A Facebook gush about Paul McCartney duet-ing with Neil Young, a testament about how wonderful this musical moment was…

The other day Sasha Stone asked for names of the all-time dishiest actresses. The ones who’ve inspired the most tumescent sexual fantasies, etc.

I’ve always had a thing for sleek blondes. The two most painfully unfulfilled relationships of my life, an achey-breaky high-school flirtation and an anguished sexual affair with a married People magazine co-worker, were with blondes. There was another hurting affair with a blonde filmmaker in ’12. So I didn’t hesitate in saying that Camilla Sparv (Downhill Racer, Dead Heat on a Merry Go-round, Mackenna’s Gold, The Greek Tycoon) was at the top of my list.

Sparv and the young Grace Kelly share the top slot, pretty much. Along with the young Ingrid Berman, Kim Novak in Vertigo and I-don’t-know-who-else. Elke Sommer in The Prize?

Still with us at age 81, Sparv landed only one truly interesting role — the delectable but elusive Carole (Robert Redford‘s Dave Chappellet falls for her but she eventually dumps him) in Michael Ritchie‘s Downhill Racer (’69).

In my humble opinion the young Sparv (26 when she made the Ritchie film) had the sparkliest eyes and most beautiful mouth…slightly upturned, tempting, exquisite.

I guess I’ve alays felt a vague kinship with Sparv because she was married in the mid ’60s to Robert Evans, whom I was on friendly terms with in ’94, ’95 and ’96.

Evans’ description in “The Kid Stays in the Picture“: “Her name was Camilla Sparv. The moment she arrived in New York, she was a star model. A tall, leggy blonde, she had a natural patrician quality money can’t buy.”

A recently restored 4K version of Charlie Chaplin‘s The Gold Rush — not the 1942 re-released version (72 minutes w/Chaplin’s narration + occasional sound) but the original 95-minute silent classic — will open the Cannes Classics section in the early evening of Tuesday, 5.13.

I’ll be arriving in Cannes roughly four hours before the screening, but I’m not especially enthused about attending the screening, to be honest. I’ve just re-watched the ’42 version and had seen it once before somewhere. That’ll suffice.

The Gold Rush was shot in late ’24 and early ’25, and premiered on June 26, 1925. Portions were shot in the snow-covered terrain of Truckee, California; the rest was shot on sound stages in Chaplin’s studio on La Brea Ave.

The New Year’s Eve “auld lang syne” scene is my favorite segment.

A kind of Roman Polanski-ish figure in his day, Chaplin had a thing for much younger women. Lita Grey, whom Chaplin began a sexual relationship with when she was 15 (are you reading this, Polanski pitchforkers?), had originally been cast as Georgia. But Grey was was replaced by the 24-year-old Georgia Hale after Grey got pregnant. Chaplin’s marriage to Grey “collapsed” during production of the film, largely because he’d taken up with Hale.

Hale didn’t marry Chaplin, but was on romantic terms with him (bip-bip-bip) in the late 1920s and early ’30s. She became wealthy through real estate investments, and died on 6.17.85.

“[Because] white people don’t have anything to say.”

Imagine if some inane TikToker was to say the same thing about POCs…imagine.

This is one more reason why I’m not on the Sinners train. It’s also a reason why some people voted for Trump. I voted for Harris, of course, but I loathe people like Daisy Dream.

I’ve been an Allman Brothers guy since the Nixon administration**, but until last night I’d somehow never listened to this one.

The actual sung lyric is “nobody left to run with any more”,

“Everybody wants to know where Jimmy has gone
He left town, I doubt if he’s coming back home
Well, Tony got a job, three kids and a lovely wife
Working in the Commerce Bank for the rest of his life”

…everything fades, weakens, falls away.

** To think that Richard Nixon was once regarded as Beelzebub incarnate. By today’s standards he’s a center-right moderate. Okay, with a paranoid streak.

“Best Allman Brothers Story,” posted on 8.21.19:

David Cronenberg‘s smoothly creepy The Shrouds has just opened theatrically. A great date movie if you have the right kind of girlfriend.

Posted from Cannes on 5.21.24:

David Cronenberg‘s The Shrouds is a brainy, silky, sophisticated, deliberately paced, high-toned “horror” film for smart, well-educated people. I loved hanging with it…hanging in it.

Vincent Cassel, in great physical shape and adorned with a great silver be-bop pompadour haircut, is Karsh, a widower who’s devastated by the passing of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger).

As a way of managing his grief he’s invented GraveTech, a cutting-edge technology that enables survivors to keep visual tabs on their loved ones as they rot in their tombs.

I’m serious — that’s really what it’s about. Watching a loved one’s body slowly rot and decay. I was sitting there going “uhm…okay” and then it was “wait…really?”

I didn’t love the complex, slow-moving story but I adored the Cronenberg-ness…the handsome stylings, the discreet nudity, the sex, the flush vibe, the upscale Canadian atmosphere, the shadowy mood, the smart dialogue.

Cassel, Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders…everyone brings their A-level game. That was enough for me.

I sing this with mannish gusto while cruising down the Merritt Parkway, you bet, and as questionable as this may sound, I can sing it as well as Muddy Waters. Really. I also do the “owwoo-yeah!” stuff. Five minutes and 29 seconds of absolute joy. Always leaves me in a great mood. Unlike what you get from Sinners, songs like this are the real thing.

“Waters recorded ‘Mannish Boy’ in Chicago on May 24, 1955. Featuring Jimmy Rogers on guitar and Fred Below on drums.

The second clip, I mean…the one with the Jamaican Jimmy Cliff guy…”I think I can make it now, the pain is gone.” And I’m saying this with a split reaction. If I were locked in a car trunk alongside a highway, the last thing I’d want to be is fucking stoned.

HE to Gavin O’Connor, emailed last night around 10 pm: “Gavin — I’ve just come from a screening of The Accountant 2, and I fucking loved it! It made me feel like I was 15 or 16 and hanging with friends.

“The brotherly rapport, which is to say the low-key, contentious, character-driven humor….the disciplined brainy vibe, the wonderful Juarez prison camp finale, the tabby cat, that icy blonde assassin (Daniella Pineda), the extra-wonderful country-bar dance scene….escapism par excellence!

“I wasn’t sure at first (the presence of J.K. Simmons‘ Raymond King threw me off) and to be fully honest I never fully put together every last plot strand (looking forward to reading a synopsis before seeing it again), but once Bernthal arrived and the humor kicked in, I was in heaven.

“The original Accountant was better than reasonably decent, and I was naturally hoping the sequel would be as good. But it’s five times better! Magnificent job! Had a great time! — Jeffrey Wells, HE (we haven’t seen each other since that party at Brett Ratner‘s a dozen or so years ago).”

Roughly five years after the release of The Accountant (’16) O’Connor announced that there would not only be an Accountant sequel but a trilogy.

“I’ve always wanted to do three because…we’re going to integrate Jon Bernthal‘s brother into the story,” O’Connor said. “So there’ll be more screen time for Bernthal in the second one. And then the third movie’s going to be, I call it, ‘Rain Man on steroids.’ The third movie is going to be the two brothers, this odd couple. The third one is going be a buddy picture.”

Well, O’Connor lied! Or at the very least he misdirected or jumped the gun or whatever. Because The Accountant 2 is, without a doubt, Rain Man on steroids itself…obviously….a brothers-in-jeopardy buddy comedy with lots of wit and persuasive atmosphere and beat-downs and thousands of whizzing bullets and dust and bald bad guys and crash-boom-bang, but always with the dry humor and a wonderful feeling of assurance that neither Ben Affleck nor Bernthal will get killed…pure fantasy bullshit but a total blast.

I felt vaguely miserable after seeing Sinners and then even more miserable after reading all those deranged Sinners raves, but The Accountant 2 put the roses back in my cheeks. Partly because it’s just a fucking good-guys-vs.-bad-guys movie without a political agenda…no instruction!…no fucking gay guys-because-every-movie-needs-to-fulfill-a-gay-guy quota or lesbians or transies…no quota casting at all, no POCs (unless you count Mexicans) and no bold-as-brass, agenda-driven #MeToo Amazons with glaring eyes and flaring nostrils (although Cynthia Addai-Robinson‘s government agent is terrific)…no woke bullshit…thank you!

I was scared when I saw Affleck’s horrific mint-green-and-orange-creamsicle whitesides, and then I realized “oh, okay, he’s wearing ugly nerd sneakers because autistic guys don’t think about looking good…they wear what they wear compulsively” so I let it go, but my blood ran cold when I first saw them.

I loved, loved, loved a dialogue scene shot in a car lot filled with nothing but silver Airstreams…the total banishing of ugly-ass Winnebagos with those awful, blue-collar color patterns…bliss!

Nobody’s talking about Blake Lively-vs.-Justin Baldoni right now — there’s simply no more gas in that tank — but Lively has persuaded everyone in the civilized world that she’s toxic and trouble. Nobody wants to work with her….she’s finished. She and her attorneys need to settle ASAP. Shut it down.