It’s long been my opinion that Hanoi is one of the greatest cities anywhere, and certainly one of the most affordable. Magnificent food. A wonderful teeming energy. The gentlest people. Bicycles and scooters. Lush country regions just outside of town.

Last night we went on the Panini on Sunset website and ordered a medium-size pesto pizza with chicken, plus a Ceasar salad with chicken strips. When all was said and done (tax + $5 tip for the delivery guy) it came to $46 — might as well call it $50. The pizza was tasty and pleasing, but I felt very slightly burned. This little meal just wasn’t worth the candle, I told myself. $30 or $35 but not $46.

Five and a half years ago Jett, Cait and I were enjoying delicious bowls of Vietnamese Pho at a classic Hanoi eatery called Pho Thin. They only serve Pho — clear stock, boiled beef, rice noodles, herbs, green onions and garlic. They charge a little less than $2 U.S. a bowl, but it’s one of the greatest bowls of anything you’ve ever eaten in your life.

$2 for a bowl of magnificent, spirit-lifting, life-changing Pho vs. $46 for an agreeable pesto pizza-and-salad combo.

Jett, Cait and I had a great time in Hanoi in mid-March of 2016 — a year and three-quarters before the launch of wokester terror. Why am I mentioning this now? Because Facebook brought it up…

As someone who’s visited and hung out at the Hanoi Cinematheque two or three times, this birthday greeting (sent by an old friend) meant something. If only the artist in question had tried a little harder to (a) tilt the wall lettering a bit more to the left and (b) make the font stylistically align….oh, well. I only just noticed this. It got me.

It’s currently 8:35 pm in Hanoi and 6:35 am in Los Angeles. We’ll be heading back to Hanoi Airport tomorrow (Sunday) morning, and then catching the same 12:20 pm flight to Seoul. An hour or two later our respective flights will leave for New York (Jett, Cait) and Los Angeles (me). My flight will leave Seoul at 8 pm Sunday night and arrive in Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon at 3:10 pm.

My Vietnam atmosphere pics are mounting up, I realize, and perhaps are starting to seem a little monotonous to some, but this is what’s happening on my end and I’ll be seeing it through. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and every day (sorry for the cliche) is a feast for the senses and not incidentally the soul, and it’s Sunday anyway so where’s the harm?

My flight from Hue landed at 9:30 am, and I was back at the Hanoi Movenpick by 10:15 or so. At 12:30 pm I went to a lunch at Ly Club with Hanoi Film Festival sponsor and Vidotour president and CEO Nguyen Mai, Vietnamese actor Chi Bao, finance director But Dinh Anh and actor-model Nhan Phuc Vinh. Then I walked back to the Movenpick with good-natured Vidotour employee Nguyen Son.

I fell in love with Hanoi almost right away. My flight from Tokyo arrived at 10:25 pm (or 7:25 am LA time) so I couldn’t see all that much, and I haven’t even walked around Old Town, in part due to relentless solicitations (full-body massage, blowjobs…”what do you want, man?”) from young guys on scooters and one 30ish woman in particular who wouldn’t give up) so I’ve really only seen the outskirts and the glistenings of the Red River and the immediate neighborhood near the Hanoi Movenpick.

But I live for cities like this. Cities with natural beauty, economic vitality and tourist appeal but with a fair amount of funk and native aroma on the fringes, side streets and outlying areas, and which haven’t been noticably affected, much less smothered, by corporate plastic enterprises and bad-taste architecture and franchises or any of that 21st Century flotsam that has infected almost every large or mid-size city in the U.S.

Older cities always look and feel and smell different than you might anticipate. I haven’t begun to digest any of the aromas but I love that the corporate plastic element is almost non-existent. I realize, of course, that in celebrating this I am convincing 90% if not 95% of the typical tourists who might read this to never visit Hanoi, but them’s the breaks. Most of the people out there want synthetic comforts when they go on vacations.

Hanoi reminds me of the less slick, less wealthy sections of towns between Nice and Cannes combined with a little Mexico here and there. Elegance and history and poverty and civic pride and corporate investment and squares and government buildings and the red lights covering the walls of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. It’s not some nouveau-riche uptown super-burgh looking to hook in tourists who want the same bland aesthetic they can get in Atlantic City, Cancun or Las Vegas, but a storied, richly atmospheric, agreeably down-at-the-heels atmosphere — not in the center of town, mind, which is fairly flush and bucks-up and well-tended but in the outskirts and along the four-lane, amber-lit boulevards coming into town. And I mean that in the most flattering way imaginable.

The air is heavy and humid in Hanoi, delightfully so. I was told to prepare for fall-type weather… wrong! I’ve seen no fast-food franchises and only one supermall, and it didn’t look like anything in the States. The occasional brick and cobblestoned sidewalks and streets and walls along the boulevards are old and imperfect and rounded down. Hanoi has been here for a thousand years. The agreeably runddown look of it is mixed in with occasional remnants of French colonial homes and the occasional soul-less hotel or office building. And in the daytime, of course, there are tens of thousands of scooters and bicycles.

It’s 1:45 am now (or 8:45 am in LA). I have to get up at 6:30 am to be at the airport (roughly a 40 minute drive to the northwest) for a 9:20 am flight to Danang. I guess I’m going to try and crash.

Ninh, a very sweet and thorough guy hired by Videotour, met me at the gate and facilitated my Vietnamese visa and passport situation.

I’ve accepted a generous invitation to visit and cover the 2012 Hanoi Film Festival (11.25 through 11.29). I’ll leave a few days before Thanksgiving to visit Danang and Hue before returning to Hanoi for four days of moviegoing, interviewing and event-covering. I’m figuring there will have to be at least four or five Asian-produced films worth savoring. It’ll be a chance to learn, open up and breathe in fresh aromas.

“I think the Vietnam War drove a stake right through the heart of America. [And] we’ve never really moved [beyond] that…we never recovered.”

I’ve been to Vietnam three times, and would love to return. I’ve even flirted with the idea or moving there permanently. There’s never been the slightest doubt in my mind that Johnson and Nixon administration policy makers brought immense horror and unimaginable slaughter to that beautiful, once-divided country, but during my three visits I’ve never felt anything but the most tranquil vibes. Nobody has ever given me so much as a hint of a dirty look because of my heritage. The natives who fought against the Americans are, of course, in their 70s and 80s or passed on. The 45-and-unders weren’t even born during the hostilities. Nobody wants to carry that war around — we all want to live in the present.

Which is why I didn’t want to watch Ken Burns and Lynn Novick‘s The Vietnam War, a ten-part, $30 million, 17-hour doc about that tragic conflict, when it premiered on PBS almost exactly six years ago (9.17.17).

But last night…I don’t know why exactly, but I felt suddenly drawn to this miniseries. So I watched three episodes — “The River Styx” (January 1964 – December 1965), “This Is What We Do” (July 1967 – December 1967) and “Things Fall Apart” (January 1968 – July 1968). Five hours without a break. This morning I watched episodes #7, #9 and #10.

I was fascinated, fascinated, horrified, saddened, at times close to tears. What a deluge of death, delusion and horror. Immeasurable and irredeemable. The second most divisive war in U.S. history. And I couldn’t turn it off. Had to see it through. Glad I did.

The great William Friedkin has passed at age 87.

I was going to begin my brief obit (other obligations are pressing as we speak) with a headline that shouted “drat!…zounds!…now Friedkin will never come clean on the French Connection censorship thing!”

Because it is entirely fair and logical to presume that no one in his inner circle will now come forth to sully the late director’s name by confirming the likely truth of the matter, which is that “Hurricane Billy” did, in fact, either ask for or approve the censoring of the Act One N-word scene in his 1971 Oscar-winning crime flick.

So yes, I’m a little bit angry and muttering “curses, foiled again!…he snuck out like a cat burglar!” But let’s put that story aside and show proper respect to a great, outspoken, occasionally turbulent director who ruled the ’70s with enormous drive and primal hunger and churning ambition.

Friedkin was one of those seriously ballsy grade-A hot shots who flourished when big-boy auterism was in flower…from the early to late ’70s he was one of the leaders of the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” motorcycle club, standing side by side with Steven Spielberg, Brian DePalma, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, Bob Fosse, et. al.

And yet, truth be told, Friedkin’s serious golden god period lasted only eight years, or from ’70 through ’77…a chapter that encompassed the making and release of four grade-A films — The Boys in the Band (’70 — a delicious zeitgeist-capturing bitter comedy that I own on Bluray and watch every couple of years), The French Connection (’71 — his finest and most vigorous and super-adrenalized achievement — a truly great film…winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture), The Exorcist (’73 — an excellent, wholly believable horror classic….his commercial peak achievement) and Sorcerer (’77)…a first-rate, hugely ambitious action action thriller that not only disappointed commercially but killed Friedkin’s career momentum.

He recovered, of course, but Friedkin never reclaimed that special current of dynamic power and auteurist urgency…from the late ’71 opening of The French Connection through the collapse of Sorcerer six years later he was damn near king of the fucking world.

Hurricane Billy kept that major-auteur-fascination thing going for another seven years (’78 through ’85)…galloping along on his mighty egoistic steed with the making of four more films…The Brink’s Job (’78), Cruising (’80), Deal of the Century (’83) and To Live and Die in L.A. (’85), his second best urban crime flick and arguably his third best of all time.

A 35-year downshift period followed, during which time Friedkin directed The Guardian, Blue Chips, Jade, Rules of Engagement, The Hunted, Bug, Killer Joe and the forthcoming Venice Film Festival non-competitive selection, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.

If the keepers of Friedkin’s legacy want to do the right thing, they’ll push for the restoration of that censored French Connection scene and erase all copies of the edited bullshit 2021 version. If the Disney guys have any decency they’ll just forget about the whole matter…they’ll say “look, Friedkin was in his late 80s and censoring that scene was completely out of character for a guy known for his ballsiness and obstinacy, so let’s just forget it happened and restore the footage and be done with it.”

For days and days the French Connection censorship story has confounded everyone. The “whodunit” factor, I mean, although it’s been obvious for several days that the nine-second deletion was done at the behest of director William Friedkin (formerly known as Hurricane Billy).

Has the 87-year-old Friedkin gone silly in his old age? Bending over in obeisance to the wokesters? I personally think —- all due respect —- that this formerly ballsy, gold-standard helmer should be roasted on a spit for censoring his own film. It sets a terrible precedent.

Last Wednesday (6.14) I summed it all up. The bizarre deletion of that brief French Connection scene (’71) has apparently been done with Friedkin’s approval or at his behest….good heavens!

On Friday, 6.9, HE commenter “The Multiplex” reported that “in Disney’s DCP asset list the currently-streaming version of The French Connection is listed as ‘2021 William Friedkin v2.'” This info, I noted, “is seemingly fortified by a statement from The Criterion Channel, passed along by “The Connection” in another 6.9.23 HE story titled “HE to Friedkin re Censorship Fracas.” CC’s statement said that “according to our licensor [Disney], this is a ‘Director’s Edit‘ of the film.”

So that’s it. Shame on that Friedkin mofo. And yet all the while several HE commenters have insisted that the issue won’t be settled until Glenn “the last word” Kenny has reported on it. I had expected Kenny’s piece to appear last week, but it didn’t. Behold…it finally surfaced this morning (“Who Censored ‘The French Connection’?” Is A Case That Only Popeye Doyle Can Solve“), and yet — hold on to your grief and your weltschmerz, Kenny fans! —the article contains no Friedkin smoking gun.

After reciting the same evidence that I reported several days ago — “2021 William Friedkin V2.” plus Criterion calling the censored version a “Director’s Edit” — Kenny merely says that “this ostensibly puts the ball in Friedkin’s court.” Ostensibly?

Kenny adds that (a) he’s “reached out to Friedkin through CAA and received no response” and that (b) “a film asset manager I’ve asked about this matter has reached out to Friedkin personally and received a response from Friedkin’s personal assistant saying basically nothing.” And the name of that tune is The Guess Who’s “No Sugar Tonight (In My Coffee).”

My favorite Kenny passage in the whole piece: “Jeffrey Wells, as mentioned, first brought the issue up on June 3rd, in a post titled “Criterion’s ‘French Connection’ Censorship.”

“Wells likes to cultivate a barrel-chested, combative, curmudgeonly air in his writings. (Commenting on the blanket of orange wildfire smoke that recently enveloped Manhattan, he shrugged it off, stating, “You should try breathing Hanoi air on a shitty day. Tough guys only.”) He’s long had differences with Criterion’s physical product practices, over issues like aspect-ratios and color timing. He almost invariably couches his complaints in ad hominem terms, and this French Connection business allowed him to really go to town in that respect.

“In one of several subsequent posts commemorating the Twitter rage over what many were still calling Criterion’s censorship of Friedkin’s film, Wells instructed the company’s president to ‘blow it out your ass,’ never specifying the “it” to which he referred. As with the inference that Criterion is some kind of ‘woke’ company, Wells believes that the label represents what he calls a ‘dweeb’ sensibility, and is populated by people who would more than likely snub him at receptions and on movie queues. And honestly, on the latter count, he’s probably not wrong, although not necessarily for the reasons he thinks.”

Reports about the Canadian forest fire smoke turning the air in the tristate area (New York City Connecticut, New Jersey) into a region that vaguely resembles Blade Runner 2 and is blanketed with air quality that’s worse than the most polluted Indian cities…okay, they haven’t been inaccurate.

But if you’re from Los Angeles, which has long grappled with occasionally dense smog (especially in the ‘70s and ‘80s) and infrequent forest fire smoke, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal.

That’s what I was telling a friend…”this is just a typical bad-smog day in Los Angeles with a little Malibu fire overlay…no one’s idea of healthy, but ya gotta roll with it…flush it out…man up.”

The sun is smaller with a muddy-orange hue and yes, there’s an eerie atmospheric visual thing going on, and no, I wouldn’t recommend jogging or long hikes until it all starts to blow away on Sunday.

But overall HE has been much more fascinated than spooked. “I don’t trust air that I can’t see” is too blustery, too Lee Marvin or Robert Conrad but I have, as a rule, eaten this shit up and shrugged it off for decades. You should try breathing Hanoi air on a shitty day. Tough guys only.

40 years of living in Los Angeles has taught me that truly sparkling, blue-sky days are relatively rare. Having hiked in Switzerland and Colorado and Vermont and Mill Valley, I know what radiantly clear air feels and smells like. And I will breathe it again.

Monday, 10:50 am: Healthy skies.