Day: January 14, 2010

ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons, who apparently hears about NBC shenanigans out of his friendship with Jimmy Kimmel (having written for Jimmy Kimmel Live for a couple of years) has tweeted the following: “Next week is Conan’s final week hosting the Tonight Show. His staff is trying to book big guests so he goes out with a bang. It’s true.” (Thanks to HE reader Doug Helmreich.)

Nikki Finke hasn’t reported that that NBC Universal honcho Jeff Zucker has gone into In The Loop lubricated horse cock Peter Capaldi-as-Malcolm mode in negotiations with Conan O’Brien‘s reps, but it sounds like this might be happening anyway.

It seems, in other words, as if Zucker is snarling and clawing and spitting wads of saliva as far and ferociously as he can in order to discourage anyone at GE or anywhere else from thinking “wow, this guy is such a destructive asshole…let’s figure out how to get rid of him!” Zucker is lurching and flicking his tongue and snapping and slamming his alligator tail against the office furniture.

Finke reports that Zucker has taken “a super tough threatening position” with O’Brien’s reps, who are saying that Zucker “wants to jettison Conan altogether and put Jay [Leno] back at The Tonight Show at its usual starting time.” Zucker, they say, is threatening to “ice Conan” and threatening to keep him “off the air for 3 1/2 years.’

The best explanation I ever gave to my kids about what happens when you die was that “you become a baby again, except most don’t remember who they were before they came out of their mommy as babies, so basically they’re starting all over again with a fresh slate.”

I put that together from Buddhism, from that old “life is a fountain” line, and from Warren Beatty and Buck Henry‘s Heaven Can Wait. Most people want (or need) to believe in some kind of serial continuity. We all suspect that the Woody Allen view of death is probably correct, but we’d rather not go there. We’d rather invest in some vague idea that (a) when your body dies that’s all she wrote, but (b) something in you keeps on by transferring or re-inhabiting (i.e., finding a new host) or going all Stanley Kubrick cosmic.

Or by returning as a dog or something. Wasn’t that a plot of an ’80s cop comedy?

So what happened between Roger Ebert and The Lovely Bones? The film’s presentation of heaven (a mixture of Alice Sebold’s story, which envisions a kind of continuity, and Peter Jackson‘s need to keep work coming into WETA) really rubbed Ebert the wrong way. He didn’t just say “not a vision that enthralls me” but “good God, man…how dare you?”

In Ebert’s view, The Lovely Bones “is a deplorable film with this message: If you’re a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you and realize what a wonderful person you were. Sure, you miss your friends, but your fellow fatalities come dancing to greet you in a meadow of wildflowers, and how cool is that?

“The makers of this film seem to have given slight thought to the psychology of teenage girls, less to the possibility that there is no heaven, and none at all to the likelihood that if there is one, it will not resemble a happy gathering of new Facebook friends. In its version of the events, the serial killer can almost be seen as a hero for liberating these girls from the tiresome ordeal of growing up and dispatching them directly to the Elysian Fields. The film’s primary effect was to make me squirmy.

“It’s based on the best seller by Alice Sebold that everybody seemed to be reading a couple of years ago. I hope it’s not faithful to the book; if it is, millions of Americans are scary. The murder of a young person is a tragedy, the murderer is a monster, and making the victim a sweet, poetic narrator is creepy. This movie sells the philosophy that even evil things are God’s will and their victims are happier now. Isn’t it nice to think so. I think it’s best if they don’t happen at all. But if they do, why pretend they don’t hurt? Those girls are dead.

“I’m assured, however, that Sebold’s novel is well-written and sensitive. I presume the director, Peter Jackson, has distorted elements to fit his own ‘vision,’ which involves nearly as many special effects in some sequences as his Lord of the Rings trilogy. A more useful way to deal with this material would be with observant, subtle performances in a thoughtful screenplay. It’s not a feel-good story. Perhaps Jackson’s team made the mistake of fearing the novel was too dark. But its millions of readers must know it’s not like this. The target audience may be doom-besotted teenage girls — the Twilight crowd.”

All things are God’s will, Roger — the good, the evil, the ugly and the banal. God, who is not a celestial football coach urging humans to do their best in their fight against the opposing Devil team, doesn’t pull strings in order to make good stuff happen occasionally. He/She just floats around up there like vapor and says, “Whatever, guys…it’s your show. I’m not in this. You know…absentee landlord and all the rest of that Al Pacino Devil’s Advocate crap?”

The creation that He/She put together has always been easy access for all types and all manner of behavior. You have to try and do good for yourself and others within the short time that you have on this planet and that’s all. Because we’re all headed for the mulch pit.

I guess I’m supposed to be all cranked up about Warner Home Video’s forthcoming Dr. Zhivago Bluray. The truth is that I kind of am. Mainly — naturally — because of Freddie Young and Nicolas Roeg‘s 35mm cinematography. My favorite shot is one of the most nonsensical in film history — i.e., the closeup of Yuri’s deceased mother inside her casket after it’s been sealed and lowered into the grave, but with just enough light for the camera to catch her bluish features.

It’s a long and tedious milquetoast “romance” — a chick flick, really — with some elements that mesmerize all the same. The kindly paternal tone in Alec Guiness‘s voice as he speaks to Rita Tushingham. That wall of ice covering the freight-car door during that eternal train trip. That scene when the advancing Russian troops are turned by the deserters, and then the British-accented officer stands on top of a water barrel and tries to persuade them to hold fast in the ranks, and then he falls through the top, soaked, and is shot. Klaus Kinski‘s fury as he shouts “I am the only free man on this train!” Julie Christie‘s blonde hair and gleaming blue eyes. The troops raising their fists and yelling “Strelnikov!” in perfect unison as Tom Courtenay‘s train passes by. Guiness’s final line: “Aahh. Then it’s a gift.”

Pork-pie hats are worn only by GenX and GenY guys, and never by boomers. It’s cool for older guys if they were a kid in the ’70s, a teenager or young lad in the ’80s, a 20something or early-thirtysomething in the early ’90s, and are pushing or just past 40 in 2010. Or in your mid 40s even (i.e., Brad Pitt). But you can’t go pork-pie if you’re Barack Obama or David Poland‘s age (i.e., late 40s). There’s a very clear cutoff point.

Messenger costars Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson at two separate Monkey Bar parties within the last few days.

This could be Keifer Sutherland‘s signature, but that’s what I love about handwriting jabberwocky. The good ones are artful, impressionistic, and revealing of the author’s spirit. And yet people who are serious about their signatures tend to design them, usually in their early teens. And then they kind of evolve into more and more of a Picasso-like scrawl when you get older. You should see mine — the big swooping “j” is the only legible letter, and the rest of it is just Cal Tech seismograph razmatazz.

All of this “I’m With Coco” stuff (pro-Conan O’Brien tweets, Facebook protest groups) is an amusing news twinkle, but where was this viral passion when it really mattered? If you ask me this is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham. As Brian Stelter has observed in a 1.15 N.Y. Times story, these tens of thousands of Coco loyalists “may not have watched his Tonight Show regularly — or at all — but boy, are they angry now.”

Why, I’m wondering, has Maureen Dowd been the only columnist so far to really rip into the bad guy behind the whole Conan-Leno mess and in fact the general ruination of NBC — i.e., network president and CEO Jeff Zucker?