Six years and four months ago, Vanity Fair contributor Sam Kashner interviewed the extremely press-shy Richard Lester. It happened “on a chilly morning at a gastropub near a marina in Chichester, England,” Kashner writes. One of the topics was Lester’s two Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night (which opened on 7.6.64, or almost exactly 50 years ago) and Help!. In honor of the HDN anniversary or the recently released Criterion Bluray or both, VF has published an article by Kashner about the ’08 encounter. The piece also contains references to the here-and-now.

Richard Lester, now 82, in a still from the website of 2013 Febio Fest, which Lester attended.

Lester might be interview-averse with journalists, but he visited the 2013 Febio Fest in Česke Budejovice, a mid-sized city in the Czech Republic.

Kashner’s article deals with Lester’s decision to quit directing due to the death of actor and longtime Lester friend Roy Kinnear, who suffered a fatal heart attack during the filming of Lester’s The Return of the Musketeers (’89). This was preceded by a performing accident in which Kinnear was “thrown from his horse, fractured his pelvis and suffered massive internal bleeding.” The 54 year-old Kinnear died the next day.

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A gathering of the friends, fans and colleagues of the late Jeffrey Ressner will happen on Tuesday, July 8th, at 11 am at the Burbank branch of Forest Lawn (6300 Forest Lawn Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90068). It’s definitely in Burbank but the Forest Lawn hustlers are calling it the “Hollywood Hills” branch. That strikes me as a rather phony and pretentious claim. Oh, by the way: there was a mistake in the obit that was sent out yesterday to Variety. Ressner passed last Saturday night, 6.28, so the whole L. Ron Hubbard announcement riff no longer applies.

Jeffrey Ressner, 1958 — 2014

I may as well admit that I played a very small role in the publicity effort behind Rambo: First Blood, Part II (’85). No, I didn’t work for TriStar or Carolco but for temporarily partnered publicists Dick Delson and Bobby Zarem, who were working for Sylvester Stallone himself. I spent some time around Sly, of course. He wasn’t unfriendly but I wouldn’t call him gregarious. A bit sullen, a man of fewer words. We were visiting our client at his Pacific Palisades home one night, and as we were leaving I noticed an original Francis Bacon painting in the foyer. “Wow, Francis Bacon!,” I exclaimed. “You got it,” Stallone replied.

It feels like Anton Corbijn‘s A Most Wanted Man (Lionsgate/Roadside, 7.25) has been around forever. Lionsgate acquired the rights a year ago. It played Sundance last January but I couldn’t get to it. Now it’s opening limited in three weeks or so. Not the last big-screen performance from the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman but the last one that anyone with taste will want to see. The trailer tells you Philly’s German accent owns this thing, at least as much as his screen time allows. Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe, Daniel Bruhl, Robin Wright, Grigoriy Dobrygin, Homayoun Ershadi, Martin Wuttke, etc.

Theodore Melfi‘s St. Vincent de Van Nuys (Weinstein Co., 10.24), which shot last summer in various New York-area locations, is about a rootless young guy with just-divorced parents befriending a “misanthropic, bawdy, hedonistic war veteran” played by Bill Murray. Costars include Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd, Naomi Watts. This looks like the same trailer they showed at Harvey’s annual preview event in Cannes in mid-May.

Jeffrey Ressner, a Los Angeles-based entertainment journalist pal whom I first met when we worked together at the Hollywood Reporter back in ’83 and ’84 and whom I considered an actual, real-deal friend, has died of a heart attack. He was only 56, for God’s sake. I’m sure his friends would like to gather and share stories and raise a glass. Update: A memorial service for Ressner will be held on Tuesday, 7.8 at 11 am at the Burbank branch of Forest Lawn Mortuary.

The late Jeffrey Ressner, probably sometime in the late ’80s.

Jeff would call every so often or I would invite him to a screening or we’d do an occasional lunch. He was cautious, a stay-at-homer. He never wanted to drive east of the 405 and I started to give up inviting him to screenings because of this. But he read the column all the time, and we would talk about women a lot. The last time we met he slipped me some prescription pain pills. Jeff travelled to Asia quite a lot. After my initial trip to Vietnam in 2012 we compared extensive notes on the region. The last time I went to Vietnam (i.e., eight months ago) he asked me to buy him some coffee and cigars and bring them back. I told him to flat-out forget it — I wasn’t going to lug boxes of coffee and cigars through customs for him.

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The great Paul Mazursky has died at the age of 84. For eight or nine years Mazursky’s films seemed to understand the half-comedic, half-bittersweet backwash of the ’60s and ’70s better than any other filmmaker except perhaps Robert Altman. Mazurksy was the reigning Woody Allen figure — the guy whose films were connected with the moods and meanderings and what modern hipster relationships were really about back then — before Allen found his voice and took the crown away from Mazursky with Annie Hall in ’78. Mazursky’s New York roots went into Next Stop, Greenwich Village (’76), An Unmarried Woman (’78) and Moscow on the Hudson (’84) but there was always something more knowing and intimate about his Los Angeles-based films. From ’69 to ’78 Mazursky held mountains in the palm of his hands, or something close to that.

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Uh-oh…another Melissa McCarthy movie! I’d better say the right things or, more to the point, not say any bad things or Judd Apatow and the armed Sunni p.c. police squad will kick the shit out of me, especially on Twitter. I need to get my attitude adjusted and crank up the denial or I’ll be in big trouble. Okay…go! McCarthy’s schtick of playing a coarse, angry, under-educated, junk-food-inhaling, lower-middle-class instinct animal is…hilarious! And it’s totally common when thin, nice-looking guys (in this instance an ex-hubby and a possible new boyfriend) are depicted as being (or having been) sexually interested in her. One reason for this curious state of affairs is an understanding that morbid obesity isn’t a life-shortening affliction but…kinda cute! And a drop-dead hilarious comic device. When McCarthy tries to leap over a fast-food counter during a robbery but can’t manage it…gasping for breath! Did I mention that morbid obesity has become a kind of metaphor for serenity and self-acceptance?

Wait…should I run this by Apatow first before publishing? Maybe I haven’t expressed my views in the right way? Aaahh, too late now.

Tammy (Warner Bros., 7.2) is a husband-and-wife enterprise — directed by McCarthy’s husband, Ben Falcone, and co-written by Falcone and McCarthy. Creative collaborations between married or otherwise intimately entwined couples often don’t work because they’re not blunt with each other. If an idea is shit or not quite good enough, you have to be able to effing say that instead of “yeah, honey, that’s a really good bit except…well, it’s not that I don’t respect your idea or you for that matter but I just think if we massaged it a little bit more and doubled down on the love we might have something a little bit better.” Do you think Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond talked that way to each other?

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For the last five years Melena Ryzik has been writing the N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” column, having inherited it from David Carr. But now Ryzik is bailing and handing the torch to Cara Buckley…congrats! It’s all a hustle for Oscar ad dollars anyway, but I’ve always found it irksome the way Carpetbagger columnists always jump into the award season in early December and go “tah-dah!…here we are!…let the games begin!” I wrote the following in response to Melena’s 12.4.13 piece called “Eyes On The Prize”: “Hardcore awards-tracking watchers and handicappers like myself and Sasha Stone and Scott Feinberg have been riding the rails for over seven months now (i.e., since the 2013 Cannes Film Festival) and humping it extra-hard since Telluride, Venice and Toronto (or for the last 13 weeks), and then Melena comes breezing into the room with her video crew and writes, ‘The Oscars are not until March but the jockeying for position has already begun.’ Early December is ‘already’?”

New N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” Cara Buckley…tah-dah!

While watching The Leftovers last night I was thinking it was a shame that Pope Francis, the first truly compassionate, Franciscan-like good guy Pope in many a decade, had to be raptured along with Gary Busey, Jennifer Lopez and Vladmir Putin. I nonetheless decided that Francis Bacon‘s “Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X,” painted 61 years ago, was no longer just a perfect image in its own right. It was also, suddenly, a perfect capturing of a Pope being “taken.” I’ll probably never be able to look at this painting again without thinking of The Leftovers. Is that a good thing? You tell me.

What is Joe Popcorn supposed to do with this downer attitude and grim-thug vibe? Channing Tatum looks like an ape here, and his bee-stung nose makes him look like Shrek, for God’s sake. The critical quotes from Kenneth Turan and Stephanie Zacharek praise his performance, but the guy he’s playing (real-life former wrestling champ Mark Schultz) is mainly just clenched and sullen. Plus he doesn’t have much of a character arc. I’m guessing this a contractual gimme from Sony Classics to Tatum’s managers. The acting awards and nominations are all going to Steve Carell, guys. You know this, of course, but I’m just saying.

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This is what I was talking about earlier in my review of The Leftovers. A bitter or drunken authority figure needs to deliver a hard-nosed assessment of the big cataclysmic event that drives the story of the film around…oh, the 30-minute mark. Leftovers co-creators Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta probably decided they’re too cool and cutting-edge to follow in Stanley Kramer‘s footsteps, and that’s fine. But one result of this mindset is that some people aren’t feeling the love for this pain-in-the-ass miniseries as we speak.