Harvey Korman has died; Hedley Lamarr lives.

“There is something depressingly stunted about this movie; something desperate too. It isn’t that Carrie has grown older or overly familiar. It’s that awash in materialism and narcissism, a cloth flower pinned to her dress where cool chicks wear their Obama buttons, this It Girl has become totally Ick.” — from Manohla Dargis‘ SATC review in today’s N.Y. Times.

By a standard set many years ago by Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, “the women in Sex and the City are little better than also-rans,” writes the New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane, “and their gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to be.

David Hughes’ illustration for Lane’s review; one of Fancis Bacon’s Popes.

√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚Äú’When Samantha couldn’t get off, she got things,’ Carrie says. Look at the beam in your own eye, sister. Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (‘I got it’), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. ‘I can build you a better closet,’ he says, as if that were a binding condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come.
“The creepiest aspect of this sequence was the sound that rose from the audience as he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women applauding.
“The tactic here is basically pornographic — arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach — and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in.
“When the wedding hits a bump (look out for Kristin Davis screaming ‘No! No!’ at Chris Noth like a ninth grader auditioning for The Crucible), and the bridegroom veers away, our heroine’s reaction to the split is typical: ‘How am I going to get my clothes?’ What, honey, even the puffball skirt that you wear to the catwalk show — the one that makes you look like a giant inverted mushroom?

The red-band trailer for the Coen Bros.’ Burn After Reading (Focus Features, 9.12) tells you it’ll almost certainly be — surprise! — a dry, deadpan thing mixed with broad slapstick, and probably hilarious. My favorite aspect, though, is the photography by Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezski, whose legendary work on Children on Men was passed over last year for the Best Cinematography Oscar. A larger version.

Cafe Charbon, a beautifully preserved (late 19th Century) bar in the Menilmontant district, was an absolute madhouse an hour or so ago. Insane. My return flight leaves tomorrow morning around 10:15 am, putting me back on JFK terra firma around noon.

Thursday, 5.29, 11:35 pm.

Huffington Post‘s Hillary Rosen has reported that at last night’s “All Things Digital” conference in Carlsbad, California, media bigwig and staunch conservative Rupert Murdoch said that Barack Obama “is a rock star…I love what he is saying about education [and] I think he will win and I am anxious to meet him.”
John McCain, he added, “is a friend of mine. But I think he’s got a lot of problems. He has been in Congress a long time, and you have to make a lot of compromises. So what’s he really stand for?… I think he has a lot of problems.”

Early yesterday evening on the way to meet friends for dinner in the 17th.

My idea is this: Eddie Murphy shouldn’t return as “Axel Foley” proper in the new, Brett Ratner-directed Beverly Hills Cop flick (the fourth), which will shoot sometime next year and come out in 2010. He should play Axel gone to seed, as a 375-pound prosthetic fat-ass. I know that Ratner and the team have to do something for the film not to seem like a creaky retread, and this would be that.

Houston, we have a problem. They can’t just put it all into a bag, take a space walk, give it a toss and let it float away?

A video “that purportedly shows a living, breathing space alien will be shown to the news media Friday in Denver,” according to a 3.28 story by Rocky Mountain News reporter Daniel J. Chacon.

Jeff Peckman, who, Chacon says, is “pushing a ballot initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver to prepare the city for close encounters of the alien kind” (in other words…a nutbag!) said “the video is authentic and convinced him that aliens exist.”
Peckman “said the general public will have to wait to see it because it’s being included in a documentary by Stan Romanek.” What? On top of which “no one will be allowed to film the segment with the extraterrestrial because there is an agreement in place limiting that kind of exposure during negotiations for the documentary.” Peckman is allegedly sitting on conclusive proof of the existence of an alien life form and he’s talking about contractual rights and whatnot?
An instructor at the Colorado Film School in Denver scrutinized the video “very carefully,” Chacon reports, “and determined it was authentic, Peckman said.” What instructor? Doe he have a name? My bullshit meter is doing somersaults.

From this Matt Gross “Frugal Traveller” piece in the 5.28 N.Y. Times about doing Paris on a budget, a term I haven’t used before — “bobo,” which means bourgeois bohemian, as in ostensibly funky, soulful and tourist-free but not really. I should have popped out by now, being in the Urban Dictionary and all. Some of us are slower than others.