Thorsten Schutte‘s Eat That Question (Sony Classics, 6.24) is a cool, often amusing doc about the legendary oddball rock star and musical provocateur Frank Zappa. Man, what I wouldn’t have given to be friends with this guy. In a way I was friends with him, even though I never bought a single Zappa album in my life. That’s because he didn’t create much in the way of catchy, riffy, soul-lifting music. He mainly created experimental mindfuck music, but always with invention, theatricality and winking humor. And I loved that about him.

Eat That Question director Thorsten Schutte, Moon Zappa during Monday’s night’s after-party.

What I really loved about Zappa was his smart, impudent, iconoclastic attitude. He’s greatly respected as an avant-garde musician, of course, but to me he was mainly a deadpan satirist. I will forever be in debt to the man who dreamt up “Weasels Ripped My Flesh,” and who created/approved that magnificent album-jacket illustration [above].

Eat That Question is entirely composed of Zappa interview footage. It’s amusing, but over and over it tells you the same thing, which is that Zappa was cool to know and talk to and was always good for a pungent sound bite or two. Schutte gives you a very good idea, in short, of who Zappa was philosophically, attitudinally and personally.

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Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room At The Top, This Sporting Life, A Kind of Loving, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner — the British “kitchen sink” films of the late ’50s and early ’60s get better and better the more I re-watch them.

Downbeat black-and-white dramas, I mean, about despairing middle-class men (and some women) in their 20s who felt trapped in their low-paying jobs and middling social stations. Scowling, sarcastic fellows, some still living with their parents, who took refuge with alcohol and impulsive sex and sometimes getting the wrong girl pregnant. Miserable at work or school and forever carousing with their mates and getting into pub fights, and then stumbling blind drunk into the kitchen after midnight and throwing up in the kitchen sink.

It hit me last night that a similar kind of despair is in the hearts of millions of Millennials — not enough income, saddled with enormous college debt, unable to afford kids much less a home, resentful of their parents’ generation for vacuuming up all the wealth and leaving them with relatively little, stuck in a grind, at best making do.

Millennials, in short, have just as much reason to be pissed off as Britain’s angry young playwrights and filmmakers of the ’50s and early ’60s, and yet what kind of films do they make? Or spend much of their time watching? Do they wade into social realism or at least comedies with a bitter edge? Except for the occasional cable series (Lena Dunham‘s Girls, Mike Judge‘s Silicon Valley), no. Do they make or watch films about real-deal aspects of their own difficult lives? No. Millenials mostly watch bullshit escapism, superhero flicks, dumb-shit comedies, airy-fairy relationship films. They seem to be so enveloped in despair that they can’t even get angry about it. The only evidence of any kind of Millenial rage about anything has been the Bernie Sanders movement.

Boiled down, where are the movies about scowling, sarcastic Millennials, many still living with their parents (which is true), who take refuge with alcohol and impulsive sex, who are miserable about earning so little and having to struggle so hard just to make ends meet? The social conditions are clearly there, but the movies that could be made about this don’t seem to exist.

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Yesterday morning Kay Brown‘s Vimeo compilation of scenes from Jerry Lewis‘s The Day The Clown Cried (’72), which had been edited from a German-broadcast documentary called Der Clown, was taken down. She did so out of legal concerns. Lewis has stated that the unfinished film (which he’s donated to the Library of Congress) can’t be shown until 2025, and yet German broadcast laws somehow allowed last February’s showing of Der Clown. Brown nonetheless feared that Lewis’s attorneys might come down on her like a pile of bricks.

But this morning it’s back up again! Go figure. Watch it as quickly as you can before it gets pulled a second time.

The Day the Clown Cried edit from Kay Brown on Vimeo.

Recapping: Two months ago Brown’s 31-minute video, a condensed version of Lewis’s film, albeit German-dubbed with English subtitles, posted on Vimeo for limited viewing last April.

A friend sent me a link to Brown’s video Wednesday morning. I felt it was too historically important not to re-post.

I wrote the following to renowned Clown disser Harry Shearer yesterday morning: “You’ve seen the whole film and I’ve only seen excerpts, but I was surprised to discover that it doesn’t seem to be half bad in some respects. When it’s finally seen nine years hence the consensus view may well be that TDTCC has problems, but it’s certainly not the horribly miscalculated, embarrassing wipeout that you described to Shawn Levy way back when.

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Donald Trump may be the most famous proponent of views that are clearly unsupported by facts, but there are many others, obviously, who insist on clinging to fantasy. 13 years ago Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson‘s father, gave an interview in which he questioned Germany’s ability to get rid of six million bodies during the Holocaust. Holocaust denial is, of course, an anti-Semitic mindset that imagines the Holocaust to be a mythology created to advance the interest of Jews. But all of this seems so fringe, so 20th Century. If it had been released in 1979, okay, but now? I just don’t see anyone clamoring to see a film in which thoroughly verified historical fact (I’ve been to Dachau and Terezin) is disputed by a nutter. Bleecker Street will open Denial on 9.30.16.

Impression #1: That Entertainment Tonight vibe has always made me want to throw up, but this time we have Kevin Frazier saying “Hey, you’re looking to throw up, right? Well, why not take a minute to absorb my on-camera attitude and personality so you can really throw up? With gusto, I mean. Big splat.” Impression #2: Three and a half years ago director-writer Chris McQuarrie surprised everyone by making Jack Reacher into a lean and mean thing. Realistic chops, no jumping off buildings, no stupid CG bullshit. But Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (Paramount, 10.21) is an Ed Zwick film, and that almost always means trouble. One way or another Zwick always seems to overbake it, push it too hard. And I hate, hate, hate the presumptuous, sexy-smug attitude broadcast by costar Cobie Smulders. Get outta my life.

Two months ago Kay Brown, a Tempe-based editor, used portions of Eric Friedler‘s Der Clown, a documentary about Jerry Lewis‘s never-seen The Day The Clown Cried (’72) that aired last February on German television, to create a condensed version of Lewis’s film, albeit German-dubbed with English subtitles.

Brown posted her 31-minute video on Vimeo for limited viewing last April.

A friend sent me a link to Brown’s video yesterday morning, and I strongly felt that it was too important to keep private.

I didn’t initially know it had been seen by tens of thousands on German TV earlier this year, but that, I felt, made it even more okay to post a link.

Brown wrote me this morning to say she’d yanked the video out of concern that Lewis’s attorneys might make trouble for her. After donating TDTCC to the Library of Congress Lewis stipulated he didn’t want the film seen until 2024. Apparently German broadcasting laws enabled the TV station, Das Erste (ARD), to air Friedler’s documentary without fear of legal consequences.

My response to Brown: “The Der Clown footage in question was broadcast to tens of thousands last February on Das Erste, and was therefore available to every Tom, Dick & Abdul who happened to watch it in their chalets and rent-controlled apartments from Hamburg to Dresden to Munich and a thousand places in-between, but if an edited-down version is seen over here via a single Vimeo file you could ‘get in a lot of trouble’, as you put it? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

“TDTCC is a kind of ghost cult film, one that has been written about and discussed (as well as mocked and derided in absentia) by film sophistos for at least two or three decades.

Last year I nearly drove all the way down from Washington, D.C. to the Library of Congress film archives in rural Virginia with a vague hope that I might persuade the archivist to let me see stills from TDTCC, and then out of the blue actual scenes in some kind of narrative sequence turn up on Vimeo? What a trove!

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Tommie Smith and John Carlos during the medal ceremony at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City’s Olympic Stadium.

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I had this attitude about Tom Hiddleston being a kind of wired, ginger-haired, string-bean guy who played chilly weirdos (Loki in The Avengers, the rigid-mannered captain in War Horse, Rachel Weisz‘s creepy lover in The Deep Blue Sea). Then out of nowhere he suddenly seemed to become this randy hot guy that women were talking about, second only to Benedict Cumberbatch. The affair with Elizabeth Olsen during the shooting of I Saw The Light, the talk about possibly becoming the new James Bond, playing an intense social climber in High Rise, his starring role in AMC’s The Night Manager. And how he’s putting it to Taylor Swift, which is cool. In my eyes he’s the most surprisingly transformed actor of the decade.

For years I’ve been derided for being a Steven Spielberg disser, for saying he’s been a super-hack since the late ’90s, for intensely regretting his love of Janusz Kaminski‘s milky-white cinematography, for recently loathing most of The BFG, for feeling annoyed by much of Catch Me If You Can, for hating his decision in Lincoln to depict the House of Representatives as having a large window with sunlight streaming through, for wearing sneakers to a Harvard graduation ceremony. And for my repeated declaration that his rep rests upon a 13-year hot streak between Duel (’71) and Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom (’84), and that he rebounded in ’89 with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade but then crashed with the labored Hook but then rebounded again with Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Minority Report and Saving Private Ryan, but that he’s been more or less on a lumpy downward swirl ever since.

I am definitely a guy with a psychological problem for daring to say this stuff, right? I’m an asshole with an attitude, and every day Spielberg gets up, prepares himself a bowl of granola and yogurt with a cup of hot tea and then retires to his palatial bathroom and shits out little gold bars.

The kowtowing instinct toward Spielberg is so ingrained in this town that the following observation in a Kim Masters Hollywood Reporter profile is almost regarded as startling: “For years, everyone has wanted all of Steven Spielberg and taken what they could get. Spending limited time with him, I get the impression that he lives in a kind of bubble — protected by the privilege that comes with money, by aggressive partners, by loyal underlings and by the deference accorded to the most successful filmmaker in Hollywood history.” My God, she actually dared to say that insulation may be a slight factor in his creative determinations! Will THR send flowers and warm muffins to Spielberg’s office as a conciliatory gesture?

When Ken Loach‘s I, Daniel Blake won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, I posted the following: “WHAT? Wrong call, gents. A good film, but not my idea of a really good one, and a long way from greatness. It’s a sturdy, downish Loach-wheelhouse thing about an older craftsman (Dave Johns) with a heart condition getting the humiliating run-around by the system. Except it’s also about an obstinate fellow who’s more committed to venting frustration than playing the system for his own benefit. It’s a sad tale but the world is full of guys like this.”

On 5.13 I had an argument with a critic friend about Blake, and I posted it later that day:

Me: “You need to calm down on I, Daniel Blake. He’s a carpenter, a joiner, a delicate craftsman, and a would-be employer offers him a job around the two-thirds mark and he turns it down because he’d rather just keep pretending to look for work so he can keep getting government checks?

“Don’t tell me it’s because he’s afraid that working will give him a heart attack because he’s already leading a life of considerable stress plus the anguish of feeling depressed. When he said ‘no, thanks’ to that job, I checked out. No sympathy. If his heart is going to fail anyway then it’s better that it fail while he’s working and earning a living with a sense of pride than to die a miserable government dependent.

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Bill Clinton was on fire when he addressed the 2012 Democratic Convention. His voice was strong and commanding, he seemed full of energy, his words inspired. And yes, he delivered a very touching speech at Muhammad Ali‘s memorial last week in Lexington. But it seemed as if he’d aged ten years since 2012. His voice sounded watery and feeble. He seemed to radiate half the energy. He’s not that old. It’s worrisome. Maybe he was just having a bad day. I love Bill ten times more than I like Hillary.