A week or two ago I bought a black Kooples T-shirt — easily the greatest T-shirt I’ve ever worn in my life. Great fibre, fits beautifully and has a two-button, leather-banded collar. It’s really heaven. I put it on and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning and just sighed — it’ll never get any better than this. Except it cost over $125, which is three times more expensive than any other T-shirt I’ve even thought about buying. (There’s a long-sleeve version that costs $250.) I love this T-shirt so much that I’m almost afraid to wear it. I don’t want to wear it out or risk spilling coffee on it or something. It’s the same principle as the middle-aged wife in Astoria who buys a couch that’s so beautiful and so expensive that she covers it with see-through plastic and tells everyone to sit somewhere else. On top of which having my Kooples T-shirt dry-cleaned costs $8 at Holloway Cleaners (the owner said they have to take extra care because of the leather collar). It’s a responsibility, this shirt.

A female producer friend mentioned this morning that she “saw a doc on cable a few years ago that interviewed male-to-female transgenders. They were asked to name the first thing they noticed in how they were treated as a woman rather than a man. They all said it was the loss of instant authority that men have in the culture. When they became women [many] men didn’t turn to look at them when they were speaking, and often didn’t acknowledge that they’d spoken at all. They said it took a while to realize that the men had heard them but had chosen to ignore them. I laughed when I heard that one.”

Adam Carolla and Nate Adams‘ Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman (Film Buff, 5.22 theatrical & VOD) appears to be a niche doc appealing to Paul Newman fans (mostly GenX, boomer) plus racing fans (all ages). Everyone adores the idea of enhancing your middle-aged life with something you really love, which is what the 47 year-old Newman did when he began professionally racing in early 1972. It took guts, skill and tenacity, but career moves of this kind are tough to pull off if you’re not rich and famous to begin with. Newman’s racing career spanned roughly 33 years (or until ’05); Newman won four national championships as a driver and eight championships as an owner. Sidenote: Co-director Carolla, the well-known author, comic talk-show guy and car aficionado, owns and races “five of Paul Newman’s race cars,” according to Newman’s Wiki page.

Toward the end of this Real Time clip (or rather the “Overtime” supplement) from last night’s show, Bill Maher asks Dave Barry about his “youthful hair” — floppy, 80s-style, no augmentation — and asks if he worries about his “young-guy hair, old-guy face.” Barry says no, that this is “my fucking hair” and people need to deal with it, etc. Honestly? When I walk around Brooklyn and Los Feliz I see a lot of 20- and 30-somethings who have, from my seasoned perspective, old-guy hair with young-guy faces. By “old-guy” hair I mean overly shorn, repressed, constipated, bordering on military, not all that flattering. Young guys who aren’t suffering from prematurely thinning thatches should flaunt the fact that their hair is relatively thick and glistening.

“It’s become a Trainwreck talking point. Or selling point, really. For those that live by t.p.’s, the notion or term ‘give it a rest’ is a non-starter. Congenial talk show host giving ‘anything to keep the ball in the air’ guest a chance to beat up the blogger. Schumer said she ‘didn’t read it’ but that her people said ‘he called you a monster!’ At a certain point it doesn’t matter what you actually wrote. The legend becomes the legend. No winning. You just have to move on.” — from comment thread posted this morning when David Slovakia and Pertwillably pointed out the Conan/Schumer clip, which starts at 21:35. Sidenote: I cringe when someone refers to me as a “blogger” — a noun that I’ll never stop wincing at. “Columnist” will suffice. I used to say “online columnist” when print still had a foot-hold.

I really despise the tone of high-five euphoria that often creeps into box-office reports when a film is a big hit. Like Anthony D’Allesandro’s Deadline story (filed at 5:05 am) about Furious 7‘s surprisingly strong second weekend. Describing James Wan‘s cyborgian bludgeoning tool as a “seven-quel,” D’Allesando notes that “with a high-ooctane fuel injection from social media across genres, the prognosis for Furious 7‘s second weekend is pretty amazing.” An “amazing seven-quel,” eh? That’s fraternity talk, neckrub talk, backslap talk. Does D’Allesandro own Universal stock or what? Is he looking to get hired by Michael Moses?

After catching It Follows at the Grove the other night I stepped into a theatre showing Furious 7 so I could see the farewell-to-Paul-Walker finale, which I’d missed at the all-media due to walking out at the one-hour mark. It’s nicely handled as far as it goes. It felt to me like a tribute reel at Cinemacon. But it didn’t get me emotionally. The idea of loss always melts me down, but I draw the line with people who have more or less allowed their own demise. Or, as in Walker’s case, who flirt with danger and in fact get off on the nearness of possible death. A guy from my home town loved serious mountain climbing, and sometime in his mid 20s he died (as you might predict) when something went wrong and he fell. A painful stunner, for sure, but I wasn’t the only one who said, “Well, he knew what could happen if something went wrong but he did it anyway…a tough break but it’s not like a tree fell on him.” Walker died “with his boots on,” so to speak. As did JFK, if you think about it. Let it go at that.

Okay, putting the mask on was just a thing to do. Ryan O’Neal wanted to pose in an odd way. Whatever. But why was an oxygen tank on the set to begin with? Oxygen for what? For people who’ve suffered an anxiety attack and need to calm down or something? Stanley Kubrick was obviously less than alarmed. Have you ever flipped through a photo book called “Wisconsin Death Trip“?

From my 5.20.14 review of Ryan Gosling’s Lost River, which opens today: “Lost River is much, much better than I expected — a wide-angle-lensed, visually inventive decrepit dream-fantasia that’s obviously been influenced by Behn Zeitlin‘s Beasts of the Southern Wild as well as David Lynch, Terrence Malick (murmuring voice-overs mixed with impressionistic visuals), John Carpenter‘s Escape From New York and you tell me. The film may not be 100% successful but at least Gosling errs on the side of wild-ass imagination.

“Director-writer-producer Gosling and dp Benoit Debie have really come up with a ruined realm of their own — part Tobacco Road, part urban wasteland, part psychedelia — and a lot of it is very cool to gaze upon and…I don’t know, get lost in. Oh, the meditative muck and sprawl of it all!

“With the exception of Kristen Stewart‘s alert, quietly arresting performance as a personal assistant to Juliette Binoche‘s famous, middle-aged actress undergoing a psychological downshift, Olivier Assayas‘s Clouds of Sils Maria is a talky, rather flat experience. It isn’t Persona or Three Women or All About Eve, although it seems to be occasionally flirt with the material that these three films dug into. MCN’s David Poland has written that it sometimes feels like ‘a female version of My Dinner With Andre‘ — generous! But on that note I’ll give Poland credit for thinking about this rather airless and meandering chit-chat film more than I did. It just didn’t light my torch. I agree with Poland on one point — it would have been a more interesting film if Assayas has focused more on Stewart and costar Chloe Moretz, who’s playing a version of herself.” — from a 5.23.14 mini-review, filed from the Cannes Film Festival.

We all realize that movie trailers always use the lowest-common-denominator elements and we all know that comedies pitched at women tend to be…unsubtle? But this latest trailer for Hot Pursuit, obviously a female Midnight Run with a much lower IQ, seems almost painfully primitive. How can people sit through films like this? How can you get through life with the kind of mind that would seriously enjoy this kind of thing? The director is Anne Fletcher, the former choreographer who directed The Proposal.

I’m a little late to the table on the death of big-time marketing hotshot Marvin Antonowsky, who left three days ago (4.7) at age 86. He was a good friend within a certain bandwidth and a reliable source of information to me between the early ’90s and early aughts. Marvin used to read box-office figures to me on Sunday mornings (remember those days?) and sometimes share tracking information on upcoming films. I used to love hearing him bark that this or that film “isn’t tracking!” He once had David Poland and I over to his home in Manhattan Beach to give us an early peek at a major film, although I can’t remember what it was. (I’ll never forget how Poland once threatened to “out” Antonowsky as the source of my tracking info — a real sweetheart move.) Marvin and I were also occasional screening pallies in the late ’90s and early aughts.

Antonowsky was closely allied with Frank Price during most of his Hollywood career. I first got to know him sometime around ’82, or during a period when he served as an upper-echelon marketing exec at Columbia from the early to mid ’80s. In ’84 he went over to Universal as marketing president, toughing it out with studio chief Price until the Howard the Duck fiasco of ’86. Antonowsky then shifted over to TriStar as a marketing consultant in the late ’80s, and then went back to Columbia in ’90. His last major gig was as marketing president with Price Entertainment.

With United Talent Agency‘s recent snatching of several CAA agents and clients over the past week, my thoughts turned this morning to UTA’s CEO and co-founder Jeremy Zimmer, with whom I’ve felt a vague connection for 25 years and actually a bit more. Not so much for who he is (he’s fine but he’s an agent) but because in the mid-to-late ’70s I was somewhat friendly with his mother, author Jill Robinson (“Perdido“, “Bed/Time/Story”), when I was living in Westport, and because I’ve long been an admirer of her father (and Jeremy’s grandfather) Dore Schary — the late producer, playwright, screenwriter and former RKO and MGM honcho, a serious liberal whose taste in films was more complex and layered and socially progressive than that of Louis B. Mayer, whom Schary succeeded at MGM before losing the post himself in 1956.

I’ve always loved the sound of that name — Dore Schary. It could be a character in a mystery novel, used to suggest someone cultivated and refined. There’s no way in hell that a lifeguard or a race-car driver or a high-school janitor could ever answer to it.

And I’ve always respected Zimmer for having uttered, a quarter-century ago when he was at ICM, an uncharacteristically blunt (and, as it turned out, prophetic) assessment of the basic nature of Hollywood’s agent culture: “The big agencies are all like animals, raping and pillaging each other day in and day out.” (My admiration grew years later when Zimmer’s thought was echoed by Matt Zoller Seitz when he said in a 2006 Slate piece that Barry Lyndon was about “animals in clothes.”) Zimmer’s quote, which resulted in ICM chairman Jeff Berg showing him the door, was first reported by Variety and then by Spy‘s “Celia Brady”.