Day: July 26, 2005

There’s a movie — a Showtime or an HBO movie, I’m thinking — in the story of Silvia Johnson, an indiscreet Colorado woman of 40 who just pled guilty to various charges for having schtupped a bunch of local teenage boys. A news story says she threw a series of weekly parties between October ’03 and October ’04 in which she gave drugs and alcohol to eight of the boys and had sex with five of them. Enabling young guys to get high is stupid and irresponsible for any adult, but what’s wrong with a little sexual healing? If only I’d known someone like Johnson when I was 14 or 15, I would have been a much happier lad. Courtney Love would be great in the role, but Meg Ryan would be better.

It’s 97 blazing degrees on the streets of Manhattan today. We might as well be in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It’s so hot you can break an egg and spill it on the sidewalk and it would sizzle, I swear. The air on some of the subway platforms feels like something out of a blast furnace. At least it’s better than last week’s climate, which was muggy like a rain forest’s. There was a soppy thickness to the air…you needed a machete to cut through it.

The just-up trailer for Rob Reiner’s Rumor Has it (Warner Bros., 12.9) looks like a typically conservative big-studio soother. It feels smart (i.e., alert), inviting, easy-going. The content, it suggests, will be that of a politely randy sex-and relationships comedy. And I have to admit it looks like the film will be fairly funny in the usual-usual sense….maybe.

One of the main reasons big-studio movies always feel appealing is because of the way they’ve been shot, or, more precisely, the way they’ve been lighted. The dp for Rumor Has It is Peter Deming (The Jacket, I Heart Huckabees), and he has totally followed the standard drill by making all the actors in this trailer (Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Costner, Mark Ruffalo, Shirley MacLaine, etc.) look movie-star exquisite. Perfectly dressed, just the right hint of a golden-amber glow on their skin, every hair follicle arranged just so, etc. Nobody ever talks about this, but the superficially sensual composition in these films is why they tend to sell many more tickets to the hoi polloi than sometimes more provocatively photographed indie films. Average folks respond to the vibe of these damn things because they provide a certain sense of visual Tupperware tidiness by way of Victoria’s Secret…a sense of middle-class security…a visual massage effect by way of the carefully calibrated photography.