The legendary Lou Reed, the unaffected king of solid, straightforward, basic-style rock ‘n’ roll poetry — that deep, bullshit-free voice plus bare-boned New York street lyrics with a good old twangy guitar, bass and drums — and one of the most important rock music influencers of all time….Lou Reed is dead? He was only 71, for Chrissake…oh, I see…”complications due to a liver transplant”…uh-huh…a rock ‘n’ roll pay-the-piper death. But what matters at the end of the road is quality, not quantity…right? Reed’s contributions to the Velvet Underground banana album plus Transformer alone were enough to cement his reputation as a seminal ’60s and ’70s legend. Being something of a middle-of-the-roader (musically, I mean) I was no fan of Metal Machine Music or The Bells or even Berlin for that matter, but Reed was “the guy” to me…the Real McCoy of flinty, tough-as-nails, occasionally flamboyant but at the same time plain-as-can-be rock ‘n’ roll authority. I turned to his cuts over and over and over. “I Love You Suzanne” is one of the great lightweight rock anthems of all time. The kids and I used to sing along to New York (particularly “Dirty Boulevard”) and Magic and Loss in the ’90s. But quantity counted also as Reed stuck to it for a much longer and arguably more impassioned period than Elvis Presley (whose peak influence period lasted from ’55 to ’58) or the Beatles (’63 to ’70) — he kept writing and composing and strumming away for 45 years, and mattered a great deal for at least 30 if not 35 of those. He went away from time to time but never retired, never recycled…well, he “recycled” but he never stopped looking for the next thing. I love that he didn’t smile very much. I can imitate Reed singing “Venus in Furs” really well.

Read more

I’ve long advocated the idea of parents taking their tweener kids to films that portray real history and stark present-day realities. Once in a blue moon a Hollywood film portrays violence as the truly horrid thing it is — I would take my ten year-old to that film in a New York minute. 20 years ago I wrote a piece for a parenting magazine that urged parents to take their younger kids to Schindler’s List. If it upsets their tender sensibilities to see what it was like to suffer and die in a Nazi concentration camp, good — maybe it’ll teach them something. I would also take my ten-year-old to see 12 Years A Slave, no hesitation. I would tell him or her “put your shoes on…you’re seeing this movie.”

I suspect that most parents don’t see it this way. My two sons are grown, but having been in the trenches in the ’90s and early aughts my impression is that most parents want to protect their kids from the harsh realities of life and raise them inside a kind of ultra-sensitive alpha bubble. One reflection of this is the way Screen It, a movie-screening website for parents, is noncommittal about 12 Years A Slave. It doesn’t ask if kids should see it because of the moral lessons it contains, or whether they should be taken to see it by their parents. It asks if kids will “want” to see it, and it answers as follows: “If they’re interested in the subject matter and/or are fans of anyone in the cast, they might. Otherwise, it doesn’t seem too likely.” That’s it?

Read more

Last night’s SNL Wes Anderson spoof [previous post] reminded me that it’s been almost exactly 20 years since I tapped out the very first Wes Anderson-and-Owen Wilson interview, which came out of a phoner that happened a while before this 11.7 L.A. Times Calendar piece was seen. The wheels of newspaper journalism turned fairly slowly back then. It could take as long as two or three weeks for a 750-word article to happen — initial pitch, library research, interviewing, writing the piece, editing, an occasional re-write and re-edit and finally the physical publishing. And then you’d buy a few copies and cut out the article with scissors, and then make copies at Kinkos. The process is a teeny bit faster these days.

Published on 11.7.93 in L.A. Times Sunday Calendar

Read more

Bull’s eye. Bonus points to Edward Norton for capturing Owen Wilson‘s voice just so. Best bit: Reactions from N.Y. Times critic (“You had me at ‘Wes Anderson'”) and Fangoria (“Da fuh?”).

Richard Gere is obviously trying to get Andy Garcia‘s goat, but his analysis about how busy yuppie couples sometimes lose the spontaneous sensual element is spot-on. I was married when Internal Affairs came out in ’90. The recently released Bluray, which I bought this evening, sounds good but doesn’t look that exceptional. Better than a decently mastered DVD, but not that much better.

It’s obvious that Robert Redford‘s role in this possibly tolerable Marvel film allows him to play it straight and modest and sensible and so on. He isn’t wearing spandex or a helmet or throwing lightning bolts out of his fingers. So all indications are that Captain America: Winter Solder is in no way, shape or form “Redford’s Norbit.” In a Best-Actor-race context, I mean.

I honestly feel that a reality series about Hollywood’s award-season blogger crowd — Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone (the feminist-compassionate earth mama), Hollywood Reporter columnist/analyst Scott Feinberg (the tough-talking whippersnapper), Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil (the shoot-from-the-hip statistician), MCN’s David Poland (the chuckling, lecturing, eyebrow-raising know-it-all), Deadline‘s Pete Hammond (the tireless tapdancing political gadfly who files at 2 am), Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson (the seasoned, lightly-treading diplomat), Hitfix‘s Kris Tapley (the solemn and judgmental young guy who wants to bail on this racket in order to write screenplays), Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan (the soft-spoken droll guy) and myself (the Last Honest Cowboy Hat — the most poetically-inclined, confessional-minded and intuitive, non-alcoholic poet-samurai truth-teller of them all) — would make for excellent viewing. I would watch it in a heartbeat. Seriously — are you going to tell me that other reality series (i.e., Fucked-Up, Soul-Poisoned Housewives of Suburban New Jersey) would be even half as interesting as a bunch of clever, eager-beaver neurotics (okay, semi-neurotics) hustling around Hollywood in their alligator shoes? The difference is that it would be entirely composed of edits from Google Glass captures. Everyone would have to wear these glasses 18/7. No video crews following everyone around…that’s old hat.

Late this morning Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I again discussed whether or not 12 years A Slave is an all-but-inevitable Best Picture winner due to the “pivotal moment in history” factor. We also kicked around The Counselor and the Nikki Finke-at-odds-with-Deadline management thing. Again, the mp3.

Now that Blue Is The Warmest Color has been seen by the Friday night crowd, is it “the first great love story of the 21st Century” or what? And are certain Oscar bloggers earning their hottest-place-in-hell points for dismissing Adele Exarchpoulos‘ world-class performance as a marginal also-ran? N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith calls it “vulnerable, eager, curious, innocent and thirsty for experience…the opposite of Cate Blanchett’s mannered, tic-laden, strenuously actress-y performance in Blue Jasmine and, as such, it’s easily the most haunting work I’ve seen by an actress this year.”

“I saw The Counselor at a theater in Silver Spring, Maryland,” writes Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino. “The crowd was with the movie for most of the duration. I could tell they were genuinely wondering what would happen next and the soon-to-be infamous car scene with Cameron Diaz generated real laughs. But the film’s momentum died when it became crystal clear that a certain female character was not going to make it out alive. It reminded me of the reaction to Drive when I saw that with a paying audience. The crowd was with it right up to the point when Ryan Gosling punches Christina Hendricks.

“The lesson here is simple: women are driving the box office in a considerable way and they don’t want to see bad things happening to female characters. They are sick of the woman-as-victim, damsel-in-distress idea. They want to watch movies about strong women who overcome obstacles, and Hollywood would be wise to give them more of that instead of relying on tired story arcs that treat women as disposable secondary characters.”

Read more

“I’m glad yesterday’s Counselor post [i.e., “A Bleak, Indelible Beauty“] at the N.Y. Times gave you good copy,” F.X. Feeney wrote this morning. “I’m also especially delighted by the surging response by the commentators. ‘Merton’ catches me dead to rights about dismissing a whole genre. I didn’t mean to do that — I was just gnashing my teeth in a fit of lost temper over the way people are reacting to the uncompromising brilliance of The Counselor.

“One of the responders objected to the scene of Malkina (Cameron Diaz) in the Catholic confessional, saying it had no point. Actually, the sceene has a profound one [that is] touched upon in a throwaway line: “I never knew my parents. They were thrown out of a helicopter into the Atlantic Ocean when I was three.” There’s a lot of tragic history under that line. Because she is Argentine, it means her parents were desaparecidos (‘disappeared ones’) killed by the Junta in the 1970s, as part of their holocaust against their own citizens” (i.e., Argentine leftists). “Malkina is thus a literal orphan of history. As she’s not been allowed any ordinary connection to humanity, she has renounced being human (or tells herself she has) and elected to model herself after her beloved Cheetahs. ‘To see a quarry killed with elegance is very moving to me,’ as she says later. ‘It always was.’ In the deepest sense, she was killed with her parents.”