Minutes after arriving at the Park Regency, Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas (who’s sharing the pad for three nights) gifted me with an official “Yo, Whiplash!” hat. For the uninitiated, this was the original title of the story that was changed to “Miles Teller ‘Pervert’ Story,” which I posted on 10.24.14.
One of the many gloom-inducing things about Michael Mann‘s Blackhat are the Asian urban locales, which are mostly gray, grim, congested and corporate fuck-ugly with little else but high-rises, office buildings, freeways and skanky, neon-lit fast-food joints. The IMDB says Blackhat shot in (a) Jakarata, Indonesia, (b) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, (c) Klang, Malaysia and (d) Hong Kong besides Los Angeles. They all seem like the same soul-less Asian hell-hole. Mann obviously decided to avoid the conventionally photogenic and emphasize the stinky, but good God. The footage of over-developed Bangkok in the 2nd Hangover movie made me feel the same way. In some ways the above-named burghs looked a bit like Tokyo, Seoul and Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon — cities I didn’t care for and have zero interest in ever visiting again.
Shot adjacent to a Burger King in Las Vegas’s McCarran airport — Wednesday, 1.21, 1:10 pm. I’ve been in love with Preston Sturges‘ Sullivan’s Travels for 40-odd years now, and pretty much every time I’ve seen it (most recently a year or two ago) it’s looked sharp and rich and chromatically full-bodied. I just don’t see how I can justify buying the Criterion Bluray because I can’t imagine it delivering a noticable Bluray “bump”. And yet I took the leap with Criterion’s Foreign Correspondent and got a good bump out of it…go figure. Wiki excerpt: “Veronica Lake was six months pregnant at the beginning of production, a fact she didn’t tell Sturges until filming began. Sturges was so furious when he learned that, according to Lake, he had to be physically restrained. Sturges consulted with Lake’s doctor to see if she could perform the part, and hired former Tournament of Roses queen Cheryl Walker as Lake’s double. Edith Head, Hollywood’s most renowned costume designer, was tasked to find ways of concealing Lake’s condition.”
Today is 80% about Sundance travelling. Leaving for Burbank airport at 9 am to catch an 11:15 am flight. Better early than sorry. To save dough I’m flying to Las Vegas and then parking it for two hours, and then flying to Salt Lake City. I get in at 4:30 pm, and it’ll take at least 90 minutes if not two hours to get to the Park Regency with those slow-ass shuttle vans dropping customers off in way-out-of-the-way locations. And for all of it, there probably won’t be any snow to marvel at during the entire nine days. The last time there was any kind of Sundance snowfall was maybe three years ago. 11:10 am update: Southwest Vegas flight delayed by 30 minutes. 1:10 pm update: Enjoying superb free wifi at LV’s McCarran airport. My Southwest Salt Lake City flight leaves at 1:55 pm.
“After sitting through American Sniper twice, I’m more convinced than ever that there’s a level of sardonic commentary at work that is sometimes subtle and sometimes pretty damn obvious. Pay attention to Cooper’s increasingly congested body language, the posture of a man stricken with unmanageable psychic distress. Pay attention to the use of the phrase ‘mission accomplished’ late in the film, or the stateside scene in which Kyle runs into a Marine whose life he saved in Fallujah and can’t even make eye contact with the guy. This is a portrait of an American who thought he knew what he stood for and what his country stood for and never believed he needed to ask questions about that. He drove himself to kill and kill and kill based on that misguided ideological certainty — that brainwashing, though I’m sure Clint Eastwood would never use that word — and then paid the price for it. So did we all, and the reception of this film suggests that the payments keep on coming due.” — from “American Sniper and the culture wars: Why the movie’s not what you think it is” — Andrew O’Hehir, Salon, 1.20.
I still say the only decent thing Bill Cosby can do at this point is to cough up $10 or $15 million and dispense it to the 30-plus victims in some kind of indirect, half-assedly benevolent way, which would be a form of atonement without actually admitting anything. History will at least record that Cosby half-acknowledged his fiendishness and offered a little restitution as an oblique way of saying “I can’t say I’m sorry because I can’t say I’m guilty but…well, you know.”