The once-legendary Soupy Sales, an immensely likable josher, has died at age 83. This video reminds that the best part of the New York-area Soupy Sales Show (also called Lunch with Soupy Sales) was the offscreen laughter from the crew. Sales’ career peak happened during a live engagement at the Paramount theatre during the 1965 Easter holiday. I’d love to find a YouTube of Frank Sinatra‘s visit to Sales’ show the same year.,
Here’s a tip-of-the-hat to whomever makes the in-flight video programming decisions for Continental Airlines. All airlines program contemporary crap (i.e., Land of the Lost, Transformers 2) but very few include classic films. I’m just saying it was enormously comforting to watch John Ford‘s The Grapes of Wrath and Howard Hawks‘ Bringing Up Baby during Wednesday’s JFK-to-LAX flight. It mitigated an otherwise close-to-hellish experience (i.e., stuck in a cramped seat on a seemingly interminable flight).
Dogwood Entertainment and Freestyle Releasing have pacted on a limited theatrical release of Scott Teems‘ That Evening Sun, which reputedly boasts an award-level performance by Hal Holbrook. Pic will open in New York on 11.6 and in LA on 11.20. Holbrook will reportedly make appear at each theater on the film’s opening nights in New York and Los Angeles.
Variety‘s Joe Leydon has called it “an exceptionally fine example of regional indie filmmaking [that] deserves savvy handling by a venturesome distrib to maximize its potential to attract auds and win prizes. Pic’s major selling point is Holbrook’s career-highlight star turn as an irascible octogenarian farmer who will not go gentle into that good night. But this deliberately paced, richly atmospheric drama also boasts first-rate work by a splendid supporting cast and impressive production values that would pass muster in a much pricier production.”
“As everyone knows before I started making movies I was working in a video store. I made my first movie is ’92…well, ’91. And somebody asked me the question, ‘In 1988, if someone had told you [that] you were going to be getting the Kirk Douglas Excellence in Filmmaking Award, given to you by Kirk Douglas… would you have believed it? And it actually stopped me completely in my tracks on the red carpet. ‘No,’ I said. ‘That would have been unfathomable.”
Diane Kruger, Kirk Douglas, Quentin Tarantino at last night’s Santa Barbara Film Festival presentation of the Kirk Douglas Excellence in Filmmaking Award ceremony.
This was Quentin Tarantino‘s opening remark last night on the occasion of his receiving the KDEIF award in Santa Barbara. He then told a good story about watching a fragment of The Vikings when he was six years old (i.e., the part when Tony Curtis kills Douglas with a broken sword) and then watching Spartacus a few months later and figuring it was the same film, etc. (Watch it on the YouTube clip below.)
Tarantino was gracious and amusing and very much the debonair gentleman. Douglas (who will be 93 in December) looked happy. Inglourious Basterds costar Diane Kruger was there. Producer Lawrence Bender was there. Dennis Miller, who charmed the world with his Sonia Sotomayor “La Cucharacha” joke on Bill O’Reilly‘s show a while back, was there.
Ditto Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling (wearing a Brad Pitt/Inglorious Basterds haircut), SBFF publicist Carol Marshall and numerous well-heeled ladies and gents representing the creme de la creme of Santa Barbara society.
It was a black-tie event, and I had flown to California under-prepared. I had my black pants, socks and shoes and a nice tuxedo shirt…but no black suit jacket. So I asked L.A. Times/Envelope columnist Pete Hammond, who was also planning to attend, if I could borrow a black evening jacket, and he obliged. Except Pete’s arms are shorter than mine and my white shirt cuffs were sticking out like crazy. It looked absurd. So I started telling people that short jacket sleeves was a new avant-garde fashion thing.
Another problem was that I was still on my New York clock, plus I made the mistake of accepting two Metropolitans early on. By the time the dinner had been served and eaten and the program began (a span of roughly two hours) I was feeling a little groggy. I had my pen and note pad at the ready but the energy wasn’t there. I felt it best to slip out before the end of the show.
My infinite wisdom led me to decide it would be best to not drive back to Los Angeles with vodka in my bloodstream. I stayed at a Motel 6 in Carpinteria, which has been spiffed up in recent years.
10.22.09, 6:10 pm.
10.22.09, 6:55 pm.
10.22.09, 10:35 pm.
An intriguing similarity between Amelia and Up In The Air has been remarked upon by Eric Kohn in Moving Pictures magazine.
I need to hump it up to Santa Barbara’s Biltmore Hotel tonight for a special fundraiser honoring Quentin Tarantino and Inglourious Basterds. “Why are you going if you’re not a huge fan of Basterds?,” a guy asked me earlier today. Well, I said, because I’ve long enjoyed, savored and respected the Tarantino brand — sometimes less so, sometimes more so, depending. And gatherings like this are as much about honoring the life work of the honoree as the latest film.
The Weinstein Co. obviously wants Basterds to be one of the ten Best Picture nominees and Quentin to land a Best Picture nomination, and tonight’s event is intended to put that notion across. Fine, whatever. They might get there. Being the event whore that I am, I just want to be there and take pictures and bask in the glare.
Everyone remembers the concept of dog or cat heaven from childhood. Toddlers needed to be comforted about the death of Fido or Snickers, and from this the theological concept of separate heavens for each and every animal species was born and passed along by parents. It follows, of course, that if dogs have their own heavenly realm then there must also be an ant heaven and a mosquito heaven — a place in the clouds in which triillions upon trillions of ants and mosquitoes fly around with little insect angel wings.
Not to mention snake heaven, wildbeest heaven, bird heaven, giraffe heaven, grasshopper heaven, pelican heaven, trout heaven, worm heaven…the list is infinite.
Strict conservative constructionists will tell you that God doesn’t love lower animal species as much as he loves homo sapiens and therefore they don’t rate a heaven. When they’re dead, they’re dead as a blackened remnant of a leaf floating up and away from a bonfire. That’s arrogance, of course. The mind of God is so vast and dazzling and exquisitely perfect that if He/She even deigned to consider which life forms deserved to peacefully frolic in some spiritually serene after-life realm, He/She would surely regard all of creation as one unified and equal-opportunity symphony with one species singled out above all the others because of a semi-developed brainpan and the ability to speak and write and make movies like 2012, G.I. Joe and Transformers 2.
Either ants, dogs and giraffes go to heaven along with humans when they die, or we’re all equally mulch with no choir, no clouds, no Robin Williams walking around with his dog, no Joe Pendleton looking to play quarterback for a team that’s going to the Superbowl, and no Jack Dawson waiting at the top of the grand staircase of the Titanic.
If Warner Home Video’s new North by Northwest Bluray has a kick-around issue, it’s the somewhat darker tones. I chose these comparisons (lifted from DVD Beaver’s NXNW page) because the 2004 DVD seems to deliver a more naturally-lighted version of what an agricultural area in southern Illinois might look like. (Yes, I know — the crop-duster scene was actually shot somewhere around Bakersfield.)
Frame capture from Warner Home Video’s forthcoming North by Northwest Bluray.
From WHV’s 2004 DVD.
What does it say about the state of U.S. culture (or at least the Los Angeles version of it, which is generally thought to be more scattered fizz-pop ADD than in other regions of the country) that Ennio Moricone‘s “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood” concert at the Hollywood Bowl, scheduled for Sunday, 8.25) has been cancelled. My assumption is that this happened due to lousy ticket sales. If so then woe unto thee, O Hollywood Babylon — you have sinned a great sin against the Movie Godz.
Ennio Morricone
Morricone, the winner of a 2007 honorary Oscar in 2007, would have conducted the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and the Angeles Chorale playing excerpts from his four-decade career in the movie business. Has this ever happened to John Williams? I kinda doubt it. Or James Horner?
“I don’t know who the handlers are, ” Envelope contributor Pete Hammond says. “The event kind of came into town recently…not more than three weeks ago. This is kind of a drastic thing to do. I don’t know if this was due to disappointing ticket, but if it is this is really a pathetic statement about Los Angeles movie culture.”
Solution: Morricone’s handlers need to arrange for an alternative venue at Royce Hall or wherever, or even a free concert in a park somewhere. The hell with ticket sales. This is shameful. The man needs to play his stuff and the right people need to hear it, and Los Angeles needs to nurture its movie-loving soul. Who are we if someone like Morricone can’t find a decent-sized audience?
“If there’s a Precious backlash — ‘if,’ I say — it’s due to the oppressively ugly, emotionally sadistic vibe generated by Mo’Nique‘s ‘mom from hell’ character. It’s a movie about compassion and, at the end, a ray or two of light breaking through the clouds, but the cruelty we are obliged to endure (along with poor Gabby, of course) is quite awful. Mo’Nique sells malicious monsterhood like a champ. So if — IF — there’s a certain hesitancy or resistance to Precious, it’s that.”
This was my response when The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil e-mailed me yesterday about “the shocking omission of Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire from the list of Gotham Awards nominees,” and particularly about the
alleged Precious backlash that N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick wrote about on 10.20.
Here’s Lumenick’s followup piece.
The timing of this Vogue cover featuring four Nine costars — Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Kate Hudson — seems intended to boost the 11.29 opening (a little more than a month hence) rather than the currently scheduled 12.18 debut (a little less than two months hence). Not a huge deal but still.
10.22.09, 7:25 am
Kitchen of Chance and Debbie Browne of Wilton, Connecticut — Wednesday, 10.21, 8:55 pm.
Please ignore that idiotic news story linked to by Movie City News about yesterday’s Tokyo Film Festival screening of The Cove (or more specifically about a letter of complaint from a Taiji fisheries cooperative plus a bullshit threat to sue over suspected “factual errors”). And focus instead on a first-person account of the screening by Cove director Louie Psihoyos, posted a few hours after the screening.
“Today was surreal,” he describes. “Teams of news crews were turned away and banned from the film festival property. The festival planners roped off the green carpet so I had to take an escalator up to the in the screening. It was obvious they didn’t want any more press on The Cove screenings. There wasn’t a single poster up of The Cove around the grounds or the theater. Just a piece of paper taped onto the theater doors saying ‘The Cove.’
“I was shuffled away from the news crews and taken through a series of hallways and warned not to walk around because of protesters. I didn’t see any protesters.
“I had asked to introduce the film, and looking around the audience I saw many of the main characters in our film. Is that Private Space? Look, that’s the Taiji Mayor, and Moronuki. And some of the fisherman [only dressed] in suits? There’s Joji’s predecessor from the Japanese International Whaling Commission Komatsu himself, who is famous for his quote, ‘Whales are the cockroaches of the oceans.’
“I was deep into enemy territory but I was armed with the most powerful weapon in the world — a film.
“The Mayor of Taiji couldn’t get tickets because the screening was sold out, so I had offered him [a] ticket allotment so his city council could attend as well. In the end it was deemed too expensive for them all to come, so I had faxed him an invitation that OPS would screen The Cove for the whole town of Taiji for an Ocean Film Festival.
“The q & a [following] the screening was mostly silent from the dark forces. Really though, how can they defend what they just witnessed?
“Moronuki got to see even more of the killing footage that I flashed to him on my iPhone in the film, but not in context with the rest of the movie. Now there he was, a few rows from the front, smiling blankly like his worst nightmares had become real and everyone in the room had come to share them. That must be what it’s like to be a politician caught on a film taking a bribe. I felt like somebody could have set him in a coffin, folded his hands over his chest, buried him and he wouldn’t have resisted.
“Komatsu, who wrote the definitive book on the Japanese defense of whaling, had his head between his knees and was frantically rubbing his temples as if trying to poltergeist a migraine. If everybody else around him wasn’t in shock, I think they would have gotten him a doctor.
“The mayor of Taiji stormed out like a man in need of a restroom. He didn’t come back. I don’t expect he’ll be following up on the offer of a Taiji Ocean Film Festival anytime soon. Lots of fishermen in nice suits with their lawyers in attendance were slinked down and shielding their faces. There were numerous threats to sue TIFF if the film was shown.
“The question came up, and I said, ‘The dolphin hunters said they were proud of their profession, so what are they afraid of? The Taiji mayor said they only closed off the cove because of danger of falling rocks. I watched the cove for weeks and didn’t see any falling rocks. So I put in some of my own to see for sure.’ That got laughs from the ex-pat community and the mostly sympathetic Japanese community.
“I told the audience that as much as we all feel that the film is about animal rights, the way to win the argument is through human rights. Dolphin meat is toxic, all of it. The meat violates Japanese Health laws, and I called for the new Ministries of Health under the new political party to enforce their health laws. The LDP was in power in Japan for 53 years. Since WWII. A corrupt oligarchy whose four-lane highways to nowhere are the stuff of legend. They subsidized the whaling industry with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. The new government is shutting down those large construction projects, and of course were all hoping whaling gets shut down too.
“I told the audience that if Japan shut down whaling and joined the International community on this issue, their economy would soar. I said whale watching has earned far more money than whale killing has ever made, even when one compensates for the value of money then and now. All whaling and dolphin killing accounts for only 1/10th of one percent of the toothbrush market in their huge economy, but it stains their international reputation to no end.”
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