My younger brother is a bit of a reckless asshole, which may be due to his having a screw loose. I can’t change or save him. He is who he is and has to deal with his issues…or not. He went to Iraq on his own steam. Did he come back a little fucked up? Yeah, and I’m sorry. My father was a little fucked up also after Vietnam. Life is hard, man, but you have to sink or swim. But now that my no-account brother is missing, probably taken out by his bad-guy colleagues, I have to do the old “avenge the death (or the harming) of my brother” routine. Jesus.

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Russell Brand, now embarking on his “Messiah Complex” tour, has been officially and completely forgiven for Arthur. He’s 100% redeemed and then some. Plus I’ve been waiting for someone to take Morning Joe‘s Mika Brzezinski down for her conservative-mannered smugness…zing! Brzezinski and her also-not-hip-enough co-hosts Katty Kay and Brian Shactman were, of course, speaking to Brand in a glib, patronizing way. “Is this what you all do for a living?,” Brand asked. “Thank you for your casual objectification.”

The fun starts around 4:45.

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“Funny” if you’re from Bakersfield or Tucumcari or East Hartford and you recognize these smug, clueless smoothies because you know them from work or whatever. The behaviors are too easy, too broad. For me anyway. But if you’re not that hip and you’re an easy lay in terms of comedy, great.

Frances Ha director-cowriter Noah Baumbach speaking candidly (as far as that goes) with HuffPost’s Ricky Camilleri about…well, Frances Ha and Baumbach’s tendency to follow characters of a certain anxious, prickly and/or melancholy bent, and how Baumbach found this particular tone or voice or whatever. Answer: It all changed when Baumbach “stopped worrying about how I’ll be perceived….whatever critic you have in your head, I got rid of that guy and just went for it.” This is a good interview. Really. Camilleri opens up, explores, really gets into it.

In a 6.17 q & a with Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci, Karina Longworth, the author of Al Pacino: Anatomy of an Actor, discussed Pacino’s transition from a spirited but psychologically rooted actor into the “hoo-hah!” guy — the florid mannerist and shouter. And yet whenever I think of my favorite Pacino performances, it’s almost always a performance that includes the shouty stuff. The excitable gay bank-robber in Dog Day Afternoon, Vincent Hanna in Heat, Lowell Bergman in The Insider, the Devil in Devil’s Advocate, Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy. The only quiet Pacino performances I’ve really admired are those in Glengarry Glen Ross, You Don’t Know Jack and The Godfather pics. My favorite all-time Pacino moment? The “inches” speech in Any Given Sunday.

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It’s soothing and nurturing to watch this shot every so often. When’s the last time a long dazzling uncut shot like this was the talk of film buffs the world over? The last one that really floored me was that first extended action sequence in Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men, and before that the opening of Robert Altman‘s The Player. 95% of the apes who love the last 80 minutes of Man of Steel would never even watch a film like The Passenger and therefore never watch a perfect scene like this, but if they did most would sit there like metal lawn furniture and go “uhhm, okay…so that’s it?”

I’ve eaten at Irv’s Burgers maybe two or three times over the last 20 years. I sure as hell would never go near the place now with my cockatoo diet. But I love places like this for their authentically greasy downmarket L.A. atmosphere. Astrobuger, the former Tail of the Pup, the long-defunct Tiny Naylor’s. But now Irv’s, which has been around for 63 years and reportedly received a cultural landmark designation in 2010, has been told to vacate the premises by the landlord and will close by the end of June. A shame. I won’t eat at places like Irv’s, but I love looking at them as I drive by. I love their aura, their flavor. They exude L.A.-ness as much as Mulholland Drive or the Smoke House or the Formosa Cafe or the Hollywood Bowl or the Apple Pan.

No way can I accept Jennifer Lopez, regarded as one of the most flagrantly materialistic, super-high-maintenance divas in the celebrity-acting-performing realm of 2013, as a working-class Chilean woman in The 33, a drama about the 2010 Chilean mining disaster. The film, being produced by Mike Medavoy, will costar Antonio Banderas, Martin Sheen and Rodrigo Santoro. Okay, I don’t know precisely who or what Lopez will portray but what else could she play in a film like this?

Jennifer “gimme a break with the diva lifestyle” Lopez

The Chilean miners celebrate after the rescue of the 33.

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One of my first back-in-the-U.S. screenings will be next Monday’s all-media for Paul Feig‘s The Heat (20th Century Fox, 6.28), the Sandra Bullock-Melissa McCarthy cop-buddy action comedy. It suddenly hit me this morning that I haven’t paid a dime’s worth of attention to this thing, which is obviously broad as a barn. I have to be honest about something. The trailer narration describes McCarthy’s character as “a tough Boston cop,” and she clearly has the mouthy, belligerent attitude of a streetwise detective. But when I think “tough cop” I think of Gene Hackman‘s Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, and that association reminds me of the Act One scene when Popeye and Roy Scheider‘s Cloudy run after Alan Weeks‘ drug dealer for two or three blocks before catching him. Does anyone believe McCarthy could run several hundred yards in a high-speed pursuit of a lithe 20something drug dealer? On top of which she’s only 5’2″…c’mon.

Thanks for smiling and welcoming me into your store. But you’re being paid to do that, right? You’re collecting a salary to help people find what they need and maybe persuade impressionable types to buy something they’re on the fence about. In any event when I walk into your store it’s not about you, no offense — it’s about me and what I see on the racks and what I might want to try or buy. It’s between me and the clothes. Which is to say a kind of delicate communion. Intimate, personal. I’m here to experience a transcendent “oh my God, I want this” moment, maybe, but I don’t want help from you any more than I want advice from a bartender about which pretty girl sitting at the bar I should think about talking to.

If I need assistance you’ll be the first ones to know, but otherwise (and I’m saying this respectfully and gently) please keep your distance.

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We all like to pass along gossip and maybe embellish for effect, but Orson Welles took the cake 30 years ago when he dished about the plane-crash death of Carole Lombard to Henry Jaglom. It happened during a luncheon they shared in 1983, which Jaglom recorded and transcribed and has now shared in a book called “My Lunches With Orson” (Metropolitan, 7.16). Welles contended that the plane Lombard was flying on the night of 1.16.42 was “full of big-time American physicists” (news reports said it was full of small-time Army guys) and that the plane was shot down by “Nazi agents” and that the plane was “filled with bullet holes.”

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Even though I’ve seen Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold ten or twelve times, I’m still going to possess the new Bluray version when it streets in September. Because it’ll be better looking, of course, than that handsome but not 100% satisfying Criterion DVD that came out in ’08. And because it’ll deliver that exquisite Bluray texture and specificity that many of us live for. And because it’s another opportunity to pay tribute to a 1965 film that was released in 1.66 — yet another defiance of the fascist edict that says all American-funded non-Scope films after April 1953 were released in 1.85.

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