Not long after Joni Mitchell was rushed to a hospital on 3.31, I felt moved to write a fan letter. Just a few thoughts, recollections…nothing profound. A friend knows and visits her from time to time, but he told me last weekend (a) he’s been denied access since her fainting episode and (b) her daughter had just flown in from Toronto. That indicated Mitchell might be less well than usual and perhaps…who knew? So I wrote the letter and emailed it to the friend and asked him to give a printed version to her. But he declined because I’d included a portion in which I urged her to quit tobacco and smoke vapor instead. “She really won’t like that part and she’ll blame me on some level if I give it to her,” he explained. “But it’s obviously my opinion and not yours,” I answered. “It won’t matter,” he said.

So last Thursday I drove over to Mitchell’s 85 year-old Spanish home in Bel Air in order to pop it into the mailbox. But I couldn’t find the damn mailbox so I threw the letter through the iron gates. It was late at night and quiet like a forest. The hedges outside her place are towering and somewhat overgrown. As you approach I noticed that a portion of her curving street is cluttered with little mounds and potholes, which is odd for a ritzy area.

“Joni — I’ve never gotten to know or work the music realm like the movie business. Not professionally or politically, I mean, so I’ve never tried to interview you or anything. I’ve nonetheless been a rapt admirer of your music for eons. And I want you to know I felt serious pangs of fear when you were suddenly rushed to the hospital, and it made me want to finally say something.

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I might be down with re-purchasing a remastered Sticky Fingers (complete with added, never-heard versions of some of the songs) but forget the Rolling Stones’ baseball park concerts, the first of which will happen in San Diego’s Petco Park on 5.24. The shittiest upper-bleacher seat you can buy (section 327 or 328) will run you $184 or $189, respectively. If you bring a girlfriend plus parking and afterdrinks you’re talking $500 and change, but what will your girlfriend think of you if you sit in the section with the worst possible vantage point? If you want a decent seat (on the field, centered, not far from the stage) it’ll set you back $2500 and obviously $5K if you bring a date.

Robert Altman‘s O.C. and Stiggs (shot in ’83, released in ’87) was his all-time lowest, slummiest gig. Not that he made a habit of slumming, but almost every director runs aground sooner or later and is sometimes forced to direct a film that he/she feels no connection with and would never touch if financial pressure didn’t require it. The trick, of course, is to do the very best job you can (at the very least technically) even if your heart isn’t in it. In his own mind Oliver Stone may not have been slumming when he made World Trade Center and Savages, but these films always struck me as comedowns — they were certainly well beneath his usual level. The reprehensible Honky Tonk Freeway (’81) was easily John Schlesinger‘s slummiest gig. Looking for other legendary misfortunes along these lines…any director, any film.

Whatever the role, Ben Mendelsohn needs to (a) suck on filtered cigarettes and (b) have his face glisten with sweat. Without these elements he runs into trouble. His sweat-free, sans-cigarette performance in Ridley Scott‘s Exodus: Gods and Kings was a clear indication of that. Mendelsohn must have therefore thought twice when he was offered the villain role in John Mclean‘s Slow West (A24, 5.15) as men didn’t smoke cigarettes in the late 1800s. He almost certain talked it over with his wife and agent. “I need my smokes,” Mendelsohn probably said in a moment of vulnerability, “and they need me.” They no doubt assured him that he could win through, and that if he felt uncertain he could always double up on the sweat.

Belated regrets over the passing of Australian dp Andrew Lesnie, 59, and all due respect, of course. In all candor I didn’t post about his passing last night due to somewhat conflicted feelings. On one hand Lesnie was a master craftsman with a sublime eye, but on the other he collaborated quite often with HE nemesis Peter Jackson. He made the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films look pretty but to what end? Ditto Jackson’s overbearing King Kong. Lesnie also captured M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Last Airbender…awful! The Lesnie-shot films I either didn’t like or hated would make for a very long column. The only Lesnie-shot film I truly enjoyed and admired was Martin Scorsese‘s Shine A Light, on which Lesnie served as a camera operator.

During last January’s Sundance Film Festival I went to some trouble to see Stevan Riley‘s Listen to Me, Marlon. I posted some captures of 16mm color footage from the filming of On The Waterfront but then forgot to review it. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy called it “moving, poignant, troubling and sad. Due superficially to nothing more than the tremendous girths they both achieved in their later years, it’s easy to draw a certain comparison between Brando and another great artist of the approximate period and same geographic origins about whom there similarly lingers the feeling that he achieved less than he might have — Orson Welles. To an armchair psychologist, it seems that what perhaps held back both men the most was a lack of discipline quite likely fostered by untidy, vagabond childhoods.”

Ted 2 is going to clean up, fella. ESPN watchers, wage-earners, flatbed truck drivers, Croc footwear owners and wearers of low-thread-count T-shirts will love it. Made in America, made with American coin, made for Americans…proud of that, homey.

In a nutshell, Thomas Vinterberg‘s Far From The Madding Crowd (Fox Searchlight, 5.1) is not a “woman’s film,” although I presume that over-25 or over-30 women will comprise the core audience this weekend. I sat down with a guarded attitude but I was relaxing and settling in only minutes after it began. This is a trimmer, more condensed adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel than John Schlesinger’s lavish 1967 version, which ran 169 minutes. Vinterberg’s film is 50 minutes shorter, but is just as flavorful and well-scented as the Schlesinger, which I haven’t seen in ages but which no one seems to have really loved. The Vinterberg is a convincing, well-structured capturing of a complex story of twists and turns and ups and downs, and in a way that doesn’t drag in the least. Early on I was muttering to myself, “Wow, this is about as tight and fat-free as one could expect…not a wasted line or shot…I really wasn’t expecting this kind of discipline.”

There can be no question that Vinterberg’s film is more stirringly acted, certainly when you compare Carey Mulligan‘s Bathsheba Everdeen (accent on the first syllable of the first name) to Julie Christie‘s.  The ’67 Bathsheba was a somewhat flighty, whimsical beauty who seemed to almost casually glide from event to event and romance to romance, but Mulligan’s is made of sterner stuff — a woman of passion and steel spine, or quite the spirited feminist by the measuring stick of Victorian England. Mulligan is magnificent and in no way girly-ish or dreamy-eyed. The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw wrote that Mulligan’s face “has a pinched girlish prettiness combined with a shrewd, slightly schoolmistressy intelligence — the sort of face which can appear very young and really quite old at the same time.” Well put.

It also needs to be understood that Michael Sheen‘s William Boldwood, the oldest and most financially stable of Bathsheba’s three suitors, finds elements of true pathos.  This is one of the saddest rejected-male performances I’ve ever witnessed. I’m usually not moved by guys who don’t “get the girl”, or, in Sheen/Boldwood’s case, guys who never had a chance in the first place. But my heart went out to Sheen. His acting reminded me what it feels like to be told by a beautiful woman that “you’re a nice guy but I’m not going to be intimate with you or anything along those lines….sorry but you don’t do it for me” or, much worse, the dreaded “can we be friends?”

This is Sheen’s finest performance since he played Tony Blair in The Queen, and — take this to the bank — the first male supporting performance in 2015 that can be called award-worthy.

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This is probably as close as I’ll ever come to experiencing a tsunami-sized avalanche. As horrifying as it must have been on 4.25 at the Mount Everest base camp, at least the guy shooting this video wasn’t one of those killed (at least 18) or buried in suffocating blackness. The four Americans killed were Tom Taplin (cousin of producer Jonathan Taplin), Dan Fredinburg, Marisa Eve Girawong and Vinh B. Truong. 14 woefully underpaid Sherpas also lost their lives that day — obviously an equally tragic event or even more so, given their number.

This clip from Errol Morris‘s The Fog of War is one of the most eerie blendings of found footage and looking-back narration ever used in a documentary. It’s like JFK is sitting at a desk in some celestial realm and listening to Robert McNamara, his former Defense secretary, relate a story about 11.22.63. A split second after McNamara says “was shot in Dallas” Kennedy’s eyes drop to the desk and a faint look of laissez-faire regret comes into his eyes. Kennedy seems to be saying “yeah, it must have been really hard on McNamara and my brother and everyone else…I’m part of the cosmic swirl now and so all the pain and anguish of life has naturally subsided but I get it…it was hard for those who were there.”

A decision by Far From The Madding Crowd star Carey Mulligan to forego eye make-up during photography for the current Vogue has resulted in perhaps the most quietly mesmerizing photo of the 29 year-old actress I’ve ever seen. Mulligan has embraced various mascara’d looks since she popped six years ago but this is some kind of kind of classic breakthrough.

Last night I bought and watched the Twilight Time Bluray of Broadway Danny Rose, mainly to savor Gordon Willis’s black-and-white photography. It looks fine but it didn’t deliver anything close to what I like to call a Bluray “bump” — dollars to donuts the DVD doesn’t look much different. I’m disappointed. (You’d never know it from the packaging but the Bluray between La Notte and Paths of Glory is The Social Network.)

This column has been running for exactly 16 and 1/2 years now. It began in October 1998. Photo was taken when I was suffering at People magazine, partly because I hated it there and partly because at the time I was….naah, private.

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