Day: January 14, 2009

As sorry as I am about the passing of Patrick McGoohan, I wasn’t that taken with his internals on-screen. I loved, of course, the magnificent snap, crack and timbre of his voice — what an instrument! — blended with that purring Irish-English accent. But McGoohan always — almost always — played creepy obsessives with cold eyes and cold souls, and I can’t say I ever liked him all that much.

I respected him, naturally, for his chops, for that undercurrent of whatever, for that well pedigreed quality. He was a first-rate actor.

I loved the metaphor of The Prisoner, the ’60s TV series, but I never watched more than a couple of episodes — sorry. McGoohan, for me, was defined by his series of twisted and malevolent big-screen pricks in Silver Streak, Escape From Alcatraz, Scanners, Braveheart, etc. Yes, he was very good at putting out this particular mood and color.

What kind of actor in his right mind would turn down the James Bond role over moral grounds? He once stipulated “no kissing” in his contract for Danger Man, the British TV action series. I seem to recall reading way back when that he was a bit of a conservative prig, an old-school moralist, etc.

And why, with his British theatre background and that awesome voice, didn’t he appear on Broadway more often? In 1985 he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award played a British spook in a stage production of Hugh Whitemore‘s Pack of Lies, opposite Rosemary Harris.

If you don’t know anything about the semi-infamous Star Hotel/cowboy hat/ residual-scent episode, read about it here and then continue. I walked into the Park City police station about 10:15 pm this evening and asked if they had my cowboy hat. It took them a while to find it, but find it they did. Good guys! I now look like the Durango Dude. I am here in Park City — stoked, outfitted, ready to rock, getting my press pass tomorrow morning, etc. Life is good again.

Saddest, most neglected cowboy hat in the world on butcher-block table inside Squatters, a grilled burgers-and-cold brewski place in Park City, Utah — Wednesday, 1.14.08, 10:55 pm

Andy Klein, one of the wisest and most smoothly readable film critics in the known universe, has been whacked. LACitybeat, which he’s been reviewing for since ’03 or thereabouts, has cut him loose. Jesus, it’s the damn bubonic plague out there! L.A. Observed says he’ll continue with KPCC’s FilmWeek segment and “Off-Ramp.” Andy, if you’re reading this…we’ll talk soon. Hang tough, stand tall, wait for the next turn.

Got into LAX around 12:15ish. Paid $50 to leave on a Southwest Salt Lake City flight that will leave two hours earlier than the flight I’d previously booked, but which’ll arrive in SLC only an hour earlier — around 6 pm — because it stops in Pheonix. Live with it. It’s mid January and the current L.A. temperature is 83 degrees. But it’s 32 degrees in Park City. As it should be.

Waiting for Southwest #463 to Salt Lake City.

“A scheduled Tuesday court conference between Fox and Warner Bros. attorneys has been canceled,” the Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit wrote late last night, “fueling talk that a settlement in the contentious Watchmen case is imminent.

“Fox sued Warners last February, saying the Burbank-based studio infringed on its rights to make the comic book adaptation. In December, when federal judge Gary A. Feess ruled that Fox has distribution rights to the film, Warners faced the prospect of having the film’s March 6th release blocked.

“Settlement talks between the two sides became serious over the weekend and continued to heat up yesterday.

“A settlement could cost Warners tens of millions of dollars. A case involving copyright ownership of Warners’ The Dukes of Hazzard, which Feess blocked from release in 2005, ended in a settlement worth a reported $17.5 million.

“With Watchmen, an adaptation of the Alan Moore graphic novel with a budget in the $130 million range, the financial stakes are higher. According to sources, Fox is asking for upfront fees as well as a percentage of the back-end.”

One Sundance film I should have included on my final shortlist is Nicolas Winding Refn‘s Bronson. Journalist Bilge Ebiri yesterday spoke of “a bunch of New York journos” having seen an early screening of the bio-prison pic and gone “ape-shit.”

And for what it’s worth, a fellow with a certain professional interest in Bronson has written the following: “It’s a directorial wow from Refn and it has a Best Actor Oscar-worthy performance by Tom Hardy. I’m not kidding about Hardy’s work. It’s a total ‘who is that?’ performance which is right up there on my very short all-time list with David Thewlis in Naked and Hillary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry. Please do not miss it.

” And there’s something that’s not getting across anywhere, by the way — the film is very, very funny.”

A senior foreign-language Academy committee guy who wanted everything he said of interest to be non-attributable called last night to say two things about yesterday’s Gomorrah snub. One, he doesn’t feel that blowing off Gomorrah this year is as much of a scandal as last year’s 4 Months snub because 12 months ago the foreign-language fuddy-duds also ignored Carlos Reygadas‘ Silent Light and Fatih Akin‘s Edge of Heaven, among others. And two, voices in the foreign branch’s executive elite committee just didn’t think Gomorrah “delivered in the way it could or should have,” he said. “It’s not a matter of it not being heart-warming. It’s a matter of our respecting the film without believing that it really brought the goods home.”

Envelope/Feinberg Files columnist Scott Feinberg spoke last night to IFC Entertainment president Jonathan Sehring, whose company is distributing Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah — the widely-hailed, much-honored Italian crime film that was snubbed yesterday by the Academy’s foreign-language committee by being kept off the “short list” — a preliminary list of foreign-language faves from which the final five nominees are decided upon.

“I know I speak for the entire country of Italy and a lot of people in the critical community when I say that it just doesn’t make sense and there’s something wrong with the foreign language committee as a whole,” Sehring told Feinberg. “It’s still broken.”

Sehring, says Feinberg, “noted that despite the endorsements the film had received from festivals, critics, and even Martin Scorsese, he was never confident that the rules changes had corrected the foreign language committee’s underlying problems or that the committee would pick Gomorrah for the shortlist.

And yet Sehring had been pessimistic all along. “We were concerned,” he said. “We got messages that the initial screening didn’t go well, so you figure you’re vying for one of three slots,” referring to the executive committee’s slots. “It just demonstrates the foreign language committee’s aversion to graphic violence, I guess. I mean, I don’t know…I look back at City of God not getting a nomination. I look back at our experience with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days not getting a nomination. And now this?

“You would hope that the [committee] would pay attention to the critical response around the world. You would hope that they would take into account world cinema awards. I don’t know. How can they get it so wrong two years in a row? It’s a real disappointment, and we’re sort of dismayed, but it’s not gonna stop us from distributing movies like 4 Months or Gomorrah and we’ll soldier on.”

Note: I don’t like spelling Gomorrah without an “h” at the end. I look at it without the “h” and I go, “That’s just not right. It needs an ‘h.'”

Outta here at 6:45 am, LAX plane at 8:30 am, landing at 12 noon. Either 90 minutes or four hours of layover, depending how it goes. But however you slice it Wednesday, 1.14, is likely to be a low-activity day in terms of postings, photos and prose poems. But it’ll all work out in the long run if you have some of that Allie Fox “four o’clock in the morning courage” stored inside…which I do.