An HE reader wrote yesterday about how Chris Nolan‘s Inception (Warner Bros., 7.16) is the Great White Hope of the summer — the only May-to-Labor Day movie that semi-discriminating moviegoers want to see. Or something in this vein. I wouldn’t say it’s the year’s only hope — that’s pushing it. I wish it was coming our sooner rather than later. I’m still hot to see a shooting script, if anyone has a clue (or knows someone who might). There’s a part of me that likes to pre-process.
Iranian director Jafar Panahi will reportedly be released on bail soon, according to france24.com, quoting Tehran’s public prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi. A =”green” opposition ally, Panahi has been sitting in the slammer since 3.1. He was most likely incarcerated for the same reason that all ugly-thug regimes imprison political opposition leaders or figureheads — i.e., he pissed them off.
We’ve all been expecting Sex and the City 2 to be vulgarly profligate and surface-y and generally reprehensible. To go by David Edelstein‘s New York review, it apparently is that. The challenge in reviewing such a film isn’t to state the obvious (i.e., confirm the expected) but to come up with fresh and exhilarating ways to trash and befoul the franchise, and particularly the four stars.
About all Edelstein attempts in this regard, part from rote lamentations about the fading or diminished appearances of Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall and Kristin Davis, is to say that Liza Minnelli, who has a cameo, “looks more human.”
“The most depressing thing about Sex and the City 2 is that it seems to justify every nasty thing said and written about the series and first feature film,” Edelstein begins. The SATC dynamic has always been fragile, but at its most affecting you could see beyond the costumes and artifice and feel the characters fighting for validation — and connecting with one another in their struggle. Now there’s nothing but surface. And what a surface.
“The film is an epic eyesore. It’s as if they set out to make a movie that said, ‘You’re right! We are hideous!’
“The thinking behind the movie (written and directed by Michael Patrick King) is undisguised. Let’s start with an over-the-top gay wedding! Then we’ll send the girls to Abu Dhabi so they can rile up the fundamentalists with their sexuality! Then they’ll make fun of women in niqab (‘Certainly cuts down on the Botox bill!’) but later show (campy) feminist solidarity! Won’t they look great swishing around the desert being waited on by smooth young Arab men?
“Amy Odell, of nymag.com’s The Cut, accompanied me to the screening and was kind enough to whisper that a particular dress of Carrie’s cost 50 grand. But what’s the point of spending that much when the cinematographer, John Thomas, lights Sarah Jessica Parker to bring out the leatheriness of her skin? How did he manage to mummify the lovely Cynthia Nixon? Kim Cattrall, fresh off her witty, subtle work in The Ghost Writer, is costumed to look like a cross between (late) Mae West and (dead) Bea Arthur. Kristin Davis gets by (just) pulling little-girl faces, probably for the last time.
“For all the sniggery double entendres, virtually all of Sex and the City 2 is a pale shade of vanilla. But there is this one moment [in which] Cattrall, in short shorts in the Arab marketplace, has a flurry of hot flashes, drops to the ground, and writhes around screaming, ‘I have sex, yes! I quite enjoy it!’ People coming out of surgery with bad reactions to the anesthesia have been known to behave like that, which gives it some fleeting connection to real life.”
For me, nothing so far has topped the Onion‘s image of this quartet being thrown into a vat of acid and melted alive.
Taormina is a quiet, comforting, pleasantly scenic mountainside town…or was, I should say, before it was transformed into a kind of Sicilian-hamlet theme park for middle-aged (50-plus) tourist couples. The high-view location is calm and settling, and the silences and especially the cool air in the late evening are transporting, but the silver-haired Club Med vibe almost makes it feel like a retirement community. My mother would love it here.
The only place we could find in town with decent wifi, and reasonably priced — only 73 euros.
Today was almost entirely consumed by a brutal 10 and 1/2 hour drive from Rome’s Fiumicino Airport to Messina, Sicily (including, naturally, a 25-minute ferry across the Italy-Sicily channel). Repeatedly becoming mired in slow, one-lane traffic in southern Italy’s mountainous area, hour after hour after hour, was far more stressful than I anticipated. Jett doesn’t drive a stick so I was at the wheel start to finish so I couldn’t even post from the iPhone.
Saturday, 5.22, 1:10 am
Wait…Simon Monjack died? Of “natural causes”? I pulled over to a rest stop this afternoon to ask director George Hickenlooper, who had an unpleasant experience with about Monjack over Factory Girl, for a comment.
“Its a sad and pathetic story,” he wrote back. “I loathed Monjack and what he did to Brittany Murphy. Regardless every living thing has a soul and its classless to bash someone when they’ve passed. So all I’ll say is I hope they’re both resting in peace, but not together. She deserves better company.”
The Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or has gone to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Which goes to show, at the very least, that it pays to stick around long enough to catch everything, right to the very end. Hoorah-goorah for Biutiful‘s Javier Bardem winning for Best Actor and Certified Copy‘s Juliette Binoche taking the Best Actress prize. [Posted from a cafe during a light rainshower.]
Serious alpha points to Kevin Costner for investing $26 million in his brother Dan‘s Ocean Therapy device — a kind of vacuum cleaner that separates oil from water. They’ve so far built 26 units, six of which are now being tested in the oil-spill area on the Gulf of Mexico with the support of British Petroleum.
Kevin and Dan, a scientist, have reportedly spent the last 15 years testing and building their “separation” device. They’ve done so under the aegis of the Costner Industries Nevada Corporation, a company devoted to eco-friendly research.
Ocean Therapy sucks up dirty liquid and then uses a high-speed centrifuge to separate it into oil and heavier water. The water that spews out at the other end will be 97% oil-free, they’ve claim. Costner-the-actor got into the idea after being enraged by the Exxon Valdez spill and wanting to do something, etc.
Ocean Therapy can clean “between 5 and 200 gallons of water a minute, depending on its size,” according to Costner’s lawyer and business partner, John Houghtaling. The Independent’s Guy Adams concludes that the machines “could in theory mop up oil at the rate it is currently gushing into the Gulf.”
When the Costner brothers allowed the local media to see Ocean Therapy in action – albeit on dry land – “it appeared to work as advertised,” Adams reports.
I’m not quite as late in posting Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Nike-sponsored “Write the Future” short as I’ve been with other stuff. It broke worldwide yesterday. There must be something the dweebs don’t like about it.
And that’s all she wrote until later today. Further scootering awaits.
This is the slickest and best-edited HE video I’ve ever posted, entirely due to Jett and his Final Cut skills. I asked him to take some video footage last night as we scootered around Rome. (That’s my blue helmet.) And then Jett nonchalantly cut it together back at the pad, taking only about an hour and layering on some music to boot. Way beyond my abilities.
Jett is a contributing editor for the Huffington Post‘s college page.
Having written last Thursday that Shia Labeouf deserves “alpha points for trashing ’08’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and, by obvious implication, Steven Spielberg,” I was naturally gratified with Patrick Goldstein‘s 5.20 “Big Picture” column having said roughly the same thing and more.
“You’d think that LaBeouf would be deluged with e-mails and giant bouquets of flowers for having the temerity to tell the truth,” he wrote. “As anyone who sat through Indiana Jones in a theater could tell you, it was a bust, not to mention one of the worst movies of Spielberg’s career, an all-too-cynical attempt to go back to the well one more time to revive a franchise that should’ve been left in the deep freeze.
“But only in Hollywood is truth-telling considered heresy. Instead of being congratulated for his honesty, LaBeouf got a stern lecture from Michael Fleming at Nikki Finke‘s Deadline, who seems to have forgotten that he’s now working for the supposedly fiercely independent Finke instead of the industry apologists at Variety.
“Fleming hewed the studio party line, echoing the sentiments of the usual coterie of unnamed executives who complained that LaBeouf was being ‘disrespectful’ for saying what audiences had learned long ago: The movie was a stinker.
“Noting that actors like LaBeouf are overpaid to star in silly summer movies, Fleming wrote that ‘what they’re not supposed to do in return for that all that moolah is trash those hits and their directors.’ He added that a host of Hollywood suits believe that LaBeouf’s comments ‘could potentially hurt his career,’ adding that ‘violating Hollywood protocol is a dangerous game to play.’
“So let’s see if we can get this straight,” Goldstein responds. “Hollywood actors are celebrated when they oppose the war in Iraq or bash George Bush, they are encouraged to lobby Congress for a thousand different pet causes and given awards for supporting free speech, but when they dare to say that some lackluster sequel was a dud or that Michael Bay is a tyrant on his film set [as Megan Fox did], they are sent to the woodshed, accused of being disrespectful and told their careers could be in jeopardy.
“And just to add to the hypocrisy, the criticism comes from Finke’s Deadline website, which has made its living hurling tons of napalm-like inflammatory invective at many of those same titans of the industry.
“Megan Fox may be an airhead and Shia LaBeouf may be a lightweight, but when it comes to speaking the truth, they deserve credit for having far more bracing honesty than most of the suck-ups who rule the business. Only in Hollywood is calling a lousy movie a lousy movie considered an act of sedition.”
For obvious reasons, I’m not going to offer apologies for being three days behind on this thing.
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