And immediately humiliated myself when, having forgotten his name, I idiotically addressed him as “Captain Smith”. The glancing look on his face, a combination of mild contempt and mild disgust, is forever branded upon my memory.

I’m not saying that Captain Edward Smith was or wasn’t the chief culprit in the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, but someone needs to explain how Bernard Hill’s performance as this tragic figure in James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster was in itself infamous.

These things happen, I realize, when an obit writer is under pressure to quickly bang out copy but still.

His performance as Theoden hadn’t happened at the time of our unfortunate encounter (sometime in ‘98 or ‘99) but being a Lord of the Rings hater I would have avoided any such mention anyway.

Ominous indications of what may be coming are making me feel more and more depressed and sick in my soul. I don’t want to succumb to despair but this awful pit-of-my-stomach feeling won’t go away.

If admitting this makes me a bad person, fine — I’m a bad person then. To alleviate my vague feelings of guilt I subsequently read through Wikipedia’s synopsis of Baby Reindeer’s seven episodes. Thank God I trusted my impulse to abandon this series after episode #1. No offense but Richard Gadd’s “Donny Dunn” is…I’m obviously in no position to judge after one lousy session but he immediately struck me as someone I really, really didn’t want to hang with. Not to mention Jessica Gunning’s “Martha Scott”. Yes, I know — the problem isn’t the show or the morbid obesity or the anal stuff or Donny’s sexuality or the trans thing…the problem is with me, the potential seven-episode viewer who ran shrieking from the room. I’m the bad guy, no question, but at least I’ve accepted my guilt in this matter. Go ahead — throw vegetables.

Just the sound of “Anita Pallenberg“…just the sound of her name gets your blood going. And the way she looked in the ’60s and early ’70s…those eyes, that slender model bod, that blonde hair, that great toothy smile and that mischievous expression.

Pallenberg, who passed in 2017 at age 75, was an elite, live-wire cultural adventuress like few others. An Italian-German model, a Roman Dolce Vita girl, a Warholer in Manhattan, an edgy actress (Barbarella, Performance) and a tantalizing, muse-like Rolling Stones girlfriend — initially linked with Brian Jones and briefly sexual with Mick Jagger, but mainly in deep with Keith Richards, with whom she lived for 13 years and had three kids with.

If any woman was right in the London Morocco Cote d’Azur vortex of it all, Pallenberg was…all of that hormonal energy and lust for life…all of that dizzy proximity to that druggy neverland playground feeling…an elite circle that drew nourishment from a well that everyone wanted to sip from…fame, decadent glamour, notoriety, discovery, depravity, provocation and all manner of drug-fueled breast-stroking and splashing around…what a time, what a life and what a comedown when it all tapered off.

Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill‘s Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg, which I finally saw last night, is hard to succinctly describe beyond the boilerplate. Everyone seems to find it fascinating but there’s something a bit resigned and downerish about it.

But I’ll tell you one thing…no, two things off the top. One, it’s based on an unpublished memoir that Pallenberg wrote, and so the narration has a tone of straight-shooting, take-it-or-leave-it authenticity. And two, Scarlet Johansson was the wrong actor to “play” Pallenberg by reading from it. Pallenberg’s voice had a dry, casually sophisticated, laid-back European flavor…a seen-and-tasted-it-all quality, and Johansson’s rural, shopping-mall voice is just all wrong…it makes Pallenberg sound coarse and common, which she certainly wasn’t.

The doc is certainly interesting but less than a half-hour in you’re saying to yourself, “Wow, she was a fascinating actress and a major presence, ahead of the curve and truly fearless…she knew everyone and was quite the social and sartorial influencer who whoo-whooed on ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and inspired ‘Beast of Burden’…right there at the center of every significant Rolling Stones chapter and juncture, but what did she do wrong?”

I’ll tell you what she did wrong. She flirted too closely with danger and self-destruction. Pot and hallucinogens and the whole tingly, mid ’60s spiritual side of the equation were great, but she and Keith got too deeply into smack in the late ’60s and ’70s. That was it, the whole problem. Junkiedom, fatalism, no planning for the future.

But man, what an incandescent life before that factor moved in…a life that inspired my using the word “that” 15 or 16 times in this review, and that ain’t hay.

The entire Fall Guy team and especially Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt and director David Leitch…they’re all in the dumps right now, chins on the pavement, hiding their faces or at least wearing sunglasses and thinking about escaping to Palm Springs for a week or two.

The Fall Guy hasn’t exactly been rejected en masse but it’s certainly been “meh”-ed or half-waved off by Joe and Jane Popcorn.

The whole Gosling balloon is sinking into the wetlands, the swamp. Imagine being Gosling right now and thinking back to your “I’m Just Ken” Oscar moment, which was only a few weeks ago…life can switch around like that.

I’m half-enraged and half-heartsick over the apparent likelihood that Donald Trump will win the election next November.

Average Joe rage against the Gaza campus occupiers and Biden failing to project a tough-enough image…this is analogous to middle-class Americans recoiling at the Grant Park chaos during the 1968 Democratic Converntion.

Biden is almost certainly going to lose and I’m sick over this…spitting on the sidewalk, punching the refrigerator.

Biden did it to himself, of course, and to us by deciding on a hard progressive approach to the Presidency rather than a moderately sensible liberal-centrist course. In his hubris Biden decided that only he could defeat Trump and thereby refused to step aside.

Then Merrick Garland set the stage by essentially giving us a second Trump term by doing nothing about Trump for 22 months, waiting to appoint special prosector Jack Smith on 11.18.22. Nearly two years of wimping out.

The memory of these two will live in absolute infamy.

I used to work for a New Canaan landscaping outfit in the mid ’70s, and the boss, Big John Calitri, used to subconsciously mutter pop labels and phrases as a kind of work mantra. One of his favorites was “Molson’s Golden Ale.” We’d be lugging bags of fertilizer and wood chips or planting balled saplings, and between exhausted grunts Big John would say “Molson’s Golden Ale.”

Then his son started to do it, and of his favorites was “Walter Chalmers.” It became a running joke between he, myself and one other guy on the crew. Whenever we were especially tired or facing an especially hard task, someone would say “Walter Chalmers.”

Who was Walter Chalmers? You’re reading Hollywood Elsewhere and you’re wondering who Walter Chalmers was?

11.11.16 Obit: What a sad irony that Robert Vaughn, an ardent lifelong liberal Democrat, has died with the knowledge that Orange Hitler will move into the White House on 1.20.17. Perhaps last Tuesday’s election hastened his end, and perhaps not. But if I’d been in Robert Vaughn’s slippers and ill and near the end, I would have probably said “oh, my God, this is ludicrous…I’m outta here.”

Vaughn was 83, and if you ask me his strongest performance was conniving San Francisco politician Walter Chalmers in Peter Yates‘ Bullitt (’68) — the bane of Steve McQueen‘s existence. In the annals of movie villains, all hail the sinister, calculating, rodent-like Walter Chalmers!

He also played David Blackman, a fetishy studio-boss character who liked to wear bras and garter belts during sex, in Blake Edwards‘ S.O.B. (’81). Every character in S.O.B. was allegedly based on a real person to some degree, and I’m told that Blackman was allegedly based on Johnny Carson, or more particularly an observation passed along by Morgan Fairchild (who was Carson’s lover in ’80 or thereabouts) that Carson enjoyed this, etc. Yes, it sounds ludicrous, grain of salt, etc.

Posted on 4.8.07:

The Wiki page says Vaughn played two roles in Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments — a Hebrew golden calf paganist and an Egyptian charioteer (i.e., he allegedly stood right behind Yul Brynner’s Ramses in the campaign against Moses’ flock). Three…actually four years later he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as a drunken, self-destructive scion in The Young Philadelphians (’59).

He also played the most neurotic of the gunmen in The Magnificent Seven (’60).

Yes, Vaughn’s biggest, splashiest role was Napoleon Solo in the original ’60s series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. He also played Harry Rule in The Protectors, a ’70s TV series that I never saw or cared about in the slightest, and then General Hunt Stockwell in the 5th season of The A-Team — ditto.

He also has a six-year, 48-episode run (’04 to ’12) on the British TV series Hustle, and in ’12 appeared in a British soap called Coronation Street.

Zeke’s X reaction, which appeared last night, made me laugh out loud.

“Sometimes there’s God…so quickly!” — Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire

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Time is at an absolute premium during the Cannes Film Festival, and 60 to 90 minutes is a sizable block of that stuff. But I must attend! I must diligently support and especially (if necessary) defend this presumably exceptional film from the bad guys.