I’m sorry that Leonard Nimoy has left the earth, but know that his soul is moving at light speed through the heavens, an element in the cosmos, serene and absolute and soaring and eternal. I’m glad Nimoy, 83 when he died, had a long and fulfilling life for the most part, and that Mr. Spock meant so much to so many millions of Star Trek fans during the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s even (the last Star Trek film starring Nimoy was Nicholas Meyer‘s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in 1991). I mostly hated Phil Kaufman‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’78) but I thought Nimoy was quite good as a San Francisco spiritual psychobabble guru type. And I’ve always loved his “Highly Illogical” song. The poor guy passed from the after-effects of smoking. Nimoy reportedly stated on Twitter that “I quit smoking 30 years ago…not soon enough.” Zachary Quinto, the 21st Century Spock in JJ Abrams‘ two Star Trek films, has posted the following on Instagram: “My heart is broken. I love you profoundly, my dear friend, and I will miss you everyday. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

I suppose I need to add Tom Hooper‘s The Danish Girl (Universal) to the hot list, although it may be a February 2016 release. Eddie Redmayne is playing transgender “pioneer” Einar Wegener, who later became Lili Elbe. Alicia Vikander and Amber Heard costar. Tomas Alfredson was the first director on the project, then Lasse Hallström.

Eddie Redmaybe as Einar Wegenar/Lili Elbe in Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl.

10 months hence we’ll see Harrison Ford bring Han Solo back to life, and then sometime in 2017 Ford will revive Blade Runner‘s coolest replicant, Rick Deckard. Maybe in a lead or supporting capacity, but definitely in a Blade Runner sequel that’ll shoot in the summer of 2016. Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Incendies) will direct from a script by Michael Green and original Blade Runner co-author Hampton Fancher, based on an idea by Fancher and producer Ridley Scott. My usual response is to say “why?” and “1982 was then, this is now” and so on. But maybe. Reactions?

From a 1.8.10 N.Y. Times article by the late David Carr, called “Me, Campaign? Just Go To The Film”: “Mo’Nique, 42, says she cares deeply about Precious and is thrilled to be among the mentioned, but she is not about to reorganize her life or her priorities to get her mitts on an Oscar. The Mo’Nique Show, her daily talk show on BET, just began in October, and while other hopefuls are criss-crossing the country for all manner of events, chatting up Oscar bloggers and making sure that everyone knows that they want it, Mo’Nique is mostly here in Atlanta, tending to her show, this past year.

A friend has been applying for a job he’d really like to get and has gone through a series of interviews so far, the last being with the head of the company. He just got a call saying that the honcho wants to meet again, apparently because my friend seemed a little nervous and the honcho felt he was off his game on some level. Right away a suggestion came to mind but I hesitated before sharing it. If you don’t want to be nervous before a job interview just slip into a bathroom stall about 20 minutes before the interview and jerk off, and you’ll be as centered as Buddha. I seem to recall reading that Bill Maher does this before taping Real Time. Matthew McConaughey told Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street to have a wank once or twice a day because it leaves you in a Zen place.  Chris Elliot said the same thing to Ben Stiller in There’s Something About Mary when Stiller said he was nervous about going on a date with Cameron Diaz.

Well, it turns out that all the bellyaching and predictions of doom about the demise of net neutrality and the advent of “fast lanes” and all those assumptions about FCC Tom Wheeler being a cable-industry toady were wrong. For this morning the Federal Communications Commission did the right thing by voting 3 to 2 to regulate broadband internet service as a public utility, which is a major milestone and a blow for equal internet access and cause for dancing in the streets.

This is excellent news for everyone out there and easily one of the proudest accomplishments of the Obama administration. If David Carr was still with us he’d write a hell of a column about this. Sasha Stone owes Wheeler an apology.

The new rules ensure that no content will be blocked and that the net will not be divided “into pay-to-play fast lanes for big media companies that can afford it and slow lanes for everyone else…[which] are hallmarks of the net neutrality concept,” in the words of the N.Y. Times story. Wheeler said the F.C.C. was using “all the tools in our toolbox to protect innovators and consumers” and preserve the internet’s role as a “core of free expression and democratic principles.” He added that interest access was “too important to let broadband providers be the ones making the rules.”

An instinct told me to put off seeing Lone Scherfig‘s The Riot Club (IFC Films, 3.27 theatrical/VOD) during last September’s Toronto Film Festival. I had gone cold on her after enduring One Day, which I found almost shockingly tepid and underwhelming after Scherfig’s highly enjoyable Italian for Beginners and especially An Education. The Riot Club is based on Laura Wade‘s Posh, a 2010 stage play about a swaggering attitude of entitlement and imperviousness known to the sons of the British conservative upper classes. (British Prime Minster David Cameron is a former member.) The play and the film (which Wade also wrote) are based on the real-life Bullingdon Club, an exclusive all-male dining club at Oxford University, going all the way back to 1780 and known for its grand banquets and trashing of restaurants.

I think we all know about rich assholes, don’t we? Do we really need to be told again that they’re all quite arrogant and loathsome?

To non-Brits, The Riot Club “will play like Brideshead Revisited meets Donna Tartt’s The Secret History meets Lord of the Flies,” wrote Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney. “An anesthetizing inevitability creeps into the film as damning evidence stacks up that these ‘Wild Boys’ believe they can buy their way into any pleasure of their choosing and out of any scrape of their making. The far-from-revelatory conclusion is that the deck remains stacked in the class war. Duh.”

I said it last September and I’m saying it again: Paul Dano‘s performance as the youngish Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad‘s Love and Mercy (Roadside, 6.5) is almost spookily great. I’m telling you straight and true this is 2015’s first must-nominate performance. “Wilson’s disturbed spirit hums and throbs in the 30 year-old Dano, who looks like he gained 35 or 40 pounds to play the genius Beach Boy maestro in his mid ’60s blimp period,” I wrote on 9.8.14. “You can really feel the vibrations and sense the genius-level ferment and the off-balance emotionality. Inwardly and outwardly it’s a stunning, drop-dead transformation and the finest performance of Dano’s career, hands down.

“Not to mention John Cusack also as the 40ish Wilson in the same film, which shifts back and forth between the mid to late ’60s (i.e., the recording of Pet Sounds and Smile) and the mid to late ’80s (i.e., “the Landy years”). For the last few years Cusack has been on a downturn, playing ghouls and creeps and psycho killers…my heart aches for the guy. True, he’s had two good roles over the last couple of years — Richard Nixon in The Butler and the husband-masseuse in David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars — but this is a revelation. Cusack plays a gentle but very solemn and intimidated Wilson during the period in which he was under the firm hand of the disreputable Eugene Landy, who died in 2006. Cusack is child-like and Gentle Ben-ish, and as convincing and fully submitted to his task as Dano is to his. For the first time in my moviegoing life I wasn’t bothered by two actors playing the same character — quite a landmark.

It’s been reported that later this year Richard Linklater will direct an adaptation of Maria Semple‘s “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?,” with Annapurna’s Megan Ellison producing with Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson. Semple’s book, which has been adapted by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (500 Days of Summer, The Fault in Our Stars), is about an outspoken architect mom who disappears and an attempt by her 15-year old daughter to find her. My first reaction to this summary and to the book’s Amazon page was that this premise doesn’t seem very interesting or engaging. Why should I care about a intelligent mom with passion and responsibilities who takes a powder? If there’s one thing I don’t want to pay to see it’s the story of a hider or a quitter. (It’s a different story if the hider/quitter is childless, and if the hiding/quitting is presented in a take-it-or-leave-it, existentially cool way, as Mike Figgis did with Leaving Las Vegas.) I don’t know anything but my instinct is that Linklater’s film, presuming it gets made, is going to tank commercially (it’ll play mainly to older upmarket urban women) and be met mostly with indifference by guys like me. I’m sorry but that’s my first reaction. The situation could change, of course, but right now this almost sounds awful. On top of which it would be the second Linklater film title to use a proper name that starts with the letters “B-E-R-N.”

I’ve been through this. You always get right up and continue like it’s nothing, but two or three hours later you start to bruise and feel stiff. 12 years ago Jett and I were barreling along on a scooter on a summer evening in Paris. He was driving. We were approaching Place Bastille when I mistakenly yelled out that we’d gone through a yellow light, which meant nothing. But Jett got riled and slammed on the brakes, and the bike went down and I with it. I got right up and wheeled the bike off to the side of the boulevard. I felt a little sore right away but the serious stiffness kicked in three or four hours later. The next morning my left thigh was colored green and grey and I was hobbling pretty badly.

When I was 12 or 13 I had no tolerance for math and was flunking algebra, and so my parents sent me to a math tutor, an old guy who really smelled old and occasionally acted old. Which is to say he was rigid, autocratic and even scolding from time to time. He made me write down algebraic equations until they came out of my ears, and these late-afternoon sessions were so painful that, unfair as it sounds, I gradually came to hate the tutor as much as the math. When the sessions finally ended after a few weeks I put them in a little box and the box in a drawer, and after a decade or so I’d completely forgotten about the whole mathematical agony of it all. Algebra, trigonometry and calculus were torture, and I never once used any of my arduous math lessons in any kind of practical way. If I need to add, subtract, divide or multiply I use my iPhone calculator. The people who made me study math all those years in high school were sadists.

In any event yesterday I saw Ethan Hawke‘s Seymour, An Introduction, a documentary portrait of retired classical pianist and present-tense teacher Seymour Bernstein, who’s now 87. God help me but I almost hated it. Not because it’s badly made or uninteresting, though I wouldn’t exactly call it riveting. It’s because the more I watched Hawke’s film, the less I was able to handle Bernstein the man.

I admire Bernstein’s passion and skill and delicacy as he instructs and plays — don’t get me wrong. And I marvelled at various pearl-like insights that he passes along. He explains that the order of music reflects the order of the cosmos…love it…and that “most people don’t tap the God within” and that his most profound joy as a teacher comes when “I pour it into you,” as he says to a longtime student. Awesome. But Bernstein’s persistent and gently domineering manner reminded me of my math tutor from 7th grade, and I’m sorry but as loving and impassioned as Hawke’s film is it mainly re-ignited my rage. I started to clench up early on. Bernstein is so needling and exacting, so interruptive and particular. It made me nervous just watching him put a female student through the wringer. If I was one of Bernstein’s piano students I would go absolutely nuts. I would get up and say “thank you for your time, Mr. Bernstein” and walk out and never return.