Day: November 23, 2013

Marshall Fine recently ran a piece that basically said there were plenty of shit-level movies released during the 1970s, which is mainly regarded, of course, as one of the most creatively fertile and exciting eras in Hollywood history. There are bad ’70s movies you can find online (The Concorde: Airport ’79 or Midas Run) and there are ’70s films so tedious and obscure that they’ve been wiped off the face of the earth — no one’s even heard of them. I’m going to stick my neck out right now and declare that I’m the first movie journalist to even mention Quentin Masters and Don Mitchell‘s Thumb Tripping (’72) in the 21st Century and perhaps for the last 30-plus years. Well, am I?

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Hats off to Paramount marketers for their brilliant Wolf of Wall Street one-sheets. They’re appealing to the empty Coke bottles out there by suggesting it’s The Hangover meets Wall Street (i.e., a rollicking, bacchanalian, ape-crazy Roman orgy of absurd wealth, blowjobs and dwarf-tossing) instead of Wall Street meets Goodfellas, which indicates a somewhat darker journey. (At least during the second half.) Not a hint of moral complexity or impending doom or Monday-morning anxiety — that‘s the way to reach the under-35s, you bet. I’m not being facetious — this is a very, very smart campaign.

If there’s some vestige of old-world French colonial architecture in Saigon (which nobody calls Ho Chi Minh City), I haven’t found it yet. I’m sure there are some appealing nooks in this big, noisy, sprawling burgh. I only arrived here last night so what do I know? But I can say without qualification that Saigon is an aggressively commercial city with Godzilla-sized super-towers on every other block (at least in the downtown area) and that there are piles of garbage floating near the banks of the Saigon River. Plus the iPhone receptivity has been just awful and the wifi at the Saigon Grand Hotel is the worst I’ve ever experienced in any big-league town in my life. Saigon clearly has an economically vital pulse, but it lacks that culturally refined je ne sais quoi that always defines a great city. People always want your money wherever you travel, but the good citizens of Saigon really want it — merchants and street hustlers have been hitting on me relentlessly. I love the tall trees and the big parks, but it’s just not my kind of town. I’m guessing it might be a little bit like Bangkok, which The Hangover Part II and Only God Forgives convinced me to never, ever visit. I guess I’m just more of a Hanoi type of guy.