Apart from becoming a Scientology fanatic, it’s fair to say that the last 40-odd years of Tom Cruise‘s life and career have panned out hugely, exceptionally and phenomenally.

It’s just that the idea of Joel Goodson being five years away from the classic retirement age of 65 makes me feel that the locomotive pace of life is moving…well, a bit faster than I’d prefer. I know, I know…60 is the new 50 but still.

For me, Cruise turning 60 is roughly at par with McCartney turning 80. Anyone who was around when Risky Business opened knows what I’m talking about, and I don’t want to hear from any scolds.

HE’s 15 Richest, Best Crafted, Most Compellingly Performed Tom Cruise Films (in this order and excluding all of his high-powered, robo-bunny formula action franchise films): Jerry Maguire, Collateral, Risky Business, The Firm, Born on the Fourth of July, Rain Man, Jack Reacher, American Made, The Color of Money, Tropic Thunder, A Few Good Men, Edge of Tomorrow, Losin’ It, Interview with the Vampire, Magnolia.

HE’s 14 Least Favorite Cruise Films (excluding all of his high-powered, robo-bunny formula action franchise films): Cocktail, Far and Away, Legend, Days of Thunder, Eyes Wide Shut (very well made, compulsive watchable but finally a curiously chilly experience), Minority Report (irritating Kaminsky bleachy-gray color scheme), Vanilla Sky, The Last Samurai, War of the Worlds (good film with atrocious ending), The Mummy, Knight and Day, Valkyrie, Lions for Lambs, The Outsiders.

I can’t remember how I feel about Rock of Ages.

…since the late ’70s. Definitely catchy — you could even say throttling — in a flashy, one-hit-wonder way. The opening guitar-and-bongos prelude (the first 51 seconds) is the best part. I saw Dirk Hamilton and the band play a set at the Bitter End sometime around ’79 or ’80, and it was clear he was dealing with a serious case of stage fright. He quit music for two or three years but then came back to it, and is still plugging along.

Best wishes to the just-married Lindsay Lohan and Bader Shammas. The couple has been living in Shammas’ home city of Dubai, where he works as an assistant vp at Credit Suisse, for a couple of years.

I’ve never been to Dubai, but I’ve always understood it to be a kind of flamboyant wealth-porn city…high-rises, high temps, beaches, super-malls and devoid of anything that I would value culturally. Paris, Barcelona, London, Rome, Munich, Prague, Bern, Zurich…anywhere but effing Dubai, please.

Plus we all understand that Middle Eastern men and particularly those raised in the UAE are not exactly known for honoring 21st Century feminist values. They’re generally known, in fact, for being somewhat medieval-minded….be honest.

If you’re a fan of Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City (and what Lumet admirer isn’t?) and you haven’t seen Find Me Guilty (’06), which many have ignored or dismissed as a commercial failure, you need to buckle down and rent it.

I know that Find Me Guilty never seems to come up much in discussions of Lumet’s career, and yet it’s absolutely one of Lumet’s finest and is certainly one of the greatest films ever made by a director who’s over 80. (Lumet’s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, released in ’07, also belongs on that list.)

I haven’t re-watched Guilty since it opened 16 years ago, but I’ll be revisiting tonight.

Guilty is a marvel of old-fashioned (i.e., ’80s-style) craftsmanship — Lumet’s superb direction, T.J. Mancini and Robert McCrea’s’s finely structured screenplay and skillfully pared-down dialogue, and Vin Diesel’s inescapably charming, sincerely felt performance that briefly put him back on the road map. It was the last first-rate performance he ever gave.

In my book Find Me Guilty was Lumet’s best film since Q & A (1990), and before that Prince of the City (1981). It’s a tight, no-nonsense court drama that’s not about legal maneuvers or discovering evidence or doing right by the system and justice being served, but mob family values.

It’s not without its amusements and gag lines from time to time, but Guilty is a fairly serious, rooted-in-reality court procedural about wise-guy morality, or the urban mythology about same..

There’s more time spent in a courtoom in this thing than in Lumet’s The Verdict, and for good reason: Find Me Guilty is about the longest-lasting federal criminal prosecution in history. From March ’87 to August ’88, 20 members of the New Jersey-based Lucchese crime family, each represented by his own lawyer, were brought to trial in Newark, New Jersey, on some 76 charges (dope smuggling, gambling, squeezing small businesses…the usual mob stuff).

The mob family values can be summed up by the words “don’t rat,” “don’t roll” and “family is everything.”

I’m talking about the values of a group of bad guys (i.e., men who live outside the law and occasionally enforce their ethical standards by whacking each other) who ostensibly care for and someitmes “take care of” each other, and about one particular bad guy — Diesel’s Jackie DiNorscio — who stood up for certain things over the course of this trial…loyalty, friendship, togetherness…even if the reality of Italian crime ethics, going by everything I’ve heard, is that everyone rats out everyone else sooner or later and a lot of these guys are just full-out sociopaths, or are viewed this way by the majority. And yet Guilty isn’t an invented story.

What’s really striking is that Find Me Guilty delivers pretty much the precise opposite moral message of Prince of the City, which is about the emotional torment that a corrupt cop puts himself through when he decides to tell the absolute truth and rat out his equally corrupt cop friends, and ends up despised and lonely and broken.

Guilty is about a wise guy who refuses to rat out his wise-guy friends, even when most of them shun him and treat him like a leper because of his court behavior, but who nonetheless holds to his own moral ethical course.

Has there ever been a major-league filmmaker besides Lumet who has made two films about the same culture — the New York-area criminal underworld — with both (a) based on a completely true story about courts and prosecutors and defendants, (b) both grappling with almost the exact same moral-ethical issue, and yet (c) coming to almost the exact opposite conclusions about ratting out your friends?

Joe Turkel (1927-2022) burned his way into the acting legend annals three times, and is the only actor of note to be hired by Stanley Kubrick three times.

His finest and most incendiary performance, hands down, was as the anxious and cynical Private Pierre Arnaud in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (‘57).

Early on Arnaud frets not so much about dying but the painful manner of death he might suffer (bayonet, machine gun). He’s later knocked unconscious after a fist fight with Ralph Meeker’s Corporal Phillipe Paris, and is pinched awake just before his daybreak execution. French bullets!

Turkel’s eerily stoic turn as Lloyd, the ghostly bartender, in The Shining (‘80) is the performance that most people recall.

Turkel was also vivid as Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the inventor of Rutger Hauer ‘s replicant “Roy”, in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (‘82), and he spoke a line that served as a poignant epitaph for the life of a large-living cyborg — “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very brightly, Roy.”

He also played “Tiny” in Kubrick’s The Killing (‘56).

At age 48 or 49 Turkel didn’t make a huge impression as a member of the San Pablo crew in Robert Wise’s The Sand Pebbles (‘66), but there he was in a first-rate allegory about the Vietnam War.

Turkel was an excellent actor with a face that conveyed a certain inner steel and turbulence, and he was graced with a deep, slightly Brooklyn-accented voice. But for some reason he didn’t work very much after Blade Runner, at least as far as his Wiki bio indicates.

Turkel wrote an autobiography titled “The Misery of Success,” due for publishing later this year.

Two weeks shy of his 95th birthday, Turkel passed on 6.27 at Santa Monica’s St. John’s hospital.

You’d think on the surface that “friends” you hung with for months or years on end in your teens or 20s…you’d think they might be up for an old times’ sake text or an email once in a blue moon. But for the most part they’re not. Either they don’t want to go back there or they’re afraid you might want to, or something in that realm.

In the late ‘90s and early aughts I kept in touch with a high-school friend. We met for a midtown lunch two or three times. But that melted away in the late aughts. You put that stuff away.

I was good friends with a Wilton guy in high school. We kept it going during his 18-month stint as a Boston drug dealer (467 Commonwealth Ave.). After he was arrested and imprisoned I visited him twice in Walpole. After he did his time the guy moved to Fort Lauderdale, and within a year of this relocation I flew from Los Angeles to visit.

He grew up, mellowed, got into home furnishings as a profession, got married, etc. And when I reached out to say “hi” a decade ago, he ghosted me. Because, I’m presuming, I represented the drug-dealing past, and he didn’t want to go near that with a ten-foot pole. This is how people are.

The only friends and acquaintances from the past who might occasionally share a hale and hearty “how ya livin’?” (and I’m including myself) are professional colleagues from 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. But forget college and high-school pals…they’re gone.

Wait…there’s an exception. I was friendly for decades with a Wilton pal whom I first knew in high school, but a year or two ago he turned “woke” (partly because he was showing loyalty to his three Millennial-aged daughters) and became Cotton Mather, at least as far as his judgmental shithead attitudes toward HE were concerned.