Day: November 21, 2013

In an 11.21 interview with The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez, Wolf of Wall Street screenwriter Terrence Winter describes Martin Scorsese‘s latest film precisely as I’ve been describing it since last August (which is when I finally got around to reading Winter’s script) — Goodfellas on Wall Street.

“It is very much [in that vein],” Winters says. “It’s sort of written in the same style, voice-overs, it’s a very fast movie, it’s really a wild roller coaster ride. I’m really proud of it and incredibly proud to be working with Marty and those guys.”

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31 years ago I was interviewing Jack Nicholson at the Carlyle. The promotional agenda was Tony Richardson‘s The Border, but the subject was mainstream audiences, and more particularly that classic Samuel Goldwyn line that “if people don’t want to see something, you can’t stop ’em.” Nicholson put it more succinctly: “They don’t want that — they want this.”

What they’ve seen and enjoyed before, he meant. Comfort, familiarity, assurance, command. A nice five-foot wave they easily catch and surf back to shore on their boogie boards. They don’t want metaphors and meditative undercurrents. As Nicholson put it back in February ’82, “They want their meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gravy on the side.”

Which is why, as Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet reported earlier today, the public has bought 538,100 tickets to see J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost since it opened on 10.18 compared to 30.7 million tickets to see Gravity. It’s also been reported that Gravity has racked up $500 million worldwide.

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I find it amusing that one of two things probably happened in the creation of this Nymphomaniac orgasm-mugshot poster. One, Shia LaBeouf talked Lars von Trier into letting him pose with a cigarette rather than join the crowd. Or two, Von Trier was shrewd enough to realize that one (but only one) person should be depicted as a rebel. “I’m obviously in this film, but I have other things on my mind,” LaBeouf seems to be saying. “I might even be indifferent to shuddering orgasms…maybe. In any event I like imagining that I’m James Dean in 1955.”

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“It is most likely that scissors were invented around 1500 BC in ancient Egypt,” says the Wiki page. “The earliest known scissors appeared in Mesopotamia 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.” The Noah page says that “the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, composed about 2500 BC, contains a flood story almost exactly the same as the Noah story in Genesis” and that most Biblical-era historians and scholars believe that the two floods are one and the same. It is therefore conceivable that scissors were (a) around during Npah’s time and (b) that Noah might’ve used a pair to trim his locks. But professional-looking buzz cuts were impossible. You can’t be too much of a stickler for hair realism in Hollywood epics. You have to be tolerant of eccentricity among hair stylists and vanity among actors. But I draw the line at accepting the existence of electric barber shears 2500 years ago.

Russell Crowe as Noah in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.

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Thursday, 11.21, 1:12 pm on a train from Quang Ngai to Nha Trang. The charm of decades-old trains is a mixed bag. Look around and it could be 1958 or ’48. At least six hours (and quite possibly more) to travel 300 kilometers.