Last night’s Black List reading of Stepheny Folsom‘s 1969: A Space Odyssey, Or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon was somewhere between okay and underwhelming. It was great to visit the Los Angeles theatre (which was built in 1931 or thereabouts) but the sound was imprecise and echo-y and ricocheting all over the large auditorium, and so I really couldn’t hear a good portion of the dialogue.

Plus the show began 45 minutes late, which is pretty close to unforgivable in my book unless you offer an apology once the show finally starts. (Nobody did.)

As for the script itself…well, I can only say that the reading didn’t feel like enough. It’s an amusingly crafted piece about a con job that never quite comes off, and about the natural disharmony between a bunch of Washington tap-dancers and flim-flammers and a genuine artist with a prickly personality.

All I got from it was a rat-a-tat-tat feeling. The applause was polite and perfunctory and that’s all. Want my advice? Start the fucking show promptly next time.

1969 is a better script than Quentin Tarantino‘s Hateful 8, a Petrified Forest-like ensemble piece which had a live reading at the Ace Theatre a while back. The reading of Hateful 8 was nonetheless a more engaging “show” than the Kubrick thing. More personality and pizazz, etc.

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The late Casey Kasem, 82 when he passed yesterday, was a successful, well-liked Hollywood “personality” who led a high-on-the-hog life within the Beverly Hills/Bel Air realm. He was a kind of upscale DJ, actor/voice actor and radio personality who coasted on the froth. “Best known for being the host of the music radio programs American Top 40, American Top 20 and American Top 10 from 1970 until his retirement in 2009, and for providing the voice of Norville ‘Shaggy’ Rogers in the Scooby-Doo franchise from 1969 to 1997, and again from 2002 until 2009.” Due respect and condolences to fans, family and friends. Honestly? I never gave Kasem more than a moment’s thought until today. By all accounts he led a full, robust life, but he never did anything that even slightly impacted mine. And that’s fine.

In a certain way Kim Novak had it pretty rough in Hollywood during her ’50s heyday. Constantly pedastaled and patronized. Praised for her looks and given little credit for her acting skills, which were nothing to sniff at in Joshua Logan‘s Picnic and Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo. In other ways she had it great, of course, but by today’s standards she was often dealing with insults. People respected her for being a gainfully employed breathy sexpot, but what’s that? Consider the comments on the What’s My Line? clip after the jump.

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Mr. Ford is alluding to his recent on-set ankle fracture. He’s also quoting Han Solo’s famous boast. The Kessel Run “was an 18-parsec route used by smugglers to move glitterstim spice from Kessel to an area south of the Si’Klaata Cluster without getting caught by the Imperial ships that were guarding the movement of spice from Kessel’s mines,” it says here. Except a parsec is a unit of distance and not time so I still don’t get it.

Last November I bought the Eureka Entertainment/Masters of Cinema Bluray of Howard Hawks‘ Red River (’48). I mostly hated it — at best it looked unexceptional and too much of it was covered in Egyptian mosquito grain. Three days ago I bought Criterion’s Red River Bluray. I naturally expected it to be just as grainy as the Masters of Cinema version…how could it not be? No other video distributor has worn the grain badge more proudly or persistently than Criterion. Their devotion to grain structure (a high-falutin’ term that basically means “presence of digital mosquitoes”) has caused me much anguish over the years. Anyway, I popped in the Criterion Red River and…astonishing. It has next to no bothersome grain, and the images seem deeper, sharper, cleaner. By my sights it’s certainly more handsomely realized than the Masters of Cinema version. The details are delightful, magnificent. I’m genuinely surprised. Hats off to the Criterion team. Oh, and I didn’t like (and will never again watch) the somewhat shorter version which Walter Brennan narrates. I don’t care if Hawks preferred this version. I know what’s best.

In a 6.12 interview with Toronto Star critic Peter Howell, Clint Eastwood admits to being “amused that one of his more recent movies, Gran Torino, has spawned a catch praise that’s almost as popular as Dirty Harry’s ‘Go ahead, make my day!’ line from Sudden Impact. The line is ‘Get off my lawn!,’ barked by Eastwood’s grizzled Korean War vet Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino. “Yeah, I can’t control all that,” Eastwood says. “If it has that kind of impression, then it’s a compliment — a left-handed one, at least.”

About ten years ago a prominent director-actor told me that Eastwood was the source of another famous line — “Show me a beautiful woman and I’ll show you a guy who’s tired of fucking her.” Maybe not the original source but he said he’d heard it from Eastwood (or perhaps had been told Eastwood had said it) back in the ’70s or ’80s. I naturally believed him but now I’m thinking that line has probably been attributed all over the place so who knows?

In the following order, the Best 2014 Films That I’ve Seen Thus Far (regardless of forthcoming or undetermined release dates for those seen at Sundance, Berlin and Cannes) are as follows:

1. Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan (hands down the best film I saw in Cannes and an almost certain contender for the 2014 Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar); 2. Steven Knight‘s Locke; 3. Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash (Sundance); 4. Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel; 5. Yann Demange‘s ’71 (Berlinale); 6. Paweł Pawlikowski‘s Ida (released in early May, Telluride/Toronto 2013); 7. Damian Szifron‘s Wild Tales (Cannes); 8. Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher (Cannes); 9. Doug Liman‘s Edge of Tomorrow; 10. Craig Johnson‘s The Skeleton Twins (Sundance); 11. Anthony and Joe Russo‘s Captain America: The Winter Soldier; 12. Jim Jarmusch‘s Only Lovers Left Alive; 13. Steve James‘ Life Itself; 14. Darren Aronfosky‘s Noah; 15. Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood; (15) Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies; (16) Hany Abu-Assad‘s Omar; (17) Chiemi Karasawa‘s Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me; (18) John Turturro‘s Fading Gigolo; (19) Charlie McDowell‘s The One I Love (Sundance), (20) John Ridley‘s Jimi — All Is By My Side (Toronto 2013/LAFF), (21) Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days In Vietnam, and (22) Chapman and Maclain Way‘s The Battered Bastards of Baseball (Sundance — Netflix in July).

Anecdotal but noteworthy plot wrinkle: The Equalizer works the aisles at Home Depot, or a store that looks an awful lot like one. Which I can roll with. But once you succumb to semi-banal employment situations, how far are you prepared to go? How would it be if The Equalizer worked at a Rite-Aid? What if he was a freelance massage therapist? What if he was a flight attendant? McDonalds? Studly, panther-like, ex-commando Creasy types aren’t supposed to work jobby-type jobs. They’re supposed to be operators who’ve figured out enough angles so they don’t have to punch a clock…right?

On our last day in Venice (Tuesday, 6.3) my son Dylan and I spotted one of those massively grotesque Love Boat tourist ships from a distance of a quarter-mile or so. It was gliding by the south side of the Dorsoduro district on its way out to the Adriatic. These ships are sickening. The people who travel around on them are the same fraidy cats who vacation in Las Vegas or Cancun or in Club Med spots. Pod people who are terrified of coping with any aspect of any environment that isn’t totally Americanized or exuding a plastic corporate vibe.

Here’s the release: “In celebration of the 6.17 Blu-ray and DVD release of
Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel, on Saturday, 6.14 a version of the illustrious European hotel constructed entirely of Lego bricks wil be unveiled at the Grove. Ryan Ziegelbauer and his team of eight model builders — all die-hard Anderson fans — spent 575 hours building and designing the replica of the exquisite hotel. To construct the model, more than 50,000 certified Lego bricks from collectors and wholesalers were sourced from Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Germany, Italy and 14 different states in the U.S. The final model will weigh approximately 150 pounds and stand 7 feet tall and 6.5 feet wide. The model will be on display for two days at The Grove — Saturday, 6.14 and Sunday, 6.15 — for fans to enjoy.

I felt profoundly moved and even close to choking up a couple of times while watching Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam yesterday at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The waging of the Vietnam War by U.S forces was one of the most tragic and devastating miscalculations of the 20th Century, but what happened in Saigon during the last few days and particularly the last few hours of the war on 4.30.75 wasn’t about policy. For some Saigon-based Americans it was simply about taking care of friends and saving as many lives as possible. It was about good people bravely risking the possibility of career suicide by acknowledging a basic duty to stand by their Vietnamese friends and loved ones (even if these natives were on the “wrong” or corrupted side of that conflict) and do the right moral thing.

Last Days in Vietnam director Rory Kennedy during post-screening q & a.

Kennedy’s incisive, well-sculpted (if not entirely comprehensive) 98-minute doc is basically about how a relative handful of Americans stationed in Saigon — among them former Army Captain Stuart Herrington, ex-State Department official Joseph McBride and former Pentagon official Richard Armitage — did the stand-up, compassionate thing in the face of non-decisive orders and guidelines from superiors (particularly U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Graham Martin) who wouldn’t face up to the fact that the North Vietnamese had taken most of South Vietnam by mid-April and would inevitably conquer Saigon.

It was obvious as hell to almost anyone with eyes and ears, and yet Martin and other officials, afraid of triggering widespread panic, wouldn’t approve contingency plans for evacuation until it was way, way too late. So the above-named humanitarians and their brethren decided it was “easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask permission” and did what they could — covertly, surreptitiously, any which way — to save as many South Vietnamese as they could.

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