Month: March 2009

Yesterday’s suggestion by a Republican congressman that those AIG bonus recipients should resign or kill themselves was treated as a joke. But this is one of the few times when I’ve found myself relating to a Republican viewpoint. And the people who instinctually laughed at this idea should think again

$165 million is nothing compared to the billions in stimulus money that has gone to AIG, but symbolism counts in times like these. The recipients of the AIG bonuses should obviously not only give the money back but atone in some profound and public way.

Imagine the public reaction if just one of them took his shirt off during lunch hour on Wall Street, knelt down and opened himself up with a knife, and then was beheaded by a colleague. People would be aghast and traumatized, naturally, but imagine the respect that would gradually be showered upon this man and his family after people had taken the time to consider the meaning of such an act. “At least he got it!,” people would say.

One of the failings of American culture is that no one believes in shame, much less showing it in public by admitting guilt. Fewer still, if any, subscribe to symbolically (i.e., ritualistically) setting things right with a display of public humiliation and/or suffering. My suggestion two months ago that Wall Street scalawags should be placed in stocks and pillories was also treated as a joke. But I meant it sincerely. And the inability of people in this country to understand, much less respect, the concept of public penance for past sins is — no question — a sign of moral slackitude.

Ritual seppuku has always struck me as an extremely perverse and appalling practice, but at least it’s tied into the concept of honor — which is clearly not something that’s highly valued by the AIG ayholes who are now rolling in that $165 million in bonus dough and dodging the efforts of N.Y. state attorney general Andrew Cuomo to identify and expose them to the public.

That said, the scrappiest and most unequivocal reaction to the AIG bonus scandal was posted yesterday by Young Turks host Cenk Uygur, to wit:

“AIG executives will walk away with $450 million in bonuses,” he wrote, “at a company that was such a colossal failure that it lost $99.3 billion last year and required a $170 billion taxpayer bailout. Worse yet, the executives in the division that caused this epic meltdown will get $165 million in bonuses. I can’t get over the injustice of that.

“But don’t worry — we are told that Tim Geithner ‘was really upset by the news’ and ‘berated them’ over the phone. What a joke! Wow, that tongue-lashing must have really stung. I wonder if their several million dollar bonus will help cushion the blow of being yelled at.

“Geithner is responsible for setting the rules in the first place. It’s all in the rules. If you let people take the money, they will. If you don’t allow it as a condition for receiving the money, they can’t. As the politicians scurry to find someone to blame, they should look in the mirror. They’re the ones that set the rules of this game.

“Now the same politicians who brought you this piece of injustice will claim ((a) there is nothing that can be done and b) will pretend to be outraged and then not fix the underlying problem. The politicians will huff and puff and probably do nothing. So, after all this fake outrage, will this happen again? If this broken incentive system is not fixed, of course it will. You can bet your bottom dollar on it. In fact, you already have.”

There are no particulars about the “tragic” skiing accident suffered by 45 year-old actress Natasha Richardson, and which has reportedly resulted in a “traumatic brain injury.”

Richardson is currently at the Hopital du Sacre-Coeur de Montreal. She was initially being taken to Hospitalier Laurentien, which is close to Quebec’s Mont Tremblant ski resort where the accident occured. Here’s hoping for her survival and recovery. Support and condolences offered to husband Liam Neeson and their kids.

Duplicity, which I saw again at last night’s Zeigfeld premiere, goes down much more easily and understandably the second time. My ex-wife Maggie, who saw it with me, said that with one relatively minor exception she found it engrossing and unconfounding. Julia Roberts more or less looks her age in the film, which is fine, but she was luminous last night, especially with the blonded hair and a slightly trimmer physique. Director-writer Tony Gilroy offered some gracious and spirited pre-screening remarks, thanking everyone but particularly (i.e., lastly) his wife.

Julia Roberts at last night’s Duplicity premiere at Manhattan’s Zeigfeld.

At the MOMA after-party I spoke to screenwriter William Goldman (All The President’s Men, Marathon Man), who’s known Gilroy “since he was ten years old.” I spoke also with Brothers director Jim Sheridan (who said, by the way, that Brothers probably wouldn’t be going to Cannes, partly because “Tobey [Maguire] doesn’t want to go there”) And with Duplicity editor John Gilroy, who’s now working on Phillip Noyce‘s currently-shooting Salt. Universal/NBC honcho Jeff Zucker, screenwriter Stephen Schiff and Tribeca Film Festival honcho Geoff Gilmore also attended

I noticed Fox 411’s Roger Friedman attempting to speak to Roberts and getting quickly hissed at and shut down. Indeed, Friedman wrote about this today: “When she saw me last night, Roberts didn’t hesitate to cut me dead,” he said. “She was rude, downright nasty and dismissive. She snubbed me in front of other people to make her point, and later cut in between me and Gilroy to make her point. Her behavior was unexpected and chilling.”

Whatever Sam Mendes‘ Away We Go (Focus Features, 6.5) actually is, this just-posted trailer sells the impression of a wise and witty upscale family comedy with a truth-sadness undercurrent. It’s about an expectant couple looking for the ideal place to live. My only concern is the casting of The Office‘s John Krasinki and SNL‘s Maya Rudolph in the leads. This will sound odd, but as I watched I was saying to myself, “They look too much like real people.” I didn’t even recognize Krasinki with the beard. Not that he’d be Mr. Charisma without it.

Click on the Rope of Silicon link or click-through to the full page for the trailer — for whatever reason the trailer doesn’t seem to want to load on HE’s front page.

In my passing-of-Ron Silver piece two days ago I said that “history will not judge him kindly” for becoming a 9/11 Republican and supporting Bush Cheney in ’04. But the final graph in Bruce Weber‘s N.Y. Times obituary, which appeared in yesterday’s print edition, amends this assessment somewhat. Silver’s brother Mitchell tells Weber that the actor voted for Barack Obama last fall.

Mitchell Silver, who lives in Newton, Mass., said that his 62 year-old brother’s “acting awed them, [but] his conservative streak confounded them.” His quote: “Ron’s politics, as far as I know, were not shared by anyone he knew, except for the people he knew because of his politics.” And yet “he told me that he did vote for Barack Obama in the end.”

As HE reader Matthew Morettini notes, “Perhaps he was coming out of his 9/11 haze.”

“An ultra-sophisticated love story between two corporate spies with pronounced mutual trust issues, Duplicity is a brainy, non-violent Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the film Intolerable Cruelty wanted to be, a Trouble in Paradise for modern times,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy.

“Smart, droll and dazzling to look at and listen to, writer-director Tony Gilroy‘s effervescent, intricately plotted puzzler proves in every way superior to his 2007 success Michael Clayton. The twisty, time jumping narrative forces viewers to keep on their toes, and it could well be that Duplicity is too smart for its own good as far as the popcorn masses are concerned.

“Still, this is about as good as it gets these days for sharp-minded Hollywood entertainment made for an intelligent audience, and Universal can only hope that Julia Roberts, in an excellent return to leading lady form, still has the B.O. pull to put this one over.”

The Weinstein Company has bought US rights to Sam Taylor Wood‘s Nowhere Boy, the John Lennon teenaged-years biopic that began principal photography on March 8th. (Latin American and German rights were also purchased.) I’ve read Matt Greenhalgh‘s screenplay, and the scruffy British dialogue sounds as true and authentic as it does in Greenhalgh’s script of Control, which, for me, is as good as it gets.

I posted a piece in late January that said “if you take out the born-during-the- German-blitz scene in 1940, the story spans from 1955 to 1960 — years of creative ferment and coming into one’s own.

“19 year-old Aaron Johnson (The Greatest) will obviously play Lennon from age 15 to 20 — not much of a stretch. They’d better get the light reddish brown hair color right. If they screw this up they’re dead.

“The great Kristin Scott Thomas will play Lennon’s Aunt Mimi, which is a larger, more expressive role than the part of Lennon’s mother Julia, who’s being played by Anne Marie Duff. The young Paul McCartney arrives during the last 20-odd pages, and generates, as you might expect, a significant flavor and force. Thomas Sangster (next in Jane Campion‘s Bright Star) will portray Macca.

“The story ends with Lennon and McCartney heading off to play an open-ended gig in Hamburg.”

After decades of absence, a first-rate DVD of Andrzej Wajda‘s Danton (’83) is due from the Criterion Co. on 3.31, or nearly two weeks hence. I’ve seen this superbly composed historical drama only once, and have never forgotten the vivid writing, the bold performances (particularly Gerard Depardieu‘s as Georges Danton) and the mesmerizing recreations of early 1790s Paris.

$35 friggin’ dollars for a standard DVD, even if it does contain two discs with many bells and whistles? It gave me pause, I must admit. But this is an epic film, and the transfer quality is up to the usual Criterion standards. Update: I watched the first 20 minutes last night on my 42″ Plasma and it’s almost Blu-ray quality.

Regarded by some as an allusion to the battle between Polish Solidarity and the doctrinaire Communists (including General Wojciech Jaruzelski) who ran Poland and repressed and penalized Lech Walesa and his cohorts in order to hold onto power, Danton is basically about the clash between two revolutionary leaders, Danton and Maximilien Robespierre (Wojciech Pszoniak), and the many guilllotine deaths that resulted on both sides.

Danton is earthy, ribald, impassioned, and perhaps a wee bit corruptible, but also an advocate of moderation and compassion in the handing of so-called enemies of the revolution . Robespierre is exacting, scrupulous, fastidious and morally demanding in a revolutionary sense, a result of this being that he comes to regard Danton’s moderation as a betrayal of the Revolution, which leads to strenuous efforts to slice off his head.

“Without stretching things too much, Mr. Wajda presents us with a Danton who is the articulate conscience of the Revolution, someone, perhaps, not entirely unlike Lech Walesa, the popular spokesman of Poland’s Solidarity movement,” Vincent Canby wrote in his 9.28.83 N.Y. Times review. “On the other hand, Robespierre is seen as being completely removed from the practical needs and real feelings of the people, a stern father-figure of a dictator, a man who doesn’t hesitate to approve the murder of thousands of people for the fatherland’s ultimate good.

“In an interview in Le Monde, Mr. Wajda denie[d] all associations between 18th-century France and 20th-century Poland, though he does say that Danton represents the West and Robespierre the East.”

What it’s like to have your head chopped off? What would you feel and think? Would there be anxiety and terror or…? I’ve read that the head lives for one to two minutes before expiring so you can presumably see, hear, smell and even taste things before blacking out.

I remember being stoned one night and imagining a conversation between myself and a kind of spectral administrator of in-between states just after my head and body had been separated. “I’ve got a couple of minutes left and I want to be both,” I told the administrator. “I’ve felt the organic totality of my body since birth and don’t want to let that go of that until I’m dead, and I don’t want to lose any kind mental awareness either, much less my sight, smell and hearing in my head.” Sorry, said the administrator — you can’t be both. You’ve been separated and you’re going to have to choose. “All right, all right,” I said. “I’ll be the head.”

Tony Gilroy‘s Duplicity “is a breathlessly enjoyable mind-game, the kind of movie that uses romantic comedy as both leavening and misdirection from its true intent, even as it revels in the heated interaction between its two leads,” critic Marshall Fine posted this morning.

“Built like a devilish puzzle – with emotional variables that alternately underline and undermine the logic of the solution – Duplicity is giddy fun, something that’s been in short supply at the movies. While there have been other jigsaw movies that keep your brain racing as you attempt to connect the disparate pieces, movies that played with time-structure such as Go and 21 Grams, there aren’t many that have the same fizzy titillation that Duplicity does.

“It’s all in the title, isn’t it? Keep it in mind as Gilroy works his cinematic sleight of hand.”