I began to be friendly with the amiable Robert Forster 22 years ago, or just after I’d seen Quentin Tarantino‘s Jackie Brown. I was with People at the time, and had wrangled an interview with the 56 year-old actor because I absolutely knew (and had convinced People‘s bureau chief Jack Kelly) that Forster’s career, which had been slumping since the late ’80s, was about to take off again.

Because his low-key, straight-from-the-shoulder performance as bail bondsman Max Cherry was a perfectly assured mellow-vibe thing. Right in the pocket. It landed Forster a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and he was suddenly back in the game.

Forster worked steadily after that, and in 2011 he scored again as George Clooney‘s cranky father-in-law in The Descendants. I interviewed him right after seeing Alexander Payne‘s film at Telluride. Forster sure knew how to play pissy.

Both interviews happened at West Hollywood’s Silver Spoon cafe, which was Forster’s favorite haunt for many years. It closed on 12.31.11, and I distinctly recall Forster telling me that he was pretty broken up about this. (A seafood place, Connie and Ted’s, opened in the same spot two years later.)

And now he’s gone, dear fellow. I must have run into Forster at two or three hundred industry gatherings over the last 20-odd years. “Hey, Bob,” “Hi, Jeff,” small-talk, sound byte….”later.”

I’m very sorry that he’s left the room. Really. Only 78 — old not that old. Brain cancer.

When death comes knocking, you can hide in the cellar or duck into a closet and sometimes it’ll go away and forget about you. For a while. But if your number’s up, it’s up. Ask Warren Beatty‘s Joe Pendleton. Or Robert Redford‘s wounded cop character in that famous Twilight Zone episode, “Nothing in the Dark.”

In my book Forster made only four really good films and two pretty good ones: Medium Cool, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Don Is Dead, Jackie Browne, The Descendants, What They Had.

Shepard Smith, whose penchant for truth-telling and lie-lamenting made him the only honorable Fox News anchor, is out the door. President Trump despised him, which was very good. Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity were no friends either.

N.Y. Times: “The internal tensions [at Fox] had frustrated Mr. Smith, 55, who was dismayed at the disconnect between some of the pro-Trump cheerleading in prime-time and the reporting produced by the network’s newsroom, according to two people close to the anchor who requested anonymity to share his private observations.

“Mr. Smith had been considering an exit from Fox News for several weeks, [sources] said.”

Tatyana is in shock — before today she’d never once purchased a car. Because Russian princesses don’t buy cars — their wealthy, adoring husbands buy cars for them as a birthday gift, or their employers give them snazzy, spotless, brand-new vehicles to drive as a business perk. It’s important for Tatyana to project a certain flush, well-tended aura, you see. Which I understand, knowing her Russian attitude and all. Me? I’ve always been a rumblehog type of guy, and always will be. Best way…hell, the only way to get around.

Tatyana’s car hunt, in any event, is why I didn’t post much today. We started early this morning — all the papers had been signed by 3 pm.

Tatyana bought her 2016 black VW Beetle convertible earlier today at Hawthorne Square (11646 Prairie Ave., Hawthorne, CA 90250). As it happens this is only five or six blocks from the Beach Boys memorial (3701 W. 119th Street), or where the home of Murry and Audree Wilson (parents of Brian, Dennis and Carl) stood before it was demolished by the construction of the 105 Freeway in the mid ’80s. I visited the site while test-driving the Beetle.

Nothing lasts. Asphalt and concrete cover everything. Especially in the Los Angeles area.

The difference between myself and Jane Fonda as far as political protest and civil disobedience are concerned is that I’ve never been arrested and led away by the bulls. I’m too fleet of foot or, to put it more bluntly, too chickenshit. Jane is now living in Washington D.C. (temporarily) and intending to get arrested each and every Friday (“Fire Drill Friday”) in the vicinity of the Capitol steps, all in the name of climate change and the grotesque refusal of the Trump administration to even acknowledge that the clock is ticking, much less trying to do something about it.

So Emily Blunt‘s Lily Houghton is basically Indiana Jones — a smart-assed, two-fisted, kick-boxing Jackie Chan-like scientist searching for a tree’s magical cure a la Medicine Man. And Dwayne Johnson‘s Frank is a smirking, Hawaiian-born body builder who has tried and failed to model himself on Humphrey Bogart‘s Charlie Allnut.

For what it’s worth, Dwayne’s river boat is much cooler than Allnut’s African Queen. Jungle Cruise opens on 7.24.20. Director Jaume Collet-Serra is shameless, but then you knew that.

Fallen hound and allegedly insensitive assaulter Matt Lauer has lost everything by way of termination and excommunication — the man is finished. But NBC News chief Andy Lack still has skin in the game, and Ronan Farrow’s new book has painted an equally negative portrait of Lack, his allegedly cozy relationship with Harvey Weinstein and a reluctance to move forward on Farrow’s Weinstein reporting.

Two days ago Lack stated in part, “It disappoints me to say that even with passage of time, Farrow’s account has become neither more accurate, nor more respectful of the dedicated colleagues he worked with here at NBC News. He uses a variety of tactics to paint a fundamentally untrue picture.”

This morning Farrow told George Stephanopoulos that the book speaks for itself, but that it’s hard to believe Lack’s account of what happened.

If you’re part of the dwindling community of physical-media buyers, every so often a Bluray comes along with such a great-looking cover that you almost want to buy it just to pick it up and fondle the darn thing. This is one such occasion. Those glowing yellows, reds, greens and browns.

The 1996 winner of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar is one of the best feel-good docs ever made.

I showed Kings at my Woodland Hills screening series, “Hot-Shot Movies.” I remember an older woman raising her hand and asking somewhat peevishly “why are we watching this film?” before it even began, and I remember shrugging my shoulders and saying “well, because it captures something special…one of those once-in-a-lifetime occasions in which life on the planet earth seemed truly beautiful and fair.”

I want a rockstar Democratic candidate for President. Somebody who reminds me somewhat of Bobby Kennedy…someone exceptionally bright and eloquent with that certain hard-to-define quality of extra-ness. I’m serious about the fact that I’ll die if Joe Biden gets the nomination. Okay, I’ll survive but the blood will drain from my face. And if Elizabeth Warren wins I’ll be scared shitless that Trump might beat her. I’ll wind up chewing my nails to the bone.

From “Pete Buttigieg’s Undeniable Allure,” a Walter Shapiro piece in The New Republic: “Four months before the Iowa caucuses, it is time to reckon with the reality that Pete Buttigieg probably has a better chance to be the Democratic nominee than anyone aside from Biden and the surging Warren.

“With Sanders ailing and Kamala Harris sputtering, Buttigieg has enough money to go the distance (he has raised $44 million in the last six months) and enough polling support to guarantee his place on every debate stage. Whatever happens next, this youthful candidate with a long resume (Harvard, Rhodes Scholar, McKinsey analyst, failed statewide candidate, mayor, and intelligence officer in Afghanistan) has already emerged as the political surprise of 2019.”

HE acknowledges that Warren and “Typewriter” Joe are approvable candidates if you want to relax your standards and say “okay, yeah, sure…I’d prefer to see either of them be sworn in as President on January 20, 2021…anyone but The Beast.”

But they’re not Mick Jagger candidates, and they never will be. Only Mayor Pete fills that bill. Definitely the only magic-medicine guy out there. On top of which he’s not a woke fanatic (and that’s a huge plus).

But garden-variety homophobes and especially the African-American variety (there’s a real mental blockage against gays in the black community) don’t quite see it that way. And they don’t much care for Warren either. And so we’re still stuck with Droolin’ Joe. And that is such a drag when you consider the kind of transformative Democratic candidates who have run before.

“These are not ordinary times and this is not an ordinary election,” a certain Presidential candidate said 51 and 1/2 years ago. But what are Biden and Warren if not, in a positive sense, ordinary? As in “okay, good people, obviously better than Trump and I’ll definitely vote for one or the other but I have to be honest — neither of them quicken my pulse.”

From Frank Bruni‘s “The Agonizing Imperfection of Pete Buttigieg,” posted on 10.8: “If I dreamed up an ideal Democratic opponent for President Trump in 2020, I’d locate that candidate in the industrial Midwest. That’s where Hillary Clinton lost the last election, and it’s where the next one could very well be decided.

Last night I attended a screening of Benedict Andrews‘ Seberg (Amazon, 12.13), a bland and under-energized dramatization of the FBI’s persecution of actress Jean Seberg for her support of the Black Panthers in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It struck me as the kind of thing that used to be called “an HBO movie” — decent enough but lacking exceptional elements.

The initial plan was for Kristen Stewart, who plays the titular tragic character, to stop by for a post-screening q & a, but she couldn’t attend for whatever reason. HE guess: Some kind of personal issue. Maybe her spirit wilted.

I know that despite a lot of pans for the film Stewart’s performance has been generally praised. I don’t know, man. While I worshipped her wonderfully skittish existential performance in Personal Shopper, she seemed to be more or less playing herself in Seberg. I know her manner and her behavioral tics like the back of my hand, and she seemed to be more or less defaulting to them. That’s not a bad thing per se, but it does put you in a kind of ho-hum place.

Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse‘s screenplay pays an awful lot of attention to the FBI guys who were assigned to shadow and harass Seberg (principally Jack O’Connell‘s Jack Solomon, a young straight-arrow with a certain compassion for Seberg, and secondarily Vince Vaughn and Colm Meaney as a couple of bureau dickheads).

The dependably charismatic Anthony Mackie plays Hakim Jamal, a real-life Black Panther bigwig whom Seberg had a brief affair with. Margaret Qualley and Zazie Beetz‘s performances as Solomon’s and Jamal’s wives, respectively, are negligible.

Here’s the thing: To go by any biographical summary or link file about this period in Seberg’s life, her worst emotional trauma was triggered by the FBI’s planting of a false rumor (via columnist Joyce Haber) that the father of her unborn daughter was Black Panther Raymond Hewitt, and not husband Romain Gary.

Seberg was so devastated by this phony allegation that she suffered a miscarriage. And yet neither Seberg nor Gary were faithful to each other during their eight-year marriage, and Seberg had always been quite the libertine, and was fairly open about it. So what’s the big deal if she’s pregnant by someone other than Gary? She was, after all.

As the movie notes, Seberg had a brief thing with Hakim Jamal but she also fell into a breathless on-set affair with Clint Eastwood during the making of Paint Your Wagon. (The movie totally ignores this.) While filming Macho Callahan in Mexico in 1969–70, Seberg became romantically involved with a student revolutionary named Carlos Ornelas Navarra. She gave birth to Navarra’s daughter, Nina Hart Gary, on 8.23.70.

Name me one other hotshot critic-columnist in this country or even on this continent who’s paid $26 and change to re-experience a film that he knows is unexceptional and even mediocre in terms of story, dialogue and acting…name me one other person in my realm who’s shelled out to see a second-rate action film just to savor the 4K 60 fps HFR + 3D. I’ll bet money nobody else has done this. Because nobody does hardcore tech like Hollywood Elsewhere.

Gemini Man director Ang Lee to Indiewire: “They are trying to make digital look like film. It’s a different media with different perception, different requirements. Digital doesn’t want to be film, it wants to be something else. I think we need to get passed that and discover what it is.”

“There is no bad media — there are only bad artists.”

“Film got so good because for over a hundred years, genius after genius, craftsman after craftsman, years of audience feedback, it got really sophisticated,” said Lee. “I just believe there is a very different beauty, a dreamlike-ness in digital. I’m trying to find it.”

Seasoned critic friend: “I saw the 120 fps 3D Gemini Man, and like all 3D films I’ve ever seen when a face was in close-up everything behind it was blown out of focus. Then again it was not murky like other 3D films I’ve seen. And the action scenes were fun. But wearing those glasses sucks, especially over my glasses.

“Does Ang Lee have any idea how bad film projection is outside of New York and L.A.?”

What can you say about Brooke Nevils‘ accusation that Matt Lauer had (I can’t figure a way around using the following three words) nonconsensual anal intercourse with her five years ago in a Sochi hotel room…I can’t even finish this sentence, the images are so odious and icky.

What it all seems to boil down to is that (a) the months-long office affair between Lauer and Nevils was consensual except for this particular unwanted congress, which Nevils said she was “too drunk” to give consent to, and (b) Lauer almost certainly showed a lack of caring and sensitivity.

Basic etiquette: You don’t just plow ahead without a green light, for God’s sake. You don’t say to your sexual partner “have you ever had sex while watching Cockleshell Heroes with Trevor Howard?” If the woman or man says, “No, I’ve never done it while Cockleshell Heroes is on the flatscreen…let’s give that a whirl,” okay. But you ask gently, and if he or she is too drunk to offer an opinion about Trevor Howard one way or the other, the gentlemanly thing is to not stream the movie. Simple.