On 9.24.22, or roughly 19 months ago, I tapped out a longish piece about a traumatic encounter with an old pally inside Wilton’s Village Market.

Although I’d regarded this guy as a great friend and an excellent human being for decades, he’d alarmingly turned into a wokester fanatic sometime in ’20 or ’21 or thereabouts. Goaded by his three Millennial-aged daughters, he’d decided I was suddenly allied with society’s bad guys and that I’d more or less become some kind of suppressive, anti-feminist, Harvey Weinstein-like figure.

I’ve seen red over a few things in my time, but my mind turned into molten lava when the Chance Brown condemnation came down. How fucking dare you?

I didn’t mention his name in the Village Market piece, but referred to him as “Strelnikov” as his chilly ranting reminded me of Tom Courtenay‘s communist enforcer in David Lean‘s Doctor Zhivago (’65).

His actual name was Chance Browne, a cartoonist (“Hi and Lois“) and musician and an all-around good fellow until the Great Awokening turned his head around.

I’m revealing Chance’s identity because (deep breath) he died last Friday afternoon from pancreatic cancer. His family requested radio silence at first, but Chance’s sister broke the news on Facebook a day or two later, and I’m figuring “okay, olly olly in come free.”

Here’s what I posted a day after his passing:

“The greatly talented, often joyful and widely beloved CHANCE BROWNE has left the earth and has merged with the infinite. He is now at one with legendary astronaut Dave Bowman at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, gazing down upon our blue planet with a certain childlike amazement.

“Chance passed yesterday afternoon (Friday, March 1st) around 1 pm. Taken down by pancreatic cancer, which he had only recently discovered.

“My heart is broken but what else can I or anyone else say? This is obviously a different deal than the passing of John Lennon (43 years and 2 months ago), and yet it feels emotionally similar in a certain way. To me at least. This sounds kinda silly but I thought Chance would just keep on Chance-ing forever. I really did. I thought he’d just keep going. I really thought we all had an eternal lease on life.

“I am shocked and thrown by this terrible waffle-iron…this feeling of having been clobbered on the side of my face or my head or whatever. I haven’t felt this shocked and thrown by the passing of a good and gentle soul in such a long time. But it’s happened. We may as well grim up and face it and join hands and ask ourselves who we are now and who we used to be, and where we’ve been and where we’re all going. We’re all getting there, no exceptions. Chance has simply left a bit earlier. He’ll almost certainly be waiting.”

Chance found out that he was more or less doomed a month and a half ago. On the afternoon of 1.17.24 he messaged a mutual friend, Mike Connors, as follows: “I have bad news, my brother. I just got diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer (!). I’m starting chemo tomorrow. I feel like dice must feel when they get shook up and thrown down the table. I may last another six months to a year or more with chemo. I love you and I’m sorry to leave the party too soon. I’ve got some time so we’ll talk.”

Alas, this never happened. This message was their last exchange.

Untimely passing cartoon, roughed out by Chance 11 or 12 years ago:

I’ll always be a fan of action flicks and suspense thrillers that end hard, clean and decisively and no fooling around, like the last minute or so of John Frankenheimer‘s French Connection 2 (’75).

But I’m an even bigger fan of edgy pulse-pounders that end with great denouements. Denouements are meditative wind-down sessions…summary scenes that provide a nice breather as both the main characters and the audience are given a chance to consider what’s happened, sort out some of the loose ends and maybe imagine what’s to come.

My all-time favorite denouement is the second-to-last scene in Three Days of the Condor (’75) — a nice dialogue scene between Robert Redford‘s “Turner” and Max Von Sydow‘s “Joubert”, standing outside of Leonard Atwood‘s suburban Virginia home at the break of dawn.

Another fave is the final scene in The Social Network, a let’s-get-real moment between Jessie Eisenberg‘s Mark Zuckerberg and Rashida Jones‘ junior attorney at a law office in Palo Alto…early evening.

There could have been an Apocalypse Now denouement that might have mirrored the ending of Joseph Conrad‘s “Heart of Darkness,” which Francis Coppola‘s 1979 Vietnam film is based upon. Martin Sheen‘s Cpt. Willard could have visited the Long Island home of the widow of Marlon Brando‘s Colonel Kutz, whose last words are “the horror! The horror!” When she asks about Kurtz’s final moment of life, Willard tells her that he wept as he called out her name. A good denouement, but Coppola felt that leaving Vietnam and transitioning to Great Neck or Oyster Bay would have been too much of a shock to the system.

Is the final scene in Red River (“You’ve earned it”) an apt and satisfying denouement or a forced and even silly ending that doesn’t quite work? (I’ve always liked it but that’s me.)

The famous Psycho denouement, in which a sandpaper-voiced psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) explains how Norman Bates killed his mother and her lover and thereafter stole her corpse and decided to become his mother in spirit — to “give half his life to her, so to speak” — feels a bit labored by today’s standards. It does, however, set up the final scene between Anthony Perkins and that fly, which is dead perfect.

Please name some other great ones.

For a last and final time HE strongly objects to a suspected Academy preference for the Best Actor Oscar to be handed to Cillian Murphy.

Murphy gives a far more persuasive performance as an oddball alien from the planet Tralfamadore than as super-physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

I’ve read “American Prometheus” and seen a great deal of footage of the actual Oppie, and there’s no question that this brilliant fellow was semi-human — that he radiated somewhat human qualities, mannerisms, characteristics. This is the one central thing that Murphy doesn’t convey.

Even with his dual head antennas, My Favorite Martian star Ray Walston was more relatably human than Murphy’s Oppie.

If Murphy wins it’ll strictly be an Oppenheimer coat-tails thing, and I really hate that Academy voters (particularly the SAG-AFTRA knuckle-draggers) are apparently unwilling to show a little mental discipline and differentiate and be fair about this, for God’s sake.

Because it’s wrong, wrong, terribly wrong to blow off Paul Giamatti’s obviously superior, more fickle and flavorful and far more human performance as Barton Academy’s curmudgeonly classics professor Paul Hunham, the lead in Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers.

Plus Giamatti gave one of the 21st Century’s greatest and most cherished performances as aspiring novelist and wine connoisseur Miles Raymond in Payne’s Sideways (‘04). And he wasn’t even nominated for this! Are you kidding me?

Giamatti obviously owns the winning narrative. They blew him off 19 years ago but they can’t do it twice…c’mon! He’s owed big-time, and the refusal of the Oppenheimer sweep lemmings to step back and acknowledge this is truly, deeply offensive.

You could call The Idea of You (Amazon Prime, 5.2) a May-December romance, but it’s more like a June-September thang.

In actuality Anne Hathaway, a Scorpio born on my birthday (11.12), is now 41 years old. In the film Hathaway’s boy-toy boyfriend, Nicholas Galitzine‘s “Hayes Campbell”, is supposed to be 24 but is actually 29.

Okay, a 12-year age gap but when I was in my early 20s I had a thing for 30something women, as I had this belief they were better in bed. That wasn’t nececssarily true, I discovered, but I still liked older.

We know how these stories always end, but don’t let me spoil it.

Directed by Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) and based on the same-titled novel by Robinne Lee.

A day or two ago I was inquiring about my iPhone 15 at the local Apple store. It was only a couple of minutes after opening, and there were maybe nine or ten store reps in their royal-blue T-shirts, all looking at me and ready to help.

You never know in advance if the person you’re about to speak to is a tip-top brainiac. Most of them are reasonably bright and always generous in spirit but they rarely know everything, and more often than not they’ll pass along information that they “think” is probably correct, often adding “let me check…hold on.” And that’s fine.

But I knew I’d lucked out when I began talking to a 20something store rep with a knitted skull cap. First of all guys who wear skull caps tend to be ultra-focused in a nerdball way. But I knew this dude was a genius because he pointedly didn’t make eye contact. Right away I said to myself “that’s an Asperger’s thing…this guy is Albert Einstein-y.”

And he pretty much was, as it turned out. Not once did this guy even glance in the direction of my pupils. The whole time he was looking at the tabletop or the belt on my jeans or the fringe tip of my wool scarf. And he was fucking brilliant. It was hugely pleasurable to converse with him.

The vast majority of people in customer service focus on smiling and nicey-nice-ing and emotional caressings, and that’s fine. But when a slightly dysfunctional Genius Bar-type guy comes along, I smile inside and say a little prayer of thanks.

I can’t abide people who repeatedly say “uhm” in the middle of long explanations or statements or descriptions.

Once they start doing this I immediately stop listening to the substance of what they’re saying and start waiting for their next “uhm.” I don’t want to hear it but at the same time I do.

When the next “uhm” comes along I roll my eyes and let out a slight cough. The more they say “uhm” the stronger my telepathic message: “Stop doing this…say what you need to say without saying ‘uhm’….you’re killing me and yourself in the bargain…dear God, stop it.”

And then they say it again.

“Uhm” is a filler word — a word that signifies (a) you’re a clod and (b) you’re mulling over and preparing your next phrase or sentence.

Okay, I’ll occasionally use “uhhh” as a pause word, but I decided decades ago to never, ever say “uhm.” Or “like” — only idiots say “like” all the time.

I also say “basically” from time to time, but I never say it like a Millennial or Zoomer — “bayziggly.”

Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “Uhm…four score and seven years ago our fathers…uhm…our fathers brought forth on this continent…uhm…a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that…uhm, all men are created equal.”

Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed is now close to 18 years old. Ranking ahead on the Scorsese hot list are Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Wolf of Wall Street and The Last Temptation of Christ.

So The Departed ranks seventh, and that ain’t hay.

A new 4K Bluray of The Departed pops on 4.23.

And I’ll repeat my argument with two Jack Nicholson/”Frank Costello” lines. One, Costello describing Rome as a place with “nicer wops” but “no pizza.” I’ve visited Rome five or six times and pizza joints are everywhere. And two, repeating that cliche about Chinese laundry guys saying “no tickee, no laundry.” Except the line is “no tickee, no washee.”