A few days ago L.A. Times columnist Glenn Whipp alerted the Academy of Motion Picture Farts and Sciences to adopt a guarded attitude about Brian Helgeland‘s Legend (Universal, 10.2). The warning was contained in a 7.29 piece that pondered which films being shown at the upcoming Toronto Film Festival might be award-season material. “We’ve seen this crime thriller, which sports the gimmick of the great actor Tom Hardy playing twin gangster brothers Reggie and Ron Kray,” Whipp wrote. “Hardy’s work is stellar, but the film, written and directed by Brian Helgeland, has its share of problems. It’s also extremely violent, and the stabby-stab-stab bloodshed will be sure to alienate many of the academy’s more squeamish members.”

After an erratic, confusing and lethargy-inducing first six episodes, True Detective finally decided two nights ago to deliver an installment — “Black Maps and Motel Rooms” — that seemed to actually pull you in to some extent. Well, sort of. Along with the usual feeling of being drained and diddle-fucked.

I feel so detached from this damn show that I didn’t watch it until last night (i.e., Monday), and I’d been a hardcore Sunday-night watcher for the previous six weeks, catching the East Coast feed at 6 pm. True Detective has been one of worst plot-diddling wankathons in search of a gripping drama that’s been consumed nationwide, ever. It’s dense and meandering and pickled to a fare-thee-well. I felt vaguely haunted during the first season (all of that bayou voodoo Yellow King shit), but mostly felt a growing annoyance with season #2. It’s become a joke, a punchline, a psychological endurance test. I honestly wouldn’t mind if the show just shoots itself in the head next week during the 90-minute finale (around the 45-minute mark, say) and goes to black screen. You know, like the final seconds of The Sopranos.

Read this moderately hilarious Atlantic summary by Spencer Kornhaber, Christopher Orr and David Sims — these guys could not give less of an infinitesimal speck of shit about this series. Read this q & a breakdown of the whole seven episodes by Slate‘s Willa Paskins — the woman is clearly in pain, pulling out brain strands and meshing them into soggy lumps and trying to stuff them back into her head. The truth is that I’ve loved the online summaries of Season #2 more than the show itself.

Yes, I was half-fatigued but half-intrigued at first by having to watch each episode two or three times and read two or three plot summary pieces to keep up…stay with it! But I realized last weekend that I didn’t give a shit any more. Because even when you sorta kinda half-assedly figure it all out a few plot points are still unclear. I gradually began to feel like Richard Burton‘s Alexander the Great contemplating the Gordian Knot. And then sometime last Friday or Saturday it came to me: “Fuck this show.” And you know I’m not alone. You know that the entire world has come together against it. You know that HBO chief Michael Lombardo was on the defensive about this last week.

I don’t what this Martian thing is. I don’t care to get it. But I know this: The instant that Matt Damon mentioned Aquaman my heart sank into my shoes. Reason: The very mention of a superhero immediately places The Martian on the uh-oh list. If you’re a serious, right-as-rain, power-hit space rescue movie, why do you feel the impulse to even mention a fucking superhero? They’re obviously trying to reach out to the idiot fanboys (i.e., the ones who had problems with the note-perfect AntMan but will be going in droves to The Fantastic Four despite the buzz) but mentioning Aquaman is a way of saying to serious Ridley Scott fans, “Uhhm, just so you know, this isn’t any kind of Alien thing…okay? We’re going with the times here. We need to bring in serious coin. I mean, if we could have worked in a cameo with Ben Affleck‘s Batman — would that be funny or what? Good Will Hunting in space with bat ears! — we would have.”

The trailer that popped on or about 7.13 has disappeared so here’s a new one: “During a Most Violent Year interview last November I asked Oscar Isaac about the HBO miniseries Show Me A Hero, which he was shooting at the time. A period piece (late ’80s to early ’90s) based on Lisa Belkin‘s nonfiction book of the same name, Hero is about white middle-class rage over a planned public-housing development (i.e, non-white neighbors) in Yonkers, and how Nick Wasicsko (Isaac), the youngest mayor in the country, dealt with it. (Curiously, Wascisko committed suicide in ’93.) Six episodes, written by David Simon and William F. Zorzi, directed by Paul Haggis. Premiering on 8.16.15. Again, the mp3.

I’m afraid it’ll never get any better than this for Ben Kingsley. There was his acclaimed debut performance in Gandhi, of course, and his delicious (but curiously buried) performance in David Jones‘ Betrayal, a fierce, above-average performance in Elegy (which I always call The Dying Animal) and his landmark supporting performance in Schindler’s List. But they never came close to pushing the zeitgeist button like Don Logan did. Kingsley is obviously working all the time and hammering away, but effort, prestige and considerable talent aren’t enough. You have to be lucky. The Gods have to be with you, and so far they’ve really and truly had Kingsley’s back only once.

Before last night’s open-air screening of Cop Car at Hollywood Forever, I was strolling around and taking photos of various tombstones and whatnot. It was just past dusk (8:15ish) and everything was perfect — enough light for photos, settled-down vibe, the hot temperatures giving way to coolness, nice grassy aroma. I took shots of a statue/tomb of Johnny Ramone near a pond, and then I noticed a tribute stone to Hattie McDaniel and walked over for a shot. “Sir! Sir!” Some guy was telling me to stop but it felt like the better part of wisdom to ignore him. My big moment with Ms. McDaniel was five seconds away, and I wasn’t disturbing anyone. Leave me alone. “Sir!” It was a tall black security dude in his late 30s or early 40s, standing 15 or 20 feet away with a couple of ladies. “The park is closed, sir.” I changed tack and decided to forget the photo, but I really didn’t get it. The vibe was so cool and soothing before this guy got in the way. The screen area of cemetery was overflowing with people but his orders were to stop people from roaming past a certain pathway. Insurance concerns, he said. Idiocy. I decided to return some day soon and commune with some of the residents there — McDaniel, Peter Finch, Douglas Fairbanks, etc. I’m fairly sure that the Hugo Shields funeral scene in The Bad and the Beautiful was shot there.

Okay, I agree that Jon Watts‘ Cop Car (Focus Word, 8.7) could be more inventively plotted. But the plot that Watts and cowriter Christopher Ford went with isn’t bad — it’s certainly servicable — and I therefore feel it’s really unfair to dismiss a film because the plot points aren’t as clever as they might have been if Watts had listened to this or that critic’s suggestions during early story meetings. They’re good enough, and besides Cop Car isn’t about would-be cleverness as much as high-end craft and sly, sardonic humor that you’ll either get or you won’t.

This is a highly sophisticated, almost-arthouse-level B movie. It’s a popcorn thing, but in a well-ordered, darkly amusing Coen Brothers way. Blood Simple-like. Okay, it’s Coen Brothers light, but good enough for me. It’ll be good enough for nearly everyone, trust me. Don’t listen to the cranky critics who have brought the Rotten Tomatoes average down to 72%.

The basic drill is about two young boys with semi-anarchic attitudes (James Freedson-Jackson, Hays Wellford) finding a seemingly abandoned cop car hidden in a semi-secluded glade amidst wide-open fields in rural Colorado. They eventually goad each other into taking the car for a wild-ass joyride, and then they enjoy some recreational highs with some weapons they’ve found in the back seat. Time of your life…huh, kid?

I was definitely intrigued by this footage of the recent (6.30) Swedish-funded voyage of the Mapheus-5, which was posted on 7.26. Mainly because I’d never seen footage of a real atmospheric re-entry. The larger and heavier the vehicle, the larger the degree of atmospheric resistance during re-entry…I get that. I’m nonetheless presuming that temperatures soared as this little Swedish pod encountered denser and denser molecules, but there’s no visual sense of anything hellish or inferno-like. I’m sorry but that’s a bit disappointing. Remember the re-entry of Ed Harris‘s Gemini capsule in Phil Kaufman‘s The Right Stuff (’83), looking like a comet, engulfed in white molten-like flames? I always suspected that was Hollywood bullshit (I never trusted Kaufman) but now I suspect it even more.

Nobody wants to make too much of a teaser for a trailer, but right away the smug loquacious smartypants dialogue hit me the wrong way. I realize that Ryan Reynolds and director Tim Miller and others have poured their hearts and souls into making Deadpool (20th Century Fox, 2.12.16) after years of delay and deveopment hell, and I realize that Reynolds badly needs this to work to keep his career as a stand-alone “star” going. I’m just saying that it’s not enough for a superhero to just be irreverent and sassy, and that cynicism alone can get tiresome and then toxic if it isn’t balanced out by something…you know, genuine or whatever.

Two days ago it was announced that Hitchbot, the R2D2-sized hitchhiking robot with the GPS-like voice, has been murdered and dismembered in Philadelphia. Hitchbot had encountered nothing but kindness, wonder and fascination during solo trips across Europe, Canada and portions of the Northeast USA — Boston, Salem, Gloucester, Marblehead and New York City. But a Philadelphia animal or two or three (probably 12 or 13 or 14, either stupid or under-educated or both, most likely parentally-abused) decided to clock that robot bitch once and for all. Ain’t that America? Apart from the teenaged-animal element, I’m also sensing a metaphorical linkage between Hitchbot’s murder and Ted Cruz’s machine-gun bacon video. Eating bacon is…well, okay, I’ll eat a little bacon if it’s burnt like a cinder but cooking it with a machine-gun barrel? What kind of deranged beast even thinks something like this up, much less makes a video of it? I’m telling you that the seed of the Cruz attitude was a roundabout factor in the slaying of Hitchbot. There’s a massively ugly metaphor in both these acts that joins them together in infamy. Bill O’Reilly needs to write a “Killing Hitchbot” book…seriously. If he wrote it honestly and reportedly it thoroughly, I would buy it and pay to see the movie.

“Based on the poster, that Man from UNCLE movie looks like a stylish adaptation of the word ‘why'” — tweeted by “Boobs Radley” a.k.a. Julianne Smolinski, a writer for Netflix’s Grace and Frankie.

A N.Y. Times Cultural Studies article about “resting bitch faces,” written by Jessica Bennett and dated 8.1, caught my attention yesterday. Otherwise known as RBF, the Facebook-shared term refers to that expression we all get when we’re not turning on the charm for friends or a camera, when we’re bored or driving or vaguely pissed about something. Kind of a blank frowny face. Bennett says that the label has apparently caused some consternation among women who don’t want to be perceived as being any kind of pouty pisshead because guys will be turned off. Or something like that.

The piece hit home because I was told the same thing once by a former girlfriend (“Why are you always frowning?) and I’ve never forgotten it. That old saying that “the face you have at 40 is your own” began to haunt me. And then in the late ’80s I began to notice that my mouth had developed downturned corners. I decided then and there that I didn’t want to have a resting bastard fuckface and I’ve been working against my “permafrown” ever since.

I consciously try to half-smile at all times when I’m walking around, and I try to concentrate on alpha waves and positive thoughts and…you know, funny things I’ve written about and the Baghavad Gita and stuff like that. I try and exude a certain cosmic serenity and I never step on cracks in the sidewalk. God help me but I don’t want to look like Hillary Clinton…you know, that hangdog, crabby-faced thing. I want to look relatively happy and at peace with life or at least semi-content.