Day: March 19, 2011

I recently ordered a DVD of a flagrantly bad film — Roger Vadim‘s Pretty Maids All In A Row (’71) — just so I could check out a brief, nothing-special nude scene with Angie Dickinson, who’ll turn 80 later this year. Dickinson au natural is why I also own Big Bad Mama (’74) — another stinker. Dickinson was never much of an actress. And she only made two good films in her life, Rio Bravo and Point Blank.

The guy with Dickinson in this scene from Pretty Maids All In A Row is the late John David Carson. She was 40 when this film came out, and looked, at the oldest, like she was 32 or 33.

I’m not proud of this but at least I’m being honest. It feels a little bit weird that I’m confessing to the same Dickinson longing that Dominic Chianese‘s Corrado Soprano spoke of two or three times on The Sopranos, but I might as well cop to it.

West Hollywood skies are overcast tonight, completely obscuring the supermoon.

The Van Gogh sky plus Owen Wilson strolling along the Seine in this Midnight in Paris poster is a pleasant thing. But shouldn’t it suggest that Woody Allen‘s latest (which will debut at Cannes in May) is an ensemble piece of some kind, or at the very least a somewhat-troubled-relationship-at-a-crossroads story between Wilson and Rachel McAdams?

“Early Sunday, the sound of anti-aircraft fire and screaming fighter jets echoed across Tripoli, punctuated by heavy explosions,” reads David Kirkpatrick, Steven Erlanger and Elisabeth Bumiller‘s 3.19 N.Y. Times story about the combined American, British and French air strikes against the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, “unleashing warplanes and missiles in a military intervention on a scale not seen in the Arab world since the Iraq war.”

There are some who moan and frown and condemn when hostilities of this sort break out (like Michael Moore), and others, like myself, who strangely love the greenish flashing nightlight and the sonic kaboom and the coordinated splendor of expensive technological aggression. Plus the target is a genuine scumbag. Plus it’s Barack Obama‘s first big main-street shootout of his own and, I would argue, America’s first right-minded, semi-supportable military maneuver since…when? Plus it’s not the start of another land war but some kind of strategic rock ‘n’ rumble.

“I love it…God help me but I love it so.” — George S. Patton.

This is bad. This is really bad. Variety‘s Jeff Sneider has reported what Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s role will be in The Dark Knight Rises as if the world gives a shit. All villains, quasi-villains and sons-of-villains in superhero franchise films are essentially the same — broad, perverse, self-amused or self-hating, corrupted, flamboyant, diseased. And it doesn’t matter what their names or backstories are. It’s all the same corporate crap. For what it’s worth, Levitt will play “Alberto Falcone, the son of Mafia chieftain Carmine Falcone, the character Tom Wilkinson played in Batman Begins.”