Column-filings and tweets from the Cannes Film Festival attendees have been thinning out over the last 12 hours due to packing and travelling. Just about everyone lands in Nice today, and most of them will be jet-lagged and half-asleep when they do. But this Berliner and ardent defender of the Billy Wilder legacy is fully acclimated. My Berlin-to-Nice flight leaves at 10:15 am, but stops in Dusseldorf on the way.
Month: May 2013
Safe Bet
I’d been told that Jim Toback and Alec Baldwin‘s Seduced and Abandoned had turned out pretty well, but the proof is in the pudding. And that’s HBO’s acquisition of the doc, which was shot during last year’s 2012 Cannes Film Festival. S&A will screen at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in an out-of-competition slot. I don’t know what it is and I won’t know for another week or so, but you gotta figure it plays better than decent for HBO to have laid out coin.
Young Colt
I don’t believe for a second that Marine Vacth‘s 16 or 17-year-old schoolgirl would even fantasize about submitting to sweaty congress with anyone vaguely or not-so-vaguely over the hill. It would be icky even if Vacth had played her actual age of 20 or 21 during filming. Feels like a creepy fantasy wank. All fantasies have to be at least somewhat conceivable in a real-world sense, and this is b.s. Somehow when Catherine Deneuve went there with Luis Bunuel in 1967 it was different.
Rapid Consumption
I’ve been paying particular attention to people who wolf their food down. More particularly to the term “wolf,” which I can’t seem to get out of my head. It’s kind of an ear bug thing. I only know that wolfing your meal down while constantly staring at your food (and therefore never looking up at the person you’re sitting with) is repellent. Whenever I see someone doing this at a restaurant I have to move to another table so this person isn’t in my line of sight. A woman I had dinner with last year was wolfing her food down, and while I didn’t say anything inside I was telling myself, “Okay, that’s it…this doesn’t work.”
Chilly Historical Visit
Speaking of Billy Wilder and One, Two, Three, until yesterday I’d never walked around Berlin’s defunct Tempelhof Airport, which appears twice in the film. I wandered around in the rain for about a half-hour. Tempelhof shut down in 2008, but was a major European airport starting in the 1930s and was crucial to the success of the 1948 Berlin airlift (along with Berlin’s Tegel Airport). The latter is also scheduled to close (probably sometime in 2014) in concert with the opening of the new Berlin Brandendurg Airport. Who closes airports?
Tempelhof Airport — Sunday, 5.12, 3:35 pm.
Douglas’s Upswing
Lynn Hirschberg‘s New York profile of Behind The Candelabra star Michael Douglas is typical for her — not fawning but fair, smoothly written, sharp observations. But here’s what got me: “[Douglas] took out his iPhone. ‘Look at this,’ he said. It was an ecstatic e-mail about another one of Douglas’s upcoming films, Last Vegas, in which he plays an about-to-be-married bachelor out for a final hurrah with his buddies (played by, among others, Robert De Niro and Kevin Kline) in Las Vegas. The film had tested through the roof.
Tumblr Millenials = Movie Culture Death Knell
The subject of last night’s Oscar Poker discussion between myself and Sasha Stone was initially the Cannes Film Festival, and how this year’s lineup looks like one of the best in a long time. But then we detoured into a glum assessment of how shallow and smug and soulless the movie-watching realm is becoming due to the effing Millenials being indifferent or oblivious to any film that isn’t massive or powerfully marketed or sequel-y or in some other way culturally unmissable or unavoidable.
“Billy Wilder?”
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.
Behind The Bars
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.”
“To Smell The Excitement…”
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.)
If Saving Mr. Banks Is As Good as The Script…
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.
Tom Hanks as Walt Disney as Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers in John Lee Hancock and Kelly Marcel’s Saving Mr. Banks (Disney, 12.20).
