The first sign of serious trouble in any relationship is when you realize your girlfriend is seemingly more in love with and definitely more affectionate toward her dogs than yourself. This situation tends to feel even worse when these canine love objects are neurotic little yappy dogs who are so agitated and neurotic and fearful and cranked up with anxiety that almost anything upsets them. You try to make friends with these little fuckers (always the best policy if they belong to your girlfriend) and they look at you like you’re a wolf about to tear their throat out. They tremble and vibrate when you try to gently pet them. They’re not cool like most dogs. Guy dogs, I mean. Anything you do short of being cruel or neglectful, guy dogs are okay with. Guy dogs like playing tug of war and going on runs and catching frisbees and sticking their heads of out fast-moving cars. Yappy dogs like to go on walks also, true, but everything freaks them out. A motorcycle roars by and they go nuts. A private plane approaching Santa Monica Airport causes them to go insane. Women love yappy dogs because they’re small and defenseless and trembling for the most part. I am down with any dog, anywhere, any time. But I hate yappy dogs.

“…who has never made an entirely good, entirely satisfactory film.” — Nicholas Ray (1911 — 1979), as quoted by Dennis Hopper in a 1997 TCM essay. All this heartfelt and very accurate praise for one of Hollywood’s great crazy men, and not a single mention of an alcoholic dissolute life style that ruined Ray’s career and shortened his life. He was only 67 when he died in August 1979, and he looked like he was at least 80 when he costarred in Wim Wenders‘ The American Friend, which was shot in ’76 when Ray was 65. Hollywood tributes never mention self-destructive or suicidal behavior. (“It doesn’t matter what I think about Nic Ray,” Hopper says at the end of the piece.) The deceased was all about his creations, he lived as best he could, a tree fell on him….not quite. (The Ray essay was produced and written by Chris Merrifield.)

Former Cannon Films co-owner Menahem Golan, the flamboyant instinct mogul who paid me a half-decent salary when I worked as a Cannon press kit writer from mid ’86 to early ’88, has died in Israel at age 85. What a character, what a personality. A large, bagel-and-cream-cheese-eating man who lived large, if not with a great deal of strategic or artistic precision.

Menahem never really embraced the Movie Catholic faith. He lived for the hustle and bustle of making and selling movies, but…well, let’s give him a friendly send-off for now. The slings and arrows will be felt soon enough when Mark Hartley‘s Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, a doc that allegedly presents an honest, no-holds-barred account of the Cannon Films heyday, has its big debut at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival.

Phase 2 of Domino FM’s Kickstarter campaign begins today. The brainchild of Jett Wells, Domino FM is a Spotify-related one-stop-shopping app that, like Jeff Lebowski‘s Persian rug, really ties the world of music together. No single music service — Spotify, Soundcloud, Vevo, YouTube, Bandcamp — supplies all the music and the service (reviews, related links, histories…the whole background magillah of each and every worthwhile band) in one unified package. Domino FM is the first app to actually do this. A lot of apps provide just the music or just great service without all the music…solution! Domino FM is some kind of benevolent soul-daddy, soul-mama music spider with 100,000 legs and fingers. The Kickstarter campaign launched last Thursday. The goal is $21K. All HE loyalists are hereby requested to think it over and maybe toss a few spare bills into the pot…whatever works. The new guys are making their world.

Steven Soderbergh‘s The Knick kicks off on Cinemax tonight. It has not been met with universal praise but four out of five critics are giving it back-pats. Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes ratings stand at 77% and 84% respectively, but the Metacritic gang tends to be a little tougher. I only know that it seems like an important-enough thing that I forked over an extra $15 so I can get Cinemax, which I’ve never had the slightest interest in. (This on top of the $8 monthly charge so I can watch the Sunday-night airing of the color version of Nebraska.) HBO Asia’s YouTube channel is making the first episode available for free for a two-week period (8.11 to 8.25).

A friend has tried to cheer me up about Richard Gere hanging with the doddering, over-the-hill Marigold gang. He assures me that Gere ‘is brilliant as a homeless man on the streets of NYC in Oren Moverman’s Time Out Of Mind, which you will see in Toronto…but you didn’t hear from me since I haven’t ‘officially’ seen it.” Moverman directed and wrote the screenplay with Jeffrey Caine, who’s taken a “story” credit. Gere plays a grubby homeless guy trying to re-connect with his daughter (Jena Malone, who will turn 30 in November).

Richard Gere in Oren Moverman’s Time Out Of Mind, a drama about Bob Dylan’s artistic comeback in the late 1990s. I’m kidding. It has nothing to do with Dylan at all.

There are those who’ve become homeless by way of terrible misfortune or shitty luck or having made a few mistakes. My heart goes out, there but for God’s grace, etc. But the majority, I’ve long believed, are just “bums” — alcoholics, druggies (or ex-druggies), schizophrenics, depressives, compulsive-anger junkies, etc. Toward the end of his life my brother nearly fell into that hole, the poor guy. And yet in the eyes of the p.c. kneejerk crowd they’re all “homeless” — the catch-all term that one is obliged to use if you want to be regarded as a semi-compassionate type. If you use the term “bums”, which I frankly do when I’m talking to myself, you’re a heartless pig.

It’s fair to say that 2014 has been a kind of breakout year for Kristen Stewart. The festival cognoscenti have pretty much agreed that her performances in Olivier Assayas‘s Clouds of Sils Maria and in Peter Sattler‘s Camp X-Ray are probably the best of her career. The problem (and I’m not deriving any pleasure from saying this) is that both films are stiffs. Earnest and serious-minded but snail-paced, psychologically claustrophobic, almost listless at times. Stewart’s challenge is to deliver a first-rate performance in a film people might actually want to see. I’m sorry.

One of the things that bothered me about Camp X-Ray was that it made me feel extremely sorry for for poor Peyman Moaadi, who absolutely ruled in Asghar Farhadi‘s About Elly (’09) and particularly A Separation (’11). Farhadi made him into man of dignity and substance and some ambiguity, but Sattler’s film humiliated him, turning Moaadi into a grimy Islamic detainee in an orange jumpsuit. A no-win loser. Okay, his character has a certain angry focus and a compelling backstory, but I really, really didn’t want to be in that grim-ass facility and it brought me down to hang with Stewart and Moaadi inside it. I must have checked my watch at least 8 or 10 times.

Richard Gere, the silver panther who fucked and finagled in Arbitrage, cut legal corners in Brooklyn’s Finest, romanced Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe and merrily fell in love with Jennifer Lopez in Shall We Dance a mere ten years ago…Richard effing Gere is hanging with a bunch of sqinting, doddering elders (Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith) in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel? I want my Dennis Peck back! The American Gigolo guy does not belong in a fucking retirement village. Somebody hit rewind.

Earlier this afternoon I did a 15-minute interview with The One I Love costars Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss. Nice chat, fast and loose, ball in the air, etc. I’d recorded our discussion on two Olympus digi-recorders just to be sure. 20 minutes later I discovered that neither recorder had captured our conversation. I was stunned but I didn’t fold. I collected my myself and spent two hours tapping out memories of our discussion. Riffs, recollections, back-and-forths, snippets. It looked pretty good, in some kind of shape. I was about to hit save…and then some mystifying keystroke from hell killed the post. Erased. I’ve never lost two hours worth of WordPress work in my life (auto-save has always functioned until today), but today was a bingo. I suppose I could re-write the damn thing again tomorrow morning but not today. Way too angry. All I have at this point are shots of Moss and Duplass. That’ll have to do for now.

The One I Love costars Elizabeth Moss, Mark Duplass at the SIS Hotel in Beverly Hills — Thursday, 8.7, 1:10 pm.

The presumption is that “I Love You All,” a song sung by Michael Fassbender in Frank (Magnolia, 8.15), is meant to be taken ironically, at least when Fassbender performs it with his costars while wearing an “ironic” paper-mache head. I have this vague suspicion that you can’t love or even like anyone while wearing a head mask, but I could be wrong. My understanding is that affection is not a pose or a musical attitude — it’s as sincere as a heart attack, and the act of wearing a dumbfuck mask is testimony to the fact that the wearer is too emotionally chickenshit to feel or offer love.

But maybe that’s just my hostility talking. The song would probably work better if it was called “I Hate You All (But Not So Much As I Hate Myself)”. Fassbender’s character is based upon a real-life comic musician persona, “Frank Sidebottom”, who was inhabited by the late Chris Sievey. (Don’t ask.) Fassbender and his costars performed the song last night on the Colbert Report.

I saw Frank a couple of nights ago. (Well, most of it and then I saw the rest last night through an online link.) I was asked for my opinion the next day, and I tapped out the following: “It’s a movie that’s stuck on itself and its own sense of hip bemusement. It’s very dry, very smart, very well done, sometimes funny and utterly marginal and peripheral.” And yet Devin Faraci, who was sitting two rows in front of me, was laughing out loud from time to time so maybe…you know, I’m just not hip enough for Frank but Devin is. I mean, that’s one possible interpretation.

Two Philip Glass tracks from Akhnaten, his 1983 three-act opera, are heard on the soundtrack on Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan. The music, initially heard at the very beginning of the film, tells you right off the bat that Leviathan is not going to deliver mild-mannered escapism. A Sony Classic spokesperson told me that the two tracks are titled “Akhnaten’s Reign — Prelude,” and “The Ruins — Epilogue.” Glass’s publicist told me there are actually three tracks — “The Ruins”, “Epilogue” and “Year 1 of Akhnaten’s Reign.” Now I’m all turned around and don’t know who to believe.

“Back in ye olde summer of 1996, few could have imagined that we would eventually look back fondly on Jan de Bont’s Twister as the kind of movie ‘they’ don’t make like they used to. And yet, a scant two decades later, here comes Into the Storm to prime that nostalgic tear. At its best, Storm is like a really high-tech version of those science-museum wind-tunnel simulators that thrill groups of touring schoolchildren with their roaring blasts of hurricane-force gales. But stretched out to even 90 minutes, such thrills become monotonous, and by the time the film arrives at a climax that finds most of the cast waylaid in a storm drain, the effect is like sitting through all the cycles of some ultra-super-deluxe gas-station car wash. Into the Storm can make it rain like nobody’s business, but when it tries to be smart, it comes out all wet.” — from Scott Foundas‘s 8.7 Variety review.