An hour ago a friend and I walked into a friendly neighborhood video store called Cinemania Videothek (Neue Kantstrasser 32, Charlottenberg). It’s so cool to just browse around in an old-fashioned DVD rental store, discussing the alleged merits of this or that film and the clerk offering knowledgable comments and suggestions…a nice nostalgia trip. Anyway, my friend asked about renting Billy Wilder‘s One, Two, Three and the clerk soon conveyed that it was all Greek to him.
A 5.12 N.Y. Times story by David Segal reports that Scott Thorson, former boy-toy lover of Liberace who’s played by Matt Damon in Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra (HBO, 5.26), is currently doing time in Washoe County Jail near Reno after buying $1300 worth of merchandise with someone else’s credit card and driver’s license. “It’s hard to connect this worn and anxious man in a blue prison shirt to the beefcake grinning in photographs in the late 1970s,” Segal writes. “Time, an on-and-off meth addiction, several stints in prison and what he describes as Stage 3 colon cancer have taken their toll.”
A BBC documentary called The Great Gatsby: Midnight In Manhattan came out on DVD last Tuesday (5.7). It includes interviews with William Styron, George Plimpton and Hunter S. Thompson. (Tip of the hat to Speakeasy’s Barbara Chai of The Wall Street Journal.)
This morning I finally got around to reading Kelly Marcel‘s script of Saving Mr. Banks, the story of the contentious script collaboration between Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) and Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) during the development of Disney’s Mary Poppins film, which came out to great success and acclaim in 1964.
For some bizarre reason a U.S. version of this Fruitvale Station trailer denies embed code access so I went with a French-subtitled version. This fits with Ryan Coogler‘s film, which the Weinstein Co. is releasing on 7.16, about to screen in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival.