I missed Robert Siegel‘s Big Fan when it played Sundance ’09 and haven’t seen it since. It’ll screen here next week, I gather. First Independent Pictures will start a gradual indie rollout in NYC on August 28.

A.O. Scott‘s inspired video essays always look smallish and slightly degraded on the Times site, but they look significantly improved at a width of 560 pixels on YouTube. (Just search with “NY Times critics’ picks A.O. Scott”.) This essay on John Ford‘s Fort Apache is one of the better ones, particularly for the parallels Scott raises between Ford’s U.S.cavalry vs. native Americans conflict and current U.S. military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the currently-rolling Michael Jackson tribute, Stevie Wonder recently said the following: “I know we all feel that we needed Michael with us, but God must have felt that he needed him a lot more.” Oh, surely. And a tearful Brooke Shields has just spoken of the Little Prince whom “we need to look up” to now that he’s sitting on high. The denial is pathetic and it’s all so Vegas. But I’d be concealing if I didn’t admit that some of the tributes have moved me. Some, not all.

I attended a Barnes and Noble discussion early last evening with Night of the Gun author David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger“) and Beautiful Struggle author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

(l.) Beautiful Struggle author Ta-Nehisi Coates, (r.) Night of the Gun author David Carr at Barnes and Noble on East 86th Street — Monday, 7.6., 7:25 pm.

Here’s an mp4 (or rather, what used to be an mp4 before YouTube’s processor turned it into video ghoulash) of Carr reading a passage from his book about his father — a blunt, blustery, tough-love type.

I’m sorry for not having read Beautiful Struggle. It’s a growing-up-with-a-tough-dad story — growing up in a tough Baltimore neighborhood, the constant push-and-pull of temptations and admonitions, and his father being “steeped in race consciousness and willing to go to any lengths — including beatings — to keep his sons on the right path.”

Coates’ remarks last night told me he’s a frank and intelligent man of good and generous spirit. I’ll take the evidence of what I heard him read (on top of Carr’s praise) as a reliable indicator that his book is worth reading.

I reviewed Night of the Gun almost exactly a year ago (on 7.19).

“I love Carr’s voice,” I wrote, calling it “at once flip and candid and yet elegant and wise. But the book is also a gripping, dead honest and well-reported confessional. And at the same time — no mean feat — dryly entertaining.

“Night of the Gun is one of those ‘I did this and whoa…I’m not dead!’ books, but of a much higher calibre. Much. Carr is a man of immense steel balls to have written this, and particularly to have gone back into the damp muddy tunnels of the past and fact-checked everything for three years. He did some 60 interviews with the witnesses and participants. He pored over the depressing documents (arrest reports, medical sheets) that all drug-users accumulate sooner or later. It must have revived nightmares. But Carr went and did it and bravely wrote this book, and did a bang-up job of it. Hat off, head bowed.”

I was wrong. The malware that is causing the misdirection of Google searches to wacky-junk sites continues unabated. On Firefox, I mean. But not on Flock or Windows Safari. So that’s the last straw, I’m afraid, for Firefox. It’s been my default browser since ’05 but no longer. I’m feeling twinges of sentimental regret but that’ll pass.

On the day of the big Michael Jackson memorial at the Staples Center (along with the private service at Forest Lawn), my sincere thanks to Tony Martin, editor of the Melbourne-based Scrivener’s Fancy, for re-running “Jackson Virus” plus a flattering intro.

“The public funeral for Jackson at LA’s Staples Center on Tuesday July 7,” I wrote, “is going to be a huge Diane Arbus event, like nothing ever seen or imagined. A Multitude of Grotesques.” Meaning that today will be, in effect, if you want to look at it that way, a day of national mourning. Not for the memory of a talented but diseased man but for the whittling away of America’s soul. Who, really, is proud of what today’s Staples Center is saying to the world about the communal values and character that define this country?

This high-quality TMZ live webcam, by the way, is very cool.

“I got quite a shock yesterday,” Mad About Movies author Shawn Levy wrote early this morning. “Browsing the movie pages in the Sunday Oregonian, I saw an ad for Francis Coppola‘s Tetro and thought, ‘This is opening on Friday [and] we haven’t seen it yet?’ And then I noticed the phrase “now playing” in the ad and I felt a little sick. The film had opened? And we had missed it?

“I checked Friday’s A&E and found a ‘now playing’ ad for the film, and then i went online and checked the showtimes for the theater in question (the Fox Tower, FYI) and learned that, indeed, Tetro had opened on Friday, July 3 in Portland without anyone involved with the film telling the region’s largest media outlet about it.

“I consulted the film pages in the Portland Mercury and Willamette Week — our alternative weeklies — and their film editors seemed not to have heard the news either. Tetro had been released into the wild with no warning, no previews, and, of course, next-to-no chance to make a nickel from Portland moviegoers.”

“I would really like us all to have a meeting about this so we can discuss and generate more ideas for the third weekend EVENT. Maybe we can have Optimus Prime host a day at the MTV Beach House? They still do that? Just spitballing, but that’s the kind of thing we should be kicking around together. Because I WILL NOT be beaten by the foreign gay with the lederhosen hot pants. — Thank you, Michael Bay” — from today’s debut Movieline entry by Mark “three times weekly” Lisanti, posted at 1:15 eastern.

I’m coughing as I write this because I don’t generally hold with Republican VFW guys, but I pretty much agree with what New York Congressman Peter King is saying in this video. I didn’t say exactly the same thing in my 7.2.09 “Jackson Virus” post, but it was in the same general ballpark.

It appears as if C. David Heymann‘s “Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story” (Atria, 7.14), which tells of a four-year affair between Robert Kennedy and Jackie not-yet-Onassis Kennedy from ’64 to ’68, may be legitimate and credible. Maybe, not sure.

Reading a N.Y. Post description of it got me, in any case, because of a description of a fascinating shared psychology that may have existed between the two — the eroticizing of a family relationship as a way of suppressing trauma and grief.

When I read this I was immediately reminded of the so-called “terror fucking” syndrome that caught on in Manhattan for two or three weeks following 9.11.

Heymann’s book, due in stores a week from Tuesday, reportedly includes recollections of the affair from such Kennedy family intimates as Pierre Salinger, Arthur Schlesinger, Jack Newfield, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote and Morton Downey Jr. Heymann reportedly “spent nearly two decades researching the tome, even digging through old FBI and Secret Service files about the clandestine couple. Tapes of his exhaustive interviews are available at the SUNY Stony Brook library.”

I’m still a little reluctant to buy into this lock, stock and barrel, but the following portion of Jeane MacIntosh‘s N.Y. Post piece put the hook in because it seemed emotionally and psychologically credible:

“By all accounts, the romance between Jackie and Bobby sprang from their shared grief over the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was the coming together of a man and a woman as a result of his bereavement and her mental suffering at the hands of her late, lecherous husband,” according to Jackie confidant Truman Capote.

“It was passionate, [but] it was doomed.”