Day: June 3, 2013

I’m vaguely depressed or certainly alienated by the decision of Paramount Home Video marketing guy to present John Schlesinger‘s Marathon Man (’76) to potential buyers as if it’s some kind of primitive Charles Bronson flick. It’s anything but that, of course, but any marketer will tell you that if you even slightly indicate that a film contains complexity or texture or anything other than primary color elements you’re hurting sales right off the bat. Keep it stupid and blunt and you can’t go wrong. The region-free Bluray streets today.

Read more

With the ghastly wifi situation in Lauterbrunnen last weekend I missed the “Mad Men‘s Megan Draper is about to be killed, possibly in the manner of Sharon Tate” speculation. Even if it’s total bullshit the notion certainly jacks up interest levels in the show. And yet Matthew Weiner has obviously planted the seed by having Jessica Pare wear the same T-shirt that Tate wore, etc. Violently killing a character…I don’t know. Something a little facile about that.

Berne, Switzerland is a very appealing city. I could almost live there. But the train back to Paris put me in Lausanne for a few hours yesterday afternoon. I walked down to the shore of Lake Geneva and took a ferry to Evian-les-Bains. The idea of literally weeping from boredom had never entered my head until I visited this little morgue of a town. Give me those eight spindly trees in front of Rockefeller Center any day. In my mind there is nothing so loathsome and soul-stifling as strolling around picturesque little towns like Evian at the pace of a 75 year-old, snapping photos and lolling around cafes. I would rather be dodging bullets in Syria — seriously.

Breakfast room inside Berne’s Hotel National.

Read more

Three interesting things about this What’s My Line? appearance by Liberace on 6.3.56. One, the huge applause he gets. Two, the drawing of the piano and the candelabra next to his signature, and how quickly and skillfully he draws it. And three, the fact that Lee’s hair was going at the time but not yet to a fatal extent. It didn’t reach emergency levels for another five or ten years, I’m guessing. Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra tells us Liberace’s hair had totally gone south by the time he met Scott Thorson in ’76.

In a 6.3 review, Daily Mail critic Christopher Tookey has taken a dump on Marc Forster and Brad Pitt‘s World War Z (Paramount, 6.21). And so has the Telegraph‘s Robbie Collin. In fact they’re both using the “World War Zzzzz” line so U.S. critics need to come up with something else.

Read more

I’m persuaded that Sharon Waxman‘s “Nikki Finke has been fired by Jay Penske” story is untrue, or at least misleading. Finke may be leaving Deadline to run a one-woman website again, but that’s within the limits of her contract. The elements (temper, saber-rattlings, internal squabbles) may be true, but you have to take all family arguments with a grain of salt. What appears to be true is not always the truth even if it seems like it is.

Penske knew when he partnered with Finke that volatile Type-A personalities require constant backrubs and reassurance, and that on a certain level he had to be a 24/7 care-giver. Did Penske boil over and maybe convey anger or frustration to this or that person? Apparently, but that’s not the finality. Or so I gather.

Read more