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.”

I’ve never been head-over-heels in love with the TCM Classic Film Festival, but I’ve always liked watching restorations of classic films (DCPs and not the dreaded 35mm) on the big screen. I’ve been attending since 2011, or the festival’s second year, and I’ve always been press-credentialed. This year, however, I didn’t request the press pass soon enough and the Ginsberg-Libby p.r. guys are telling me they can’t bend the rules to help me out. If I want to see something I guess I can just show up and buy a ticket. Not worth fretting over but a bit of a pain.

I have two good excuses for dropping the ball. One is that I was assuming the festival would happen in either mid-April (last year it ran from 4.10 through 4.13) or late April (in 2013, or the year of the 1.37:1 Shane, it ran from 4.25 thru 4.28). This year it’s happening from 3.26 through 3.29 — a full month earlier than the 2013 fest and two weeks earlier than last year’s. On top of which Chelsea Barredo, the gracious and compassionate Ginsberg-Libby publicist who took care of me in ’13 and ’14, is no longer with GL and her replacement didn’t send me a friendly reminder or nudge about the earlier dates. She didn’t get in touch at all about anything.

Expressing disgust or nausea at the culture of Twitter rage-heads out there isn’t the half of it. Roving mobs of howling, hyperventilating scream queens…scolds, fools, goons, brutes, low-lifes. Hair-trigger responses, short-attention-spans, no nuance, saliva missiles, spray pissings.

“A few spotters will shriek at this or that provocateur like Donald Sutherland shrieking at Veronica Cartwright at the end of Phil Kaufman‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The mob turns and joins in the shrieking and runs over and beats the hell out of the “bad person” for some politically incorrect “error”, and then leaves him or her bleeding on the sidewalk as they move on, looking for the next transgressor. This is the medieval cyber country that we live in.

“Bill Maher told Sean Penn last Friday that he’s getting tired of “politically correct assholes” lighting up every time someone says something “wrong” or outside the realm of the usual bromides and sentimental assurances. Penn called it the dark side of social media where people just like to hear the sound of their own voice. Maher suggested that these people have “never done anything good in their life and they want to feel like they’re the good people” by punishing anyone who says anything even mildly provocative. Maher: “They want to turn this country into a place I don’t want to live in.”

Does anyone remember Universal mentioning that Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken was basically a film founded upon Christian theology and pretty much tailor-made for the Christian flock? Or critics pointing this out? Yeah, me neither. It was presented and received as a rugged, humanist war film about survival, and one that contained award-worthy direction, acting, cinematography (i.e, Roger Deakins). I really don’t remember many critics aside from myself bringing up the “suffering is next to Godliness” angle. My first reaction, posted on 12.1, stated that Unbroken was “Christian torture porn” and that it portrays “a good kind of suffering that feels vaguely Christian and conservative on some level…something tells me the Orange County crowd will find a place in their hearts.” Two days ago I got an email from Matthew Faraci‘s Faith-Driven Entertainment announcing that Universal Home Entertainment is including a special “Legacy of Faith” bonus disc available as part of the Unbroken DVD that pops on 3.24. Describing Jolie’s film as “one of only two faith films nominated for an Academy Award this year,” Faraci states that Unbroken “has received overwhelming support from faith leaders and audiences alike. The ‘Legacy of Faith’ bonus disc features 90 minutes of rich content from Louie Zamperini, Billy Graham, Greg Laurie and others.”

I would say that Michael Fassbender‘s resemblance to Steve Jobs is pretty close to nil. He looks as much like Jobs as Dustin Hoffman looked like Robert Redford when they were costarring in All The President’s Men. His casting as the late Apple genius is analogous to….oh, Matthew McConaughey playing the title role in Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln but minus the beard and the stovepipe hat? Director Danny Boyle, currently filming the Aaron Sorkin-authored, Scott Rudin-produced drama about Jobs that will open on October 9th, has obviously decided against giving Fassy a Jobs-like nose or floppy Jobs-like hair. Boyle had a Jobs look-alike when Christian Bale was on the train, but that flew out the window when Bale abandoned the role. I can roll with Fassbender/Jobs. I was down with Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan so why not? Forget the physical resemblance (which is superficial anyway) and focus on who Jobs was deep down, and particularly how he thought and dreamt and achieved. Steve Jobs costars Seth Rogen, Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, Michael Stuhlbarg and Katherine Waterston.

It’s generally understood that Universal won’t stop making Fast & Furious films until they stop being hits so the Furious 7 slogan is obviously insincere. Unless, of course, it refers to the fact that Paul Walker is no longer available. Naaah, that couldn’t be it.

Focus Features will distribute Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette, a history of the women’s suffrage movement from (I gather) roughly ’03, which is when Emmeline Pankhurst (played by Meryl Streep) founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, to the start of World War I in 1917. The drama, which has the aura of another Selma (and that doesn’t imply excitement on my part), will open sometime in the fall (a likely Venice/Telluride debut) and be part of the award-season chatter, I’m sure. When peaceful protests for women’s right to vote proved fruitless, certain WSU activists “became known for physical confrontations (smashed windows, assaulting police officers) and later arson,” says the Wiki page. The story of Carey Mulligan‘s Maud, a working-class woman involved in the militancy, “is as gripping and visceral as any thriller, [and] also heartbreaking and inspirational,” says the boilerplate description. Question: Why is Garvon standing in the second row and off to the left? The movie is her baby. She should be sitting dead-center between Streep and Mulligan.

(l. to. r.): Sufragette director Sarah Gavron, Helen Pankhurst (great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst), Laura Pankhurst (great-great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst), Alison Owen (producer); front row (L-R): Abi Morgan (screenwriter), Anne-Marie Duff (“Violette Cambridge”), Meryl Streep (“Emmeline Pankhurst”), Carey Mulligan (“Maud”), Helena Bonham Carter (“Edith New”), Faye Ward (producer).

Last Thursday I wearily predicted that yet another round of Amy Schumer-related bashing would kick in with the approach of last Sunday’s SXSW “work in progress” screening of Trainwreck. Limited apologies, re-phrasings and walking it back to some extent haven’t mattered to dodo bird journos like Indiewire‘s Ryan Lattanzio or, it appears, to Schumer herself. She got into the groove of playing the victim who won’t let sticks and stones, etc. As I reminded last week these attacks have been going on for over a month now. The hyperbolic haters won’t quit.