“I was amused when Maps to the Stars screenwriter Bruce Wagner claimed during the Cannes Film Festival that Evan Bird‘s Benjie Weiss character, a poisonous 13 year-old superstar who immediately summons thoughts of Justin Beiber, wasn’t written or cast with Beiber in mind. A friend told me he ran into Beiber at the AMFAR during the festival. He said he didn’t ask about the Cronenberg film because such a question would have seemed rude given that Wagner had stuck to the party line, etc. ‘Oh, please!,’ I replied. Never trust the artist — trust the tale.” — from a 5.30.14 post called “Blather.”

Robin Williams, 63, has been found dead of asphyxiation. In other words by his own hand. I’m very, very, very sad about this. The poor guy had been wrestling with severe depression, probably in part because his heyday was clearly over and he was on a kind of career downswing. I hate to say this but he was. Life can feel so awful and cruel at times when the heat leaves the room and the candle starts to flicker. The weight can feel crushing and oppressive. And for a guy who seemed to burn a lot more brightly than most of us, certainly in the late ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. A genius improviser, gifted madman and comic superstar for…what, 25 years or so? Williams hadn’t been landing the greatest films or roles over the past decade or so but from the peak of Mork and Mindy fame until One-Hour Photo…what a run! But this…this hurts. It reminds us that we’re all hanging by a thread in a sense, some thinner or stronger or more resolute than others.

Williams’ best films and performances: The World According to Garp (’82), Moscow on the Hudson (’84), Good Morning, Vietnam (’87), Dead Poets Society (’89), Awakenings (’90), The Fisher King (’91), Aladdin (’92), Mrs. Doubtfire (’93), Jumanji (’95), The Birdcage (’96), Good Will Hunting (’97), Insomnia (’02) — 12 films in all. The stinkers included Hook (’91), Toys (’92), Jack (’96), Father’s Day, Patch Adams (’98) , What Dreams May Come (’98), Bicentennial Man (’99), RV (’06) and Old Dogs (’09). His last significant roles were as Dwight D. Eisenhower in The Butler and as a huge pissed-off guy who’s been told he was only a few hours to live in Phil Alden Robinson‘s The Angriest Man in Brooklyn.

Let’s put aside the fact that no one outside the target demo (i.e., none-too-bright women) would want to go anywhere near a screening of this icky romantic tale. Let’s just address the fact that both lovers are played by younger and older actors — the high-school-aged Dawson Cole (what kind of a horseshit Nicholas Sparks name is that?) is played by Luke Bracey and the 20-years-older version by James Marsden, and the teenaged Amanda Collier is played by Liana Liberato with Michelle Monaghan portraying her at age 38. Bracey and Marsden don’t even look like cousins much less the same person; ditto Liberato and Monaghan. You can’t invest in this kind of thing — it’s impossible. Why not forget the younger actors and simply de-age Marsden and Monaghan the way the 42-year-old Matt Damon was very convincingly de-aged in Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind the Candelabra? It’s well within the reach of today’s technology, and it’s not like Marsden or Monagahan are looking “old” or anything. They’re both relatively young and unwithered.

Patricia Arquette‘s grounded performance as Ellar Coltrane‘s stressed-out mom in Boyhood has been attracting some awards talk. Obviously the smart play would be to go for Best Supporting Actress as (a) the film is largely an ensemble piece and (b) Arquette’s Olivia is obviously not the lead. Two of P.A.’s biggest supporters right now are Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson. It’s obvious they have personal motives above and beyond their respect for Arquette’s acting. They’re both hard-working moms and so they naturally relate to Olivia’s burden. Plus both their daughters are either approaching or just past college age and so they know something about the heartbreak of letting your child go in order to find his or her own way, which is what Olivia expresses at the end of the film. There’s nothing wrong with feeling this identification or expressing how it’s touched you.

I’m mentioning this because I too feel an identification, and that’s with young Ellar as he suffers under not just one but two boozy, bullying stepdads whom Arquette marries over the course of Boyhood. Dickhead husband #1 is Bill (Marco Peralla), a silver-haired political conservative and a major-league alcoholic. Dickhead husband #2 is Jim (Brad Hawkins), an Iraq/Afghanistan War veteran with another alcohol problem and a kind of brawny, obnoxious, don’t-fuck-with-me approach to parenting.

Arquette eventually divorces them both, but she’s the one who has brought this shit into her children’s lives. I therefore came to dislike Olivia (or at least not respect her very much) for being so selfish as to not give a little more thought to the kind of guys she was installing as a stepdad. It’s one thing to make a mistake with the wrong guy once, but twice? By marrying the same kind of asshole? And making the kids pay for it more than anyone else?

May I respectfully suggest that Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams was being either careless or disingenuous last Friday when he posted a “Best Actress Watch” (still, mini-synopsis, trailer) about Kristen Stewart‘s generally admired performance in Camp X-Ray? I remarked the same day that this plus Stewart’s deservedly praised turn in Clouds of Sils Maria have made 2014 “a kind of breakout year” for her. But neither will draw the kind of heat that will even begin to generate a conversation, much less serious enthusiasm, about a Best Actress nomination. Forget it — it’s not in the cards. If you’re going to use the term “Best Actress Watch,” use it earnestly.

If you’ve seen Brighton Rock (’10), you know something about the inclinations of director Rowan Joffe. That plus this mind-of-a-confused-woman thriller (based on the book by S.J. Watson) in a kind of flashy-spooky vein — Memento + Shutter Island meets handheld video recall — tells you right away that Before I Go To Sleep (Clarius, 9.12) is almost certainly a paycheck programmer, undoubtedly containing the usual third-act twist. The fact that Ridley Scott is one of the producers tells you “hmm, maybe” but then you also notice that Avi Lerner (The Expendables 3, Olympus Has Fallen) is also a producer. If Lerner ever produces a film that is anything but formulaic popcorn fare I will grow wings and fly to the moon.

I did a phoner yesterday morning with John Scheinfeld, director of the PBS-produced Dick Cavett’s Watergate. The show aired last Friday on KOCE, and there’s a possibility it might re-air on some PBS station this week. (It’s very hard to figure out PBS programming.) Either way it’s watchable online. As I said last Saturday, the show shoots “those old Watergate junkie highs right back into your system.” And yet I complained to John that 55 minutes isn’t long enough to re-explore this delicious if appalling chapter in American history. The material could easily allow the doc to run two hours or at the very least 90 minutes, but PBS wasn’t interested. Cavett’s ratings were always below Johnny Carson‘s back in the day, which eventually led to ABC cancelling his show in ’75. And yet Cavett’s percentage of the viewing audience was much higher than what Jimmy Kimmel, David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, Craig Ferguson or Conan O’Brien are attracting today for the simple reason that he and Carson were the only two talk shows back then. Again, the mp3.

The director of Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? and co-director of The U.S. vs. John Lennon, Scheinfeld is about to start work on a documentary about jazz legend John Coltrane.

In an interview last year with Fade In‘s F.X. Feeney, Nebraska director Alexander Payne said that while a color palette is “not right for the film,” he “saw the color version once” and “liked it. It was really pretty. Some shots look even prettier in color. We made it look like a color from about 1970 or ’71, like the colors in Five Easy Pieces, for example.” Well, I just saw the color version on EPIX, and Payne, no offense and due respect, is completely full of shit. The colors in Five Easy Pieces were ripe and natural and plain — God’s own palette, nothing added or subtracted. The colors in Nebraska looked thoroughly pale and sickly and washed out. Everyone’s face had a kind of fake, fleshy makeup-base color, like people in black-and-white films do when the film has been artificially colored. The whole film looked that way. The palette was all creams and bieges and dead grays and K-Mart mustards and washed-out earthy browns and especially reds with an emphasis on maroons. Red this, red that…almost every jacket, sweater and flannel shirt worn was an eat-shit-and-die red. The commercial signs were red. One or two of the commercial buildings were red. The baseball cap that Dern was given to wear at the end had a red brim. The reason, I’m presuming, is that red looks good in black-and-white. Not a single vivid blue of any kind in the film except the sky. Green made three appearances (i.e., a living-room wall, faded grass, a pool table in a bar). Blacks were spotty and mostly fleeting. It was hellish to sit through in a sense. As if Payne and his dp, Phedon Papamichael, wanted the viewers in the countries that demanded a color version to suffer. The film looks 15 times better in black-and-white. Case closed.

I’ve said repeatedly that you never know how much an actor can deliver until you’ve seen him or her in a strong play. Well, I found out last night how exacting and passionate and super-dimensional Amber Tamblyn, Shawn Hatosy, Alicia Witt and Nick Gehlfuss are when push comes to shove. It happened during a two-hour-and-40-minute performance of Neil Labute‘s Reasons To Be Pretty, which I saw at the Geffen theatre in Westwood. It’s running until 8.31, and I’m telling you that…okay, a semi-pricey ticket to Randall Arney‘s production (mine cost $85) is worth its weight in gold. The writing, acting, emotion…forget it. Far more potent than 90% if not 95% of the films and cable fare out there. Really. I felt alive, taken. A kind of throbby, buzzy feeling in my veins.

I’ve been a particular fan of Tamblyn for several years now (Joan of Arcadia, Stephanie Daley, her poetry, that recent Hateful Eight reading), but her performance as Steph, a hairdresser who goes ballistic when her live-in, factory-employed boyfriend, Greg (Hatosy), is overheard describing her looks as “regular” — a bullet to the heart — has to be the best thing she’s ever done. She’s startling, heartbreaking…everything you can imagine that a gifted, live-wire actress could be in a you-are-there, holy-shit realm. Hatosy also — he’s been humping it hard in films and television since the mid ’90s and nothing he’s done has come anywhere close to his Reasons performance. For the first time in nearly 20 years the guy woke me up. Wow…he’s fucking got it! Not Hatosy’s fault — it’s the nature of film and TV to underuse actors. Obviously not entirely but mostly. Sufficient, no-big-deal dialogue. Stories that distract or vaguely “entertain” but rarely elevate.

Before I get into this let me again reiterate my affection for Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood. I don’t think it’s quite the masterpiece that others are calling it, but it’s a very warm and humanistic film — deft and assured and wise and quite unusual. You could even call it unique if you want to ignore Francois Truffaut‘s Antoine Doinel films and Michael Apted‘s Up films. I think it will probably end up as a Best Picture nominee if, as I wrote on 8.3, “the Oscar-blogging mafia (less than 15 people when you boil it down) keeps pushing it as Best Picture-worthy over the next five and a half months.” At the end of the year Boyhood may indeed seem like the pick of the litter because it has “that all-encompassing, life-embracing sprawl or theme” that touches people where they live.

But has Boyhood been overhyped, and is this affecting the responses of those who are just getting around to see it? More particularly, did TheWrap‘s Steve Pond lovingly poison the well by stating on 7.31 that it might not just snag a Best Picture nomination but “actually win” the Best Picture Oscar?

A couple of hours ago a smart industry guy, someone I’ve been talking to for years and genuinely respect, called to say that he and two guild-member friends caught Boyhood over the weekend, and they all agree that Pond’s piece about it possibly winning the Best Picture Oscar is out to lunch. The guy doesn’t want to be identified because he doesn’t want to openly diss Linklater. But he insists that Pond overdid the enthusiasm. “Stop Bogarting that doobie, Steve, and pass it along to us,” the guy said. “That’s such a reach. If it turns out to be a really shitty year, I can see it being Best Picture nominated. But winning?”

Most of us are down with Guardians of the Galaxy, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Get On Up, of course, and I suppose there’s nothing fatally misguided about seeing an apparently mediocre foodie film like The Hundred-Foot Journey (55% Metacritic rating). But the other six toppers are the usual late-summer crap. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (33% Metacritic rating), Into The Storm (submental, CG-driven Twister for YouTube generation), Step Up All In (47% Metacritic….who cares?), Lucy (“It’s a movie that says ‘you can take a bathroom break whenever you like’“), Hercules (another 47% wonder) and The Purge: Anarchy. This is the world we live in, the world we’ve submitted to. Except me. Tonight, at least. I’ll be catching Neil LaBute‘s Reasons To Be Pretty at the Geffen, and all the better for it.

Dick Cavett’s Watergate aired last night on KOCE, the local (i.e., Costa Mesa) PBS station. I missed it, but I figured “no big deal…I’ll find some kind of VOD way to see it this weekend.” Actually, no. I thought everything was VOD-accessible these days. A recent L.A. Times review says it runs 90 minutes. But this morning I called John Scheinfeld, director of the Cavett/Watergate show as well as Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talking About Him)?, and asked if I can get the 90-minute version, and he said that the 55-minute version is the final deal. Dick Cavett’s Watergate is such a smooth and delicious recollection. Those old Watergate junkie highs come rushing right back into your system.