In early ’06 I paid $135 or $140 retail for a 150 gig external hard drive (i.e., the small kind that runs off your pc’s power when you plug in the USB). Two days ago I paid just under $100 for the same type of external hard drive, made by Seagate, except it has 500 gigs. A totally routine development. Two or three years from now a thousand-gig hard drive will cost $75 or thereabouts.
I told Jett the other day there’s no way I’m springing for an iPad. For cost reasons alone I’m waiting for the 2.0 or even the 3.0 before I even start to think about it. I will, however, be investing thought and money in formatting Hollywood Elsewhere for the iPad, and of course I’ll need to create an app. You could actually say I’ve been slacking off in this regard.
I didn’t have an especially great time with Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland. I can see people taking the kids and maybe deciding they have no choice but to catch it because of the 3D factor. But I found Hubble 3D much more interesting and fulfilling even though it’s a somewhat routinely-made documentary. Why? Because it provides a feeling of awe that is 100% real.
All to say it really, really doesn’t add up that Alice in Wonderland is #1 at the box-office for the third week in a row, having yesterday brought in about $9.8 million from 3,739 locations. Okay, it’s a livelier-seeming attraction than The Bounty Hunter, which seems instantly dismissable to all age groups, creeds and cultures, as well as Repo Men, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Green Zone and so on.
But Alice in Wonderland is still a fairly tepid thing to sit through, and I just don’t get why it hasn’t fallen off. I’m coming from knowledge and experience here. I don’t just “think” Alice isn’t that great a movie — I know it isn’t. I sat in a theatre with mostly Hispanic Eloi, side by side, and I could sense their emotional engagement levels, and they were not enthralled — they were sitting there like bean-bag chairs.
According to a five-month-old survey on weightlossdietwatch.com, Mississippi is the Jabba capital of the U.S. For five years straight it’s had the highest rates of adult obesity (32.5 percent). It also has the highest rate of obese and overweight children (ages 10 to 17) at 44.4 percent.
This is what rankles me about our health-care situation. Obviously not the Obama-proposed legislation (which the country definitely needs ) but the fact that the health prospects of your average sea lion rep a tremendous financial burden for everyone. The total cost of obesity, including “indirect costs,” is estimated to be $139 billion per year, and that ain’t hay.
Obese people pay 77% more for health care than normal-weighters. And two-thirds of American audlts are now either obese or overweight, the survey says. And most of the tonnage is accumulating in the poorer states in the South.
Clearly, buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken pose a much greater threat to the lives of Americans than Middle-East terrorism. If obesity was smallpox or some other scary disease there would be sirens blaring and National Guard troops outside your windows right now.
Why hasn’t Barack Obama been more ardent about pushing a physical fitness program? Not just by giving a speech or two about it, but really getting on the train and urging schools to enforce exercise regimens like President Kennedy did in the early ’60s? I’m not exactly sure, but it probably has something to do with Obama’s not wanting to overly agitate obese swing voters.
I tried to watch Spike Jonze‘s I’m Here, a short love-story film about two robots, and I was told “sorry…theatre is full…come back in 3 hours.” I love it.
The word is out among lightweight “entertainment”-seekers everywhere — don’t go see Greenberg! Too well reviewed (the highest-rated opener at Rotten Tomatoes), too smart, too psychologically recognizable, too neurotic, etc. It was in the low 80s earlier today, and is now sitting at 74 thanks to naysayers Kyle Smith, Katey Rich, Nick Schager, Mary F. Pols, Stephen Whitty, Betsy Sharkey, etc.
Whitty callsBen Stiller‘s Greenberg “a nasty neurotic” and Greta Gerwig‘s Florence “a passive victim,” and adds, “If you’re looking for someone to identify with — well, pray you don’t find one here.” I didn’t identify with Greenberg, but I recognized him. And anyone who’s met a guy like this will recognize that Stiller gives a ballsy, dead-on performance. I for one loved some of his bits and lines. His irritation at a guy shrieking with laughter at a nearby table at Musso and Frank, for one. I’ve felt the exact same way a few times, and no character in any film I’ve ever seen has provided any sort of validation…until now.
“As any video clerk can attest, movies with the same or similar titles can wreak havoc,” writesPhiladelphia Inquirer critic Carrie Rickey. “After a preview of Repo Men (Universal, 3.19), the Jude Law sci-fi thriller about organ hijackers, a perplexed filmgoer friend asked, ‘Was I wrong to think this was a remake of that Emilio Estevez comedy?’
“What a difference a vowel makes!
“Miguel Sapochnik‘s Repo Men (2010) is hard-core gore sci-fi starring Law and Forest Whitaker, and based on the sci-fi novel by Eric Garcia. Repo Man (1984) is a punk sci-fi comedy starring Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton, written and directed by Alex Cox.
“I love Cox’s movie, one of the great all-time cult films, and its droll perspective on the way the future looked in 1984. Set in a Los Angeles where all products are generic, all authority is suspect and aliens may be hiding in the trunk of your car, Repo Man is about Otto (Estevez) and his career repossessing stolen automobiles. (Otto: Auto.)
“I still crack up at the movie’s visual jokes about the sinister implications of tree-shaped air fresheners. I still crack up at its anarchic characters given to dialogue like, ‘Let’s go get sushi and not pay!’ And I love the film’s epiphany, delivered by the deadpan Tracey Walter: “The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.” And who doesn’t love the film’s transcendent climax, with a 1964 Chevy Malibu ascending to the heavens?
“I remember seeing the movie with my colleague Vince Canby who asked, with a delighted grin, “Did you ever expect to see a fusion of Close Encounters and Used Cars?”
Alan Poul‘s The Back-Up Plan (CBS Films, 4.23) is obviously a J.Lo rom-com — her first starring role in a mainstream comedy since ’02’s Maid in Manhattan. It’s also the sophomore offering from Les Moonves‘ nascent feature film division following Extraordinary Measures.
Obviously cut from the same formulaic cloth as 89 other films of this type. The marketing obviously invokes Sex & The City — same fonts, color scheme. I’m getting a bit of a small-screen feeling from the dialogue.
HE was attacked by a D-Day-level spam invasion yesterday and this morning. I had to spend about 90 minutes this morning deleting over 300 spam posts, and not just recent ones but in threads reaching back to January and February. Manage comments, ban the poster, delete “comments.” I may have accidentally deleted one or two legit postings.
TMZ has posted a year-old Nazi-garbed photo session with Michelle McGee, the lady who had a thing with Jesse James (Sandra Bullock‘s estranged husband) and then ratted him out to In Touch magazine for $30 grand.
I don’t particularly care about this — James got what he deserved — but the photos took me back to a 1973 industrial-design photo piece in the old National Lampoon called “Nazi Regalia for Gracious Living.”
The article was written by Bruce McCall with photographs by Dick Frank. The product was “manufactured” by Harry Fischman, Alan Rose, Celia Bau, and David Kaestle. Elizabeth Benett did the illustrations.
The satire in “Nazi Regalia for Gracious Living” was aimed at American middle-class values. (I think.) I now believe it was feeding off the same risque cultural pollen that began to manifest about a year later in various arthouse films (as well as some from the sexploitation field). The common idea/attitude in these films was that under the uniforms Nazis (or Italian fascists) had heavily suppressed sex lives with gay, S&M and B&D inclinations.
Tinto Brass‘s Salon Kitty, Liliana Cavani‘s The Night Porter, Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo and Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 all worked this into their narratives. I remember Andrew Sarris describing this cinematic trend as “homosexual Nazi chic.”
Apparent common consensus still insists that the ultimate Nazi sexploitation film was David F. Friedman‘s Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS.
Jett went to see She’s Out of My League with a friend last night, and says that any critic who gives it a pass is out of their mind. “It’s as bad as The Ugly Truth, that Gerard Butler-Kathryn Heigel movie,” he says. “It’s a one-joke thing — she’s hot and you’re not.” And yet it has a 51% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating. That’s the easy-lay contingent in action.
I decided months ago that I wouldn’t see She’s Out of My League with a gun at my back. Unless…you know, Scott Foundas or some other tough critic went to bat for it.
Nash Edgerton‘s The Spider, a nine minute and 11 second short, will be shown with The Square when it opens in early April. It’s been on the festival circuit for quite some time, but whatever.
