Obviously Earl Holliman‘s career peaked in the mid to late ’50s, and if you ask me his absolute top-of-the-heap moment was his solo performance in “Where Is Everybody?“, the debut episode of Rod Serling‘s The Twilight Zone. The episode aired on October 2, 1959.

Otherwise Holliman almost always played unsophisticated or doltish none-too-brights and second bananas — The Bridges at Ioko Ri (Mickey Rooney calling out “Lester! Lester!” when Holliman was shot by North Korean troops), The Rainmaker, I Died A Thousand Times, Forbidden Planet, Giant, Sergeant Bill Crowley in Police Woman, etc.

Until today I never knew Holliman was gay but whatever. Successfully closeted for decades…fine. An Advocate piece outed him in 2015. His husband was Craig Curtis.

The Tachen folks have issued a Dr. No coffee table book, and they’re charging $850 for it.

Boilerplate: “This detailed companion explores the making of Dr. No (1962), the film that first introduced the world to the cinematic 007. With over a thousand images, excerpts from the original script, and stories from the cast and crew, this book offers unrestricted access, etc.”

I would love to have this lying around but c’mon…

Last weekend I re-watched George Harrison: Living in the Material World, the 208-minute Martin Scorsese-David Tedeschi doc from 2011. I experienced the same reaction. A fair amount of annoyment with the jumpy, spottily edited, all-over-the-map first half, and a profound emotional involvement with the second half, especially the portion when George’s cancer starts to win and infinite finality is getting closer and closer.

As a kind of wind-down exercise in bed I re-read my 10.5.11 review and thought, “Okay, I was obviously in the tank for Harrison and Scorsese but it was also a perceptive, reasonably fair assessment.”

Then I read Bill Wyman’s 10.4.11 review for Slate, titled “The Boring Beatle.” The difference between my piece and Wyman’s is that he didn’t care for Harrison’s gloomy manner or a good portion of his output after All Things Must Pass, or for Scorsese’s sanitizing on Harrison’s behalf. I, on the other hand, was more or less a fan who was willing to look the other way.

Wyman’s review is much ballsier and more incisive than my own.

Please read them both, starting with my HE review…

Initially posted on 10.5.11: I saw the first half of Martin Scorsese‘s 208-minute George Harrison doc during the [2011] Telluride Film Festival, and was only somewhat impressed. It covered the first 23 or 24 years of Harrison’s life, or ’43 to ’69…and I felt I knew all that going in. But the second half, which I finally saw at a New York Film Festival screening, is highly nourishing and affecting and well worth anyone’s time.

Yes, even for guys like LexG who are sick to death of boomer-age filmmakers and film executives endlessly making movies about their youth. It’s reasonable to feel this way because boomers have been commercially fetishizing their ’60s and ’70s glory days for a long time. But George Harrison: Living In The Material World is nonetheless a very good film. Particularly Part Two.

Because it’s about a journey that anyone who’s done any living at all can relate to, and about a guy who lived a genuinely vibrant spiritual life, and who never really self-polluted or self-destructed in the usual rock-star ways.

Well, that’s not really true, is it? At age 58 Harrison died of lung cancer, which he attributed to being a heavy smoker from the mid ’50s to late ’80s. And he wasn’t exactly the perfect boyfriend or husband. (There were a few infidelities during his marriage to Olivia Harrison.) And he wasn’t the perfect spiritual man either, despite all the songs and talk about chanting and clarity and oneness with Krishna. He had his bacchanalian periods. And he did so with the wonderful luxury of having many, many millions in the bank. It’s not like Harrison was struggling through awful moments of doubt and pain in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Nobody’s just one color or mood or flavor. Everyone’s complicated and inconsistent and contradictory. If Harrison-the-holy wasn’t known for occasionally flawed or weird behavior his rep would be insufferable.

But this journey is something to take and share.

Part Two, as you might presume, is about Harrison’s solo career. It starts with the Beatles breakup, the making of All Things Must Pass, the 1971 Concert for Bangla Desh, etc. And then settles into the mid to late ’70s and ’80s, “So Sad”, “Crackerbox Palace,” Handmade Films, “Dark Horse,” the Travelling Willburys, the stabbing incident and so on.

The film is entirely worth seeing for a single sequence, in fact. One that’ll make you laugh out loud and break your heart a little. It’s a story that Ringo Starr tells about a chat he had with Harrison in Switzerland two or three months before his death in November ’01. I won’t explain any more than this.

Scorsese’s doc has no title cards, no narration, no through-line interview as Bob Dylan: No Direction Home had. As noted, I found Part One a little slipshod and patchworky at times. The editor is David Tedeschi, who also cut No Direction Home as well as Scorsese’s Public Speaking, the Fran Lebowitz doc, and Shine a Light, the 2008 Rolling Stones’ concert doc.

I still say A Complete Unknown should have been titled Ghost of Electricity (Searchlight, 12.25) because there’s definitely something ghostly (as in elusive, unknowable, wispy, shadow-cloaked, just out of reach) about the actual Bob Dylan as well as Timothee Chalamet‘s version of him. Not an allusion to “going electric at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival”, for Chrissake, but something, you know, trippier.

I would have also loved My Weariness Amazes Me because it’s the single best line in Mr. Tambourine Man…because before Dylan cooked it up nobody had ever been amazed by their own weariness, and I mean nobody. I sure as hell hadn’t felt that way, I can tell you. But ever since I first heard that line I’ve chanted it over and over. It’s almost become a kind of proverb or motto…a mantra to be repeated when the ache and angst and cosmic boredom get to be a bit much.

Eddie Ginley again: “A Complete Unknown is the boomerist boomer shit that ever boomered.”

…that I feel compelled to forgive its primarily structural, non-lethal shortcomings. I certainly felt an urge to brush them aside while chatting late last night with a smattering of the cool kidz (including the Hoboken-residing twin Oscar Expert bruhs) outside theatre #7 within Manhattan’s Lincoln Square complex. No review until 12.10 but in the meantime…

The tail end of the final sentence should read “so much of Unknown is spot–on, the real thing, a bell ringer. I was sorta kinda emotionally melting during the first half hour or so — literally on the verge of tears. Yes, I’ve been deeply invested in Dylan my entire life so I’m especially susceptible but still…