From HE reader Jakob Aljaz: “I’ve read Jeff’s ‘Too Damn Many‘ article on Hollywood Elsewhere (8.16.12), which listed around 40 films he’d like to catch in Toronto. But in the last few days there have been major raves (Variety, etc.) for two fims that Jeff didn’t include: Tobias Lindholm‘s Danish thriller A Hijacking and Peter Strickland‘s Berberian Sound Studio. Also of interest is the philosophical documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (a must for any leftie).”
Every time Bill Clinton addresses the Democratic National Convention, I fall in love all over again. He hit a grand slam in ’04, in ’08 and again tonight in Charlotte. This was The Master — a man who talks straight and specific and with beautiful rhythm and emotion, and just lays it down like an oratorical God…wham! Playing the crowd like a violin, choice line after choice line…spirit-lifting, like great music.
To fully understand what a truly great speech Clinton gave, you might want to read Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker piece (“Let’s Be Friends”) about the relationship between Clinton and Barack Obama.
“People ask me all the time how we delivered four surplus budgets,” Clinton said. “What new ideas did we bring? I always give a one-word answer: arithmetic.
“If [the Republicans] stay with a 5 trillion dollar tax cut in a debt reduction plan – the arithmetic tells us that one of three things will happen: 1) they’ll have to eliminate so many deductions like the ones for home mortgages and charitable giving that middle-class families will see their tax bill go up two thousand dollars year while people making over 3 million dollars a year get will still get a 250,000 dollar tax cut; or 2) they’ll have to cut so much spending that they’ll obliterate the budget for our national parks, for ensuring clean air, clean water, safe food, safe air travel; or they’ll cut way back on Pell Grants, college loans, early childhood education and other programs that help middle-class families and poor children, not to mention cutting investments in roads, bridges, science, technology and medical research; or 3) they’ll do what they’ve been doing for thirty plus years now — cut taxes more than they cut spending, explode the debt, and weaken the economy.
“Remember, Republican economic policies quadrupled the debt before I took office and doubled it after I left. We simply can’t afford to double-down on trickle-down.”
This is nicely cut, but it’s just not right to watch Lawrence of Arabia footage on a smallish screen. I’ve said that I’m at ease with watching films on a iPad, but not this one. Nothing smaller than a 50-inch or 60-inch high-def screen, I’m thinking, although 70 or 80 inches would be better. And sitting no more than four or five feet away.
A friend asked me to riff about the various festival entries for a video interview piece, and I said fine. We were halfway through when a young festival rep came up and said sorry, no video inside the festival reception room unless a festival rep is observing. We all said cool, but I asked the rep why the rule exists. “No biggie but where’s the harm in shooting an occasional video interview?,” I said. She said she didn’t know. “So you haven’t asked your bosses to explain why?,” I said. No, she answered. “Okay,” I replied.
An excerpt from Aleksandar Hemon‘s “Beyond The Matrix,” a 9.10 New Yorker piece about Cloud Atlas: “It was on the day before they left Costa Rica that the Wachowski brothers and Tom Tykwer had a breakthrough” about how to write the script of David Mitchell‘s ‘Cloud Atlas‘. “They could convey the idea of eternal recurrence, which was so central to the novel, by having the same actors appear in multiple story lines — ‘playing souls, not characters,’ in Tykwer’s words.
“This would allow the narrative currents of the book to merge and to be separate at the same time. On the flight home, Lana and Andy carried the stack of rubber-banded cards they would soon convert into the first draft of the screenplay, which they then sent to Tykwer. The back-and-forth between the three filmmakers continued, the viability of their collaboration still not fully confirmed.
“By August, the trio had a completed draft to send to Mitchell. The Wachowskis had had a difficult experience adapting V for Vendetta, from a comic book whose author, Alan Moore, hated the very idea of Hollywood adaptation and berated the project publicly. ‘We decided in Costa Rica that — as hard and as long as it might take to write this script — if David didn’t like it, we were just going to kill the project,’ Lana said.
“Mitchell, who lives in the southwest of Ireland, agreed to meet the filmmakers in Cork. In ‘a seaside hotel right out of Fawlty Towers,’ as Lana described it, they recounted for the author the painstaking process of disassembling the novel and reassembling it into the script he’d read. ‘It’s become a bit of a joke that they know my book much more intimately than I do,’ Mitchell wrote to me. They explained their plan to unify the narratives by having actors play transmigrating souls.
“‘This could be one of those movies that are better than the book!” Mitchell exclaimed at the end of the pitch. The pact was sealed with pints of Murphy’s stout at a local pub.”
After some delay Porter Airlines has cancelled the Newark-to-Toronto 10:10 am flight that I was on. After the cancellation news everybody had to line up and speak to a Porter agent in order to be assigned a new flight. For my sin of working on the column and therefore not listening to the initial announcement and not responding quickly enough, I’ve been been put on a flight that leaves two hours hence, or 12:10 pm. If I’d been a little more Johnny-on-the-spot I might have made the 11:10 am flight.
This is a metaphor with broad applications. If you don’t hear the proverbial “first announcement” and respond right away, you will pay the price.
In my exhaustion last night I forgot to plug in the iPhone, and without the alarm I woke up late and missed my 8:45 am Porter Airlines flight to Toronto. On top of which I now have to pay Porter a penalty fee of $150 if I want to go standby for the next flight, which leaves at 10:10 am. 9:15 am update: Currently at Newark Airport and ticketed for the 10:10 am flight.
On top of which the guy sitting in front of me on the crowded Port Authority-to-Newark Airport bus has decided to lean his seat back and stretch out like Caligula watching ESPN in his living room. People who lean their seats back into another person’s 18 inches of private space are ungentlemanly and uncouth. An upbringing thing, alcoholic father, etc.
On top of which this Caligula guy was right in front of me in the security line, and when he took his shoes off — I swear I’m not making this up — he was wearing gold-toe socks.
Honestly? I’d begun to forget Graham Chapman before seeing this animated 3D doc, which will play the Toronto Film Festival. I’ve written my review, but I can’t post until it screens in Toronto two or three days hence.
It was somewhere between unpleasant and deeply unpleasant to be roaming the streets of Manhattan today, more precisely between 2:45 and 4:45 pm. I was lugging my suitcases across several blocks, damp and straining and coping with Panama City humidity and rainshowers, cabs going off duty, mobs of slow people blocking sidewalks, etc. This town is only atmospherically tolerable in the fall, winter and spring. Forget the late summer. I’m off to Toronto tomorrow morning, and to that prospect I say “thank God.”
Several times while walking alone in Manhattan and Brooklyn I’ve been faced with a do-or-die situation, or more precisely a hold-your-ground-or-run-like-hell thing. You’ve just come around a corner and spotted a group of five or six kids — rowdy, trash-talking, maybe a couple of hundred feet away — hanging out near a stoop or walking in your direction. The first instinct is to reverse course and avoid them altogether. But I’ve stopped myself from doing this knowing that the gang will sense weakness if I do a 180 and perhaps follow me….who knows? The two worst things you can do in a street confrontation is convey too much weakness or too much macho belligerence. You have to be cool and steady and low-key, not seeking eye contact but not avoiding it. Once or twice I’ve turned tail but 90% of the time I’ve manned up and kept walking.
Yesterday and today I was shoved around and name-called by a team of leftwing p.c. mullahs and fascist feminist thugs. It was caused by their simple-minded inability to understand what I said in yesterday’s post about Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon‘s The Central Park Five, a PBS-funded doc about the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case that I saw two days ago at the Telluride Film Festival. They were alarmed that I seemed to be making a blanket statement about the victim, a 29 year-old Salamon Brothers employee, having “all but asked” to be attacked. I wrote this because I feel she nearly did by exposing herself to serious danger in a really dicey area at a much-too-late hour.
Let’s try it again because we have some seriously thick people out there who hear only what they want to hear and who truly live to take offense and point fingers. Anyone, man or woman, child or oldster, who jogs solo through the north end of Manhattan’s Central Park at 10:30 pm, which is when and where Trisha Meili, the victim in the above-named case, was assaulted and raped, is flirting with danger. Especially if you don’t look like Muhammud Ali of the ’60s and ’70s or like present-day Jason Statham, and double especially if you’re a young woman who’s not Katniss Everdeen and carrying a hunting knife.
Central Park is a dark unlighted haven for all sorts of goings on after it gets dark, especially after 9 pm. I’m an ex-New Yorker so don’t tell me. There’s an “element” out there, Central Park is not exactly flooded with cops, and bad guys can obviously hide in the dark between bushes and trees and wait to pounce. Anyone with half a brain knows this. Trust me — tourists from Missouri and Alabama and Virginia know this. If you must run through the park after dark you need to stay within shouting distance of well-lighted areas. You definitely don’t run above 96th Street when the clock goes into double digits. And if you ignore these rules and do what Trisha Meili did that night in April 1989, you’re not “asking for it” but you might as well be for all the caution and common sense you’d be showing.
The reason I brought his up in the first place wasn’t to beat up on poor Trisha Meili, but because I found it irksome that the Burns-McMahon doc never even addressed the fact that it was clearly irresponsible to expose herself to attack, particularly given the fact that New York City in 1989 was something of a racially incendiary culture. That was all it was…until the mullahs and the fascist goons jumped in and tried to turn it into something else.
Earlier today I asked one of them if they felt that late-night solo jogging in Central Park seemed even somewhat safe to them, and if they themselves would do this if they were into jogging. They didn’t answer but the answers are obviously “no” and “no.” Boneheads.
