Day: July 31, 2011

Let no one doubt that Hollywood Elsewhere is an influential, shaker-upper column. Not just in terms of influencing the conversation about Oscar nominees and the Best Picture race. But also in terms of getting people fired. Or one guy, at least. Which doesn’t feel very good if the facts are what they seem. Call me chagrined and somewhat appalled.

I learned a few hours ago that Ivan Infante, a screenwriter and maker of short films who’s been the most friendly and recognizable face at West L.A.’s Laser Blazer for nine years, was canned last Wednesday by owner Ron Dassa, and that one factor in his termination was a piece I ran on 7.20 — 11 days ago — about the sagging fortunes of Laser Blazer. It was called “Saddest Video Store.”

Like all retail video stores Laser Blazer has been going downhill for the last couple of years, so Dassa would have had to cut bait sooner or later. The business has been running at a loss, so Infante, who’s been the store’s product buyer for several years, figured the blade would drop by September or October. It happened sooner, he strongly suspects, for reasons of spite and revenge over the 7.20 article.

Infante says Dassa told him it was also because the article made him suddenly realize that the business was doomed, despite Dassa having assessed Laser Blazer’s financial situation on a regular basis all along. That’s bullshit, of course.

But there does come a time in every dying business when an owner realizes he needs to reduce overhead. Dassa claims he had to cut Infante because he couldn’t afford to pay his salary. Okay, I believe that part. But not 100%.

I think the severing was probably 60% or 70% about revenge for the article, and 30% or 40% about facing economic reality. Okay, 55% to 45%.

Laser Blazer owner Ron Dassa

The first email blast I got was that Infante had been whacked because of the piece. But what was in the article that was so damaging to Laser Blazer’s income or rep? “Business is down,” I wrote. Hello? Video retail is down everywhere. “The mood is down,” I wrote. As it naturally would be inside any store that feels like a storage closet due to a lack of air-conditioning. “Excess inventory is being sent back to distributors”…is that what ticked Dassa off? “And the air conditioning is on the fritz, and in fact hasn’t been repaired for several weeks,” I wrote. That was a simple climatorial fact. You can’t run a business in the summer without a.c.

So Dassa was angry at Infante for sharing honest and/or obvious information about the store’s diminishing business, and particularly for sharing the fact that Dassa had refused to fix the air-conditioning system since it stopped working last February, and he wanted to take revenge because Infante, he felt, was using HE to agitate Dassa to get the a.c. fixed. Or something like that. It sounds semi-plausible to me.

I just don’t see whacking a good employee after he’s been with you for nine years without showing a little kindness. Dassa offered no goodbye severance check, no farewell party, no thanks or hugs….just a chilly, straight-from-the-shoulder “you tried to pressure or embarass me about the air-conditioning so you’re gone…sorry.” I don’t blame Dassa or any businessman for cutting costs when he’s forced to, but I wouldn’t cut a guy loose who’d been with me for nine years without giving him a little renumeration and maybe a farewell dinner or something. End it with a little class and grace.

If anyone in any aspect of video business is reading this, understand that Infante knows film backwards and forwards and that he’s very good with people and that he’s loyal and trustworthy and considerate and well-liked, etc.

Here’s the piece that caused the ruckus.

Barack Obama has bent over backwards to Republican swine over the debt reduction fight, and right now he looks weak as hell to me. He’s the “adult in the room,” yes, but how I wish he had the courage to be more than just reasonable and mild-mannered. I think of Obama these days and right away I get irritated. He’s a moderate conservative, and I thought I was voting for a guy who would try to be much, much more.

It would be so great if a serious liberal could challenge Obama in the primaries and give him trouble and speak the truth and let some light into the room.

I’m saying this with a presumption that Obama will be re-elected in 2012. As he should be, given the alternatives. He’s a sane, perceptive and highly intelligent U.S. President. Most voters of any education or reasonably adult perceptions will almost certainly choose to keep him for a second term rather than vote in the glib and shape-shifting Mitt Romney or, God forbid, Michelle Bachmann or some other lying, slithering, corporate-kowtowing Republican serpent.

But Obama’s refusal to act like a man — to talk straight and stand his ground like a strong, scrappy liberal and call those deranged, Tea Party-fellating radicals by their right name and most of all to use the bully pulpit of his office to explain what’s really going on and what the right’s agenda is truly about — is infuriating. In his 7.31 piece called “The President Surrenders,” N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman noted that Republicans “will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats…and that the reported terms of the deal…amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president.”

If I could clap my hands three times and have a genuinely tough liberal hombre in the Oval Office, somebody who thinks like Bill Maher and talks almost as plainly and who would all but spit in the Republicans’ eye, I would clap my hands three times.

Obama has made the term “adult in the room” seem synonymous with “the capitulator,” “the man with no balls,” “the guy who doesn’t know how to play poker like a man” and so on.

LexG drove out to the deepest West Valley the other day to confront Lars Von Trier‘s Melancholia ((Magnolia, 11.11) during its ultra-low-profile, Academy-qualifying L.A. engagement. I sat on his review for two or three days but here it finally is. He somehow manages to actually write about the film without going into his “woe is me, I needs me some white wimmin’ and if I don’t get what I need I’m gonna kill myself” routine. Very commendable.

Alexander Skarsgard, Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia.

“Functioning as almost a companion piece to his more outrageous Antichrist, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is an emotionally audacious movie of two halves. The first depicts the encroaching mental breakdown of depressed bride Justine (Kirsten Dunst) on a notably unhappy wedding day as a distant planet called Melancholia approaches Earth. The second half skips ahead as the Melancholia continues its ominous approach we witness the doomed last days of now-thoroughly-shut-down Justine along with her more functional but also emotionally ragged sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Claire’s husband (Kiefer Sutherland) and young son (Cameron Spurr)

“Dunst and Gainsbourg deliver distinct, shattering characterizations, and that give-and-take contrast extends to the subtly audacious narrative as well. The two-part structure allows Von Trier to revisit and mirror certain motifs, images, and themes from the internalized Justine section (depicting mental anguish) again in the more sci-fi-ish, suspenseful and visual Claire segment, where the end of the world has become an externalized physical threat.

“It’s an auteurist triumph, bringing full circle the more pulpish elements of Von Trier’s earlier work with the emotional rawness of Breaking the Waves with just a little of the formal experimentation of his dogme years, but now with the impeccable visual panache of Antichrist.

“Dunst is the real deal here, functioning as LVT’s muse in a story that’s in a way almost first and foremost about the director’s own notorious mindset and provocations; Dunst has gone to the dark side before, most impressively in John Stockwell‘s crazy/beautiful, but this is a whole ‘nother level — an indelible portrait of complete dejection that’s easily the intensity-equal of Natalie Portman in Black Swan.

“Dunst is so good, in fact, it’s almost getting lost in the shuffle how raw Charlotte Gainsbourg is — the two performances, again, complement each other perfectly.

“Supporting cast is a veritable if unsurprising roll call of Von Trier-worthy maniacs, from Udo Kier to Charlotte Rampling to Jesper Christensen to John Hurt to the father-and-son Skarsgaards (Stellan and Alexander), but definitely worth noting is how easily Sutherland, perhaps taking a cue from his awesome old man’s roving-artist ’70s work, makes the transition to European Art Cinema in a decidedly un-Jack Bauer role.

“I’m not entirely sure where Brady Corbet managed to earn his ‘work with insane provocative overseas auteurs club’ card after Funny Games and this, but he pops up here doing his Rich Man‘s Kyle Gallner routine in the first half, wherein the cynical familial, corporate, and romantic relationships represent either a reason for, or a wonderfully indulgent justification of, Justine/Von Trier’s nihilistic despair.

“Others have cited a certain shared series of cinematic and thematic interest that recur between Melancholia, Another Earth and Tree of Life, but for my money this is the strongest of the bunch, the one that best melds the otherworldly implications of a giant perilous universe with the interpersonal breakdowns of its characters. But when they write the definitive film-summation book on 2011, lumping these three (and probable others to come) together might not be a bad place to start, this year almost starting to look like a more cosmic extension of last year’s dark ruminations on mortality (Enter the Void, Inception, Black Swan, Hereafter, etc etc.)

“In a nutshell: highly recommended.”

About 13 months ago I posted an observation about a tendency of younger women to project thin little pipsqueak voices and use mallspeak accents and phrasings in order to sound average and blend into the crowd. I flashed back to this a few nights ago as I listened to Cowboys & Aliens star Olivia Wilde talk to Jimmy Kimmel. She’s beautiful but her voice has no particular flavor and distinction.

Wilde is supposed to be a star in the making but she sounds like a checkout girl. Her voice is almost stunning in its flatness, and it makes her sound glib and unexceptional. She opens her mouth and…that’s it? A woman with a face as exquisite as Wilde’s ought to have some kind of soulful, cultured, knowing, inner-oomph voice to go with it…but no.

I had the same reaction to Blake Lively‘s voice when she visited Late Night with David Letterman to plug The Town. This? She sounds like a sixteen year-old from a suburb of Akron or Denver or Orlando, or…I don’t know, somebody who works for a downtown Manhattan accounting firm. She doesn’t sound like a tenacious lady who’s been around and taken legendary iPhone pics of herself in the bathroom and portrayed a frayed floozy in The Town and who will soon be swirling around Europe with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Who has a voice that matters? One with a little sass and intrigue and conviction, that cracks at times or has a breathy quality? Emma Stone, for sure. Elle Fanning has a voice with faint undercurrents of hurt and need. Amy Adams has a voice in The Fighter that suffers no fools. Katie Holmes‘ voice has a genuine something-or-other…a “been-around and known some disappointment” quality. Kristen Stewart sounds like she’s actually lived a life and has some convictions about this and that. Cameron Diaz sounds like a girly-girl, but her voice has a playful spirited quality and she knows how to sound hurt and nihilistic. Debra Winger has a real voice. Sassy Fran Drescher obviously had a voice in the ’90s. Michele Rodriguez has a voice right now.

Here’s that June 2010 piece I mentioned, called “Chirpy Minnie Mouse.”

“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 ‘oop-poop-pee-doop’ 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.”