I Don’t Know About This

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Terry: I don’t know, Charlie. I mean I’m tellin’ ya, I don’t know. This is what I wanted to talk to you about. Charlie: Listen, Terry, you know what this movie costs? You know how many millions are at stake here? You think they’re gonna risk even a small piece of this over one rubber-lipped…what the hell? Terry: I’m tellin’ ya I haven’t made up my mind yet. Charlie: Well, make up your mind before we get to 437 River Street!

Kick In The Pants

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Respected and renowned for his whispery mood-trip films and for indulging in meditative reveries to a point that these reveries become the whole effing movie, Terrence Malick seemingly lives in a state of coddled denial. His producers, Sarah Green and Nicolas Gonda, apparently see to that. He lives to “paint” and dither and toss lettuce leaves in the air. Indulged and allowed to operate within his own cloistered realm, Malick doesn’t just take eons to edit his films — he apparently decides not to make films that he intended to make if the elements don’t feel right or…you know, if they haven’t come together in his head or if he needs to shoot a bit more or whatever.

This is indicated by a 7.21 New York Post story by Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein that says Seven Seas Partnership, a London-based company, is suing Malick for the $3.3 million it provided to fund Malick’s Voyage of Time, which was supposed to be some kind of trippy, loose-shoe cosmic IMAX trilogy that would have amounted to two (2) 45-minute IMAX films plus a feature. Who would want to watch that much footage or that many films about the origins of earthly creation or whatever the fuck by way of Malick’s fingerpaint mise en scene?

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Few and Far Between

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The humid air and briney aroma of Beach Haven took me right back to my first visit here, with my parents and cousins and grandparents when I was 9 or 10 years old. There may be other beachy places with a similar invigorating flavor (Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket) but I’ve got it in my head that Beach Haven owns it. Last night there was a flashing lightning storm over the bay. Lightning bolts and warm gusty winds and whitecaps on the water. We sat on a wooden pier on the bay and just waited for words that might improve on the silence. They never came.

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Castles, Comic Books, Cars

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“Oh my god. I just can’t keep up with that stuff. The internet has developed this thing about me, and I’m not even a computer guy, you know? I don’t know why it is happening. I’m trying not to…lemme say this: I’m now of the mindset that, when in Rome, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” — Nicolas Cage to Emma Brockes in a 7.19 Guardian piece titled “People Think I’m Not In On The Joke.”

And yet Cage also says the following: “There is a misperception, if you will, in critical response or even in Hollywood, that I can only do exaggerated characters. Or what they would call over-the-top performances. Well, this is completely false. Another misconception about me is that I just do movies for paychecks. For a while there, it was the three Cs — castles, comic books and cars. I just can’t get that stuff off of me.”

Jean Luc Godard’s Contempt

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If I was a big-studio production chief whose survival depended on greenlighting as many dumb-ass, CG-driven superhero-franchise-comicbook bullshit jizz-whiz movies (Batman Meets Superman, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Edge of Tomorrow, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor 2, Captain America 2, Suck My Dick 3) as possible, I would need to get a colonic every weekend just to get rid of the poisons in my system. To say I would be seething with contempt for the tens of millions of fanboys who pay for my lifestyle…that would be putting it mildly. Ahab’s last words would have nothing on me. On the other hand I would donate generously to liberal causes, and I would drive a hybrid and worship my children and eat as healthily as possible.

It Happened One Night

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I’ve crashed contentedly at Airbnb apartments in New York, Paris, San Francisco and Prague. (And I almost snagged an Airbnb Telluride pad a few weeks ago.) Totally down with it. Hotels and motels can go suck it. Ditto Craigslist, which used to be my #1 go-to for temporary sublets. So I was naturally interested in this interview piece with Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky by writes N.Y. Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman.

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You’re Bringing Me Down

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“This is not a psychotic episode. This is a cleansing moment of clarity. I’m imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It’s a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing, as if suddenly I’d been plugged into some great electromagnetic field. I feel connected to all living things. To flowers, birds…all the animals of the world. And even to some great, unseen, living force. What I think the Hindus call prana. But it’s not a breakdown. I’ve never felt more orderly in my life. It is a shattering and beautiful sensation. It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and…of such loveliness.”