A week and a half ago a Variety piece indicated that next month’s Cannes Film Festival might turn out to be “mildly deflating” — i.e., lacking in triples and homers. The idea of flying all the way to France for an experience that will partly include Matthew McConaughey contemplating ritual suicide fills me with levels of dread that I’d rather not describe.

Then an idea hit me this morning. What if Guillermo del Toro‘s Crimson Peak (Universal, 10.16), which Stephen King and Joe Hill saw and praised three weeks ago, shows out of competition in Cannes? Del Toro’s “blood-soaked Age of Innocence, a gloriously sick waltz through Daphne Du Maurier territory” (as Hill called it) sounds to me like a triple and just what the doctor ordered to counter-balance those images of McConaughey trying to work up the guts to disembowel himself over a bowl of ramen.

I’ve been paying for regular bundled cable TV since around ’81, when I first moved into my Bank Street apartment with a half-decent income. And now it’s finally time to cut the cord and make do without regular TV, which I never watch at all. I’ve got a top-of-the-line Roku Player along with an Apple TV box (completely superfluous compared to what the Roku contains), and right now I pay for HBO but I can obviously get that straight from the horse’s mouth when I give my Time Warner channel bundle the heave-ho.

The only thing I’m reluctant to give up is my occasional check-ins with MSNBC and CNN, which aren’t as frequent as they used to be but I like the fact they they’re there. And I’m certainly going to want them around when the 2016 election kicks off in earnest…what, five or six months from now?

If only I could independently access those two channels along with the usual HBO, Showtime, Netflix, TMC, AMC, Amazon and Warner Archive, I’d be totally fine. I know it sounds ridiculous to delay on a significant monthly saving over a sentimental attachment to two news channels, but there it is. It’s the only thing holding me back.

For whatever reason I never read Shawn Levy‘s “Rat Pack Confidential” when it came out 16 or 17 years ago, but I suddenly bought it on Amazon right after posting my review of Alex Gibney‘s All or Nothing At All, a two-night, four-hour doc about Frank Sinatra which pops tomorrow night. The old Frank magic vaguely had me in its spell. Levy’s book is a lot more candid and less cautious than Gibney’s doc in terms of portraying the Sinatra who swaggered around like king shit in the heyday. The Sinatra family gatekeepers, Tina and Frank, Jr., got along with Gibney but had no love for Levy. In any event the book arrived today, and here’s a passage at the very end that summarizes how suddenly and quickly the Rat Pack era, which peaked with the shooting of Ocean’s Eleven around January 1960, came to a close with the arrival of the Beatles four years later:

“There [in 1960] you had them — a group consisting of the nation’s greatest and most popular entertainers, with the blessing of a dynamic political star and fearsome crime lords, the favors of gorgeous women, an enviable playground, all the money in the world — and within four years of commanding the world’s attention they were deposed. That blip of teen culture that they’d mocked and derided but secretly envied and aped? It echoed back off the far side of the abyss and overwhelmed them. What seemed like high-spirited fun in the winter of 1960 came to look like pathetic lechery and debauchery by the summer of 1964, the high hopes of one generation — a delusional sham which obscured a corrupt, licentious core — were replaced with the simply adolescent cheeriness of the next.”

Well-written, adult-angled, dryly comedic but not out-and-out funny. But at the same time romantic and middle-budgeted with stars. Ben Stiller or Seth Rogen or Will Ferrell or Kevin Hart would kill to be in a film as good as John McNaughton and Richard Price‘s Mad Dog and Glory, but low-key, character-driven dramedies are as extinct as dinosaurs in today’s realm. Big studios won’t touch them and indie producers don’t seem to have the touch or something. “Put down the magazine before you hurt yourself, Harold”….lines like this are beautiful.

Yes, it’s agreed that sculptor Dave Poulin‘s statue of former Celoron resident Lucille Ball resembles an adult version of Chucky, Michael Keaton‘s snake manifestation from Beetlejuice, Conway Twitty or Steve Buscemi. The question is why is this suddenly a big weekend news story now? The butt-ugly thing has been standing there from almost the beginning of the Obama administration, and all of a sudden a “secret” Facebook posting claims it’s a problem requiring national attention? The Jamestown-based Poulin, whose artistic reputation has obviously taken a hit from this, apparently wants to be paid to replace the head while local Lucille Ball fans think he should do it for free.

(l.) Dave Poulin‘s ugly statue of Lucille Ball, which has stood in a park in Ball’s hometown of Celoron for over five years; (r.) Chucky.

Now that James Wan‘s Furious 7 has opened, thrilled, bludgeoned and appalled audiences nationwide, surely the HE community will stand with yours truly, Nick Pinkerton, Rene Rodriguez, Sara Stewart, Roger Moore, Mick LaSalle, Randy Cordova and others who’ve expressed varying degrees of dismay, disdain and whatever else. The critics who helped elevate Furious 7‘s Rotten Tomatoes score to 81% have done their part to enable and encourage the corporate cancer-think that has largely ignored and almost totally suppressed the notion that organic, real-world, McQueen-styled action films are coolness supreme. The 67% Metacritic score is at least somewhat less enthusiastic and a little closer to the thinking of the Godz. If anyone out there is on the team, please weigh in.

The title of this new Michael Winterbottom-Russell Brand doc is The Emperor’s New Clothes, but the similarities to Michael Moore’s 2009 doc are immediately apparent. Winterbottom’s film is also joined at the hip with Ondi Timoner‘s BRAND: A Second Coming, the recently premiered two-hour doc about the transformation of Russell Brand from hyper libertine to social revolutionary. Clothes will screen later this month at the Tribeca Film Festival. Pic will also be specially screened in the UK on Tuesday, 4.21.

Around 3:30 pm today a Variety story reported that a man had fatally shot himself at Universal Studios theme park this afternoon. Variety stated that the man had killed himself “near the Despicable Me ride.” I’m sorry but this is an exact quote. Tragic as this story of public suicide is, at the very least it’s an improvement over the mass-murder suicide caused by Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz. Suicide should be directed solely at one’s own person, and at least today’s victim respected that concept. I’m truly saddened — I’m in no way making light of this. It’s just that we’ve become accustomed to public acts of homicide being directed at innocent victims. At least that didn’t happen here.

Thanks to HE reader Zach Copeland for improving the density and resolution of this No Country For Bad Wifi one-sheet, which was intially posted yesterday afternoon in the comment thread under “This Is Your Life.” Copeland took the time to change the physical shape of the runner for the new poster — in the original he used Josh Brolin‘s original NCFOM silhouette.

In my 4.1 review of Alex Gibney‘s All Or Nothing At All (HBO, 4.5 and 4.6), I called it “quite the loving valentine…a doc that is always looking to show understanding and affection…no judgment, no impartiality…every well-known or rumored-about negative in Sinatra’s bio is finessed or explained away.” The reason for this, of course, is that the doc, which is expertly done and quite moving for the most part, had to go through Tina Sinatra and Frank Sinatra, Jr., who are the gatekeepers. “Rat Pack Confidential” author Shawn Levy commented the other day that “I’m sure Gibney had a very fine line to walk [with Tina and Frank, Jr.] and equally sure that the final product was gone over with extreme care.”

With that in mind, here’s a portion of a q & a between Gibney and Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir:

O’Hehir: “It’s probably not fair to say you go soft. But there are a lot of other narrative approaches one could make to this guy, looking at his history with women, his history with the Mob and the Kennedys, his relationship with race and politics, his switch from the left to the Reagan right, all of that. I completely agree that he’s the greatest popular singer of his period, a guy who blended the jazz and pop traditions like nobody else, an iconic American and an iconic performer. But while your film certainly brings up the darker stuff, you don’t dwell on it.”

Just over five months ago a N.Y. Times story by Maureen Carvajal announced that a full-length version of Orson Welles‘ never-completed The Other Side of The Wind, which was shot in fits and starts from the early to mid ’70s, would be assembled and screened in May 2015. Carvajal wrote that the producers, particularly Royal Road Entertainment’s Filip Jan Rymsza and even more particularly Welles’ friend and colleague Peter Bogdanovich, who told Carvajal that he’d assumed the responsibility of cutting together the final version, “aim to have it ready for a screening in time for May 6, the 100th anniversary of Welles’s birth.”

In a 10.29 HE interview I was told by original Wind producer and Welles biogrqpher Joseph McBride that the film might also screen at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off next month.

Well, both scenarios are out the window, McBride now says. The Other Side of the Wind might screen somewhere later this year (Telluride? New York Film Festival?) but forget May 6th and forget Cannes.

“Post-production work on The Other Side of the Wind is underway in France,” McBride told me this morning. “But it won’t be ready in time for this year’s Cannes Film Festival” — a statement that obviously includes Welles’ 100th birthday, which is about five weeks away. “I never thought it could be finished that quickly. A considerable amount of editing and sound work still needs to be done. There are eighteen hours of negative. Welles edited 41 minutes of scenes [before he died]. As Welles used to say, ‘We will sell no wine before its time.'”

This isn’t just another lifestyle post as it was taken (in early August of 2012) in Monument Valley, which of course was a default scenic backdrop of almost all John Ford westerns from Stagecoach (’39) through Cheyenne Autumn (’64). I was just thinking as I re-watched this how badly I felt for my poor wheezing horse, humping it over those rocky uphill trails with my not-exactly-feathery ass on his back. Here’s that Firetree Inn story again, the one about the hosts with the bizarre personalities.