Month: May 2011

My Air France flight landed at Paris Charles DeGaulle airport at 5:55 am. I couldn’t bring myself to take Ambien for fear of a black-dog hangover, and so I bagged about 90 minutes’ sleep, if that. The flight to Nice is just about to leave. I’m tapping this out on the iPhone from seat #22D.

I can’t embed links but Pirates of the Caribbean received its first bad review from the Guardian. Arnold and Maria Schwarzenegger are separating. Rod Lurie is directing a hostage thriller. Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny is on my Nice flight and in fact sitting one row in front of me.

My Air France flight to Paris leaves four and a half hours from now so it’s time for re-packing and hitting the bank and last-minute whatevers before taking the A train out to JFK. Thanks very much, Air France, for not offering on-board wifi. (If shlubby-shleppy Delta can offer it, why not they?) As far as I understand they don’t even offer AC plug-ins for computers and phones…nice. I might manage a couple of final posts from the airport lounge before the plane leaves, but then again maybe not.

Flight #23 will arrive in Paris at midnight New York time. That’ll mean trying to get some sleep when my mind and body won’t especially be in the mood. To alleviate this I’ll be taking Ambien for the first time in my life. The Paris-to-Nice flight arrives at 2:55 am Manhattan time.

After reading Jonathan Alter‘s Vanity Fair profile of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (“Woman of the World,” June issue), I’ve decided that it’s time to completely bury my Hillary-hating attitude from the ’08 primary campaign and to support her for President in 2016, when she’ll only be 68. It’s way past time for a female chief exec, and there’s no one tougher or more experienced than she.

I was talking yesterday with Jett about creating a Hollywood Elsewhere iPad2 app. “Forget it — it’s not necessary and you can’t afford it,” he said. But a voice is telling me I can’t stand still and that I have to move into the iPad2 realm. “The site is fine as it is,” he replied. “The site is totally fine. It has a voice and a niche. You don’t need to do this.”

But with a larger iPad format I could introduce a permanent link to all the Oscar Poker podcasts with fast links to each one. “Okay,” he said. “I like the podcast. I listen to it every weekend.” And I could add a feature that highlights the best quotes and most popular stories at the end of every week. “You should do that for the site right now,” he replied. And I could compile a section that links to all articles that cover classic or otherwise older films on Bluray and DVD over the last 12 years. (In October I’ll have been doing an online column for 13 effing years.) And I could finally scan all the L.A. Times and Entertainment Weekly print articles from the ’90s and load them according to date, movie, topic or what-have-you.

“All good ideas but again, you can make these happen for the site right now,” Jett said. “But forget an iPad2 app. Designers cost way too much and you’d need a lot of daily maintenance.” I’m not so sure I have a choice, I said, no matter how hard or expensive it might be.

Fox Home Video’s Bluray of Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler, an absolute essential, streets on May 17th. Monochrome Scope (2.39 to 1) is the format for me so I don’t have a choice in the matter. I won’t have a chance to see it until I return from France at month’s end (hello, James Finn!) but here’s a just-posted DVD Beaver review.

I’m saying right now that I’m not especially looking forward to Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s The Kid With The Bike, which is playing in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. For one thing I don’t like movies about red-haired kids with high-pitched voices who wear red T-shirts. I don’t much care for movies about kids, period. I once had a place in my heart for this kind of thing but no longer. Especially with kids like this in the lead. I’m just being honest.

I have news for all young kids dealing with absent or abusive parents. Life is hard so you may as well grim up and deal with it and stop trying to make me empathize with your plight. I can tell you stories about my own messed-up childhood that’ll tear your heart out.

A few weeks ago I wrote the great Albert Brooks and offered to do what I could to heighten awareness of his new book, “2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America.” I suppose if I’d really wanted to help I would have written the St. Martin’s Press publicist and gone from there, right? Except book publicists are sketchy people these days with the book industry in decline, and it seemed somehow simpler to write Brooks because we’ve spoken a couple of times and he knows the column, etc.

Brooks completely ignored me. I might as well have been an assistant book editor from an obscure Riverside County alternative weekly. But let’s turn the other cheek and offer a portion of a Proust q & a with Brooks in the online Vanity Fair.

VF: What is your idea of perfect happiness? Brooks: Not sure what happiness means. Need to look that up. VF: What is your greatest fear? Brooks: That three days before I die I’ll find out what happiness means. VF: Which historical figure do you most identify with? Brooks: Pete Best. VF: Which living person do you most admire? Brooks: You don’t know him.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is the one 70mm film I’ve never seen on DVD or in a theatre. Reason #1: I’ve never cared. Reason #2: Any film starring Dick Van Dyke is verboten on general principle. When and if the original car sells for $2 million, the buyer will be a rich Arab in his 50s or 60s.

On May 1st the New York Post‘s Ann Karni reported that the Freedom Tower (i.e., the main tower at 1 World Trade Center) “has reached 64 stories and is growing by a story a week.” So it’s now at 65 stories, I gather, since today is May 8th. Karni wrote that the Ground Zero skyscraper is now visible “from the New Jersey Turnpike, the West Side Highway, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Staten Island Ferry.”

Freeedom Tower is the building to the right of the taller, squared-off one, and behind the one in front. Pic taken on Sunday, 9:05 pm from the corner of Greenwich Street and Duane Street.

On 8.30.10 CBS News reported that a poll showed that a clear majority of respondents felt that Mel Gibson‘s character issues were not a significant factor in determining their interest (or lack of) in seeing a film in which he stars.

If the poll was accurate, the only conclusion as to why The Beaver died this weekend is that audiences had simply taken a look at the trailer and/or read the reviews and decided that Jodie Foster‘s film was a dumper.

But why exactly? The love…okay, the like for this thing was more than palpable after the

South by Southwest screening. I realize that film festival audiences are not Average Joes but still. I saw a mezzo-mezzo response this weekend, not total refutation.

I think we all understand that Bad Santa was at best a minor influence upon the making of Bad Teacher (Sony, 6.24). I think it happened mainly due to innumerable reports of sexual indiscretion on the part of God-knows-how-many-TILFS-and-MILFs in high schools over the past few years. Fate dealt me a bad hand, I feel, by not arranging for one of these women to teach one of my seventh, eighth or ninth-grade classes, and that’s probably the main reason why I want to see this Cameron Diaz comedy.