Day: August 3, 2012

I haven’t yet seen the Jaws Bluray (8.14), but I gather it’s been nicely restored. Fine. The film itself is a decent-enough thing. But it has no undercurrents so it hasn’t aged all that well. Which is the mark of all hackwork — popular or unpopular in their day, but always diminished by time. The fact is that the two-hour “making of Jaws” doc, included on the disc, is much, much more entertaining.

I still think of Jaws as one of the two films (Star Wars being the other) that killed the ’70s and ushered in the infantilization of mainstream movies and murdered the idea of the gradual theatrical break, so no matter how much you might “like” this film, it’s nearly impossible to forget what it is, was and always will be in a metaphorical sense.

But God cherish the memory of the great David Zanuck, one of the smartest, most kindly and most perceptive producers you could ever hope to meet.

My favorite moment is still the zoom-in, track-back shot of Roy Scheider (borrowed from Vertigo) when he realizes, sitting on his beach towel, that the shark has eaten a little kid.

Explanation: Some guy has hacked into my staging software and is changing copy. No way did I mistype and call it Jews, twice. It’s always something.

I might see Total Recall sometime this weekend. Maybe. But I could smell the fumes coming off this thing from the trailers, and I know who and what Len Wiseman is…I know where he lives, and that I’ll never go there if I can help it. It opens today with a 31% Rotten Tomatoes rating and a 44% from Metacritic. Colin Farrell‘s life and career turned around post-Alexander when he stopped drinking and became a character actor. I say “ignore this” — I say “give him a pass.”

I had a reservation to stay tonight at Monument Valley’s Firetree Inn, a b & b located in a wifi dead zone about a half-hour’s drive from Goulding’s. The novelty is that visitors sleep in a Navajo Hogan, a kind of dirt igloo that Navajos have been crashing, praying and meditating in over the generations. It’s a sacred thing so the owner-managers want people who “get” the Hogan experience to stay there — they don’t want trashy, fast-food-eating families with loud kids looking to watch American Idol on flatscreens.

I get that. I wanted to do this. I figured I could do without wifi for an eight-hour period. But I’d never seen a real Hogan up close (to me the word “Hogan” means Hogan’s Heroes) and was curious about the Firetree, so early yesterday afternoon a friend and I drove out to pay a visit.

The owner-managers, a couple in their early 40s or late 30s, were — I don’t want to exaggerate — stunned by our visit. Stunned. They pretty much went into apoplectic shock. Their basic response was “whoa, wait a minute…what are you, a person who’s not scheduled to be here until late tomorrow afternoon, doing here now?” They couldn’t wrap their heads around someone just checking the place out, all friendly and no biggie.

The first thing the bald and bleary-eyed guy said was that “we don’t open for guests until 5 pm.” Nice people skills, pal. And then the woman said they’d recently gotten up — it was around 1 pm — and they were having breakfast. Right away I was thinking, “What’s up with these guys? Who treats customers like tax collectors? Who has breakfast at 1 pm?” When I said we’d just driven over from Goulding’s and just wanted to look around, the woman said, “But that’s so far.” No, I said — it’s about a 25-minute drive. (Which it is.)

Then they went into a kind of silent mode. “How do we deal with these people?,” they seemed to be saying. “How do we cope with this?”

The general vibe was “We don’t do this…people don’t just drop by to check our place out and you’re the very first to do this in the history of the Firetree Inn” — the guy actually said this to me in a subsequent e-mail — “and this is a place of tradition and spiritual worship in a sense, but first and foremost the Firetree Inn is about us…about what we want…and we don’t like people just dropping by before 5 pm.”

An hour later I was back at Goulding’s and writing the Firetree guys and asking if they could find it in their hearts to please refund the $200 and change that I’d sent them in advance. “You didn’t like me dropping by,” I wrote, ” and I didn’t like that you didn’t like this. So let’s agree to dislike each other. This happens occasionally. Not everything is a fit. You’re okay, I’m okay, we’re all okay. Peace?” They agreed and sent the refund immediately.

I’ll be staying this evening at the San Juan Inn in Mexican Hat.

“Ruthless, ogre-ish, heavily-armed invaders descend from the sky, take over the reins of government, and before you know it rebel groups are forming into grass-roots militias, fighting back like proud guerillas and asserting their nativist rights — this is our country! Death to the invaders! Does this remind anyone of anything?” — posted five years ago upon the DVD “Collector’s Edition” release of John Milius‘s Red Dawn (’84).

The “Russian commie invaders invading and taking over the U.S.” fantasy peaked in the ’50s. Milius’s 1984 film came so late in the cycle that a cycle didn’t exist, but you could just just barely roll with it…just. North Koreans are thought to be militant and crazy enough, I suppose, but the basic idea seems ludicrous.

I’ve chosen not to make time for the 2012 Olympics, thanks. At best I’ll catch the late-night or BBC or Today show sum-ups. But even I, uploading MV photos in a motel room, saw the Gabby Douglas gymnastics triumph last night, and I couldn’t be dispassionate. You just knew she’d win. Superb form, pretty face, elfin (4′ 11″), killer smile and…did you notice?… exquisite eye makeup. A torrent of monetary favorings await. She needs to keep it classy.