Two weeks ago I mentioned the necessity of being able to see a high-def version of Ken Russell‘s Women in Love (’69), which is only viewable now as a 2003 MGM Home Video DVD. Ditto Russell’s The Music Lovers (’70), his tortured-Tchaikovsky biopic with Richard Chamberlain as the closeted Russain composer. Viewable only as a DVD — no Bluray and not even a Vudu high-def version. The Music Lovers was the third of Russell’s five biographical films about classical composers. Elgar (’62) and Delius: Song of Summer (’68) came before it, and then Mahler (’74) and Lisztomania (’75).

Chiemi Karasawa‘s Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me (Sundance Selects, 3.7) is one of the frankest and boldest docs I’ve ever seen (or would want to see) about what a bitch 87 years old can be. Karasawa’s film is admirably blunt and candid, but that Bette Davis line about aging being “not for sissies” has never seemed more dead-on. This is no glossy showbiz portrait. Well, it is but it has more on its mind than just praise, and some of what we’re shown is unpleasant. I’m just being as honest as Karasawa’s film, okay? It’s not a walk in the park, this thing. But it’s quite tough and ballsy. And hats off to the subject for allowing the raw truth to come through.

Elaine Stritch, God love and praise her, is a Broadway legend and survivor extraordinaire. Most of the under-45s know her as Alec Baldwin‘s mom on 30 Rock, but you have to watch this YouTube video of Stritch’s one-woman show, Elaine Stritch: At Liberty, which she did in her late 70s and which won her a Tony.

How much of that 77 or 78 year-old can be found in the 87 year-old version? Honestly? Somewhere between half and two-thirds. Stritch is still that great, snappy firecracker and pistolero with the brassy attitude and the world-class gams. But Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me is really about what being 87 (Stritch is now 89) was doing to her and how she was pushing back all the same, pushing and performing and rehearsing and travelling around and forgetting lyrics and walking the uptown Manhattan streets. But still losing the battle.

A lady and I were in a live-in relationship during the summer of ’85. We shared a nice single-level bungalow in Beachwood Canyon that had a cedar-wood sundeck with a great view. Things were kind of mezzo-mezzo between us. Not terrific but not too bad. So-so. One Sunday afternoon we went to the beach in Santa Monica, and we laid our blanket down fairly close to the surf but not too close. We were both reading for the most part, and then she began to take a nap. Before too long the tide began to wash in and the surf got closer and closer. Every so often a big wave would splash down and the water and the foam would come within three or four feet. And then two or three feet. I knew we’d be soaked sooner or later. But I didn’t wake her up. On some mildly devilish level I had decided it might be amusing if she were to be woken up by the water splashing onto the blanket. This was obviously a sign that I wasn’t feeling a lot of love. In order to not be blamed I got up and took a short walk, all the while keeping an eye on the blanket and my girlfriend. Five or ten minutes later a wave finally got her. I was standing maybe 50 feet away. She flinched and yelped and was furious. “What the fuck is wrong with you?,” she yelled. “Whaddaya mad at me for?,” I said. “I was just taking a walk.” But on some level she knew. I never copped to it but she knew or at least suspected. I’ve never admitted this until now. I’m sorry. Well, kind of.

Director Anton Corbijn (Control, The American, A Most Wanted Man) is currently shooting Life, a mid 1950s drama about a friendship between real-life Life photographer Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) and legendary actor James Dean (Dane DeHaan). Principal photography begin on 2.18.14 in Toronto and will continue until 3.27.14. The film obviously could open later this year but it’ll probably go for a 2015 release. What do I know?

Stock was around 27 when he photographed Dean (most famously capturing that Times Square shot of an overcoat-wearing Dean hunched over in the rain). Stock died at age 81 in January 2010. Dean died on 9.30.55 in a car crash about 35 or 40 miles east of Paso Robles.

Dean and Stock in early 1955, presumably in some New York bar.

Yesterday I spoke with Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson about her new book, “The $11 Billion Year,” a story of the ups and downs and turnarounds of 2012. Thompson’s idea was to make a movie-release version of William Goldman‘s The Season (’04), a chronicle of Broadway’s trials and tribulations in 1967 and ’68. When I think of 2012 I think of the year in which Argo beat Zero Dark Thirty and Silver Linings Playbook in the Best Picture race, but there was more to it than that, of course. Digital encroachment. Oscar takedown campaigns. Shifting concepts of where the money is coming from, and how much and at what stage of the game. Zombie studio executives churning out dumber and dumber summer tentpoles. Greater and greater numbers of belligerent apes talking to the screen in megaplexes.

“The $11 Billion Year” author sighing books yesterday at Manhattan’s NYU Bookstore.

I wrote about John Ridley‘s All Is By My Side, the story of Jimi Hendrix‘s career transition from 1966 to ’67 (i.e., New York-based cafe performer to London-based psychedelic phenomenon) after catching 40% of it during last September’s Toronto Film Festival. It’ll re-appear on Wednesday, March 12th at South by Southwest with a new title: JIMI: All Is By My Side. There’s also a scene featuring star Andre Benjamin that was posted online today.

Here are my initial remarks, posted on 9.14.13:

“Two or three minutes after settling into All Is By My Side I was feeling stirred by Benjamin’s dead-on performance. It was obvious he’d captured Hendrix’s manner, vibe, voice…that gentleness, that ambivalent but spiritually directed mood-trip thing. Plus I was feeling a certain comfort with Ridley’s script and direction. I wasn’t knocked flat but I was saying to myself, ‘This kind of works…yeah.’

It would be great if this new Sin City movie would actually look and talk and behave like a real film noir from the early ’50s. If it would imitate the attitude and stylings of Fritz Lang‘s The Big Heat, let’s say. That’s impossible, of course, because this latest collaboration between shameless-genre-wallower Robert Rodriguez and reactionary anti-Occupy Wall Street screenwriter Frank Miller has to pander to exaggerated comic-book notions of what film noir might have been if the original purveyors were low-rent genre wallowers instead of actual filmmakers. Josh Brolin, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Jaime King, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dennis Haysbert, Jamie Chung, Bruce Willis, Eva Green, Julia Garner, Ray Liotta, Juno Temple, Jeremy Piven and Stacey Keach costar. Movies like this test my love for black-and-white images.

For any comedian to be hot, much less “so damn hot,” he/she has to be funny. That’s a really important trait, I think. You have to make people laugh. Well, Kevin Hart has never made me laugh…ever. He probably never will. To me he’s somewhere between the black Gallagher and the new Martin Short. Andrew Stewart’s 3.6 Variety piece proclaims that Hart has “an ability to appeal to a demographically wide audience that bridges the racial divide.” Okay, except Summit marketers clearly didn’t have that idea in mind when they assembled last summer’s redband trailer for Let Me Explain. As I wrote on 6.14.13, “There are six or seven cutaways to urban types laughing at Hart’s material…we get it, we get it.”

Last night TheWrap‘s Lucas Shaw reported that Noah director Darren Aronofsky was “not happy” about not being consulted about Paramount’s decision to insert a “religious disclaimer” in the Noah marketing materials. The disclaimer says that “artistic license has been taken” in the making of the film. Shaw reports that Aronofsky “knew nothing about [this] and was ‘not happy’ to learn about it in the press,” according to a single source.

Shaw reported that Paramount and Aronofsky have declined requests to comment.

Wells to everyone involved with Noah and the selling of it: What’s to be unhappy about, Darren-my-man? Paramount marketers aren’t disrespecting or disassociating themselves from you. They’re simply looking to maximize those Christian dollars…big deal. Has Hollywood ever made a Bible-based film that didn’t take artistic license? Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments pissed off 1950s Biblical scholars by depicting a sexual love affair between Charlton Heston‘s Moses and Anne Baxter‘s Nefritiri, and Paramount regretted this all the way to the bank.

The trailer assures that Will Gluck, Jay-Z and Will Smith‘s Annie (Sony, 12.19) is a spunky musical-comedy by way of Manhattan wealth porn. Aimed at the squares, yes, but I like the vibe. (Or I’m in the mood for it after the sturm und drang of the just-finished Oscar season.) If Annie turns out to be half-decent you know Quvenzhane Wallis is going to be Best Actress-nominated…bank on it, Michael Musto! Jamie Foxx as Benjamin Stacks, i.e., a Daddy Warbucks for our time. Cameron Diaz as “the cruel owner of the orphanage where Annie resides”…a Dickensian orphanage in 2014 Harlem run by a neurotic white lady? Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale costarring. The screenplay is by Gluck, Aline Brosh McKenna and Emma Thompson. (Yes, the actress.)

L.A. Times reporter John Horn wrote yesterday that he’s recently spoken with “two Oscar voters [who have] privately admitted that they didn’t see 12 Years a Slave, thinking it would be upsetting…but they said they voted for it anyway because, given the film’s social relevance, they felt obligated to do so.” The morning after the Oscars I wrote the following: “[Academy voters] felt in the end that they had to go with a film that mattered, that said something, that was strong of heart. But I’ll bet a lot of people just voted for it without having seen it. They trusted, based on the strong Slave passions they’d heard or read about, that they were doing the right thing.” How representative of the Academy voters are Horn’s two sources? Two blades of grass usually suggests there’s at least a patch nearby.