Part one of Lars von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac is playing theatrically and has been VOD-accessible for a while now. Part two is also viewable at home and opens theatrically on 4.4. A fair portion of the HE community has presumably taken the plunge. Reactions would be appreciated. I called the first installment “an intelligent, jaggedly assembled, dispassionate wank [making] faintly satiric philosophical points…an assortment of explicit sex depictions are made to seem quite clinical and occasionally tedious, and vaguely repellent from an emotional/spiritual standpoint.” I described the second installment as “a downward spiral in the fate of Charlotte Gainsbourgh‘s Joe…her narrative goes in a darker and colder direction with less and less oxygen…where Volume One used dry satire to mitigate a somewhat arid and clinical tone, Volume Two is a cinematic equivalent of a ‘cold spot’ in a haunted house.”

I suddenly decided earlier today to attend Cinemacon in Las Vegas. I want to catch Tuesday’s screenings of Neighbors and Draft Day and Wednesday morning’s showing of Million Dollar Arm plus a Chris Nolan-Todd McCarthy q & a that won’t include any footage of Interstellar. But I can’t see dropping $750 bucks on this ($425 for RT Southwest flight from Burbank, $150 for a nearby budget hotel room, $150 or more for cabs, food and incidentals) so I’m going to risk my life by driving there and back in the span of 36 hours. That’ll just cost me gas plus $40 for Motel Eight plus incidentals — maybe $250 all in.

Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah is set in ancient times but the clothing (designed by Michael Wilkinson) is medieval — close to the sartorial styles worn in Ridley Scott‘s Robin Hood (’10) and Kevin Reynolds‘ Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (’91). The material looks superficially rugged (i.e., leather, unbrushed suede, burlap) but the duds have clearly been designed and tailored with great professional care. It strains credulity that pre-historical characters, living in scrubby, hand-to-mouth, close-to-caveman-level conditions, would be wearing cool-looking threads that would probably fly off the racks if they were offered in designer shops in downtown Manhattan. But Hollywood Biblical epics have always dressed their characters in fine-looking apparel.

Wells to Aronofsky, sent this morning after seeing Noah last night: What a myth! What a severe, surreal, eye-filling, Old Testament buzzard of a 21st Century Bible movie, and with rock giants yet! Defenders and ark-construction helpers who stand 20 feet tall and speak with the weathered, synthesized voices of Nick Nolte and Frank Langella but who sound to me like Optimus Prime. Noah isn’t perfect but it’s certainly a mad, imaginative leap off the high-dive board. Some of the scenes are mind-blowing, shattering. (Especially those creepy depictions of Noah’s underwater hallucinations and that Terrence Malick-like story-of-creation sequence.) It’s not soothing, not comforting, not conventional — it’s really and truly out there on its own planet.

It’s a dead-serious fantasia, Noah is. And in no way does it resemble anything more or less than a fevered hallucination in a certain filmmaker’s head.

Deranged as it is, the first three-quarters of Noah exudes a spiritual clarity of mind and absolute certainty of righteousness that few have but many seek. The problem is that this righteous clarity is borderline psychotic. Most of Noah is about harsh judgment and penalties and zero tolerance for even the slightest divergence from the path, and the very last portion is about mercy (Russell Crowe gets to re-do that John Wayne moment in The Searchers when he finally catches up with Natalie Wood) and charity and hope.

The latest word is that several Christian leaders and Catholic audiences in Mexico are cool with Noah, and that haters like Glenn Beck are off on their own beam.

Rightwing Christian wackos are apparently objecting to the ecological metaphors about tending the garden and whatnot. Conservatives have always felt it’s their right to have absolute dominion over the earth, and in today’s context that means an absolute right to despoil all they want so they can swagger around and live in McMansion vacation homes in Wyoming or Idaho so I’m not surprised this aspect bothers them. Who are we to obey the earth? The earth obeys us, and we can burn fossil fuels any time we feel like it. We have our lifestyles to enhance!

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I’ve just hung two framed Czech movie posters from the ’70s (bought last February) in my living room. (Notice the condition of Faye Dunaway‘s left eye in the top image.) The natively-created posters were bought in a street-level shop inside Prague’s Kino Svetozor, a film lover’s theatre located in the cellar of an office building just off Wenceslas Square. Two theatres plus a nice wifi cafe downstairs. The vibe is perfect.

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The admired James Rebhorn has passed at the relatively young age of 65, taken out by melanoma. Hugs and condolences to family, friends, fans. Rebhorn’s most noteworthy 21st Century gig was playing the father of Claire Danes‘ Carrie Mathison on Homeland. But for me and, I suspect, a great many others his biggest moment was playing that boys’ school dean — an officious, stick-in-the-mud prig — during that climactic scene in Scent of a Woman (’92) in which Redhorn got his ass handed to him by Al Pacino. This is what it’s often like when you’re a skilled and trusted character actor — the most legendary scene in your career is owned by someone else, and almost everyone who sees this scene comes away with a sneaking suspicion that you just might be an asshole off-screen.

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As I was driving down Olympic Boulevard late yesterday morning, I began to (a) feel envious of all the people who were up to their usual Saturday activities, wearing their workout duds and sipping lattes and strolling in the sunshine and preparing to go hiking or…whatever, roaming the aisles of Home Depot in search of the right floor tiles and (b) I began to resent my daily Hollywood Elsewhere burden (five or six stories). Every few months I just can’t man up and bang it out, and yesterday was one of them. (I take off about two days per year.) Plus I was suddenly seized by the idea of doing a spring cleaning and throwing out piles and piles of crap. So I took a long afternoon break and did that. And then I took a nice bike ride and ate a kale salad and went to a 7:30 pm Noah screening at Paramount Studios. And then I ended the day at Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe, the simple interior of which hasn’t changed since the 1960s. The waiters are just as cool also. The only thing that’s changed is the clientele, which is bit more slovenly and downmarket today (but that’s true of everything and everywhere).

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I wrote the following this morning to the Paleyfest publicists, with whom I corresponded yesterday about attending last night’s Mad Men event at Hollywood’s Dolby theatre:

“Hi, guys. I took your advice and shelled out $42 for a seat at last night’s Paleyfest/Mad Men thing at the Dolby. Last year at this time (actually around April 1, 2013) I was given the two-hour season opener for Mad Men‘s season #6, and so I naturally assumed — silly me! — that episode #1 of the final season would be screened last night before the q & a with the Mad Men cast. Why haul yourself all the way down to the tourist inferno of Hollywood Blvd. and pay good money to see a Mad Men episode that aired last summer, right? Along with the q & a, I mean.

“To repeat, last year around this time the first episode (two hours long) of Mad Men‘s sixth season was handed out to press so there was no rational basis, in my mind, for last night’s event to not follow suit. How could they be intending to show anything but the opening episode of season #7? If I was series creator Matthew Weiner, who delivered some opening remarks last night, I would never Read more

I’ve always believed that James Horner‘s score for Ron Howard‘s A Beautiful Mind is one of the main reasons Academy members liked the film so much. (And possibly why others hated it.). The music is lulling and layered and curiously emotional at times. The track that did it, the one that played when the film won Best Picture, Best Director (Ron Howard), Best Adapted Screenplay (Akiva Goldsman) and Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Connelly) at the 2002 Oscars, is “A Kaleidoscope of Mathematics.” Horner’s score didn’t win an Oscar or a Golden Globe, although it was nominated for both. The other thing that led to the wins is the pen scene.

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There’s a Paleyfest screening of the first episode of the final Mad Men season. Screening at 7pm, q & a with the principal cast (Jon Hamm, January Jones, Vincent Kartheiser, Elisabeth Moss, Christina Hendricks, Robert Morse, Jessica Paré, John Slattery, Kiernan Shipka) at 8 pm. I begged yesterday afternoon for a press seat but the Lippin Group publicist said nope because I needed to have applied for Paleyfest credentials weeks ago. She said she’ll try to find me one but to be on the safe side I might want to pay $42.00 for a bleacher seat. So like a total chump, I just did that. The AMC series kicks off on April 13th.

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