So Mick Jagger‘s heart-valve operation won’t involve a scalpel cutting into his chest and the doctors prying open his rib cage. It’ll be a non-invasive procedure called transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR. The procedure “wedges a replacement valve into the aortic valve’s place” through a small tube without having to remove the old valve, according to the American Heart Association…the tube can be inserted into an artery in the groin or via a small incision in the chest…patients typically stay in the hospital for only a couple of days.”

Oh, for the pre-Aftermath days when Jagger wasn’t doing his standard rooster-on-acid and was more or less holding his ground, just standing there and focusing on the lyrics while executing subtle little moves.

The greatest Rolling Stones concert I ever attended was in summer ’75 at Madison Square Garden. It was the tour with the movable star-shaped stage, and which began with the opening bars of Aaron Copland‘s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Granted, the Stones had a vague common-man aura when they were mainly performing covers of classic blues numbers, but after they came into their own with Beggar’s Banquet (’68) they began to project a classic rock-splendor image –elite, highly perverse rock ‘n’ roll gods living lives of grand debauch. Associating their brand with Copland’s anthem in ’75 was some kind of chortling in-joke.

The second best Stones concert I attended was at the Pavillon De Paris (Les Abattoirs) on 6.6.76. Les Rolling Stones aux Abattoir! The show was due to start around 9 pm — they didn’t take the stage until well after 11 pm.

A sensitive simpleton, raised by a none-too-bright mom, wants laughter, joy and rapture from life. Alas, he finds little or none. Attempts stand-up comedy…nope. Starts wearing clown makeup full-time. Beaten, pummelled and tormented by a cruel, perverse, judgmental world. Finally snaps, becomes a demonic, broken-hearted figure whose motto is “life isn’t a tragedy — it’s a comedy.”

I can’t be the only one who’s had it with Warner Bros. opportunists constantly returning to the same old drafty barn to milk the same old cow. 30 years ago everyone thought Jack Nicholson had knocked it out of the park with his giggling creepo. But along came Heath Ledger’s version in 2008…the best, the absolute summit, the most delicious and diseased. And then eight years passed and the Joker was back in the form of Jared Leto…c’mon! And now a fourth version is upon us, and I’m not even thinking about Ceasar Romero.

The Joker script (co-written by Scott Silver and co-director Todd Phillips) is an origin story, but Joaquin Phoenix was 43 or 44 years old when they shot it last year, and with his constant cigarette-smoking Phoenix looks at least 49 or 50. Who ever heard of an origin story performed by a weathered, somewhat haggard middle-aged guy with an embalming-fluid complexion?

It’s one thing to be a tormented Donnie Darko as a child, a teenager or even an early 20something, but a 40something who’s nudging the big five-oh? And how does a mopey loser who’s been putzing around for 45 years…how does this guy suddenly morph into a notoriously demonic crime king?

Joker opens on 10.4.19. I don’t care, I don’t, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care. The D.C. factory owners have no imagination, no balls — they just want our money.

When it comes to bad-boy auteur Bertrand Blier, I’ve always been slightly more enamored of Going Places (’74) than Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (’78). If someone was dumb enough to remake Handkerchiefs in the Blier style, it goes without saying that the Robespierres would give them a fairly hard time.

It actually ran into some feminist criticism 40 years ago, primarily over Blier and the sexist-klutz characters played by Gerard Depardieu (so thin!) and Patrick Dewaere relentlessly objectifying or eroticizing Carole Laure.

Wiki borrow: After four ballots, the National Society of Film Critics named it the Best Film of 1978. A disapproving People critic called this decision “downright incomprehensible.” In early ’79 Handkerchiefs won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Cohen Media Group will open a 40th anniversary 2K restoration at West L.A.’s Laemmle Royal on 4.19.19.

Kent Jones‘ Diane, which I strongly feel is 2019’s best film so far, has been playing and streaming for a bit more than a week. I know for a damn fact it will be a Gotham/Spirit Awards contender at the end of the year, but yesterday I heard from a cranky friend who didn’t care for it (“Huh?”), and now there’s a significant gap between the 95% Rotten Tomatoes critics rating and the 63% audience score. If you’ve seen it, please weigh in. Here’s my 3.27 rave.

Yesterday two episodes of Jordan Peele and CBS All Access’s The Twilight Zone began streaming — “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” with Adam Scott and “The Comedian” with Kumail Najiani. (The latter episode is accessible on YouTube.)

Forgive me for preferring the mixed pleasures of San Francisco hill-climbing. I’m returning to Los Angeles this afternoon and catching Ralph Fiennes‘ The White Crow tonight — I’ll catch them sometime tomorrow. New weekly Zone episodes will begin on April 11. Reactions?

One of the pleasures of the original Rod Serling series was the discipline of each episode delivering the whole kit-and-kaboodle in 30 minutes — actually more like 23 or 24 with commercials. Peele’s episodes are just under an hour. I’m more of a shorter-is-better, less-is-more type.

From Nick Harley’s Den of Geek review of the Nanjiani episode: “’The Comedian’ is the exact sort of morality tale that The Twilight Zone always excelled at, while offering fresh commentary about the comedy world and audiences assuming ownership over an artist’s work.

“Director Owen Harris, who also worked on the similar anthology series Black Mirror, is able to make the dark shadows of the comedy club or an empty apartment feel creepy and the shots from the stage of a bored audience all staring at their phones really puts you in the shoes of a bombing comic.”

More Ross Douhat: “In a primary where Biden is just an old white dude running away from his record, the party’s various moderate voters will almost certainly fracture and go to fresher candidates with cleaner pitches — to the Texan Jesus (Beto O’Rourke) or the South Bend Meritocrat (Pete Buttigieg) or the Mean Minnesotan (Amy Klobuchar) or the Racial Optimist (Cory Booker).”

Consider two N.Y. Times opinion pieces about the ongoing strategic erosion of Joe Biden‘s would-be presidential prospects — Ross Douhat‘s “The Real Joe Biden Decision” (4.2) and especially Michelle Goldberg‘s “The Wrong Time for Joe Biden” (4.1), for which the subhead states that Biden “is not a sexual predator, but he is out of touch.”

They’re a one-two punch that says “it’s all over but the shouting — Biden doesn’t have the balls to run as the moderate, behind-the-curve guy he really is deep down, and if he tries to apologize and suck up to the wokesters he’ll seem like a weak sister to his older, mostly white hinterland and suburban supporters, and so he’s basically between a rock and a hard place.”

Goldberg and Douhat are not wrong. Joe is more or less done.

Because his neck-wattled, decent-older-guy centrism will ignite all kinds of missiles and grenades from the urban forces of “the Great Awokening” (i.e., coined by Vox‘s Matthew Iglesias). And after months and months of this Biden may, Douhat suspects, wind up losing as badly as Jeb Bush did to Donald Trump in the 2016 primaries.

Plus the somewhat squishy, always-looking-to-accommodate Biden probably lacks the courage, in Douhat’s view, to run a no-apologies, straight-talking campaign that politely but firmly talks back to the wokesters and says “hold on, take it easy, you don’t have an exclusive hold on wisdom and truth and divine, heaven-sent strategy.”

Goldberg notes that while Biden is “by most accounts a man of great personal decency, if he runs for president he will have to run away from his own record. To those desperate to unseat Trump, the centrist, establishment Biden might seem like the safest choice, but it would actually be risky to pick a candidate who will need to constantly apologize for himself. Particularly when he doesn’t know how to do that very well.”

Satellifax.com is reporting that Terrence Malick‘s Radegund, Jim Jarmusch‘s The Dead Don’t Die and Pedro Almodovar‘s Dolor y Gloria are all confirmed for Cannes ’19 competition. Also, the opening night film is between Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s The Truth (Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke) and an “American film” they can’t reveal. (Thanks to Jordan Ruimy.)

While the Al Franken-ing of Joe Biden continues…

As one who’s often grappled with what shall now be called EBI syndrome, I felt obliged to post this two-day-old Facebook jotting. During my first two or three years of journalistic endeavor in the late ’70s, most of my writing sessions were EBI torture. Not all the time, but 70% or 80%. My default quote was “I hate writing, which is like digging ditches, but I love having written.” I finally pulled myself out of that sinkhole in the early ’80s, and had more or less forgotten about EBI by the early ’90s. It still hits me from time to time these days, but not too much. Every so often I’ll get stuck for three or four hours, but one way or another I’ll find my way out of it.

The Dead Don’t Die (Focus Features, 6.14) will obviously be fun, but it’s a departure and a half for Jim Jarmusch, the Godfather of east-coast, cool-cat, laid-back hipster autuerism. All I can figure is that Jarmusch decided that in the wake of Only Lovers Left Alive (which I loved) and Paterson (admired) that he wanted to make an actual hit movie for a change. The obvious template was Ruben Fleischer‘s Zombieland (’09). The cast is top-to-bottom Jarmusch types — Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, Rosie Perez, Iggy Pop, Sara Driver, RZA, Carol Kane, Tom Waits. Allegedly locked for next month’s Cannes Film Festival.