I just re-watched this. On a certain level it’s hard to believe this is still a thing. But in the minds of many some, it still is. And there’s no talking to them about this, and I don’t want to go over the whole thing again. At all. But when you re-watch this, I just don’t sense any lying. Apart from what the New York and Connecticut investigators concluded or what Moses Farrow wrote or any of the rest of it, I’m not seeing or sensing the little tells that say “this guy is dodging something.” They just aren’t there.

The other takeaway is that there’s a huge difference in terms of biology, energy, alertness and mental acuity between a 57 year old and an 82 year old. I’m sorry but this is what I was thinking. Aging is such a bitch.

Posted today at 4 pm Pacific: “For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.

“It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.

“And that was the key for us: it was an art form. There was some debate about that at the time, so we stood up for cinema as an equal to literature or music or dance. And we came to understand that the art could be found in many different places and in just as many forms — in The Steel Helmet by Sam Fuller and Persona by Ingmar Bergman, in It’s Always Fair Weather by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly and Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger, in Vivre Sa Vie by Jean-Luc Godard and The Killers by Don Siegel.”

HE insert: Scorsese prefers the drably photographed, TV-movie-ish version of The Killers just because Don Siegel directed it, and not Robert Siodmak‘s deliciously noirish The Killers (1946) with Burt Lancaster, Edmond O’Brien, Ava Gardner and Sam Levene?

Back to Scorsese: “Some say that Alfred Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.

“They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.

“Another way of putting it would be that they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not. When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.

Another Farewell, right? I’m especially disinclined with Crazy Rich Asians‘ Michelle Yeoh and Henry Golding rounding out the cast. And I’m saying this as a heartfelt fan of The Farewell.

George Michael and Wham? Later.

Alternate plan: See it with a fair-minded attitude, and then trash it. Unless it’s good. But it can’t be with that cloying poster image.

Hollywood Elsewhere and the much-whispered-about Yamaha Rumblehog lost traction, tipped over and hit the floor sideways this morning. It happened in the underground parking lot of the Paradigm talent agency (8942 Wilshire) at 10:20 am. I banged my elbow slightly but no worries. Like a terrified animal about to be killed, the rumblehog pissed a pint of gas onto the floor when we hit the floor. I almost said ”Aagghh…act like a manly motorcycle and not some candy-ass scooter!”

I sustained no injuries, but I do blame the construction guys who built or remodeled the Pardigm garage because the floor is too slippery to corner with. Should I have noticed this and driven accordingly? Yes, but the floor is a lot smoother and slicker than other talent agency garages, and I’ve been to them all. They should post a sign at the entrance that says “WARNING TO MOTORCYCLISTS — extra-slick floor makes cornering dicey if not dangerous.”