These guys fought because the weenie in the black T-shirt (i.e., the one who surrendered) didn’t have the driving skills to slip into the parking spot nose-first, like a ferret. Anyone who tries to back into a parking space on a crowded Manhattan cross street deserves whatever trouble comes his/her way. With power steering commonplace you should never do that. If you can’t nose your way in and wiggle around and eventually achieve parallel (which is how I park) then stop blocking the people behind you and man up and pay for a parking garage.
Day: June 13, 2013
She Bought It
My prejudicial problem with Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s Diana, a forthcoming drama about the last two years in the life of Diana Princess of Wales (Naomi Watts), stems from my belief that Diana, however unloved she was by Prince Charles and however beloved she was by millions, wasn’t all that bright or wise. She was just a nice, gracious, kind-hearted lady who didn’t have a tremendous amount of activity going on upstairs, and whose death was entirely caused by her mystifying decision to become the girlfriend of Dodi Al Fayed, by any measure a playboy and a wastrel.
Not As A Stranger
What kind of a slimey sociopathic life form do you have to be to spray-paint an old wooden door that took some 20th Century or 19th Century carpenter days to make just right? The guy who did this should be lashed and then thrown into the Vltava river, and then fished out and forced to clean the walls. All the walls. Fucking animal.
Queer For Swords
Beware of samurai swords in action films. It means it’s beholden to extreme Japanese action-flick tropes and a general obsession with razor-clean slicings and gleaming silvery blades and blah blah. Eff that noise. I was in Tokyo for a day last November, and I vowed never to return. That includes seeing this film. During my time in Tokyo I didn’t see a single yakuza lose his hand or his head or get disemboweled by a samurai sword. I didn’t even see a samurai sword hanging on a wall. Do you think it’s all movie bullshit, the samurai fixation? What digits or appendages will Hugh Jackman slice off? Who’s his trainer?
Patience
A buggy version of Apple’s new IOS7 is circulating among software designers. A friend sent it along yesterday. He’s downloaded it to his iPhone5, and says he’s almost sorry he did because it’s lumpy and problematic to some extent, as all not-yet-released operating systems always are. Apps and functions that aren’t quite working the way they should, etc.
Steel’s Fate
In high-school exam terms, a 62% Rotten Tomatoes rating for Man of Steel is a fail — an F. Which doesn’t mean squat, of course, in box-office terms. My 9:30 am Prague screening (Vinohradská 151, 13000 Prague) starts in 55 minutes. I’m told that last week’s early-bird digital screening for critics on the Warner Bros. lot suffered a technical breakdown, causing a full hour’s delay.
Yesterday’s News
I don’t know where the suspicion came from about David O. Russell being the “recently Oscar-nominated director” who reportedly complained about Creative Artists Agency during an in-house meeting, per that 5.13 N.Y. Post item, lamenting that CAA “should be called Caan’t! Caan’t, Caan’t, Caan’t!” This month-old rant was the inspiration for William Morris Endeavor‘s anti-CAA print campaign that was first reported about 36 hours ago — all those Century City posters (and one T-shirt seen on the Today show) with the familiar CAA logo spun into a deep-imprint lampoon that has already made its point, even if the ads are being taken down.
