Day: March 23, 2014

I suddenly decided earlier today to attend Cinemacon in Las Vegas. I want to catch Tuesday’s screenings of Neighbors and Draft Day and Wednesday morning’s showing of Million Dollar Arm plus a Chris Nolan-Todd McCarthy q & a that won’t include any footage of Interstellar. But I can’t see dropping $750 bucks on this ($425 for RT Southwest flight from Burbank, $150 for a nearby budget hotel room, $150 or more for cabs, food and incidentals) so I’m going to risk my life by driving there and back in the span of 36 hours. That’ll just cost me gas plus $40 for Motel Eight plus incidentals — maybe $250 all in.

Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah is set in ancient times but the clothing (designed by Michael Wilkinson) is medieval — close to the sartorial styles worn in Ridley Scott‘s Robin Hood (’10) and Kevin Reynolds‘ Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (’91). The material looks superficially rugged (i.e., leather, unbrushed suede, burlap) but the duds have clearly been designed and tailored with great professional care. It strains credulity that pre-historical characters, living in scrubby, hand-to-mouth, close-to-caveman-level conditions, would be wearing cool-looking threads that would probably fly off the racks if they were offered in designer shops in downtown Manhattan. But Hollywood Biblical epics have always dressed their characters in fine-looking apparel.

Wells to Aronofsky, sent this morning after seeing Noah last night: What a myth! What a severe, surreal, eye-filling, Old Testament buzzard of a 21st Century Bible movie, and with rock giants yet! Defenders and ark-construction helpers who stand 20 feet tall and speak with the weathered, synthesized voices of Nick Nolte and Frank Langella but who sound to me like Optimus Prime. Noah isn’t perfect but it’s certainly a mad, imaginative leap off the high-dive board. Some of the scenes are mind-blowing, shattering. (Especially those creepy depictions of Noah’s underwater hallucinations and that Terrence Malick-like story-of-creation sequence.) It’s not soothing, not comforting, not conventional — it’s really and truly out there on its own planet.

It’s a dead-serious fantasia, Noah is. And in no way does it resemble anything more or less than a fevered hallucination in a certain filmmaker’s head.

Deranged as it is, the first three-quarters of Noah exudes a spiritual clarity of mind and absolute certainty of righteousness that few have but many seek. The problem is that this righteous clarity is borderline psychotic. Most of Noah is about harsh judgment and penalties and zero tolerance for even the slightest divergence from the path, and the very last portion is about mercy (Russell Crowe gets to re-do that John Wayne moment in The Searchers when he finally catches up with Natalie Wood) and charity and hope.

The latest word is that several Christian leaders and Catholic audiences in Mexico are cool with Noah, and that haters like Glenn Beck are off on their own beam.

Rightwing Christian wackos are apparently objecting to the ecological metaphors about tending the garden and whatnot. Conservatives have always felt it’s their right to have absolute dominion over the earth, and in today’s context that means an absolute right to despoil all they want so they can swagger around and live in McMansion vacation homes in Wyoming or Idaho so I’m not surprised this aspect bothers them. Who are we to obey the earth? The earth obeys us, and we can burn fossil fuels any time we feel like it. We have our lifestyles to enhance!

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I’ve just hung two framed Czech movie posters from the ’70s (bought last February) in my living room. (Notice the condition of Faye Dunaway‘s left eye in the top image.) The natively-created posters were bought in a street-level shop inside Prague’s Kino Svetozor, a film lover’s theatre located in the cellar of an office building just off Wenceslas Square. Two theatres plus a nice wifi cafe downstairs. The vibe is perfect.

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The admired James Rebhorn has passed at the relatively young age of 65, taken out by melanoma. Hugs and condolences to family, friends, fans. Rebhorn’s most noteworthy 21st Century gig was playing the father of Claire Danes‘ Carrie Mathison on Homeland. But for me and, I suspect, a great many others his biggest moment was playing that boys’ school dean — an officious, stick-in-the-mud prig — during that climactic scene in Scent of a Woman (’92) in which Redhorn got his ass handed to him by Al Pacino. This is what it’s often like when you’re a skilled and trusted character actor — the most legendary scene in your career is owned by someone else, and almost everyone who sees this scene comes away with a sneaking suspicion that you just might be an asshole off-screen.

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As I was driving down Olympic Boulevard late yesterday morning, I began to (a) feel envious of all the people who were up to their usual Saturday activities, wearing their workout duds and sipping lattes and strolling in the sunshine and preparing to go hiking or…whatever, roaming the aisles of Home Depot in search of the right floor tiles and (b) I began to resent my daily Hollywood Elsewhere burden (five or six stories). Every few months I just can’t man up and bang it out, and yesterday was one of them. (I take off about two days per year.) Plus I was suddenly seized by the idea of doing a spring cleaning and throwing out piles and piles of crap. So I took a long afternoon break and did that. And then I took a nice bike ride and ate a kale salad and went to a 7:30 pm Noah screening at Paramount Studios. And then I ended the day at Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe, the simple interior of which hasn’t changed since the 1960s. The waiters are just as cool also. The only thing that’s changed is the clientele, which is bit more slovenly and downmarket today (but that’s true of everything and everywhere).

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