I’ve made no secret of my admiration for Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam, which I first saw last June at L.A. FilmFest. It is, I feel, her best film ever and one of the two finest competing for the Best Feature-Length Documentary Oscar, the other being Laura Poitras‘s Citizenfour. Kennedy and I spoke this afternoon for about 17 minutes. She’s been making docs for 16 years, but I didn’t really pay attention until Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (’07), which pretty much everyone admired, and particularly the emotionally affecting Ethel, which I saw at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and later aired on HBO on 10.18.12. Last Days in Vietnam has made a big impression because of its humanity. It’s a doc about Americans who showed compassion and decency and stuck their neck out for their Vietnamese friends during the final days of the Vietnam War. I’ve told Kennedy before that it’s a shame Last Days will probably never be seen in Vietnam due to presumed objections over political content. The Hanoi government would probably argue with Kennedy’s portrayal of the victorious North Vietnamese forces looking to settle scores with thousands of South Vietnamese who threw in their lot with American forces, which of course they did. (Tens of thousands were murdered or otherwise taken to task.) Kennedy’s film doesn’t lie but her main thrust is not political or tactical criticism but an honoring of loyalty and humane instincts and taking care of your own. Nobody’s angry about the war over there any more. I visited Vietnam in 2012 and ’13, and my sense was that the citizens have moved on and are living in the present. The young guys I met in Hanoi, Hue and Hoi An were all into iPhones and iPads and making money and getting ahead as best they could. I think they’d understand and admire Kennedy’s doc if they had a chance to see it. Again, the mp3.

“If there’s any good news here, it’s that, despite rumors to the contrary, Accidental Love is very much a coherent movie. It’s not incomplete; it’s just been sloppily completed—cobbled together, in other words, by [distribution guys] looking to salvage a releasable product out of footage crying out to be reshot or reworked. Yet traces of David O. Russell’s spirit, a humane screwball exuberance, poke through the compromised results. It’s there in the way the movie keeps stuffing a bunch of yammering eccentrics in a room together, and also in the bug-eyed performance the director coaxes out of Jake Gyllenhaal, whose character — a flip-flopping, libidinous politician — could have fit neatly into American Hustle. Russell fans owe it to themselves to see this disowned disaster, painful as that act of completism will be.” — from A.A. Dowd‘s A.V. Club review of a facsimile of Russell’s never-completed Nailed, partially shot in ’08 and now called, as noted, Accidental Love and currently viewable on VOD. I’ve been wondering about this film for over six years and tonight, finally, I finally get to see it.

I did a brief chat with Citizenfour director Laura Poitras during last week’s Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival. I don’t know why I forgot to post it, but I was certainly jolted out of my lethargy yesterday when I watched Poitras, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald being interviewed by the late David Carr…less than 24 hours ago! I asked Poitras many of the same questions that everyone else has asked her. I love her film, have seen it five or six times…and so I’m lacking the instinct to do anything but caress and approve. One thing that I hit on (and which Poitras wasn’t interested in…fine) is that it would be great if someone like herself could deliver a strong, American-made doc in the vein of Adam Curtis‘s The Power of Nightmares (’04), which introduced an idea that the anti-western Islamic terrorists and the rightie hardliners are almost identical in their purist fervor, and are pretty much cut from the same philosophical cloth. Which was more or less replicated in that “American Taliban” rant that Aaron Sorkin wrote for The Newsroom, and which aired two years ago. Again, the mp3.

Citizenfour director Laura Poitras inside the Hotel Santa Barbara during last week’s Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival.

I’m really going to miss those “Sweet Spot” pre- and post-Oscar chats between N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott and the late “Media Equation” columnist David Carr. Scott should continue to do them with the current bagger, Cara Buckley, who today has posted a sad tribute piece to Carr. “Whatever ‘The Sweet Spot’ was, it had a much simpler reason for being,” Scott has written. ” It guaranteed that I would have a few hours a week in the company of David Carr. For anyone who cared about journalism, there was simply no better place to be.” And I’m really, really going to miss Carr’s wonderfully hale and hearty Oscar-race reports from Times Square….pure heaven.

From the good side of the imagination of Guillermo del Toro, a gothic, seemingly Henry James-like horror tale more in the vein of The Devil’s Backbone, Chronos or Pan’s Labrynth than any of GDT’s big whopper monster franchise films…thank God. Perhaps even a touch of Robert Wise‘s The Haunting? Jessica Chastain and Tom Hiddleston as brother and sister. Mia Wasikowska plays a young innocent, recently married to Huddleston, whose last name is Cushing — obviously an homage to Peter Cushing in the Hammer films. Charlie Hunnam plays Dr. Alan McMichael, a “quiet, shy, thoughtful kind of stoic, taciturn, very learned guy who is madly in love with the female hero.” Universal is opening Crimson Peak on 10.16.

The high-water mark for this kind of character-rooted action comedy is, of course, Martin Brest‘s Midnight Run (’88). I don’t want to stick my neck out based on insufficient evidence and/or indications, but it’s probably safe to say that Anne Fletcher‘s Hot Pursuit (originally titled Don’t Mess With Texas) is not on Midnight Run‘s level. But it might be stupidly amusing. A witness needs to be protected from a murdering Mexican drug cartel and Reese Witherspoon‘s superiors figures she can handle it alone? Reese is playing Robert DeNiro, but does her character have any significant character issues that need to be recognized and solved by the end of the film? Sofia Vergara is playing Charles Grodin except she screams and rants and brays instead of doing the dry sardonic thing. If you saw Fletcher’s The Proposal you know there’s legitimate reason for concern. Written by David Feeney and John Quaintance. Opening on 5.8 via Warner Bros.

Because of his knockout direction of Open Your Eyes (Abre Los Ojos, which Cameron Crowe remade as Vanilla Sky), The Others and The Sea Inside, Alejandro Amenabar deserves everyone’s respect and attention. Ditto his latest film Regression (Weinstein Co. 8.28), a psychological thriller costarring Ethan Hawke, Emma Watson and David Thewlis. It’s obvious where the tale will take us. Amenabar directed and wrote. Grim up.

For what it’s worth I’m sorry for the Amy Schumer sturm und drang of the last couple of days. She’s a first-class talent and deserves more respect than what I gave her. I know I’m not thinking wrong but I’m probably saying it wrong from time to time. ”It’s hard to grow up…it doesn’t stop when you’re 40…a hard row to hoe.” These words were shared a few nights ago by Ethan Hawke during a Charlie Rose interview, and they got to me. So I’m sorry, truly, for not dealing my cards with a little more compassion and gentility. I wasn’t incorrect in saying that social attractiveness standards have changed over the past decade or so, largely due to the creations of one Judd Apatow and those who’ve climbed aboard his ferry boat. But I could have put it a bit more delicately and diplomatically. Then again that’s not what the HE brand is about, is it?

It’s in my Hollywood Elsewhere nature or karma to get beaten up once or twice each year by the moshpit beasts of the Twitterverse. Long is the road and hard that out of darkness leads up to light — that John Milton quote has my name on it. Sobriety (my third anniversary is a month away) has bestowed a sense of peace and even serenity at times, and it has toned down or modified the ever-present anger in the belly. Which I’m not at all sorry about as anger has been the eternal fuel of my writing career, born of an alcoholic father, a bordering-on-evil public school system and the awful repression of a whitebread, middle-class suburban upbringing that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. Add to this a growing notion that I’ve learned a thing or two plus my natural inclination to shoot my mouth off first and think about it later, and wham…every now and then I poke a hornet’s nest or step on a landmine and the raptors parachute down upon Maple Street.

The great N.Y. Times “Media Equation” columnist and all-around sage David Carr died Thursday at age 58. Just like that. Collapsed inside the Times newsroom, found around 9 pm and pronounced dead at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital. A Houdini punch in the stomach. Devastating. Words fail. Shocked.

Solemn, pained condolences are offered to David’s many friends and colleagues at the Times (particularly Tony Scott, with whom David taped several “Sweet Spot” video discussions) and especially his wife, Jill, their daughter Maddie and David’s twin daughters from a previous marriage, Erin and Meagan.

I became friendly with David during his run as the Times‘ Oscar-beat guy (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) from…was it ’05 to ’09? I know that Melena Ryzik took the reins in late ’09. Carr was taxed and tested by Hollywood, but he was absolutely the greatest at that gig. I loved his wit, his bon mots, his columns, his insights into the game, his Times Square video interviews. I loved his personality, his scratchy voice, his pencil neck, his laser brain. I loved that he found Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln tedious and said so during one of his “Sweet Spot” chats.

He treated me like a regular hombre colleague and took me to lunch once in Manhattan, at a haunt on West 44th. Or was it twice? We saw each other all the time at the same Oscar-season parties on both coasts, one after another after another. And he did a video interview with me on Park City’s Main Street during an ’06 or ’07 Sundance. But he was closer buds with Sasha Stone.

I only know that I worshipped the guy and that I felt duty-bound to plug the shit out of his Bagger columns during that four-year run, and I just feel awful…shattered. This is beyond any realm that I know. It’s almost like when Elvis died.

There’s talk about suspended NBC anchor Brian Williams possibly going on some kind of “apology tour” as a way of getting himself back into the good graces of the public, NBC and the News Godz. First of all he almost certainly won’t return to NBC…right? He’ll have to take a gig at CNN or someplace else. But he can’t go on the air again until he cleanses himself completely, until he atones for his sins. And the only way to do that is go back to the desert, back to the Middle East conflict where his troubles originated in ’03, and do some hard reporting and place himself in harm’s way. This kind of remedy is straight out of Joseph Conrad‘s “Lord Jim.” If you haven’t read the book then watch the 1965 Peter O’Toole movie.

I’m being perfectly serious here, serious as a heart attack. Williams has to put on the desert boots and the sunblock and go back to Iraq or maybe even Syria and get down on the ground and dodge bullets and this time ride in a helicopter that really gets attacked. Williams’ news industry colleagues would understand this. So would the public. They know from Christian mythology that the only way to purify your soul is to roam for 40 days and nights in the desert. Williams would be risking his life, of course, but people would respect that. They would get the idea.

It’s 50 degrees warmer in Los Angeles right now than the 35 degree temperature in New York City. And it’ll be 85 degrees here tomorrow also. Warm enough to buzz around on the Yamaha without a jacket. Warm enough to sunbathe, to wear nothing but a T-shirt and shorts, to prompt thoughts of turning on the air conditioning (but not really), for all the Drew McWeeny types with unattractive feet to put on their sandals.