Day: February 14, 2013

“The Vegas odds will tell you exactly what the Gold Derby odds are telling you,” Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote earlier today. “There is no difference because they’re all drawing from the same thought pool. The way things are going now, though, I wonder if there will ever be any surprises again.

“I don’t think a movie like The Godfather or The Godfather Part II could run the gauntlet today and win [Best Picture]. It couldn’t overcome the giant guilds picking what they Facebook-liked over a masterpiece. Nor the nastiness we saw in this year’s race. Can you imagine?”

Translation: Sasha is still crestfallen about her eloquent and masterful Lincoln having lost in this year’s race, and about the takedown jabs (including what seemed to me like a crucial anti-Lincoln Sweet Spot observation from N.Y. Times columnist David Carr) that might have had some marginal effect. But I wonder if either of the Godfather flicks might indeed have trouble winning in today’s environment. Thoughts?

Forget what actually happened in this real-life news story, which broke a day or so ago. The basic premise, you have to admit, is kinda funny if Melissa McCarthy is the marriage counselor and Kevin James is the husband. A sexually ruthless marriage counselor fits McCarthy’s screen persona (i.e., the nutter who’s oblivious to her own appalling behavior) to a T. I don’t know who should play the wife but this is definitely a megaplex flick if you ignore the real-life ramifications.

Errands, conversations, bank visits, meetings, chance encounters, crosstown hikes and the constant Starbucks filings. Today is one of those Manhattan catch-as-catch-can days. 23rd Street and above. No downtown, no Brooklyn, no nothing. I always take pics and videos on days like this — partly just to do it, partly so I can look back and say “this is what it felt like that day,” and partly so I can post them so I can get back outside and take more pics and videos.

Everybody always looks grim and stern and mildly pissed on the streets, but that’s not a reflection of where they’re at. It’s a kind of performance, really. Because they’re all just walking around with their New York street faces. I’m steady and cool and so are you (or so it seems at a glance) but don’t even think of trying to fuck with me. I do it too. In fact I’m having a pretty great time. Isn’t everybody? This is one of the greatest…I was going to say it’s one of the greatest walking-around, face-watching, never-a-dull-moment cities in the world. It is that, I guess, but there are many, many other cities that can make that claim. Paris, Hanoi, London, Rome, Prague, Toronto.

What a drab and mortifying finish for one of the most innovative and delicious and beautifully photographed and superbly choreographed and exceptionally well acted films of 2012 — to end up in a video parlor on 8th Avenue in the mid ’40s with a yellow sticker on the jacket.

GoGo in-flight wifi raised their prices significantly last September….capitalist wolverines.

There’s nothing wrong with a highly respected, Oscar-winning filmmaker making a popcorn thriller that uses stylish menace, bad guys, hypnotherapy, sexuality, sadism and the hero going “aarrgghhh!” to punch up ticket sales. Plus I’m trusting that Danny Boyle will do the right thing. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle is another plus. Ditto Vincent Cassel as the arch-villain.

The best thing about it, of course, is the Dali-esque touch with the head-blown-off guy (is that Cassel?) talking like a chicken with its head cut off.

I’m not sure I like James McAvoy any more. I don’t know what it is but he bothers me. And I really don’t like scenes in which the main protagonist is held down and made to feel so much acute pain that he goes “Aaarrggghhh!”

Another comfort factor is knowing that Fox Searchlight doesn’t release crap.