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?”

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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.

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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.