This is just wrong, man. Vin Diesel was really good — genuine, centered, straight-arrow vibes — for nine years. First out of the box was Strays, an autobiographical piece which he directed. And then a smallish supporting role in Saving Private Ryan — nothing special but solid. And then Boiler Room, Rob Cohen‘s The Fast and the Furious and finally — this was major — Diesel’s performance as an amiable, lower-level mafia guy in Sidney Lumet‘s Find Me Guilty. I began to lose the feeling with Cohen’s xXx (’02), to be honest, but Find Me Guilty put me back on the train. Diesel was doing something back then, and he could always bounce back.

Last night I caught episode #1 of Steven Soderbergh‘s The Knick. I’m sorry but I felt a little…inconclusive about it. My basic problem was Clive Owen‘s cocaine addiction. I can’t invest in a lead character, even a brilliant surgeon, who’s on a self-destructive downswirl. Life is difficult and draining enough without a monkey on your back. Otherwise I found it smart, layered, downbeat, well-written-ish, very nicely shot (kind of Gordon Willis -y), all but humorless (that bit with the cigarette-smoking nun insulting those two guys wasn’t funny enough), grisly, intriguing and sometimes fascinating in a period atmosphere sense…and just a bit underwhelming, I have to say.

The highlights were (a) a startling if stomach-churning surgery scene that began with Owen shooting cocaine into a patient’s spine and (b) a portrayal of professional/urban racism as it existed 114 years ago. I don’t know what I was expecting but I wanted something more. Something crazier, sexier, more sinister…I don’t know. I realize it might take two or three episodes to really kick in. You can’t just pull narrative tension out of a hat, but maybe if Soderbergh had thrown in a nice sprawling CG shot or two of lower Broadway or some other distinctive Manhattan neighborhood. I’m not that hard to please.

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I’ve just heard from Telluride Film Festival honcho Tom Luddy, who was a producer on Barfly (’87), the Barbet Schroeder-directed film with Mickey Rourke. He explains that the generic, much-passed-around story about Schroeder, the late Menahem Golan and the electric chainsaw, which I repeated in my Golan obit piece, is incorrect. I’ve also heard from Mr. Schroeder himself.

Luddy: “Jeff — Very nice post on Menachem. [Note: most people spell the late mogul’s first name as Menahem but Luddy prefers the alternate spelling] But part of your text is not quite accurate.

“As I think Barbet will confirm, he went to the office of Alan Abrams, one of the Cannon lawyers, with his Black and Decker saw, not to Menachem’s office. And it was not to demand that they greenlight the film, but to demand that they give us back the film in turnaround, with no onerous ‘turnaround fee’.

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The Armenian genocide, the Nazi holocaust against Jews, the killing-field genocide in 1970s Cambodia, the Tutsi-vs.-Hutu Rwanda slaughter of 1994, the Serbian ethnic cleanings in the early ’90s — these are some of the greatest genocidal hits of the last 100 years. But the impending slaughter of Iraqi Christians and Shiites by the ISIS nutbags will surely rank as one of the most horrendous ever. And yet the “wise” and “prudent” course is to let the ISIS genocide run its course, a lot of people are saying. Let the Iraqi factions thrash it out. Roadside executions, beheadings, crucifixions, female genital mutilations…all of it. Let the evil spread and find its own level. If only the country could be split into three natural portions, which is what Joe Biden has been saying for some time — Shiite, Sunni and Kurds.

The Bluray of Steven Knight‘s Locke streets on 8.12. From my 4.8 review: “It happens entirely inside a BMW SUV on the motorway between Birmingham and London at night, and it’s all about bluetooth phone calls. The great Tom Hardy is behind the wheel the entire time. But what pushes the film along is the stuff of any compelling drama — character, tough decisions, adult pressures, guilt, tragedy, trauma, twists and turns.

“Locke might sound a bit confining or even boring, but it’s not — trust me. This is not some arcane aesthetic exercise. It’s not a stunt film. It’s a story about a real guy coping with pressure and responsibility and love and adulthood and serious, real-deal consequences and trying to man up and do the right thing without allowing everything else to fall into a heap on the floor.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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