Jeffrey Wells

I was thinking about Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha, which is expected at Telluride and booked for Toronto, and wondering what’s up with the last name. Greta Gerwig is the star and co-writer (with Baumbach) of this 86-minute monochrome film, and I’ve spoken with Gerwig a couple of times and realized she’s definitely the spirited type. The synopsis says Frances Ha is about her character living an up-and-down New York life “with unaccountable joy and lightness” so the last name alludes to a happy state of mind or she has an Asian stepfather.

Greta Gerwig in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha

A friend writes that “the explanation of the title, which doesn’t come until the very last scene, is one of the loveliest surprises in the movie. Hopefully no one will spoil it for you.”

Either way Frances Ha is a title that says “we’re not coming to you — you have to come to us.” Hinterland types in Kansas, Georgia, Utah, Maine, southern New Jersey, Oklahoma and South Dakota are going to glance at the title and go “…the fuck?” I imagine a fair number of big-city types will presume it’s about an Asian girl. 90% of the people out there will think that…c’mon.

I asked a publicist connected with the film to give me a hint and she said “it’s explained in the film.” You mean the meaning of “Ha” isn’t deliberately hidden by Baumbach with no clues at all? “When you watch the movie you will find out why that is the title,” she added. “I’m not trying to be cryptic but when you see it you will know!” It’s totally okay with me if Gerwig does in fact play the stepdaughter of a guy who runs an Asian take-out truck.

Indiewire‘s Edward Davis quotes Gerwig saying the following: “[It’s] a love story about girls. It’s a girl who’s in love with her best friend, but not sexually. It’s sort of that moment when you realize, ‘Oh, so we won’t all move in together,’ and you’re going to move on with your life.’ I’m really proud of it. I think it’s really good.”

Baumbach and Gerwig are entwined, so to speak. They made Greenberg together in ’09. Baumbach got divorced from Jennifer Jason Leigh in 2010. He and Gerwig have allegedly been happening for the better part of two years.

Earlier today Richard Rushfield wrote a hilarious short piece about why the odds against an “industry person” getting laid in Los Angeles are really high. It basically comes down to his belief that if you’ve found success in the entertainment industry then you’re probably a major shit and your flaws are probably more appalling or more malignant than the Average Joe’s, and that no one wants to schtup, much less fall in love with, a person who is basically Dorian Gray so forget it, dutch — go work out, grab some takeout, watch a Bluray, play with your cats.

It’s true that the entertainment industry attracts the worst people in the world, but by this I mean those who are neurotically desperate to curry favor — the glad-handers, hangers-on, Starbucks gigglers, personal assistants, sucks-ups, kiss-asses, grossly insincere flatterers, wine-bar howlers, yes men, phonies. Los Angeles also attracts the finest crazy people in the world — the 24-7 obsessives, the most talented, the deepest, the funniest, the most mystical or hardcore, the most eccentric, the most impassioned, the trickiest, the most dedicated to art and achievement and truth and great suits and T-shirts.

Do you know which group probably gets laid a lot more? The former. Because the latter group doesn’t even think about getting laid 60% or 70% of the time. I know that being empty or shallow or not a very kind or thoughtful person will never, ever get in the way of having sex with someone attractive, or so I’ve deduced over the years. The hottest women always seem to be with the creepiest-looking or (judging by the vibes) most spiritually unappealing guys, or so it seems.

If a James Mason-like angel was to descend from heaven one night and sit down at a restaurant table and say, “Jeffrey, I’m afraid there’s no delicate way to put this but given your enormous work load and dedication to your column and your samurai poet aesthetic and general lack of patience with mounting a Gen. George S. Patton Third Army European tank campaign plus all the rest of the bullshit you have to submit to in order to have even a chance of striking a match with the right woman, the odds are very much against your ever getting lucky again, much less entering into a lasting, loving relationship,” I would be okay with that.

I would nod and shrug and say, “Yeah, you may be right…okay, got it, c’est la vie.” And at the same time I would say to myself that James Mason doesn’t know everything and that maybe I’ll get lucky regardless, but if he’s right then whatever…I’ve got a really full life going right now and I’ve got all my slut years (’70s and ’80s) to look back upon, and I can roll with that. On the other hand I’ve gotten lucky at the drop of a hat and lost my mind and lost all sense of proportion about things. For two or three weeks, I mean.

Rushfield: “If you work in the entertainment industry and you’re successful, then there is a small chance you are not a horrible person. If you are a horrible person, then you probably have horrible values and that applies especially to your romantic life and what you think you want from that. And that makes finding a suitable life partner challenging. [And] If you moved to LA to work in the entertainment industry and you are not successful, then everyone who moved to LA to work in the entertainment industry on some level wants to shun you as though you had the plague, which also makes finding a suitable life partner challenging.”

Something made me twitch a bit during my second viewing of Josh Radnor‘s Liberal Arts (IFC Films, 9.14), which I wrote admiring things about in early July and before that at Sundance last January. I’m speaking of a slight aversion to what I regard as an excessive amount of dewy-eyed sensitivity in Radnor — not only in the character he’s playing (a 35 year-old college admissions guy) but in his own temperament, as he’s the director-writer and is presumably drawing from the well.

The story is about Radnor visiting his college and falling into an infatuation with a 19 year-old sophomore (Elizabeth Olsen) and getting all glum and guilt-trippy about it. A voice inside was saying “will you ease with the sensitive shit and just tap it already?” I mentioned last month that I have a certain perspective as I felt a bit funny about having a relationship with a 19 year-old when I was 28. It does feel weird. Then again life is short and we all know Olsen will probably experience much more caring and compassion from Radnor than she would from some 19 or 20-year-old horndog.

And so I started to feel a bit impatient with Radnor’s girlyman hesitancy. He needs a little Vince Vaughn, some unregenerate guy-ness to round things out. You get the idea he doesn’t have a lot of primal energy inside him. Radnor is Woody Allen-esque but not as funny — he’s just not as good with the zingers and the comebacks. He’s all about being mental and morose and oh-so-attuned.

Radnor and Olsen are 16 years apart, and perhaps the best scene in the whole film is when Radnor figures out some equations. When I was 19 she was 3…bad. When I’m 41 or 42 Olsen will be 25 or 26…a little sketchy. But when I’m 50 she’ll be 34…a tiny bit better. When I’m 60 she’ll be 44…excellent! When I’m 70 she’ll be 54…perfect! When I’m 80 she’ll be 64…let’s get married right now! It can’t last? Maybe not, but what in life is guaranteed to be a long-term thing?

My thing with the 19 year-old when I was 28 was pretty wonderful, by the way. I did have a concern when she wound up dumping me after 18 months or so. I was devastated, in fact, but that’s life. All’s fair, rough and tumble, no assurances.

No offense, but Dawn Hudson and Hawk Koch‘s hiring of producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron to produce the 85th Academy Awards means that it’ll be the same old lah-lah show it’s always been. Zadan and Meron are boomer-aged members of “the club” who share the same passion for theatrical pizazz, spunky musical numbers and Tin Pan Alley uplift that former Oscar show producers Bill Condon and Larry Mark showed when Hugh Jackman hosted in ’09. So the show will be “fun”, swanky, spirited, Vegas-flavored, etc.

Not a “problem” but sooner or later the boomers will have to step aside and the reins will be handed over to GenXers who didn’t grow up idolizing Liza Minnelli and Michael Bennett and A Chorus Line and that whole line of country…whose influences happened more in the ’80s and early ’90s than the late ’60s and ’70s Maybe not now but soon and for the rest of our lives…until the GenXers are one day pressured to pass the baton to a GenY producer, etc. Generational cycles and all that.

Four or five days ago I did a phoner with Hit and Run producers Kim Waltrip and Jim Casey, who have a company called Kim & Jim Productions. They’re a bit formal and guarded, but nice. Hit and Run opens today with a Rotten Tomatoes hoi polloi rating of 67%. I was mixed on it myself, but I loved the writing. Here’s the mp3.

(l.) Kim Waltrip and (r.) Jim Casey, producers of Hit and Run, co-chairs of Kim & Jim Productions.

“Much of Hit and Run is a very cleverly written, refreshingly original, angular-attitude comedy that reminded me (in the early stages, at least, and in portions throughout) of David O. Russell‘s Flirting With Disaster (’96),” I wrote last week, “and that is high praise indeed. That classic comedy had inspired character flavor, unusual detours and flaky oddball dialogue, and so does Hit and Run. And while this stuff was happening during last night’s premiere screening, I was delighted.”

One of our topics was the fact that Kim is a moderate Republican — far from a crime but certainly a curiosity in this overwhelming liberal industry. In her defense she’s a “green” Republican who believes in conservation and gay marriage and is generally liberal-ish on social issues. I didn’t ask her if she supports Romney-Ryan — that would have been an antagpnistic question under the circumstances.

Nicole Kidman has appeared nude and semi-nude in movies and photo sessions before, and I guess this V magazine spread is some kind of nod to her white-trash character in Lee Daniels‘ The Paperboy. I just don’t get the hair. It’s part sheepdog, part floor mop, part Jane Fonda in Klute.

Monochrome is a good idea, but the crispness of the image is almost a little too Richard Avedon-ish. You know what I would have done? Have the photographer deliver a rustic photo of Daniel Day Lewis‘s Lincoln in the old Matthew Brady style, like a daguerreotype taken in the 1860s.

The normal 21st Century thing is for major newspapers to fire their movie critics, so it feels almost surreal to hear that the Orange Country Register is looking to hire one. I could make several suggestions to editor Ken Brusic, but let’s keep it to one for now: former Arizona Daily Star critic, OK magazine critic, blogger and Twitter guy Phil Villarrreal. Do you have to be a Republican to be considered? Is it realistic to expect to even find more than one or two Republican film critics? Kyle Smith, Michael Medved and who else?

As Hitler videos go, this isn’t half bad. Except the Akin thing will go away within two or three days…okay, a week. And the brainiac who wrote the copy has misspelled “know” and “disappear.” And the Stalin reference makes no sense. But some of it is funny. “We never called Romney a felon…yeah, right.”

This morning I’m a tad more knowledgable about factors that may have led to Patrick Goldstein having taken a buyout from the L.A. Times and shut down his 12 year-old column, “The Big Picture.” A key thing for any working journalist to consider is to think about the amount of content you produced ten years ago, and then ask yourself “would that cut it in today’s media environment?” Ten years ago I was banging out two columns per week for Reel.com, and no, that would not cut it today.

This, I gather, is the crux of the Goldstein exit saga. He wouldn’t agree to grim up, eat more Wheaties and churn out more stuff. He wouldn’t get with the 2012 program.

You could assert that it was unrealistic for anyone who had Goldstein’s gig to run with the mindset of “I’m going to write one column a week and tap out a few blog posts in the margins.” It seemed that more than a few of his columns, boiled down, were basically “I just went to lunch with so and so” along with that “summer movie posse” thing (show kids some trailers) he’s been doing since forever. We all go dry or stale from time to time and need to re-charge, but it did seem as if Goldstein was out of ideas or running low on gas or something along those lines.

There’s also a view with although the L.A. Times is structurally unsound with creaking timbers and financial wolves circling (hence my remark yesterday that it’s “largely a gutted, dying organization”), Calendar, run by John Corrigan, is actually a fairly lively place to be. It’s now employing six movie writer-reporters in hopes of ramping up on that Oscar season ad income. The latest new staffers are Mark Olsen and Glenn Whipp, adding to Rebecca Keegan, Steven Zeitchik, Amy Kaufman and Nicole Sperling. So Goldstein is gone, okay, but new writers, new ideas and new innovations will quickly rush in and take his place.

Last night I saw A Liar’s Autobiography, a 3D animated film about the life of the late Monty Python headliner Graham Chapman (1941 — 1989), based on Chapman’s comedic memoir that was initially published in 1980. No reviews permitted until the beginning of the Toronto Film Festival, but here’s a clip from Chapman’s funeral that worked nicely as I slumped in my seat.

The film, a Bill and Ben Production, uses Chapman’s recording of his autobiography, made shortly before he died of throat (or tonsil) cancer. Produced and directed by London-based Bill Jones, Ben Timlett and Jeff Simpson, the film had several animation companies working on different chapters of varying lengths. ” John Cleese has recorded new dialogue which will be matched with Chapman’s voice, Michael Palin will voice Chapman’s father, Terry Jones will play his mother, Terry Gilliam plays Graham psychiatrist…and they all play various other roles,” says the Wiki page. Eric Idle was apparently the only Monty Python fellow who abstained.

With getting specific or even geographical I’m hearing Ben Affleck‘s Argo, Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson, Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha, Wayne Blair‘s The Sapphires, Robert Lorenz and Clint Eastwood‘s…wait, not Trouble With The Curve? I thought that sounded right, made sense. Jacques Audiard‘s Rust and Bone, Ken Burns‘ Central Park Five and what else? What about a little wackadoodle Terrence Malick action?