In a 4.1 Hitfix interview with Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm, Alan Sepinwall asks Hamm to explain why Don Draper has refused to grow even modest-length sideburns despite the fact that by 1969 each and every creative person on the planet earth had begun to let their hair and sideburns grow at least a little bit.

Sepinwall: “Over the years, other [Mad Men] characters’ looks have changed dramatically, [but] Don’s look has remained constant. Has that helped you stay centered in the character, or have you ever wished that you could grow muttonchops or a ‘stache? ”

Hamm: “I think it makes sense. I think Don is invested in staying Don. I think it’s on purpose from a creative standpoint. And I support the choice. That’s how we start the final season, if you look at season 7 as one long season, you see the LA airport, and it’s all bright colors and new things and shiny planes, and new things and hippies and hot women and colors and psychedelics, and through it all moves this gray man that we’ve seen for the last ten years, and he’s exactly the same. And he looks so out of place.”

Joel Edgerton‘s The Gift (7.31, STX) appears to be another variation on the Fatal Attraction formula — i.e., a troubled but more or less stable middle-class marriage is threatened by a relationship that the husband has (or more precisely had) with an unstable third party.   Steady and reliable-as-Old-Faithful Jason Bateman, ostrich-like Rebecca Hall and Edgerton as the bad guy. I’m sorry but Hall doesn’t look good with short hair — never get a pixie cut again and fire your hairdresser. Edgerton directed and wrote.

Alex Gibney‘s All Or Nothing At All (HBO, 4.5 and 4.6), the two-part, four-hour doc on Frank Sinatra, is quite the loving valentine. It goes easy and then some, but it makes you feel like you’re in Sinatra’s home corner every step of the way, and in this sense it’s unique — there’s never been this much love and understanding shown to Sinatra and his legend from a polished, first-class doc by a world-renowned director. It’s Gibney’s trick, of course, to make you feel that you’re not being egregiously lied to. Which of course the doc is definitely doing by omission. What matters is that Gibney’s accumulation of lies are, at day’s end, artful. Because the doc is filled with bedrock emotional truths and echoes.

This is an intimate saga of an artist with a profound vocal gift, a legendary sense of style, a swaggering ego, an open heart when it came to friends and family, a lust for the ladies, a chip on his shoulder and a street attitude that led to certain feelings of kinship and camaraderie with mob guys. And you can’t beat the first 56 years of Sinatra’s life (’15 to ’71) for sheer emotion, Shakesperean drama, urban pizazz, ups and downs, top-of-the-world success and down-in-the-gutter career blues…a saga of an all-American, knock-around life that spanned most of the 20th Century, and one that became less and less interesting when Sinatra turned smug and gray and more-or-less Republican in the late ’60s until his death on 5.14.98 at age 82.

I was quite moved and charmed by much of it, but this is a family-approved doc that’s basically about re-igniting commercial interest in Sinatra product (CDs, films) by way of celebrating his 100th birthday, which is actually not until 12.12.15. That means it’s really friendly…a doc that is always looking to show love and understanding or at least muted affection…a highly skillful handjob as far as classy, high-end biopics go. No judgment, no impartiality…every well-known or rumored-about negative in Sinatra’s bio is finessed or explained away in some first-hand, no-big-deal fashion by Sinatra himself or by a friend, or otherwise brushed off.

Are you now or have you ever been a person who doesn’t “get it” and therefore needs to have the shit beaten out of him/her on Twitter? Are you now or have you ever been disturbingly non-progressive, in some way out-of-step or guilty of insufficient understanding of a pressing social issue or agenda? Are you now or have you ever been some kind of closet discriminator? A person whose views are (or once were) politically retrograde, politically insensitive or in any way dismissive of any socially marginalized or discriminated-upon group?

What is the difference between (a) scanning a person’s Twitter feed from two or three or four years ago in search of politically incorrect or insensitive tweets to use against him/her and (b) a HUAC committee in the late 1940s or early ’50s searching through a Hollywood filmmaker’s political associations or statements from the 1930s? Or, for that matter, a Chinese Communist Party official looking to discredit and re-educate a nonloyal person in the midst of the Cultural Revolution of ’66 to the mid ’70s? It’s the same basic impulse — i.e., to identify, shame and punish the miscreant, the outlier, “the other.”

…between the almost-comedic, dusty, wildly apocalyptic vibe of George Miller‘s Mad Max: Fury Road and the corrupt, pumped-up CG bullshit of James Wan‘s Furious 7…if you can’t sense the differences between the high-torque swagger and clenched intensity in the performances of Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult vs. the preening, macho-robot posturings of Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson and Michelle Rodriguez, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Joni Mitchell, 71, was rushed to the hospital this afternoon after reportedly being found unconscious, She was said to be alert in the ride down to “the hospital” (presumably UCLA or Cedars), but is reportedly in intensive care.

I’ve spoken to a friend who was with her last week, and he said he sensed that all was perhaps not entirely well. Mitchell, he said, had called for “a healer” to drop by and lay on hands or help out in some kind of shamanistic way.

Mitchell has been an unrepentant smoker all her life, beginning at age nine. My friend mentioned that there’s been some discussion (and perhaps an intention) of switching to electronic cigarettes but after six decades of reportedly heavy smoking…God help her. Obviously everyone wants her to recover and push on, but at a certain point the body just can’t take the nicotine and the toxins and complications will manifest.

Sidelight: I attended a short, smallish concert that Mitchell gave at Studio 54 in October ’82 to promote “Wild Things Run Fast.” The crowd was not huge, maybe 200 or 250, and I was standing fairly close and pretty much dead center. No female artist has ever touched me like Mitchell **, and I was quite excited about being this close to her. I was beaming, starry-eyed and staring at her like the most self-abasing suck-up fan you could imagine, and during the first song her eyes locked onto mine and I swear to God we began to kind of half-stare at each other. (Some performers do this, deciding to sing for this or that special person in the crowd.) Her eyes danced around from time to time but she kept coming back to me, and I remember thinking, “Okay, she senses that I love her and she probably likes my looks so I guess I’m her special fanboy or something for the next few minutes.”

Mitchell was dressed in a white pants suit and some kind of colorful scarf, and she sang and played really well, and I remember she had a little bit of a sexy tummy going on. Sorry but that had a portion of my attention along with the songs and “being there” and a feeling that I’d remember this moment for decades to come.

I understand the commercial reasons why Patricia Riggen‘s The 33, an upcoming drama about the 2010 Chilean mining disaster, would be performed in Chilean-accented English. The unfortunate downside, of course, is that it feels inauthentic. If I’d directed I would have shot two versions, one in Spanish, the other in English. It appears to be a straightforward rescue drama. The film completed principal photography a little more than a year ago, and apparently there’s still no U.S. distributor aboard. Riggen is the director, cinematographer and editor. Mike Medavoy and Edward McGurn are the producers. Antonio Banderas, Jacob Vargas, Mario Casas, Juan Pablo Raba, Naomi Scott, Rodrigo Santoro and Juliette Binoche costar. James Horner has composed the score.

Andy Grieve‘s Can’t Stand Losing You: Surviving the Police, the doc about former Police guitarist Andy Summers, opens in Los Angeles on 4.3. I wasn’t stunned or blown away by the film, which is based on Summers’ 2006 autobiography “One Train Later,” but it’s a mildly intriguing, glide-along thing. I was never bored by it. In any event I had to talk to Summers, whose guitar-playing with the Police will be swimming around in my head forever. It killed me to learn in the doc (and from Summers himself) that The Police did a CBGBs gig one night in the fall of ’78, two shows in fact, and that not many people attended the second show. I was living on Sullivan Street, and I could have just walked over and caught the show….if only I’d known. But I didn’t know about the Police until I saw Sting in Franc Roddam‘s Quadrophenia in the fall of ’79, and then I started listening to pieces of Regatta de Blanc and Outlandos d’Amour and then, a full year later, I finally became a serious fan with Zenyatta Mondatta. The chat with Summers went well enough. The only real problem with the doc, I feel, is that it’s seven or eight years old (shot between ’07 and ’08 for the most part), and it’s been released too late in the cycle. A doc that was mostly shot before the 2008 election of Barack Obama can’t matter all that much to the realm of 2015. But it’s not uninteresting. It tugged at me here and there. I was okay with it. Again, the mp3.

Andy Summers, producer Norman Golightly at West Hollywood’s London Hotel — Thursday, 3.26.

Andrew Mogel and Jarrad Paul‘s The D Train (IFC Films, 5.8) “is by far the darkest and nerviest laugher I’ve seen in ages,” I wrote on 1.24. “It begins as a not-too-funny situation comedy about a neurotic, high-strung suburban family man (Jack Black) who goes to great fraudulent lengths to travel to Los Angeles to lure a former high-school classmate who’s now a more-or-less-failed Hollywood actor (James Marsden) to a 20th anniversary high-school reunion. What I didn’t expect to see was a detour into Brokeback Mountain territory by way of a Lars von Trier film.

“But at the same time, as I mentioned during the post-screening q & a, The D Train follows the classic structure known as the Three D’s — desire, deception and discovery.

“I can’t call The D Train howlingly funny — nobody could — but it’s brave and different and much darker than what most of us would expect when we sit down with a comedy. You can call it ‘comedic’ and that’s fine, but it’s really a kind of laugh-sprinkled Middle American psychodrama about denial, suppression, self-loathing and the traumatic process of change. And yet it ends on a note of comfort and completion.

James Wan‘s Furious 7 (Universal, 4.3) is, of course, a cyborg muscle-car flick made for people who despise real action flicks and prefer, instead, the comfort of cranked-up, big-screen videogame delirium inhabited (I don’t want to say “performed”) by flesh-and-blood actors and facilitated by a special kind of obnoxious CG fakeitude that grabs you by the shirt collar and says “eat this, bitch!” I hated it like nothing I’ve seen in a long time. The critics who went apeshit for Furious 7 in Austin are to be regarded askance for at least the next ten years. Anyone who looks you in the eye and says Furious 7 delivers great, gleeful escapism really needs to submit to psychological testing.

“What’s wrong with silly, stupid fun?” they all ask. What’s wrong is that movies like this are deathly boring and deflating and toxic to the soul. They’re anti-fun, anti-life, anti-cinema, anti-everything except paychecks.

Furious 7 is odious, obnoxious corporate napalm on a scale that is better left undescribed. It is fast, flashy, thrompy crap that dispenses so much poison it feels like a kind of plague. Wan’s film is certainly a metaphor for a kind of plague that has been afflicting action films for a good 20-plus years.

In Act 3, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare‘s Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus is asked by a crowd of alarmed plebians why he conspired to murder their leader. “T’was not that I loved Caesar less,” Brutus answers, “but that I loved Rome more.” By the same token I spit upon Furious 7 and the whole cyborg action muscle-boy genre not because I love sitting through cranked-up, power-pump, beyond-silly action flicks less (although my feelings of revulsion are as sincere as a heart attack) but because I love real action movies more.

I hated the first 65 minutes of Furious 7 so much that I was literally twitching and flinching in my seat and making little squeaky moaning sounds. I was checking my watch every five minutes, wondering how much more of this crap I could take. I was firing psychic hate grenades at the screen.

You don’t have to be a snooty type to be a connoisseur of gourmet dishes, but you need to be a person of at least some cultivation and taste. A person, let’s say, who might attend a revival screening of Going Places or Hiroshima, Mon Amour, or who might catch a Lower Manhattan showing of Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York. What are the odds that fans of Furious 7 or Insurgent would appreciate this Netflix doc? I think we know the answer. I don’t need to belabor the point.

Three weeks hence Cinemacon, the annual four-day exhibitor convention held at Ceasar’s Palace in Las Vegas, will kick off. Every year I ask myself, why am I spending $600 or $700 bucks minimum to drive (or fly) to Vegas and stay in a cheesy motel to watch product reels for three days? Answer: Because I’m afraid I might miss a hint of a spark of something special. All it takes is a special clip or two, the right joke, a special appearance by a big-name celebrity…anything that gets the blood rushing. I’m also going because it’ll give me stuff to write about. Not just the convention attractions but the corporate, soul-narcotizing experience of Vegas itself. Not to mention my down-at-the-heels accommodations.

Last year I stayed in a Motel 8 craphouse (I actually described it as a “spartan shitbag” motel) across the Strip from the Mandalay. This year I’ll be in the Howard Johnson Tropicana, which definitely represents a step up. Two nights for roughly $112 or something like that. And it’s only about an 18-block walk to Caesar’s.