Who am I? What’s wrong with me? Why didn’t I try and write more Thursday night and especially Friday after filing the Gandolfini thing on Thursday? Because I’m a sensitive, intelligent individual and my feelings were hurt. I felt stung, morose, detached, weak in the knees. I needed to heal, I guess. And I needed to walk around the city and buy shoe trees and lose umbrellas (it rains, I buy one at Duane Reade, and I go to a screening or something and leave it there) and just “be.” Everybody goes through these interludes and time-outs. I do them a couple of times a year. The rest of the time I’m a hammer.
Since returning a week ago I’ve seen The Way Way Back, White House Down, Stuck in Love, Pacific Rim and Our Nixon…which I saw the night before last. (A conflict kept me away from the all-media screening of The Heat, and this didn’t sink in until two days after.) I can and will write about Stuck and Way Way Back (which is quite good as far as this kind of smart, well-acted, Fox Searchlighty, mid-range, modestly scaled character material tends to go) today or tomorrow. But I can’t write about Rim until much later.
I’m also throwing together a set-visit piece about George Clooney‘s Monuments Men — material I’ve been sitting on since early May or roughly seven and a half weeks ago. And now that Sony has told me I’m good to go, I have to dredge it all up and give it shape. Should I have written a rough draft right after I visited so I could just post it when the green light (i.e., end of shooting on 6.25) was given? Yes. Did I do that? Of course not.
Next week looks a little flat, for the most part. There’s an evening screening of Gore Verbinski‘s The Lone Ranger (Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Helena Bonham Carter, et. al.) which runs a minute shy of two and a half hours…God! Unless it turns out to be much better than what everyone’s expecting, which we all know won’t be the case, Ranger should have run 100 to 110 minutes, tops. There’s a certain intrigue about Arik Bernstein‘s Israel: A Home Movie and Drew DeNicola & Olivia Mori‘s Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me.
You know what I’m moderately cranked about? I’ll tell you what I’m moderately cranked about. I’m moderately cranked about a New York Public Library screening of Barry Shear‘s Across 110th Street. I know it’s on DVD but still. Yaphet Kotto, Anthony Quinn, Tony Franciosa, Richard Ward (“I’m Doc motherfuckin’ Johnson!”), Burt Young.
