In about 90 minutes I’ll be seeing what I understand will be a mint-condition print of William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer (’77). I heard the Tangerine Dream overture once and only once, when I saw this near-great remake of The Wages of Fear at the Post Cinema in Westport, Connecticut. If it’s not attached to tonight’s print there will be trouble — that’s all I have to say.
I’m presuming this Wolf of Wall Street teaser poster isn’t legit, but if it is I have a problem with the slogan “The Rise and Fall of a White-Collar Gangster.” Is “bankster” not a commonly used term these days? It should be “The Rise and Fall of a Bankster” or, better yet, “The Rise and Fall of a Gangsta Banksta.” Why run a slogan that sounds like like it was written by one of Charlie Rose‘s staff writers?
Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini‘s The Girl Most Likely (Lionsgate/Roadside, 7.19) screened at the Toronto Film Festival under the title Imogene. Michelle Morgan‘s screenplay is about a playwright (Kristen Wiig) who stages a suicide in an attempt to win back her ex, only to wind up in the custody of her gambling-addict mother (Annette Bening). Matt Dillon, Christopher Fitzgerald and Darren Criss co-star.
The just-released one-sheet for Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac. Yeah, I get it.
“Would you still be attracted to me now if we happened to meet for the first time…today, as I am now? Would you come over and talk to me and try to pick me up if you saw me on a train?” Answer: Damn straight, no hesitation, in a New York minute. Is that an honest answer? Perhaps not, but any wife who asks her husband of 10 or 15 years that question doesn’t want candor. She wants to hear that the current is crackling and the batteries are still charged. She doesn’t want to feel like a leftover. Who does?
That said, I think it’s fair to say that guys will rarely toss ambush questions at their wives or longtime girlfriends. When women ask them they’re basically saying “okay, here’s your chance — will you give me the answer I want to hear or not?” Guys never do this. Guys never say “I want to believe in a fantasy — will you tell me that this fantasy is real? Because if you don’t, I’m going to be very disappointed in you.”
Tom Shone has posted a complaining but moderately favorable review of Baz Luhrmann‘s The Great Gatsby, which had its big U.S. premiere last night at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. The operative terms are “handsome,” hectic” and “very impressive yet slightly boring at the same time.” Leonardo DiCaprio‘s rendering of Jay Gatsby is “the most rock-solid presence in the film,” Shone feels. He gives it a B-minus at the end of the review, but it reads more like a C-plus to me.
The funniest…okay, the only funny paragraph addresses the narration by Tobey Maguire‘s Nick Carraway character: “”No act of Dionysian revelry is quite as laborious as the one narrated in voiceover by Tobey Maguire,” Shone states. “He’s all over this movie, regrettably. Luhrmann has clearly tried his utmost to rev up Maguire’s notoriously lethargic delivery, he still he manages the excitement levels of a small marsupial, recently awoken from hibernation by the roaring twenties and now anxious to get back to sleep.”
What’s the point of my quoting any further? Just read the piece.