If you’re a regular follower you know all about the iCloud sign-in blockage problem on my new iPhone 8 Plus, which I bought two and half weeks ago after my previous phone was stolen. (Here’s my latest report, filed on 7.17.) Five or six days ago I wrote a famous, well-connected hotshot director to see if he knows any powerful higher-ups in the Apple corporation. If so I was hoping he might ask this person to focus on my situation for five minutes and order some senior Apple iCloud technician to fix things once and for all, and no crapping around.

Mr. Hotshot doesn’t know Tim Cook or anyone in that realm, but he did turn me on to a smart guy named Michael Newman, who runs a company called Omegapoint-it.com. I called Newman right away. I’m not out of the woods yet, but Newman has been a godsend — a steady and responsible fellow in every imaginable way, and a shrewd and proactive analyst and problem-solver extraordinaire.

Mike and a colleague visited my West Hollywood abode yesterday morning to try and use an old iMac (which I purchased in 2009) to try and sidestep or outsmart an Apple passcode problem that has prevented me from accessing my iCloud info. This approach didn’t quite work as hoped, but Mike is still working the angles.

At his advice the stolen iPhone 6s Plus has been blacklisted (i.e., deactivated) through AT&T, and now it’s a matter of informing Apple iCloud technicians that this stolen phone is no longer a working device, much less a valid or trusted one.

Once this new reality is recognized by the Apple Empire, the Apple security passcode lockout problem (basically caused by Apple’s six-digit, second-step security code being continually if nonsensically sent to the thief who stole the iPhone on 7.5) will most likely disappear. Or so Mike believes. Who am I to doubt his optimism? He said yesterday that he thinks the problem will be eradicated before the end of the coming business week. Maybe.

I shouldn’t count my chickens before they’re hatched, but I certainly owe Mike and especially Mr. Hotshot a huge debt of gratitude. If this director hadn’t responded to my email and discussed the ins and outs and recommended Mike’s assistance, I would be in the same deep hole I’ve been stuck in for the last two and a half weeks. In my book Mr. Hotshot has racked up good karma points that will last him for at least the next couple of decades.

The career of M. Night Shyamalan has gone through two phases. First was the unnerving, heir-to-Hitchcock, nine-year run that began with 1999’s The Sixth Sense and ended with ’08’s The Happening, and which also included Unbreakable (’00), Signs (’02 — arguably his best), The Village (’04) and Lady in the Water (’06).

Then came a less exacting, somewhat more desperate phase in which he started pandering to genre-friendly popcorn audiences rather than make films with his own unique stamp. Like everyone else I had issues with M. Night’s phase #1 films, but at least they seemed to come from a place inside his own creative soul, which is more than you can say for his phase #2 output.

Shyamalan has cranked out five phase #2 films over the last eight years, including his upcoming Glass (Universal, 1.18.19). The Last Airbender (’10) was a critical disaster; ditto After Earth (’13) with Will Smith and his son Jaden. I didn’t even pay attention to The Visit (’15), a found-footage thing. Nor did I catch Split (’16), a sequel to Unbreakable in which James McAvoy played a psychotic superhuman beast named Kevin Wendell Crumb.

Now comes Glass, another Unbreakable flick (third in a trilogy) with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson reprising their David Dunn and Mr. Glass roles, and joined by the persistent McAvoy plus Anya-Taylor Joy (victim) and Sarah Paulson (psychiatrist).

I know it’s hard to stand alone and make films with your own specific flavor and worldview, and that everyone has to adjust to changing tastes and currents and, you know, get along with moronic studio execs. But I yearn for the days when “directed by M. Night Shyamalan” meant “directed by an eerie auteur who for better or worse makes his own kind of movie, and who brings a certain signature and personality to the table.”

We’re living in a slow-motion Roland Emmerich movie about nature’s wrath. At least 11 wildfires are raging inside the Arctic Circle as the hot, dry summer turns an abnormally wide area of Europe into a tinderbox. Vietnamese farmers are migrating out of the Mekong Delta due to rising sea levels caused by climate change. Things are tough all over, and even the climate-change deniers understand deep down that extreme weather (which opens the door to economic hardship and occasional devastation) is becoming the norm.

I believe that the primal selfishness that has always fueled wealthy conservatives (us before them, occupy the high ground, defend our enclaves from angry multicultural hordes) is getting worse and worse. Righties might challenge or dismiss climate-change science in public, but deep down they’re acting as if a worldwide apocalypse is right around the corner. They seem to believe that social constraints are weakening and that a sense of chaotic desperation will gradually worsen among the have-not classes, and that the safest approach right now is to stockpile as much wealth as possible, enforce governmental regulations that weaken the middle and lower classes, reduce compassion and decency, build higher walls and hire more security consultants.

The widely respected L.A.-based food critic Jonathan Gold passed yesterday from pancreatic cancer. He was only 57. I never met Gold, but felt as if I half-knew him through Laura Gabbert‘s City of Gold, a 2016 doc that I didn’t catch until it hit cable/streaming. And I certainly felt a kinship with Gold through his writing, which was always finely phrased, concise, aromatic and delicious.

Gold wrote about the “glorious mosaic” of L.A. cuisine, occasionally focusing on bucks-up, tourist-trade establishments but mostly on choice, small-time restaurants, food stands and food trucks serving less-than-glamorous neighborhoods. Quality was where he found it. But Gold was first and foremost a man of the world, an Anthony Bourdain-level gourmand and humanist who found wonder and joy in great dishes, and you felt that in every observation and side comment.

Boston Globe‘s Devra First: “Gold expanded our possibilities and introduced us to one another through food. He changed our ideas about what restaurant criticism is and should be, about what good food is and why. Although he wrote about L.A., his perspective reaches far beyond that city.

“Perhaps the most tangible difference he made was in the lives of the people he wrote about — immigrants cooking the dishes of their homeland, making ends meet until Gold came along and changed their fortunes. In City of Gold they talk about how his review completely rearranged things, how they can now afford to send their children to school. They also say that they didn’t fully understand what they were doing until they saw it reflected back at them through Gold’s words.

“As I wrote in a review of the movie, ‘He is the anti-Anton Ego, and the anti-Donald Trump — a distiller who writes from a place of love and generosity, a celebrator of the best kind of immigrant story.’ With the death of Anthony Bourdain last month, the food world has lost two of its great humanists.'”

I thought Gareth Edwards‘ Godzilla (6.16.14) was half-tolerable if you ignored the ending. Edwards was going to direct the forthcoming Godzilla, King of the Monsters (5.31.19), but then he bailed, presumably because he wasn’t happy with some aspect of the development. I can smell trouble from this trailer. Just knowing it’s been directed and co-written by Michael Dougherty (Trick r Treat, Krampus) is warning enough.

“The new story follows the heroic efforts of the crypto-zoological agency Monarch as its members face off against a battery of god-sized monsters, including the mighty Godzilla, who collides with Mothra, Rodan and the three-headed King Ghidorah. When these ancient super-species — thought to be mere myths – rise again, they all vie for supremacy, leaving humanity’s very existence hanging in the balance.” — Warner Bros. and Legendary synopsis.

Six months after debuting at the 2018 Sundance Film festival, Marina Zenovich‘s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind recently premiered on HBO. I watched it again last night, and it held like new.

Yes, it’s a bit of a gloss, but a highly arresting one. Efficient burnishing. And it doesn’t really invite anyone into Williams’ mind. At best it offers little flashes of what he felt or sensed during this or that chapter, but it’s mainly a talking-head tour. We knew and loved Robin, he was such a tender soul, he loved being “on” but yeah, those rough times, etc.

This is one fascinating, often hilarious, touching but finally depressing study of a whirling dervish and comic firecracker who flew high and fast for a 25-year period, give or take, and then embarked on an up-and-down journey of his own realm, some of it thrilling or marginally satisfying or unpleasant, portions lessened by addiction and toward the end quite ghastly (severe depression, Lewy body dementia). The poor guy was unlucky, and disease took him down.

Everyone loved and cherished Williams, but no one likes to think too long or hard about what he started to experience when he passed the big five-oh (in the early aughts), and particularly the big six-oh. The sad truth is that he had a glorious run from the mid ’70s (pre-Mork & Mindy stand-up) to the early aughts (his psycho nutter in Chris Nolan‘s Insomnia was his last truly decent role), but after that it was rough sledding.

The doc reminds that when you’re hot you’re hot, and when you’re not you’re not. Old age and deterioration and slowing down are no picnic and worse if you’ve drawn bad genetic cards, so enjoy your youth and health while you can because they won’t last, baby.

Williams nearly sank his film career with sentimental overkill in the mid to late ’90s. Starting with Francis Coppola‘s Jack in ’96, he performed in a series of tender, teary-eyed films — What Dreams May Come, Patch Adams, Bicentennial Man — that made some want to barf and others to reach for the nearest fire extinguisher.

Then Williams did a abrupt 180 into dark parts — One-Hour Photo, Death to Smoochy, Insomnia, The Night Listener. Then came a brief blessed period in ’05 and ’06 — a funny bit in The Aristocrats and then a starring role in Barry Levinson‘s Man of the Year (’06), which wasn’t miraculous but seemed to some like Williams best part (and performance) since Good Will Hunting.

But right after this Williams shifted over to broad, rube-level comedy with RV, Night at the Museum and License to Wed.

The poor guy had been wrestling with depression, probably in part because his heyday was clearly over and he was on a kind of career downswing. And then came the Lewy body dementia. Life can feel so awful and cruel at times when the heat leaves the room and the candle starts to flicker. The weight can be crushing. Especially for a guy who seemed to burn a lot more brightly than most of us, certainly in the late ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.

I have flaws and issues. I am far from perfect. But at the very least I will never be accused of wearing the universal “bruh uniform” that each and every male from the age of 5 to 85 wears during warm weather.

This consists of (a) a loose-fitting, low-thread-count T-shirt (or Lacoste polo shirt or short-sleeve shirt with crazy-sick patterns), (b) preppy, knee-length cargo shorts (Ralph Lauren, Urban Outfitters, Patagonia), (c) unstructured baseball cap, knit cap or lightweight pork-pie hat and (d) sockless sandals, slip-ons, huaraches, white athletic sneakers or Crocs.

The exact same outfit. No variations or enhancements of any kind. The U.S. Army salivates over this level of sartorial regimentation. A worldwide submission to a casual-dress style that any non-invested observer would describe as absolutely totalitarian and Orwellian. Bipeds following orders, walking in step, singing the same song.

I’m not alone in this view. An eastern-seaboard film critic friend who recently moved to Los Angeles wrote the following last week: “I still cannot believe the way grown men dress in this town.” HE reply: “I guess I’m used to it. My initial thought was that you’re mostly talking about young GenXers, Millennials and GenZ, but now that I’ve thought it over, yeah…pretty much every male on the planet of whatever age wears this exact same outfit.” Critic friend: “They dress like they’re eight years old.”

Well, yeah, but to play devil’s advocate, I sorta get it. The bruh uniform is comfortable so why not? It’s not what you wear that counts, but who you are inside, etc. And who are you, by the way, to tell us what we should or shouldn’t wear, asshole?

Answer: I’m not saying you can’t or shouldn’t wear your bruh outfit, but does the fact that tens or even hundreds of millions are wearing the same identical threads and the exact same type of footwear and headgear…does that bother you in the slightest?

Does it ever occur to you to occasionally not dress like an obedient little factory drone? Does the fact that there used to be many different approaches to warm-weather dress before the brah uniform took hold…does that bother you in the slightest? The fact that individual style used to be an actual thing?

Once or twice a year a slack-off urge will take hold. I want to get it up but can’t quite. 24 hours of “off” energy. Today was such a day. It was complicated to some extent by having flown to New York Wednesday night (red-eye), and also due to various snarls, tangles and irritations, one of them being a $349 fraudulent charge to my business checking account. You don’t want to know. But I can feel myself starting to adjust to East Coast time. A voice is telling me Saturday will be better.

It’s not just which films are likely to play the Venice Film Festival (8.29 to 9.8), but which films aren’t. There’s always a reason when a presumed award-season hottie doesn’t get invited or decides against attending. It isn’t necessarily a downish harbinger when this happens, but it does tend to indicate that vague uncertainties may be stirring the pot.

In addition to Damien Chazelle‘s First Man taking the opening-night Venezia slot, the other likelies, to hear it from Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli and Deadline‘s Pete Hammond and Nancy Tartaglione, are as follows:

Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma will play Venice, but then most of as knew that. Paul Greengrass’s Norway, about the ghastly 2011 terrorist attack by a Norwegian rightwing loon who killed 77 people, most of them teenagers, is said to be more or less locked.

Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born — beloved by name-brand actors and exhibitors, but perhaps not as much by others — is said to be more or less firmed. (Nobody knows anything.) Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, which I’ve heard is good but “maybe not so period.”

Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk and Francois Ozon’s Alexandre “will not be making the trip to Venice,” sources have told Vivarelli. Ditto Benh Zeitlin‘s Wendy — probably won’t open this year, much less playing Venice.

Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake is an allegedly good bet; ditto Felix Van Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy, which stars Timothee Chalamet.

Saverio Costanzo‘s My Brilliant Friend, an Italian-language feature that will end up on HBO. Ditto Mario Martone’s Capri, Revolution.

Possibly Mike Leigh’s Peterloo; Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir and Yann Demange’s White Boy Rick.

I thought perhaps Steve McQueen‘s Widows, an alleged mix of social relevance with a heist film, might debut in Venice, but maybe not.

Laszlo Nemes’ Sunset is an alleged Lido lock.

No mention of Terrence Malick‘s Radegund, which was recently speculated as a possible Venice debut.

Variety‘s Brent Lang is reporting that director James Gunn has been whacked as the director of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3. You know why two portly Disney execs led Gunn into a garage-level den and then popped him….you know it. Because of “a series of offensive tweets” about pedophelia and rape, except they date back to ’08, ’09 and ’10.

I’ve read the decade-old tweets in question, actually sent out in ’08, ’09 and ’10. Gunn was unwise to tweet flip-perverse remarks about man-boy contact, but he was (a) partly alluding to being in the company of convicted pedophile director Victor Salva and (b) being outrageous, like irreverent Type-A creative types are from time to time.

Disney, the studio behind the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, revealed the Gunn termination in the midst of San Diego Comic-Con. “The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James’ Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values, and we have severed our business relationship with him,” said Disney chairman Alan Horn.

I don’t know Gunn personally but I know people who do, and I’ve never heard him described as some kind of intemperate, jabbering idiot. You don’t get to become a successful director of expensive, geek-friendly fantasy flicks unless you’re smart and careful and know how to play the game. Yesterday Paramount TV honcho Amy Powell went down for a similar-type offense — said wrong thing, exacerbated SJWs, etc. Maybe she and Gunn should get together this week and trade notes.

The Trump-boinked-and-paid-off-Stormy thing was diverting for three or four months. Ditto the Karen McDougal interview about her year-long affair with Trump. But they both pale next to the traitorous-Putin-lapdog thing.

One day we might hear a tape of Trump attorney-fixer Michael Cohen discussing a payoff with Trump a couple of months before the November 2016 presidential election…big deal. Will Trump and others be prosecuted for violating election campaign finance laws? Maybe. Will more embarassing or compromising details about Trump’s financial dealings come to light? Possibly. But none of this feels as sexy as it did last winter and early spring. All things must pass.