Poor Zak (formerly called Jazz) is getting castrated at Laurel Pet Hospital today. I don’t know where I got the idea that a neutering operation costs around $300, but I’m wrong. If I hadn’t told the vet to forget about doing a blood work test (on a seven-month-old kitten in the prime of life?) I’d be paying $100 more. If I hadn’t told her to forget about a flea treatment I’d be paying over $600. (I have some flea treatment stuff at home, thanks.) If I hadn’t told them to forget about giving Zak his final boosters I’d be paying $750 or so. Edgar Buchanan to Alan Ladd in Shane: “S’matter, son? You look kinda pale.”

The “new” Renee Zellweger looks nice these days. Pretty, relaxed, well-tended. But the fact that she bears little if any resemblance to the actress who starred in Jerry Maguire, Cold Mountain, Bridget Jones Diary and Chicago has caught people’s attention. And wouldn’t you know it but Zellweger and Hollywood Elsewhere will probably cross paths next Monday (10.27) at the Savannah Film Festival. (I’ll be there between Friday, 10.24 and Tuesday, 10.28.) Why is her “work” getting all this attention now, a week before she shows up in Savannah with guys like me hanging around? What, for that matter, has Ms. Zellweger done lately? I’m in no way chuckling or making light of the fact that her career has been slowing down. It happens. It’s tough. There but for the grace of God.

But in a very real appearance sense the Zellweger of 10 or 15 years ago has been pretty much erased. The spirit and personality are presumably still intact, of course, but I really, genuinely, honest-to-God don’t recognize her…although she does look pleasant and attractive as far as those terms go. The eyes, the jaw…really strange.

First-rate “work” is supposed to enhance, de-sag and de-age so subtly that people notice a certain improvement without wondering how or chattering behind your back. That’s how it used to be, at least. Maybe the new aesthetic is “don’t make yourself look slightly younger…throw your entire face out in the trash and start over clean with a nice, fresh newbie.” Imagine what Rod Serling would make of this.

One naturally assumes that Chuck Workman‘s Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is about his facility with magic. Nope — it’s just a tribute to his filmmaking genius. And an argument, it seems, that he didn’t peak at 25 when he made Citizen Kane. Clips from almost every existing Welles film plus the usual talking-head testimonials (Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Richard Linklater, Peter Bogdanovich). And by the way, nobody wolfed it down like Welles. Chris Pratt can’t hold a candle.

In an interview with Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, John Wick‘s Keanu Reeves says that “the last studio movie I did was 47 Ronin but before that it had been a long time…probably The Day the Earth Stood Still. So I haven’t been getting many offers from the studios.” Kohn says, “Are you okay with that?” Reeves says, “No, it sucks, but it’s just the way it is. You can have positive and negative experiences [but] for me, [that’s] just not happening.” What he means is that The Day The Earth Stood Still drove a stake through his career and forced him to think it differently and try some new moves. Now that Wick is an apparent action hit, he’s doing okay again. Not that people like me are going to sing its praises. The script is supposed to be on the idiotic side. I shouldn’t say anything until I see it. Tonight’s press screening starts at 7:30 pm.

I popped for a Roku 3 player last night ($100 bills and change). I had resisted it because of the cheesy name, which sounds like something cheap bought in downtown Tokyo. Anyway I hooked it up and signed up for a year’s worth of Warner Archive access. It’s pretty sweet, I have to say. All those older films on high-def (Straight Time, Gun Crazy, A Face in the Crowd, The Yakuza, Klute, The Candidate, Action in the North Atlantic, Marked Woman). Update: I’ve got the priciest Roku with ultra-fast wifi, and the movie has to reload every four or five minutes…no good. At least I can finally watch Amazon rentals on my 60-incher. I haven’t figured out how to get Showtime but apparently there’s a cheaper way through Roku than just signing up and paying through the nose.

I was over at the Cole Avenue DMV this morning to (a) renew my Class C driver’s license, which expires early next month, and (b) get a motorcycle license. The first part is the written test, and of course I failed it. I got five or six questions wrong, but my answers were only sorta kinda somewhat wrong. I always choose the most conservative-sounding answer but they flunked me anyway. Dicks. I’ve been driving scooters and motorcycles for decades, man. I know everything about handling myself on two wheels but they got me. The questions ask you to choose one of three answers, and two out of the three answers usually sound fairly reasonable. The (b) answer isn’t crazy or stupid — it’s just not quite as correct in a bureaucratic petty-ass way as (c). Now I have to study the damn booklet tonight and take the test again tomorrow. And then a driving test. When’s the last time you needed to study something in order to pass something? I always hated school. It took me years to get past the feelings of low self-esteem, etc. Almost everyone who gets good grades grows up to be a dullard, and the ones who get lousy grades always grow up to be cool.

A little while ago Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson assembled a few thoughts about the late L.M. Kit Carson and sent them along: “We met Kit twenty years ago. Kit and Cynthia had come back to Texas to put Kit’s biological son Hunter through school there, and we submitted ourselves to be his adopted ones, hoping to become his latest discoveries. (We weren’t the first as Kit was a natural guru.) He was the only person we’d ever met who actually worked in the movie business, and we had never come across someone who so automatically and instinctively turned any idea or experience or suggestion into a story — a pitch. Sometimes it was only at the end of the story that you realized “this has a purpose, he’s advising us, these are ‘notes.'”

“Kit had a rustic glamor, like a sort of a cowboy-screenwriter. He never told us much about his childhood except that the L. was for Louis and the M. was for Minor, two old men he was named after. What we heard about was guerilla filmmaking and gonzo film journalism and Dennis Hopper in Taos and Peru. We loved Kit in David Holzman’s Diary which we saw with him in Dallas, and we had already loved his work in Breathless and Paris, Texas. He had longish, stringy, sandy hair, and he clomped through the house in hiking boots all year round. He gave us a one-on-one tutorial in script-writing and short-film-editing (and, also, a lesson in how to hustle a project into existence). [Kit’s wife] Cynthia said to us that of all the people who were lucky to have known Kit, we were the luckiest. It certainly feels that way to us. He introduced us to the rest of our lives.

L.M. Kit Carson, the legendary Texas screenwriter, actor, documentarian, short-film impresario (Direction Man), hotshot journalist, ex-husband of Karen Black, father of Hunter Carson, a kind of godfather to Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson in ’93 and ’94, Guillermo del Toro pally and a personal friend (we first met around ’87 when I was working at Cannon Films), died last night after a long illness. Hugs, tears…I’m sorry. Kit was a good egg. Always with a grin and some kind of sly, wise-man quip. Condolences to Hunter (with whom I corresponded about Direction Man last year) and Kit’s wife Cindy Hargraves and the general sprawling family of friends and acquaintances.

Carson began as a movie-realm journalist and documentarian (David Holzman’s Diary, American Dreamer) and gradually ambled his way into screenwriting. He had the vibe and the touch. He understood how it all was supposed to be, or could be. I don’t know where he “was” over the last decade or so, but in the ’80s and ’90s he always seemed to have the whole equation in his head.

The early to mid ’80s were Carson’s peak years when he co-wrote Jim McBride‘s Breathless (a 1983 remake of the 1959 Jean-Luc Godard original with Richard Gere) and Wim Wenders‘ Paris, Texas and a thing called Chinese Boxes that I’ve never even seen, and then came that wonderful Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 screenplay, which was a dry, darkly comedic kill-the-yuppies thing that was heralded in an issue of Film Comment (it might have been Harlan Jacobson who wrote “it’s okay to like it”). But alas, director Tobe Hooper came along and fucked it all up when Cannon decided to make it.

Amir Bar-Lev‘s Happy Valley “is a perceptive, shrewdly sculpted study of denial — of people’s willingness and even eagerness to practice denial if so motivated. The specific subject is the Penn State child-abuse sex scandal of 2011 and 2012, which resulted in convicted pedophile Jerry “horsing around in the shower” Sandusky doing 30 years in jail and the late beloved Penn State coach Joe Paterno being at lest partly defined between now and forever as a pedophile enabler. Cheers to Bar-Lev (The Tillman Story, My Kid Could Paint That) for delivering another riveting sink-in.

“The Freeh report (conducted by former FBI director Louis Freeh and his law firm) stated that Paterno, Penn State president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley and school vp Gary Schultz all knew about Sandusky probably being guilty of child molestation as far back as 1998, and that all were complicit in looking the other way. State College residents and especially Penn State football fans were enraged when Paterno was fired for not saying or doing enough. Even after the Freeh report they wouldn’t let go.

How aware are Academy members of their reputation outside their little bubble? I’m wondering this because I keep hearing over and over that the biggest hit with well-heeled Academy-type viewers is Morten Tyldum‘s The Imitation Game, and I’m wondering if Academy members will have the balls to make fun of themselves again by giving the Best Picture Oscar to a film that is a fairly close relative of The King’s Speech. Because it’s basically another Masterpiece Theatre period drama directed in the Richard Attenborough style…set in the past, about a male protagonist overcoming a disability or roadblock of some kind in order to do good…emotional, touching, tidy. Does the Academy know or care that handing the Best Picture Oscar to The King’s Speech denigrated their reputation among thinking people the world over? If they do, are they willing to do the same thing all over again by tumbling for The Imitation Game? I’m not putting it down, mind. Really, I’m not. I got it when I saw it in Telluride….”yup, this is a good one,” I told myself. It works by the terms it sets out to fulfill. But Game is, indisputably, informed by the same DNA that created The King’s Speech. You can’t argue that.

“Too much alpha chuckling can be an unwelcome thing, and I don’t mind saying that Poland’s relentless chuckling can feel truly oppressive at times. After a while it can feel like a form of torture. What happens in these DP/30 interviews is that people talk a lot — expressively at times and certainly at great length — but every so often the interviews drive me crazy because it hits me that all I’m watching is a lot of chuckling and effusive blather because Poland’s questions are sometimes inane and forced and anxious. It’s Poland going ‘bee-duh-bee-duh-bee-bee-bee-bee’ and the interview subject going ‘well, okay, hold on…I’m going to answer you, of course, but I’m going to slow it down a bit.” — from an 11.14.10 riff called “My Soul Wilts.”

Edward Norton’s first scene in Birdman is about his character, Mike Shiner, rehearsing a Raymond Carver play with Michael Keaton‘s Riggan Thomson. And within 90 seconds he “runs through a Crayola box of tones and emotions, jumping between Shiner and Shiner’s character in the play like he’s changing shirts,” says Grantland‘s Kevin Lincoln. “Throughout the rest of Birdman, flexibility defines Norton’s performance. He fistfights in a floral Speedo. He wields an erection like it’s his first. He throws himself into being a maniac. Norton empties the playbook, turning a flimsy role into Dada madness.