A fair number of famous, super-gifted 20th Century musicians have managed (or did manage) to age into their 40s and 50s and even beyond — Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, James Brown, Sting, etc. But to go by many Hollywood biopics the majority of them died young from drugs and alcohol abuse. Or certainly before their time. Or suddenly and tragically. Amy Winehouse, Hank Williams, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, John Contrane, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Edith Piaf, Bix Beiderbecke. Same damn story every time — they grew up hard, found fame with their great gift, burned brightly for a relatively brief time and then keeled over. Where would the American musical biopic be without booze and drugs? Without a pot to piss in, that’s where.

When a big, stupid, assaultive franchise flick is about to open and break the box-office, as is the case with James Wan‘s Furious 7, most critics play it smart by “reviewing” with a light touch. Like smirking bullfighters, they toy with the beast rather than plunge a lance. “What’s the point of actually taking this one on?,” they seem to be saying. “A pan will just make me and my newspaper or website look old-fogeyish and out of touch with the megaplexers. What the hell…I’ll just ironically admire it and flick my frilly handerchief and make gentle sport of my real feelings.

“And what perverse fun it is, when you think about it, to give a pass to a corporate muscle-car movie that is totally and in fact purposefully opposed to the organic, real-world excitement of a classic fast-car flick like Bullitt or Gone in Sixty Seconds or Drive. The truth is that I don’t like real fast-car movies any more than James Wan does. So I’ll just tee-hee my way through the writing of this piffle of a review and then take a nice lunch…hey!”

Portugese director Manoel de Oliviera, who died today at age 106, lived a life that everyone envied — long, prolific, legendary. He was respected worldwide as a man of taste, cultivation and modest aesthetic accomplishment. He once described himself as an interpreter of the Bunuelian themes of romantic frustration and stifling societal mores, and that’s fine. But honestly? When I learned of his death this morning I respectfully couldn’t think of a single, stand-out default classic that he’d made. I went to his Wiki bio and scanned his films and went “uh-huh, yup, heard about that one, respected, missed that one, hmmm, yup.” But I love that he kept working decades past the usual age of retirement or slowing down. I love his oft-quoted remark about directing films for the sheer pleasure of it, regardless of how many critics went nuts for his latest. I adore the fact that de Oliviera was 103 when his last feature, Gebo and The Shadow (which I never saw), played the 2012 Venice Film Festival.

In a 4.1 Hitfix interview with Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm, Alan Sepinwall asks Hamm to explain why Don Draper has refused to grow even modest-length sideburns despite the fact that by 1969 each and every creative person on the planet earth had begun to let their hair and sideburns grow at least a little bit.

Sepinwall: “Over the years, other [Mad Men] characters’ looks have changed dramatically, [but] Don’s look has remained constant. Has that helped you stay centered in the character, or have you ever wished that you could grow muttonchops or a ‘stache? ”

Hamm: “I think it makes sense. I think Don is invested in staying Don. I think it’s on purpose from a creative standpoint. And I support the choice. That’s how we start the final season, if you look at season 7 as one long season, you see the LA airport, and it’s all bright colors and new things and shiny planes, and new things and hippies and hot women and colors and psychedelics, and through it all moves this gray man that we’ve seen for the last ten years, and he’s exactly the same. And he looks so out of place.”

Joel Edgerton‘s The Gift (7.31, STX) appears to be another variation on the Fatal Attraction formula — i.e., a troubled but more or less stable middle-class marriage is threatened by a relationship that the husband has (or more precisely had) with an unstable third party.   Steady and reliable-as-Old-Faithful Jason Bateman, ostrich-like Rebecca Hall and Edgerton as the bad guy. I’m sorry but Hall doesn’t look good with short hair — never get a pixie cut again and fire your hairdresser. Edgerton directed and wrote.

Alex Gibney‘s All Or Nothing At All (HBO, 4.5 and 4.6), the two-part, four-hour doc on Frank Sinatra, is quite the loving valentine. It goes easy and then some, but it makes you feel like you’re in Sinatra’s home corner every step of the way, and in this sense it’s unique — there’s never been this much love and understanding shown to Sinatra and his legend from a polished, first-class doc by a world-renowned director. It’s Gibney’s trick, of course, to make you feel that you’re not being egregiously lied to. Which of course the doc is definitely doing by omission. What matters is that Gibney’s accumulation of lies are, at day’s end, artful. Because the doc is filled with bedrock emotional truths and echoes.

This is an intimate saga of an artist with a profound vocal gift, a legendary sense of style, a swaggering ego, an open heart when it came to friends and family, a lust for the ladies, a chip on his shoulder and a street attitude that led to certain feelings of kinship and camaraderie with mob guys. And you can’t beat the first 56 years of Sinatra’s life (’15 to ’71) for sheer emotion, Shakesperean drama, urban pizazz, ups and downs, top-of-the-world success and down-in-the-gutter career blues…a saga of an all-American, knock-around life that spanned most of the 20th Century, and one that became less and less interesting when Sinatra turned smug and gray and more-or-less Republican in the late ’60s until his death on 5.14.98 at age 82.

I was quite moved and charmed by much of it, but this is a family-approved doc that’s basically about re-igniting commercial interest in Sinatra product (CDs, films) by way of celebrating his 100th birthday, which is actually not until 12.12.15. That means it’s really friendly…a doc that is always looking to show love and understanding or at least muted affection…a highly skillful handjob as far as classy, high-end biopics go. No judgment, no impartiality…every well-known or rumored-about negative in Sinatra’s bio is finessed or explained away in some first-hand, no-big-deal fashion by Sinatra himself or by a friend, or otherwise brushed off.

Are you now or have you ever been a person who doesn’t “get it” and therefore needs to have the shit beaten out of him/her on Twitter? Are you now or have you ever been disturbingly non-progressive, in some way out-of-step or guilty of insufficient understanding of a pressing social issue or agenda? Are you now or have you ever been some kind of closet discriminator? A person whose views are (or once were) politically retrograde, politically insensitive or in any way dismissive of any socially marginalized or discriminated-upon group?

What is the difference between (a) scanning a person’s Twitter feed from two or three or four years ago in search of politically incorrect or insensitive tweets to use against him/her and (b) a HUAC committee in the late 1940s or early ’50s searching through a Hollywood filmmaker’s political associations or statements from the 1930s? Or, for that matter, a Chinese Communist Party official looking to discredit and re-educate a nonloyal person in the midst of the Cultural Revolution of ’66 to the mid ’70s? It’s the same basic impulse — i.e., to identify, shame and punish the miscreant, the outlier, “the other.”

…between the almost-comedic, dusty, wildly apocalyptic vibe of George Miller‘s Mad Max: Fury Road and the corrupt, pumped-up CG bullshit of James Wan‘s Furious 7…if you can’t sense the differences between the high-torque swagger and clenched intensity in the performances of Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult vs. the preening, macho-robot posturings of Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson and Michelle Rodriguez, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Joni Mitchell, 71, was rushed to the hospital this afternoon after reportedly being found unconscious, She was said to be alert in the ride down to “the hospital” (presumably UCLA or Cedars), but is reportedly in intensive care.

I’ve spoken to a friend who was with her last week, and he said he sensed that all was perhaps not entirely well. Mitchell, he said, had called for “a healer” to drop by and lay on hands or help out in some kind of shamanistic way.

Mitchell has been an unrepentant smoker all her life, beginning at age nine. My friend mentioned that there’s been some discussion (and perhaps an intention) of switching to electronic cigarettes but after six decades of reportedly heavy smoking…God help her. Obviously everyone wants her to recover and push on, but at a certain point the body just can’t take the nicotine and the toxins and complications will manifest.

Sidelight: I attended a short, smallish concert that Mitchell gave at Studio 54 in October ’82 to promote “Wild Things Run Fast.” The crowd was not huge, maybe 200 or 250, and I was standing fairly close and pretty much dead center. No female artist has ever touched me like Mitchell **, and I was quite excited about being this close to her. I was beaming, starry-eyed and staring at her like the most self-abasing suck-up fan you could imagine, and during the first song her eyes locked onto mine and I swear to God we began to kind of half-stare at each other. (Some performers do this, deciding to sing for this or that special person in the crowd.) Her eyes danced around from time to time but she kept coming back to me, and I remember thinking, “Okay, she senses that I love her and she probably likes my looks so I guess I’m her special fanboy or something for the next few minutes.”

Mitchell was dressed in a white pants suit and some kind of colorful scarf, and she sang and played really well, and I remember she had a little bit of a sexy tummy going on. Sorry but that had a portion of my attention along with the songs and “being there” and a feeling that I’d remember this moment for decades to come.