"Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were killed by their son, Nick, according to multiple sources who have spoken with family members."

"Police have not yet confirmed the account.On Sunday, Dec. 14, at about 3:30 p.m., the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) was called to a home to provide medical aid, the LAFD told PEOPLE. Upon arrival, they found a man, 78, and a woman, 68, dead. Sources confirm the victims were Rob and Michele. Police say Nick, 32, is alive and being questioned. No arrests have been made...."

People reports.

From the NYT obituary: "Mr. Reiner, who initially rose to fame playing Meathead, Archie Bunker’s son-in-law, on the sitcom 'All in the Family”' in the 1970s, went on to become a remarkably versatile film director. He seemed equally adept at the mockumentary ('Spinal Tap,' 1984), the coming-of-age film ('Stand by Me,' 1986), the children’s classic ('Princess Bride,' 1987), the romantic comedy ('When Harry Met Sally …' 1989) and the courtroom drama ('A Few Good Men,' 1992)."

He contributed so much to the culture we Baby Boomers lived through in the 70s and 80s. 

Here he is talking to Bill Maher for an hour and a half, just last September, on the occasion of the release of the 40-years-later sequel to "Spinal Tap":

REINER, at 3:40: "Nobody's ever done a sequel 41 years after the first one."

MAHER: "It's great that they're all still here."

REINER: "Yes. It's a plus. It's a plus. Although we have a bit, we have a bit in the second one, which I hope you'll see at some point... where the, a guy who's a promotion guy... says to... them, listen, it will help your legacy if at least one of you were to die during the concert, because... you know...."

MAHER:  "So true. I mean, it's the best career move anybody ever makes."

REINER: "Right. And yeah. And... Chris... as Nigel says... I don't wanna die. And then McKean as David says, but you settle for a coma. And he says, oh, well, that, that's very good. Thinking outside the, outside the literal box...."

Megan McArdle went to see the Matt Walsh movie "Am I Racist?"

You know, so did I, last week, and I didn't even blog about why I wasn't blogging about it. But I'm telling you now because I have the hope that reading McArdle will liberate my thoughts on the subject. 

The headline is "You might not enjoy ‘Am I Racist?’ You should watch it anyway. In the mockumentary, Matt Walsh is concerned that he is racist. Awkward moments follow" (WaPo)(free access link).

Ok, first, I don't agree that it's a mockumentary. I think the word "mockumentary" refers to a scripted (or improv) fictional movie that takes the form of a documentary, like "Spinal Tap" or "Best in Show." It's a great comedy category. I love it. But "Am I Racist?" films real people who are being themselves within a situation that the filmmaker sets up. It's in the category of pranking. The classic example is "Borat." The central character is pretending to be something he isn't, perhaps for sheer comedy, perhaps with a political agenda, and the idea is to extract something revealing from people who are not in on the joke. 

McArdle writes:

"Hundreds of French châteaux for sale as owners cut and run."

The London Times reports. 

On the one hand environmental rules and other bureaucratic initiatives are driving up the cost of maintaining stately homes. On the other, “the younger generations are urban,” [said Olivier de Lorgeril, chairman of La Demeure historique]. “They often want to have international careers and to live in towns and cities.”...

“A monument that is not lived in is a monument that is not looked after,” he said. “We keep repeating that our national monuments are in danger.”...

And here's a conversation between the elderly owners of Château de Courson, whose family has owned the place since 1775 and whose children don't want it because it "consumes just about all your life":

“We had that singer here once”...

“Oh, what was his name?”

“Sting”...

Yes. The article makes it sound as though Sting just dropped by once, but it was the location for his excellent 1985 film, "Bring on the Night." We saw the band rehearsing in at the Château de Courson. Michael Apted directed. 

From the contemporaneous NYT review:

In addition to the performance footage, Mr. Apted also includes a few unexpected moments: a visit by a tourist group to the chateau where the musicians happen to be rehearsing (one woman keeps her fingers in her ears while walking through the room) and a disagreement between the costume designer Colleen Atwood and Miles Copeland, Sting's pushy manager. ''Well, I'm sorry, I'm just a peasant, man, but I'm telling you they look boring to me,'' Mr. Copeland complains noisily about the backup singers. It's a scene straight out of ''This Is Spinal Tap.''

Speaking of Sting, I was just thinking about his song — also from the mid 80s — "Russians":

We share the same biology, regardless of ideology/But what might save us, me and you /Is if the Russians love their children too....

What everyone wore at the Grammys, beginning with a man in shorts...

... tight gold plastic short shorts — panties really, almost Spanx, don't you think? He's carrying Lady Gaga inside a prop left over from "This Is Spinal Tap."

More tight shiny men's pants at #25 (Ricky Martin). Justin Bieber also models the comically male, spoofing adulthood, I think, doing bagginess instead of tightness, at #36. Katy Perry, at #40, seems to be spoofing the old mishap of unwittingly dragging toilet paper with you out of the bathroom. Rihanna, at #47, seems to have collected all that toilet paper and crimped it into millions of tiny ruffles to band around her body in stripes — alternating with — apparently! —nakedness.

It's the Grammys. It's perfectly apt to dress as a joke.

Art metal.

Heavy metal music has gotten rather intellectual. So says the NYT. I don't know. You decide. This is offered up as evidence:

When Atsuo, the single-named singer-drummer for the sludgy Japanese post-metal band Boris, was asked recently in the online magazine radcompany.net about the influence of Satan on the band's work, he gave a predictably high-minded answer, engaging the question's absurdity - heavy metal's Satanic influenceis one of the genre's great clichés - and then trumping it. "It's simple to talk about Satan as a symbol, but it's important to consider the deeper meaning of the symbol," he said in one of his rare interviews to be translated into English. "To me, the Devil is not a symbol, but a moment that touches on morals. The moment when a person changes - that is the Devil."

Does that strike you as intellectual or ... I don't know ... something out of the "Spinal Tap" screenplay? But then, it doesn't matter so much what they say as how it sounds. I stop at the heavy metal stations on XM radio when I'm driving in my car and am often surprised at how good things by bands with strange names sound. I tell myself to remember the names. I don't know if the ones I've liked are the same art metal trend the Times is tracking. They do name a lot of bands in the article, but unfortunately I've forgotten all the names I meant to remember.

10 best rock movies.

Here's the AFI list of the ten best rock movies ever made. (Do I have to say "via Blogdex"? I got the link via Blogdex, but I'm irked at Blogdex for not tracking my blog. I've tried reentering my blog address and even emailing them -- more than once! -- but they never pick up my links. They never answer the email either.)

[CORRECTION: It's not the AFI's list, but a really good list by a music critic. Sorry. The AFI is mentioned in the article, and they do have their lists. This isn't one of them.]

One thing about the list is that the only movie on it I haven't seen is the one they place first, "Almost Famous." I've never cared about seeing that. It's always looked to me to be mainly about how cute Kate Hudson is. But since I don't at all respond to the putative cuteness of Kate Hudson -- not positively anyway -- I've steered clear.

Of the remaining nine, I even have seven on DVD. I don't have "Hail, Hail Rock and Roll," because it's not available on DVD, and I don't have "The Rutles," because frankly, it's not very good. I remember when it first came out. It was just a TV movie. We loved both The Beatles (who were being spoofed) and Monty Python (who did the spoofing), but we could barely sit through it. It just wasn't very funny. The closest thing to funny is that the John character is named Nasty. "The Rutles" is nothing compared to "This Is Spinal Tap."

I looked over my DVDs to see what I'd suggest that wasn't on the list. I have "The Filth and the Fury," but it's not all that great, and "Sid and Nancy" is already on the list and much better. The one I'd suggest is "Nico Icon," and I thought to write that before it occurred to me how underrepresented women are on this list. Women are underrepresented in rock music, of course, but to have the only significant women characters on the list be groupies -- the Kate Hudson character and Nancy Spungen -- is a bit galling, especially considering that one of the greatest of all rock stars is Madonna and she really did make a great movie ("Truth or Dare").

UPDATE: Writing a lot and publishing instantaneously and without an editor, I still work hard at cutting verbosity. I regret missing the last two words of that phrase "the ten best rock movies ever made." How did that idiotic usage get started? There's no possibility of ranking movies that have not been made. I suppose it's an alternative to "of all time." Which is a stupid thing to say about movies generally and rock movies especially.