Year: 2013

I’ll go with Haley Joel Osment seeing dead people in The Sixth Sense or Warren Beatty moving from body to body in Heaven Can Wait, but I won’t tolerate a little kid telling his parents what heaven is like in Heaven Is For Real (Sony, 4.16.14). Especially when the director is the stalwart and conservative-minded Randall Wallace (Secretariat, We Were Soldiers). Righties are such sentimental saps about Jesus and the flag and American exceptionalism and heaven. You know what happens when you die? Somehow or some way the human body delivers a kind of hormonal trigger that results in a brief sense of ecstatic destiny. And then it’s lights out, power off and a perfect serene sleep that you won’t wake up from. Well, you will in a sense because you’ll be reborn as a baby but it won’t matter because 99.9% of us don’t remember our previous lives so you might as well resign yourself to an eternal flatline.

I tried watching an episode or two of Amazon’s Alpha House last night but there were the usual streaming-from-overseas problems. I started to use the Tunnel Bear solution but then I made the mistake of lying down and that was all she wrote. Has anyone given it a whirl, and are there any reactions to share? A Gary Trudeau thing “skewering conservative stereotypes.” The reviews have been good. John Goodman sleeping in the shower. A Bill Murray meltdown cameo. Right up my alley.

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For me Hue will always be the inferno-like, concrete-rubble city where Full Metal Jacket concluded. I arrived here last night around 11 pm. I took a 15-minute walk near the Moonlight Hue hotel around 11:30 pm and in that time frame I was solicited four times. Guy on scooter: “You want girl?” Me: “No, thank you!” Guy on scooter: “Hey, c’mon, man…” Me: “Look, man…no. Okay? Not interested.” But I might have responded if he had said, “C’mon, man, she love you long time boom boom.” To me Hue is the city that inspired the final lines of Stanley Kubrick‘s Vietnam War classic (which were either written by Gustav Hasford or Michael Herr): “I am so happy that I am alive, in one piece and short. I’m in a world of shit…yes. But I am alive and not afraid.” I would rather cherish that perfect 1987 moment than sample any present-tense comforts, no offense.

Two nights ago the Rome Film Festival did a bold and original thing by giving Scarlett Johansson its Best Actress award for her voice-over performance in Spike Jonze’s Her. I said in my initial reaction that this is Johansson’s best performance ever, and she doesn’t even appear on-screen. It would be very, very cool if SAG or the Academy or even the HFPA were to honor her with at least a nomination. (SAG conservatives wouldn’t touch this if Scarjo were voicing some kind of Avatar-like CG character, but she simply acted with her voice so where’s the threat?) Congrats also to Dallas Buyer’s Club‘s Matthew McConaughey for snagging the fest’s Best Actor prize, and to DBC itself for winning the BNL Audience Award for Best Film. Scott Cooper‘s Out of the Furnace was also named Best First or Second Feature.

This guy didn’t like it when I started snapping pictures. First he gave me one of those “are you about to steal a little piece of my soul?” expressions that I’ve seen every time I’ve taken a random quickie of this or that unprepared human. Then he came over and stuck his arm through the bars and swatted me across the forehead. He wasn’t trying to hurt me. He didn’t try to scratch or cut my skin with his nails. It was just a mild “fuck you and your camera” swat. He made his point. I ignored him completely but I understood what he was saying.

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The drive from Hanoi to Ha Long Bay is no picnic. Three hours and change, lots of traffic, two-lane blacktop, road construction, etc. And submitting to a Ha Long Bay tourist cruise aboard the Annam Junk made me feel like a very well-treated steer. I just don’t like being herded along. But the area is one of God’s greatest creations and the Vietnamese tourism industry tries very hard to make everyone feel special and honored so I should just ease up and call it a nice pleasant time. Which it was.

Aboard Annam junk — Monday, 11.18, 7:50 am

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Yesterday HE commenter “Morpheus” and HE’s own LexG (i.e., “Ray Quick”) briefly discussed the differences between the Best Actor and Best Actress realms. Please understand I am not signaling 100% agreement with Lex’s comment but he’s hit on something worth sharing, I think.

Morpheus: “It’s sad how year after year it is far more exciting to talk about the Best Actor field than it is to talk about the Best Actress field. It’s so weak [and] has been so weak that Streep needs only make a movie to be in contention. If Daniel Day Lewis was a woman he’d [have] won it for not only Gangs Of New York but also for The Crucible.”

Ray Quick: “That’s because the field is exclusive year in and year out to the same campy blowsy hens who eschew romcoms or visual sexiness to give ball-busting BIG performances — Streep, Blanchett, Winslet, Adams…all the same CANNED FUCKING HAMS while subtler, nuanced [performances] like those from Brie Larson or Saoirse Ronan get overlooked, and we all coo and awwww around the yearly inevitable BA/BSA ‘fifth’ spot for some newcomer/flash-in-the-pan, hot chick, kid with weird name who just cut to the front of the line like an Armenian guy at an airport queue.”

Lex is referring, of course, to Blue Is The Warmest Color‘s Adele Exarchpoulos.

If I was back in Los Angeles I would be at the Dallas Buyer’s Club party at Craft in Century City, which began about an hour ago (i.e., 1:30 pm). I’m there in spirit! The last time I checked Focus Features was still stiffing award-focused Hollywood sites with a “sorry, no ads” policy, but this has no bearing on our enthusiasm for the film, of course. Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto, Jennifer Lawrence in attendance along with screenwriters Craig Borten and Melissa Wallack and producer Robbie Brenner, among others.

It’s 5:05 am on Monday morning, and I’ve been awake since 3:30 am. I’m sitting in warm, quiet darkness on the rear deck of a Ha Long-based “junk.” The ship is gently bobbing in the not quite placid waters. The white lights of other craft are softly beaming in the distance. A full moon is peeking through cloudy skies. Large, craggy, bullet-shaped mountains surround the bay. The junk guys have shut off the generator so it’s just me and my thoughts and the soothing, pre-dawn solitude. Along with my iPhone and fully-charged MacBook Pro, I mean. Thank God for the Viettel connectivity — two bars but it’s good enough.

USA Today stepped into shit today when one of their presumably older, less-hip editors ran a box-office story with a racially gauche headline: ” ‘[Best Man] Holiday’ Nearly Beat ‘Thor’ as Race-Themed Films Soar.” The tweets hit the fan and so the newspaper changed “Race-Themed” to “Ethnically Diverse.” What they meant to say was “Mildly Shitty Romcom (64% On Rotten Tomatoes) Primarily Aimed at ‘Urban’ Audiences Does Almost As Well as Mildly Shitty , CG-Driven Comic-Book Bullshit (66% RT) Primarily Aimed At Under-40 Primitives.” USA Today‘s obviously clumsy headline was a reverse-case cousin of the classic Variety headline “Stix Nix Hix Pix” as it sought to summarize a box-office response to a film in ethnic and/or cultural terms — a huge no-no in today’s politically correct environment. The sin was in the insensitive wording. Malcolm D. Lee’s film earned $30.5 million vs. $38.4 million snagged by Thor: The Dark World.

Sunday, 11.17, 7:20 am.

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This latest American Hustle clip seems to be conveying the same under-message that those opening six minutes did. These late ’70s people with their atrocious hairstyles and clothing and borough accents are on the clueless side — under-educated, slow on the pickup. “Not bullshit…I read it in an ahhhtickle…thank God for me.”