Tom Berenger has been jogging around the track for 35-plus years. He broke into features in the mid ’70s and had a great 16-year run — Looking for Mr. Goodbar (’77), In Praise of Older Women (’78), The Dogs of War (’81), The Big Chill (’84), Platoon (’86), Someone to Watch Over Me (’87), Major League (’89), Born on the Fourth of July (’89), The Field (’90), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (’91), Sliver (’93) and Gettysburg (’93). And then he seemed to slip into B-level genre stuff, but he came back two years ago with a significant role in Chris Nolan‘s Inception.

The man is a veteran who’s paid his dues several times over and is now into his seventh decade of life on the planet…and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences has only just granted him membership? I understand that you have to apply and that you need a sponsor or two. Maybe Berenger never applied, but why wouldn’t he have? He knows this town and that membership couldn’t hurt and could possibly help his career, so what kind of moron do you have to be to say “naaahh, I don’t want to join”? So if he did apply before, why would Academy gate-keepers turn him down? It just seems weird. The overwhelming majority of those recently granted membership are people who broke through within the last ten years or less.

Wait…is it because he’s politically conservative or something? I don’t know anything but that kind of thing can be a stopper.

The odd thing about Berenger is that he’s allegedly declared that his favorite feature of those he’s starred in was Gettysburg, in which he played Gen. James Longstreet. That movie has stayed in my mind for one reason only — bad beards. I would say that the beards in that film were ludicrous — they looked woven out of yak hair.

Magic Mike did around $18 million on Friday, and is forecasting $47 million by Sunday night — much higher than expected. And Seth McFarlane‘s Ted, the Mark Wahlberg teddy-bear movie which I saw tonight and was more or less okay with, is expected to do a little over $50 million by Sunday night. All the hot-dog-eating, ESPN-watching guys who wouldn’t be caught dead seeing Mike went to Ted — it’s that simple.

Mike got a B from CinemaScore respondents — i.e., it didn’t get an A because some felt that it would’ve been a little better if it had less character stuff and was glossier-looking (“What was up with the orange-y color?”) and cheaper and sillier with dumb jokes.

For whatever reason the following exchange, which happened at a party in London’s Soho district sometime in early December 1980, has never left my memory. It was a really great gathering, thrown (or so I recall) by Time Out magazine. It was crowded and everyone was half bombed and the music had a great tribal drum thing going on. This is how it went:

Me: Who are we listening to?

Guy #1: What?

Me: (shouting in his ear) Who’s playing?

Guy #1: You know who it is.

Me: I do? It’s not coming to me.

Guy #2: You know who it is…say it!

Guy #1: You know who it is!

Me: Bow Wow Wow?

Guy #2: That’s right.

Three or four days earlier I had been woken up at a place I was staying in Stockwell with the news that John Lennon was dead. I was over there to do a GQ profile interview with Peter O’Toole. O’Toole wasn’t very receptive at first, but it eventually happened and the piece turned out fine.

Read more

That’s a ’70s Lina Wertmuller film, right? Giancarlo Giannini, just back from a two-month stay in Europe, arrives in a sticky, sweltering Manhattan. Doesn’t feel too badly, walks around, buys Lifeboat Bluray, writes about Tomkat. Checks into nice air-conditioned Chinatown hotel around 2 or 3 pm, goes upstairs for a 90-minute nap. Wakes up at 10:15 pm…whuh?…and comes to a depressing realization that falling asleep again within the next several hours is gonna be a bitch.

Relationship-wise Tom Cruise isn’t much of a stayer, but then who is? Most couples last five to ten years, longer if they have kids. Cruise’s relationships have mostly tended to last three to six years. Rebecca DeMornay, ’83 to ’85, was the shortest but they were both young. Mimi Rogers was just under three years (May ’87 to February ’90). Cruise’s one long-term relationship was with Nicole Kidman, lasting just over 10 years from ’90 to ’01. Penelope Cruise was…what, two and half or three years, ’01 to ’04? And now the Katie Holmes marriage is toast after six…okay, seven years if you count courtship.

Tom and Katie have a daughter together, Suri, and she’ll be the basis of their post-marital bond for the rest of their lives. It’s no biggie. We all move on, renew, find new oil, rebuild, join new health clubs, re-finance, re-adapt.

I’ll give you $100 if any European property owner who isn’t a drug addict, an alcoholic or saddled with mental issues has a backyard like this. But this is more or less par for the course in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Brooklyn neighborhood that reeks of degeneracy and fatalism and anti-social asshole teenagers and a lack of soap and regular toothbrushing and deodorant and decent take-out food.

Backyard of 190 Pulaski Street, Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

I waited 45 minutes to get my passport stamped last night — me and 260 others being served by three shlubby guys. “Look at this way — at least there won’t be any waiting for the luggage,” I said to a guy I’d been on the same jet with. A 45-minute wait would never happen in Europe. There are lines, of course, but nobody waits that long for something as simple as a passport stamp.

The bottom line is that no system in Europe is quite as pathetic as New York City’s — their pride and respect for others won’t allow it. I love the really cool parts of this town as much as anyone else, but you don’t want to fly back from a really nice burgh like Munich and be suddenly wrestling with this wheezy, borough-accented, under-air-conditioned armpit of a town. It’s like “what“? They live better over there. They really do.

I realize that “Green Leaves of Summer,” which sounds tedious and Godawful in this Brothers Four version, was used in Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds. I just don’t remember the scene…nothing. But this — this! — is good. Name the source of this track and the composer.

The Silver Linings Playbook “looks fast and sharp — a raggedy-jazz comedy about caustic humor, family, sex, anxiety, therapy, hurt, healing…all of it. Edgy, crackling, push-pushy, what-the-fucky. Directed and written by David O. Russell, adapted from the serio-comic novel by Matthew Quick. Agitated, lacking-in-people-skills Bradley Cooper falls in love with Jennifer Lawrence. Robert De Niro, Julia Stiles, Jacki Weaver and Chris Tucker costar.” — from a 5.21 Cannes Film Festival riff about my first look at a Silver Linings reel.

Three days ago Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote about the trepidation she’s been feeling about the inevitable Beasts of the Southern Wild backlash. Two days later Deadspin.com’s Tim Grierson heard her call and posted this fairly well-written riff about the “five worst indie film cliches” in Beasts.

You can read as well as I can, but here are the five in bullet form: One, the film “fetishizes authenticity.” he says. Two, it tries way too hard to be gritty.” Three, “it treats poverty as something noble.” Four, “it confuses simple characters for memorable ones.” And five, “it touches on real-life events without saying anything about them.”

Katey Rich aside, a significant portion of elite female film critics have gone thumbs-down on Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike (Warner Bros., opening today) and are more than partly responsible for its Rotten Tomatoes grade hugging the low ’80s instead of the low to mid ’90s, where it belongs. As far as I can tell the only extra-brainy, big-gun female critic to come down squarely in support of this Warner Bros. release is N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis.

I noted the same pattern a year ago with Bridesmaids. On 5.12.11 I wrote that (a) “certain female critics and bloggers (including Stephanie Zacharek) have either dissed or gone ‘meh’ on Bridesmaids, to which I can only respond ‘what?” But also (b) “thank God for balance and general perception’s sake that N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has come down positive.”

Some kind of upscale feminist nerve was touched by Bridesmaids. Something to do with disputed gender identity or an unwelcome mirror-image issue of some kind. I suspect that Magic Mike is pushing a similar button and arousing a similar ire. Maybe because it echoes the depression of female stripping or because the female characters (aside from Cody Horn) aren’t strong enough or something. Yes, I know — women ticket-buyers are going to deliver at least 60% or 70% of Mike‘s expected weekend earnings (possibly $30 million or better), and yet many progressive-minded female critics have a problem with it.

Consider this post by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, one of the more seasoned and plugged-in journo-critics with ties to the industry’s most powerful women. Like many others Thompson was impressed by Magic Mike‘s character currents and socio-economic reflections, but she also said the following: “As for Magic Mike‘s place in the feminists’ history books, further thought and consideration is necessary.”

In other words, it’s probably on the mainstream establishment feminist shit list.

The anti-Mike sorority includes L.A. Weekly/Village Voice critic Karina Longworth, Movieline‘s Alison Willmore, Seattle Times critic Moira MacDonald, About.com’s Rebecca Murray and Flickfilosopher‘s Maryan Johnson. Even the mild-mannered, comme ci comme ca-ish Claudia Puig of USA Today said that “when the focus [of Magic Mike] drifts to more peripheral characters, or follows more serious plot threads, it’s a grind.”

This also from Indiewire‘s Melissa Silverstein: “In general, Magic Mike is not exactly the type of film we write about here on Women and Hollywood. It’s a movie about men and directed by a man. But it seems that the audience for this film is going to be pretty much all women so it’s worthy of looking at.”