The opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (‘44) meets the spirit of Omicron Christmas.

Yesterday Hollywood hotshot and cultural pulse-taker Lewis Beale sent his annual movie milestone list. I’ve included HE counter-opinions in some instances. Here, again, is HE’s 12.19.21 list of the year’s 30 finest films.

The Best: ‘Riders of Justice,’ ‘Pig,’ ‘Prayers for the Stolen,’ ‘A Hero,’ ‘The Power of the Dog,’ ‘The Hand of God,’ ‘Licorice Pizza’.” / HE: I have to presume Beale hasn’t seen “Parallel Mothers.”

The Worst: ‘Annette,’ ‘Cry Macho,’ ‘The Many Saints of Newark,’ ‘The Tomorrow War,’ ‘The Woman In the Window,’ ‘Titane,’ ‘Bliss,’ ‘The Lost Daughter,’ ‘The Mitchells vs. The Machines,’ ‘The Unforgivable.’

Overrated: ‘Passing,’ ‘In the Heights,’ ‘Drive My Car,’ ‘Petite Maman’.

Underrated: ‘Benedetta,’ ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’

Guilty Pleasures: ‘Godzilla vs. Kong,’ ‘Copshop’

Biggest Disappointment: ‘Summer of Soul’ (too much talk, not enough music)

Films You Couldn’t Make Me Watch Even If You Waterboarded Me: ‘The French Dispatch,’ ‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife,’ ‘Halloween Kills,’ anything from the MCU. / HE insists that this year Beale got it wrong about the MCU, and I’m saying an an MCU hater for the most part — Spider–Man: No Way Home really and truly hits a grand slam during its final hour.

If Pornhub Were In the Feature Film Business: ‘Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn’ (Yes, this is the title of a real Romanian film)

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I never thought I’d say that Marvel honcho Kevin Feige, whom I’ve regarded as a demonic force over the last seven or eight years… I never thought I’d wholeheartedly endorse the idea of a Spider-Man film being nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, but right now I agree with him.

Brian Desmond Hurt and Alistair Sim‘s A Christmas Carol (’51) will always be the finest version of Charles Dickens‘ holiday tale, and the 2011 Bluray version is easily the best-looking — excellent detail, mine-shaft blacks, wonderful monochrome palette. Then I came upon this new 4K version on YouTube, completely free and deserving of the highest praise. It might even be a touch better than the Bluray.

One dreams that in honor of the life and lore of the great Joan Didion, who passed yesterday at age 87…one imagines that an HD scan of Frank Perry‘s 1972 adaptation of Didion’s Play It As It Lays — a film that totally captures the detached Didion mood and vaguely nihilistic disdain she felt about this town — might finally be streamed.

You can watch the movie and read Didion’s book at the same time. They’re almost the same thing.

I accepted a long time ago that this film will never be HD’ed or streamed. Somebody out there really hates it with a passion, and wants it kept on YouTube.

It’s the most curiously arresting film ever made about cold, jaded, corroded Hollywood. Weld’s performance as sad, spaced-out Maria (pronounced Mar-EYE-ah) Wyeth is easily her best ever.

Kim Morgan: “Play It As It Lays floats and swerves and cuts with observations and weirdly timed statements throughout, brilliantly matching the fragmented time fame and switching POV of Didion’s novel, while wandering from place to place and person to person with Maria’s depressed but succinct sensitivities.

“It’s often genius-level, and so the fact that Play It As It Lays was poorly to adequately received at the time (though Roger Ebert loved it) seems unjust to me. Many critics thought it very pretty, and Weld and Perkins fantastic (they are), but very empty (it’s not, and it is, precisely the point). Or that Perry was all wrong for Didion (he’s not).

“Didion’s novel has sometimes single-paragraph sentences, terse observations met with deadpan responses, and Perry visualizes her manner stunningly. And he does so as a Perry film, not just a Didion film — this is what happens when another is helming your own work, even if you write the screenplay — you cannot control your narrative once it’s in the eyes of the other beholder.”

I loved Dominick Dunne‘s Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (Netflix). Well worth watching

I just watched Tom Barbor-Might‘s Velvet Underground: Under Review (’06), an inexpensive but decently assembled doc about one of the most influential bands of the ’60s. It’s obviously a bit rougher and splotchier than Todd Haynes‘ The Velvet Underground, but I honestly kinda prefer it. I found it more accessible, less precious and without so much of an emphasis on John “screechy violin” Cage. Barbor-Might’s talking heads include Robert Christgau, Norman Dolph, Malcolm Dome, Clinton Heylin, Billy Name, Maureen Tucker and Doug Yule. (I think.)

White wokester attitudes about people of color boil down to this: POCs (particularly African Americans) have been so consistently and systemically marginalized, held back and shat upon for four centuries, that we now need to level the playing field by tilting the game in their favor as much as possible to counterbalance generations of white preferentialism.

John McWhorter and many other people of character, higher education and candor believe this is more or less a valid assessment of things. But if white people tweet or verbalize this observation they might be labelled as white supremacists and suffer professionally as a result. McWhorter doesn’t have to sweat this one.

I knew Sterling Hayden personally. Not well but somewhat. I ran into him here and there in the late ‘70s, interviewed him once or twice. I was a fan and a friend as far as it went. His manner was a bit odd and curious but only because there was so much going on inside. I actually loved that about him. At times peaceful and reflective, at other times anxious or even turbulent, I could always feel — sense — where Sterling was at. He was like a surly uncle with a kind heart and a beautiful half-smile that he only revealed in rare moments.

I watched him act in two locations during filming of Frank Pierson’s “King of the Gypsies” in ‘77. He was happiest as a roamer, a wanderer. He once lived on a river barge in Paris — a life for me if I could’ve managed it! Sterling was magnificent in “The Asphalt Jungle” and “Dr. Strangelove.” and “The Long Goodbye” and Bertolucci’s “1900.”

Quote: “Fasting is the precise opposite of debauch. I’m always torn between the two. The hard thing is to hold that middle ground, hold that middle ground.”

Hayden reminded me of my big, tall, eccentric paternal grandfather, although he wasn’t that far from my father, age-wise. A nearby resident of Wilton, CT. He used to take long morning walks. He was a great writerly fellow, like a character out of Melville. A writer, a dreamer, the soul of a poet, Wonderful Zeus-like gray beard, walking stick, Irish tweed cap. Deep purring voice, and occasionally a bellower when irate. Enjoyed an occasional hash pipe. Loved his Johnnie Walker Red.

Hayden was one of the most spiritual actors I’d ever had the pleasure to know or speak with.

There are the rote facts of life, the plain material truth of things, and then there are the currents within. The singing angels, the demons, the fireflies, the banshees, the echoes, the dreams…the vague sense of a continuing infinite scheme and how we fit into that. Every last one of us can define our lives as a constant mixing of these two aspects, but the charm and final value of a person, for me, is about how much he/she seems to be cognizant of and dealing with the interior world, and how much he/she comments and refers to those currents and laughs about them, and basically lives on the flow of that realm.

Some go there more frequently or deeply than others, and some are just matter-of-fact types who let their spiritual side leak out in small little droplets from time to time.

Sterling Hayden, by my sights, was almost entirely about those currents. He never just said, “I’d like a little sugar in my coffee” and let it go at that. Well, he would…but if you asked him to expand upon that notion he would just take off and you’d just sit back and marvel. Hayden knew various coffees and coffee growers and had walked through coffee plantations in the Caribbean at dawn and he knew all about how sugar was refined and would speak metaphorically about the sweetness of sugar being the enticement but coffee being the reality of it all, the bean from the earth, the bean that needed to turn brown and then be ground down and prepared just so, and then he’d be off on some tangent that took the coffee-vs.-sugar metaphor and ran with it, or took it and jumped off a cliff as it were.

Hayden was a fascinating, hungry and obviously vulnerable man, Proud but insecure and ridden with guilt about naming names in the ’50s, jolly or surly depending on the time of day, very singular, a great contentious bear of a man, unsettled, always the thinker, certainly a poet or a man trying all the time to be one, a man of the sea and a boy in some ways. He and Patti Smith would have gotten along famously. He loved getting high. And (I’ve already said this) he loved his Johnnie Walker Red.

We were once speaking about his role as the farmer in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 and he started to talk about his final line in the film, which he wrote, but I said it before he did — “I’ve always loved the wind”. Sterling loved that. He chuckled and patted my knee and said “God love ya.”