Day: September 1, 2008

I’ve seen it, posted an update and put it to bed already….Jesus.
12:30 pm Pacific Update: “I’ve heard some of the news. I’ve said before I think families are off limits, children limits. It has no relevance. I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. My mom had me when she was 18. And how families deal with issues of children shouldn’t be part of our politics.” — Barack Obama speaking to reporters a little while ago, filed by MSNBC’s Savannah Guthrie at 2:40 pm Eastern.

A motor-sport website reported on 8.26 that the ailing Paul Newman, 83, took a final spin around the Lime Rock track earlier this month in his GT1 Corvette. However accurate this sad tale may be, it summoned an immediate recall of Fred Astaire‘s “Julian” character in Stanley Kramer‘s On The Beach, and particularly Astaire’s expression after he wins the third-act Grand Prix race. (Which comes right at the end of this YouTube clip.)

Water is currently rolling and spilling over the New Orleans industrial canal’s west side, but Hurricane Gustav, thank fortune, has been downgraded from category 3 to category 2, and it’s starting to look like it won’t quite be a Roland Emmerich disaster film. (Thirty years ago the term would have been “an Irwin Allen disaster film.”) The worst of the storm will happen within the next couple of hours, but some are guardedly sensing that this won’t be Katrina 2. You can almost — almost — detect a slight tone of disappointment in the voices of the cable newscasters covering this thing.

“There was a time when Nicolas Cage, with his hangdog barks of irony, could have shouldered some of the women’s work, mocking his own penchant for excess. Now, however, the more ridiculous his films become, the more seriously he takes them — and the more, presumably, he is paid to do so.

“The Cage of Wild at Heart and Leaving Las Vegas found life to be engrossingly weird, and treated it accordingly, whereas the Cage of Bangkok Dangerous intones a line like ‘There’s a beer in the refrigerator’ as if he were reading from the Book of Micah. He appears sunken throughout, understandably depressed by his long, ropy mane of black hair; from a certain angle he’s a ringer for Chrissie Hynde, of the Pretenders.
“Only once does the Cage of yore flicker into view. It happens when Joe enlists the services of a resourceful thief, who introduces himself as Kong (Shahkrit Yamnarm). ‘Kong?’ Joe repeats, with a smile and a drawl, as though wondering when the guy is going to stop fingering wallets and start climbing the nearest tower.” — from Anthony Lane‘s review of Danny and Oxide Pang‘s Bangkok Dangerous in the 9.8 edition of The New Yorker.