One of the hottest sequences I’ve seen in ages. Especially when the older woman says “and then you take him into the lavatory and have sex” and the young girl drops her gaze, bashfully or somewhat ashamedly. And then the cutaway as she enters the train compartment. This is pervy but good. Who’s the teenager?
Post-Traumatic
I always file less whenever I have an event to attend. (Naturally.) When I have two events within six or seven daylight hours I’m barely able to post more than a story or two. Yesterday was the Gandolfini funeral plus a press conference at the Crosby Street Hotel for The Way Way Back. Plus there was such an avalanche of bile and toxicity in response to the Gandolfini thing that I felt as if I’d been infected by a flu virus of some kind.
The poison that coarses through men’s souls! All I did was soberly and respectfully attend the funeral of an actor whose performances I worshipped. My hands were clasped and I said my amens and I took Holy Communion and even gave a hug to two people sitting nearby, but because I had the temerity to use the term “funeral crasher” and talk about Altoid mints I was all but stoned to death. I love you too, guys. Fucking piranhas.
I don’t give a shit if the public was invited. I wrote and asked the right people about attending and they didn’t fill me in. All I know is that there was a platoon of black-clad women checking names at the door when I came in, asking for spellings and whatnot. And then I faced another group of women wanting to know what my deal was. Okay, so as a result of my crashing I was seated farther forward than the hoi polloi and I didn’t have to wait as long to go inside. You think Paulie Walnuts would have given a shit one way or the other?
This morning I attended a memorial service for the great Bert Stern, and during the service I behaved in exactly the same way as I did yesterday at the Gandolfini thing. I’m not a friend of the family so I wasn’t “invited” per se, but it too was open to the public and I’m a rapt admirer of Bert Stern: Original Madman and so I felt compelled to drop by.
Not So Fast on Pacific Rim Tracking
We’ve all been reading about how Guillermo del Toro‘s Pacific Rim (Warner Bros., 7.12) isn’t tracking as well as Grown-Ups 2 and yaddah-yah. Well, a highly-positioned industry figure with an interest in Pacific Rim‘s fate is disputing, to wit:
“These tracking reports are exaggerated, snarky and premature,” he wrote. “We started our campaign last week. We had focused on the core group, which is the most vital group for this film. Since then and as of today’s tracking we are steadily rising in a significant way. We are getting on track. The sensationalist headlines about Grown-Ups 2 are just that. Even a slight contextualizing shows that any sequel or reboot has much bigger built-in awareness than a new property with no stars. The numbers they were quoting were the early numbers from last week. There is also a fundamental truism in the summer, which is that your tracking always pops much later in the campaign.”
Hemsworth as Snowden
Sometime earlier today (perhaps as I as attending the James Gandolfini funeral?), Salt and Clear and Present Danger director Phillip Noyce told NBC News that (a) Edward Snowden is a great subject for “a suspenseful film with some comedic elements”, (b) that Noyce would love to make such a film, and (c) that Liam Hemsworth is an ideal choice to play Snowden.
“This is a movie that’s playing out before our eyes, even though we can’t see anything,” Noyce said. “We can’t see the hero or the villain — the central character. Like Salt, it’s a story where you’re not quite certain if you’re dealing with a heroine or a villain. And we may not be certain until the end of the movie or even beyond that. That’s a beautiful duality to deal with when you’re making a story or watching a movie. You can speculate he’s motivated by complete unselfish motives through belief in protecting worldwide public interests. Or you can speculate he was himself a victim of knowing that notoriety might bring him immortality.”
Cosmic Intervention
I got hated on big-time for tweeting about having crashed James Gandolfini‘s funeral this morning at Manhattan’s St. John The Divine. Yes, I flippantly used the term “funeral crasher!” because that’s what I was. But it’s the singer, not the song. The haters ignored the fact that I (a) asked for God’s forgiveness in having crashed, (b) ascribed my crashing success to the intervention of angels, and (c) said that I crashed with reverence and respect for James, David Chase and all the “made” Sopranos guys. The rush-to-judgment pissheads simply weren’t listening. They never do. They’re scolds…shrill finger-wagging scolds going “tut-tut!” and “no, no, no!”
Stern Is Gone
Famed fashion and portrait photographer Bert Stern, 83, died this morning at his home in New York City. His passing was announced by his wife, filmmaker Shannah Laumeister (Bert Stern: Original Madman), whom Stern married in 2009. I’m a huge fan of this doc — I went apeshit for it last March and April. A brilliant, zeitgeist-defining photographer during his late ’50s to mid ’70s heyday, Stern had been suffering from unspecified old-age maladies and had recently been treated at Manhattan’s Beth Israel hospital.
Bert Stern (1929 — 2013)
Judge Hardy Disapproves
A recently posted Vanity Fair piece containing choice portions of an extended 1988 Ava Gardner interview given to biographer Peter Evans includes the following about Mickey Rooney, Gardner’s first husband: “I still didn’t know that he was the biggest wolf on the lot,” Gardner says. “He was catnip to the ladies. He knew it, too. The little sod was not above admiring himself in the mirror. All five foot two of him! He probably banged most of the starlets who appeared in his Andy Hardy films, Lana Turner among them. She called him Andy Hard-on. Can we say that…Andy Hard-on?”
“He wasn’t what I’d call a handsome may-an, and his shortness surprised me, but there was definitely something appealing about him. He had thick, red-blond wavy hair, crinkly Irish green eyes, and a grin that was…well, it definitely wasn’t innocent, honey, I can tell you that!”
Jewish Solidarity
15 days after Tablet‘s David Mikics previewed Ben Urwand‘s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, about collaboration between the big studios and the Nazi regime during the 1930s, N.Y. Times reporter Jennifer Schuessler has reviewed the basics and spoken to Urwand. (The book isn’t out yet.)
“What [Hollywood] wanted was access to German audiences,” the Tablet piece reads. “What Hitler wanted was the ability to shape the content of Hollywood movies — and he got it.”
Little Bears
As a fan of Jeff Garlin‘s I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With and given the smart-sounding dialogue in the trailer, I’m definitely into seeing Dealin’ With Idiots (IFC Films, 7.12, VOD and iTunes). Official obit: “Faced with the absurd competitiveness surrounding his son’s youth league baseball team, comedian Max Morris (Garlin) acquaints himself with the parents and coaches of the team (Gina Gershon, Fred Willard, Bob Odenkirk, JB Smoove, Richard Kind, Kerri Kenny-Silver) — not just to help his kid but to find material for his next film.
Bitch-Ho Slapdown
A female fight broke out during the closing minutes of last night’s Lincoln Square promotional screening of White House Down. Screaming, slapping, wailing, shouting. Crazy violence on the screen and crazy violence in the seats. It was absolutely fantastic — almost like that Radio City Music Hall scene in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Saboteur in which a shooting scene on the big screen is mirrored by real-life gunplay between the cops and Norman Lloyd‘s “Frye.”
It happened between (a) two 20something African-American chicks (I’m using that term with air quotes) who were sitting directly in front of me and (b) another pair in the row in front of them and off to the center — a spirited X-factor white girl and her African-American friend.
Definitely Genre Satire; Almost Flat-Out Comedy
In his Hollywood Reporter review of Roland Emmerich‘s White House Down (Sony, 6.28), David Rooney says that a Keystone Cops car-chase sequence in which the presidential limo and some bad guy pursuers go tear-assing around the White House south lawn with chunks of turf flying high…Rooney says this scene is “played partly for laughs.” The word “partly” tells me all I need to know about Rooney’s understanding of this self-mocking action slapstick satire. On one level he seems to get WHD but on another level he doesn’t. Or at least, not in the way the crowd did last night at an AMC Lincoln Square promotional screening (which culminated with a real-life slapdown brawl between four 20something women who’d been mouthing off at each other). WHD isn’t entirely played for laughs, but the tonal overlap between it and the Marx Brothers‘ Duck Soup is not, in my view, incidental or unintended.
