Day: January 27, 2009

Ben Brantley‘s 1.26 pan of the just-opened Hedda Gabler is a corker. The spirit was truly with him when he wrote it. “Ian Rickson, who this season delivered a nigh-perfect Seagull on Broadway, one of the best revivals I have ever, ever seen, is now responsible — oh, break, break my heart — for one of the worst revivals I have ever, ever seen. It’s not just that everyone is bad in this Hedda — it’s that they’re all bad in their own, different ways.

“Could it be that this production has fallen under the spell of Twilight, the hit movie from fall about the price of loving for teenage vampires? I mean, think about it. The forever fresh-faced Mary Louise Parker, one of our most delightful actresses, has traded in her usual air of easy, quirky spontaneity for the robotic petulance of an I-hate-everybody adolescent in a yearlong sulk. With her hair darkened, her face ghostly pale and her frame skeletal thin, her Hedda brings to mind a valley girl who’s given up cheerleading to be a goth because it’s way cooler and it matches the place her mind’s at now.”

What agent in his/her right mind would put his/her actor client into a lowball Bonnie and Clyde movie — an effort sure to be either ignored or urinated upon — under a director whose last effort was a “family” flick starring Lee Majors?

Once costars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova are no longer conjugal. “Too bad,” Jett wrote an hour ago. “Not that I’m surprised. Age difference killed it.” Hansard is 38, Irglova is 20. 18 years can seem like a fairly big gap from the vantage point of the younger person. Gaps diminish once you get older, of course. A 30 year woman with a 48 year-old guy is a bit strange, but only a bit. A 40 year-old woman and a 58 year-old guy…who cares?

When I was in my early 20s I used to regard people who were 30-plus as somehow soiled and lacking in spiritual buoyancy. On the other hand I used to worship the idea of women in their mid 30s, and I finally got down with one — a 37 year-old divorcee — when I was 22 or 23. It was heavenly in a sensual milkshake sense, but she wasn’t as interested in the present and future tense as I was — she was settled into her child-less suburban home, drank too much scotch, thought too much about her lost youth and opportunities. She was Maggie May.

I saw Danny Boyle‘s Slumdog Millionaire for the second time last night at Santa Barbara’s Lobero theatre. It didn’t improve or diminish. It’s still a scruffy, extreme-cinema poverty-tour Dickens fable — vigorously well done for what it is. My impression of Mumbai hasn’t changed — i.e., that it’s populated by some of the nastiest and cruelest people on the planet. And I’m still bothered by Dev Patel‘s halting, deer-in-the-headlights response to anything and everything that arouses, challenges or threatens his Jamal character.

Boyle Durling from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

Boyle came out afterwards and did a 30-minute chat with SBFF director Roger Durling. As an theatre-of-life observer and raconteur, Boyle is a complete pleasure. He’s one of the most fully alive filmmakers I’ve ever sat with. (We did a 20-minute video interview in Toronto.) I could listen to him for hours. He knows everyone and everything. Durling asked the right kind of questions — i.e., very general — and just stood back and let Doyle go to town.

For me, European TV commercials have always been the Holy Grail. This one’s dead perfect, and far more effective than this said-to-be-sexy PETA vegetable ad (rejected for Super Bowl airing) that is obvious, metallic and way too pushy.

Ice Cream from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo