Day: November 17, 2010

You’re damn right I ordered The Outfit today. I had to after belly-aching for the last five or six years that it wasn’t available on DVD. The Movie Godz are, I think, probably fairly satisfied with this. No special delivery so that means seven to ten days, I’m guessing.

On 10.23.73 Roger Ebert called it “a classy action picture, very well directed and acted, about a gangster’s revenge on the mob for the death of his brother. An outline of the plot would make it sound pretty routine, but what makes the picture superior is its richness of detail. We don’t care much about what happens; the same things are always happening in action movies, and when you’ve seen one car burst into flames you’ve seen them all. But the people in this movie are uncommonly interesting.

“The lead is a guy named Macklin, played by Robert Duvall. He and his brother made the mistake some years ago of sticking up a bank that was owned by the outfit. In revenge, his brother is wiped out by a couple of stone-faced gunsels. (And this is, by the way, the first movie in a long time to resurrect “gunsel,” that great piece of 1930s slang. Maybe it was suggested by Elisha Cook, who has a bit part here and was the archetypal gunsel in The Maltese Falcon.)

“Anyway, Duvall gets out of prison and hitches up with an old partner in crime, Joe Don Baker. They also take along Duvall’s girl (Karen Black), but mostly she just gets to ride in the back seat. Like so many movies of the last five or six years, this one is essentially about a relationship between two males. Duvall and Baker make it work better than usual by suggesting real, fundamental friendship and mutual respect.

“No, these are just a couple of old pals who are quick and mean and very professional. And Duvall is reasonable, too; he doesn’t want total vengeance, he only wants a quarter of a million dollars. The outfit takes in more than that before noon, on a good day — or so observes Robert Ryan, who plays the mob chief. But Ryan double-crosses Duvall, and then it turns out that for $250,000, he would have been getting off cheap.

“Duvall and Baker raid a series of mob operations, including a gambling club and a bookie wire room, and finally they raid the mansion of Ryan himself. The nice thing about all the raid sequences is that they’re carried out realistically; no James Bond gimmicks or impossible heroism, just a few well-executed plans.

“John Flynn, who wrote and directed the movie, fills it with a series of supporting characters who are allowed to seem complex and real.

“I especially remember a couple of dealers in hot cars and the nymphomaniac wife of one of them (Sheree North). And Marie Windsor, as Baker’s wife. And Ryan, in his next-to-last role, playing a man with great strength but very little happiness. The scene at the farm of the two stolen car dealers is handled with such attention to character detail that it could stand by itself; with a few small strokes, Flynn gives us three characters and their relationship, Instead of just throwing in some stock dialog.

“There’s something else that’s good about the movie: The relative restraint with which Flynn uses violence. Instead of going for a lot of fancy gunplay, Flynn more often than not examines the way in which violent situations tend to be clumsy and confused. A scene in a skid row mission, for example, comes alive when Duvall and Baker, trying to escape a couple of hit men, set off a fire alarm. Bums and firemen and cops and killers all mill around trying to find the fire; it’s exciting, but it’s fun too.”

What I need to make myself feel whole and fulfilled and to take away that awful feeling of stalled emptiness is a Rat Pack coffee-table book that will set me back $650 bills. Edited by Tony Nourmand, written by Shawn Levy and art direction/design by Graham Marsh, this is the ultimate Rat Pack nostalgia cruise for the man-child in your life who has everything but not quite, and who owns a pair of black suede pumps and drinks martinis and owns a DVD of Doug Liman‘s Swingers and all that.

Levy, whose regular gig is critic for the Oregonian, has invited me to a special Soho House party for the Rat Pack book, put on by Real Art Press, on December 7th. I’ll be in Morocco at the time so I guess I’ll never be able to leaf through the damn thing, but really — who shells out $650 for a photograph book? There’s a market for this stuff, obviously. The obnoxiously wealthy, I suppose.

“They had it made. The booze, the broads, the banter. The handmade suits, the swimming pools, the automatic welcome into backrooms of restaurants owned by men of discretion. From Las Vegas to Palm Springs to Miami, they lived in a world of endless sunshine. Nothing surely, could be as much fun as the life of the Rat Pack at the dawn of the 60s. The more they drank onstage, the more they indulged a liking for the obscure in-group nonsense, the louder the audience cheered.

“During one four-week season at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, 34,000 people flocked to see Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford exude the glow of an effortless hedonism, behind which flickered the shadows of organized crime and political corruption. — from Richard Williams‘ 10.7.10 Guardian article called “When The Rat Pack Ruled Supreme.”

The guy who has everything but not quite wishes he could have hung and swung with Frank and Dino and Sammy and Peter and Joey in ’58 or ’59 or early ’60, when things were about as perfect as they could have been for those guys. Oh God, I missed the glory time and here I am stuck in 2010 with my iPhone and my iPad and hundreds of channels and nothin’ on and no broads — only women of varying levels of cultivation.

Clearly, many millions have some kind of primal need to put royalty on a pedestal and then show obeisance before that power and that mythology. Women are the most susceptible, it seems. (Particularly those who watch “Dancing With The Stars” and read www.popeater.com.) “Kneeling before power” is built into our genes. It’s mostly satisfied by the worship of certain celebrities, but now England’s royal family is competing for attention with “the new Diana” — i.e., Kate Middleton — engaged to marry Prince William, the heir to the heir of the British throne. Poor guy — 28 years old and he’s all but egg bald.

Obviously a huge hit waiting to happen, but half of the trailer is awfully dark…no? Ford is obviously playing more than a walk-on part. Good for him. He needs the juice. I would honestly like to buy and own and wear one of those blue-light alien wristband things that Daniel Craig is wearing.

I don’t sympathize with yawners either. Especially the ones that make no attempt to muffle it. It’s rude. But honestly? I’ve had yawning attacks myself. Sometimes expressions of boredom or impatience come out without a person meaning to clearly express them. They just happen. I’ve been accused of loudly exhaling during meetings, and I didn’t even know I was doing that.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment design guy: “So what about the Ishtar Bluray jacket art? I’ve roughed out some ideas.”

SPHE marketing director: “No ideas. Boilerplate. Use the art from the VHS. Tweak it or re-do the titles, but we’re not spending nickel one on re-design.”

Design guy: “The VHS art…? But we’ve got all this material.”

Marketing director: “We don’t care. It’s a loss leader. Just re-do the lettering. Fuck it.”

Design guy: “What about a critic quote?”

Marketing director: “Use the Mike Clark one from 23 years ago.”

Design guy: “Have you read the Richard Brody one?”

Marketing director: “The what?”

Design guy: “The quote from Richard Brody. From last summer. New Yorker guy. A very smart, well-respected dweeb critic with a big brown Leo Tolstoy beard.”

Marketing director: “Average people don’t want to hear from guys like that. Just keep it simple. ‘Undeniable hilarity.’ The dumbest person in the world gets that.”

Design guy: “But…whatever you want, I’ll do it, no worries. But they’re putting this movie out after not putting it out for all these years because it’s become a cult film, and Brody…”

Marketing director: “I don’t want to hear this.”

Design guy: “But they’re not putting this movie out because it’s just another comedy. It has a special kind of dry humor. It’s called no-laugh funny . And Brody is articulating the new view. He gets the new Ishtar coolness.”

Marketing director: “‘No-laugh funny’?”

Design guy: “It’s the new comic aesthetic.”

Marketing director: “What’s the quote?”

Design guy: “He called it ‘one of the most original, audacious, and inventive movies — and funniest comedies — of modern times…it isn’t just a movie worth rescuing for a few choice bits…it’s a thoroughgoing, beginning-to-end masterwork.'”

Marketing guy: “Too long.”

Design guy: “We can cut it down. ‘One of the funniest, most original, audacious, and inventive movies of modern times.'”

Marketing guy: “Sounds intimidating. More like an art film than a comedy you can just laugh at. If I was just looking to just flop on the couch and chill out, I’d watch something else. Something stupid.”

Design guy: “But the people who want to watch Adam Sandler films will never watch Ishtar. That’s the point. It’s a cult film. That’s why they’re putting it out.”

Marketing director: “A cult film that maybe 800 or 900 people in the country will respond to by buying the Bluray. Big deal. The rest of the country just wants to have a good time. Use the VHS art and the Clark quote. Next?”

The Social Network as directed by Wes Anderson, Michael Bay, Quentin Tarantino and Frank Capra. The Anderson-esque rendering of Erica Albright’s break-up moment is perfect. The Bay riff is…well, okay. The Tarantino thing should have been worked on a bit more. The Capra is pretty good. We all get the basic idea, I think.

“The ring!” Same formula, same spandex, same CG, same “whoo-hoo!,” same old crap. When 21st Century film historians write about the superhero genre of the aughts, they will not be kind to the ComicCon culture. The apologists for these films will pay and pay. They will make Neville Chamberlain look like Alexander the Great. Movies like this are a plague upon our house. They sap and impurify our precious spiritual fluids.

What a tragedy that David Gordon Green, who looked like the new Terrence Malick back in the days of George Washington, has devolved into a manifestation of late-career Mel Brooks. Green’s last, Pineapple Express, was clever and liberating — a near-perfect surprise. Your Highness is a low-rent mulching of A Knight’s Tale, The Princess Bride, The Year One and A History of the World, Part 1 by way of 2010 throwaway humor, and smeared with the fart-joke sensibility of the bloated Danny McBride.

This morning Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough ridiculed a speculative piece by the Huffington Post‘s Howard Fineman. It said that “well-placed sources” are saying that Scarborough and New York Mayor Michael Boomberg “have begun trying to figure out whether they could be an independent presidential ticket in 2012 [and] have talked about running together, with Bloomberg in the top spot.” I listened to Scarborough deny it all from various angles, and he wasn’t low-key about it — he was borderline angry.

But the instant I read Fineman’s article I could hear a little gear clicking into place. Right now there are no clubhouse Republicans or tea-party wackos with anything close to the kind of charismatic heft necessary to generate serious excitement about a 2012 run at the White House. Nobody. But Bloomberg-Scarborough — a couple of reasonable, right-center, practical-minded corporate ass-kissers who won’t do anything brilliant or revolutionary but are clearly not looney-tunes — do have that charisma. If they were to actually run, Obama-Biden might have something to worry about.

If America can elect an African-American to the White House, it can certainly elect a Jew.

N.Y. Times media reporter David Carr and others have joked that the forthcoming merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek should be called Newsbeast. But don’t laugh — the sound of it works. I’m actually a bit surprised that searches still aren’t finding any professional-looking Newsbeast logos. What else are they gonna call it?

“Tina Brown‘s Daily Beast reportedly loses $10 million a year, and in 2009 Newsweek lost $28 million ,” the N.Y. Observer‘s Nick Summers (a former Newsweek staffer) writes in a just-posted article. “The premise that together the two will somehow make money has struck more than a few people as insane — but the bleeding may be more stoppable than people realize.”

It “may” be “more” stoppable? As opposed to less stoppable or comme ci comme ca stoppable? Somebody explain how “stopping the bleeding” = gradually profitable. Why is it that the financial algebra behind big-media deals like this one always sounds like mystifying gobbledygook?

“The print-ad market [is] coming back,” Summers explains early on. “Newsweek‘s name would add credibility as the Beast grew. And the world of magazine pages, Ms. Brown’s old stomping ground, beckon[s].” Newsweek as currently constituted (minus a recently departed “editor, int’l editor, the editor-at-large, a senior Washington correspondent, a diplomatic correspondent, the executive editor, two editorial directors, two deputy editors, the economics editor, an economics correspondent, two lead investigative reporters, the White House reporter, an international editor plus the website’s editor, general manager, managing editor and three articles editors”) is a shell of its former self. That was then, this is now, and Newsweek is for all intensive purposes a corpse with a “name.”

“Ms. Brown’s name brings in print-ad dollars all by itself,” Summers continues. “Newsweek‘s move from pricey West Village digs to [a] dodgy space at 7 Hanover Square will save $6.3 million in rent and operating costs alone. And there will be layoffs as the two staffs merge. (The incentive is to make those cuts from the Newsweek side of things, as the Washington Post Co. has agreed to cover some of those costs for up to one year.)

“Ms. Brown opposed the merger as late as last Tuesday morning. Three weeks prior, she appeared visibly relieved in the Beast newsroom when negotiations broke down, even reaching a level of Zen when it was clear she would not have to deal with the daunting logistics of a merger.

“Now she does. And she already works around the clock. The Observer asked: Where will she get the extra time?

“‘Well, my kids are grown up,’ Ms. Brown said softly. ‘And I’ve this theory that as you get older, you work harder.’ The absence of children creates a hole best filled by work, she said — ‘otherwise you’ll just feel mournful.’

“Ms. Brown, who gets tripped up a bit talking about the future of Newsweek.com, speaks calmly and clearly about her plans for the print magazine. She wants to be carefully organized and not rush into hiring. There will be no gaudy ‘first Tina’ issue. Things will improve gradually. ‘One is ready when one is ready,’ she said. ‘I know what it takes; I know what I’m able to do.’

“To speak with her about what to do with a magazine, even one so battered as Newsweek, is to believe in the magic of dead trees and ink.

“Oh my God. This is really going to happen.”