It took about 40 minutes before I remembered.

I’ve been watching Leos Carax‘s Annette for a while…two hours and 19 minutes all in…but now I have to hit the Apple store. Update: Okay, it’s fixed.

Honest initial impression: As they (Driver, Cotillard, Sparks guys, Carax, singers) were striding down the street at night while singing “May We Start?”, I wanted to see them attacked and eaten by snarling wolves. No, changed my mind — I wouldn’t want the wolves to hurt the kids or the female singers, and certainly not Cotillard. But definitely Russell and Ron Mael…that smug little half-smile that Russell wears and the way he folds his scarf around his neck as they leave the studio and stride out of the building and down the sidewalk, and especially director Leos Carax…the orchestrator of the whole thing. You might say I felt an instant animal dislike for this film.

Val Kilmer — haggard and roughed up by cancer but spiritually persistent as far as it goes. He was Mr. Hot Shit in the Reagan, Poppy Bush and Clinton eras (Top Gun, Batman Forever, The Doors, Tombstone, Heat, The Saint), but now he’s the semi-tragic star and cinematographer of Val. I saw this absorbing, dig-down portrait of the 61 year-old actor and onetime superstar yesterday afternoon, and for a while I didn’t know what to think except “uhm, well…”

Be honest — it’s a melancholy sit.

Edited by Leo Scott and Ting Poo, Val is all catch-as-catch-can video footage — stuff that Kilmer shot over the last 40 years, ’80s and ’90s VHS and onward into digital and 1080p. Some of it is just faces and moments and time-grabs, and some of it is steady and gentle and poignant, and after a while it gets you…it’s a serious doc about a serious, intense guy…haunting, intimate and often (how could it not be?) quite sad at times.

“I think of myself as a sensitive, intelligent human being with the soul of a clown…”

You can sense that whomever and whatever Kilmer might have been when he was young and pugnacious and humming with hormones in the ’80s and ’90s, age and cancer have definitely taken him aside and whispered in his ear “time to turn that shit off, bruh…those chapters are over.”

Kilmer has not only modified what and who he is inside but age and disease have molded him into a different physical being — he now looks a bit like Will Sampson from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest only older and grayer. Imagine if Cary Grant had aged into William Hickey in Prizzi’s Honor or Oskar Homolka — it’s on that level.

And everyone had to wonder why Kilmer didn’t show up in Cannes a week or two ago for the Val premiere. It was easily the biggest moment of his life and career this century, and yet for some reason…

You know what Val tells you? I’ll tell you what Val tells you. It tells you that when you grow older, life does not fuck around. Especially when cancer comes along and says “hey man…are you ready for some serious shit in your life? Because I’m about to fuck you up but good.”

There were four…no, five standout moments for me. But before I mention them I should share an opinion, which is that Val would have been a better package if it had devoted, say, 35% or 40% of its running time to professional-grade video interviews with, say, eight or ten talking heads — friends, colleagues, agents, producers, journalists…people with a little perspective outside of KilmerDome.

For me the five most affecting moments are (a) Kilmer arguing with director John Frankenheimer on the set of Island of Dr. Moreau (“Will you turn the video camera off, please?”), (b) Kilmer sitting by a fireplace and cutting off hunks of his long hair with a knife (this was the one sequence that made me think of getting up and leaving), (c) Kilmer and his son Jack dressed in mid ’60s Batman and Robin costumes, (d) a weary Kilmer telling an assistant that he needs to take a break from autograph-signing and fan-greeting, due to some physical ailment, and (e) Kilmer driving through his childhood neighborhood of Chatsworth and muttering “this place is hell…pure hell…I hate it.” (Or words to that effect.)

Paraphrasing a line from a 5.6.20 Taffy Brodesser Akner N.Y. Times piece about Kilmer: We still need to believe that all our efforts weren’t for nothing, that we could — we will — survive a dark moment in our history and that when that happens, we won’t be left without the things that made those moments decipherable and meaningful and therefore tolerable.”

Repeating: what Val finally tells you is that life doesn’t fuck around.

My iPhone 12 Pro Max, bought only six weeks ago (June 11), stopped working this morning. Total freeze-out, won’t let me sign in. Tried the usual YouTube tutorials…nothing. I now have a Genius Bar appointment for 7 pm this evening. If a relatively new iPhone doesn’t even reboot there’s something fundamentally wrong — I definitely have grounds to demand a new one.

Remember the old solution to start-up problems or otherwise frozen iPhones? You’d use a paper clip to push the hole in the side of the phone for a “soft” reset…remember? That’s been eliminated in the newer models — no more hole or paper clips. Now the soft reset solution is to briefly hit the up and down volume button, and then press the power button down and wait. Even that procedure doesn’t work with my newbie.

I didn’t do anything to the phone…no accidental liquids. Okay, I dropped it a day or two ago but that’s part for the course. Plus I have a plastic shock-absorber cover.

I just saw M. Night Shyamalan’s Old. It delivers a hooky premise (wealthy tourists are unable to leave a cliffside cove in which the laws of time and biology are bizarrely suspended) but without much rhyme or consistency.

It’s interesting and trippy and semi-spooky — I was certainly never bored — but there are all kinds of loose ends and head-scratchy developments that don’t line up or unify. And yet despite the haphazard plotting it feels oddly intriguing.

In other words, the fact that the low-key horror elements don’t make sense or build into a cohesive whole strangely works in Old‘s favor. It feels like a first draft of an experimental creeper, written by someone new to the game who doesn’t care about following the usual rules. I was saying to myself “this is kinda sloppy but at least it’s different, and I’ve no idea where it’s going.”

And then during the final 15 minutes Old suddenly loses its nerve and turns logical — it tries to impose order by making sense of things (villains, conspiracy, arrival of law), and in so doing it betrays and destroys itself. A complete collapse.

As I left the theatre a guy booed. But without the imposition of logic and rationality during the finale, I’m betting that the booing guy would have been more accepting and perhaps even won over.

But of course rural bumblefucks don’t have common sense. Because they’re stupid bumblefucks who live in their own little vacuum-sealed Trumpian or Marjorie Taylor Greene echo chambers.

I’ve never felt that the term “re-shoots” is a fair one, as it suggests that a film in question hasn’t worked out in editing, and that it’s been re-thought, re-written and re-shot because what was shot before wasn’t good enough. That’s not what re-shoots typically means. Re-shoots mostly means that new material been shot. Perhaps a scene or two will be re-shot, and that’s rare. And so what if that happens? Every writer working on anything of any size or scope always rewrites, re-thinks, re-shuffles and re-shapes. Filmmakers also, and it’s all to the good.

Bill McCuddy to HE (written last week): “I love you. You know that. I’ve been a fan for 20 odd years, but the column seems to be more for you than us. If this is The Sopranos, I want to be Tony, not Dr. Melfi. I know what I’m about to suggest involves more work, but the stories that I pay to see have to be mouth-watering. So far I’m dry coughing.”

HE to Friendo: “‘Mouth watering’? What am I, a hamburger chef? A gelato guy with a push cart? A trained seal? I bleed every day onto the keyboard and you’re saying ‘mmmm, I want more flavor, more gusto, better jokes, more pepperoni on the pizza.’ Jesus!”

McCuddy to HE: “The stuff we want to pay for has to be sexier and stickier, in my opinion. Air Mail is kind of getting it right but even they are struggling. I want you to succeed. Will keep you posted.

“P.S. For the record I’m fascinated with the evolution of the space and your battle with the Stalinist wokesters so, while I may in the minority, I’m good there. (Why not make all of THAT POLITCAL-CULTURAL SHIT the subscriber stuff?) And no, I’m not pissed that I wasn’t one of the insiders you gave a free pass to.”

HE to McCuddy: “Fine. Whatever. Thanks for the notes.”

McCuddy to HE: “Really or just being nice? Okay, I’ll take it either way.”

HE to Friendo: “What do you think I am, a news bureau here? A cable station with three anchors, four news writers, three tech guys, five producers and a couple of van drivers on call? I’m not Saturday Night Live, for Chrissake. It’s just me and the movies and whatever streams or opens and whatever happens on a real-deal basis…whatever comes to mind or pours out. I know you’re right, and that I have to generate more flavor, tastier ice cream, a dynamic twice-weekly podcast, steaks with more sizzle and drugs with more potency…I have to be a chef, a high-end drug dealer, a dramatist, a magician, an Uber driver, a comedian on the level of Dave Chapelle, a juggler, circus acrobat…all of that and more, and it still won’t be enough.

“Everything that happens or erupts goes into the column…everything including my entire 40 year history in this racket, my strange inability to see Nicolas Cage‘s Pig, not going to Cannes but going to the forthcoming Telluride Film Festival, my loathing of the Sundance and Toronto agendas, lost keys, trips to Prague and Zurich and Mexico, the souls of cats and kittens and pit bulls, lost wallets in the dumpster, side-eyes from fans of atrocious hip-hop at West Hollywood gas stations, lost iPhones, recollections of this and that…anything I can pull out of my head…fuck!

“Do you know of another one-man-band + long-standing bigmouth who generates even a third as much content? I’m not blah-blahing here…every day I’m digging fucking ditches.

“I’ve been grinding this shit out 24/7/365 since ’06 — 15 years straight. If you count the HE launch in August ’04 I’ve been doing it for 17 years. And 23 years if you count the launch of Mr. Showbiz and the other columns, beginning in October ’98. Every drop of blood I could squeeze out along the way, I’ve squeezed out. Every damn day and twice on Sundays, and it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. And it’s not enough for Bill McCuddy.”

McCuddy to HE: “THAT’S NOT WHAT I’M SAYING. I’m saying to build a subscriber base you gotta reconfigure some of what you’re saying to make it more irresistible. It’s MARKETING, not changing. And what do mean ‘not enough for me”(?) I come at least three times a day!”

On 12.10.94 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association voted to give their Best Film Score trophy to Howard Shore‘s compositions for Tim Burton‘s Ed Wood. It may have been the first time that LAFCA has given such an award to an ironically composed score — one that was knowingly, wink-winkingly and brilliantly “bad”. Except that it wasn’t, of course. A better description might be that Shore was going for satirically banal.

Shore’s music was actually wonderful (and it still is), but you needed to listen to it with the right kind of ears. You had to understand that Shore had attempted to write music that might have been composed for an actual grade-Z Ed Wood film from the ’50s — cheesy-sounding but “in quotes.” Shore was more or less saying between the stanzas “do you get it?…the movie is kidding and so is the music.” There’s absolutely no question about Shore’s intent.

The LAFCA awards were handed out at the Bel Age Hotel on Saturday, 1.21.95, and longtime LAFCA member and L.A. Reader film critic Andy Klein presented the Shore award.

In his introductory remarks, or so the legend goes, Klein riffed on Shore’s music in a way that I’ve just attempted, calling it brilliantly insincere, satirically referenced, playfully composed, etc.

And yet to everyone’s surprise Shore was vaguely miffed at Klein’s remarks, or so I read afterwards. I don’t have a tape or a transcript of his acceptance speech, but I heard through the grapevine that Shore said something along the lines of “I don’t know what Andy Klein is on about but I didn’t write a score that was meant to be chuckled at.”

I asked Klein this morning if he could fill in the gaps. “The gist of what I said was that Shore managed to have it both ways — walking the line between being of the genre and being about the genre, as in campy,” Klein replied. “It was a compliment, suggesting he managed to do both. He took offense at the latter part, which struck me as weird.”

Question for HE commentariat: What other film scores could be fairly characterized as having been written ironically or with a general lack of sincerity? You could claim that almost any score for a comedy or a satirical genre spoof (like the score to The Spy Who Loved Me) might qualify as Ed Wood-like, but I don’t know. I’m not sure that anyone besides Shore has ever composed the same kind of score. You tell me.

I also believe that the opening Ed Wood credit sequence is absolute genius-level, and totally in keeping with the tone of the film.

I was going to say that Cleveland Steamers sounds cooler — that the idea of a baseball team steamin’ and chuggin along like a choo-choo train sounds more Cleveland-ish…a better fit for a rugged, working-class, rock-n-roll city like Cleveland. But then I looked up the local slang associations.

“We remember those moments, as we move forward with change / You see, it has always been Cleveland that’s the best part of our name.” — from ad copy read by Tom Hanks.

Together, we are all… pic.twitter.com/R5FnT4kv1I

— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 23, 2021

All day yesterday I was telling myself “tomorrow is Thursday., and a chance to catch evening viewings of Old and Val.” (Wokester publicists are being their usual delightful selves in terms of screening invites. Love you guys!) This morning I was genuinely shocked upon realizing that today is Friday, 7.23.

In mid July of 2019 Tatiana and I did five or six days in Prague, took a train trip to Munich and endured a briefly terrifying lost-wallet episode, and then took another train ride and had a couple of relaxing days in Zurich.

Munich nightmare: Soon after arriving in Munich I took an Uber to meet a journalist friend at a beer garden. The Uber driver was a 40ish Greek immigrant named Oscar. Friendly but maybe a wee bit slow on the pick-up. Anyway, I got out and Oscar took off. 10 seconds later I realized my wallet was missing.

Uber’s search engine didn’t give me Oscar’s phone, but it allowed me to write him and report the loss through their relay software. It also allowed me to write management and ask them to reach out to Oscar, etc. Agitated and scared, I sent three identical messages to Oscar and Uber management. Five minutes passed…nothing. Ten minutes. Then I got a message from Uber saying that they’d passed the news along to Oscar, blah blah. But no Oscar reply.

After 20 or 25 minutes I figured it was a lost cause, and so I called another Uber to take me back to the hotel. And of all the Uber drivers in Munich, Oscar answered and said he’d be there in three minutes. “Oscar!” I wrote back. “I left my wallet in your car less than half an hour ago!” Then he pulled up and I jumped in. “Do you have my wallet?” I asked. “No,” he said, and my heart sank. Then he said, “I gave it to the police.”

Tennessee Williams: “Sometimes there’s God…so quickly!”

So we drove to the precinct in question, and sure enough the wallet was there. And the cops were really friendly. I thanked them, and one said, “You should thank this guy,” referring to Oscar. “But of course!” I said. Happy ending! A $40 tip for Oscar, which he wouldn’t accept at first. But I insisted. I should’ve made it $50 or a $100, I know.