People writing pitch and request letters need to banish the word “wanted” and the couplet “would like” from their vocabularies. “I would like to tell you about,” etc. “I wanted to share with you,” etc. Oh, you’d “like” to tell me something or you “wanted” to tell me something but you’re not 100% certain you do want to tell me something? Still mulling it over? It sounds gelatinous and wishy-washy. Man up, cut the conditionals.

Jennifer Lawrence and David O.Russell have formed a kind of Leonardo DiCaprio-Martin Scorsese alliance. Or the beginnings of one. What would you call Lawrence starring in Silver Linings Playbook plus costarring in Russell’s untitled Abscam movie plus (according to Deadline‘s Mike Fleming) just signing to star in Russell’s The Ends Of The Earth, an early-to-mid 20th Century Midwestern romance, based on a true story.

The kicker is that Earth is about a father-and-adopted-daughter relationship that graduates, almost Woody Allen-style, into a marriage.

Ernest Whitworth (or E.W.) Marland (1874-1941) was an Oklahoma-based oil tycoon and politician. In 1916 he and his wife Virginia, who were childless, adopted Virginia’s nephew and niece, 19 year-old George and 16 year-old Lydie. Virginia died in 1926. Two years later Marland had Lydie’s adoption annulled, and then he married her. She was 28 and he was 54. He lost much of his fortune in the late ’20s but they stayed together until E.W.’s death on 10.3.41, at the age of 67. Lydie lived a spotty and itinerant life after that. She died at age 87.

Who’s going to play Marland? Tom Cruise? Naah, too short.

The script for the Weinstein Co. project has been written by Argo‘s Chris Terrio. The producers are Todd Black, Steve Tisch and Jason Blumenthal of Escape Artists.

This seems like a weird project for Russell, which feels like something Terrence Malick might have directed in the ’70s. Russell is more of a present-tense type of guy. It sounds like a little bit of Giant or Days of Heaven mixed in with an inappropriate, vaguely scandalous father-daughter attraction, not exactly incestuous but close enough. I wonder what Russell sees in this. Honestly? It doesn’t sound all that commercial. It sounds vaguely icky.

I suspect that most of the mocking responses to yesterday’s Jewish WASP piece, in which I said that despite my English-German heritage I feel like I’m a “member of the tribe” by way of manner and temperament, were about fears of social-cultural dilution. If you’re part a close-knit tribe you don’t want any Anglo Saxon dilletantes messing things up, even if they identify with and admire said manners and temperaments. All I know is that I’ve always felt more urban Jewish than suburban WASP…a lot more. I mean that sincerely and reverently.

Anyway, the following letter from Las Vegas Review-Journal staffer Carol Cling (who used to be the movie critic there) is fairly written:

“I was somewhat taken aback by your comments about Drew Barrymore‘s conversion to Judaism and your own characterization of yourself as a ‘Jewish WASP.’ Sorry, but you’re confusing cultural stereotypes with something that can (and, for some of us tribe members, should) be much more.

“For some Jews (whom you described), Judaism is nothing more than an ethnic background. For others, it’s a way of life. It’s a personal decision either way.

“For most of my life, as a nice Jewish girl who’s not from New York, not a JAP and not from a family that argued and yelled all the time, I’ve had to put up with people telling me ‘You don’t act Jewish.’ (I once had a deskmate from Brooklyn who used to say, ‘You know how Jewish families are,’ and I always had to remind him, ‘Maybe your family’s like that, Dave, but mine isn’t.’)

“Also, we also never drank Mott’s Apple Juice. My sister was addicted to Welch’s grape juice, though.

“There are many Jews who fit your description and many others who don’t. But for you to presume that ‘being Jewish is a matter of blood and to some degree conviction, but I feel it’s also a matter of personality — how you think, act and behave’ is the very definition of chutzpah.

“Besides, when it comes to Jewish behavior, being a mensch is the most important thing…and I don’t know that a mensch would be so quick to generalize about something he doesn’t know from direct experience. (It would be like me telling a Christian what Christmas is all about when I’ve never celebrated it and have only observed others doing so.)

“Anyway, just wanted to share my thoughts. Best, Carol.

“P.S. Thanks for posting the vintage Siskel-and-Ebert clip. Gene was my mentor (I met him in 1971 through his niece, who was a fellow ‘cherub’ at Northwestern’s summer journalism workshop) and he was the walking, talking definition of a mensch.”

Wells to Cling: I know from direct experience. Having quite a few Jewish friends in the TriState area over the last 35 years counts for some kind of direct link, I think. I generally know Jewish culture by growing up in New Jersey and living in Manhattan for several years. And from being fairly close with Jewish girlfriends. And from absorbing the wit and wisdom of my old-time Jewish showbiz and literary heroes (Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, Phillip Roth, etc.) I look at what urban and suburban Jews seem to be about temperamentally and personality-wise and I look at what many Connecticut WASPs are like, and I don’t even have to think about it — except for the food and the wine and all the religious-faith stuff I feel much more at home with the Hebes.

“But twice when I was younger I was told in no uncertain terms that the parents of my Jewish friends don’t feel this same closeness. I attended a large wedding reception in Bridgeport for a close Jewish pal in ’80 or thereabouts, and the goyim (myself plus two or three other non-Jewish chums) were all given seating at a table that was right next to the kitchen door, which swung open at least 200 times during the luncheon and the toasts. I also was close to a Jewish girlfriend in ’79. My memory’s a little foggy but her parents tasted some kind of Holocaust-related trauma during World War II, and she once told me there was no way she could ever introduce me to them.

“Did that give me pause? Of course not. My friends felt one way, their parents another. I am and always will feel, for what it’s worth, like an honorary member of the tribe.”

Two and a half years after debuting at the Munich Film Festival, a little more than two years after screening at the 2011 Palm Springs Film Festival and roughly two years after opening commercially in Europe, Baran bo Odar‘s The Silence is finally opening on 3.8. The fact that this “icy” murder-thriller fared well with British critics suggests quality, but no viewing opportunities have been offered. Can I get a screener or something?

During yesterday afternoon’s JFK-to-LAX Virgin America flight, I suffered yet again from a sociopathic seat-reclining asshole. Reclining his seat about 10 to 12 degrees messed with my 18 inches of private space and caused the usual rage and discomfort. I leaned forward and asked this malignant fuck if he’d mind not doing that. He obliged at first, and then about 20 minutes later he leaned back anyway, and then leaned back a bit more. I should have upped the ante, but I wimped out and just sat there and took it like Neville Chamberlain.

And then this morning I came upon a Dan Kois Slate article called “The Recline and Fall of Western Civilization,” and said to myself, “What timing!” How many thousands had the same reaction?

Kois writes entertainingly and constructively about this problem. Boiled down he (a) restates what I’ve been declaring for years, which is that people who recline their seats too much are unregenerate fiends, (b) acknowledges that the real problem is airlines allowing seats to recline too much in the first place, (c) urges that they stop allowing this, and (d) supplies a URL for a device called a Knee Defender that prevents this. I’ve already ordered mine.

From a June 2011 HE piece:

“One should never get into a slapping match with a seat-recliner. The way to deal with this is to (a) politely ask the offender to grow some manners and decency and respect the 18″ private-space rule, and when he doesn’t (because they never listen) (b) ‘accidentally’ spill wine or Coke or coffee on his head. Offer sincere and heartfelt apologies and offer to get him some napkins. If he doesn’t adjust his seat, repeat the procedure.

“People who recline their seats in coach are scum — there are no two ways about it. The second-worst offenders are parents with infants who won’t stop crying, which is obviously due to over-coddling. The third-worst offenders are fat-asses and really old people who wait until the very last second when the flight is disembarking to stand up and take their carry-on luggage out of the overhead compartment (which always takes forever), causing everyone behind them to wait and wait and wait.”

Just after the February 2nd Jennifer Lawrence tribute at the Santa Barbra Film Festival, I asked if I could show the tribute reel. It was sent to me yesterday, but when I uploaded it to YouTube the embed code was disabled due to some petty copyright bullshit. I’m uploading it to Vimeo as we speak (who knows if the Vimeo embed codes will be blocked also?) but in the meantime here’s a YouTube link.

And here’s an excerpt from remarks spoken on 2.2 by Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling:

“Lawrence’s performance as Tiffany, the grieving young widow who befriends, falls for and helps to save Bradley Cooper‘s Pat, is about a million miles away from her turn in The Hunger Games, delivering a deft comic side and a romantic longing flecked with electric energy. She’s a feisty force of nature recalling Cher in Moonstruck in 1987. Like Carole Lombardin My Man Godfrey in 1936, and the way Diane Keaton fleshed out Annie Hall in 1977. Like Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve in 1938, and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night in 1934.

“But Tiffany is totally contemporary, totally new. She’s flawed and damaged. She’s made mistakes — and continues to make mistakes. But she’s made peace with her
imperfections and tries to persuade Cooper’s bipolar protagonist to do the same.

“Before Silver Linings Playbook Lawrence had done fiery, intense performances; with Silver Linings Playbook Lawrence delivers a fiery, intense, movie-star performance. She dominates the proceedings without artifice or hammy overacting. She is the first breath of fresh air to be breathed into the motion picture industry in a very very long time.”

The Lawrence tribute reel was assembled by Durling and Dana Morrow.

If Andrew O’Hehir wanted to have some kind of impact on the Best Picture race, why didn’t he post this even-tempered but fairly damning Salon article — “Why Argo Doesn’t Deserve The Oscar” — back in mid or late January instead of today? Because baby, it’s all over now.

Excerpt: “The Americans never resisted the idea of playing a film crew, which is the source of much agitation in the movie. (In fact, the ‘house guests’ chose that cover story themselves, from a group of three options the CIA had prepared.) They were not almost lynched by a mob of crazy Iranians in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, because they never went there. There was no last-minute cancellation, and then un-cancellation, of the group’s tickets by the Carter administration. (The wife of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor had personally gone to the airport and purchased tickets ahead of time, for three different outbound flights.) The group underwent no interrogation at the airport about their imaginary movie, nor were they detained at the gate while a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard telephoned their phony office back in Burbank. There was no last-second chase on the runway of Mehrabad Airport, with wild-eyed, bearded militants with Kalashnikovs trying to shoot out the tires of a Swissair jet.

“All that is supposed to be dramatic license, ‘just a movie,’ ‘based on a true story’ vs. actually attempting to tell the truth. I get it. But I’m less concerned with the veracity of individual details than with the fact that Argo uses its basis in history and its mode of detailed realism to create something that is entirely mythological.

“It’s a totalizing fiction whose turning points are narrow escapes and individual derring-do designed to foreground Affleck and his star power (instead of the long, grinding work of Canadian-American collaboration behind the scenes that made the real rescue possible), an adventure yarn whose twists raise your pulse rate but keep the happy ending clearly in view. It turns a fascinating and complicated true story into a trite cavalcade of action-movie clichés and expository dialogue, leaving us with an image of the stoical American hero (or the Mexican-American hero played by a white guy, anyway) framed in a doorway with a blonde in his arms and the flag flapping behind him. I’m not being metaphorical, by the way; that’s the final shot of Mendez’s homecoming scene.”

Drew Barrymore is converting to Judaism and having her tattoos removed. But even after she’s taken the Torah classes and gone through all the rituals and ceremonies and starts in with the lox and bagels and onions and Mott’s apple juice, she won’t be that much more Jewish than yours truly.

I’m serious. You can say (and you wouldn’t be technically wrong) that being Jewish is a matter of blood and to some degree conviction, but I feel it’s also a matter of personality — how you think, act and behave. Because that’s where I come in.

I sincerely believe that I am, in a sense, “a member of the tribe.” I’m a near-Jew in that I come from an English-mixed-with-German family but I possess most of the standard urban Jewish-male traits — angst, edge, a rat-a-tat mind, guilt, self-doubt, a penchant for dark humor, a glum world view, occasionally combative, a complainer who’s occasionally compulsive. Back in the late ’70s two Jewish pals told me I had as much Jewish guilt as they did if not more so. I have rarely felt so honored, and I have tried to live up to this ever since.

From the mind of Jamie Stuart, the short-video essayist and poet who made that “Man in a Blizzard” short about the 2010 New York blizzard.

There has to be at least a short list of films that have great-sounding titles but are close to unwatchable. Such is In Like Flint, the 1967 James Coburn espionage spoof and sequel to Our Man Flint (’66). I can think of only two others: Things To Do In Denver When You;re Dead and Midnight in the Garden of Evil.

All ’60s spy spoofs suck horribly — the Flint films, Dean Martin‘s Matt Helm films, Get Smart, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Casino Royale (’67), the James Bond take-off with David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, etc.

In Like Flynt is a derivation of “In Like Flynn,”a 1940s slang term. The Wiki page says it means “having completed a goal or gained access as desired,” and that it’s “sometimes used to describe success in sexual seduction.”

Expanded: “The term is often believed to refer to movie star Errol Flynn. Flynn had a reputation for womanizing, consumption of alcohol and brawling. His freewheeling, hedonistic lifestyle caught up with him in November 1942 when two under-age girls, Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee, accused him of statutory rape. The trial took place in January and February 1943, and Flynn was cleared of the charges.

“According to etymologist Michael Quinion, the incident served to increase Flynn’s reputation as a hound, which led to the popular phrase ‘in like Flynn.’ Columnist Cecil Adams also examined the term’s origins and its relationship to Flynn. Many early sources attesting the phrase say it emerged as war slang during World War II.

That’s really terrific about Mindy McCready killing her late boyfriend David Wilson‘s dog before offing herself. McCready to pooch: “Ahh luv you, doggie, but I gotta die so I can join my fella and that means you gotta go too, poor fella. Yeah, sorry, I know…but it’ll be quick, I promise.”

The last dog I read about being killed due to its owner committing (or intending to commit) suicide was Blondi, Adolf Hitler‘s German Shepherd who was poisoned before Der Fuhrer and Eva Braun took cyanide. That’s nice company to be in, Mindy, if you’re reading this from purgatory.

Depression is an ugly bear that can take you straight to hell, all right, but some people greatly increase the likelihood of suicide by boozing heavily and keeping guns handy. That’s what McCready and Wilson (who also shot himself) did. Otherwise I’m sure they were fine, fine people.

In shooting herself McCready abandoned two sons — 6-year-old Zander and 10-month-old Zayne.

My only beef with these obviously sophisticated guys, who know their stuff cold, is that they’re hung up on films that walk, talk, look and act “serious” and “important.” And so they blow off Silver Linings Playbook, a film about Regular Joes that gets the whole “steaks, salads, cocktails” thing in 24-hour diners. And they also ignored Anna Karenina…not cool. Otherwise they have my respect. Sharp, intelligent analysis.