Month: May 2016

Whatever the truth of it, Johnny Depp was trashed in social media circles last weekend for having allegedly thrown a cell-phone fastball at wife Amber Heard and given her a facial bruise. Heard has obtained a restraining order over this alleged altercation as well as claims that Depp has “been violent towards her on multiple occasions during their 15-month marriage.”

Depp’s ex-wife Vanessa Paradis (who just did time as a Cannes Film Festival juror) has chimed in as a positive character witness, saying she finds Heard’s assertions dubious or appalling or something along those lines. And yesterday TheWrap guest blogger Doug Stanhope posted a piece saying that Heard’s assertions are “bullshit” and part of a deliberate shakedown attempt to get as much money out of Depp as possible. (Depp and Heard hadn’t signed a prenup before marrying.)

I know nothing specific but I’ve heard that Depp likes to bend the elbow so maybe something happened. I know for sure that when a super-rich, over-50 guy marries a hot actress who’s 25 years younger, he’s definitely asking for trouble. He’s basically saying “I know this almost certainly won’t last very long — I’m not an idiot — but she’s beautiful and the sex is great and I’ll be dead in 35 or 40 years so what the hell.” (The gossip, says a friend, “was that Heard was a banshee in bed, bringing in other girls for threesomes”). And now that chicken has come home.

I think The Movie Godz may have put in a call to the Fate Godz and suggested that Depp needs to pay a little penance for all those Pirates of the Caribbean movies. That may sound fickle or loony to some, but I’m a serious believer in the idea that if you deliberately make a movie that you know will make piles of money but which you also know will be hell to sit through for people like myself, then you have to accept that the forces of karma will somehow push back and bring grief into your life.

As of 5.18, Time Warner Cable (my ISP for years) officially became a Charter cable company, and more specifically a brand-new cable, internet and home-service provider called Spectrum. I understand that these changeovers always happen with a minimum of theatricality and presentation, but wouldn’t you think they could at least manage to call themselves “Spectrum” when you call the Time Warner customer service number? (I called this morning — here‘s what it said.) How hard could that be? Variety‘s Cynthia Littleton wrote that “the old names and logos will linger for a few months on the screen guides and billing documents while Charter readies its relaunch plan.” I don’t like or trust ass-draggers as a rule. Until further notice when you hear Spectrum, think slow-boat, slacker, slumber.

A 5.29 NBC News story by Dante Chinni calculates that with Bernie Sanders out of the Presidential race, Hillary Clinton‘s lead over Donald Trump, currently at 46% to 43%, would surge to 51% to 43%.

“To get a better look at where the Clinton-Trump race might stand after the nominating dust has settled, we recalculated the latest NBC/WSJ poll with Clinton capturing 70 percent of the Sanders-only vote,” Chinni writes.

“The result [is that] Sanders-only voters are worth an extra five points to Clinton. In the NBC/WSJ poll, Clinton’s advantage over Trump goes from three points to eight points and she leads 51 percent to 43 percent. But the difference holds in other polls as well.

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News reports indicate that an innocent gorilla died yesterday because an irresponsible mother was too distracted to properly watch her four-year-old son. The kid crawled through a barrier and fell into a 12-foot-deep gorilla pit at the Cincinatti Zoo, and was soon being carried around by Harambe, a 400-pound, 17-year-old gorilla. Fearing for the kid’s life, zoo officials felt they had no choice but to shoot Harambe. “It seemed very much by our professional team…to be a life-threatening situation,” Cincinnati Zoo President Thane Maynard said at a press conference. The mainstream news whores won’t say this (all they’re talking about is what a close call it was…kid saved from scary gorilla!), but the kid’s mother killed that poor gorilla. Okay, 85% her fault and 15% the fault of the zoo staffers who built a barrier that a four-year-old could crawl through without much difficulty.

After Saturday’s Prague flight landed around 3 pm at JFK I decided to break with longstanding Airbnb tradition and stay at Greenpoint’s Henry Norman Hotel. It’s seven or eight blocks from the G line (the nearest stop is Nassau Ave.) but the HNH design is eclectic, striking, and boutique-y in a wonderfully non-corporate way. The Polish-Russian neighborhood is modest and quiet. The Henry Norman is a six-minute walk from Broadway Stages, the busy production facility.

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The biggest pre-ordained, sight-unseen tank of the summer is Paul Feig‘s Ghostbusters (Columbia, 7.15) reboot. It doesn’t matter if it’ll be any good or not (although it’s obviously not going to be the least bit funny), or if it’ll make a lot of money, which it probably will. What matters is that everyone hates the trailers. There is, however, one thing working in its favor right now, and that’s Donald Trump’s vidclip from January 2015. Nobody wants to agree with Trump’s agenda so there’s now a little part of me that wants to like this awful movie whereas before I didn’t care — I just wanted it to die.

After watching this excerpt from The Graham Norton Show, I realized that Kate Beckinsale, 42, has suddenly caught on by tapping into something a bit louche in herself. Part of this has to do with Beckinsale having nailed the part of Lady Susan Vernon, a blase, irreverent seductress, in Whit Stillman‘s Love and Friendship, but it’s mainly due to a suspicion that she’s somehow become Vernon or, you know, merged personalities. I’ve been reading for years that Beckinsale, a mother of a youngish daughter, is a bit eccentric and levitational but in the Norton clip she seems more than a bit perverse. A woman who thinks nothing of slipping a bar of chocolate between her sleeping boyfriend’s butt cheeks…okay!.

Beckinsale has been plugging away since the mid ’90s as an intriguing actress who’d never quite lit the big fuse. Sometimes it takes a while for an actor/actress to get lucky and turn the key just so and realize, “Ah, yes…that’s me, that’s my brand.”

Vernon has become Beckinsale’s all-defining role. Image-wise she and Vernon are suddenly a “team” in the same way that Bette Davis (also 42 at the time) and Margo Channing had seemingly blended into one person after the release of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s All About Eve (’50). Before Love and Friendship Beckinsale’s best performance ever had been as a besieged journalist in Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth (’08). Before that her most admired turn had been in Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (’98). I don’t blame KB entirely for acting in five of those awful Underworld movies (she held her nose and pocketed the paycheck so she could cover her daughter’s college tuition) but it’s water under the bridge now. From here on Beckinsale is, for me, Lady Susan chocolate bar ass-crack Vernon.

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There was a sobering discussion about Hillary Clinton‘s credibility gap during a Morning Joe segment yesterday morning. Transcripts are copied from Shaun King‘s 5.27 N.Y. Daily News column, titled “Hillary Clinton should quit presidential race as email scandal engulfs her campaign“:

2:43 — Mika Brzezinski to Andrea Mitchell: “The first interview we showed was the one you did with her and she says time and time and time and time and time and time again it was allowed. Was it allowed?” Andrea answers: “It was not allowed to not return those records before she left the State Department. She violated the Official Records Act, according to her own State Department IG (Investigator General) appointed by President Obama.”

Mitchell (cont’d): “What you have shown just now, Mika, completely undercuts the argument she has been making for more than a year, just as she trying to persuade voters that she is not untrustworthy. I think the most surprising, and in some ways shocking thing, is their reaction, claiming that this is the same as what former secretaries did.”

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GoGo in-flight wifi (I’m somewhere over the North Atlantic) won’t let me watch video, but Bill Maher + Bernie Sanders has to be fairly decent chatter. I’m crestfallen that Donald Trump has chickened out of the proposed Trump-Sanders debate. Is he a man or a mouse?

After staying in an Airbnb place you’re aways asked to review the apartment as well as the host, and the host in turn gets to review your performance as a renter. Did you leave the place in reasonably decent condition? Were you polite and considerate? Do you have a nice smile?

I never give hosts a bad review as a rule. If I don’t like a place I just won’t say anything. But a couple of renters have given me shitty reviews because I didn’t leave their places white-glove clean. In response to which I’ve always replied as follows: “Are you serious? I was raised by nice middle-class people with good hygiene and manners, and most of that rubbed off. I know I left your place in reasonably good condition. I’m not an animal, but if you want your apartment absolutely dead-bang spotless after a renter leaves, hire a housecleaner.”

I’ll never leave a place looking like a cyclone hit it. I always tidy up a bit — no sopping towels on the floor, no stogies in the ashtray, no broken cups or glasses. But it’s not my responsibility to leave the place looking like an IKEA showroom. It’s my responsibility to show respect by leaving things in reasonable order and by not trashing it, but no more than that.

I might leave a chewing-gum wrapper or an empty Coke bottle lying around but I’m not a private in the Marines, and when I leave a place I expect that the owner will bring in a professional to spruce it up, which is what I always do when I rent my place out. I think it’s definitely beyond the pale to read an Airbnb review that belittles me as some kind of uncouth person or, you know, makes me feel like Gomer Pyle being reamed out by Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann in Full Metal Jacket.

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Wanna guess how many Sundance reviewers of Eat That Question mentioned the boxy aspect ratio? So far I’ve counted one — a review by Variety‘s Dennis Harvey that mentions “archaic” video formats. I haven’t seen the doc so maybe there are portions shot in standard 16:9 but the trailer is all 1.37:1, and that, for me, is a deciding factor.

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My 5.16 Cannes review reposted in recognition of a new trailer: “Woody Allen‘s Cafe Society is an attractively composed period dramedy (a few laughs but hardly a torrent) that plays it mild and steady and familiar. But it’s a fine Woody hit-list thing with a compelling if familiar moral undertow. There’s no way anyone who’s even half-acquainted with the Allen realm is going to be disappointed. Is it a bust-out in the vein of Midnight in Paris? No, but it’ll do until the next one comes along. It’s fine, it’s good — just don’t expect any big surprises.

“Set in Los Angeles and New York over a two-year period in the mid ’30s, Cafe Society is a romantic triangle piece mixed with a hard-knocks, get-tough saga. It’s witty more than funny, but it’s really great when the laughs land. How many good laughs does it have? Not more than 20 or 25. I laughed maybe 10 or 12 times but I didn’t mind because it’s not about hah-hah but fuck-me.

“It’s a romance-gone-wrong thing that deals with sadness, moral ambiguity, disappointment. It’s too mired in hurt to be called a light-touch thing, but it does kind of glide along in a way that lets you know nothing awful or grotesque will occur.

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