Your typical American yahoo believes that under the skin many if not most Islamics are radical anti-Americans who have to be guarded against and certainly can’t be trusted. A more benevolent, open-hearted view is that we’re all God’s children and we have to accept our differences. Sean Stone, 27 year-old son of director Oliver Stone, belongs to the latter camp. He announced today from Iran, where he’s shooting a documentary, that he’s converted to Islam.
This is the kind of thing that bright willful types sometimes do in their 20s. Stone is trying to define himself. What matters in the end is blood, and Stone is half-Christian and half-Jewish so this is a phase — a “statement.” He’ll be sipping martinis with super-models in Paris next year or the year after. I met him once at a party in Manhattan. He believes in passion, wildness and the search for ecstasy by way of truth.
“The conversion to Islam is not abandoning Christianity or Judaism, which I was born with,” Stone said in a telephone call from the central Iranian city of Isfahan, where he underwent the ceremony. “It means I have accepted Mohammad and other prophets.” According to Iran’s Fars news agency, Stone had become a Shiite and had chosen to be known by the Muslim first name Ali.
I once made the mistake of leaning down and hugging a red Doberman Pinscher — a dog I knew really well and had played around with several times. The fucker bit me on the right cheek and ear. That never would have happened with a Golden Retriever. You can’t really trust Dobermans, Pit Bills or Mastiffs, certainly not when it comes to kissing or hugging.
Look at those cops after the Denver newswoman, KUSA’s Kyle Dyer, is bitten by Max the mastiff. They be cool, chillin’…no worries. And look at that weather guy after it happens.
Rick Santorum, who would probably get slaughtered in a race against President Obama, has essentially tied Mittens Romney in three nationwide polls among Republicans. Santorum has 30% to Romney’s 27% in a N.Y. Times/CBS News poll released today. A Pew Research poll has Santorum over Romney, 30% to 28%, and a Gallup poll has Romney at 32% vs. Santorum’s 30%.
Is there a scenario in which Santorum could realistically override Romney and wrestle away the Republican nomination? Highly doubtful. If anything Santorum, who knows the taste of butter on bread, will probably go the opportunistic-waffle route and become Romney’s vice-presidential candidate, which will probably strike a good portion of Santorum’s base — the Evangelicals, Tea Party nutters and gun-owning racist heehaw right — as a cop-out.
I say again what I’ve been saying all along: President Obama will squeak out a victory next November. There will be some (but not much) joy in Mudville among liberal moderates and progressives when this happens. The lefties felt euphoric in ’08 when Obama beat McCain, of course, but his victory over Romney will be met with great surges of…relief, I suppose. Better a mellow centrist who supports moderate measures in the pursuit of economic fairness and justice while winking at corporations than a shallow 1% guy — an empty haircut with the mindset of a corporate raider who made the family dog shit all over the station wagon.
As you might expect, Dave Izkoff‘s 2.12 N.Y. Times story about Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s Lovelace, the currently rolling biopic about exploited ’70s porn star Linda Lovelace, was a marvel of artful dodging. Suffice that Itzkoff avoided mentioning that Lovelace’s fame wasn’t so much from starring in the famous 1972 porn film Deep Throat (’72) as playing a woman who swallows male appendages whole. Sorry.
All Itzkoff manages to say is that Lovelace “played a woman who learns that her clitoris is in her throat.”
He also says “there is comedy…in the film’s fastidious re-creations” of Lovelace’s python-like feat. He quotes actor Adam Brody, who plays Deep Throat co-star Harry Reems, saying that “those sex scenes with Ms. Seyfried were ‘by far the lightest, silliest stuff in the movie.'”
The other Linda Lovelace movie, Matthew Wilder‘s Inferno: A Linda Lovelace Story, won’t begin shooting until March, meaning that in all likelihood it’ll be eating Lovelace‘s dust. That in itself suggests that Wilder won’t be shooting his sex scenes in a light or silly vein, if only to avoid aping Epstein and Friedman. Lovelace producer Heidi Jo Markel, a former producer of Inferno, tells Itzkoff that Wilder’s script is “good” but “dark and oppressive.”
Inferno will costar Malin Akerman as Lovelace and Matt Dillon as her creepy and manipulative boyfriend, Matt Traynor. Peter Sarsgaard is playing Traynor in Lovelace and James Franco is playing Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner.
Itzkoff gets a tad more explicit at the end of the piece when he dryly describes the beginning of a scene in which Seyfriend/Lovelace orally pleasures Franco/Hefner in the balcony of Glendale’s Alex Theatre. Sorry again, but that is the gist of Itzkoff’s last paragraph. A N.Y. Times first?
Who, honestly, is going to have the stones to watch two Linda Lovelace dramas? One will be grueling enough, I suspect.
Andrew Sullivan‘s 2.11 riff about how Ja Rule goes well with slow-mo Wes Anderson shots reminds how much I love Anderson’s original scoring of this scene with Nico‘s “These Days”. I’ll always adore how she couldn’t sing but sang with such honesty, and could hit every note. Perfect.
Daniel Nettheim‘s The Hunter (Magnolia, 4.6) opened in Australia last October to a mostly positive critical response. The ads indicate that Willem Dafoe‘s character is out to shoot a Tasmanian tiger (thought to be extinct when the last of the species died in 1936) but that’s not the deal. This is tonight’s diversion pour moi. Written by Julia Leigh, Alice Addison and Wain Fimeri.
My idea of a cool Abraham Lincoln vampire movie would be one that resembles Phillip Borsos‘ The Grey Fox — a movie that looks, feels and behaves like it’s actually happening in the 19th Century — but with 19th Century vampires (i.e., ones that are trying to blend into society by concealing their nature whenever possible) running around. You need to respect the milieu and time period, and then weave in your bullshit. You’re a filmmaker with a time machine, and you’ve just landed in 1864 Washington…got it?
This trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (20th Century Fox, 6.22) tells us that director-producer Timur Bekmambetov isn’t much for authenticity. It tells us, as anyone who’s seen Wanted would know, that he’s an unbridled, wild-eyed, froth-at-the-mouth wildebeest who doesn’t give a shit about anything except roping in the idiots who pay to see cool CG monster shit.
I have this sense of having seen too many romcoms about under-40 couples (partly GenX but most GenY) taking the longest time to either find their ideal romantic partner or, having found him/her, taking eons to pull the trigger about moving in together or getting married or having kids.
I’m telling myself that these films — the latest being The Five Year Engagement (Universal, 4.27) — are metaphors for a general sense of under-40 futility out there — cynical attitudes and expectations, shitty jobs, crappy paychecks and “the Boomers have screwed us so what’s the point of shouldering too much responsibility?…we can’t afford that much and who knows when the next recession will come?”
You can’t turn off the hunger or instinct for love, sex and procreation, of course, and clearly there are thousands of rich or flush GenXers like Judd Apatow who’ve gotten married and have had kids, etc., but middle and lower-middle under-40s seem to be seriously ambivalent about taking the next step toward anything. They’d rather shoot the shit and hang out at cafes and text and go to Cancun and piddle around. Generation Flounder, Generation Procrastinate, Generation Wank. If this isn’t true why do I have a sense of so many movies and TV shows about romances that are endlessly delayed for this and that reason? Later.
On top of which I can’t buy into any film in which Jason Segel, the Manatee of GenY comic actors, is the engaged bachelor or groom or guy in a serious relationship. I look at him and I think indulgence and corpulence. Ice cream, Hostess Cupcakes, cheesecake, cheeseburgers, bananas, peanut butter, pasta, etc. I can’t “be” him and he can’t “be” me as I watch one of his films. He gives me the creeps.
I first saw Barry Levinson‘s Diner 30 fucking years ago at the Magno (now Dolby) Screening Room at Sixth Ave. and 55th Street. It might’ve been late January rather than early February 1982…I forget. But I remember going “wow! this is definitely the shit!” in my review, and then interviewing Levinson at the Sherry Netherland and then Kevin Bacon for an Us magazine piece.
I wish now that I’d landed a Mickey Rourke interview because I could now say I talked to the guy during his magic-ascendancy period (Body Heat to Angel Heart) before the downturn and the facelifts and all the other weird stuff.
Like everyone else I loved Diner‘s jazzy, meandering late-night guy talk, and the way the narrative never really took shape and kind of floated around. Levinson’s film understood waiting, stalling and aimlessness. I remember telling my friends “it’s the American I Vitelloni!” Speaking as a survivor of a harshly competitive teenage existence in Westfield, New Jersey (which seemed similar to Levinson’s Batlimore environs, and which also included endless late-night banterings in diners and bars), Diner felt fresh and authentic — a low-budget but utterly genuine American film about a mentality and milieu that any urban or suburban guy who’d bopped around during the ’60s or ’70s knew backwards and forwards.
Why, then, haven’t I rented or bought a Diner DVD since? I might’ve seen part of it once in the ’90s on the tube…I can’t remember. I’m kind of into seeing it again after reading S. L. Price‘s recently-posted Vanity Fair piece (“Much Ado About Nothing”), but I’d rather see a Bluray version…which hasn’t been made. You know which Levinson-Baltimore film I’d really like see again? Tin Men.
“Made for $5 million and first released in March 1982, Diner earned less than $15 million and lost out on the only Academy Award — best original screenplay — for which it was nominated. Critics did love it; indeed, a gang of New York writers, led by Pauline Kael, saved the movie from oblivion. But Diner has suffered the fate of the small-bore sleeper, its relevance these days hinging more on eyebrow-raising news like Barry Levinson’s plan to stage a musical version — with songwriter Sheryl Crow — on Broadway next fall, or reports romantically linking star Ellen Barkin with Levinson’s son Sam, also a director. The film itself, though, is rarely accorded its actual due.
“Yet no movie from the 1980s has proved more influential. Diner has had far more impact on pop culture than the stylistic masterpiece Blade Runner, the indie darling Sex, Lies, and Videotape, or the academic favorites Raging Bull and Blue Velvet. Leave aside the fact that Diner served as the launching pad for the astonishingly durable careers of Barkin, Paul Reiser, Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern and Timothy Daly, plus Rourke and Bacon — not to mention Levinson, whose resume includes Rain Man, Bugsy and Al Pacino‘s recent career reviver, You Don’t Know Jack.
“Diner‘s groundbreaking evocation of male friendship changed the way men interact, not just in comedies and buddy movies, but in fictional mob settings, in fictional police and fire stations, in commercials, on the radio. In 2009, The New Yorker‘s TV critic Nancy Franklin, speaking about the TNT series Men of a Certain Age, observed that ‘Levinson should get royalties any time two or more men sit together in a coffee shop.’ She got it only half right. They have to talk too.
“What Franklin really meant is that, more than any other production, Diner invented…nothing. Or, to put it in quotes: Levinson invented the concept of “nothing” that was popularized eight years later with the premiere of Seinfeld.
“In Diner (as well as in Tin Men, his 1987 movie about older diner mavens), Levinson took the stuff that usually fills time between the car chase, the fiery kiss, the dramatic reveal — the seemingly meaningless banter (‘Who do you make out to, Sinatra or Mathis?’) tossed about by men over drinks, behind the wheel, in front of a cooling plate of French fries — and made it central.
”It influenced a whole generation of writers,’ says director John Wells, “revolutionizing the way characters talk and how realistic we were going to be. And it was particularly influential with actors — this notion that you could play someone who was extremely real and at the same time be humorous and emotional. It had a complexity that not a lot of movies at the time had.’
“While movie audiences lived in an outside world cluttered with names and faces from newspapers, TV, politics, and the products of the Hollywood machine, movies themselves didn’t much reflect popular culture. There was, beyond plot, a practical reason: TV was still viewed by movie executives as the enemy, and to acknowledge its omnipresence must have seemed like free — and suicidal — advertising. So even movies set in the here and now played out in a hermetically sealed universe: the bank robbery, the romance, or the bankrupt farm was the only story to tell.
“Diner threw open the windows to a constant flow of brand-name appliances and soda, TV shows from soap operas to Bonanza to GE College Bowl, Bergman films, President Eisenhower, newscasts, real N.F.L. players like Alan Ameche, and real actors like Troy Donahue. Levinson even playfully mixed his own dialogue with that of a background TV.”
Whoa, wait a minute — Bonanza was a conversation in Tin Men, not Diner.
“While Jerry Seinfeld mass-marketed Levinson’s focus on minutiae, the ultimate film geek made it cool. In 1994, Quentin Tarantino‘s Pulp Fiction won praise for its ultra-stylized, ultra-violent take on the L.A. underworld. But what made the movie click were the jazzy back-and-forths between hit men John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson about Big Macs, foot massages, and the virtues of eating pork like ‘that Arnold on Green Acres.’ Tarantino’s genius, first demonstrated in 1990’s Reservoir Dogs, sprang from the decision to make his reprehensible characters sympathetic through dialogue that any truckdriver would recognize. Guy talk. Diner talk.
“Pulp Fiction became, arguably, the most influential movie of the 1990s, but Levinson’s reach didn’t end there. Between the release of writer-actor Jon Favreau‘s Swingers — with its dinner-table riff on Reservoir Dogs, no less — in 1996, and the debut of HBO’s Entourage.
“Diner is, as I Love You, Man director John Hamburg says, ‘the Cadillac of male-bonding movies,’ and no one has tapped that vein better in recent years than director Judd Apatow. With The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, Apatow was credited with creating the ‘bromance,’ one of the few genres capable of luring the increasingly elusive male audience into theaters. When Apatow was asked in the spring of 2009 to speak at the U.S.C. film school and screen his favorite movie, the choice couldn’t have been easier.
“At 14, Apatow sneaked in alone to see the R-rated Diner in a Huntington, Long Island, theater, then pestered his mother to take him again. Ever since, he’s been trying to match the shaggy, improvised dialogue that Levinson encouraged during his tabletop scenes. The part in Knocked Up when Seth Rogen and his pals are talking about the vengeance-seeking Eric Bana in Munich? “That was my version of a Barry Levinson run from Diner — finally they’re letting Jews kill people,” Apatow says.”
All well and good, but you’ll never get me to believe that a guy could get a girl to touch his gross animal member by cutting a hole in the bottom of a popcorn container and then stick it through the hole and wait for the woman, eating the popcorn, to work her way through to the bottom. The gag wouldn’t work unless he was “standing at attention”, of course, and are you gonna tell me a guy can maintain stiffitude for eight or ten minutes (if not more) while his organ is surrounded by warm popcorn? I never bought that, and I never will.
Appropos of nothing: I ran into Tim Daly at LAX on my way up to Sundance last month. I didn’t say “hi” but there he was. The only conversation starter I could think of was that I enjoyed his recurring guest role as Christopher Moltisanti’s A.A. sponsor, J.T. Dolan, in four Sopranos episodes (In Camelot, Mayham, Stage 5, Walk Like a Man).
Not bad. The Helpcould be a musical…easily. Music, lyrics and video editing by Jon Kaplan and Al Kaplan (Conan the Barbarian: The Musical, Off-Broadway’s Silence! The Musical)
Rebecca Cammisa and Julie Anderson‘s God Is The Bigger Elvis, one of the nominees for Best Documentary Short Subject, is a congenial, fair-minded portrait of the actress once known as Dolores Hart, who had a pretty good career for a while (costarring in Loving You, Miss Lonelyhearts, King Creole, etc.) until she decided to hang it up and become a nun in 1963. Now 73, she lives in a Benedictine retreat in Connecticut and is called Mother Prioress.
Hart was invited to pursue a higher calling, and I think it’s nice that she chose a nun’s life and stuck to it, and that she seems serene about this. Some of us wind up with jobs that make us happy, and that’s a good thing. But while it’s fine to contemplate a life of such austerity, it’s hard to relate to this. Surely Cammisa and Anderson realize that Mother Prioress might seem, her charitable and kindly manner aside, like a bit of an odd duck from an average viewer’s perspective. Well, not “odd,” really, but curious. Gently and agreeably possessed, so to speak. And so some will find it strange that they chose not to mention that she’s still a member fo the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and that she presumably receives screeners and keeps up with everything. Why hide that?
It’s hard to match the face of Mother Prioress with the one Hart had in the late ’50s and early ’60s — there’s really no resemblance.
The character who makes the film come together emotionally is Hart’s ex-fiance, Don Robinson, who says he was hurt when she told him she was breaking their engagement to join the church, and that he’s been visiting her at the Connecticut residence for 47 years. (This portion of the film was apparently shot in 2010.)
All in all God Is the Bigger Elvis is an intriguing visit. A meditation, in a sense. The fact that I am 100% persuaded that there is no entity as the Catholics imagine God to be (i.e., a cosmic, sentient energy force that comprehends and cares about the moral goings-on on Planet Earth) did not interfere with my interest or concentration.
