20 years ago I did a sitdown interview with Brian Wilson and then-fiance Melinda Ledbetter during the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. We were supposed to talk about Don Was‘s documentary about Wilson, I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, which was having its big premiere up there, but we went all over. I remember telling Wilson that I always loved the reverb guitar-and-keyboard intro for ““The Little Girl I Once Once Knew,” and he quickly agreed. (That same year he told a British interviewer that “the intro is the only good part of it.”) I then told Wilson how I once tried to learn to play the intro on keyboard but I couldn’t “hear” the separate harmonized notes in my head. Wilson responded with disappointment and even a lack of patience — “You couldn’t figure that out?” That’s how geniuses are. When the stars are aligned they can swoop right in and solve any riddle, and if they’re in any kind of mood people who lack their gift can seem…I don’t know, tedious?

I’m presuming that a lot of people are going to be re-sampling Beach Boys music this weekend after seeing Love & Mercy. The default iTunes downloads will be Pet Sounds and The Smile Sessions, of course, but during last night’s cab ride from LAX I decided to buy a few songs from The Beach Boys Today!, which was recorded a little more than a year before Pet Sounds. Today! is occasionally experimental and in some ways a kind of Pet Sounds forerunner. It contains similar elements — sophisticated off-rhythms and swirling harmonies, a feeling of sadness and vulnerability in the lyrics, that symphonic white soul thing — that Wilson built upon and made into something extra with Pet Sounds. The track that knocked me out was “Kiss Me Baby.” It’s not so much a love song as a “we almost broke up last night so let’s not get that close to Armageddon again!” song. The melody is a bit on the plain and familiar side, but the lyrics are so child-like and emotionally arrested…an immature boy-lover recovering from nearly losing his mommy-lover: “Please don’t let me argue any more…I won’t make you worried like before…can’t remember what we fought about…late, late last night we said it was over,” etc. But when the chorus kicks in the harmonies and the general meltdown sound of this song are just amazing. This was Wilson’s unique realm — he made it sound just so, and with such exquisite balance and texture.

This instrumental track for “Let Him Run Wild” is also interesting for its resemblance to the instrumental Pet Sounds Sessions tracks.

You have to be a little bit concerned about Everest in one respect, which is what kind of film it’s likely to be under the commercial guidance of director Baltasar Kormakur (2 Guns, Contraband). Other than that “minor” consideration it looks great. Based on Jon Krakauer‘s “Into Thin Air” and adapted by William Nicholson (Gladiator), Mark Medoff (Children of a Lesser God) and Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours), it’s about how the moody ferocity of Everest came down on a team of climbers and then tortured and killed eight of them. Jake Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Sam Worthington and John Hawkes, and costarring Keira Knightley, Robin Wright, Emily Watson and Michael Kelly. Opening on 9.18, or towards the end of the 2015 Toronto Film Festival (9.10 thru 9.20). Here‘s the international trailer.

The sound on this clip is too low to hear anything unless you’re plugged in and wearing headphones, but Amy Schumer‘s money line, delivered yesterday, is that she weighs around 160 pounds and can get laid any time she wants. No reason to doubt that. She’s done comic routines about having to lose weight before shooting began on Trainwreck, and now she’s turning around saying her more natural, somewhat heavier self is cool so whatever works. I am Bobby Seale, gagged and bound in the courtroom of Judge Julius Hoffman. Schumer has the mike and the pride attitude down pat (“I’m not going to apologize for who I am and I’m going to love the skin that I’m in”) and anybody who says anything and I mean anything different is going to get the living shit kicked out of them on Twitter….fair enough?

Most under-40s have never heard of Chuck Connors nor The Rifleman. Connors was a nice, well-liked guy who started out as an athlete (basketball, baseball) and then lucked into an acting career. He wasn’t anyone’s idea of a gifted thespian but he did well enough as Lucas McCain and in various supporting roles in the ’60s and ’70s. On the other hand Connors was close to great in one scene in William Wyler‘s The Big Country (’58), playing a cowardly lowlife who gets plugged by his own father (Burl Ives) at the finale. This is a father & son scene for the ages — anger, revulsion and contempt melting into love and ache during the last seconds of life. Connor’s sole moment of acting glory reminds me of a line from Jean Anouilh‘s Becket in which Richard Burton describes a peasant: “At 20 before he lost his teeth and took on that ageless look the common people have he may have been handsome, he may have had one night of love, one moment when he was a king and shed his fears.” This scene is also one of Burl Ives‘ best, and is probably the main reason why he won 1959’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk (TriStar, 10.2), the scripted, line-speaking version of James Marsh‘s Man on Wire with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, will open the 53rd annual New York Film Festival on 9.25. It makes sense for a movie about a legendary New York event (i.e., Petit’s tightwire walk between the two World Trade Center towers in 1974) to debut in New York — let it go at that. But I have to acknowledge that last December’s teaser trailer worried me somewhat.

“Man on Wire for Megaplex Idiots,” posted on 12.10.14: “The opening shot of this teaser tells you everything you need to know about the Hollywood-ization of a really great story that doesn’t need any Hollywood-ization…unless you’re looking to sell it to the morons. That ascending high-speed elevator shot of the Word Trade Center’s South Tower is pure Chris Nolan, pure Batman. Ditto Joseph Gordon-Levitt walking out on a metal beam and balancing himself on one foot…showoff crap.

It’s been nearly 20 days since legendary film scholar and Orson Welles biographer F.X. Feeney posted this essay about an ambitious, insufficiently celebrated interior scene in Touch of Evil, but what’s two or three weeks in the general scheme? Feeney is drawing upon research for his recently published Orson Welles: Power, Heart & Soul (Critical Press). Nobody has more respect for Welles’ films than myself, particularly the audacity and sophistication evident in every shot and scene. But his performances have always struck me as a bit too self-regarding. Whatever the role Welles always seems to be focused on letting us know what a brilliant and erudite fellow he is/was. He never seems to look his fellow actors in the eye — at best he allows them to react to his dominance. And I still find it amazing to consider that Welles was only 42 years old when he played the obese Hank Quinlan. He looks a good 20 if not 25 years older, and what did that physical condition achieve in terms of his performance or the film? Answer: Nothing. Quinlan walks into a room and everyone is thinking the same thing — i.e., what has this guy been drinking and eating over the last few years besides bourbon, pasta and ice cream? Where does he find trousers with a big enough waist size to accommodate that gut?

I’d heard during Cannes that the Toronto Film Festival was going to back away from last year’s get-tough-with-Telluride policy, and now the change is confirmed with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg reporting that “in a major reversal” Toronto has more or less folded that tent. Last year’s Toronto policy stipulated that hot-ticket films which had premiered at the smallish but influential Telluride Film Festival, which always happens over Labor Day weekend or a few days before Toronto starts, couldn’t be screened in Toronto during the first four days. As this policy pissed off some indie-level/arthouse distributors, it can be presumed that Toronto figured the hard-ass posture was more trouble than it was worth. Boiled down, the new policy stipulates that films which have played Telluride will be eligible to screen during Toronto’s opening weekend, but not at any of the city’s three super-deluxe venues — the Elgin Theatre, the Princess of Wales theatre and Roy Thomson Hall. Which is fine. Toronto has decent venues besides these (Bell Lightbox, Scotiabank, Ryerson) plus the sound at the Princess of Wales theatre was awful last year so this is actually a partial plus. Deadline‘s Pete Hammond: “Clever TIFF. You managed to get some press saying you have ‘reversed’ this policy when in fact you’ve simply told a lot of players…that they can premiere whenever they want in Toronto but they may have to settle for going coach, not first class.” More precisely: “Telluride first? Fine, but you’ll have to ride coach in Toronto during the first four days.” Private TIFF Translation: “Sorry but our sense of Canadian pride insists on this policy. We’re still peeved about Telluride-first premieres and try as we might we can’t — won’t! — just roll over and play along like we used to do. We must apply a certain degree of punishment for Telluride-firsters. Besides the new deal isn’t that bad. They can live with those secondary venues.”

Five days after opening and tanking last weekend, Aloha is already a withered flower, pressed between the pages of history — essentially dead and buried and conversationally a non-starter. I can’t imagine anyone at this stage having the slightest interest in director-writer Cameron Crowe having apologized yesterday (6.2) about his having miscast Emma Stone as Allison Ng, a fighter pilot said to be one-quarter Asian-Hawaiian…who cares? I was in Prague for the cycle and missed the whole thing, period. But I’m 100% committed to seeing it sometime tomorrow in Los Angeles. (I’m writing this on a JFK-to-LAX Virgin America flight, around 3:40 pm Pacific.) I’m in fact looking forward to what I presume will…okay, could feel like something more than a run-of-the-mill disaster. Disaster mixed with goofy tunes or mushrooms or mescaline, something seriously bent and over-the-cliff. I’m probably the last guy in the world who has an interest in seeing this thing, much less a sense of intrigue about it.

Where does this feeling come from? Why, from a 5.29 review by Film Drunk‘s Vince Mancini — easily the funniest I’ve read so far.

Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig‘s Mistress America (Fox Searchlight, 8.14) is “a delightfully whipsmart, acrid, His Girl Friday-like comedy. Comedy is hard to begin with but making the fast, rat-a-tat-tat kind is, I’m guessing, all the more difficult, especially when you’ve managed to fortify it with serious character shadings and a touch of pathos. And it’s not some remote exercise — it’s tethered to an obsessive Type-A female personality (i.e., Gerwig’s) who feels relatively fresh and certainly unpredictable, and to any number of neurotic obsessions and distractions of the moment, or at least as they’ve manifested over the last two or three years in New York City and all the other hip burghs. I’ve loved almost everything that Gerwig’s done in recent years, each and every time — no exception here.” — filed from Sundance Film Festival on 1.25.15.

From my 9.2.14 Telluride Film Festival review of Ramin Bahrani‘s 99 Homes (Broad Green, 9.25): “It’s obvious from the get-go that Andrew Garfield, known for his sensitive, doe-eyed expressions and an apparent preference for playing alpha good guys who would rather be fucked over than vice versa, is going to rebel against Michael Shannon‘s foreclosure shark and the surrounding venality. This is what people do in films like this — they stand up and cleanse their souls. It’s a cliche that is telegraphed, trust me, from the get-go.

“But the worst moment of all comes when mom Laura Dern and son Noah Lomax find out what Garfield’s job is, and they shun him. This is when I really bailed on this film. Dern: ‘My God…you have no morals! I can’t live with you…I’m going to move in with someone else!’ Lomax: ‘How could you take a job that makes people like us miserable, dad? That’s so awful! I’m going to sit on the couch and avoid eye contact with you!’

“Again, only in the realm of manipulative bullshit.

I for one don’t believe that the Caitlin Jenner hoopla (Vanity Fair cover, reality show) is a metaphor for the fall for the Roman empire, as some righties have been saying. It’s a major media parable about acceptance, compassion, personal dignity and equality. It’s obvious, however, that she was seriously impressed by the improvements brought about by a makeup person who helped her prepare for the Vanity Fair shoot, and in that light…I’m losing steam here. This is what life in Malibu is like a lot of the time. Maybe I should keep a certain distance from the Caitlin thing for a while. I’m starting to shake my head a bit. How would Caitlin fare if her jeep broke down in the middle of the Sonoran desert?