I want to say this carefully but clearly: Judd Apatow‘s The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling, the 270-minute doc I finally finished watching a couple of days ago, might be the best thing he’s ever done. Seriously. The most full-of-feeling, the saddest, the wisest, the most melancholy, the most emotionally affecting.

And I say this as a serious admirer of Apatow’s Knocked Up, Funny People, This Is 40 and Trainwreck, not to mention all the good or near-great comedies Apatow has produced (Bridesmaids, Pineapple Express, Get Him To The Greek, Juliet, Naked). Maybe I’m overpraising, but I don’t think so. All I know is that I began to really miss Shandling after it was over, even more than I did when he suddenly died two years ago.

There is nothing more interesting than the story of a man or woman who started out feeling oppressed or miserable, and nothing less interesting than hearing about how he or she ended up feeling happy or content. That was John Lennon‘s life — he was a much more interesting guy between ’60 and ’74 (his anxious, cutting-remark period, including his lost-weekend alcoholic phase during ’73 and ’74) and an almost dull fellow between ’75 (when he became an obedient Yoko Ono house-husband) and his assassination in December ’80.

I’ve only just asked for screener access to Thom Zimny and Priscilla Presley‘s Elvis Presley: The Searcher (HBO, 4.14). In the interim here are excerpts from Jon Pareles’ N.Y. Times review: “There are no fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Nor is there a television with a bullet hole in its screen. Drugs, an unavoidable topic, are mentioned in sympathetic tones as an overworked performer’s self-medication.

“A two-part, three-hour documentary that begins airing Saturday on HBO, Elvis Presley: The Searcher strives to rescue the Presley story from its tabloid side. Instead, it presents a biography of an artist and musician who was both spectacularly gifted and unconscionably misdirected. Guided by his own ideas and instincts, he transformed 20th-century culture in the 1950s. But afterward, treated by his manager as a commercial workhorse, he spent years making trivial movies and performing as a nostalgia act.

This is special. Seven minutes and 45 seconds of Manhattan in the summer of 1911 — 107 years ago. The mint-condition print, slowed-down speed and added sound makes a huge difference. Posted on 4.7.18 by Guy Jones. Captured by Svenska Biografteatern, a Swedish film company that operated between 1907 and 1919. Imagine if someone were to colorize this footage just so.

From Michael Rechstaffen’s 3.14.18 SXSW review: “Visually atmospheric but tonally all over the place, Hot Summer Nights” — what a banal-ass title! — “has much to appreciate but ultimately possesses the sampler-platter vibe of a director’s demo reel.

“Set on Cape Cod during the particularly scorching summer of 1991, Elijah Bynum‘s drama [zeroes in on vacationing] Daniel (Timothee Chalamet) forming a pot-dealing partnership with bad boy Hunter (Alex Roe). Add to this a steamy relationship with Hunter’s sister McKayla (Maika Monroe). Pic’s initially hyper pace gives way to needlessly protracted takes, often featuring extreme close-ups of characters quietly revealing painful truths.

“Things pick up a bit as destructive Hurricane Bob is gathering strength, but by that point, the all-too-apparent two-hour running time is also weighing heavily without enough plot to fill it.

“Director-writer Bynum admittedly coaxes sensitive performances from his photogenic cast, especially Chalamet, Roe, Monroe and Emory Cohen as a self-styled thug, and makes for a terrific music curator, given the ’60s and ’70s song choices that permeate many of the scenes. In the future, should he manage to add a little more discipline to the mix, his sophomore effort could hold considerable promise.”

Is this the weakest Cannes lineup anyone can remember? Kinda feels that way. Telluride’s Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger are having champagne for breakfast. I know titles will be added, of course, but right now, what a letdown. Lame. Weak tea. The Netflix withdrawal was devastating, decimating. If the festival could have at least shown Roma, Norway and The Other Side of the Wind, things would be looking somewhat better this morning.

Right now the only apparent bright lights are Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War, David Robert Mitchell‘s Under The Silver Lake (which I’ve heard good but mixed things about), Matteo Garrone‘s Dogman and Spike Lee‘s BlacKkKlansman.

I’m leaving home for three weeks, travelling thousands of miles and laying out roughly $4K to see these five significant films plus whatever the noteworthy surprises may be.

No Luca Guadagnino (Suspiria will play Venice/Toronto), no Laszlo Nemes (Sunset), no Nuri Bilge Ceylan (The Wild Pear Tree), no Brian De Palma (Domino), no Mike Leigh (Peterloo), no Paolo Sorrentino (Loro), no Jennifer Kent (The Nightingale), no Claire Denis (High Life), no Alfonso Cuaron (Roma), no Olivier Assayas (E-Book), no Carlos Reygadas (Where Life is Born), no Paul Greengrass (Norway), no Terrence Malick (Radegund), no Woody Allen (averse to showing A Rainy Day in New York as this would involve press badgering) and no Orson Welles (The Other Side of the Wind). 15 might-have-beens!

What’s the point of re-mentioning the out-of-competition screening of Solo: A Star Wars Story?

No Lars Von Trier for now, but The House That Jack Built, an envelope-pushing serial-killer drama with Matt Dillon and Uma Thurman, may be announced as an add-on.

Jafar Panahi‘s Three Faces and Joe Penna‘s Arctic…maybe. Jean-Luc Godard‘s The Image Book and Kore-Eda Hirokazu‘s Shoplifters…meh. Wim Wenders‘ Pope Francis — A Man of His Word (out of competition)…ehh.

Obstinate French exhibitors and that prehistoric French law insisting upon a three-year window between theatrical and streaming are the villains this morning.

From Variety: “The competition program includes just three female filmmakers, prompting Frémaux to reiterate his position that ‘the films that were selected were chosen for their own intrinsic qualities,” not the gender of their directors. Acknowledging the importance of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, (i.e., “The world will never be the same again, and we will question our own practices about the gender parity” in salaries and jury representation), Fremaux stressed that “there will never be a selection with a positive discrimination for women” — i.e., a quota system.

In a 2.15 piece called “This Is Beneath Me,” I wrote the following about Brad Pitt‘s post-divorce adventuring: “Brad’s next serious girlfriend or wife needs to be someone better than Angelina Jolie and way better than Jennifer Aniston, and by that I mean someone classy like Amal Clooney…a lawyer or a diplomat, a brilliant book author or stage director or brain surgeon, someone brilliant and accomplished but without Jolie’s curious history.”

Well, a new Us magazine cover story says Pitt has been romantically involved “since last fall” with 42 year-old Neri Oxman, “a renowned architect and professor at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology whom Pitt reportedly sought out after seeing a series of 3-D printed furniture pieces she designed.”

Us reports that Pitt “‘has been spotted going into her apartment building on multiple occasions late at night and emerging the next morning after she leaves to teach,’ the source said.” [HE to readership: That means they’re doing the hunka-chunka.] “He’s also said to have headed abroad with his alleged new squeeze, accompanying her to a conference in South Africa at which she was a featured speaker.”

Previously married to Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, Oxman dumped a “very wealthy man” she’d been dating shortly after meeting Pitt.

More than a couple HE readers pooh-oohed my 2.15 Amal Clooney-type hypothesis. One guy said, “Naah, Brad needs to settle down with some hot 28-to-32 year old actress, knock her up and live in an open marriage so if he wants to fuck around on set, he can. He’s a good ole boy. An Amal Clooney situation makes no sense. He has never given much of a shit about social causes, etc.”

“Damn, is it good to watch a movie that expects the audience to pay attention and that doesn’t pander to the least common denominator.” — James Berardinelli, ReelViews. “It may be a mostly pessimistic portrait of its time and place, but it offers hope, if only that movies of its style, scope and smarts can still get made.” — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post. “Gilroy is a master at laying out a twisty plot, and Anderson directs with the kind of verve that enables almost all the twists to hit us with the force of surprise.” — Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times.

And so I began my chat with Beirut screenwriter Tony Gilroy with the following: “It’s so lovely to see a good Tony Gilroy-authored film…done right, done in a clear, adult, complex way…you can actually follow the plot..veins of eloquence and feeling…second-act plot pivots, the payoff and the denouement,” blah blah. And then off to the races.

We covered the basics, which is that Gilroy wrote the Beirut script 27 years ago, when he was working for TedField‘s Interscope. Except nobody bit and so it was put away, and then the film finally launched in ’16 or thereabouts with Brad Anderson directing and Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike costarring, and so Gilroy did a rewrite and then Anderson shot it in Tangiers in less that 30 days, and for next to nothing.

Beirut producer-screenwriter Tony Gilroy.

I’m told that Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York will not be announced as a Cannes Film Festival selection tomorrow morning. The reason, I gather, is not because festival honcho Thierry Fremaux didn’t want to show it, and not because Amazon didn’t want to provide a DCP, but because Allen and producer Letty Aronson (i.e., his sister) didn’t want the controversial attention.

Rather than stand up to the naysayers and Rainy Day costar Timothee Chalamet, who announced several weeks ago that he’s donating his salary for working on the film to a #TimesUp organization, Allen and Aronson have apparently opted out.

It may be that A Rainy Day in New York isn’t very good, in which case I would understand Allen’s reluctance to show it in Cannes. But at least a couple of not-all-that-great Allen films have screened in Cannes before (Irrational Man, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger) and so not showing Rainy Day is also, one could infer, about a lack of sterner stuff or certainly an instinct to avoid a turbulent episode.

Ducking and hiding in the midst of a persistent but highly questionable controversy (i.e., the Dylan Farrow allegation that was re-stated in a 12.7.17 L.A. Times op-ed piece, and the Robert Weide defense that was posted on 12.13) is a way of saying “whatever you guys want to believe or not believe is fine with me, but I’m not going to submit to a tabloid circus in Cannes in order to promote my latest film, however good or bad it might be…I just don’t want to get raked over the coals by the Cannes press corps about this whole matter once again so the hell with it…Amazon will probably release it with a minimum of fanfare but I’m moving on to my next film.”

As one insider put it, “Woody himself and his own team might not think that going to Cannes is the best idea at this particular moment.”

A pair of second-hand “insiders” have confided that nothing has been said about A Rainy Day in New York since earlier this year, and that “they’re already talking about working on the next one.” Duck and cover, avoid the heat, choose the path of least resistance, etc.

Netflix’s Ted Sarandos has toldVariety‘s Ramin Setoodeh that the previously submitted Netflix slate — Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind, Morgan Neville‘s They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, Paul Greengrass‘s Norway and Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark — won’t screen at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.

Terrific! The general importance and impact of this legendary Cote d’Azur gathering has suddenly dropped two or three notches. With the absence of Cuaron, Greengrass and Welles, there is suddenly a gaping void. What could have been a great or very good festival will now be somewhat less so.

“It was not our decision to make,” Sarandos explained. “Thierry announced the change in their qualification rules [that] requires a film to have distribution in France to get in, which is completely contrary to the spirit of any film festival in the world. Film festivals are to help films get discovered so they can get distribution. Under those rules, we could not release our films day-and-date to the world like we’ve released nearly 100 films over the last couples of years. And if we did that, we’d have to hold back that film from French subscribers for three years under French law. Therefore, our films they are not qualified for the Cannes Film Festival competition.”

Also: “I do have faith that Thierry shares my love for cinema and would be a champion of changing that when he realizes how punitive this rule is to filmmakers and film lovers. [So] we hope that they do change the rules. We hope that they modernize. But we will continue to support all films and all filmmakers. We encourage Cannes to rejoin the world cinema community and welcome them back. Thierry had said in his comments when he announced his change that the history of the internet and the history of Cannes are two different things. Of course they are two different things. But we are choosing to be about the future of cinema. If Cannes is choosing to be stuck in the history of cinema, that’s fine.”

My first thought as I watched this obviously well-cut trailer for Dawn Porter‘s Bobby Kennedy For President (Netflix, 4.27) was “how deep-down honest is this film?” It’s very easy to paint a romantic, inspirational portrait of this fallen hero. But we’ve just been through the sordid events of Chappaquiddick, which portrayed Edward Kennedy as a character-challenged weakling. And we all know that President John F. Kennedy had his own character issues as far as incessant hound-dogging was concerned. Are we to assume that the Kennedy family’s tradition of privilege and the faint whiff of arrogance never rubbed off on Bobby? Not a bit?

I agree that RFK was probably the best of the brood, as he’d clearly demonstrated the ability and willingness to grow with the times. But I wonder who he really was, and I mean “really.” He began in the mid ’50s as a conservative-minded hardhead investigator (founding father Joseph P. Kennedy once said that RFK “hates like I do”) and an ally of Communist witch-hunter Roy Cohn, of all people. But by the end of his life RFK had become a kind of poet-dreamer of his own making, a guy who seemed to truly believe in transcendence and compassion and who sang a song that resonated all over.

50 years ago huge portions of this country were in love with the idea of Bobby Kennedy, the successor to the throne with the reedy voice and tousled hair and an affection for Greek poets. Even rural bumblefucks loved and admired him. But today the children of those legions are supporters of an animal — a nostril-breathing, blatantly unhinged rightwing sociopath. Paul Schrader has noted that it wasn’t just movies of the ’60s and ’70s that were better, but that moviegoers were better also. Same thing with the voters. 35% of the voters in this country are nihilistic and dangerous.

The debut of Porter’s four-part miniseries will follow a special 4.25 screening at the Tribeca Film Festival.