Day: December 26, 2008

A story posted today on Philly.com reported that a 29 year-old Philadelphia man shot a guy in the arm last night during a showing of Benjamin Button because the guy wouldn’t stop talking. That’s obviously a totally unacceptable and uncalled-for act. I hope the guy who took the bullet is okay…really.

But I would also be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling a wee bit sympathetic as far as the feelings of the shooter were probably concerned. I’m more of a zap-em-with-a-squirt-gun man myself.

Now that I’ve mentioned it, that’s not a bad idea. If theatres were to sell squirt guns at the kiosk along with popcorn and drinks, far fewer people would talk during movies, for obvious reasons. Just as (and I don’t want to give the wrong impression by saying this) if people were getting shot for talking in theatres with some regularity — say, two or three times a month nationwide — you know that talking in theatres would all but cease. I’m just saying.

In a chat with In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, Last Chance Harvey star Dustin Hoffman confesses to having “strong feelings” about film criticism. “There’s no job description,” he says. “You see someone’s suddenly a new critic, and you say, ‘Oh, I know that name.’ Yeah, he was a food critic. So the newspaper moved him up from food critic to film critic, which is fine, because everybody is a critic.

“But there are other people who know film, who really understand it, maybe even on the level [that] Scorsese does.” That’s me! I’m that guy! I may not have quite the same open-door, Michael Powell-worshipping passion that Scorsese has, but I’m from the same fraternity, the same church, the same faith. If anything I probably care about movies too much, to the point of neurosis and basic denial of life habits.

“I name Scorsese because he’s probably seen as much or more film than anyone I’m aware of, and is sensitive to film deterioration,” Hofman goes on. “And the fact that these critics see so many films, I don’t know…if it’s a job it’s already questionable. And I do think that films are meant to seen with audiences, and they don’t do that. There has to be some self-consciousness, I think.”

At the very least, Tapley writes, Hoffman feels that “the critical fraternity should be more steeped in the process than they are.”

What…the making of movies? Hofman knows that can’t happen without integrity issues coming up. And yet most of the people I know in the writing-about-movies racket are as steeped in the process of knowing movies and as much of the attendant political hoo-hah as they could possibly absorb without being p.a.’s or actors or producers.

Imagine a world in which the assurance of fast wifi on a train trip would be so locked down that you wouldn’t have a moment’s doubt. I’m experiencing considerable doubt right now, of course, as I prepare to catch an Amtrak train from Albany to Penn Station. I found out during a train ride from Grand Central to Norwalk earlier this week that you can have three, four or five bars on your AT&T Air Card but you still can’t connect to the internet if you’re moving.

Albany-Rensselaer train station — Friday, 12.26, 12:35 pm — waiting on 1:05 pm train to Penn Station.

Oh, and some of the yokels up here pronounce Albany like Albany, as in “you can call me Al.” It’s Albany as in “all of me,” of course.

Okay, so Marley and Me/Old Yeller is the big 12.25 to 12.28 champ — bigger than anyone had projected, myself included. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is second, Adam Sandler‘s Bedtime Stories is third and Valkyrie is fourth. Marley‘s success — it will end up with $100 million and then some — is, of course, a bit of mixed-bag thing — bad for our collective movegoing souls, understandable from an economically-afflicted-viewers POV, good for sales of the original book, bad because of the “me too, Marley!” movies it’ll inspire.

This response to Rick Warren‘s 12.23 “this is who I am and what I believe” video is interesting for the points that are made, for the intriguing Latin accent of the speaker, and the fact that he speaks very quietly, so as to not wake someone else up, I’m guessing.