“Bless Gore Vidal for having exposed liars and hypocrites and monsters, and having made their lives just a bit more awkward or painful. Yes!” — tweeted around 10:40 pm, or about an hour after hearing of the death of Gore Vidal following a screening of Hope Springs.
Vidal worked as a Ben-Hur screenwriter for a long period — post-Karl Tunberg, pre-Christopher Fry. Here’s that famous story about Vidal having suggested to Ben-Hur director William Wyler that Messala’s fierce rage toward Ben-Hur might have been driven by a “lover’s quarrel gone wrong.”
And for all of it Bob never laments much less condemns unrestricted access to assault weapons, without which the Aurora massacre would have been less likely to happen or surely less deadly.
It’s not the pompadour wig or the glittery wardrobe or the piano-playing. That stuff’s easy. The big challenge facing Michael Douglas in his portrayal of Wladziu Valentino Liberace in Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra is getting the speaking voice right.
Matt Damon as Scott Thorson and Michael Douglas as Liberace.
In this morning’s post about the new Skyfall trailer, I wrote that “the comedic surreal rules that were once used by the Wile E. Coyote vs. Roadunner cartoons have been embraced by the super-action genre.” I was referring to characters falling dozens or hundreds of feet (like Mr. Coyote used to in the cartoons) and somehow not hitting the pavement through this or that escape clause. But there’s one cartoon bit action movies haven’t embraced that I’d really like to see.
I’m speaking of the extended suspended animation rule. That’s the one in which the Coyote will chase the Roadrunner off a very tall mesa or mountaintop, and run right off the edge of a cliff…but without falling. That’s because he doesn’t realize that the cliff has ended and he’s now suspended over a canyon with nothing below him but air. He can’t fall, in short, until he fully accepts that there’s nothing holding him up. He starts to suspect that he might be in trouble. Without looking he reaches around underneath his feet to try and feel ground or rock…nothing. He looks back at the cliff edge and sees he’s not standing on it. Then he looks down and grasps the reality. Then he looks at the camera and goes “oh, no,” pleading with fate or God not to let him fall. And then he’s gone, making a whistling sound as he drops to the desert floor like a bomb. Sometimes the camera would just watch from above and note a very faint impact sound and a small puff of smoke as he hits. And then he’d be fine in the next scene.
I want to see Colin Farell perform this kind of scene in Total Recall. Seriously, why not? Action films haven’t the slightest interest in adhering to the laws of physics so why not just go full cartoon?
If this were my map I would throw out Fast Times at Ridgemont High as the fill-in for California (what an insult!…as if California is full of adolescent stoner mallheads), and replace it with either (a) Jacques Tourneur‘s Out Of The Past, which encompasses San Francisco, Los Angeles, Bridgeport and Lake Tahoe (as well as New York and Acapulco), or (b) Karel Reisz‘s Who’ll Stop The Rain, which encompasses Oakland, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
I’d like to see a much bigger map that gets much more specific and which assigns movie titles to particular towns and/or blends their names (like, let’s say, The Wild One and Hollister, California, where the original 1947 motorcycle-gang riot that inspired the 1953 Marlon Brando film).
The Movie Map reminds me of the one that accompanied Joel Garreau‘s The Nine Nations of North America, which came out in 1981. Question: Do the same nations exist 30 years later, or have the borders shifted to some degree? Do the same names apply?
The first thing that comes to mind is “did Nancy Meyers have something to do with this?” She didn’t. The culprit is director-writer Justin Zackham, author of The Bucket List screenplay and director of Going Greek. Obviously aimed at silver-haired women and all the squares, schmucks and schmoes who love films about characters who have shiny copper pots hanging in their kitchen (i.e., a classic Meyers signature).
Painful dialogue, broad gestures, winking and signalling at the audience from a mile away…what kind of retardo finds this stuff remotely funny?
Robert De Niro is supposed to be better than pretty good in The Silver Linings Playbook so he probably took this one thinking, “90% of everything is crap….you can’t hit a homer every time at bat…money is money…I’ll just hold my nose and do it,” etc.
The bearded devil from Angel Heart finds De Niro leaving the set of Bang the Drum Slowly and ushers him into a room at a nearby motel. An irritated DeNiro says “whaddaya whaddaya?…I’m set to do Mean Streets and then The Godfather Part II and then Taxi Driver and then 1900 and then The Last Tycoon and New York, New York…whadday want from me?” And the devil cracks open a hard-boiled egg, sprinkles it with salt, turns off the light, fires up a projector and shows De Niro a reel from The Big Wedding and says, “This is what you’ll be doing in 40 years.”
It was kind of a good thing in a couple of different ways when Mitt Romney‘s traveling press secretary Rick Gorkatold reporters to “kiss my ass” and “shove it.” First, these were the most human-sounding, refreshingly un-scripted statements to come out of the Romney organization in months. Second, Gorka’s anger is an obvious indicator of stress and frustration within the Romney inner circle (i.e., they’re giving it to Gorka and he’s passing it along).
We’d all love it, I suspect, if more Romney camp statements were on this level. Q: “Governor Romney…? A: “Why don’t you drop to your knees and blow me, asshole?” During the end of the 1972 campaign George McGovern told a heckler to “kiss my ass,” and that was surely indicative of McGovern’s “fuck it, I’ve lost this election” attitude. Profanity isn’t spoken — it splashes out of the bucket and onto the floor. There’s very little lying in it, usually. Richard Nixon‘s use of “cocksuckers” and “Jew boys”…classic stuff.
Sam Mendes is a classy, seasoned director who knows from poise and discipline, and it’s clear from the new Skyfall trailer (which I’m the last guy in the world to respond to, due to my time zone) that he’s kicked things up. But boil it down and it’s the same old shit. It’s simply been re-vitalized with Roger Deakins‘ brilliant cinematography and re-energized with Thomas Newman‘s striking orchestral score, and edited with serious pizazz by Stuart Baird, or possibly by some house guy. But calm down already. It’s just a Bond film.
Javier Bardem‘s yellow hair isn’t “bad” or problematic, as some have said — it’s just standard Bond arch-villain hair. Didn’t Chris Walken use the same dye in A View to a Kill?
And you can’t get shot and conveniently splash into a river or a bay off a fast-moving train and just, whatever, wake up a few weeks later. That’s just another example of “have him jump off a building or a bridge and fall several stores because falling doesn’t matter any more” big-studio bullshit, and Mendes knows it. Outside of multiplexes falling from 60 or 70 feet is almost always lethal, and crashing into water at almost any velocity can knock you out and break bones. The comedic surreal rules that were once used by the Wile E. Coyote vs. Roadunner cartoons have been embraced by the super-action genre, and that means check-out time for the realists in the audience. And it’s largely the fault of asshole studio executives who want to be competitive with the other action movies that ape the Coyote vs. Road Runner aesthetic. Stupid gets. If I had my way I would throw them off a moving train and into a river.
