I’m into my fourth year of sobriety now (the three-year anniversary occured almost exactly a month ago) but every so often I look back and go, “Whoa…that happened in my drinking days.” Which were only occasionally wild. Except for my vodka-and-lemonade period from ’93 to ’96, which involved two alcohol-related car collisions, I never felt as if my life was all that negatively affected by drinking. Nor did I ever decide in my 20s and 30s that things had become problematic due to pot, hallucinogens, quaaludes and cocaine toots. I saw my nocturnal adventures as purely supplemental. I never partied during work hours. I saw myself as someone who worked hard, always woke up early, killed myself to become a half-decent writer, kept myself in shape and led a more-or-less disciplined life.

Yes, I behaved erratically and irresponsibly at times, but when I was younger I believed that a life without Jack Daniels and beer and quaaludes and revelry represented a kind of death. On top of which my romantic life was fairly spectacular back then so there was that besides.

One night I was at a party in Wilton with the usual assortment of drinking buddies. I started to feel tired around 1 am or so (I had to work the next day) but the guy I came with wasn’t in the mood to leave. I went outside for whatever reason and noticed that a friend who lived about a mile from my place was preparing to leave. He began to get into his ride (an LTD Ford station wagon) with his girlfriend and two other couples. I asked for a lift and he said “Uhm, I don’t think there’s any room, Jeff.” So without telling my friend (i.e., Pete) I decided to sneak a ride on top of his car, lying spread-eagled and holding on to the luggage rack. It was a moonless, pitch-black night and I somehow managed to gently crawl on top without anyone noticing. Don’t ask me.

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The photography is too murky, too grayish, too shadowed. You can barely see Meryl Streep. The rock through the window is the only image that sticks.

Nice trippy little dream piece. Blood torrent replaced by tennis balls (or possibly Jolly Green Giant frozen peas?). “There ain’t nothin‘ in Room 237.” Kubrick’s moon hovering in the 18th Century bedroom at the end of 2001. Posted two weeks ago by BBB3viz.

Andrew Bujalski‘s Results, which I caught at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, is a mildly diverting “indie romantic comedy” that is actually aggressively non-romantic for the simple fact that the aggressively balding, somewhat flabby, alabaster-skinned Kevin Corrigan, who is usually funny on his own louchey, street-slacker terms, plays a romantic suitor of Cobie Smulders (How I Met Your Mother). Nobody wants to see a movie in which Corrigan (who’s now 46 but looks a decade older) has sex with anyone, for any reason. The other leg of the romantic triangle is played by Guy Pearce, who’s all buffed up and handling his trainer role with a kind of dry, non-“comedic” gravitas. Results is not a “problem film” — I stayed with it, chuckled once or twice, nodded off once, woke up again. It’s a bit meandering but fine. Giovanni Ribisi, Brooklyn Decker, Anthony Michael Hall and Constance Zimmer costar.

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I’ve always wanted to go inside Abbey Road Studios (3 Abbey Road, London NW8), but this Google-created virtual tour is (or was) inaccessible on my iPhone 6 Plus. So I took the tour on the Macbook Pro. It doesn’t show you the administrative offices or the walking path to Studio #1 or Studio #2. It just plops you down in Studio #1 with the narrator offering a brief history and…it all stops. Oh, I see…I have to activate the menu box and click on various blue buttons. But how do I get to the Beatles recording studio (i.e., #2)? Oh, I see…I have to resuscitate the main options and then click on 2…fine. (If Dennis Quaid was taking this tour with me, around this point he would be muttering “fucking piss shit cocksucker.”) Oh, here’s the famous old piano that was heard on “Lady Madonna” and “Martha My Dear” and sounded that legendary chord-strike on “A Day In The Life.” If I had put this together, I would have offered an optional version for the easily irritated — an old-fashioned, non-horseshitty, non-interactive version that just takes you around with a gliding Steadicam and shows you stuff…period, over and out.

I saw and praised Bill Pohlad‘s Love & Mercy (Roadside Attractions, 6.5) seven months ago at the Toronto Film Festival, and now, with this excellent trailer, I’m feeling some of the same sitrrings and satisfactions for the first time since then. Paul Dano and John Cusack both give knock-out, award-level performances as Beach Boys wunderkind and genius composer Brian Wilson at different ages. I’ve been looking forward to a second dip in the pool since Toronto, and now I’m a little disappointed that I’ve been been told about only one Los Angeles press screening this month (on 4.28), and at the less-than-wonderful Wilshire Screening Room at that.

Neil LaBute‘s Dirty Weekend, debuting this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, is said to be an “ascerbic” comedy concerning an odd-couple pair of co-workers (Matthew Broderick, Alice Eve) who roam around Albuquerque “on a business trip as personal proclivities and intimate secrets are revealed” blah blah. A Wikipedia entry states the obvious, which is that the U.K. term “dirty weekend” alludes to “a romantic hotel assignation.”

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The New Republic‘s Brian Beutler has suggested that Hillary Clinton‘s likability problem would evaporate overnight if she got Barack Obama to run as her Vice-President. If you ask me Beutler is on to something. From my perspective this would totally lift me out of my Hillary doldrums and change everything.

“There are three sections of the Constitution that prescribe limits on who can be president and vice president,” Beutler writes. “Article II, the Twelfth Amendment and the Twenty-Second Amendment. While the former two limit who is ‘eligible’ to serve—natural born citizens, 35 or older—the Twenty-Second Amendment begins ‘No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.’

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I was thinking about crashing around 11 pm last night, or about 90 minutes earlier than usual, but then I decided to watch a little bit of Jonathan Demme‘s Philadelphia (’93), which is streaming in high-def for Amazon Prime subscribers. I hadn’t watched it in 21 and 1/3 years, and I’d forgotten many of the excellent scenes and the unforced, mild-mannered way in which they sink in and connect. I wound up watching the whole thing and staying up until 1:15 am.

I remember that soon after Philadelphia opened in December 1993 (when Hillary was in the White House!) it fell out of favor in foo-foo circles for what was regarded as a too-chaste portrayal of the relationship between Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas. But the widespread affection for Hanks’ performance as Andy, the gradually dying AIDS victim, was overwhelming. It was a dignified, carefully measured performance with the weight loss and the vulnerability and the make-up, and sad as hell. Everyone knew he’d win the Best Actor Oscar, and of course he did.

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Last night I watched about two-thirds of Furious 7 in a D-BOX seat at the TCL Chinese plex, and I found it mostly pleasing. It’s basically a high-tech chair that rumbles and vibrates and pitches around in synch with the action. You could describe the D-BOX experience as a slightly less dynamic cousin of the 4DX experience, a South Korean-developed system that augments the vibration and movement with atmospheric effects. 4DX is available worldwide (including Vietnam) but it may not be in U.S. theatres for another year or two.

My D-BOX experience happened during a 7 pm screening inside theatre #1. The cacophonous Avengers: Age of Ultron premiere was occuring outside on Hollywood Blvd. and inside the adjacent Dolby theatre. A friend has told me I’m going to hate, hate, hate this Joss Whedon-directed Disney release, which screened last weekend for the junket whores.

I can’t believe I’ve now watched portions of Furious 7 in three different theatres so far. I’ve now seen the completely sub-mental Abu Dhabi sequence. Are you reading this, Michael Moses?

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Directors, fight choreographers and editors of all of those Marvel and D.C. Comics superhero features (along with evil Furious 7 director James Wan) need to pull up a chair and watch this one-take Daredevil fight scene and take copious notes, and then bow down in front of series creator Drew Goddard. Brilliant! HE gold standard! The cinematographer is Matt Lloyd. As per House of Cards tradition, all 13 episodes of Daredevil began airing four days ago (i.e., 4.10).

From HE reader Matt Howell: “Given your hatred of the comic book genre and your lament over action scenes and fight choreography being unrealistic, what’s your take on this clip? Those are real looking blows, struck by a progressively more beaten down and winded hero. Bad guys don’t go down with one punch and stay down, they get back up and come back at him (albeit a little slower and in pain). Oh yeah, and it’s all one take.”

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Jon Stewart is saying that Hillary Clinton‘s “it’s not about me but you” announcement video hits the right notes, but the piece felt a bit too orchestrated and prepared and stage-managed — the sentiments and feelings were fine but they didn’t feel all that genuine. Her “did you know I’ve been Elizabeth Warren all along?” act feels like an act. We all know that when the rough-and-tumble starts next year and Clinton is forced to respond off the cuff that somehow or some way she’ll put her foot in it. I’m not hoping this will happen, but we all know it will. Repeating: I don’t want her to lose but she doesn’t turn me on. And she never will.