It’s 5:05 am on Monday morning, and I’ve been awake since 3:30 am. I’m sitting in warm, quiet darkness on the rear deck of a Ha Long-based “junk.” The ship is gently bobbing in the not quite placid waters. The white lights of other craft are softly beaming in the distance. A full moon is peeking through cloudy skies. Large, craggy, bullet-shaped mountains surround the bay. The junk guys have shut off the generator so it’s just me and my thoughts and the soothing, pre-dawn solitude. Along with my iPhone and fully-charged MacBook Pro, I mean. Thank God for the Viettel connectivity — two bars but it’s good enough.
Daily
Hintings, Translations
USA Today stepped into shit today when one of their presumably older, less-hip editors ran a box-office story with a racially gauche headline: ” ‘[Best Man] Holiday’ Nearly Beat ‘Thor’ as Race-Themed Films Soar.” The tweets hit the fan and so the newspaper changed “Race-Themed” to “Ethnically Diverse.” What they meant to say was “Mildly Shitty Romcom (64% On Rotten Tomatoes) Primarily Aimed at ‘Urban’ Audiences Does Almost As Well as Mildly Shitty , CG-Driven Comic-Book Bullshit (66% RT) Primarily Aimed At Under-40 Primitives.” USA Today‘s obviously clumsy headline was a reverse-case cousin of the classic Variety headline “Stix Nix Hix Pix” as it sought to summarize a box-office response to a film in ethnic and/or cultural terms — a huge no-no in today’s politically correct environment. The sin was in the insensitive wording. Malcolm D. Lee’s film earned $30.5 million vs. $38.4 million snagged by Thor: The Dark World.
More Hustle Judgment
This latest American Hustle clip seems to be conveying the same under-message that those opening six minutes did. These late ’70s people with their atrocious hairstyles and clothing and borough accents are on the clueless side — under-educated, slow on the pickup. “Not bullshit…I read it in an ahhhtickle…thank God for me.”
Get More:
Movie Trailers, Movies Blog
Vague Blues Over Blue Reception
Another neat event I’ll be missing due to the Vietnam journey is an evening reception for Blue Is The Warmest Color costars Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux at the French Consulate residence in Beverly Hills. Then again if I could attend I’d just be in conflict. Half of me would want to ask about Seydoux about the latest turn in her quote war with director Abdellatif Kechiche, and the other half would want to duck that topic because everyone else has been harping on it. The result is that I would probably just stand around and not say anything to anyone. I can’t ask the same question that everyone is asking — I have to ask something original. What are the chances that the forthcoming special edition Criterion Bluray (i.e., not the bare-bones version coming on on 2.11.14) will get into the Kechiche-Seydoux spat? Zilch.
Stirrings, Servings, Clink of Drinks
In a Hitfix report about Friday night’s Fox Searchlight “holiday” gathering at Cecconi’s (which I would have loved to attend), Gregg Ellwood says something startling (to me anyway) while referencing a chat with 12 Years A Slave star Chiwetel Ejiofor. I’ve been hearing all along that the Best Actor situation is between Ejiofor vs. All Is Lost‘s Robert Redford. But Ellwood says it’s “clearly” between CE and Dallas Buyer’s Club‘s Matthew McConaughey for the win. That wasn’t the 11.6 consensus among the MCN Gurus of Gold, although the Gold Derby gang is sensing more of a three-way toss-up. So there’s a McConaughey surge?
Hour Of The Wolf
I shouldn’t have crashed last night around 6 pm (3 am L.A. time) but I did, and now I’m paying the price. It’s 3:12 am in Hanoi (or just past noon back home) and I’m stone-cold awake. Yes, it’s Sunday here and we’re all leaving for Ha Long at 7:45 am. But at least I have Tunnel Bear, a VPN which allows access to U.S.-based streaming sites that are normally blocked if you’re outside the country. HE’s own Rian Johnson turned me on to Tunnel Bear last June in Paris. We met for Indian food at Angeethi (36 rue de la Roquette) as Johnson had just been to a Wagner opera at the Bastille Opera. Johnson also told me about Uber, an upscale, cool person’s taxi service that you can order online and which you turn to when there are no cabs due to rain or commuter demand.
Calf Muscle Fatigue, Dodging Scooters
Vidotour’s Hang Nguyen led us through Saturday’s walking tour (lunch at Hanoi’s storied Metropole hotel, some old-town roaming, a visit to the Hanoj Cinematheque). Hang has been married for two years to a British language teacher from Leeds. Over lunch we discussed the not-so-great health care situation in Vietnam. Hang and hubby are saving money with a plan to move to England and buy a residence there.
Hang Nguyen
Johnny Jones + Notepad + Trench Coat
The intention of the Criterion guys to release a Bluray of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Foreign Correspondent (’40) fills me with equal levels of excitement and anxiety. It’s always been a crisp and generally good-looking film, and I for one can’t wait to see it look just a little better than before with a nice Bluray “bump.” I’m terrified, of course, that Criterion’s version will be blanketed with grain, which these guys do every so often. I’m taking a deep breath and calmly asking them to please not do that — please. It’s always looked fine on cable and on DVD. A grainstorm treatment will do nothing but frustrate the fans. I’m “asking them nice,” as Jake La Motta would put it.
Three Dernsies
If I’d been allowed to interview Nebraska‘s Bruce Dern (which isn’t going to happen), I would have mentioned the following opinions and asked him for a response.
“Professionals Panicked”
Richard Stayton, editor of Written By — the magazine of the Writers Guild — has written an editorial lamenting the trashing of The Counselor. In so doing he chastises those who reported (i.e., passed along) the belief that The Counselor is Cormac McCarthy‘s first screenplay. It isn’t. In their mostly negative reviews, critics “changed an all-too-frequent reaction — ignore the script — into a game of Get The Screenwriter,” Stayton writes. “Never before in the history of American film have critics mauled a screenwriter with such extremes of fear and loathing.” He acknowledges the supportive words written by N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, Variety‘s Scott Foundas and myself, among others.
The issues also contains a piece by Counselor supporter F.X. Feeney about The Black & The White, the Herblock documentary directed by Michael Stevens.
Been Here Before
I arrived at Hanoi’s Noi Ba airport last night around 9:45 pm. Customs, visa fee ($45 U.S.), mild weather, roughly 25 miles from downtown, a 45-minute drive. No freeways, and I like it like that. My Vidotour guide is a young married woman named Hang Nguyen, who lives south of town and gets around (like almost everyone else here except the elite) on a scooter. The Vietnamese have this wonderful idea about nighttime — they actually leave it alone and don’t try to obscure it with obnoxious floodings of electric light on every street corner. The half-Mexico, half-south of France atmosphere that I first commented upon last year is, of course, unchanged. I checked into room #909 inside the Hilton Garden Inn (20 Phan Chu Trinh, Hoan Kiem District). These were taken around 7:30 this morning.
