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After hearing for years about Quentin Tarantino‘s affection for Enzo G. Castellari‘s The Inglorious Bastards (1978) and how it led to QT’s writing his own version, I was naturally into catching the just-out DVD of the 1978 original. I was presuming that something strange or kinky would pop out — some facsimile of that battlefield Sam Fuller vitality, strange freewheeling dialogue, servings of left-field perversity…something.

So I popped it into the player last night, and in less than 90 seconds I was faced with the inescapable fact that Quentin Tarantino‘s affection for ’60s and ’70s exploitation fare is essentially a con as far as people with actual taste in movies is concerned, and that The Inglorious Bastards was and is a waste of time, celluloid and general expenditure.
I want the minutes I spent watching this DVD last night back. I felt rooked, polluted, flim-flammed. It’s not one of those so-bad-it’s-kinda-good B pics that you can sort of get off on if you’re in a loose and joshing mood. It’s just third-rate crap in every way imaginable way. I’m talking lazy and sometimes ludicrously bad performances, unconvincing violence, way-too-bright lighting, dubbed dialogue, absurd haircuts, zero character involvement, careless plotting, and rifle fire that sounds like amplified cap guns.
Even the skinny-dipping scene with the SS girls in the country stream, which I was looking forward to, is ruined by being too hasty and over-before-you-blink. Why didn’t Castellari decide to have the “bastards” somehow melt the hearts and turn the allegiances of the SS women and have them all team up in a common effort? Why not? It’s just a stupid B movie anyway.
I was thinking that the two stars, Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson, might at least deliver a little warmth and comfort with their natural charisma, but they haven’t a chance against Castellari’s clunky story and fourth-rate Sgt. Rock dialogue.

In a story that appeared yesterday (8.6) in La Stampa, Maria Elena Finessi reported that the late Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who passed last July at age 94, was so bummed by “his gradual loss of sight” that he starved himself to death, but in an elegant mystical way that was a kind of “masterpiece” of finality.

Enrico Fico, Michelangelo Antonioni

Finessi got the story from Enrico Fico, the widow of the legendary helmer (L’Avventura, Blow Up, L’Eclisse). Antonioni would not have taken his life by shooting or poison “because I still represented his link with the world,” Fico told Finessi. “But certainly he asked for help. To die was his only wish. To go away, in order not to fall into darkness and live as a blind man”.
Fico, who married Antonioni in the mid ’80s, said that with “incredible willpower” he had “simply stopped eating.” He had eaten little or nothing from September 2006, [a little less than] a year before he died, she told La Stampa. “He came to the table with me, to keep me company, but only ate a few spoonfuls”. He had proved that “one’s body continues to live even if you go month after month without eating”.
She said that like the mystics who had similarly starved themselves, Antonioni had acquired “extraordinary mental lucidity” towards the end. He had put up with his decline and illness “gloriously,” but “not to be able to see was for him truly unacceptable”. He had wanted to die “to free himself not so much from pain as from the body which was the origin of his suffering.” She said his death “was a masterpiece as much as his cinematic works. He went in absolute peace, embracing the absolute, as if he were a mystic. He wanted to de-materialize.”

Slim Pickens’ spirited farewell near the end of Dr. Strangelove.

For years my ideal self-obliteration fantasy (if I was facing imminent death anyway and wanted to end it on my own terms) was to go out like William Holden‘s Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch. But getting shot several times (and in the back!) would hurt. It therefore might be better and kind of cooler, I used to tell myself, to go out like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove — vaporized in a millisecond in a hot flash of light, and so quickly that my body wouldn’t have time to send the pain messages to my brain.
But I don’t feel that way anymore. I believe in raging against the dying of the light and holding on to the very last. I want to go like William F. Buckley, slumped over at my computer, a sentence half-typed. Or I want to collapse on a busy street as I’m thinking about (or trying to get the attention of) a beautiful woman, like Omar Sharif in Dr. Zhivago.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter‘s Alex Ben Block, ThinkFilm’s David Bergstein seems to acknowledge that several lawsuits have been filed against ThinkFilm this year by partners claiming they were stiffed. “Some of what is out there is true,” Bergstein tells ABB. “The vast majority is not true. And for the stuff that is true, my answer is, ‘So what? So what if X, Y or Z might be owed money?’

Bergstein said that? Holy moley. Ben-Block muffles it somewhat when he says that Bergstein’s attitude “has some in the creative community fuming.” But he scores a bulls-eye with the title: “Has ThinkFilm Lost Its Mind?”
“‘He’s the biggest disgrace in the film business,’ said producer Albie Hecht, formerly president of Nickelodeon, who produced the Oscar-nominated ThinkFilm documentary War/Dance and claims he still has not seen the small advance ThinkFilm promised. An arbitration is pending.
“‘This is someone who goes around making deals and looks like he has no intention of fulfilling his obligation to filmmakers and artists,’ Hecht added. ‘Not only is it disgusting, but downright immoral.'”

Here it is August 3rd and Hollywood Elsewhere, a reasonably hip, zetigeist- appraising, industry pulse-taking site, is only just waking up to Don’t Forget to Validate Your Parking. I’m speaking of the brilliant, extremely well written webcomic by screenwriter and “movie executive” Mike Le that’s been going since last December. I missed Cory Doctorow‘s Boing Boing link last January because I don’t read Boing Boing so whatever, sue me, I do what I can.

All I know is that Le’s dialogue feels natural and well-timed in a deadpan, GenY-ish Doonesbury vein, and that he knows from Hollywood suck-up psychology. And from bitterness, cynicism, hunger and desperate, under-educated phonies. I laughed out loud twice this morning, and I’m not a laugh-out-louder. (Mainly a heh-heh type.)
“Don’t Forget To Validate Your Parking is a webcomic written and illustrated by Mike Le, the American screenwriter and movie executive,” says the DFTVYP Wikipedia page. “Officially launched on December 11th, 2007 and published roughly once a week, the webcomic is loosely based on the author’s experiences working in Hollywood. Don’t Forget To Validate Your Parking’s initial popularity was limited to Hollywood insiders as it was passed around through internal work emails and private tracking boards”
“The only main character is a drawn version of the author sitting behind his laptop and on the phone. All supporting characters are expressed through dialogue, usually as a voice on the phone. The tone of the webcomic is comedic, satirical, and ironic.”
22 words to have, keep and hold: “You can tell how far your life and career will go based on the five people you spend the most time with.”

With the exception of Heath Ledger‘s performance, which they love, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., and Marcia Nasatir, a.k.a. the “Real Geezers,” have come down pretty hard on Chris Nolan‘s mega-hit. “There seems to be an attempt to say we’re living in some kind of fascist state,” says Nasatir. “The Joker seems to rule supreme the same way Osama bin Laden does…I think the director intended it to remind us of what happened to the twin towers…[but] the reason I think it’s such a success, tragically, is because of the death of Heath Ledger.”

Update: I stilll say that the new John McCain ad suggests that Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, who represent two-thirds of the dumbest, emptiest and most repulsive celebrity trifecta in the history of western civilization, are endorsing the trashing of Barack Obama. Others are saying the ad equates their shallow celebrity status with Obama’s, but that is not what this ad implies. At the very least the ad is ambiguous enough to suggest that Spears and Hilton (both of whom are known or believed to be conservative-minded) are in cahoots with the McCain campaign. Here’s the link to the official website.

I don’t know if Spears is narrating or not (doesn’t sound like her) but it’s definitely not Hilton. Anyway, the visuals are all of Obama and the narration goes like this: “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead? With gas prices soaring, Barack Obama says no offshore drilling? And says he’ll raise taxes on [something]-tricity? Higher taxes, more foreign oil — that‘s the real Obama.”
A friend just called to suggest that the ad equates Obama’s celebrity with the legendary shallowness of Hilton and Spears. In other words, it’s trashing these two along with Obama. That wasn’t my impression at all, but to each his own. Throwing in clips of Spears and Hilton and then having a young-sounding female read the narration clearly implies they’re endorsing the ad’s negative Obama assessment

I’ve never thought of Jon Voight as intellectually challenged, but it’s hard not to at least consider the possibility after reading his 7.28 Washington Times op-ed piece slamming Barack Obama. “The Democratic party, in its quest for power, has managed a propaganda campaign with subliminal messages, creating a God-like figure in a man who falls short in every way,” Voight wrote. “It seems to me that if Mr. Obama wins the presidential election, then Messrs. Farrakhan, Wright, Ayers and Pfleger will gain power for their need to demoralize this country and help create a socialist America.”

I finally get what Angelina Jolie has been on about all these years. (I think.) Most people reading the Voight piece will say, “Okay, the Times gave him the rope and he hung himself.” But you’d think an arch conservative working in an overwhelmingly liberal town would think about restraining himself for expediency’s sake, if nothing else.
My honest deep-down reaction is that I now have a reason to feel negatively about the guy. I’m not saying Voight is on the HE shit list (although the idea certainly feels good — just as it felt good to imagine the same thing last spring about Tina Fey when she became a rabid Hillary person on SNL), and I certainly don’t think a symbolic condemnation along these lines would matter much to anyone. Nonetheless, it’s going to be hard henceforth not to think of Voight as some kind of diseased wingnut.
I’ll always admire and respect Voight’s better performances (Luke in Coming Home, Reynolds in Enemy of the State, Ed in Deliverance, Howard Cosell in Ali, Manny in Runaway Train, FDR in Pearl Harbor, Jack in Desert Bloom, Paul Serone in Anaconda). And he’s obviously entitled to say and write whatever he wants. But it’s only natural that industry-based Obama supporters will henceforth regard him askance. Honestly? If I were a producer and I had to make a casting decision about hiring Voight or some older actor who hadn’t pissed me off with an idiotic Washington Times op-ed piece, I might very well say to myself, “Voight? Let him eat cake.”

This newly re-posted W. trailer is very slightly different than the one that was taken down last night. Yesterday’s version had a stern admonishment spoken by James Cromwell‘s George Bush, Sr., to Josh Brolin‘s Dubya: “What are you cut out for? Fighting, chasing tail, driving drunk? What do you think you are? A Kennedy? You’re a Bush. Act like one.” In today’s version the words “what are you cut out for? Fighting, chasing tail, driving drunk?” have been cut.

The same trailer has been posted on Daily Motion.

Cinemascope‘s Yair Raveh has passed along Barack Obama‘s handwritten prayer note, written on hotel stationery, that the Democratic presidential candidate slipped between the stones at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall during his visit to the site two days ago.

“Journalists then promptly stormed the wall and ransacked his note,” he writes. It turned up in today’s issue of Maariv, a popular Hebrew-language daily. “It’s a big faux pas from a Jewish traditional point of view to steal a written Wailing Wall prayer,” Raveh writes, “and I’m quite certain that if Obama were Jewish no mainstream reporter would’ve dared violate his privacy so bluntly.”

The decision by ABC/Disney honchos to hire E! Entertainment critic Ben Lyons and Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz as the new Ebert & Roeper on a revamped At the Movies is one of those basic no-brainer moves that 50-something executives do when they don’t know what the hell else to do. A syndicated movie-review show starring two older guys (Roeper and Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips) isn’t attracting the under-35 demo? Solution: Replace them with two young bucks with TV experience, engaging personalities and the royal genes of an entertainment-establishment family.

Ben Mankiewicz (l.), Ben Lyons (r.)

Lyons is the congenial, golf-playing, to-the-manor-born son of notorious easy-lay film critic Jeffrey Lyons, and the grandson of N.Y. Post columnist Leonard Lyons; Mankiewicz is the grandson of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and the great-nephew of the legendary Joseph Mankiewicz, director-writer of All About Eve and A Letter to Three Wives.
If I watch the show, Mankiewicz is the guy I’ll have an easier time with. He seems low-key, thoughtful, sardonic. I would prefer if, actually, if the show featured Mankiewicz and his Young Turks partner Cenk Uygur. I love that guy — blowhardy, smart, take-it-or-leave-it.
I don’t like Lyons because you can tell right off the bat that he’s too much of a glider and a gladhander. Plus he went to school with Ivanka Trump. Plus he once called Nikki Blonsky his good buddy. Plus there’s something inauthentic about a supposed film maven who plays golf. Golf has its own spiritual kwan and undercurrent, of course, but 90% of the people who play it do so because they want to schmooze their way into power. Golf courses and clubhouses are havens for conservative-minded ex-fraternity guys who love wearing those awful pink and salmon-colored Tommy Hilfiger polo shirts and trading insider info with their pallies over mixed drinks after the game. You can’t serve golf and movies any more than you can serve God and Rome. They represent entirely different theologies.
I also wonder if the era of sitting passively in front of a TV screen and listening to a couple of guys trade opinions about movies has the same vitality that it had when Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel started Sneak Previews on PBS in 1977. It was a whole different world 31 years ago. Audiences these days like to talk back and argue and engage interactively. I’m not sure that a show that basically says “we’re the cool-ass GenY film critics with the famous dads and granddads, and you guys get to listen” is going to connect all that well.

Terry Gilliam‘s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which will open in England and Australia in early ’09, will contain the shards of Heath Ledger’s very last performance, although his character of Troy will also be played by three other actors — Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law. Nonetheless, and no matter how Gilliam-esque Parnassus turns out out to be, Ledger’s name on the marquee will certainly boost business. Especially given the excitement associated with his Dark Knight/Joker performance.

And yet Gilliam has told The Telegraph‘s Tim Walker (a.k.a. “Mandrake”) that the idea of a Ledger Oscar campaign as “nothing more than a cynical publicity stunt” by Warner Bros. Has Gilliam lost his mind? A Best Supporting Actor Oscar campaign on Ledger’s behalf would probably be the best commercial godsend that could happen to Dr. Parnassus. And Warner Bros. wouldn’t be mulling a campaign if the support wasn’t there among fans, press and industry. What could Gilliam be thinking?
Warner Bros. “will do anything to publicize their film,” Gilliam told Walker. “That’s just what they do and you can’t get upset because it’s bullshit. They’re like a great white shark which devours whatever it can.”
Gilliam directed Ledger in some outdoor London scenes for Dr. Parnassus just two or three weeks before the actor’s accidental death last January.

I used to recreate with drugs (pot, hallucinogens, opiates) in my 20s, I had a vodka problem in the early to mid ’90s, and I had an alcoholic dad who passed along a good amount of emotional misery before joining AA in the mid ’70s, so I know a little something about substance-abuse pitfalls. Addiction is the banshee that could have taken me to hell but shrugged and gave me a “get out of jail” card instead. I was spared, grew past it, whatever…and yet there but for the grace of God.

I’ve therefore been very interested for some time in reading a forthcoming book by N.Y. Times columnist David Carr called The Night of The Gun, which is about his former life as a drug user and coke dealer (in the ’80s), and his struggles with alcohol addiction more recently.

Night of the Gun (Simon and Schuster) has an Amazon.com publishing date of August 8th.

I got the book yesterday and read most of it right away. If you know Carr’s media column or his Oscar-season writings as “the Bagger,” it should come as no surprise that it’s exquisitely written. I love Carr’s voice, which is at once flip and candid and yet elegant and wise. But the book is also a gripping, dead honest and well-reported confessional. And at the same time — no mean feat — dryly entertaining.

Night of the Gun is one of those “I did this and whoa…I’m not dead!” books, but of a much higher calibre. Much. Carr is a man of immense steel balls to have written this, and particularly to have gone back into the damp muddy tunnels of the past and fact-checked everything for three years. He did some 60 interviews with the witnesses and participants. He pored over the depressing documents (arrest reports, medical sheets) that all drug-users accumulate sooner or later. It must have revived nightmares. But Carr went and did it and bravely wrote this book, and did a bang-up job of it. Hat off, head bowed.

David Carr

Carr offers this succinct sum-up on page 16: “WHAT I DESERVED: Hepatitis C; federal prison time; HIV; a cold park bench; an early, addled death. WHAT I GOT: A nice house, a good job, three lovely children. WHAT I REMEMBER ABOUT HOW THAT GUY BECAME THIS GUY: Not much. Junkies don’t generally put stuff in boxes; they wear the boxes on their heads, so that everything around them — the sky, the future, the house down the street — is lost to them.”

A truly first-rate website has been put together to explain the book and the story and the whole thing. Tomorrow’s N.Y. Times magazine (in the 7.20 Sunday edition) will contain an excerpt from the book titled “Me and My Girls.”

Carr’s book reminded me of the “farewell, my dignity” aspect of drug use. Constant assaults on your self-esteem, stains on your sheets and your soul, humiliations unbridled. One way or another, if you do drugs you’re going to be dragged down and made to feel like a low-life animal. Because that’s what you are as long as you let drugs run the show.

Drugs didn’t exactly “run the show” when I was 22 or 23, but they sure were my friends. I saw my life as a series of necessary survival moves, spiritual door-openings, comic exploits, adventures, erotic intrigues — everything and anything that didn’t involve duty, drudgery, having a career and mowing the lawn on weekends. Pot, hashish, mescaline, peyote buttons, Jack Daniels and beer were my comrades in crime.

(I’m going to leave aside discussions of my Godhead Siddhartha discoveries with LSD, and I’d just as soon forget my relatively brief encounters with blithering idiot marching powder from the late ’70s to mid ’80s.)

The particular story that David Carr’s book brought back was me and my upper-middle-class friends’ flirtation with opium and, for a brief time, heroin. The way we saw it, smack was much hipper than your garden-variety head drugs. Opiates were more authentic, we figured, because guys like William S. Burroughs and Chet Baker did them. Where today I see only the danger, the depravity and the recklessness, back then we saw only the contra-coolness.

I was never much of a user, but I did flirt from time to time. I was a candy-ass in junkie circles because I confined myself to snorting and smoking the stuff. One thing I learned pretty quickly is that “chippers” (casual users) have to be careful because heroin will make you throw up if you smoke or snort too much because your body isn’t used to it. Which mine never was because I wasn’t…you know, dedicated.

I was living in a crash pad in Southport, Connecticut. My sole source of income at the time was working part-time for a guy who ran a limousine driver service. Business guys looking to go to Kennedy or LaGuardia or Newark airports would call and I’d come over and drive them to the airport in their car, and then drive it back to their home. Doesn’t sound like much of an idea, but there were definitely customers calling from Westport, Weston, Easton, Wilton, Georgetown, Redding, Southport and Fairfield.

My deal with my boss, Peter, was to be on call at all times. A guy leaving for the airport in a couple of hours would call Peter, he’d call me, I’d drive over and so on. So one afternoon — a Sunday, possibly — a friend and I happened to have some of that snort-smoke stuff, and had retired to a barn out back for a little indulgence. We rolled a nice fat joint and soon I was royally Baker-ed. But just as we got back to the house the phone rang. It was Peter telling me to dress nicely and be at a certain client’s home in 45 minutes if possible, certainly no later than an hour. A trip down to Kennedy.

If I were less of a fool I would have said then and there, “Sorry, Peter — no can do.” But I was broke and needed the money. Go for it, I told myself. I figured I’d take a quick shower, change into a dress shirt and sport jacket, and be relatively straight by the time I got to the client’s house. But the shower didn’t help and I looked like a wreck. My pupils were little black micro-points. So I put on a pair of deep-black shades and then had the inspiration to put on a cowboy hat, the idea being that the manly-conservative cowboy vibe might rub off and make me look less drugged out.

But I was feeling way too wasted as I got into my car so I got my friend to drive me over in his. I figured the stuff would wear off sooner or later and I’d be okay.

I started to feel more and more nauseous as we drove over. When I realized with a jolt I was going to be sick, I rolled down the window and lurched halfway out and spewed. Except we were moving at a good clip — 40 or 45 mph — and so the vomit splattered along the side of my friend’s bright red car.

You need to imagine yourself raking leaves on the front lawn of your beautiful Southport home, blue sky, your toddlers playing nearby, birds chirping in the trees, when all of a sudden you see this ratty red Impala rolling along with some guy leaning out the passenger window and spraying clam chowder. You have to think of it in those terms.

It was all we could do to keep the client from calling the police once he saw me — pasty-faced, straw cowboy hat, unable to stand straight, slurring my words, flecks of vomit on my sport jacket. I was screamed at and, of course, fired by Peter. Never before had I felt like such a piece of detritus, and nothing has happened since to equal this. It was so humiliating that the opiate-usage thing ended very soon after. I told myself I was the rebellious but capable son of suburban middle- class parents who led productive, organized, reasonably moral lives, and here I was acting like a complete degenerate.

The purple rage on Peter’s face, the look of contempt in the client’s eyes, my own self disgust. If these things didn’t wake me, nothing would have. But they did.