My transmission collapsed early this morning, so I had the car towed all the way to Santa Monica Motors. Two days from now I’ll be $1050.00 poorer and back on the road. I’ve been filing all morning from a Starbucks at Olympic and Sawtelle, which is one long block up from Tomy’s on Pico, where I had breakfast this morning. Off to Best Buy soon to get a scanner so I can digitize ’90s articles for “Yellowing with Antiquity.”

“Given the nature of the material, which comes to a climax with half of London’s criminal and Secret Service personnel chasing the baffled thieves, you would expect The Bank Job to be played as farce, or perhaps as a satire on the manners of the upper class,” writes New Yorker critic David Denby. “That’s the way Richard Lester or the Boulting brothers would once have told such a story.

“But Roger Donaldson, the Australian-born director who, in recent years, has become the kind of solid pro that Hollywood developed in the nineteen-thirties and forties, has made a straightforward, tight-knit crime thriller, which incidentally features some very odd plot elements.
“Respecting the rules of the game, Donaldson assembles the robbery team (guys who work at a car dealership and other minor jobs) and gives us a brief account of their everyday lives; he lays out their loyalties to one another and to the upwardly bound model, with whom two of them had affairs many years earlier. The plot, which includes such intriguing minor characters as the porn king of Soho (played suavely by David Suchet, of Poirot fame), is terrifically complicated, so Donaldson moves things along briskly and refuses to dwell on violence (as an American movie would).
“The director has done his best to restore the civilized pleasures of the genre. There are a couple of mild movie jokes: the filmmakers cast the tall, darkly handsome Richard Lintern, who looks as if he had just missed out replacing Sean Connery as James Bond, as the chief MI5 agent. And Donaldson has got a star in the making: Jason Statham, as Terry Leather, the head of the robbery gang. Statham, who has been playing tough-guy roles with authority in the Transporter films, has clipped hair, burning eyes, and a voice that sounds like acid running over gravel.”

I’ve been shown data indicating that in terms of delegates chosen at last night’s caucuses, Hillary Clinton may not have won Texas. Maybe. The final counts aren’t in. But what I’m looking at seems persuasive.
With an official Texas website tally of delegates that began to be counted last night in the caucuses, otherwise known as Texas Democratic Party Precinct Conventions, Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Moises Chiullan, who paticipated in a caucus last night in Austin, is telling me that if trends continue Barack Obama is going to emerge as the overall Texas delegate winner.
Look at the 31 Senate districts in this chart. By my count, Clinton is ahead in 11 of these districts (#19 through #22, #26 through #31) and Obama is ahead in the other 20.
The primary voting resulted in Clinton with 64 delegates and Obama with 62 delegates. The caucuses are choosing another 68 delegates, and if the trends evident in last night’s caucus voting are ratified by the still-continuing manual counts, it looks as if Obama will end up with somewhere around two-thirds of the 68, or roughly 45 or 46 delegates to Clinton’s 22 or 23. If the numbers continue along the lines of what’s already tallied, I’m saying.
In short, it may well be that Clinton didn’t take Texas after all. Maybe.
The people who were elected to be Texas delegates have to show up at the various Texas county conventions on March 29th. So it’s vitally important for every last Obama delegate to show up — no colds or fevers, no I-couldn’t-get-a-babysitter, nothing like that.

[Update: This story was accidentally deleted during an iPhone edit yesterday afternoon. I re-posted it around 6 pm last night but all the reader comments were lost.] I drove out last night to the TV Academy theatre on Lankershim (which is way out there, about halfway to Palmdale) for a chat with The Bank Job director Roger Donaldson. He was waiting for a screening of his well-reviewed British crime film to finish so he could do a stage chat with moderator Pete Hammond.

Roger Donaldson — Tuesday, 3.4, 8:35 pm

The Bank Job isn’t a whammy-chart action film. No car chases, no explosions and star Jason Statham only beats up one guy in the whole thing. And it’s not a classic drama. But it’s the best crafted and most gripping low-key suspense thriller I’ve seen in ages. “I don’t want to blow a gasket over this thing because it’s just a good British popcorn film,” I wrote last Friday, “but entertainments of this sort — tight, tough, well-honed — are few and far between.”
I asked Donaldson if the fact that guys like myself are fans of The Bank Job is a bad box-office omen. Serious action and thriller fans tend to like their movies to be a little dumber and blunter…no? I shouldn’t say this, I suppose. I just feel that serious action hits are — I want to put this carefully — not exactly aimed at a cretin mentality, but they have to at least make room for it. Is that fair?
I told Donaldson I was especially pleased with The Bank Job‘s expositional dialogue, which always kept me engaged and feeling informed and never made me feel like I was falling behind. Casting was a very important element, he said, with 30-plus speaking parts. He shot The Bank Job in about 60 days.

Jason Statham in The Bank Job

I haven’t gone to Statham’s previous films because it doesn’t thrill me that much to see the hero kick the shit out of the bad guys, I told him. But when Staham goes to town on a guy (or two or three) in The Bank Job, I loved it. Statham could be the new Steve McQueen, we agreed, but in the future he has to try and get himself into more action movies that Matt Damon might say yes to, and fewer that Jean Claude Van Damme might star in.
What is Donaldson’s favorite heist film? “I haven’t seen a lot of them,” he confessed. He’s never even seen the popular Topkapi, he said. But he’s a big admirer of Jules Dassin‘s Rififi. He believes, however, that the music-free heist sequence wouldn’t, in a new version, work with today’s audience unless it was scored, and he’s not sure that the dark ending (the wounded Tony driving the little kid back into Paris and the arms of his mother before dying) would work either.
Hammond said to me later that Donaldson is a dead ringer for Bill Clinton. I don’t disagree, but the more I think about it the less I agree. He looks like Clinton’s older, more bohemian older brother from California.

Pete Hammond, Donaldson — Tuesday, 3.5, 9:05 pm

All Barack Obama supporters feel badly this morning about New Hampshire redux. The distinguished and vetted Hillary Clinton threw the sink, the plumbing and whatever globs of fecal matter she was able to scoop out, and enough of it stuck to the wall or pushed buttons or whatever. And now the concern is that come April 22nd the fearful, insufficiently educated lunchbox proles in Pennsylvania (along with that state’s insufficiently educated white women over 50) will probably give her another win.
Even though Obama’s delegate lead is truly insurmountable, and despite the almost certain fact that things will go his way again in Missisippi and Wyoming and beyond. Anyone who knows the game and how to count will tell you the math and the likely super-delegate tipping factor over the next few weeks makes a Barack victory a near-certainty. But this morning the wind and the ugliness is with Hillary, and that’s a fact. It’s also a fact that the Republicans are tickled, delighted….rolling around on the ground.
It’s time now for Team Obama to get up, dust themselves off and unsheath the swords. It’s not just the voters who want to know about Barack’s three-in-the-morning courage — I want to see this! The name of the game from here on should be “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” People everywhere understand that alpha uplift will only get you so far. As that priest in the Woody Allen joke tells the mother, “I’ll pray for your son, sure, but if he can punch it’ll help.”
If you need to watch Gone With the Wind again to get your head straight, do so. Too many people out there seem to believe that Barack Obama has too much Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton in him and not enough Rhett Butler or Scarlett O’Hara. Barack needs to do that radish-in-the-fields moment. He needs to stand up, clench his fist and say to the heavens, “I’ll never be taken down by that bitch and her henchmen again! ”

“I’ve long lived quite dangerously myself, and so, anxious to share my desperate man-tits with an audience beyond Chelsea, I gleefully agreed to star in an homage to an homage: Musto as Lohan as Marilyn. That’s three generations of loveliness, and I prepared for it by not shaving or waxing a thing, just letting it all hang in the wind as both a nod to history and a means of reclaiming control.

Just like with Marilyn and Lindsay, people have always grabbed at me, wanting a piece of my piece and a slice of my soul, but usually with more pepperoni and less cheese. Well, this time, I was seizing the power back by saying: “My bits are only mine to give. Now here they are, world. Take it all!” — Village Voice columnist Michael Musto in a piece/photo spread that went up today. The first and final observation is that Lindsay Lohan‘s Marilyn photos were hotter, yes, but only somewhat.
Cheers and salutations to Musto for a brilliant parody/media move.

“Forget Gus Van Sant‘s Paranoid Park, an unfocused, meandering and even dreary look at how a Portland skateboarding teenager (Gabe Nevins) doesn’t deal with his complicity in an impulsive accidental homicide. It’s another atmospheric exotic-youth-culture piece with a minimalist plot, but nowhere near as striking or stylistically distinguished as Van Sant’s Elephant and Last Days.
“I’m calling it his first not-very-good film since Gerry. I’m sorry to say this given the respect I have for Gus, but you can’t hit it out of the park every time.” — written from the Cannes Film Festival on 5.22.07. IFC is opening Paranoid Park on Friday, 3.7.

Let’s hear some affection for poor Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the iconic Dungeons & Dragons — literally the father of modern role-playing gaming — who died today at age 69 from heart troubles.

Dungeons & Dragons was first marketed in ’74. I was never a gamer and didn’t know or care about D & D until Henry Thomas‘s Elliot character mentioned it in E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. (I was too old and too hormonally-driven to focus my energies on anything that didn’t involve girls, clubbing, playing music, etc.) The game was basically “about players creating magical and heroic characters and guiding them through a series of adventures,” etc.
The interesting thing was the absence of a set game board in this interactive, imaginative adventure, an obit says. All you needed was paper, pen, the dungeon master’s rule book and a set of multi-sided dice. D&D “spawned a booming industry and has inspired a generation of writers, video game designers and filmmakers.”

A Washington Times story by Stephen Dinan reports that “Republicans like Sen. Barack Obama nearly as much as they like Sen. John McCain, according to a new Fox 5/The Washington Times/Rasmussen Reports poll. The survey determined that a quarter of self-identified Republicans rated McCain most likable, but nearly as many — 23 percent — chose Obama as most likable. And among all adults surveyed, Obama was rated likable by more people than Sen. Hillary Clinton and McCain combined, underscoring the Illinois senator’s appeal to voters across the political spectrum.”

The great Leonard Rosenman, a two-time Oscar-winning composer who wrote the truly magnificent score for Elia Kazan‘s East of Eden (’55), has passed on at age 83. Roseman also composed the scores for Nicolas Ray‘s Rebel Without a Cause (also ’55) as well as such Pork Chop Hill, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Fantastic Voyage and A Man Called Horse.

Leonard Rosenman; James Dean in “East of Eden”

Listen to the overture and main-title music from his Eden score. Listen especially to the strange psychological spasm music that happens at the 1:01 mark — certainly not melodic, the strings seems to be lurching and cat-scratching rather than singing. Listen also to the Eden theme at 3:40. It sounds, yes, a little pat and schmaltzy, like something off The Little House on the Prairie. But it gets me every time, in part because I know the film is emotionally fierce and moody and even pulverizing at times.
Rosenman was Oscar-nominated for his original Cross Creek and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home scores in the mid ’80s, but his back-to-back Oscars, won in 1975 and ’76, were for adapting the classical music in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and the Hal Ashby‘s Bound for Glory.

Obama has won Vermont (except no one has posted numbers or voter profiles) and Matt Drudge is saying that exit polls indicate a deadlock in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island. Really? That would be great except no one believes exit polls. Twelve minutes until the first inklings of Ohio voters will be reported. I need some chill-down herbal tea. 7:30 pm update: MSNBC is saying the Ohio race is too close to call. The Page‘s Mark Halperin says that in Ohio Obama and Clinton “are tighter than the lug nuts on ’55 Ford.”

In Alessandra Stanley‘s just published Vanity Fair piece about women comedian (“Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?), she describes Sarah Silverman thusly: “In her stand-up act and on her Comedy Central show, Silverman is as crude and cruelly insensitive as any male comedian, but with a sexy, coquettish undertone — a Valley Village version of Brenda Patimkin, the Jewish-American Princess in Goodbye, Columbus. In one scene, Sarah calls her sister ‘gay,’ then apologizes to her two gay neighbors. ‘I don’t mean gay like homosexual,’ she says sweetly. ‘I mean gay like retarded.’

Gams, gams, gams — Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, and Tina Fey in an Annie Leibovitz photo posted on the VF website.

I genuinely love Silverman’s stuff, but everything she says and does results in an LQTM — laughing quietly to myself. And I have no problem with LQTM’s. I’ve also laughed at Tina Fey‘s stuff in the same way, and I say that with absolute respect and admiration for her exceptional smarts and wit. I’ve also had this reaction to the jokes of Ellen DeGeneres. So it’s not that women aren’t funny — they certainly are. It’s that some of the very best women comics don’t really make you go “hah-hah-hah!!” They make you go “heh-heh-heh.”
And that’s fine. That’s really not a putdown because I love these guys. I love their sharp-knife sass. I even liked Fey’s recent SNL bit about “bitch is the new black,” despite the pro-Hillary point of it.