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The long, lustrous and distinguished life of Richard Chamberlain ended yesterday at age 90, two days short of his 91st birthday.

If you’re an older couch potato, Chamberlain’s career began, peaked and gradually dwindled on television — the Dr. Kildare series (’61 to ’66), Shogun miniseries (’80), The Thorn Birds (’83). But between ’68 and ’77 — a full ten years — he did himself proud as a feature film actor (mostly in ensembles, twice in starring roles) in a few high-end films directed by grade-A auteurs.

The general obituary buzz, yes, has been that Dr. Kildare or the dashing Thorn Birds star has died, but some of us respect Chamberlain for better, deeper reasons.

Chamberlain’s greatest and richest big-screen role was in Peter Weir‘s The Last Wave (’77); his second best role was the anguished Peter Tchaikovsky in Ken Russell‘s The Music Lovers (’71). He was directed twice (technically thrice) by the great Richard Lester in 1968’s Petulia and then ’74’s The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers.

Chamberlain played one of the most despicable scumbags of all time in Irwin Allen and John Guillermin‘s The Towering Inferno (’74 — one of the biggest hits in the ’70s disaster wave), and four years later costarred in the most embarassingly awful disaster film of all time, The Swarm, which Allen produced and directed. (Michael Caine called it “a bee movie.”)

If you count Dr. Kildare and The Thorn Birds, Chamberlain was at the top of his fame=and-achievement game for over 20 years…he fully peaked throughout the ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s…longer than most big-name stars.

Sometime this week Bill Maher will break bread in the White House with Orange Mussolini. The difference between this and Richard Nixon going to China in ’72 is that Mao Zedong and Chou en Lai, despite being Communist tyrants, were at least nominally sane, which is to say governed to some extent by rationality.

There are boilerplate dictators who have cold-bloodedly presided over mass murder, and there are emotional-infant tyrants like Trump and Kim Jong Un…different equation.

How will Maher pass along the detailed story of his dinner (McDonalds?) or some kind of sit-down with — I can’t believe I’m writing this — the first U.S. President since FDR to at least ponder the possibility of a third term in the White House, depending on how acquiescent the Dems and the courts may be to this possibility.

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On top of which this may go to Cannes. If so, some are rooting for a Director’s Fortnight slot, which can be comfortably ignored.

I ran into Terrence Malick and a friend of his on the Cannes Croisette during…I can’t recall which festival but probably sometime around ‘12 or ‘13 or ‘14…somewhere in there. On the narrower, northern side of the boulevard as opposed to the southern beach side, not far from the Carlton.

I realized it was Malick right after we passed each other. The eponymous Panama hat, the shades, the salt-and-pepper beard. And so I paused and turned around and saw he’d done the same thing — stopped or slowed, half-turned, quizzically eyeballing me. Maybe he thought I was Chris Walken.

Candy-ass that I am, I didn’t seize the opportunity to approach and launch into a brief chat. I could have kept the ball in the air. I could’ve reminded him that I cold-called Mike Medavoy’s home in ‘95 because I’d heard he was staying there, and that he’d picked up and we’d bantered for three or four minutes.

Instead I wimped out. I just said “hey, Terry…how ya livin’?” and offered a casual salute and he returned the gesture, and I moved on. I wasn’t instantly seized by a feeling of self-loathing, but a hint of this had taken hold. It never left me.

Whimsical is pretty much synonymous with capricious, and post-Days of Heaven Malick has shown himself to be nothing, creatively speaking, if not “given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood and behavior.”

Again — ask Adrien Brody about this. Ask the late Chris Plummer. Ask Geza Rohring, who plays Jesus in Malick’s STILL unfinished The Way of the Wind, which shot principal photography in 2019 and has been subject to Malick’s tossed–salad, elusive–butterfly editing aesthetic (you can’t call it a process) ever since — five and a half years as we speak.

“Sudden and unaccountable changes of mood and behavior” = the man does not know his mind, or is so engrossed in the mystical that there can be no destination. “The farther one travels, the less one knows” — George Harrison, “The Inner Light.”

One could adopt a brusque attitude and conclude that Malick has no sense of decency or fundamental follow-through when it comes to post-production.   How about them apples?

I HATE guys who make a big egoistic show of this…who brazenly perform for the crowd by dropping to their knees in order to propose marriage to their beloved. “Look at what a loving, open-hearted fellow I am! Actually look at the two of us!”

You’re appalling, Monsieur Douchebag, and you don’t even know it.

Initial HE reaction to Terrence Malick‘s The Thin Red Line (’98): “Too many leaves, alligators, interior monologues and meditations. The script I read before filming was tight and lean and true, but Malick didn’t shoot it. Or he did but fell in love with something else in post-production. Talk to Adrien Brody about this.”

It was The Thin Red Line that (a) fixed Malick’s reputation as a whimsical, nature-revering, tossed-salad filmmaker, and (b) resulted in that famous quip about Malick never having “met a leaf he didn’t like.”

But you know what? Jim Caviezel‘s “death of Private Witt” scene is amazing. Most of it, I mean.

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We all listen to excellent music of our exact choosing all the time, and certainly whenever we like. But this mostly happens when we’re driving or on a plane or train trip, and yet — this just hit me this morning, sadly — we never have the right kind of musical accompaniment in our heads during the actual, real-deal moments of engagement (momentous, tearful, emotional, climactic, poignant, euphoric, jarring)…the real thing.

This is one of the key differences between classic movies and real life. When we encounter dramatic stuff in actuality, we almost always (99.99% of the time) experience these things without a soundtrack. But in classic films, the heavy stuff often has an expertly written and orchestrated soundtrack playing along, either quietly in the background or loudly or lullingly.

The curious thing is that I believe that Phillip Glass‘s The Fog of War soundtrack is, in a certain sense, my personal soundtrack…the music of my life…music that I often hear in my head as I experience significant stuff as well as the boring non-essentials. It’s been living inside me for years.

But of course, Robert S. McNamara never heard a single note of Glass’s score when he was actually in the thick of various chapters in his life (World War II in the Pacific, Ford Motor Company presidency, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson). But in an ideal world, McNamara would have heard it all along. Because the meaning of his life and what was actually happening deep down could have been so fully and completely understood and articulated by Glass’s music.

It’s a shame, in short, that we all live our respective lives without sublime musical accompaniment. We all have to wing it (and feel it) on our own…silently in a sense.

The Wiki page is calling Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another (Warner Bros., 9.26) “an American satirical black comedy,” but that’s a vague description. A dude who recently saw this September ’25 release says it essentially “makes fun of radical left revolutionaries.”

Set in the American northwest, pic has to do with Leonardo Di Caprio‘s “Bob Ferguson” character, an unhinged, bathrobe-wearing, hyper-mannered lowlife, and is about his mixed-race daughter, possibly played by Chase Infiniti, having been kidnapped by Sean Penn‘s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw. Maybe, apparently…who knows? The guy didn’t specify.

No, I’ve never read Thomas Pynchon‘s “Vineland,” which the film is loosely based upon.

I wish I was more certain about who play Infiniti’s mother (and DiCaprio’s ex-lover) — Regina Hall or Teyana Taylor. Probably Hall because she’s the prettier of the two.

Except the guy I spoke to wasn’t all that clear about certain aspects. I asked questions and absorbed as well as I could, but I wasn’t left with a specific idea of what the film really is.

“It’s played for comedy,” the guy told me, “but the [wokeys] won’t like it. I laughed and my white friends laughed, but we were in the minority [in the audience].

“It’s a guy movie, kinda like Uncut Gems. Made for a predominantly male fanbase. It will probably go over like Mickey 17 and Alto Knights, both of which lost Warner Bros. a lot of money.

“Guys aside, the humor is aimed more at the demo of black women or conservative white women than liberal white women on anti-depressants who are keyboard warriors on Twitter. Black women and conservative women aren’t as mentally ill as college-educated white women, and will probably enjoy it. It was fun for me, but a gender studies major at a liberal arts college will definitely pan this. Don’t look for much love from the woke army.

“I probably wouldn’t take a woman to see it. It’s a film for dudes.

“PTA actually manages to direct the black actresses — Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti — pretty well. It’s his most commercial work in a sense, but it probably won’t get any awards action. The cinematography and editing are fine, and I loved the performances.

“It’s a movie I’d take my male friends to opening weekend, but not the girlfriend. And Leo, remember, isn’t selling tickets like he did 10 or 15 years ago.

“It’s not a 2025 movie. It’s something that would’ve gone down well during the halcyon days of Obama’s second term. I love this type of shit, but movies like this are not made today.

“Leo has a great scene in which he says ‘I love black women!'”

The Democrats are “toxic” now, Gavin Newsom said last night on Real Time, and are regarded with unfettered contempt by over 70% of the electorate, and that is simply because of their insane allegiance to woke shit.

Identity politics, he meant, along with “all white males are bad and all POCs are wonderful”, cancellations over sexist slights in the workplace, trans stuff in schools and in women’s sports, guys fucking each other in the ass in movies and on streaming series (i.e., Sam Rockwell in The White Lotus), progressive government officials decriminalizing shoplifting by hoodie assholes…all of that “what is happening to our culture?” shit.

And yet elite urban Democrats (especially university-diploma’ed women) are so heavily invested in this stuff that they’ll probably never back off.

Bill Maher to Newsom (:18 mark): “I feel like this country is divided into owners and healers. And I feel that the next president, at least if he or she comes from this party, the Democratic party, is going to be someone who wants to talk and heal.”

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For years I was fortunate enough to stay in a Napoleonic-era duplex apartment in Cannes’ old town section. Not cheap but affordable, and a five-minute walk to the Palais.

This year HE and World of Reel have luckily scored a reasonably priced pad — $2500 for an 11-day stay, and a 15-minute walk to the Palais — except it’s ugly and soul-less. It reminds me of Robert Duvall‘s living space in THX-1138.

Otherwise Cannes rents are completely ridiculous. The greed factor has gone through the roof. Especially since the pandemic.