I can’t be led around on a leash during the mid-November Vietnam visit. It was okay last year as I didn’t know anything, but not again. I’ve told the Vidotour guys that I want my freedom for at least one day, due respect. “The basic idea is that I do not want to fly from Danang to Nha Trang on Thursday, 11.21,” I told the chief rep. “I want to either drive or at least take a train between Hoi An/Danang and Nha Trang.

Sandra Nettelbeck‘s Last Love is a gentle, agreeably low-key relationship drama, set in Paris, about a platonic affair between a widowed, 80-something professor (Michael Caine) and a younger French lady (Clemence Poesy). Nettelbeck directed and adapted Francoise Dorner‘s “La Douceur Assassine” into a screenplay. Justin Kirk and Gillian Anderson play Caine’s somewhat snide and snippy kids, and Jane Alexander plays his deceased wife (i.e., she pops in for an occasional ghost scene). Being a fan, I called Nettelbeck in Berlin yesterday morning to chat for a bit.

Last Love director-writer Sandra Nettelbeck.

Deadline‘s Mike Fleming is reporting that Paramount and Skydance execs are “sweet” on Attack The Block‘s Joe Cornish to direct the third Star Trek film. A great payday for Cornish if it happens, but the the ability to be a kind of visionary traffic cop on a costly, CG-laden Trek film is exactly what Cornish has shown he’s not adept at doing. He’s looking for a big-time career and that’s fine (he co-wrote fucking Ant Man), but when I think of Cornish I think of a guy who was clever enough to make a good monster-invasion film on a nickle-and-dime budget.

I’m about to sit down with a screener of Dheeraj Akolkar‘s Liv and Ingmar: Painfully Connected, which was first seen 13 months ago at the 2012 New York Film Festival. The doc is set to open on 12.13 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe on 65th Street in Manhattan and in Los Angeles at Landmark’s Nuart. I have to say that the gentle piano music on the trailer soundtrack has me worried. Akolkar “directed” and “wrote” but the film is obviously Liv Ullmann‘s recollection of her long relationship with Bergman and not, say, some impartial God’s-eye view. A woman’s film, in short, about one of the most worshipped filmmakers of the 20th Century who…oh, yes, that’s right, was quite depressed and gloomy and neurotic for much of his life. And he liked the ladies.

The general attitude is that you don’t want people watching your film at home if you can help it. Too many distractions, too easy to pause or fast forward. You want them fully engaged in a theatre, staying with it, in it. But I felt a bit distracted when I saw In A World in a theatre, and I’m wondering if this is the kind of film that almost plays better on a disc because you can cantake a short break when a sluggish moment happens and then come back to it 20 or 30 minutes later without losing anything. Lord knows that are films that have to be seen in a theatre (Gravity, All Is Lost, 12 Years A Slave), etc. You know that when older Academy members pop in 12 Years A Slave at home they’re just going to fast-forward through the rough parts.

All I do with this column, day after day after effing day, is lay it out there as honestly and openly as I can. Knowing full well that the p.c. brownshirts will be after me with baseball bats for a good portion of whatever I post. It goes in waves and cycles. Sometimes I just shrug it off and other times it gets to me. Lately I walk around in fear. I’m so terrified of the next trauma that I’m almost wimpishly polite with everyone. If I can order a cappucino at Le Pain Quotidien and pay for it without somebody looking at me cross-eyed I almost weep with relief. If I have to step around a dog I say “excuse me.” I don’t step on cracks in sidewalks or on rocks of any kind because they could be land mines or camoflauged anacondas or boa constrictors.

I’m getting really sick of arguing all the time with guys like Kris Tapley. (Tapley is the new David Poland these days — surly, dismissive, knows it all.) Last night two friends of that gay guy who lives upstairs and loudly giggles and cackles every morning like clockwork around 7 am called to complain that I had hurt his feelings. “But I didn’t identify or even vaguely allude to who he is,” I replied. “I just wrote that the giggling was incessant and that it was driving me nuts.” That awful, awful episode when I reported about that kid with some kind of debilitating condition who couldn’t control himself in that Manchester, Connecticut theatre…it took me two or three days to recover from that one. If I had it to do over again I wouldn’t have used the word “platypus” in the comment thread but otherwise I was simply stating that theatres are churches and movie-watching is like Holy Communion and that everyone needs to respect that. The mob hate…Jesus!

Corey Feldman has written a tell-all book called “Coreyography.” About halfway through his HuffPost chat with Ricky Camilleri, Corey Feldman responds to his reputation as a “Poster Boy For Fallen Child Stars.” Quote: “I don’t blame anybody. I don’t blame myself. Life is what life is. Things happen the way they’re meant to [happen]. And at the end of the day, I’m eternally grateful that I’m still here, that I’m still working [and whatnot]. I’m eternally happy. I feel like a blessed man. You have to keep moving forward, keep reinventing yourself, keep recreating yourself.” It gets better around the 15-minute mark. “Michael Jackson [wasn’t] a child molester”? Really?

Earlier this year Charlie Countryman (Millenium, 11.15) was called The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman — a film festival title that was zotzed for obvious reasons. Right now is has a 33% Rotten Tomatoes rating. “A gripping, violent film that owes an unabashed debt to the Tarantino-penned love-in-low-places story True Romance,” wrote Empire‘s Damon Wise. Variety‘s John Anderson stated that the film contains “barely a serious moment…with the actors offering up vaguely tongue-in-cheek portrayals of characters either too cliched or unpleasant to deserve much else [while the] ending will have viewers shaking their heads in dismay.”

Not that anyone needs reminding but Dallas Buyer’s Club has a 94% Rotten Tomatoes rating. That makes it required viewing this weekend if you live in New York or Los Angeles, where the Focus Features release is now playing. I’ve seen it twice and I’m actually thinking about going a third time tomorrow or Sunday on my own dime. I’m figuring there’s a little more juice to be squeezed out of the rag. In terms of my own viewing excitement, I mean. The movie has obvious potential to be nominated in at least three or four categories — Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, etc.

Warner Home Video’s new Bluray of William Wyler‘s The Best Years Of Our Lives looks tolerable for the most part and in some portions is quite pleasing, but — I’m genuinely sorry to report this — it looks compromised here and there by Egyptian grainstorms along with a few soft-focus passages. This is partly, I’m told, because the original negative was lost a long time ago (possibly due to being on a ship that sank in the North Atlantic), and that the source materials are from a couple of fine grain prints (neither one of which is completely usable) plus a dupe negative or two. The bottom line is that this 1946 classic and Best Picture Oscar winner can never look wonderful and will always look a bit dupey and compromised in spots. I accept that, but I swear that the old DVD looked just as good if not a bit better on my old 26″ Sony flatscreen than the Bluray does now on my 60″ Samsung. 13 years ago I had no significant issues with the DVD, but today’s Bluray is an in-and-outer.

The great Myrna Loy trying to smile and laugh her way through a mosquito swarm in an early scene from The Best Years of Our Lives.

Some wacko started shooting people inside Terminal #3 at LAX around 9:30 this morning. 10 or 15 “very loud” shots, some guy is reporting. TSA agent killed; “multiple injuries.” The young, black-clad shooter was reportedly carrying an AR-15, and has since been cuffed. Obviously a terrible trauma and tragedy, but when something like this happens the reaction by law enforcement and security officials is always the same. Shut everything down, ground all flights, explode everyone’s travel plans to pieces and bring the entire Los Angeles air-travel world (even Burbank and Long Beach airports have reportedly gotten into the act) to an all-but-absolute standstill. The motto seems to me “somebody shot somebody? Well, guess what, public? You’re going to pay for this. We’re bureaucratically obliged to treat this shooting by a lone psychopath as the spearhead of some kind of coordinated terrorist attack…sorry but we have to think this way…and so we’re going to waste your travel plans. Trust us, the pain starts now.”

Some people need a support system to survive. They’re too susceptible to this or that demon and can’t do it on their own. They need something or someone strong to get them through the choices and struggles of the day. To hear it from Seduced and Abandoned director James Toback, Robert Downey, Jr. is such a person, and his controller is his wife, Susan. There’s nothing horribly wrong with this kind of submission — Downey’s career is obviously doing very well. It’s just that certain kinds of creative energies and wild-ass improvs are no longer in Downey apparently — they guy he wqs when he co-starred in Two Girls and a Guy and Black and White no longer exists. Or so Toback says in a chat with HuffPost Live‘s Ricky Camilleri.