Nothing much has happened, and nothing much will happen, during Sunday’s (4.6) finale. Okay, the fact that it’s 90 minutes offer a glimmer of hope. But it’s mainly been inching along and pissing people off.

I despise Jason Isaacs‘ Tim Ratliff so much….nothing he can do on Sunday, even killing himself, will satisfy me as he’s done nothing for the last seven episodes…waste of skin.

Natasha Rothwell‘s Belinda Lindsey is mind-blowingly stupid for turning down a $100,000 gift when she doesn’t really know what Jon Gries‘ Gary / Greg is actually guilty of, death-of-his-wife-wise…she’s just guessing. (And stupid.) Her son gets it: “If you don’t take the money, he’ll come after you.” Duhhh.

Season #3 has been a shortfaller on so many fronts that it can’t possibly make things right with one episode to go. It’s pretty much been an outright failure. Mike White has dropped the clay pitcher, and the milk is all over the floor.

Remember that scene in which Al Pacino‘s Vincent Hanna and the cops, hiding inside a parked ten-wheeler, are spying on Robert DeNiro‘s Neil McCauley, Val Kilmer‘s Chris Shiherlis and two others as they begin to rob some nondescript joint (possibly a precious metal depot) in downtown Los Angeles?

After a careless uniformed cop makes a noise inside the truck, McCauley, suspecting the worst, aborts the heist…”we walk!” The crew leaves the building carrying nothing, but they’re being taped, of course, and so Hanna and the cops know their faces, obviously including Shiherlis.

There’s a scene directly following in which McCauley tells Chris and Tom Sizemore‘s Michael Cheritto that they’ve almost certainly been identified…”assume it all.”

After the big downtown L.A. bank robbery, Hanna’s team, led by Mykelti Williamson‘s Sergeant Bobby Drucker, has Chris’s wife, Charlene (Ashley Judd), in a Venice apartment. They’re somehow anticipating that Chris will try to rendezvous with Charlene at the Venice pad (how exactly?), and within a couple of minutes a car slowly approaches from a small side street, and Drucker has an idea it might be Chris.

The car pulls up and the driver gets out, and we see that Chris has sheared off his long blonde hair and is now sporting a Chris Walken flattop. Charlene, standing on an outdoor balcony, signals Chris with that wonderfully subtle hand gesture that things are not cool. Chris gets back in and drives off. Drucker radios a black-and-white to stop Chris and check his ID. Except he has clean ID, identifying him as someone else, and they let him go.

We’re expected to believe that Drucker can’t recognize Chris because his hair is shorter? He and Hanna know his facial features — why can’t they make him despite the length of his hair? They haven’t passed around photos of Chris to everyone concerned?

I’ve been avoiding Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne‘s Adolescence (Netflix) because of an instinct. But I guess I’ll start watching tonight.

Violent stabbings in the UK. Young lad attackers, young girl victims. Teenage blade rage. An indictment of cruelty and bullying and how the manosphere has affected young teens. Andrew Tate and the “red pill” community. Four episodes, all “oners” (i.e., no cuts, shot in real time). Originally conceived by Stephen Graham “as a response to a sudden increase in violent knife crime in the UK”, including the 2023 murder of Elianne Andam and 2021 stabbing of Ava White.

Is there any kind of racial or immigrant community factor here? There’d better not be or consequences will ensue. Don’t mention the 2024 Southport stabbings…none of that. Trash the manosphere all you want, but keep it there.

No poet-songwriter worth his or her salt will explain what their song lyrics mean. The absolute king and ruler of this attitude is Bob Dylan, of course…he’s been rebuffing such questions since he first appeared 65 years ago.

On at least one mid ’60s occasion, however, Dylan not only relaxed his standards but eagerly offered specific analysis of each and every track on Bringing It All Back Home, released in April ’65.

Why the lyrics tutorial? Because Dylan wanted to put the high hard one to Marianne Faithfull, who was quite the erotic object of desire back then.

N.Y. Times correspondent Lindsay Zoladz reports that in “Faithfull: An Autobiography“, published 25 years ago, Faithfull wrote that Dylan “tried to seduce her by playing his latest album, Bringing It All Back Home, and explaining in detail what each track meant.”

Alas, no nookie for Bobby. “I just found him so…daunting,” Faithfull wrote. “As if some god had come down from Olympus and started to come onto me.”

The legend is that post-shutdown Dylan exacted a form of revenge by ripping up a poem he’d written about Faithfull. They nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long friendship.

Faihfull got fat when she aged into her late 60s or thereabouts, but that happens. She passed two months ago — 1.30.25 — at age 78.

“I see myself as a sensitive, intelligent human being, but with the soul of a clown.”

Val Kilmer, aged 65, took off sometime yesterday in Los Angeles. And I’m sorry…of course I am. But the announcement shocked no one. Kilmer’s bout with throat cancer that began in the mid teens, his jarring Will Sampson-like appearance starting around 2020, the vibe of diminishment he gave off in Top Gun: Maverick…we all understood he was on a gradual downswirl. There but for the grace of God.

A lot of people will be streaming Val, that better than-decent 2021 portrait doc, on Amazon tonight. Or Oliver Stone‘s The Doors (in which Kilmer did his own singing) or Top Gun or Tombstone (Kilmer’s grayish pallor and wheezy cough) or Batman Forever (that Batsuit ass shot) or Phillip Noyce‘s under-remembered but smartly engaging The Saint.

But for me the ultimate Val Kilmer film — the one I immediately default to when I think of this fine, conflicted, relentlessly passionate fellow, whom I knew very slightly and chatted with once or twice — is not one of his starring vehicles (for he was never really a superstar as much as a high-energy, high-commitment character actor) but Michael Mann‘s Heat (’95), an ensemble crime film for the ages.

Kilmer played Chris Shiherlis, a rugged, well-disciplined, first-rate thief with a gambling problem…a loyal soldier who absolutely ruled during that explosive shoot-out scene in downtown Los Angeles.

After watching Heat with one of my sons for the third or fourth time in the early aughts, I remember saying in a tone of hushed reverence, “If I was reckless and self-destructive enough to be a bank robber, which would never happen but still…if I ever got into a ferocious shoot-out with cats who wanted to take me down, I would want a hardcore guy like Kilmer defending my flank and covering my six.”

Not that shooting at street cops is any kind of decent or civilized thing, but when and if the chips are down and the bullet casings are flying…

True stuff: I went to a party at Kilmer’s Hollywood Hills home sometime in early ’03 or ’04. (Bill Maher was there also.) I never regarded Kilmer as anything more than just a name-brand actor I’d said hello to once or twice, but he was a friendly host that night. Cool to shoot the shit with in the kitchen. We talked about The Saint. There was a huge blowup photo of Angelina Jolie, his recent Alexander costar, on the living room wall.

Seven years earlier I did a fair amount of reporting on an Entertainment Weekly hit piece about the tumultuous shooting of The Island of Dr. Moreau. At one time or another the piece was called “Psycho Kilmer, Qu’est ca c’est?“. Did Kilmer know I’d helped out on this damning article? I only know that he didn’t mention it during our kitchen chat.

In 2011 I was interviewing Judy Greer at a West Hollywood La Pain Quotidien about her award-calibre supporting performance in Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants. Kilmer was there also, and we exchanged curt smiles and waves without speaking. We waved at each other again as he left 15 or 20 minutes later. When it came time to pay the bill for Judy and myself, I was told by the waitress that Kilmer had paid it.

Despite all the bumps and potholes, Kilmer was a good soul…for my money he exuded decency and seemed to be seeking transcendence at every turn.

Marc Antony in Julius Caesar: “This was a man!”