Year: 2011

I have too much going on in my life to have paid any more than faint attention to the Casey Anthony murder trial, but in the wake of this morning’s “not guilty” verdict, the man-on-the-street presumption is that she killed her two-year-old daughter Cayley in 2008 but that she got off because of a lack of hard proof and too much circumstantial evidence. Henry Fonda and others have described cause for rendering a not-guilty verdict as “reasonable doubt,” which I generally believed in until this morning.

In God’s eyes the 25 year-old Anthony may be pure as the driven snow, but she sure seems like a fiend and a sociopath and Florida trash to me. The donkeys on the jury having decided against convicting her doesn’t mean she’s innocent. It means they felt they couldn’t convict her according to the rules of the court.

Let no one doubt that Casey Anthony is from the same low-rent gene pool as Octomom and Pamela Smart.

The last time a person this guilty walked away scott-free from a murder trial was when O.J. Simpson was found not guilty by the infamous “downtown jury” personified by juror Brenda Moran (i.e., “Brenda Moron“) who called the damning blood evidence in that case “a whole lotta nothin'”. Casey Anthony will be in the tabloids for months and months to come. She’ll receive book offers, marriage offers…she’s off to the races. And all it took to get to this amazing place in her life was to kill her two-year-old daughter. Just think of the money Casey will soon have, and all the good-looking guys she’ll eventually be having sex with. Maybe she’ll wind up blowing Tiger Woods, a fellow Floridian?

When Anthony dies she’ll be spending several thousand years roasting on a spit in hell, of course, but that’s down the road.

Four days ago this Matt Zoller Seitz/Stormy Monday video essay (i.e, Kim Morgan reading from Roger Ebert‘s 1988 review) appeared on Indiewire. It’s an intriguing piece — I’d love to see similar video essays about ’70s and ’80s films using Pauline Kael ‘s New Yorker reviews — but Indiewire didn’t supply embed codes so I didn’t repost. This morning it finally appeared on Vimeo with codes.

But to be honest, something was suppressing my interest in this essay to begin with, and in fact had diminished interest when I first saw Stormy Monday 23 years ago. It’s the same thing that kept me from staying with the recently released Criterion Bluray of Something Wild, Jonathan Demme‘s respected dramedy-farce. And to varying degrees has compromised my ability to get into The Milagro Beanfield War, Working Girl, A Stranger Among Us, Nobody’s Fool, Mulholland Falls, Lolita, Celebrity and RKO 281.

That thing is Melanie Griffith. I used to roll with her manner and personality and raspy, pouty, mincing voice, but I just can’t anymore. To me she’s always been the ultimate Hollywood ditzoid. Obviously not the brightest bulb and not well educated. (That Holocaust remark she made in ’92 while promoting Shining Through, about the six million Jews exterminated by the Third Reich in the 1940s being “a lot of people,” will haunt her until the day she dies.) She can ably convey hurt, vulnerability, flirtatiousness, tenderness. But she never seemed to be dealing from a full deck.

The only film in which she doesn’t convey this flaky affected quality is in Arthur Penn‘s Night Moves (’75), made when she was 17.

On top of which the supermarket tabs have been telling us for years about her struggle with this and that personal issue that reflect an unstable, uncertain mentality. Plus she has trout lips.

Griffith is basically why I’ve never re-watched Stormy Monday on DVD. I’ve been a fan of director Mike Figgis and costar Tommy Lee Jones for a long while so there’s a part of me that would like to watch it. But I just can’t. I can’t do Griffith anymore.

Daniel Radcliffe has admitted to GQ magazine he “‘became too ‘reliant’ on alcohol while filming the last few outings in the Harry Potter franchise.” The Guardian‘s Xan Brooks, lifting from the monthly, quotes Radcliffe as saying “there were a few years there when I was just so enamored with the idea of living some sort of famous person’s lifestyle that really isn’t suited to me.”

Radcliffe “admits [that] his lifestyle became an issue on the set of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the article says. “He went on to claim he has not touched alcohol since August 2010, shortly after completing work on the final Potter production. ‘There’s no shame in enjoying a quiet life,’ the 21 year-old actor says. ‘And that’s been the realization of the past few years for me.'”

A q & a transcript between Screen Junkies‘ Fred Topol and the relentlessly feisty director Uwe Boll was posted four days ago (i.e., Thursday, 6.30). Early on Topol mentioned Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life; Boll said he hates it and explained his thinking.

Boll: “I totally hated that movie because I feel as a filmmaker that besides the fact that Terrence Malick did some great visuals on some movies, also on The New World, like the opening of that movie was really good but then he completely lost it. I think The Tree of Life is a piece of shit. Totally, and I think Sean Penn is ridiculous in it, like walking around in the elevator. It’s nothing.

“This is the thing. It’s so overrated because it’s Terrence Malick. Same as Lars von Trier‘s movies. I like Breaking the Waves. After that [his output] was all crap. The thing is, he gets all the Hollywood stars. ‘Oh, I want to work with him’ and they don’t know what kind of [a] retard he is. I think the same with Terrence Malick. I think Terrence Malick is one of the overrated directors of all time.”

Topol: “Is that just because it doesn’t have a story and it’s more impressionistic?”

Boll: “Absolutely. You have to tell a story that you get a connection to something. When he starts doing after 25 minutes a National Geographic break where you see volcanoes and planets coming together. Then his dinosaur episode with Jurassic Park. You think well, what’s going on with him? What is wrong with the guy?

“I was not engaged [enough] to keep watching. If I would have known how this ends, I would have walked out. But I watched the whole movie because I wanted to see how it ends also. The end was I think the most pathetic thing, when they’re all at the beach hugging each other. It was fucking disastrous. It was a complete disaster and it shows also that a lot of stars have no taste. Like Sean Penn, Brad Pitt has no taste what a good movie is. They trusted the director but you have to have your own brain.

“I’m very mad right now because I want to do a bail-out movie about the financial crisis where a guy is losing everything and then he starts killing the investment bankers. I did various offers to stars and they passed on it. So CAA gave it a good reader’s review, so they’re supporting us but William Morris gave it a bad reader review.

“Like I also watch Matt Damon in The Adjustment Bureau, also a piece-of-shit movie. It was a disaster. It was a complete disaster and a guy like Matt Damon should feel that, that this story is nothing. It’s like a mini-Matrix in the normal world but it makes no sense because that agency who’s changing it all, who is that? What was the plan of these guys? Who pays them? It’s totally absurd because that agency is doing everything but not doing anything basically. Also it’s a very flat movie and I think with The Tree of Life, this was for me an embarrassment and it gets hyped up because of Terrence Malick and I didn’t like it.

Topol: “Well, I knew from his other movies that he was experimental.”

Boll: “Right, because his other movies you get the feeling he tries to tell a story and cannot do it. But this was poor experimental. You cannot tell me you were not bored to death while you watched The Tree of Life.”

Some kind of congrats is hereby offered to Oscar blogger Scott Feinberg for landing in a big Samsung “Wonder Exchange” ad campaign in the pages of Vanity Fair, Wired, GQ and Architectural Digest. Feinberg shares the five-page spread (which begins on page 67 of the August issue of Vanity Fair) with Ubergizmo co-founder Hubert Nguyen.

Feinberg and Nguyen were given free Samsung Galaxy Tabs (10.1 version) in exchange for their supplying “review comments”, as it were. They also commented about lounge robes, a titanium watch, a jacket, barbells and whatnot. C’mon, it’s all free! And pretty good publicity. You know that Glenn Kenny or Karina Longworth or Eric Kohn would take the merchandise, share their opinions about same and run like thieves. Where’s the harm? Didn’t Mike Wallace used to do ads for Chesterfields?

One question: what’s a Samsung “Wonder Exchange”? It sounds like a combination of Wonder Bread and a desk at Best Buy where you go to return stuff.

Earlier today Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I recorded Oscar Poker #39 — possibly the most meandering, lost-in-space, under-energized podcast in our joint history. We didn’t discuss Transformers 3 but we did discuss, for far, far too long, the shortcomings of Larry Crowne. “How boring is the edited podcast?,” I asked Sasha before hearing it. “Not too bad,” she answered. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

According to L.A. Weekly writer Siran Babayan, a recently-published book by Hollywood screenwriters Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon (“Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!“) summarizes meetings the pair had with Billy Crystal and Sandra Bernhard “with just one word: dick.”

“Well, at least somebody has the guts to let it be known what a selfish dick and insincere courtesan Billy Crystal is,” a screenwriter friend wrote this morning.

“Perhaps so,” I replied, “but I know three things: (a) Many if not most comedians are possessed by dark moods and inclinations of one kind or another — they’re no day at the beach; (b) I myself felt a certain morose moodiness and frostiness when I spoke to Crystal at Sundance a few years ago, although it didn’t bother me; and yet (c) I love that Crystal reportedly has an exact replica of an airplane bathroom (complete with blue water in the toilet) in his home.”

Garant and Lennon will read from and sign their book at Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., W. Hlywd. on Tuesday, 7.5, at 7 p.m.

The fact that I’m reduced to posting ping-pong photos (taken late yesterday afternoon in West Hollywood) tells you how dead it is out there. Topics for Oscar Poker #39: (a) the death of Larry Crowne; (b) What summer films (if any) are we looking forward to?; (c) the coming of Horrible Bosses and (d) Movie titles I cannot and will not abide, no matter how good the film may be: Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest.

Early this morning one of Fox News’ twitter accounts (i.e., foxnewspolitics) was hacked, and the sad death of President Obama was announced. The messages were removed around 9 am this morning Pacific. FoxNews.com first posted a brief statement saying that the reports were incorrect, and that it regretted “any distress the false tweets may have created.”

Most good lefties are “beyond borders” in their thinking. They’re citizens of the civilized world who instinctively recoil when they hear the phrase “We’re number one!” (an ESPN barroom American-ism if there ever was one), and who relate as much to Italians and Welsh-people and Argentinians and Qaddafi-hating Libyans and Lithuanians as they would to Middle Americans of any region. They’re not into “American exceptionalism” or anything that smacks of xenophobia of Palinism or Gov. Rick Perry or Arizonian thinking or DuluozGray-ism.

I love American culture in many respects and am very happy I live here as a citizen, but I haven’t felt “patriotic” in ages…please. Okay, I felt a twinge when Bin Laden took a bullet in the face and I felt as shattered as everyone else on 9/11. But I also knew on that day that we’d been anything but innocent lambs, foreign-policy-wise, and that our karma had basically turned around and bitten us in the ass. We’ve been the marauding Romans of our time since the 1950s, and we’re hated worldwide for that. (As well as, okay, envied in a weird sense.) So the idea of compiling a list of “patriotic films” seems kind of odd, but Bilge Ebiri‘s choices are…well, thoughtful. I mean, I’ve never thought of Manhattan as a patriotic film.

I feel proud of the achievements of the great American artists, writers, thinkers and doers. That’s my kind of patriotism. I feel immensely proud that I come from the same country as Mark Twain and Hoyt Wilhelm and Allen Ginsberg and Woody Allen and Walt Whitman and Frank Sinatra. But we’re not the country of George M. Cohan or FDR or George S. Patton or Audie Murphy or Woody Guthrie or Chief Sitting Bull any more. We’ve been taken over by corporations. There’s only the international dominion of dollars. We’re on the way down and everyone knows it, and it’s mainly because of the corporate-fellating right and the Rick Perrys and Sarah Palins and the Tea Party morons who cherish their inalienable right to burn fossil fuels and eat super-fatty foods and own 60″ LED flat-screens more than anything else.

So you can have the Uncle Sam, red-white-and-blue stuff with tanks and soldiers marching down Main Street. In my mind that’s pageant-code for “we’re beyond arrogant and we love it!”

You think Naom Chomsky gets all misty-eyed on the 4th of July?

A bit of the apparent Island-copycat backstory:

How do you go from being a tough, provocative director of respected envelope-pushing dramas to a seemingly flailing director of wildly miscalculated embarassments? That’s what Otto Preminger managed to do between the mid ’60s and mid ’70s. Many great directors lost their touch or their edge when they got older (Elia Kazan, Francis Coppola, John Frankenheimer, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, John Schlesinger), but only the once-great Preminger appeared to literally lose his mind, or certainly his judgment.

Otto Preminger sometime during the mid ’50s.

I’m reminded of this by the recent DVD release of Such Good Friends (’71) and the forthcoming DVD of Skidoo (’68) — two of the worst films ever made by a “name” director during Hollywood’s counter-culture flirtation. Not to mention the painfully campy Hurry Sundown (’67), the altogether dismal Tell Me You Love Me, Junie Moon (’70) and the catastrophic Rosebud (’75), which has never had a domestic DVD release.

Okay, Preminger redeemed himself somewhat (or at least slightly) with his final film, The Human Factor (’79), but the ’67-to-’75 damage has been so deep and wounding that it almost didn’t matter. What other director has lost it this badly during the final laps?

Early in his career Preminger hit the motherlode with a classic noir, Laura (’44), and then went into quasi-slumber mode for six or seven years before finding his legendary early ’50s-to-mid ’60s groove — Angel Face (’52), The Moon Is Blue (’53), Carmen Jones (’54), The Man with the Golden Arm (’56), Saint Joan (’57), Bonjour Tristesse (’58), Porgy and Bess (1959), Anatomy of a Murder (’59 — probably his peak), Exodus (1960 — starting to slip), Advise and Consent (’62), The Cardinal (’63) and In Harm’s Way (’65 — his last semi-decent film before the fall).