Day: April 28, 2011

“At one point during the preordained throwdown between the two colossi who stride through Fast Five, Dwayne Johnson rips off his bulletproof vest with the practiced economy of a 17th-century courtesan flinging off her corset,” writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. “His character, a professional tough guy bluntly named Hobbs, has just found his fugitive bad twin, Dom, the gnomic guru of the Fast and Furious franchise, played by Vin Diesel.

“They are the fast and, yes, the furious. Yet as these giants grasp each other’s bulging muscles, their bald heads rearing in the frame with tumescent vigor, it’s easy to imagine that they’d like some alone time. They don’t get it, largely because the earth might spin off its axis if they did, though also because the director Justin Lin, having come of cinematic age in the maximalist era of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, cleaves to the principle of more.

“About the only silence you hear in this movie, amid the crunch of metal and the hard rain of shattering glass, is the one between Dom’s ears.”

Deborah Chow‘s The High Cost of Living (“a dark love story about two people who meet after a car accident”) played at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and I didn’t hear a thing about it from anyone. Now it’s available on demand via Tribeca Film. You’d think that Zach Braff‘s name would attract more attention.

The cost of “Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made,” a serious film buff coffee-table book that started out costing many hundreds of dollars, is now down to $40.47 on Amazon. I think this might be the poor man’s abridged version and not the first-edition, velvet-bound 35-pound version. Still, the markdown indicates that it didn’t sell like Taschen was hoping it would.

I lived in a Soho tenement apartment on Sullivan Street from the summer of ’78 through late ’79. One day in late October near Prince and Greene streets I came upon an original Jean-Michel Basquiat SAMO graffiti that read, “Which of the following institutions has the most political power? (a) The CIA, (b) the Catholic church, (c) McDonalds or (d) SAMO?”

Taken during an early morning walk through Rome in late May, 2007

Later that year (or was it early ’79?) I ran into Basquiat in a post office as I was sending a couple of postcards to some friends. Basquiat noticed that I had written one of his SAMO slogans (“Do I have to spell it out? SAMO!”) and said to me, “Hey, man….that’s my stuff! That’s my thing. I do all the SAMO graffiti.” I was a little surprised that he pronounced it SAME-O when I’d been saying SAMMO to all my friends, but I was nonetheless stunned and awestruck. I told Basquiat how cool the SAMO thing is/was. I apologized for quoting him on the postcards without using his name but I didn’t know who Jean-Michel Basquiat was until he introduced himself.

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan has described in some detail what happened during that horrific sexual assault she suffered on Friday, 2.11 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. She’s given an interview on the subject to N.Y. Times reporter Brian Stelter, and will also speak about it on 60 Minutes this Sunday.

The word “rape” surfaced in some news reports about the attack, and to most of us that word means what it means. Logan tells Stelter that for 40 minutes 200 or 300 men “raped me with their hands” and that her clothes were “torn to pieces.” Good God.

Rape is rarely about sex but about the rapist asserting power over a victim and venting rage about some social or emotional issue. In their heads, the animals in Tahrir Square were showing a connected, well-heeled western woman with blonde hair that they deeply resent her elite-media position compared to their scraping-to-get-by lives and that they have the power to subjugate her and thereby make the statement that they’re just as good and not her social lessers.

That plus the fact that Middle-Eastern men are not exactly paragons of enlightened thought when it comes to women. As I wrote last February, “Most of us are under the impression, I think, that the patriarchal and sometimes brutish attitudes of many Middle Eastern men toward women make typical Mediterranean males — once the leading standard-bearers of sexist behavior — look like radical lesbians.”

I must admit that last December’s teaser trailer for Michael Bay’s Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (Paramount, 7.1) put the hook in, and coming from moi, a hater of the original who refused to even see Revenge of the Fallen, that meant something. Today the first major full-boat trailer arrived. It seems potentially less offensive that other CG actioners in the wings.

The paycheck standout is Frances McDormand in the Joan Allen-in-the last-two-Bourne-movies role. Costar John Turturro also pocketed a nice big fat one.

The 1979 six-part series that was John Irvin‘s Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy ran 290 minutes, or roughly 48 minutes per episode. Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In) has directed a much shorter feature film version. An undated draft of Peter Morgan‘s script, which was rewritten by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, runs 111 pages. That’s a lot of cutting.

Alfredson’s feature, which finished shooting last December, will be distributed by Universal Pictures sometime in the fourth quarter. I’ll bet the execs who pushed along Fast Five and The Immortals are looking at this film with their heads cocked sideways and going “what the…?”

Everyone knows that Gary Oldman plays George Smiley in Alfredson’s film, and that he won’t be as good as Alec Guiness no matter what he does. Colin Firth is playing Bill Haydon. I’m not spilling anything, but Haydon meets an entirely different fate in the film that he did in the series and in John LeCarre‘s original 1974 book.

After a delay of several eons, Acorn Media finally released a DVD box set of Irvin’s six-part series in June 2004.

I’ve been presuming all along that Matthew Vaughn‘s X-Men: First Class (20th Century Fox, 6.3) is a prequel using a Cuban Missile Crisis backdrop because of the early ’60s chic mentality created by Mad Men and furthered by Zack Snyder‘s Watchmen…right? They’re basically following the stylistic lead of other films.

I’ve just re-watched JFK’s Cuban Missile Crisis speech (part 1 and part 2). No mention of mutants, of course, but any chief executive would have kept this aspect under wraps.

I’ve been waiting for months to see Jennifer Lawrence‘s full-blue Mystique appearance in X-Men: First Class, which I’ve been presuming all along would bear some resemblance to Rebecca Romijn’s in the last X-Men series. And yet the Fox guys keep not including her in the trailers. Now it appears that Lawrence’s Mystique has a different, more modest sartorial idea in mind — i.e., a yellow-and-blue leather bomber jacket.

In other words, X-Men: First Class is starting to look like a LexG letdown.

It was announced today that the 2012 Golden Globe Awards telecast will happen on Sunday, 1.15.12, or six weeks before the Oscar telecast on Sunday, 2.26.12. (The 2011 GG telecast happened on 1.16, or a full seven weeks before the 3.6 Oscar telecast.) GG nominations for 2011 films will be announced on 12.15.11.