If unusually frank words had been exchanged between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on Sunday, July 21st, and if Harris had followed through on this frankness, the presidential race might have turned out differently. Maybe.

Harris: “So you’re doing this? You’ve firmly decided?”

Biden: “If I don’t fold the tent and pass the torch, Pelosi and the gang will further challenge and undermine me, and I’ll almost certainly wind up losing to Trump by an even greater margin than previously projected, and I’ll go down in history as an even greater villain…a withered, stubborn old coot who surrendered the country to MAGA facism, and all because of my Irish, bone-headed arrogance.”

Harris: “I’ve always supported you. I participated in the general gasllghting about you being mentally alert and fully able to continue doing the job, and I’m supporting you now…I respect and support your decision to withdraw.”

Biden: “So it’s on you now, Kamala. Do your best and go with God. You’ll need to hit the road running. I presume you and your team have been preparing for this all along, and particularly since my absent-minded debate performance last month.”

Harris: “Actually, no, we haven’t.”

Biden: “You haven’t?”

Harris: “We’ve been in kind of a holding pattern, waiting to see what you’d do.”

Biden: “Since 1.20.21 you’ve been one heartbeat away from the Presidency, and you haven’t done a single thing to prepare, policy-wise and contingency-wise, for the possibility of taking over if something, God forbid, were to happen to me? You’ve just been plotzing?”

Harris: “We didn’t want anyone saying that we were preparing to take over prematurely. That would’ve looked ugly and craven.”

Biden: “Jesus, man!”

Harris: “What’s important now, Joe, is that I’m going to be the Democratic candidate. I’m grabbing the reins, and…well, please don’t take this the wrong way but I have to speak frankly to you, and more importantly to the voters between now and November 5th.”

Biden: “Uh-oh, here it comes.”

Harris: “If I’m going to have even a prayer of winning, I’ll need to throw you under the bus a little bit. I can’t run as Kamala Biden…I can’t be a rubber-stamp successor. If I do that, Trump will win. Your numbers have been in the toilet for a couple of years so let’s cut the shit. I have to be able to say two things. One, the vice-presidency is a ceremonial position without any real agency of its own. Every vice-president except Cheney has acknowledged this and said as much to journalists and historians. I was obliged to be loyal to you and that’s how I played my cards up unti now.”

Obviously Earl Holliman‘s career peaked in the mid to late ’50s, and if you ask me his absolute top-of-the-heap moment was his solo performance in “Where Is Everybody?“, the debut episode of Rod Serling‘s The Twilight Zone. The episode aired on October 2, 1959.

Otherwise Holliman almost always played unsophisticated or doltish none-too-brights and second bananas — The Bridges at Ioko Ri (Mickey Rooney calling out “Lester! Lester!” when Holliman was shot by North Korean troops), The Rainmaker, I Died A Thousand Times, Forbidden Planet, Giant, Sergeant Bill Crowley in Police Woman, etc.

Until today I never knew Holliman was gay but whatever. Successfully closeted for decades…fine. An Advocate piece outed him in 2015. His husband was Craig Curtis.

The Taschen folks have issued a Dr. No coffee table book, and they’re charging $850 for it.

Boilerplate: “This detailed companion explores the making of Dr. No (1962), the film that first introduced the world to the cinematic 007. With over a thousand images, excerpts from the original script, and stories from the cast and crew, this book offers unrestricted access, etc.”

I would love to have this lying around but c’mon…

Last weekend I re-watched George Harrison: Living in the Material World, the 208-minute Martin Scorsese-David Tedeschi doc from 2011. I experienced the same reaction. A fair amount of annoyment with the jumpy, spottily edited, all-over-the-map first half, and a profound emotional involvement with the second half, especially the portion when George’s cancer starts to win and infinite finality is getting closer and closer.

As a kind of wind-down exercise in bed I re-read my 10.5.11 review and thought, “Okay, I was obviously in the tank for Harrison and Scorsese but it was also a perceptive, reasonably fair assessment.”

Then I read Bill Wyman’s 10.4.11 review for Slate, titled “The Boring Beatle.” The difference between my piece and Wyman’s is that he didn’t care for Harrison’s gloomy manner or a good portion of his output after All Things Must Pass, or for Scorsese’s sanitizing on Harrison’s behalf. I, on the other hand, was more or less a fan who was willing to look the other way.

Wyman’s review is much ballsier and more incisive than my own.

Please read them both, starting with my HE review…

Initially posted on 10.5.11: I saw the first half of Martin Scorsese‘s 208-minute George Harrison doc during the [2011] Telluride Film Festival, and was only somewhat impressed. It covered the first 23 or 24 years of Harrison’s life, or ’43 to ’69…and I felt I knew all that going in. But the second half, which I finally saw at a New York Film Festival screening, is highly nourishing and affecting and well worth anyone’s time.

Yes, even for guys like LexG who are sick to death of boomer-age filmmakers and film executives endlessly making movies about their youth. It’s reasonable to feel this way because boomers have been commercially fetishizing their ’60s and ’70s glory days for a long time. But George Harrison: Living In The Material World is nonetheless a very good film. Particularly Part Two.

Because it’s about a journey that anyone who’s done any living at all can relate to, and about a guy who lived a genuinely vibrant spiritual life, and who never really self-polluted or self-destructed in the usual rock-star ways.

Well, that’s not really true, is it? At age 58 Harrison died of lung cancer, which he attributed to being a heavy smoker from the mid ’50s to late ’80s. And he wasn’t exactly the perfect boyfriend or husband. (There were a few infidelities during his marriage to Olivia Harrison.) And he wasn’t the perfect spiritual man either, despite all the songs and talk about chanting and clarity and oneness with Krishna. He had his bacchanalian periods. And he did so with the wonderful luxury of having many, many millions in the bank. It’s not like Harrison was struggling through awful moments of doubt and pain in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Nobody’s just one color or mood or flavor. Everyone’s complicated and inconsistent and contradictory. If Harrison-the-holy wasn’t known for occasionally flawed or weird behavior his rep would be insufferable.

But this journey is something to take and share.

Part Two, as you might presume, is about Harrison’s solo career. It starts with the Beatles breakup, the making of All Things Must Pass, the 1971 Concert for Bangla Desh, etc. And then settles into the mid to late ’70s and ’80s, “So Sad”, “Crackerbox Palace,” Handmade Films, “Dark Horse,” the Travelling Willburys, the stabbing incident and so on.

The film is entirely worth seeing for a single sequence, in fact. One that’ll make you laugh out loud and break your heart a little. It’s a story that Ringo Starr tells about a chat he had with Harrison in Switzerland two or three months before his death in November ’01. I won’t explain any more than this.

Scorsese’s doc has no title cards, no narration, no through-line interview as Bob Dylan: No Direction Home had. As noted, I found Part One a little slipshod and patchworky at times. The editor is David Tedeschi, who also cut No Direction Home as well as Scorsese’s Public Speaking, the Fran Lebowitz doc, and Shine a Light, the 2008 Rolling Stones’ concert doc.

I still say A Complete Unknown should have been titled Ghost of Electricity (Searchlight, 12.25) because there’s definitely something ghostly (as in elusive, unknowable, wispy, shadow-cloaked, just out of reach) about the actual Bob Dylan as well as Timothee Chalamet‘s version of him. Not an allusion to “going electric at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival”, for Chrissake, but something, you know, trippier.

I would have also loved My Weariness Amazes Me because it’s the single best line in Mr. Tambourine Man…because before Dylan cooked it up nobody had ever been amazed by their own weariness, and I mean nobody. I sure as hell hadn’t felt that way, I can tell you. But ever since I first heard that line I’ve chanted it over and over. It’s almost become a kind of motto…a mantra to be repeated when the ache and angst and cosmic boredom get to be a bit much.

Eddie Ginley again: “A Complete Unknown is the boomerist boomer shit that ever boomered.”

…that I feel compelled to forgive its primarily structural, non-lethal shortcomings. I certainly felt an urge to brush them aside while chatting late last night with a smattering of the cool kidz (including the Hoboken-residing twin Oscar Expert bruhs) outside theatre #7 within Manhattan’s Lincoln Square complex. No review until 12.10 but in the meantime…

The tail end of the final sentence should read “so much of Unknown is spot–on, the real thing, a bell ringer. I was sorta kinda emotionally melting during the first half hour or so — literally on the verge of tears. Yes, I’ve been deeply invested in Dylan my entire life so I’m especially susceptible but still…

For a likely Best Picture Oscar nominee, this is fairly unusual. Edward Berger’s film opened theatrically only a month ago (10.25). Pops on 12.17.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s 11.25 review of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi‘s Beatles ’64 (Apple +, 11.29):

“Another thing that sets Beatles ’64 apart is that the film is full of incisive commentary: latter-day reminiscences by several of those fans, as well as meditations on the meaning of it all by figures like David Lynch, Joe Queenan, Jamie Bernstein, and Smokey Robinson, who speaks with fierce perception about the nature of women’s unguarded emotionalism in dictating the shape of pop-music culture.

“Whether it’s Jamie Bernstein (Leonard’s daughter) talking about how she dragged the family TV into the dining room to watch the Sullivan show, or David Lynch evoking what it is that music like that of the early Beatles does to you, or Betty Friedan, in an old TV clip, speaking with daunting eloquence about how the Beatles incarnated a new vision of masculinity that threw over the old clenched model, these testimonials color in the consuming quality of our collective passion for the Fab Four.

“Early on, there’s a sequence of the Beatles in transit, each of them putting on headphones that let them hear recordings of their voices. There’s something touchingly metaphorical about that. The Beatles would preside over a world where projections of who they were took on a life weirdly separate from themselves. The documentary shows you that they understood this, instinctively, from day one.

“Seated in their ‘prison’ of a suite in the Plaza, whiling away the hours (scenes that might have been the model for “A Hard Day’s Night”), always cutting up with that whimsical Liverpool put-on that takes everything just so lightly, as if it weren’t real, they were perfectly positioned, as personalities, to become the eye of the new media storm.”

Forget that “no one is above the law” stuff. Ominous thunderclouds are rumbling overhead. The ghouls are running the show. Merrick Garland, this is on you…wimp.

I wasn’t a Brad Pitt admirer at first. Over his first five years of prominence he struck me as a pretty boy without much going on inside — Thelma & Louise (’91), A River Runs Through It (’92), Legends of the Fall (’94), Interview with the Vampire (’94). Even in Se7en, I was telling myself, he radiated cheap hot-dog vibes…a certain lightweight petulance.

But then I bought the Se7en Criterion laser disc and listened to the commentary tracks (Pitt, David Fincher, Morgan Freemanm, Andrew Kevin Walkr), and the stuff that Pitt shared turned me around. After listening all the way through I told myself “okay, I underestimated Pitt…he’s a fairly bright and committed guy…he’s okay, not a lightweight…he seriously cares about the quality of Se7en and all the intense effort that went into it.”

The below was recorded in ’95 for Criterion. This particular commentary (edited) is not available on DVD or Bluray. Here’s the longer, unedited version.

Only now can it be told…

It happened at least a year and a half ago, and possibly longer than that. I was chatting with the renowned director-writer Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Duplicity, Andor, Beirut) inside the AMC Lincoln Square IMAX theatre. It was prior to a hot-shot invitational screening, and we were standing next to our seats and shooting the usual shit.

After a few pleasantries Gilroy sat down and I turned to face the huge screen, and I somehow tipped over a bit, and then quickly tried regain my balance…nope. Perhaps my heavy leather computer bag was a factor, but the IMAX theatre seats are built upon a very steep grade — something close to 45 degrees — and so I tumbled forward and fell like a crash test dummy upon the row of seats in front of me.

Although it was no big deal in terms of bruisings or physical injury, I felt slightly embarassed because, you know, who loses his fucking balance and falls over a row of seats just before the start of an IMAX screening with a gathering of hot-shot journalists sitting and standing around nearby? I was Chevy Chase doing a Gerald R. Ford.

But you know what? Gilroy saw everything and didn’t say a word. Didn’t even raise an eyebrow. He knew it was a galumphy thing to have done but he maintained his poker face and kept his cool, and in so doing he kept mine.

Another friend might have shouted “oh my God…Jeff! Jeff! Are you okay?”, and in so doing would have prompted others to take notice or ask what had happened, and the next day it might have been a topic of derision and belittlement on the Six O’Clock News. But the taciturn and unshakable Gilroy said zip and nobody else did either (no yelps or “oops!”), and our lives went on as if nothing had happened.