According to a 6.20 story by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit, Anne Hathaway will produce and star in an open-seas survival drama called The Lifeboat, an adaptation of Charlotte Rogan’s novel of the same name. Hathaway will play a refugee from a sunken luxury liner. She faces murder charges after being picked up because, as Kit writes, she and her husband determine that the lifeboat they’re on “has too many people, meaning [that] some folks have got to go.” This is similar to the plot of Abandon Ship!, a 1957 film in which Tyrone Power played a ship’s captain who made the same call about an over-crowded lifeboat. The Wiki page claims that a voiceover at the end of the film states that the real-life captain “was brought to trial on a charge of murder.”
My Paris plane touched down last night at JFK at 7:30 pm. Taxied forever on the tarmac. The passport line took a good 35 to 40 minutes because there weren’t enough passport guys at the desks. At 9:15 pm I was waiting for the slow-as-molasses A train at Howard Beach. I finally arrived at Hanover Square, my area of residence for the next couple of weeks, around 10 pm. The neighborhood, south of Wall Street and a block away from the East River, is a bit on the chilly, corporate side. Not exactly saturated with historical aroma. It could be a corporate high-rise region of Cleveland, Detroit, Hong Kong or Boston’s North End. It had a certain charm back in the days of Martin Scorsese‘s Gangs of New York, but then you had to deal with guys sinking meat cleavers into each other’s heads so it all balances out.
I had problems the instant I walked into this place last night. The interior atmosphere was dark and cave-like and sort of Guido-ish with awful hanging mini-lamps and tacky sound-level screens on the walls behind the bar, like something you’d see in some laughably low-rent recording studio in the early ’80s. And the music was way too loud…thump thump thump thump thump. I understand obnoxious house music at a club but not for a place where people are supposed to effing eat. “Uhm, does the music have to be this loud?,” I asked the waitress when I first sat down. “I mean, this is basically a restaurant, right?” She said she’d ask…nothing. I asked again 15 minutes later. She came back and said, “They said the music is part of the ambience here…sorry but it’s always been like this.” So in retaliation I tipped her 5%. I know it wasn’t her fault but someone had to pay. I hope this place dies. It deserves to.
What I strongly presumed when I read yesterday’s sad, tragic news about James Gandolfini but which I didn’t give voice to (partly because it’s better to wait two or three days and partly out of fear of being ripped to shreds by Glenn Kenny and HE’s sensitivity police), N.Y. Daily News and N.Y. Post writers have now reported. How dare they print observations and allegations that suggest Gandolfini might be with us today if he’d been a little smarter about certain tendencies? Don’t they realize how heartless stories like this are? Don’t they understand the basic rules when someone famous dies? One, during the first 24 to 48 hours after their passing never touch upon any apparent or probable reasons why and two, focus only on how kind, gifted, beloved and gracious they were, and how we’re now all poorer for their absence.
Here’s a mildly amusing satirical riff on a 2019 Ain’t It Cool review of a Gangster Squad-like remake of The Godfather. Mildly amusing but dead to rights. JJ Abrams is (a) too smart and (b) too much of a devoted cineaste to even perversely flirt with remaking Francis Coppola‘s mob classic, but you know that if Ruben Fleischer was asked to remake The Godfather with the idea of keeping the characters but punching up the action so as to appeal more to GenY audiences, this is roughly what he would come up with. You know it’s not a stretch. Just maintain an open mind as you read it — that’s all I ask.
