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Ricardo Montalban passed yesterday at age 88 — sorry. Then again, having lived a exciting high-style life for 88 years is hardly a tragedy. When you hear his name you think (a) Fantasy Island, (b) his muscular pecs in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (very impressive for a guy who was 61 years old) and (c) Esther Wiliams costar. But my strongest memory is the way he said the words “rich Corinthian leather” in those Chrysler Cordoba commercials. (His Wikipedia bio says that the adjective was “soft,” not “rich.”)

I loved Montalban’s Ahab-ish dying words in The Wrath of Khan — “for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath,” etc. And he was half-decent, I thought, as a Kabuki player in Joshua Logan‘s Sayonara (’57), although it was pretty silly to hire a Mexico City Latino to play a Japanese guy.

The pancreatic cancer that has been weakening poor Steve Jobs is apparently back and aggressive as hell. I’m very sorry. May his remaining days be creative, spiritual and full of love. It does seem weird, however, that so many people are convinced that when Jobs dies, Apple will start to die as well. There are no young bucks out there with the instincts and abilities to keep that company grooving along like it should? C’mon.

I felt nothing but contempt for the Spanish soldiers in El Cid who cried like children when word got out that the arrow in Charlton Heston‘s chest might be fatal, or at least incapacitating. “We cannot fight the Moors without the Cid! We will not” An army that refuses to re-charge and re-constitute itself when a leader dies is indeed finished. But why would Apple stockholders think and act this way? Cowards. Sheep.

Of all time. Or at least in my experience on this planet. It’s amazing to me that there are people in third-world countries who are actually paid money to design and manufacture these back-breaking coil-spring mattresses. They must know, surely, that the possibility of people feeling comfortable enough to actually fall asleep on them is very slight. I’ve slept better on hard-metal cots in city jails.

You have to be a sadist to make one of these things; you certainly have to be a masochist to willingly sleep on one. I gave up after four, four and a half hours. Awful.

I’m in a new place on Friday so it’s nothing to obsess about. But the combination of sitting through tonight’s opening film, the claymation Mary and Max (which is partly about a 44 year-old morbidly obese guy, voiced by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) on top of another night trying to sleep on this torture mattress from Jakarta…I don’t know. Feels like a tough combo.

The insulation in this cardboard milquetoast condo, located on Park City’s Windrift Lane (a little bit of a hump north from Kearns Blvd.), is on the shitty side also. I can feel the frigid early morning air seeping through the window behind me. The cheapest home-building materials known to modern man have gone into the construction of thousands of Park City condos. I know, having stayed in quite a few since the early ’90s.

This is a fairly typical example of middle-American architecture and home construction when penny-pinching figures in. Icy air leaking into the living room and yet the guy who designed this one went in for a little counter-flourish by installing a tiny jacuzzi tub — a poor man’s jacuzzi — in the bathroom. Hey, I’m Tommy Tune! A home, in other words, that’s a little more about show than substance.

As sorry as I am about the passing of Patrick McGoohan, I wasn’t that taken with his internals on-screen. I loved, of course, the magnificent snap, crack and timbre of his voice — what an instrument! — blended with that purring Irish-English accent. But McGoohan always — almost always — played creepy obsessives with cold eyes and cold souls, and I can’t say I ever liked him all that much.

I respected him, naturally, for his chops, for that undercurrent of whatever, for that well pedigreed quality. He was a first-rate actor.

I loved the metaphor of The Prisoner, the ’60s TV series, but I never watched more than a couple of episodes — sorry. McGoohan, for me, was defined by his series of twisted and malevolent big-screen pricks in Silver Streak, Escape From Alcatraz, Scanners, Braveheart, etc. Yes, he was very good at putting out this particular mood and color.

What kind of actor in his right mind would turn down the James Bond role over moral grounds? He once stipulated “no kissing” in his contract for Danger Man, the British TV action series. I seem to recall reading way back when that he was a bit of a conservative prig, an old-school moralist, etc.

And why, with his British theatre background and that awesome voice, didn’t he appear on Broadway more often? In 1985 he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award played a British spook in a stage production of Hugh Whitemore‘s Pack of Lies, opposite Rosemary Harris.

If you don’t know anything about the semi-infamous Star Hotel/cowboy hat/ residual-scent episode, read about it here and then continue. I walked into the Park City police station about 10:15 pm this evening and asked if they had my cowboy hat. It took them a while to find it, but find it they did. Good guys! I now look like the Durango Dude. I am here in Park City — stoked, outfitted, ready to rock, getting my press pass tomorrow morning, etc. Life is good again.

Saddest, most neglected cowboy hat in the world on butcher-block table inside Squatters, a grilled burgers-and-cold brewski place in Park City, Utah — Wednesday, 1.14.08, 10:55 pm

Andy Klein, one of the wisest and most smoothly readable film critics in the known universe, has been whacked. LACitybeat, which he’s been reviewing for since ’03 or thereabouts, has cut him loose. Jesus, it’s the damn bubonic plague out there! L.A. Observed says he’ll continue with KPCC’s FilmWeek segment and “Off-Ramp.” Andy, if you’re reading this…we’ll talk soon. Hang tough, stand tall, wait for the next turn.

Got into LAX around 12:15ish. Paid $50 to leave on a Southwest Salt Lake City flight that will leave two hours earlier than the flight I’d previously booked, but which’ll arrive in SLC only an hour earlier — around 6 pm — because it stops in Pheonix. Live with it. It’s mid January and the current L.A. temperature is 83 degrees. But it’s 32 degrees in Park City. As it should be.

Waiting for Southwest #463 to Salt Lake City.

“A scheduled Tuesday court conference between Fox and Warner Bros. attorneys has been canceled,” the Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit wrote late last night, “fueling talk that a settlement in the contentious Watchmen case is imminent.

“Fox sued Warners last February, saying the Burbank-based studio infringed on its rights to make the comic book adaptation. In December, when federal judge Gary A. Feess ruled that Fox has distribution rights to the film, Warners faced the prospect of having the film’s March 6th release blocked.

“Settlement talks between the two sides became serious over the weekend and continued to heat up yesterday.

“A settlement could cost Warners tens of millions of dollars. A case involving copyright ownership of Warners’ The Dukes of Hazzard, which Feess blocked from release in 2005, ended in a settlement worth a reported $17.5 million.

“With Watchmen, an adaptation of the Alan Moore graphic novel with a budget in the $130 million range, the financial stakes are higher. According to sources, Fox is asking for upfront fees as well as a percentage of the back-end.”

One Sundance film I should have included on my final shortlist is Nicolas Winding Refn‘s Bronson. Journalist Bilge Ebiri yesterday spoke of “a bunch of New York journos” having seen an early screening of the bio-prison pic and gone “ape-shit.”

And for what it’s worth, a fellow with a certain professional interest in Bronson has written the following: “It’s a directorial wow from Refn and it has a Best Actor Oscar-worthy performance by Tom Hardy. I’m not kidding about Hardy’s work. It’s a total ‘who is that?’ performance which is right up there on my very short all-time list with David Thewlis in Naked and Hillary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry. Please do not miss it.

” And there’s something that’s not getting across anywhere, by the way — the film is very, very funny.”

A senior foreign-language Academy committee guy who wanted everything he said of interest to be non-attributable called last night to say two things about yesterday’s Gomorrah snub. One, he doesn’t feel that blowing off Gomorrah this year is as much of a scandal as last year’s 4 Months snub because 12 months ago the foreign-language fuddy-duds also ignored Carlos Reygadas‘ Silent Light and Fatih Akin‘s Edge of Heaven, among others. And two, voices in the foreign branch’s executive elite committee just didn’t think Gomorrah “delivered in the way it could or should have,” he said. “It’s not a matter of it not being heart-warming. It’s a matter of our respecting the film without believing that it really brought the goods home.”