Not to be in any way disrespectful, but did anyone know — or know of — Steve Friedman, the Philadelphia talk-radio host and film expert who died the night before last (i.e., Sunday) of kidney disease just hours after completing his Mr. Movie program on WPHT-AM (1210)? I didn’t know the guy but I’m sorry. 62 is too young to be wrapping things up.

Since 1999 Friedman joined Steve Ross and Jimmy Murray on their “Remember When” radio show from 10 to midnight, and then continued with his own show until 1 a.m. Previously, he had stayed on the air all night.

Friedman was also a national film reviewer for Donnelly Directory’s Talking Yellow Pages. He had been a film critic and entertainment reporter for NBC10 and for America Online’s Digital City, where he hosted a weekly chat room for film buffs.

I decided a year ago that Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes (Warner Bros., 12.25) movie would be largely dismissable. Because I knew it would be made, like all super-expensive high-concept CG adventures, for the under-25 mongrel moviegoing culture which “doesn’t want to know from 19th Century London” and “cares only about eating popcorn and scratching their balls during the trailers.” About eight months ago a Sarah Lyall N.Y. Times article reiterated the same impression.

“This is surely evidence of a degraded culture,” I responded. “The general dilution and animalization of rarified values and dashing cerebral derring-do, which were once admired or at least found intriguing by average moviegoers.”

And then the official trailer came along last May and that was it. There could be only one….all right, three responses. One, enjoy the performances by Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. Two, admire the production design, pyrotechnics, CG, costumes, stunts and all the other peripherals. And three, hate everything else about it. For Sherlock Holmes will almost certainly be an Eloi movie, a corporate bullshit movie, a Goldman Sachs and AIG movie, the new Wild Wild West.

Barring a miracle it will almost certainly say the wrong things, do the wrong things, be the wrong things, traffic in bromance humor and poison your soul. Is it unfair that I’m committed to hating Sherlock Holmes come hell or high water? Yes, surely. Is it fair that Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny is apparently committed to finding a way to love it, come hell or high water? Possibly, maybe, you tell me. But I think my attitude is healthier.

Why bring it up again? Because a sequel is on the way, probably in a couple of years.

“Now, I love England,” Downey Jr. told Empire recently. “But we might need to shoot the next one abroad. Jude and I’ll be texting each other. I’ll say, ‘Brussels!; he’ll say, ‘Gstaad!’ We’re really gonna dig deep for the next one.”

Is everyone down with the deal? Downey and Law and producer Joel Silver and whomever is hired to direct the sequel get to text each other and have fun and deposit their fat mercenary paychecks, and we get to pay $12.50 plus parking and popcorn so we can sit there and watch the Holmes sequel while sitting next to wildebeests as they tear open their Twizzlers with their teeth and the ushers pass out sharpened sewing needles so we can stab ourselves in the eye if it all gets to be too much.

“In capitalism as envisioned by its leading lights, including Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, you need a moral foundation in order for free markets to work,” Arianna Huffington writes in a current piece. “And when a company fails, it fails. It doesn’t get bailed out using trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. What we have right now is Corporatism — i.e., welfare for the rich. It’s Wall Street having their taxpayer-funded cake and eating it too. It’s socialized losses and privatized gains.

“Which is why — although you can bet many will try — Capitalism: A Love Story can’t be dismissed as a left-wing tirade. Its condemnation of the status quo is too grounded in real stories and real suffering, its targets too evenly spread across the political spectrum.

“Indeed, Jay Leno, America’s designated Everyman, was so moved by the film he insisted that Moore appear on the second night of his new show, and told his audience that the film was “completely nonpartisan…I was stunned by it, and I think it is the most fair film” Moore has done.

“After a preview screening last week (at which I did a q & a session with Michael), he came over to my home for a late night bite. Over lasagna, he told me…”

Stop right there! Nobody eats pasta and especially lasagna (with all the ground meat and cheese and butter and whatnot) late at night. Anyone who does this is asking for tens of thousands of extra calories and jowly faces and all kinds of surplus bulk.

Back to Arianna: “[Moore] told me about an incident that occurred while he was filming that exemplifies how the economic crisis cannot be looked at through a left vs right prism. It happened while he and his crew were shooting the climax of the movie, where Michael decides to mark Wall Street as a crime scene, putting up yellow police tape around some of the financial district’s towers of power.

“While unfurling the tape in front of a ‘too big to fail’ bank, he became aware of a group of New York’s finest approaching him. Moore has a long history of dealing with policemen and security guards trying to shut him down, but in this case he knew he was, however temporarily, defacing private property. And his shooting schedule didn’t leave room for a detour to the local jail. So, as the lead officer came closer, Moore tried to deflect him, saying: ‘Just doing a little comedy here, officer. I’ll be gone in a minute, and will clean up before I go.’

“The officer looked at him for a moment, then leaned in: ‘Take all the time you need.’ He nodded to the bank and said, ‘These guys wiped out a lot of our Police Pension Funds.’ The officer turned and slowly headed back to his squad car. Moore wanted to put the moment in his film, but realized it could cost the cop his job, and decided to leave it out. ‘When they’ve lost the police,’ he told me, ‘you know they’re in trouble.’

“There is a real sense of urgency to Capitalism: A Love Story. I asked Michael what impact he hoped the film would have. He chuckled and said that, in some way, he had made the movie for ‘an audience of one. President Obama. I hope he sees it and remembers who put him in the White House… and it wasn’t Goldman Sachs.'”

“I think John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama,” Glenn Beck actually says to Katie Couric in a debut episode of her new web show, @katiecouric, which posts tonight at 7 pm.

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“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Beck adds. “I think I would have much preferred [Hillary Clinton] as president and may have voted for her against John McCain.” He describes McCain as “this weird progressive like Theodore Roosevelt was.”

Salon doesn’t like to assign specific dates to its Tom Tomorrow cartoons, which appear every week or so, but this one, I think, went up today.

I don’t get the “I was actually black before the election” line. Meaning what? A certain segment of the audience gets riled up, Obama said in his typical Zen-calm way, when significant economic changes are being proposed. Significant economic change with Geither and Summers, with Wall Street reverting to its wildly speculative practices, with a deballed health care bill that delivers no public option, with a bottomless Afghanistan pit sucking up billions, etc.? I am one of the riled. Make that pissed. Obama’s mellow ‘tude is starting to actually bother me.

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I had to read A.O. Scott‘s 9.20 Steven Soderbergh profile twice to grasp what it really was — a highly observant and mostly affectionate portrait of a detached (but impassioned!) tech-head who makes films about unknowable characters. Scott almost seems to fundamentally regard Soderbergh as a brilliant ditzoid — Fred MacMurray in The Absent Minded Professor? — who, like all scientists, cares more about his laboratory, test tubes, glass beakers and bunsen burners than he does for the public who may or may not buy the products that result from his experiments.

(l.) director Steven Soderbergh; (r) Fred MacMurray as Prof. Ned Brainard in The Absent-Minded Professor.

Soderbergh “may have zigzagged in and out of the movie-industry mainstream in the course of his career,” Scott writes, “but he has remained, throughout, to an extent matched by very few of his peers, an experimental filmmaker.

“He seems to approach each film as a problem, a hypothesis to be explored and tested in the course of production. And as an exercise, though that risks sounding dismissive and understating his creative zeal. The answers to core questions that lie at the heart of his films may not be, in the strict sense, scientific, but they are always, for Mr. Soderbergh, at least partly technical.

“The characters in [his] three most recent films are themselves part of the experiment. Che, The Girlfriend Experience and The Informant!, despite obvious differences of tone and narrative structure, make up a fascinating triptych. Each one is the portrait of a character who is fundamentally unknowable.

“Benicio Del Toro, behind his beard and his inscrutable eyes, is in the title role of Che an emblem of ideological commitment and military ruthlessness and yet also something of a cipher, the sum of his brave, bloody and foolish actions. And while Chelsea, the call girl played by the pornographic film star Sasha Grey, and Matt Damon‘s Mark Whitacre are continuous, dominant presences in The Girlfriend Experience and The Informant!, their motives, feelings and inner lives remain just out of reach.

“It’s as if Mr. Soderbergh is pointedly defying the imperative to make certain characters likable, sympathetic or, in the Hollywood jargon, relatable.

“Detachment may be the most radical aspect of Mr. Soderbergh’s experimentalism. His films often seem to be less about the people in them than indirectly and allegorically about themselves. Which is not to say that Mr. Soderbergh’s own art is cynical or solipsistic. Rather it is the self-awareness that makes it interesting, even when the experiments fail. As experiments will, more often than not.

“I will put my cards on the table and say that I have disliked quite a few, perhaps the majority, of Mr. Soderbergh’s movies of the past decade. I’ve been unmoved, perplexed, frustrated, repelled. But I’ve wanted to see them all more than once. And I always look forward to the next one. And I find it hard not to root for him or to avoid paying him a compliment that is sure to sound more like criticism to some ears, but is really an acknowledgment of the risk he takes, again and again.

“He cares more about the movies than he cares about the audience.”

(l.) The Limey; (r) Solaris

And I will put my cards on my table and say that except for Full Frontal and Solaris, those two mystifiers Soderbergh made during his notorious slump period (’01 to ’04), I too have watched and am ready to watch all his films repeatedly.

I have seen The Limey at least ten times and perhaps more. I have seen The Good German three times, Schizopolis twice, and Traffic a good six or seven times. I could watch the Che films another four of five times at least (and I probably will do this when the Criterion Blu-ray finally peeks out), having already seen them four of five times on big festival screens. I’ve seen The Girlfriend Experiment three times and would be ready and willing to watch it a few more times if there was only a little sex in it. A hand job, even.

When Soderbergh is on the stick and cooking with gas, he’s the best. I am very keen on seeing Knockout (especially with Lem Dobbs writing the script) and whatever the Spalding Gray thing turns out to be.

But honestly? I am scared shitless of the forthcoming Liberace movie (a kind of neutered atmosphere kicks in when Soderbergh deals with any kind of sexual vibe or atmosphere), and every night before I go to bed I get on my knees and pray that the Cleopatra musical never happens.

From tonight’s Michael Moore/Tina Brown q & a following a New York Film Festival screening of Capitalism: A Love Story at Alice Tully Hall — 9.21.09, 9:05 pm. “A nation of semi-literates and ignoramuses!”

Okay, a bit on-the-nose and literal-minded in some of the cuts, but there is a Brando-Beatles bond…I see that now. The masher is Mark Beers, who hails from “some shit town in Canada.” “Go on, tell me, you pigfucker…cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!” Excellent job.

I tend to have problems with lead protagonists who aren’t very smart or clever or self-protecting, especially if they’re journalists. Blokes who just blunder in, regardless of the climate or threat levels in the room, and state their business or line of inquiry without ever seeming to realize that without showing a little finesse and caution and without some idea of what might happen among territorial types when a blundering snoop starts poking around that he might very well get hit, kicked, gouged, cut and bruised very badly.

In Julian Jarrold‘s 1974, the first installment in the Red Riding trilogy, Andrew Garfield (Lions for Lambs, Boy A) plays such a blunderer. And I simply lost patience with him, as I would lose patience with anyone under any circumstance who can’t size up the room, reign in his cruder impulses and make an attempt to find out what he needs to know the way a shrewd card player counts what he’s seen and decides how to play his hand.

On top of which I really can’t stand actors who constantly smoke. All I really knew about Garfield’s journalist (named Eddie Dunford) is that he has one King Kong of a nicotine habit. I began to mutter to myself that Garfield needs to man up and get through just one scene without lighting up. He may done this once, but it wasn’t enough. I began to actively dislike and then despise Garfield. Then I started wishing he’d be killed. I wanted him dead, I wanted him dead…sooner rather than later. Sadly, irritatingly, Jarrold made me wait for it, and when the moment came…I’m actually not sure what happened, but I think it was a good thing.

So much for installment #1 of the Red Riding trilogy. I’ll catch the other two on DVD some day…maybe. (Posted on iPhone from a Starbucks on 49th and Eighth.)