Ask Mick LaSalle: Are you surprised that ‘Mother’s Day’ isn’t funny?

[...] to be fair, there are funny old people.

Yo Yo Mick: “Straight Outta Compton” could have been a classic and have competed for the Oscar if a sharp pair of scissors had been used to cut out 25 minutes or so of the film.

Isn’t there a higher power that can make the director edit the film?

Sometimes the director has it, sometimes a studio has it, and sometimes it’s a little bit of both, in the sense that a director will promise to make a film that runs under a certain length of time.

In that scenario, if the director were to turn in a longer edit, the studio would have the right to cut the film to the agreed-upon length.

For much of its running time, it’s an almost great movie, and then in the last half hour, it drops off.

The movie turns sentimental and becomes intent on showing all the characters in a positive light.

The modern age — through film, video and recordings — makes it possible to feel that you know people that you’ve never met.

If I’m honest, I’d have to say he’s one of my favorite people who ever lived.

There was even a story going around at the time — probably an urban legend, always involving a friend of a friend — of some kid who went to the Dakota, and he and Lennon started talking, and Lennon invited him upstairs and gave him a signed copy of the “White Album.”

Inspired by this, in February 1977, when I was 17, I cut school with two of my friends, and we parked directly across the street from his apartment building and waited for hours for him to come out.

[...] that was my one and only attempt.

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