As I mentioned the other day, almost all biopics about musical legends end with an early death, mostly due to drug or alcohol abuse but sometimes due to simple bad fortune, like the plane-crash death of Patsy Cline. Blues legend Bessie Smith, portrayed by Queen Latifah in Bessie (HBO, 5.16), bought it in a car crash in 1937, when she was 43. The most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and ’30s, one of the all-time greatest (right up there with Billie Holiday), a live performer, never made any films to speak of…and bisexual. Which is alluded to in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clip in the trailer. Bessie also heralds the return, after a five-year absence, of Mo’Nique.

This may be the first time in my life that I’ve more or less agreed with and even felt a degree of kinship with Glenn Beck. “More or less” because a Clinton win, as offensive as that notion sounds from a political dynasty perspective, would of course ensure a somewhat more progressive administration, certainly regarding environmental policies and a general belief in government acting as a corrective counter-weight to, say, the priorities of the Koch Brothers. Jeb Bush (whose alleged inevitabilty as the 2016 Republican Presidential candidate is far from assured, according to a N.Y. Times story out today) and Hillary Clinton are backed by many of the same financial donors, as Glenn Greenwald points out, which would indicate similar priorities, but you can’t tell me their policies would be identical or even similar. (Thanks to Mr. Sunset Terra Cotta for the link.)

If you’ve seen Alex Gibney‘s Scientology takedown doc Going Clear, you know there’s very little about this SNL piece that uses exaggeration for comic effect. It’s spot-on and amusingly done but it’s not what most of us would call “funny” because the joke histories aren’t that different from what’s actually happened to certain Scientology members, etc.

My heart goes out to any guy married to a woman who’s into nightly applications of Vicks Vaporub before retiring at 7:30 pm, but my mind furiously recoils from images of Mike O’Brien and Michael Keaton doing each other in the back seat of a car. I’m sorry but I don’t want that image in my head on a Sunday morning. But it’s there anyway. Thanks.

A week and a half ago a Variety piece indicated that next month’s Cannes Film Festival might turn out to be “mildly deflating” — i.e., lacking in triples and homers. The idea of flying all the way to France for an experience that will partly include Matthew McConaughey contemplating ritual suicide fills me with levels of dread that I’d rather not describe.

Then an idea hit me this morning. What if Guillermo del Toro‘s Crimson Peak (Universal, 10.16), which Stephen King and Joe Hill saw and praised three weeks ago, shows out of competition in Cannes? Del Toro’s “blood-soaked Age of Innocence, a gloriously sick waltz through Daphne Du Maurier territory” (as Hill called it) sounds to me like a triple and just what the doctor ordered to counter-balance those images of McConaughey trying to work up the guts to disembowel himself over a bowl of ramen.

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I’ve been paying for regular bundled cable TV since around ’81, when I first moved into my Bank Street apartment with a half-decent income. And now it’s finally time to cut the cord and make do without regular TV, which I never watch at all. I’ve got a top-of-the-line Roku Player along with an Apple TV box (completely superfluous compared to what the Roku contains), and right now I pay for HBO but I can obviously get that straight from the horse’s mouth when I give my Time Warner channel bundle the heave-ho.

The only thing I’m reluctant to give up is my occasional check-ins with MSNBC and CNN, which aren’t as frequent as they used to be but I like the fact they they’re there. And I’m certainly going to want them around when the 2016 election kicks off in earnest…what, five or six months from now?

If only I could independently access those two channels along with the usual HBO, Showtime, Netflix, TMC, AMC, Amazon and Warner Archive, I’d be totally fine. I know it sounds ridiculous to delay on a significant monthly saving over a sentimental attachment to two news channels, but there it is. It’s the only thing holding me back.

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For whatever reason I never read Shawn Levy‘s “Rat Pack Confidential” when it came out 16 or 17 years ago, but I suddenly bought it on Amazon right after posting my review of Alex Gibney‘s All or Nothing At All, a two-night, four-hour doc about Frank Sinatra which pops tomorrow night. The old Frank magic vaguely had me in its spell. Levy’s book is a lot more candid and less cautious than Gibney’s doc in terms of portraying the Sinatra who swaggered around like king shit in the heyday. The Sinatra family gatekeepers, Tina and Frank, Jr., got along with Gibney but had no love for Levy. In any event the book arrived today, and here’s a passage at the very end that summarizes how suddenly and quickly the Rat Pack era, which peaked with the shooting of Ocean’s Eleven around January 1960, came to a close with the arrival of the Beatles four years later:

“There [in 1960] you had them — a group consisting of the nation’s greatest and most popular entertainers, with the blessing of a dynamic political star and fearsome crime lords, the favors of gorgeous women, an enviable playground, all the money in the world — and within four years of commanding the world’s attention they were deposed. That blip of teen culture that they’d mocked and derided but secretly envied and aped? It echoed back off the far side of the abyss and overwhelmed them. What seemed like high-spirited fun in the winter of 1960 came to look like pathetic lechery and debauchery by the summer of 1964, the high hopes of one generation — a delusional sham which obscured a corrupt, licentious core — were replaced with the simply adolescent cheeriness of the next.”

Well-written, adult-angled, dryly comedic but not out-and-out funny. But at the same time romantic and middle-budgeted with stars. Ben Stiller or Seth Rogen or Will Ferrell or Kevin Hart would kill to be in a film as good as John McNaughton and Richard Price‘s Mad Dog and Glory, but low-key, character-driven dramedies are as extinct as dinosaurs in today’s realm. Big studios won’t touch them and indie producers don’t seem to have the touch or something. “Put down the magazine before you hurt yourself, Harold”….lines like this are beautiful.

Yes, it’s agreed that sculptor Dave Poulin‘s statue of former Celoron resident Lucille Ball resembles an adult version of Chucky, Michael Keaton‘s snake manifestation from Beetlejuice, Conway Twitty or Steve Buscemi. The question is why is this suddenly a big weekend news story now? The butt-ugly thing has been standing there from almost the beginning of the Obama administration, and all of a sudden a “secret” Facebook posting claims it’s a problem requiring national attention? The Jamestown-based Poulin, whose artistic reputation has obviously taken a hit from this, apparently wants to be paid to replace the head while local Lucille Ball fans think he should do it for free.

(l.) Dave Poulin‘s ugly statue of Lucille Ball, which has stood in a park in Ball’s hometown of Celoron for over five years; (r.) Chucky.

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Now that James Wan‘s Furious 7 has opened, thrilled, bludgeoned and appalled audiences nationwide, surely the HE community will stand with yours truly, Nick Pinkerton, Rene Rodriguez, Sara Stewart, Roger Moore, Mick LaSalle, Randy Cordova and others who’ve expressed varying degrees of dismay, disdain and whatever else. The critics who helped elevate Furious 7‘s Rotten Tomatoes score to 81% have done their part to enable and encourage the corporate cancer-think that has largely ignored and almost totally suppressed the notion that organic, real-world, McQueen-styled action films are coolness supreme. The 67% Metacritic score is at least somewhat less enthusiastic and a little closer to the thinking of the Godz. If anyone out there is on the team, please weigh in.

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The title of this new Michael Winterbottom-Russell Brand doc is The Emperor’s New Clothes, but the similarities to Michael Moore’s 2009 doc are immediately apparent. Winterbottom’s film is also joined at the hip with Ondi Timoner‘s BRAND: A Second Coming, the recently premiered two-hour doc about the transformation of Russell Brand from hyper libertine to social revolutionary. Clothes will screen later this month at the Tribeca Film Festival. Pic will also be specially screened in the UK on Tuesday, 4.21.

Around 3:30 pm today a Variety story reported that a man had fatally shot himself at Universal Studios theme park this afternoon. Variety stated that the man had killed himself “near the Despicable Me ride.” I’m sorry but this is an exact quote. Tragic as this story of public suicide is, at the very least it’s an improvement over the mass-murder suicide caused by Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz. Suicide should be directed solely at one’s own person, and at least today’s victim respected that concept. I’m truly saddened — I’m in no way making light of this. It’s just that we’ve become accustomed to public acts of homicide being directed at innocent victims. At least that didn’t happen here.