A 3.19 article by Nerdist contributor Kyle Hill reveals that Interstellar co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan didn’t agree with the ending that his brother Chris went with. Speaking on 3.28 during a seminar at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Jonathan said that he would have preferred a “much more straightforward” finale. He basically said that Matthew McConaughey would have died in the middle of the “Einstein-Rosen bridge” or wormhole.

The second I read this I realized that I don’t ever want to see Interstellar again. I honestly wouldn’t sit through it if you paid me $50 or even $100 to do so. Okay, I would see it again for $1000. But the more I think back upon that exasperating film, the more repelled I feel.

My blood is up about watching Todd Kessler‘s Bloodline, the 13-episode Netflix series that began streaming today. I’m especially looking forward to hanging with Kyle Chandler, one of the most engaging and fascinating middle-period actors around today. If only scuzzy Ben Mendelsohn wasn’t playing the older “bad” brother. I know I complained about this only a month ago, but Mendelsohn exudes the exact same reptilian vibe in role after role. (The only exception has been his amiable-gambler role in the not-yet-released Mississippi Grind.) Like I said before, Mendelsohn walks into a room and it’s “okay, here’s the sweaty scumbag who’s going to poison the well and drag everyone to hell.” He’s Lurch in The Addams Family. He always glares, always perspires, always seethes and seems to constantly smoke no matter what role he’s playing. Bad guys are always more interesting if they don’t radiate venality out of every pore, as Mendelsohn does. And yet 95 times out of 100 casting directors always hire actors who look like they were born evil and breast-fed by Mama Satan.

Ben Palmer‘s Man Up has no U.S. distributor and is presently only scheduled to open in Ireland, the U.K. and a couple of other territories. It might be okay but I was slightly bothered by an age-gap issue right off the top. It’s an old tradition in Hollywood-funded romcoms and romances for the guy to be 20 or 25 years older than the girl. (58 year-old Clark Gable romancing 24 year-old Sophia Loren in 1959’s It Started in Naples) but Man Up‘s fleet indie-ish vibe suggests a non-traditional approach. Simon Pegg is 45 but (I’m sorry to say this but it’s true) looks like he’s pushing 48 or 49. Lake Bell turns 36 next week and was 35 when the film was shot. Man Up begins with Pegg assuming Bell is a 24 year-old woman he met online, so the film is telling us she looks ten years younger than her age. So while Pegg and Bell are only 10 years apart in actuality, their appearances suggest a gap of 20 or even 25 years. In short Pegg looks old enough to be Bell’s dad. Which is obviously fine if they’d made that part of the story, but apparently they haven’t. This aside, Bell delivers a fairly convincing British accent.

Yesterday Variety ran a James Rainey profile of Shivani Rawat, a 29 year-old woman of Indian heritage and financial privelege who’s running ShivHans Pictures, a Manhattan-based production company focusing on low to medium-range budgets ($8 million to $14 million). The money is coming from 5-Hour Energy honcho Manoj Bhargava, described in the piece as Rawat’s godfather and a close friend of her investor father, Mahipal Rawat.

ShivHans Pictures’ Shivani Rawat

The three films made so far by ShivHans are Dan Fogelman‘s Danny Collins, Jay Roach‘s Trumbo and Matt Ross‘s Captain Fantastic. All three are being distributed by Bleecker Street, an entry-level Fox Searchlight-style outfit run by former Focus co-CEO Andrew Karpen.

Fogelman tells Rainey that Ms. Rawat could be “the next Megan Ellison.” Whoa, whoa, whoa. There are two noteworthy similarities between Rawat and Ellison, both being 29 and both having used family (or, in Rawat’s case, extended family) wealth to buy their way into elite film circles. But in one instance at least, they seem to part ways in terms of having an eye for quality.

Ms. Ellison clearly has sublime taste, having produced Zero Dark Thirty, Foxcatcher, Her, American Hustle and Richard Linklater‘s forthcoming That’s What I’m Talking About. But Ms. Rawat’s taste buds may be less refined, at least as far as her reportedly impassioned support of Danny Collins is concerned.

“Best of Enemies captivates with its detail and historical footage, and makes one long for the Golden Age of TV and the peak of public discourse when men with ‘patrician, languid accents‘ could trade rhetorical barbs with eloquence and panache. It also makes one mourn the track upon which this televised mud fight (which gained huge ratings) set the American media.” — from Matthew Odam‘s SXSW review.

I know the difference between agreeably diverting, reasonably commercial action fare and a shoot-em-up thriller that is more or less complete dogshit and a waste of time. The latter tends to wind up with Rotten Tomato or Metacritic ratings of 35 or less (sometimes a lot less) and the decent-but-not-top-tier films usually rank in the 50s, 60s or 70s. Or something like that. I know that if a film has a 21% Rotten Tomato rating it’s almost certainly not worth the price. And that, strangely, is the current RT rating for Pierre Morel‘s The Gunman (Open Road, 3.20), and I’m telling you this is completely excessive and unfair. Ditto the 42% Metacritic rating — too low. I can see some critics saying “not bad not good enough” but there’s no justification for pounding this thing into the pavement.

The Gunman is a hit-and-miss second-tier affair that will probably perform poorly this weekend, even though it’s a moderately satisfying, handsomely filmed, well-cut and believably choreographed old-school thriller with a not-great-but-not-too-fumbly screenplay. It’s trim and efficient for the most part and quite beautiful to just stare at, and I had a good time sinking into it as a kind of exotic atmospheric ride or a rugged, suspenseful high-style thing. I processed it as I would a brief vacation that I wasn’t paying for.

March and April are tough movie months, not so much for people who don’t know much but certainly for the rest of us. May and June can also be a problem. It’s no picnic. Mostly brown torpedos. I’ve just scanned the latest Movie Box trailers…wow. Deliver me from mediocrity. Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Transporter Refueled, Paper Towns, Poltergeist, Max, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, Barely Lethal, Furious 7, Insidious: Chapter 3, Pixels, Roommate Wanted, Harlock: Space Pirate, Lazer Team, Thunderbirds Are Go.

Macbook Pro laptops usually die after three years, but the one I’m currently using had been getting sick sooner than expected. I work my laptops pretty hard, and over the last two or three weeks this particular puppy had been operating at slower and slower speeds. It has 8 gigs of RAM but page loads were agonizingly slow. I tried the usual fixes and flush-outs with Mac tech support, but those guys will never level with you. Two days ago I took the 2012 unit to Stan’s Tech Garage in West Hollywood, and the guy at the counter told me the truth, which was that my Macbook Pro’s old-school hard drive (i.e., the kind that spins around like a 78 rpm record player) was probably dying. For $500 and change they installed a new SSD (i.e., solid state drive) and migrated all my programs and data. The laptop now runs much faster, and is of course part of the current technological realm. It feels so fleet and smooth that I’m actually thinking of taking it back to Stan’s in order to double the memory to 16 gigs.

This clip is over a day old, but Vin Diesel spoke last Monday night (3.16) prior to a fan screening of Furious 7 (Universal, 4.3) at one of the Arclights. He choked up when he mentioned the late Paul Walker, explaining that “I lost my best friend…I lost my brother.” I’m presuming he meant his best onscreen friend…right? Diesel then passed along a curious anecdote. Whenever he and Walker were at a screening of the latest Fast & Furious installment, Walker “would always tell me, Vin, the best is still to come.” Walker would “always” say that? Meaning what exactly? That the film they were about to see (or had just seen) wasn’t that great but the next one will be better or perhaps even “the best”? Whenever John Ford was asked which of his films was his favorite, he would always say “the next one.” That I get.

Diesel also called Furious 7 “a labor of love.” That term specifically refers to something you’ve busted your ass to get right even though it didn’t compensate all that well. You put your heart into it because you cared. I’m sure that Walker’s tragedy made the shooting of Furious 7 an emotionally tough ride for Diesel and everyone else, but “labor of love’ isn’t the right term to use. The salaries were huge on this thing, I’m sure, and the expected income when the film opens…forget about it.

M. Night Shyamalan was totally on top between The Sixth Sense and Signs, but things got bumpy for him with th one-two-three of The Village, Lady in the Water and The Happening. (Although I’ll always be a fan of Mark Wahlberg‘s “talking to the plant” scene, not to mention Andy Samberg‘s talking to animals routine on SNL…hilarious then and now.) Shyamalan has certainly been on a downswirl for the last six years, and now he’s got Wayward Pines, a summer series that feels kind of Children of the Corn-y or Wicker Man-ish with a little Twin Peaks undercurrent. Will M. Night ever again be “the guy” he was between ’99 and ’02? Or was that it? I’ll always respect the way he took his time building up to the payoffs in Signs, and that he wasn’t afraid to use silence from time to time.

Matt Dillon: “How do I get outta here?” Terrence Howard: “Well, I’m gettin’ outta here in June. Headin’ back to New York to play Lucious on Season Two of Empire, which is my main bread-and-butter these days. A chopper comes out and flies me back to Vancouver. But you? Sorry, man but you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

I’ve never been head-over-heels in love with the TCM Classic Film Festival, but I’ve always liked watching restorations of classic films (DCPs and not the dreaded 35mm) on the big screen. I’ve been attending since 2011, or the festival’s second year, and I’ve always been press-credentialed. This year, however, I didn’t request the press pass soon enough and the Ginsberg-Libby p.r. guys are telling me they can’t bend the rules to help me out. If I want to see something I guess I can just show up and buy a ticket. Not worth fretting over but a bit of a pain.

I have two good excuses for dropping the ball. One is that I was assuming the festival would happen in either mid-April (last year it ran from 4.10 through 4.13) or late April (in 2013, or the year of the 1.37:1 Shane, it ran from 4.25 thru 4.28). This year it’s happening from 3.26 through 3.29 — a full month earlier than the 2013 fest and two weeks earlier than last year’s. On top of which Chelsea Barredo, the gracious and compassionate Ginsberg-Libby publicist who took care of me in ’13 and ’14, is no longer with GL and her replacement didn’t send me a friendly reminder or nudge about the earlier dates. She didn’t get in touch at all about anything.

Expressing disgust or nausea at the culture of Twitter rage-heads out there isn’t the half of it. Roving mobs of howling, hyperventilating scream queens…scolds, fools, goons, brutes, low-lifes. Hair-trigger responses, short-attention-spans, no nuance, saliva missiles, spray pissings.

“A few spotters will shriek at this or that provocateur like Donald Sutherland shrieking at Veronica Cartwright at the end of Phil Kaufman‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The mob turns and joins in the shrieking and runs over and beats the hell out of the “bad person” for some politically incorrect “error”, and then leaves him or her bleeding on the sidewalk as they move on, looking for the next transgressor. This is the medieval cyber country that we live in.

“Bill Maher told Sean Penn last Friday that he’s getting tired of “politically correct assholes” lighting up every time someone says something “wrong” or outside the realm of the usual bromides and sentimental assurances. Penn called it the dark side of social media where people just like to hear the sound of their own voice. Maher suggested that these people have “never done anything good in their life and they want to feel like they’re the good people” by punishing anyone who says anything even mildly provocative. Maher: “They want to turn this country into a place I don’t want to live in.”