Last June I posted a couple of shots taken during my brief stint as a mediocre drummer. Okay, a fair drummer but no Ginger Baker. Anyway, the original photographer (i.e., an old friend) sent me another shot today.

Deadline‘s Pete Hammond likes to wait until mid-November to start picking his Best Picture Oscar faves (i.e., most likely to win). So I was excited yesterday when I saw he’d finally posted a 2013 Best Picture handicap piece. My pulse quickened when I read his observation that 2013 has been a high-quality year…yeah. And that the leaders of the pack right now are Gravity, 12 Years A Slave and Captain Phillips. And that the last two not-yet-seen contenders, American Hustle (which screens in Los Angeles this evening) and Wolf of Wall Street, could re-order the situation. He also said that the recent tendency to give Best Picture Oscars to softball audience movies (The King’s Speech, The Artist, Argo) over critical favorites could help mainstream feel-gooders like Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks, the Weinstein Co.’s Philomena or Paramount’s Nebraska (which could turn out to be, Hammond believes, “the little engine that could for Paramount”). I’m not saying Hammond is wrong about this stuff, but I was hoping he’d stick his neck out like Variety‘s Tim Gray recently did when he declared that Peter Berg‘s Lone Survivor is looking like a big Best Picture breakout. Or something like that.

After filing this morning (which was agony due to spotty wifi) we drove out to the Cu Chi tunnels, an underground hideout and staging area that was used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. On the shooting range I put on a pair of earmuffs and fired ten rounds out of an AK-47 — they charge you about $1.50 a round. I don’t know if I hit the target but firing this legendary weapon in rural Vietnam made my day. Tonight’s activity includes a dinner at Camargue and then a drop-by at Apocalypse Now, a bar that’s been going since ’91. The plane for Seoul leaves at midnight. I’ll have a few hours of filing time in Seoul before my Los Angeles flight leaves in the late afternoon. Back on Monday morning.

“The studios are not in the movie business anymore,” director-producer John Landis recently said during the Mar del Plata Film Festival, which I attended a few years ago. “Some of us were very lucky. I started to make movies for the studios in the ’70s. They were dying, but at least they were still studios. There are no original ideas. What there is — and this is something no one understands — is that it is never about the idea, it is about the execution of the idea.” Exactly. The monster-on-the-loose idea behind Landis’s Schlock (’72) was nothing special, but Landis used an exploitation concept to deliver dry social satire. It was as amusing in its way as Attack The Block (which made hilarious use of blatantly fake-looking aliens) was in its own.

Marshall Fine recently ran a piece that basically said there were plenty of shit-level movies released during the 1970s, which is mainly regarded, of course, as one of the most creatively fertile and exciting eras in Hollywood history. There are bad ’70s movies you can find online (The Concorde: Airport ’79 or Midas Run) and there are ’70s films so tedious and obscure that they’ve been wiped off the face of the earth — no one’s even heard of them. I’m going to stick my neck out right now and declare that I’m the first movie journalist to even mention Quentin Masters and Don Mitchell‘s Thumb Tripping (’72) in the 21st Century and perhaps for the last 30-plus years. Well, am I?

Hats off to Paramount marketers for their brilliant Wolf of Wall Street one-sheets. They’re appealing to the empty Coke bottles out there by suggesting it’s The Hangover meets Wall Street (i.e., a rollicking, bacchanalian, ape-crazy Roman orgy of absurd wealth, blowjobs and dwarf-tossing) instead of Wall Street meets Goodfellas, which indicates a somewhat darker journey. (At least during the second half.) Not a hint of moral complexity or impending doom or Monday-morning anxiety — that‘s the way to reach the under-35s, you bet. I’m not being facetious — this is a very, very smart campaign.

If there’s some vestige of old-world French colonial architecture in Saigon (which nobody calls Ho Chi Minh City), I haven’t found it yet. I’m sure there are some appealing nooks in this big, noisy, sprawling burgh. I only arrived here last night so what do I know? But I can say without qualification that Saigon is an aggressively commercial city with Godzilla-sized super-towers on every other block (at least in the downtown area) and that there are piles of garbage floating near the banks of the Saigon River. Plus the iPhone receptivity has been just awful and the wifi at the Saigon Grand Hotel is the worst I’ve ever experienced in any big-league town in my life. Saigon clearly has an economically vital pulse, but it lacks that culturally refined je ne sais quoi that always defines a great city. People always want your money wherever you travel, but the good citizens of Saigon really want it — merchants and street hustlers have been hitting on me relentlessly. I love the tall trees and the big parks, but it’s just not my kind of town. I’m guessing it might be a little bit like Bangkok, which The Hangover Part II and Only God Forgives convinced me to never, ever visit. I guess I’m just more of a Hanoi type of guy.

I visited Dallas about 15 or 16 years ago. I went right over to Dealey Plaza, of course, and stood behind the picket fence atop the grassy knoll, which is where the second shooter could have fired from. (There had to be some reason why those cops ran up the knoll with their guns drawn after JFK’s limo sped off.) The first thing I noticed was that the fence was old and weathered and that some of the slats were missing. Maybe things have changed since but I naturally wondered why Dallas authorities hadn’t maintained the fence as it looked on 11.22.63. On one hand the spruced-up Sixth-Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza is a big tourist attraction; on the other they’re content to let the grassy-knoll fence fall to pieces. Obviously a conflicted mentality.

Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reports that he’s read “almost all eight pages” of Patrick Goldstein‘s Los Angeles magazine story (on stands 11.28) about the battle between Hollywood’s four trades (Deadline, Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, Variety), and that he’s incensed that Goldstein has “made a pronouncement as bold and daring as when music critic Jon Landau wrote that he had “seen the future of rock and roll and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Just as boldly, Fleming writes, Goldstein “reveals that he has seen the future of entertainment journalism and it is…TheWrap‘s Jeff Sneider?”

I haven’t read the piece but I don’t see why Fleming has to pick on poor Sneider, who’s just a hard-working guy hustling around for the same casting and distribution-deal scoops that other trade reporters are after.

How can Jonah Hill‘s flamboyant performance as the big-toothed Donnie Azoff (largely based on the real-life Danny Porush, the Jordan Belfort co-conspirator who did 39 months behind bars for securities fraud and money laundering) not translate into a Best Supporting Actor nomination? He’s obviously hot-wired, on fire. You can sense it right away. (Note: I tried and failed to find an embed code for this clip yesterday.)

For a good portion of ’81 I was living in a sublet on Bank Street west of Hudson, almost exactly opposite HB Studios. The rent was around $350 per month. (Or so I recall.) The sublessor was a 40something guy who lived in Boca Raton, Florida. The landlord, who knew nothing of this arrangement, was one of those tough old New York buzzards in his ’70s. Anyway the landlord got wind and told me to vacate as I was illegally subletting. He naturally wanted a new fully-approved tenant who would pay a bigger rent, but he wouldn’t consider my own application as I was a shiftless scumbag in his eyes. I refused to leave until I could find something else, and then one day I came home to find my stuff (clothes, IBM Selectric typewriter, small color TV, throw rug, framed American Friend poster) lying in a big pile in the hallway with the locks on my apartment door changed. The buzzard was playing rough.

For me, one of the legendary moments in Inside Llewyn Davis (CBS Films, 11.6) is when Stark Sands‘ army private/folk singer guy (i.e., the one stationed at Fort Dix) is sitting in Jim and Jean‘s living room early in the morning, talking to Oscar Isaac‘s titular character and finishing up a bowl of Cheerios or whatever. With the last bits of cereal consumed, Sands looks down at the bowl, raises it to his lips and noisily slurps down the “cereal milk.” I used to do that as a kid (and I’m sure the Coens did also), but it’s obvious what the Coens are “saying” with this bit. They’re telling us that Sands is a mild-mannered dipshit.