Here’s a clip from Dick Cavett’s Vietnam (PBS, 4.27. 10 pm), a 60-minute doc by John Scheinfeld. It blends a brief overview of the Vietnam War, discussions of that quagmire by guests on The Dick Cavett Show (John Kerry, Warren Beatty, I.F. Stone, Sen. Barry Goldwater, Daniel Ellsberg, Woody Allen, Jane Fonda, Vietnam veteran John Mueller, Sen. Wayne Morse, etc.) and some present-day hindsight from Cavett, Gen. Wesley Clark and historians Timothy Naftali and Fredric Logevall. It’s stirring, angering, well-ordered time travel — brings it all back. I only wish PBS had commissioned a two-hour show.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that Sony Pictures has acquired The Wells Initiative, a pitch for a sci-fi/action adventure in which Jeffrey Wells, owner and author of Hollywood Elsewhere, actually experiences the events, screenings, mood swings, wifi failures and occasional thought-quakes that turn up in his daily column. The pitch, Fleming reports, is by Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton, authors of Winter’s Knight, the Viking-mythology-tinged origin story of St. Nick and Christmas. The Wells Initiative will be produced by Trigger Street’s Dana Brunetti and Carter Swan. Seriously…this would be just as interesting if not more so than the actual Wells Initiative, which is about H.G. Wells. A reality show at the very least.

As degraded as film culture was when this SCTV bit was shot, it’s gotten much worse since. The idea behind this skit, remember, was not to appeal to film elites but to average Frito-eating, beer-drinking Joes, and yet SCTV producers decided that the name Michelangelo Antonioni as well as the films Zabriskie Point and Blow-Up would resonate with a fair-sized portion of the viewers. How likely is it that an SNL skit today would reference a director of arty-farty VOD films that only semi-serious, half-educated cinephiles have even heard of?

A fair number of famous, super-gifted 20th Century musicians have managed (or did manage) to age into their 40s and 50s and even beyond — Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, James Brown, Sting, etc. But to go by many Hollywood biopics the majority of them died young from drugs and alcohol abuse. Or certainly before their time. Or suddenly and tragically. Amy Winehouse, Hank Williams, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, John Contrane, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Edith Piaf, Bix Beiderbecke. Same damn story every time — they grew up hard, found fame with their great gift, burned brightly for a relatively brief time and then keeled over. Where would the American musical biopic be without booze and drugs? Without a pot to piss in, that’s where.

When a big, stupid, assaultive franchise flick is about to open and break the box-office, as is the case with James Wan‘s Furious 7, most critics play it smart by “reviewing” with a light touch. Like smirking bullfighters, they toy with the beast rather than plunge a lance. “What’s the point of actually taking this one on?,” they seem to be saying. “A pan will just make me and my newspaper or website look old-fogeyish and out of touch with the megaplexers. What the hell…I’ll just ironically admire it and flick my frilly handerchief and make gentle sport of my real feelings.

“And what perverse fun it is, when you think about it, to give a pass to a corporate muscle-car movie that is totally and in fact purposefully opposed to the organic, real-world excitement of a classic fast-car flick like Bullitt or Gone in Sixty Seconds or Drive. The truth is that I don’t like real fast-car movies any more than James Wan does. So I’ll just tee-hee my way through the writing of this piffle of a review and then take a nice lunch…hey!”

Portugese director Manoel de Oliviera, who died today at age 106, lived a life that everyone envied — long, prolific, legendary. He was respected worldwide as a man of taste, cultivation and modest aesthetic accomplishment. He once described himself as an interpreter of the Bunuelian themes of romantic frustration and stifling societal mores, and that’s fine. But honestly? When I learned of his death this morning I respectfully couldn’t think of a single, stand-out default classic that he’d made. I went to his Wiki bio and scanned his films and went “uh-huh, yup, heard about that one, respected, missed that one, hmmm, yup.” But I love that he kept working decades past the usual age of retirement or slowing down. I love his oft-quoted remark about directing films for the sheer pleasure of it, regardless of how many critics went nuts for his latest. I adore the fact that de Oliviera was 103 when his last feature, Gebo and The Shadow (which I never saw), played the 2012 Venice Film Festival.

In a 4.1 Hitfix interview with Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm, Alan Sepinwall asks Hamm to explain why Don Draper has refused to grow even modest-length sideburns despite the fact that by 1969 each and every creative person on the planet earth had begun to let their hair and sideburns grow at least a little bit.

Sepinwall: “Over the years, other [Mad Men] characters’ looks have changed dramatically, [but] Don’s look has remained constant. Has that helped you stay centered in the character, or have you ever wished that you could grow muttonchops or a ‘stache? ”

Hamm: “I think it makes sense. I think Don is invested in staying Don. I think it’s on purpose from a creative standpoint. And I support the choice. That’s how we start the final season, if you look at season 7 as one long season, you see the LA airport, and it’s all bright colors and new things and shiny planes, and new things and hippies and hot women and colors and psychedelics, and through it all moves this gray man that we’ve seen for the last ten years, and he’s exactly the same. And he looks so out of place.”

Joel Edgerton‘s The Gift (7.31, STX) appears to be another variation on the Fatal Attraction formula — i.e., a troubled but more or less stable middle-class marriage is threatened by a relationship that the husband has (or more precisely had) with an unstable third party.   Steady and reliable-as-Old-Faithful Jason Bateman, ostrich-like Rebecca Hall and Edgerton as the bad guy. I’m sorry but Hall doesn’t look good with short hair — never get a pixie cut again and fire your hairdresser. Edgerton directed and wrote.

Alex Gibney‘s All Or Nothing At All (HBO, 4.5 and 4.6), the two-part, four-hour doc on Frank Sinatra, is quite the loving valentine. It goes easy and then some, but it makes you feel like you’re in Sinatra’s home corner every step of the way, and in this sense it’s unique — there’s never been this much love and understanding shown to Sinatra and his legend from a polished, first-class doc by a world-renowned director. It’s Gibney’s trick, of course, to make you feel that you’re not being egregiously lied to. Which of course the doc is definitely doing by omission. What matters is that Gibney’s accumulation of lies are, at day’s end, artful. Because the doc is filled with bedrock emotional truths and echoes.

This is an intimate saga of an artist with a profound vocal gift, a legendary sense of style, a swaggering ego, an open heart when it came to friends and family, a lust for the ladies, a chip on his shoulder and a street attitude that led to certain feelings of kinship and camaraderie with mob guys. And you can’t beat the first 56 years of Sinatra’s life (’15 to ’71) for sheer emotion, Shakesperean drama, urban pizazz, ups and downs, top-of-the-world success and down-in-the-gutter career blues…a saga of an all-American, knock-around life that spanned most of the 20th Century, and one that became less and less interesting when Sinatra turned smug and gray and more-or-less Republican in the late ’60s until his death on 5.14.98 at age 82.

I was quite moved and charmed by much of it, but this is a family-approved doc that’s basically about re-igniting commercial interest in Sinatra product (CDs, films) by way of celebrating his 100th birthday, which is actually not until 12.12.15. That means it’s really friendly…a doc that is always looking to show love and understanding or at least muted affection…a highly skillful handjob as far as classy, high-end biopics go. No judgment, no impartiality…every well-known or rumored-about negative in Sinatra’s bio is finessed or explained away in some first-hand, no-big-deal fashion by Sinatra himself or by a friend, or otherwise brushed off.