Day: March 17, 2007

All of those wonderful high-concept George Lois Esquire covers from the mid to late ’60s are viewable online here. in fact, some some 70 years worth (going back to 1933) are uploadable.

Three and a half years ago I Want Media interviewer Patrick Phillips asked Esquire editor David Granger “why magazines today seldom publish such distinctive, graphic covers? Do they simply not sell at the newsstand?” Granger said yeah, that it’s “feared that those kinds of covers won’t sell. At various times during my time here we’ve done more concepty, graphic covers, and generally it’s kind of a tough sell.”

New York Post columnist/critic Lou Lumenick yesterday slammed Variety editor Peter Bart for the content of his 3.15 column which, in Lumenick’s view, makes Bart “Hollywood’s [new] blowhard-in-chief” for “once again pandering to the studio suits (i.e., his biggest advertisers) by attacking the New York Times‘ A.O. Scott and the legion of other critics (including Post critic Kyle Smith) who failed to appreciate the artistic subtleties of 300.”

When she was at the Hollywood Reporter, Anne Thompson‘s weekly single-topic column was called “Risky Business,” a moniker she created from whole cloth back in the late ’80s. Now that she’s shuffled over to Variety the weeky column isn’t called anything, and the Thompson blog — known as “Riskybiz blog” at the Reporter — is now called “Thompson on Hollywood.” The Reporter acquired some sort of dominion over the “Risky Business” name when they hired Thompson three or four years ago, and now they don’t feel like giving it back. They’re legally entitled, but it’s not very gracious or considerate of them to do this. THR editor Gregg Kilday has taken over the “Risky Business” column.

“In short, 300 is a perfect combination of moral wrongheadedness and inept filmmaking. On any level beyond the pictorial, Snyder makes clunky Cecil B. DeMille epics like The Ten Commandments look positively deft. It presents itself as an instructive case study in nobility and bravery, but the only lesson I came away with was, ‘When in doubt, kill the hunchback.’ Go tell the Spartans, indeed. Tell them to go fuck themselves.” — excerpt from a review by L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein, the Alexander-the-Great of 300 haters.

According to an article in today’s Taiwan United (which only I can read because I own the necessary question-mark decoding software), the Taiwan (Taipei) Golden Horse Film Festival is angling to invite Gong Lias the festival’s jury president, pending the Taiwan’s News Bureau’s approval. (What the…?) But Li said she hasn’t received any invitation yet, that the job is demanding and tiring, and that she may not have time to do it as “she may play in a big-budget Hollywood film in June, which she’s now in negotiations [about].”

(l. to r.) Gong Li, Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford

Because Steven Spielberg ‘s Indiana Jones 4 is going to start filming in June, there’s obviously no other conclusion than to presume that it and Gong Li’s “big-budget Hollywood film starting in June” are one and the same. Absurdities aside, I’ll say this — Gong Li is exactly the sort of mainstream Asian actress that Spielberg and George Lucas would be hot for/comfortable with for whatever they might have in mind.

“There are about five things to write songs about: I’m leaving you. You’re leaving me. I want you. You don’t want me. I believe in something. Five subjects, and twelve notes. For all that, we musicians do pretty well.” — Elvis Costello to Esquire‘s Tom Junod for one of those “What I’ve Learned” pieces.

On last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, Maher asked guest Chris Rock, “So I hear you’re running for president?” And Rock answered, “Yes, and I’m all black.”

It’s insipid but allowable to draw a link between Lena Headey‘s 300 hot-bod character being named Gorgo (i.e., “Queen” Gorgo) and Kal Penn‘s character in The Namesake being named Gogol. Especially with both films opening on March 9th…what are the odds?

Lena Headey, Kal Penn

Both names imply some kind of ogre-ish appearance or essence, but which is more problematic? I can roll with Gorgo, actually — Headey and director Zack Snyder have made her into a strong but sexually ruthless character, and the name is obviously similar to “Gorgon,” a Greek mythology term that refers to a “vicious female monster with sharp fangs and hair of living, venomous snakes,” according to Wikipedia, so I guess it half-works.

But Gogol (taken from Nikolai Gogol, a respected 19th Century Russian writer) is a frightfully coarse and lumpy-sounding first name for any kid growing up in America, and this alone turned me off Mira Mair‘s film, frankly. Penn’s character is given this name by his Indian-immigrant dad (played by Irfan Khan). He does this out of admiration, we’re told, for the Russian writer.

The film is obviously about ethnic identity and the factors that sometimes dilute or degrade this, but I was very soon asking myself what kind of father gives his son a name like that? Only a sadistic or collossally ignorant parent living in the U. S. of A. would name his son “Gogol.” That’s worse than naming him “Ezekiel” or “Sue” or “Hortense.”

The likely motive for Khan’s Indian immigrant probably isn’t too far from the one that motivated that ne’er-do-well dad in Johnny Cash‘s song “A Boy Named Sue.” Khan is looking to obnoxiously (you could almost say brutally) impose an ethnic apartness upon the kid, and thereby instill a sense of native character. He doesn’t want the boy to flow and groove with materialist WASP culture as he grows up. He wants him to have to deal with constant shit from his peers all of his young life. That’s a pretty loathsome thing for any dad to do. It’s certainly not a pleasant or informative thing to watch or contemplate.

The offshoot is that I’d rather sit through 300 a second time than watch The Namesake again….and that’s saying something.

When it’s all said and done on Sunday evening, Zack Snyder‘s 300 (renamed in a roundabout way by L.A. City Beat critic Andy Klein as Go Tell The Spartans to Go Fuck Themselves) will end up with $30 million give or take. That’s a more-than-50% plunge from last weekend, but it’ll still be at $110 million or thereabouts by tomorrow night. God help us…God help us all.

Some commentators have been clucking, “My, look at the stunning disparity between what the critics and the ticket-buying public love and hate…critics sure are out of step with Joe Gorilla.” That’s certainly true on this end — I am way out of step with fans of 300, and I’m absolutely beaming with pride as a result. This is a stale and tired-ass thing to say, I realize, but every firing synapse tells me that 300 is yet another metaphor for the end of moviegoing civilization as some of us have known it for the last, oh, 30-plus years.

Snyder, in my book, now ranks at the top of the list of villain-class Hollywood directors like Michael Bay, Stephen Sommers, Shawn Levy and Roger Kumble. There’s never been a dumber, emptier and more sub-simian influence upon narrative cinema than the graphic novel, and 300 is the clank of a sword striking a metal shield and the dumb-thunk sound of tens of millions of graphic-novel-worshipping moviegoers going, “Whoa…looks cool.”

I paid to see 300 last week (I paid money to see it!) and liked exactly two things — Lena Headey‘s skimpy dress (and of course her big shtup scene) and the scene when the crouching Spartans are chuckling with each other about how the dense shower of 10,000 Persian flying arrows are causing them to fight in the shade. That was good — the film was on to something during that very brief moment.

It’ll be nip and tuck as to whether Premonition, the poorly-reviewed Sandra Bullock thriller, takes the second place prize with an estimated $18 million, or whether Wild Hogs takes in a bit more than $18 million and edges out Bullock. Hogs, in any event, will hit $100 million sometime today or tomorrow. Dead Silence will come in fourth with $7 mil or so. Chris Rock‘s I Think I Love My Wife is sputtering and may finish with just over $5 million tops….not good.