Month: August 2009

Originally posted on HE in March of last year (you can’t find it online otherwise):

“A friend has faxed me the pages of that John Hughes/”Big Baby” article that I mentioned the other day, the one that trashed him — despite Hughes being at the time the 25th most powerful person in Hollywood, according to the the then-thriving Premiere magazine — for being “one crazed, scary, capricious bully.” It turns out it was a January 1993 Spy magazine piece by Richard Lallich.

So here it is: page #1, page #2, page #3, page #4, page #5, page #6, page #7 and page #8.

“Apologies for the quality, but these are scans of faxed pages. At least they’re legible. The type may seem small at first but just double-click and zoom in.”

’80s comedy dynamo John Hughes, who allegedly “didn’t take care of himself” and “had bad eating habits, like that of a child,” according to a guy in the Hollywood comedy community, died on a Manhattan street this morning. Of a heart attack. My source heard Hughes may have been with his family when it happened, but he’s not at all sure and has heard otherwise. I love/loved one Hughes film in his whole canon — Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

Apart from 28 Days Later and a few others, many if not most zombie movies since Dawn of the Dead have either been seen as dry comedies or comedy-flecked, tongue-in-cheek horror romps. Ruben Fleischer‘s Zombieland (Sony/Columbia, 10.9), working from a script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernic, is obviously pushing in the direction of overt genre comedy. Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson and, in a cameo, Bill Murray playing “one of the infected.”

Sharon Stone is actually 51. Any sort of mainstream sensual display from older MILF types is generally a good thing, I believe.

The final day-before-Friday, cross-your-fingers and hold-your-breath G.I Joe numbers are as follows: 19% Unaided Awareness, 90% Total Awareness, 45% Definite Interest, 9% Not Interested, 19% First Choice and 30% “First Choice & Rel.”…whatever that last stat means. I still don’t see a weekend haul that will go much higher than the high $20s or low $30s. If I’m wrong, please explain how.

A film critic from a major east-coast city wrote this morning about new potential pressures that may be visited upon N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott in his new capacity as costar (along with Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips) of At The Movies. “Remember the old days when almost every movie ad had a ‘two thumbs…way up’ quote from Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert?,” he wrote. He meant that Siskel/Ebert didn’t start out as black-or-white, yes-or-no, positively-inclined thumb critics, but they seemed to lean in that direction after their show took off. “I’m saying this because TV audiences don’t like people who are perceived as ‘negative’ or ‘mean’ or ‘elitist,'” my critic pal said. “i don’t want to be part of this discussion, but i’d like to hear what you and your readers might have to say.”

I knew that my inability to access Twitter this morning wasn’t my own technical fault due to password problems or some other technical horseshit obstruction.

“We intend to charge for all our news websites,” New Corp. honcho Rupert Murdoch has officially said in so many words, adding his belief that “if we are successful, we will be followed by other media.” Murdoch owns the New York Post and Wall Street Journal as well as the London Times and Sun newspapers in England.

So what kind of weekly or monthly fees will average news junkies like myself have to pay in order to stay high and informed once all the major news providers start charging? What will it come to in order to read the major print outlets that can’t cut it unless they start charging? In the ’90s a typical Manhattan news hound used to buy the four NYC dailies plus the Voice and the N.Y. Observer and New York magazine and whatever else. Which came to $35 per week and $140 per month…something like that.

What would the estimated cost be in today’s economy? I’m afraid that once all the big news orgs jump on the Murdoch bandwagon that it may come to something like…I don’t know, $250 or $300 a month? More?

Yesterday’s “Argument Over Beers” piece sure stirred things up. I was rather proud of the precision and clarity in the piece as it was well written in both a structural and an expressive sense. But I didn’t quite get it right when I tried to elaborate on the notion that the world would be a much better place if the philosophical, temperamental and romantic individualism that is the bedrock platform of conservativism (a.k.a. “take care of yourself and leave me alone to do whatever the hell I want” selfishness) could be somehow eradicated.

To make my point in my usual impudent, button-pushing, excite-the-opposition fashion I lightheartedly used terms like “exterminate” and “green re-education camps.” I knew this would anger people, which of course it did. But it also brought on a response from hordes of literal-minded righties accusing me of being literal-minded myself.

So let’s try it again with a lighter touch and a bit more metaphor. If I could eliminate righties from the face of the earth easily, painlessly and un-traumatically, without being inhumane or upsetting anyone’s apple cart or having to deal with the unfortunate echoes of the policies of Pol Pot, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, I would. If I could, say, clap my hands three times and be done with them all, or — here’s a more positivist, life-embracing approach — magically transform them into whatever the polar opposites of Rep. Michelle Bachman or Rush Limbaugh or Rep. John Boehner or Phil Gramm or Joe Cassano might be, I would do so without a moment’s hesitation.

Because such an act would unquestionably pave the way toward a better, kinder, more humanistic, less corporatized and more European-styled world with all kinds of global cool-down policies and universal health care for all and everyone eating healthy foods and driving Priuses. Okay, we all like burgers and sips of Jack Daniels and McDonalds fries but corporatized junk food would be largely eliminated.

As I’ve said time and again I genuinely like guys like Clint Eastwood and John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone and all the other right-wing icons in action movies (except for Chuck Norris), and I deeply admire the character of various conservative guys I’ve personally known and had business dealings with (Eastwood and Matt Drudge included). But there’s just no more room for pugnacious conservative naysayers in today’s world — they’re just saying “no” in order to say no and getting in the way. Mass personality transplant operations would be impossible so I don’t know what to suggest.

Reply: “They know what they like.” Counter-reply: “If they knew what they like they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh.”

Denied advance press-screening access (like everyone else) to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Variety has enlisted Aussie staffer/stringer Richard Kuipers to write a review off a screening at the Birch Carroll & Coyle Myer Center Cinemas in Brisbane. But Kuipers’ reactions seem, by my sights and expectations, overly moderate.

A super-sized $175 million CG movie that Paramount refuses to screen for any press whatsoever must be seriously flawed from not only a critical perspective but, one would think, from the easy-lay standards of Joe Popcorn. At the very least a film of this type warrants a little John Anderson sarcasm or some Todd McCarthy-esque haute disdain. But all Kuipers can muster is a few wan laments.

He says that Stephen Sommers‘ film plays “more like a highlights reel from an established franchise than a movie intended to launch it” and that it “interrupts its barrage of CGI action for only the barest minimum of anything resembling character development.” Let me explain something. People like myself want to see tough critics ripping Sommers’ lungs out here. We want razor-tipped savagery. We want intestines and other internal organs splattered all over on the floor.

Kuipers says the film is “edited as if the audience wouldn’t watch unless every scene were switched to overdrive” and that the “not-bad basic plot never gets much of a chance to be anything more.” He also complains about “uninspired flashbacks to the characters’ pasts [arriving] like commercial breaks slotted into what seems to one long setpiece.”

Okay, I get it, fine. I’m sure Kuipers is expressing his reservations as plainly and comprehensively as he knows how. Now can we have some fun here?