The Other Woman (20th Century Fox, 4.25.14) is a comedy about three women (Leslie Mann, Cameron Diaz, Kate Upton) taking revenge upon a hot-shot businessman three-timer (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) who’s been involved with and cheating on them all. So it’s a kind of female payback comedy a la Nine to Five (i.e., aimed at women) but it’s also trying to appeal to horndogs with Upton’s white-bikini carnality. The movie was produced by Julie Yorn, wife of A-list entertainment attorney Kevin Yorn and also his partner in their production company, LBI Entertainment. On 2.18.14, Heavy.com‘s Paul Farrell reported an “anonymous source” allegation, tweeted by Whisper.com’s Neetzan Zimmerman, that Yorn (brother of Hollywood agent Rick Yorn and singer/songwriter Pete Yorn) was having an affair with Gwynneth Paltrow. Maybe bullshit, maybe not. (On top of which Paltrow and her husband Chris Martin are in some kind of open arrangement.) If the Yorn-Paltrow thing is true, this would at least add a level of intrigue to an otherwise rote-seeming formula comedy.
I had a mostly unpleasant experience with Jonathan Glazer‘s Under The Skin during last September’s Toronto Film Festival. My negative reaction was a minority view against the current 85% Rotten Tomatoes rating. I’ll allow that festival fatigue factor can sometimes get in the way; perhaps I should see it again fresh today. Jonathan Glazer‘s film earned a “robust” $140,000 in four L.A. and NYC theaters this weekend. Maybe, but “robust” is not what this film is when you watch it. Not for me, at least.
A couple of years ago I stole from Esquire by writing my own “What I’ve Learned” essay. There’s a new issue with a long piece called “84 Things A Man Should Do Before He Dies,” so here’s another ripoff: “Theatrical Movie Experiences You Should Have Before You Entirely Succumb to VOD.” Here are four indelible movie-watching recollections — three from the late ’70s, one from ’95. The concept or suggestion is that a devoted Movie Catholic should try to experience something similar in his/her lifetime.
(1) Catch An Exciting New Film In A First-Rate, Big-City Theatre On Opening Day, and In So Doing Experience Something You’ve Never Felt Or Sensed Before. The first time this happened in my 20s (teenage or tweener experiences are too impressionable) was on the afternoon of 11.6.77 at the Zeigfeld theatre — opening day for Steven Spielberg‘s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I’d waited in the ticket line for an hour or so in the brisk November air. I was actually knocked out several times by that film (this was more than 20 years before my Spielberg hate would begin to manifest), but the first chest-pounder happened during the opening credits. White titles on black, dead silence. And then more credits and then just a faint hint of alien-like syntho-hum on the soundtrack. As the credits ended the choral hum slowly got louder and louder, and then CRASH! An orchestral crescendo perfectly synched with the the first images of the storm-blown Sonoran desert. We can’t go home again but somehow or some way, each and every movie lover has to experience something like this. A theatrical high, couldn’t stop talking about it, saw CETK producer Michael Phillips standing in the back of the theatre and talked a him a bit.
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