Day: June 3, 2010

Vanity Fair.com‘s Rebecca Keegan is reporting that two days ago in Washington, D.C., Avatar director James Cameron “convened a meeting of more than 20 scientists and engineers in Washington to brainstorm fixes for the Gulf of Mexico oil leak.”

“‘I know a lot of smart people who regularly work a whole lot deeper than that well,’ says Cameron, referring to BP’s 5,000-foot gusher. ‘I figured this group of top sub guys and deep-ocean scientists and engineers could maybe come up with something constructive.’

“The director did not, as many news outlets reported, respond to a call from the Environmental Protection Agency, but rather organized the meeting himself , and invited government bodies including the E.P.A., the Department of Energy, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Coast Guard to participate.

“Cameron says he first contacted BP a month ago, but was told they had the crisis handled. ‘I didn’t want to be another well-meaning idiot with a bunch of suggestions,’ Cameron says. ‘But when the situation went on without a resolution, I figured the guys I knew had to be as smart as the engineers at BP, so it was time to sound the horn.;

“Tuesday’s 10-hour engineering brainstorming session included representatives from the federal agencies, as well as Anatoly Sagalevich, the Russian Mir sub pilot who first took Cameron to the Titanic; oceanic explorer Joe MacInnis, who participated in Cameron’s deep-sea documentary Aliens of the Deep; professors from the Universities of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara; Navy salvage contractors; and Cameron’s brother, Mike, an engineer with whom the director built a pair of mini remotely operated underwater vehicles (R.O.V.) that explored the Titanic wreck.

“The group made recommendations to various agencies, which will funnel them to BP. ‘It was fertile,’ Cameron says.”

How can Big Hollywood spin this and the Penn/Haiti story negatively? There must be some way. C’mon, Nolte — this is what you’re good at.

Vanity Fair.com‘s Laura Jane Estes has written a summary of David Brinkley‘s VF article (appearing in the July issue) about Sean Penn‘s Haitian humanitarian camp-down. “If it looks as though Sean Penn is just another Hollywood star courting headlines with a camera-ready cause, look again,” Estes begins.

“With a midlife milestone looming (Penn turns 50 in August), his marriage to Robin Wright Penn seemingly finished (‘She is a ghost to me now,’ he observes), and a teenage son, Hopper, having recovered from a life-threatening skateboard accident, the Oscar-winning actor decided to redirect his focus and his priorities.

“Instead of shooting another film or hawking his latest (Fair Game, in which he portrays Ambassador Joseph Wilson, playing opposite Naomi Watts as ‘outed’ C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame), Penn ended up committing himself to the people of Petionville, a once-affluent Haitian suburb where he now runs a camp for 50,000 displaced earthquake survivors.

“As Vanity Fair‘s July issue reveals in detail for the first time, a week after the quake hit last January — killing an estimated quarter of a million people — Penn, a longtime political activist, joined forces with L.A.-based, Sarajevo-born philanthropist Diana Jenkins (creating the humanitarian organization J/P HRO), lined up crisis veteran Alison Thompson to assist in recruiting an A-team of relief volunteers, and flew from his home in Malibu to a ravaged hillside in Port-au-Prince — with a dozen doctors in tow.

“Ever since, Penn, wearing camouflage khakis and carrying a Glock handgun, has been living in a tent not much larger than an army-surplus locker. And this spring the actor and his organization–who toil alongside Haitian colleagues, fellow aid workers, and army rangers — were designated by their fellow NGOs and U.N. officials as the ‘camp manager’ of the Petionville facility.

“Author Douglas Brinkley, the historian, V.F. contributing editor, and a decade-long acquaintance of Penn’s (the pair volunteered in New Orleans in 2005 shortly after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina), traces the humanitarian and personal motivations of the typically press-averse Penn, examining his desire to become an activist in the Phil Ochs mold.”

The first five minutes of Get Him To The Greek, which I’m going to see tonight in a state of absolute wide-awake alertness. Posted by Funny or Die and linked to last night by Brad Brevet‘s Rope of Silicon.

<

The idea, I think, behind Billy Eichner‘s aggressive microphone routine and trying to bully people into committing to see Sex and the City 2 (“I saw it and I liked it!”) is to engage in a kind of theatre that pushes it. He’s obviously “playing” a hostile-belligerent gay fan of the series, but I’m not sure to what end. The “fuck you” is surprising but not exactly “funny.” It’s weird. It may be a case of Eichner simply being an asshole.

Apologies to anyone who posted a comment last night or this morning and didn’t see it appear. This was due to my having turned up the discriminator on the all-but-worthless Movable Type spam controls. Instead of blocking spammers, it wound up attacking legit commenters. My bad. Every day I spend at least 30 to 40 minutes (maybe closer to an hour) banning this and that spammer and deleting their posts. Still trying to figure out the right plug-in to use.

It hit me a day or two ago that an awful lot of women these days — actresses and broadcasters to some extent, but mainly average, non-famous women in the under-30 range (including movie publicists) — speak with thin little pipsqueak voices. Couple this with a general tendency to use mallspeak accents and phrasings (which 85% to 90% of under-30 women have done in order to sound like everyone else) and it almost seems as if inane peep-peep voices have become a kind of generational signature.

Go to any bar and restaurant and walk around and listen to women’s voices…”peepity-peep-peep” and “squeakity-squeak-squeak,” over and over and over.

For whatever reason these women have decided that sultry, smoky, husky voices — the kind that Lauren Bacall and Glenda Jackson and Anne Bancroft and Patricia Neal used to play like soulful wind instruments — aren’t as appealing or have perhaps been categorized as unattractive, and that they need to project more of an amiable “ooh-ooh” Betty Boop thing.

I’m obviously not reporting scientific data, but it does seem as if an awful lot of Minnie Mouse voices are being feigned or emphasized these days, and that the rich, intriguing tonalities found in the wonderfully adult voices of Meryl Streep or Ann Sheridan in the 1940s, or Jessica Lange or Katherine Hepburn or Greer Garson or Faye Dunaway or Jodie Foster aren’t heard as much.

You can’t be one of those super-cool women who wear short skirts and long jackets and speak with a peep-peep voice. You have to sound like Anouk Aimee or Simone Signoret or Joan Crawford or Jane Russell….that line of country.

I really do think it’s affected to some extent. Chosen. Performed. Almost anyone can go deeper or higher if they want.

There’s that old story about director Howard Hawks telling a young Lauren Bacall (i.e., before he cast her in To Have and Have Not) that it’s sexier to speak in a lower register, and that she should give it a shot. Bacall took Hawks’ advice and trained herself to speak with a deeper voice. It was that simple.

So if Bacall can do this, anyone can in either direction. And I think — suspect — that a lot of younger women have persuaded themselves, perhaps not consciously, that squeaky-peepy works best in today’s environment. Mistake.

There was a swanky White House concert last night given by Paul McCartney and other entertainers, the occasion being the awarding of a Gershwin Prize for Popular Song to McCartney. With Barack Oabama presenting the award at night’s end, and with Michelle Obama and their kids sitting front-row center, and with everyone singing along to “Hey Jude” during the finale.

“McCartney brought down the house by belting out ‘Michelle,’ aiming his words straight at a first lady named Michelle,” says an AP report.

“He said he’d been ‘itching’ to perform it at the White House, and asked the president’s forgiveness in advance. The first lady was soon mouthing the words along with McCartney and the president was swaying in his seat.

After serenading the first lady with the lyrics ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ McCartney joked that he just might be the ‘first guy ever to be punched out by a president.’

“The whole night was built around Obama’s presentation to McCartney of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, awarded by the Library of Congress.

“McCartney said it was a moment like no other. “‘I don’t think there could be anything more special than to play here,’ the Englishman said. And then he volunteered to make it a regular gig. ‘Lunchtimes, we could come around,’ he offered. ‘We’re cheap.’

“McCartney, 67, left no question about how he felt about Obama, telling the president that in tough times, ‘You have billions of us who are rooting for you and we know you are going to come through.’

“Later, after the TV cameras had left, he expressed appreciation for the Library of Congress and added a zinger: ‘After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.'”

The Gershwin prize is named for the songwriting brothers George and Ira Gershwin, whose collections are housed at the library. Previous recipients of the Gershwin award are Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon.

The concert will air on PBS’s “In Performance at the White House” on July 28 at 8 pm.

There will be an encore presentation at 9:30 p.m.

I’ve no interest in whether Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are currently “on” as a couple, but I know they’re almost certainly doomed if Pattinson fails to find some degree of assurance or validation from outside the Twilight sphere. They both need to succeed in films without vampires or werewolves, but especially Pattinson given (a) his apparently limited acting range and (b) his shitty choices so far, which have created a vague “uh-oh” feeling.

Robert Pattinson on the set of the currently-lensing Water for Elephants.

Relationships between actors are never entirely defined by feelings and character and commitment. They’re about about the necessity of similar career grooves. If over the next two or three years Stewart’s career just piddles along like Pattinson’s, they may work out. But if she catches on with a great performance in something really successful or Oscar-worthy while he’s still treading water, they’ll be finished in a matter of months.

Pattinson’s stock clearly fell in the wake of his boring performance in Remember Me, a second-rate romance by way of some 9/11 exploitation. RP’s previous appearance as Salvador Dali (with that absurd uptwist moustache) in ’08’s Little Ashes didn’t do him any favors either.

Pattinson currently has three extra-curricular features in the pipeline, and if one of them doesn’t “take” on some level he’s done. I’m sorry to sound like a Darwinian hard-ass, but if you don’t think agents are thinking and saying the same things then you need to get out more.

One look at Pattinson’s appearance in his next film, a period romance called Bel Ami, and your heart goes “meh.” Co-directed by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod and based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, it’s described as “a chronicle of a young man’s rise to power in Paris through his manipulation of the city’s most influential and wealthy women.” In other words it’s a period Lothario story in the vein of Stephen Frears‘ Cherie.

Pattinson on the set of Bel Ami.

Next comes the currently-shooting Water for Elephants, which is being directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine) from a Richard LaGravanese screenplay. (Here are pics from the set.) It costars Reese Witherspoon, Christoph Waltz and Hal Holbrook. It’s about a young guy who gets a job as a circus vet. Maybe, but it seems minor.

Pattinson’s third and last shot is Madeline Stowe‘s Unbound Captives, a western that Stowe wrote and will direct. The synopsis says it’s about “a widowed woman [being] rescued by a frontiersman and the two searching for her kidnapped children,” etc. Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz costar. I’m guessing that Jackman will plays the fontiersman so I don’t know where this leaves Pattinson.

As reported by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Tom Cruise will reanimate producer Lev Grossman — his Tropic Thunder character — on this Sunday’s MTV Movie Awards (airing at 9 pm). Not just in this Risky Business riff but in two others about Twilight-ers.

I’ve always suspected that the name “Lev Grossman” was a riff on Sid Krassman, the coarse Hollywood producer depicted in Terry Southern‘s Blue Movie.