Earlier today I caught two market screenings — Ursula Meier‘s Sister at 2 pm, and then Klaartje Quirijns‘ Anton Corbijn Inside Out. Both are modestly respectable. No, make that just plain respectable and in some ways exceptional, but I haven’t the energy to write about them. It’s 8 pm and I’m been up and at it since 6:30 am. The engine shuts itself off after 13 or 14 hours.
Klaartje Quirijns‘ Anton Corbijn Inside Out, a portrait of the famed photographer and director of Control, The American and the forthcoming A Most Wanted Man, will have two market screenings in Cannes — at the Arcades 1 on Thursday, 5.17, at 3:30 pm, and at the Arcades 2 on Monday, 5.21, at 2 pm.
A Most Wanted Man, based on a 2009 John Le Carre novel, will costar Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Rachel McAdams.
My 8.31.10 review of The American. The best party of it stole from Richard Eder’s review of Rancho Deluxe, to wit: “The American is handsome, meditative, elegiac and languid. It’s so coolly artful it is barely alive. First-rate ingredients and a finesse in assembling them do not quite make either a movie or a cake. At some point it is necessary to light the oven.”
My second favorite portion of the 8.31.10 review: “There’s a moment at the very end when George Clooney‘s grim, somber-to-a-fault performance — monotonous and guarded to the point of nothingness, shut and bolted down — suddenly opens up. It’s when he asks the local prostitute to leave with him. For the first time in the film, he smiles. He relaxes and basks in the glow of feeling.
“There’s a little patch of woods by a river that Clooney visits three times. Once to test his rifle, once for a picnic and a swim in the river, and then in the final scene. One too many, perhaps. But his final drive to this spot is almost — almost, I say — on the level of Jean Servais‘ final drive back into Paris in Rififi. For the second and final time in the film Clooney shows something other than steel and grimness.
“The American is worth seeing for this scene alone, and for the final shot when a butterfly flutters off and the camera pans up.”
Yesterday’s Sidney Lumet tribute by Salon‘s Matt Zoller Seitz was the most perceptive and best written of the nine or ten I’ve read so far. Lumet’s style of directing “has a subliminal effect on what we’re feeling as we sit there in the dark,” he said. “He thought about the story from the inside out, letting text and performance dictate visuals, rather than superimposing meaning.
“It’s not the only valid way to make a movie, but it’s demanding and illuminating, and there are not as many rewards in it as there are in the shoot-the-camera-out-of-a-cannon type of directorial pyrotechnics.
“That’s why, even though Lumet’s films sometime became hits and won awards, they never gained much currency with auteurist critics. [But] just because you don’t instantly notice what directors are doing doesn’t mean they aren’t doing anything.”
Australian film journalist Sam Cleveland sent me a link to a few pages of what may be Jon Spaights‘ script for Ridley Scott‘s upcoming Alien prequel movie, otherwise known as Alien Harvest. I’ve no way of verifying if this is Spaights’ script, but it sure reads like a solid, grounded pro-level thing.
On 6.14 Coming Attractions Patrick Sauriol wrote that “sometime in early January 2010 the Alien Harvest PDF file was uploaded to the Scribd file-sharing website. (Except it isn’t there now.) The 122-page script is credited to Jon Spaights, the screenwriter hired to write the untitled Alien prequel that Ridley Scott was developing at Fox.”
On 4.26 Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet quoted Scott’s explanation of what the 3-D Alien Harvest (which may, according to reports, be a two-parter) will basically be:
“It’s set in 2085, about 30 years before Sigourney [Weaver’s character Ellen Ripley],” Scott said. “It’s fundamentally about going out to find out ‘Who the hell was that Space Jockey?’ The guy who was sitting in the chair in the alien vehicle — there was a giant fellow sitting in a seat on what looked to be either a piece of technology or an astronomer’s chair. Remember that?
“And our man [Tom Skerritt as Captain Dallas] climbs up and says “There’s been an explosion in his chest from the inside out — what was that?” I’m basically explaining who that Space Jockey — we call him the Space Jockey — I’m explaining who the space jockeys were.
“[The] main character [in the prequel] will be a woman, yeah.” [The woman in the script excerpt is called Debbie.] “We’re thinking it could go down that route, yeah. When I started the original Alien, Ripley wasn’t a woman, it was a guy. During casting, we thought, ‘Why don’t we make it a woman?
“Scott adds he will need to design ‘or redesign’ the appearance of the alien creatures saying, ‘I don’t want to repeat it. The alien in a sense, as a shape, is worn out.” He also says he will again consult with original Alien designer H.R. Giger.
“Scott was also quoted…saying he’s looking to make two new Alien prequel films referring to them as ‘prequel one and two,’ but right now the focus is on the first film only.
Sauriol’s 6.14 descriptions of Alien Harvest is more thorough and more particular than Brevet’s.
A mildly amusing mutual masturbation chat between Sherlock Holmes director Guy Ritchie and star Robert Downey, Jr. appears in this Sunday’s L.A. Times magazine. Note: Mentioning that you’re well paid or loaded or anything along these lines makes you sound shallow. And recalling your Hemingway-esque response to a cut lip sounds like macho boasting — sorry.
Sherlock Holmes star Robert Downey, Jr.
Ritchie: “You really got your hands dirty on this shoot. In fact, you got punched in the mouth — seven stitches. And you didn’t fuckin’ cry like a baby. You just spat a bit and carried on. That was a shift in my attitude toward you, too. I thought, Okay, that changed the paradigm. Because you get paid a lot of money. I get paid a lot of money. And we’re indulged with the things we’re indulged with. From my point of view, we have the best jobs in the world, and I suspect you think so, too.
Downey: “I love it. But what did I do when I got that big cut? I just hoped it was deep enough that it was going to need enough stitches to get your approval. I was nowhere near the cosmos for about 12 seconds. Then I think I peeled my lip inside out, and I was so happy to hear you say, ‘That was the best fight.'”
Ritchie: “I was happy to be the guy who said, ‘Oh, that needs stitches,’ because usually I’m the guy who’s like, ‘Oh, fuckin’ stitches–don’t worry about it.’
Downey: “We needed to finish whatever we were doing. I wish I had bled more, to tell you the truth, but that might have alarmed other folks. It was kind of a coming of age for me — thinking of being not 22 but 44. But I very well remember going to the hospital.”
The awkward/dull parts were trimmed out by Sam Donelly; the photos are by Sam Jones.
Here’s an mp3 of a three-question chat with director Mike Nichols at MOMA about 45 minutes ago. He was there to kick off a two-week retrospective of his films. I began by mentioning production designer Richard Sylbert, who worked with Nichols on The Graduate, Catch 22 and Carnal Knowledge, among others. We ended by discussing The Fortune, his 1975 bomb that costarred Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Stockard Channing (and which Nichols says he still doesn’t care for).
Diane Sawyer, Mike Nichols outside MOMA’s Titus theatre prior to this evening’s launch of a two-week Nichols retrospective.
My middle question was whether he’d be interested in directing that possible HBO narrative film, just announced as a possibility today, based on the 2008 election. In the same vein, I was thinking, as his work on Primary Colors.
Here’s his answer: “I would never again do a movie based on real life. It’s too hard. You can’t find a metaphor. You have to do what happened, and you’re chained to a series of facts. Or even pseudo-facts. It doesn’t matter [because] it’s what everybody thinks happened. And you can’t examine the story and find out what the secrets are. You have to turn yourself inside out to turn it into a metaphor and make it into a movie, but it’s really hard.”
Both Nichols and his wife Diane Sawyer looked very well tended. I’d like to look that well-tended down the road. I wouldn’t mind looking that well-tended now.
There’s a good Chris Jones story about Benicio del Toro in the current Esquire that explains the genesis of a certain white T-shirt that the 40 year-old actor wears in Things We Lost in the Fire — a T-shirt with the words SAME SAME printed on the chest. Not just in a jogging scene (when you can read it plain as day) but in other scenes also — covertly, under shirts, jackets and overcoats, unseen but “there.”
“It became very important to him that Jerry” — Del Toro’s junkie character — “wear the T-shirt in Things We Lost in the Fire,” Jones writes. “It made perfect sense to Del Toro that this would be so.
“‘For me, it just, you know, said something about being levelheaded, not taking those ups and downs,'” Del Toro tells Jones. “‘I thought it said something about, you know, like, how to stay in that middle. Like, too happy would trigger him one way, too sad would trigger him another way, too much money would trigger him one way, not enough money would trigger him another way.’
“Except the film’s director, Susanne Bier, didn’t like the T-shirt,” Jones relates. “She didn’t get it. Maybe it was the language barrier; probably it was that Del Toro is flat-out hard to get. Either way, she resisted, and the Bull dug in his hooves, back and forth like that, until Bier finally relented, and today we see Jerry jogging in this curious T-shirt, spun out of some L.A. kid’s graffiti and a Vancouver souvenir shop.
“But that wasn’t the end of it. Del Toro’s known as Benny the Troublemaker not for nothing. There are other scenes, several of them, in which only he knows he’s wearing the T-shirt, a silent rebellion. He turned it inside out, wore it under blankets and bathrobes, even sneaked it onto a shelf in the background. For him, SAME SAME had become his mission. ‘Because at that point, I am that guy,’ he says. ‘I become the book.'”
Thanks to The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil for the link to my Things We Lost in the Fire review.
All great actors are at least a little bit eccentric; some a little more so. One reason that Benicio del Toro is such a phenomenal actor is that he’s always considering the eccentric-weirdo whims that flash in his head (call them inspirations, sugges- tions, orders…whatever) and acting accordingly. All hard creative people receive messages from their inner well-of-wisdom all the time. Sometimes the messages are frivolous or unformed, but other times they tell you exactly what to do or say or the move you need to make.
I did some work on a Los Angeles magazine cover story in the summer of ’95 about the “New Noir” movie generation — guys like Bryan Singer, Don Murphy, Roger Avary, Benicio Del Toro and others who’d recently made films that had a film-noirish criminal edge.
Every big name who was featured in the piece met down at Smashbox Studios in Culver City, and the idea (hatched by editor Andy Olstein) was for everyone to hold a snub-nosed .38 or a .45 automatic and aim it at the camera. They were all okay with this except one — Del Toro.
He conveyed his opposition by motioning me over to a corner, or maybe an unoccupied room. (It happened 12 years ago; a couple of details are foggy.) He looked sad, grim. “I don’t want to do this thing with a gun,” he said. He didn’t like weapons, and he hated the cliche of aiming one at the camera. He wasn’t just disagreeing with the concept — the idea of posing with a gat seem to really disturb him deep down.
I could see that the idea was messing with his head, or perhaps with some core belief system…who knew?…so I figured what the hell. One guy not holding a gun wouldn’t be so bad, I reasoned, and it’ll probably add something to the layout. Uniformity is a mark of mediocrity, after all. So I told Del Toro not to sweat it, “this’ll be cool,” and went over to Olstein to break the news.
Gare du Nord
Olstein didn’t want to hear it. Everybody had to point a gun, he said. I should have worked harder to persuade Olstein that arguing with Del Toro was pointless, that it didn’t matter anyway, that it would give a certain distinction for one of the young Hollywood bucks to not hold a gun. But Olstein wouldn’t back off so I pussied out and went back to Del Toro to tell him Olstein was adamant. So was Del Toro. He’d dug in his heels and that was that.
Benicio went before the camera an hour or so later and refused to hold the gun, and Olstein finally caved.
The next time I ran into Del Toro along was at Gare du Nord in Paris on January 1st, 2000. He’d brought in the new millenium with some actress (I forget who) somewhere in the city, and was now waiting for a train to London where he was shooting Guy Ritchie‘s Snatch. We compared notes, talked a bit, shook hands and I walked off to rent a car. Cool coincidence, nothing more.
I’ve run into Benicio a few times since — at press junkets, a few parties, at the Mercer Hotel in Soho last year — but I’ve never quite forgotten that vulnerable but really complex look on his face — pained, worried, intractable — when he said what he said at Smashbox. Serious guy. Meant it. Formidable.
One other thing: Benicio’s junkie character is heavily into Lou Reed in Things We Lost in the Fire, and Reed’s “Sweet Jane” is heard twice in the film — early on and over the closing credits.
“The United States [has] been able to broker [peace agreements] at other times. Obviously we did not do anything in Rwanda, but we played a big part with NATO in ending the Bosnian situation. We used to be able to do that. But in our meetings with all of the heads of government they said to us, “Your policies in Iraq have made it impossible for you now to threaten anything.” We have no moral high ground. We have to look to anyone but ourselves to be able to broker some sort of a peace treaty. That is a very frustrating place to be.
“I was taught [when growing up] to look at the United States not from the inside out but from the outside in. The signs you see [today] are very disheartening. It is probably the worst time ever for us internationally. When you go to Europe, for the most part, they just hate us. Not individually, but they think we are just like these big bullies — and quite honestly, we have acted like that. That has been the most unusual twist in the last few years, having to defend being an American.” — George Clooney speaking to Newsweek‘s Ginanne Brownell in the 2.12.07 issue.
From HE’s 2.25.16 review of the second season of HBO’s Togetherness:
“Never, ever confess to infidelity for any reason at any time…ever. The mere lure of infidelity is obviously a symptom of a relationship in trouble, but it always becomes a live ingredient once it’s acted upon.
“However enticing an exra-maritakl affair might seem, it’s really better to not go there. But if you do, take it fucking seriously. Becasue infidelity always makes things worse for a relationship that isn’t working all that well to begin with.
“Being honest with a wife/husband about cheating is like shoving a knife in their ribs, and if you love your partner/spouse you should never, ever do that. Unless you’re a sadist of some kind. You cheated once or twice? Hold that shit in and keep it there — live with it.
“You’re engaged in a full-on, emotionally entangled affair? Sooner or later your relationship will suffer as a result, but if you’re going to climb up on that high board and do that swan dive, do it like a pro. Either become an East German double agent in the early ’60s or don’t go there at all. Man up and show consideration for the feelings of your significant other by — hello? — protecting them from the hurt. Or, you know, from your selfishness or whatever the hell you want to call it.
“It’s your action. Don’t lay it on them. Keep it inside and grow a tumor if necessary, but bundle it up and keep it in a box. If you’re going to cheat, show a little decency.”
I don’t believe that pro-Gaza, pro-Palestinian protestors nationwide (NYU, Columbia, USC) are primarily driven by anti-Semitism, although anti-Semitism is almost certainly lurking. I think that occupying or otherwise encamped students are angered by the slaughter of Gaza non-combatants (including thousands of kids) by Israeli forces. That’s a humanitarian thing, not a tribal thing. The cops aren’t the bad guys, of course.
This is what college students do…what they did in the ’60s and early ’70s, what they’re doing now, what they’ll be doing 20 or 50 years hence.
NYPD Assistant Chief James Mccarthy and a few officers are chased by protestors after making an arrest at NYU last night.
Mccarthy is seen attempting to get inside the NYU Catholic Center, but couldn't open the door. He eventually finds an unlocked door around the corner.… pic.twitter.com/WVVriOBbMP
— Peter H (@peterhvideo) April 24, 2024
USC COPS VIOLENTLY ARRESTING@palyouthmvmt organizer. Protest turned violent at the University of Southern California (USC) campus. pic.twitter.com/JBGmflYV95
— Channel3 Now (@channel3nownews) April 24, 2024
This is NOT what vile antisemitism looks like. The media is not being fair and even handed about the Columbia campus protests. https://t.co/hyFeyy2LDd
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) April 24, 2024
On 6.12.94, or two months shy of 30 years ago, Orenthal James Simpson murdered two people in Brentwood — his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, whom he nearly decapitated, and Ron Goldman, a “friend” of Brown’s who’d been working as a waiter at the long-since-closed Mezzaluna.
And now O.J. has succumbed to prostate cancer at age 76. I don’t know in what cosmic realm, if any, Nicole and Ron are currently dwelling in, but I can say for sure that O.J., who allowed the Othello complex to totally consume him, is now roasting on a spit in a place of fire and brimstone.
Watch Ezra Edelman‘s O.J.: Made in America….just watch it.
The physical evidence showing that Simpson was guilty is flat-out irrefutable. I’ve linked before to a legendary mid ’90s Spy piece called 1001 Reasons why the OJ Trial is the Most Absurd Event in the History of America“, but here are two relevant portions:
The Evidence:
1. Ron Goldman’s boots were covered with blood, which DNA testing revealed to be a mixture of his and OJ’s.
2. OJ’s blood matches five drops on the walkway outside Nicole’s condo leading away from the crime scene.
3. Blood samples found in the Bronco match Ron and Nicole’s and OJ’s.
4. Drops of OJ’s blood were found in a trail leading up his driveway and into his foyer.
5. The blood on a sock in OJ’s bedroom matched both OJ and Nicole
6. Blood was found in shower and sink of OJ’s bathroom.
7. More than a dozen DNA tests link OJ to the crime scene.
8. Fibers found on the knit cap left at the crime scene and the bloody glove behind OJ’s house were unique to the 1993 and 1994 Ford Bronco. OJ’s was a 1994.
9. Hairs in the cap “exhibit the same microscopic characteristics” as those contained in a reference sample taken from OJ’s head.
10. The large number of hairs inside the cap suggest that OJ had worn it.
11. A hair closely resembling OJ’s was found on Goldman’s shirt.
12. A 12-inch hair with the same characteristics as those of Nicole Simpson was found on the bloody glove discovered at OJ’s estate.
13. Similar dark bluish-brown fibers theorized to have come from the killer’s clothing were found on Goldman’s shirt, OJ’s socks, and the bloody glove.
14. Kato testified that OJ was wearing a dark sweatsuit just a few hours before the murders.
15. Prints left at the murder scene were created by someone wearing expensive, size 12 Bruno Magli shoes. OJ wears size 12 shoes.
Why the Blood Evidence Was Not Tampered With:
1. Splatter on OJ’s socks showed more than two dozen blood drops.
2. None of the splatters soaked through from one side of the socks to the other, suggesting that they were being worn when the blood hit them.
3. The drops containing Nicole’s blood were found around the ankle areas, suggesting it was splashed on the socks at the crime scene.
4. The stains containing OJ’s blood were found higher on the leg and on the toe of one sock, suggesting he stained one sock when he returned home and pulled them off.
5. The stains also included a number of microscopically small flakes and spots too tiny to have been produced by tampering.
6. Witnesses testified they had not originally noticed the stains – not because they weren’t there until the LAPD planted them – but more likely because the socks are black and it is nearly impossible to see the stains with the naked eye.
7. Some DNA samples from the crime scene, glove, socks, and OJ’s estate were degraded while others were easily typed, suggesting they had been subjected to different degrees of exposure to the elements.
8. If the drops had been tampered with in the lab, they would have degraded at the same rate.
9. The blood was not just examined by the LAPD, but also by the Cellmark Diagnostics laboratory in Maryland and the California Department of Justice. They all came to the same conclusions.
10. Criminalist Henry Lee stated that investigators erred by putting Goldman’s boot into a bag while it was still wet, allowing the blood to smear.
11. He did not explain how OJ’s blood landed on Goldman’s boot.
12. An Aris Isotoner exec testified that the gloves at the crime scene are identical to those OJ is wearing in a 1991 photo.
There were only 200-240 of the gloves sold — all of them at a Bloomingdale’s in New York City.
13. Bloomingdale’s records show that Nicole purchased two pairs of gloves in December 1990 as a Christmas present for OJ.
14. A DNA test confirmed that blood found in OJ’s Bronco came from Goldman, whom OJ said he never met.
15. Kato testified that he saw blood in the foyer and driveway of OJ’s house the morning after the murders.
16. Even if blood samples degenerate, they do not change DNA characteristics.
Posted four years ago: Speaking as a life-long cat lover, I can say with authority that some cats are on the locoweed side. Inexplicable behavior. One out of several hundred, I mean.
If none-too-bright cats are unhappy or freaked about some kind of confining situation, for example, they’ll sometimes do anything they can to escape, even at their own peril. Or they’ll take revenge upon the person they think is responsible.
(1) A woman I knew was driving with an anguished male cat on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The weather was cold, a mild snowstorm was blowing, and her car was surrounded by a fair amount of traffic. She was going the usual highway speed. For some reason she leaned over and rolled down the driver-side window, and the cat immediately leapt out.
(2) My ex-wife Maggie and I had a calico cat who was accustomed to outdoor access, and who became extremely upset when we moved into an 8th floor high-rise apartment. The first night we moved in the cat climbed onto a waist-high balcony wall that overlooked the eight-story drop. I put him inside the apartment as this obviously seemed risky. Later that night he got out and jumped. We’d loved him, petted him, fed him, etc. Go figure.
(3) In the late ‘90s I was driving down Franklin Avenue with a cat who couldn’t handle being in moving cars. Jett and Dylan were with me. The cat was howling and freaking, and at one point jumped onto my shoulder and took a serious milkshake dump all over my neck and onto my blue workshirt. I remember the smell filling the car and the kids screaming with laughter.
(4) My sister and I knew that our excitable cat hated water, so we decided to take him with us on a short rowboat trip to the middle of a pond. As a training exercise. We waited until we were 30 or 40 feet out and then let him go. He looked around, assessed the situation, jumped into the pond and swam ashore.
(5) A girlfriend and I were sharing an apartment on Boston’s Park Drive. Her male cat, Tom, was bunking with us. I love cats but Tom was extremely hostile to me — the only cat I’ve run into who was this negative. One night we came back from a restaurant and found that Tom had peed on my sleeping pillow on our conjugal bed. That was it. Over the next day or two we found someone who was willing to take him.
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