When I let my cat Zak outside in the morning, the first thing he does is hop onto the fence and raise his head slightly and just smell the world. He’s revelling in the sampling of each and every aroma swirling around, sniffing and sniffing again, everything he can taste. I was thinking this morning how delighted and fulfilled he seemed, and how maybe I should do a little more of this myself. Take a moment and sample as many scents as possible in my realm. A few minutes of olfactory meditation.

The problem with so much of Los Angeles today, of course, is that too much of it is covered in asphalt and steel and plastic and concrete shopping malls and massive apartment buildings, and it doesn’t smell like very much of anything. Talk to Robert Towne about how Los Angeles used to smell in the 1940s, or read his screenplay of The Two Jakes for some great descriptions of the fragrances that were fairly commonplace. Or talk to anyone who remembers what it smelled like from time to time in the ’70s (despite the town being covered in horrible smog back then) or the early ’80s.

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I was reminded last weekend there are several kinds of laughter but really only two — the heartfelt but not over-the-top kind that you tend to hear from people of modest character or cultivation, and the excessive, low-class laughter from people whose lives are basically a series of frustrations followed by a series of emotional outbursts, and who don’t “laugh” as much as howl or shriek or cackle like jackals, and who don’t seem to know when to put a cap on it when the laughter is done.

If something is funny you laugh accordingly — honestly, softly, giddily, loudly, joyously. But if you have any class you let it go after a few seconds and don’t hang onto it like a four-year-old. You let the flow of emotional ecstasy cool down and settle into a natural horizon-line of serenity.

I was in the fruit section of the West Hollywood Pavillions last Saturday, and a woman near one of the checkout counters was laughing like a loon who’d lost all sense of control. 10, 15, 20, 30 seconds…she wouldn’t quit. She could be heard all over the store, in every section, every aisle. You could see basket-pushers stop and turn in her direction and make a slight face as if to say, “What’s wrong with that woman? Why doesn’t she turn it down a bit?”

The general rule, I’ve found, is that the louder and longer a person laughs in mixed company, the more repressed and fucked up their lives are. For loud, prolonged laughter is not about “funny” — it’s about emotional exorcism or a kind of primal scream release. It’s about people letting go of inner torment, really. The loon laughers are never aware of what’s really going on, of course. They think they’re just having a great old time.

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A few minutes’ worth of Steve and Nancy Carell‘s Angie Tribeca, a lowbrow police spoof that Carell has called “really, really stupid,” was just screened at South by Southwest. Wildly unoriginal, of course, but nobody cares. It feels like a fairly close relation of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. Or a kind of gene splice between ZAZ material and Alan Spencer‘s Sledge Hammer!, which was a more tonally subdued, “either you get it or you don’t” thing with a vague political slant. The difference between homage and a flat-out copy was recently highlighted by the recent Thick & Pharell verdict, but everyone assumes this kind of humor belongs to the public domain.

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“My idea of a cool and studly fast car movie is Drive. My idea of a complete waste of time is James Wan‘s Furious 7 (Universal, 4.3.15). I have the same amount of belief in the real-world versimilitude in this trailer as I do in a Road Runner cartoon. Sky-diving cars with special chutes that open and close at just the right time? Sure thing. The bit with the late Paul Walker running along the top of a bus teetering on a cliff isn’t bad conceptually, but Wan waits too long and expects us to believe that a guy could leap…what, 40 or 50 feet and fall into a car and not crack his ribs and elbows and forearms? If anyone had the courage and the character to make a real car movie (i.e., something that restores the aesthetic of the car chase in Bullitt or either of the Gone in 60 Seconds films) I would pay to see it repeatedly. The people who made Furious 7 are, no offense, corporate-fellating scum.” — from an 11.1.14 HE post titled “Obviously Fake CG Cretin Porn.”

I’ll trust reviews of documentaries out of South by Southwest, but not reviews of name-brand, studio-generated comedies and action films. SXSW is, I feel, too genre-friendly, a little too self-regarding (we are the chosen hipsters amassed at Ground Zero!) and far too giddy an atmosphere. Something in me says “cuidado!” when I hear that a film has gone over big in Austin. I love watching a sharp film with a knowledgable, emotionally responsive crowd, but the SXSW crowds are too loving and laugh-ready. On top of which I don’t trust Variety‘s Justin Chang when it comes to comedies. Justin is a brilliant, first-rate critic but Spy-wise (which is to say Paul Feig or Melissa McCarthy-wise) I suspect he’s a little too gentle, kindly and obliging. In this regard Hollywood Reporter critic John DeFore (here’s his review) is also on the not-sure-I-can-trust-him list.

If you want to know if a comedy is truly special and on-target you need to hear from someone with a bit of a cranky attitude. If a comedy makes somebody with a vaguely sullen personality go all goofy, then you know it’s almost certainly a standout. In this light Indiewire‘s Drew Taylor seems somewhat trustworthy, which is to say possessed of a slightly contentious mindset, which is what I understand and relate to. A “show me and then I’ll laugh” “attitude. Not “whee-hee, I want to laugh going in! Just give me a little tickle and I’ll split my sides.”

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The Jinx director Andrew Jarecki has visited CBS This Morning to discuss the big hoo-hah and particularly review the timeline of his interviews with real-estate heir and accused murderer Robert Durst. This is generating considerable interest given that Durst was arrested in New Orleans only last Saturday night, or less than 24 hours before the airing of the final Jinx episode, “The Second Interview,” during which an audio recording is heard of Durst muttering that he “killed them all” — a presumed reference to his late wife Kathie Durst, who disappeared in 1982, as well as Durst’s murdered friend Susan Berman, who was shot in December 2000, along with Galveston rooming-house resident Morris Black, who died in ’01 after an altercation with Durst.

Art posted last night by Buzzfeed.

This startling recording and other incriminating information (particularly the two envelopes with the word “Beverley” printed in highly similar block-letter handwriting, delivered in ’99 and ’00) was shared with Los Angeles law enforcement authorities “many months” ago, Jarecki said this morning. Jarecki’s first sit-down interview with Durst happened over a three-day period in 2010, he explained, and then a follow-up happened “a couple of years later” or sometime in 2012.

In a N.Y. Times interview posted today (3.16) Jarecki says his team discovered Durst’s bathroom audio confession on 6.12.14, or roughly 9 months ago. Is that what Jarecki means by “many” when he says he passed this evidence along? And yet L.A. officials decided that this obviously damning evidence wasn’t enough to motivate an arrest until last Saturday night? They weren’t inclined to arrest Durst nine months or six months or three weeks ago? Or next week or six months from now? They waited until a day before this fascinating HBO series reached its revealing, historic conclusion?

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If I’d seen Trainwreck in Austin a few hours ago I would have probably jumped into the pool and echoed the general Twitter worship, if for no other reason than to show what a gentle, mild-mannered guy I can be when I let my alpha vibes run free. Okay, so I was hated on big-time by Schumer fans for the better part of 30 days…fine! Cooler, less invested heads will have to be heard from, of course, before Trainwreck is officially proclaimed to be a world-class comedy. But I was fairly close to delighted with Judd Apatow‘s last two directed films, Funny People and This Is 40, so here’s hoping.

Broken Horses is a crime thriller directed, produced and co-written by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, a wealthy and successful big-wheel filmmaker who’s based in India. The odd thing about the trailer is that it includes footage of the influential James Cameron praising Broken Horses to the heavens. A similar glowing quote from Cameron as well as one from Alfonso Cuaron are posted atop Chopra’s website. Broken Horses may indeed be an exceptional knockout, but it hasn’t played at any festivals, and it was shot over two years ago at a cost of $11 million, and it’s being more or less self-distributed by “Fox Star Studios,” which seems to be a Chopra-related concern of some kind.

It struck me as odd that these highly respected filmmakers would go to bat for a film no one has heard jack about, even though it costars Anton Yelchin, Chris Marquette, Vincent D’Onofrio, Thomas Jane, AMaría Valverde and Sean Patrick Flanery. I don’t know anything but here are my questions:

(1) The Wiki page says that Broken Horses began shooting on 10.29.12. Chopra presumably finished in late ’12 or early ’13, and the movie was apparently in post-production for two full years. All through ’13 and ’14. It’s a crime film, a thriller. Not a big FX film. Why does it take two years to edit a crime thriller and then wrangle a distributor and figure out the marketing and lock down a release date? A year would be more like it.

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Earlier today a journalist colleague asked why I’m not currently at South by Southwest, which he’s having a great time attending and respects as a great festival, etc. My reply: “I was going to attend but I’ve developed an opinion over the last few years that while SXSW is interesting, crackling and cool, it’s not 100% vital. But I was going to attend anyway for the sake of Ondi Timoner‘s Russell Brand doc and Trainwreck and Alex Gibney‘s Steve Jobs film and one or two others, but I got angry about the expense.

By my standards the rates for a decently located Airbnb or Craig’s List room or hotel accomodation in Austin seemed stratospheric. I didn’t want to drop $1200 to $1500 for four or five days on a room of some kind plus another $700 or $800 on airfare, food, cabs and whatnot. SXSW is not worth dropping $2000 to $2300. If I could do four days for $1500 or maybe a bit less ($150 per night rentals), okay, but not $600 to $800 higher than that. Plus I really hated the lines when I was there three or four years ago. Lines, lines, lines, lines, lines and more lines. It’s as bad as Berlin in this respect. So I thought it over for two or three days and said “the hell with it.”

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I’ve explained over and over that the sight of lean-bod protagonists smashing slow-mo through sugar glass and falling backwards from great heights all but guarantees that the film is the same formulaic cowpie being shovelled for the umpteenth time. And this doesn’t matter at all. Insurgent‘s 27% Rotten Tomatoes rating is redundant, but it obviously wouldn’t have been made if the Lionsgate guys weren’t convinced that the Hunger Games audience wanted two (clap), two (clap), two franchises about Millenials and GenZ types waging armed rebellion against boomers and GenXers. I get the metaphor but even if I was 23 and frustrated and up to my eyeballs in college-loan debt I wouldn’t pay to see any of these films with a gun at my back. Poor Shailene “paycheck” Woodley — solid in The Descendants and decent in The Spectacular Now and The Fault in Our Stars, but reduced to registering shock and anger and frozen-eyed glare stares in the Diver/Insur realm.

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It pains me once again to see Jon Voight, a guy I used to admire in the ’70s and even into the ’90s with his performances as Howard Cosell in Ali and FDR in Pearl Harbor, unpacking his rightie loon robe again by claiming President Obama is looking to weaken Israel, that the U.S. “has never been the same” since Obama’s election, and that negotiating with Iran over its nuclear agenda is like Neville Chamberlain negotiating with Adolf Hitler. Voight apparently supports Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu and the 47 Republicans who sent that mutinous letter to Iran’s leadership, and believes that…what, threatening to bomb Iran is the way to play it? “Deal-making is not a solution to what Israel faces,” Voight says, and yet he quotes Yitzhak “Bougie” Herzog, Netanyahu’s opponent in the upcoming Israeli election who, according to a 3.14 anti-Netanyahu piece in The Economist, “wants talks with the Palestinians and to heal ties with Mr. Obama.”

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Update: I haven’t seen the sixth and final episode of Andrew Jarecki‘s The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (it won’t air until 8:00 pm Pacific) but a Deadline report states that during the episode Durst “is heard on tape admitting he ‘killed ‘em all, of course'” — an apparent reference to his long-missing wife Kathie Durst, who disappeared in 1982, as well as Durst’s longtime friend and ally Susan Berman who was found shot to death in December 2000, in addition to Morris Black, whom Durst admitting killing in a Galveston murder trial. Variety‘s Brian Lowry reports that Durst “appears to confess while talking to himself, [speaking] into an open microphone while in the bathroom, after having been confronted with damaging evidence. ‘There it is…you’re caught,’ he mutters a bit later. ‘What a disaster.'”

New York real-estate heir Robert Durst, long suspected of the murder of his late wife, Kathie Durst, in 1982 and now being actively prosecuted by Los Angeles authorities for the 2000 murder of Susan Berman, who was found shot in her Benedict Canyon home.

Anonymously sent letter to “Beverley” Hills PD, postmarked 12/23/00 or the day California officials believe that the shooting of Susan Berman occurred.

1999 letter written to Susan Berman by longtime friend Robert Durst.

Art posted by Buzzfeed.

Posted earlier: If you’ve seen the five aired episodes of Andrew Jarecki‘s The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, as I have, wild horses couldn’t keep you from watching tonight’s finale. Partly because the series has been quite riveting but mainly because it became apparent during last Sunday’s episode that Jarecki had obtained conclusive proof that Durst, the wealthy 71 year-old son of the late New York real estate mogul Seymour Durst and long suspected of the 1982 murder of his wife Kathie, is the author of an anonymous cryptic note sent to the Beverly Hills police department on 12.23.00, alerting them to the presence of a “CADAVER” at the Benedict Canyon home of the late Susan Berman, a friend of Durst’s who was probably killed the same day.

The “whoa!” element is not that the word Beverly was mis-spelled “BEVERLEY” on the 12.23.00 envelope, but that the same mis-spelling appears on a letter Durst sent to Berman in 1999.

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