversial or damaged goods — a movie that might have a loose screw or iffy content or whatever.

The argument against Truth is not, of course, about how smartly assembled or engagingly complex it is. It is aces in these respects, trust me. The film is especially riveting in its layered, detailed portrait of big-time television news culture — the personalities and priorities of news reporters and stringers vs. corporate overseers. The argument will be that Truth, which is based on Mary Mapes‘ 2005 book “Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power,” seeks to whitewash or exonerate Mapes for her disputed reporting on that September ’04 60 Minutes segment that explored ex-President George Bush’s performance in the National Guard in the early ’70s, and that exoneration is not appropriate.

Feinberg and others I’ve spoken to believe that Mapes messed up, plain and simple. They correspondingly seem to believe that approving of Vanderbilt’s film is tantamount to approving of Mapes’ reporting, and therefore Truth must be given the cold shoulder. Which of course would be redundant as Mapes and Rather were already given the cold shoulder 11 years ago. Truth is about looking more closely at the reasons why they were thrown under the bus.

Condolences to the family, friends and fans of actor, playwright and librettist Jack Larson, who passed two days ago at age 87. I didn’t know him outside of party encounters and a one-hour phone interview we did six and a half years ago, but Larson was always a spirited, good-natured guy who often wore yellow and whose role as cub reporter Jimmy Olsen on the 1950s Adventures of Superman series did him no favors in the long run as it typecast him as a naive dork. I’m sorry for that unfair association, but if I’d called this post “Adieu to Jack Larson” no one would read it.

Larson was the partner of director James Bridges for 35 years (’58 until Bridges’ death in ’93), and before that was involved in some kind of semi-regular thing with Montgomery Clift. (Larson-Bridges photos abound but I can’t find one of Larson-Clift.)