Day: September 30, 2004

I was in a hair styling salon yesterday (9.29) and, for the first time in a fairly long while, actually sat in a chair and read recent issues of People, Us, the Star and In Touch cover-to-cover. We all know they’re essentially the same rag aimed at a not-terribly-bright female readership. (I worked as an in-house freelancer for People from ’96 to ’98, when it occupied a slightly higher editorial station than it does today, so I have a certain insight.) And we all know they’re essentially glamour porn. What’s changed is that they’ve gone from being hard R to XXX, and it’s nauseating. It makes you want to wash your hands. These rags distort, degrade and generally vulgarize the lives of celebrities (not to mention the human condition) as surely as gynecological X-rated films pass along some extremely rancid imressions about what goes down between men and women they get close and naked together.

I take back my theory about Team America: World Police creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker possibly being closet righties — they’re a couple of proclaimed Republicans and KY Jelly Bush bitches. In 2.3.01 news story written by E Online’s Emily Farache about their then-controversial Comedy Central series That’s My Bush, it was said to be “ironic that [Parker and Stone] are getting so much flak, because they’re both Republicans and — believe it or not — they don’t plan on ridiculing Bush. ‘What we’re trying to do is way more subversive,’ Parker said. ‘We’re going to make you love this guy.'” They also copped to their Republican loyalties in a Fox News story that ran in late ’01.

“Life’s hard…but it’s a lot harder if you’re stupid.” — spoken by Steven Keats’ “Jackie Brown” character in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73), reading from Paul Monash’s script which was based on the novel by George V. Higgins.

“There’s a revolution going on,” the legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle (Hero, The Quiet American) tells the Guardian‘s Zoe Cox, “and the world’s changed. Kids these days have so much visual experience they don’t think in literary or narrative terms. They’re constantly online or playing computer games or fiddling with their phones. These things may not be sophisticated, but they are realigning the parameters of visual experience. It’s almost like the death of the talkies.”

I’m somewhat surprised to say that Charles Shyer’s Alfie (Paramount, 10.22), a remake of the 1966 Michael Caine original, is a sure hit, a likely Oscar contender and (did I forget to say this?) a very fine film — touching, truthful, emotionally supple. The Oscar part of the equation certainly includes a Best Actor nomination for Jude Law. His performance as a smoothly charming womanizer (a limousine driver in present-day Manhattan) is more shaded and varied than Caine’s, and gets deeper and more affecting as it moves along. Alfie has loads of big-studio gloss and panache, but it pays off inwardly with obvious skill and finesse. Coming from the director of the schmaltzy Baby Boom, Father of the Bride and I Love Trouble, Alfie feels like some kind of life-change movie. The old Shyer movies (which he co-wrote with former wife Nancy) were massage-y and conventional in their audience-pleasing ambitions. Alfie obviously intends to please also, but it does so in a much more measured and subtle fashion and without copping out with a feel-good ending (which Shyer was pressured to deliver by Paramount production executives). It’s one of the best confections of its kind I’ve ever seen. After the failure of Affair of the Necklace, Shyer knew it was do-or-die time…and he did. Hail to the script (by Shyer and Elaine Pope), photography (Ashley Rowe), editing (Padraic McKinley), production design (Sophie Becher) and original music (Mick Jagger, John Powell and David A. Stewart).