I don’t exactly live under a rock, and yet somehow the news of the death of journalist Shari Roman, which happened on 9/13 (or right smack dab in the middle of the Toronto Film Festival), eluded me until I read this 10.4 Indiewire report by Scott Macaulay. An excellent lady. Sharp, friendly, always inquisitive. I first met her at a Los Angeles Entertainment Weekly pitch meeting in ’92 or thereabouts. Macaulay’s story doesn’t say what took her; only that it was a “short illness.” Very sorry.
“We must reform a system that lets my father get better care than yours does, or better care than Mike’s daughter does, because by the accident of life I make more money than he does, or my checkbook can hold out longer than his does, or yours does, as the bills come endlessly like some evil version of the enchanted water buckets in Fantasia.
“The resources exist for your father and mine to get the same treatment to have the same chance and to both not have to lie there worried about whether or not they can afford to live!
“Afford to live? Are we at that point? Are we so heartless that we let the rich live and the poor die and everybody in between become wracked with fear — fear not of disease but of Deductibles? Right now, right now, somebody’s father is dying because they don’t have that dollar to spend. And the means by which the playing field is leveled, and the costs that are just as inflated to me as they are to you are reduced, and the money that I don’t have to spend any more on saving my father can go instead to saving your father. That’s called health care reform!”
As a lifelong fan of Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick“, which came out in ’79 or ’80, I’m naturally keen on seeing Sex & Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll, a British-made biopic with Andy Serkis as Dury. Directed by Mat Whitecross from a screenplay by Paul Viragh, it’ll probably turn up in Cannes next May…although one can always hope for Sundance ’10.
Andy Serkis (I think) as Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll.
If you’ve never heard “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick”, please give it a listen.
I’m actually going to try to speak to Whitecross or Viragh during next week’s Fantastic Mr. Fox London press-junket visit. If they’re around, I obviously mean. (As well as try to see Michael Caine‘s Harry Brown, which opens in London next month but which I missed at last month’s Toronto Film Festival.)
Serkis’s costars include Naomie Harris, Ray Winstone, Olivia Williams, Bill Milner, Toby Jones, Noel Clarke and Mackenzie Crool.
Financed by Prescience, Aegis, the UK Film Council and Lip Sync, worldwide sales are being handled by Odyssey Entertainment.
This guy makes some intelligent points, but his argument about brushing aside Samantha Geimer‘s plea that the Polanski case should be forgotten because the laws are about protecting “we the people” and “for the good of the people” sounds a little wingnutty to me.
The 78 year-old Polanski doing more time will, I realize, make a symbolic statement that justice prevails and no one can ultimately defy U.S. law. But anyone over the age of 10 will see this as hollow moralistic theatre — a play aimed at those who refuse to tune in to the truly serious corruptions and malignancies plaguing the country and the planet, but whose pulses race when someone talks about putting Polanksi’s head on a pike.
Polanski would do well to stop fighting extradition and just see the situation through in the U.S. and do whatever he can to put the case to an end. A 10.9 Thomson Reuters report quotes Polanski’s lawyer as saying his client “is in fighting mood and determined to defend himself” and then “U.S. judicial sources” saying “the complex extradition process could take years, if Polanski challenges it.” In other words, he’s dug in and determined to stay in a Swiss jail for as long as it takes — possibly “years” — in order to prevent the possibility of going to jail in the U.S. for maybe eighteen months but possibly less. Does that make any sense at all?
I wish someone from the “show compassion, put things in perspective and let it go” side of the debate would make a similar video so we can have a good tit-for-tat.
In this discussion with Republican Gomorrah author Max Blumenthal, Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough tries to portray the Glenn Beck/Michelle Bachman/wingnut tea-bagger fringe as acceptable, par-for-the-course manifestations of political dispute. And the acquiescent timidity shown by Mika Brzezsinski and Tom Brokaw, obviously uncomfortable with the concept of calling a spade a spade, is, to me, fairly deplorable.
In a 10.7 posting, Vanity Fair.com’s John Lopezexplains how the Coen brothers have been assembling a decade-by-decade cinematic portrait of this country that defines the American century. The 1920s in Miller’s Crossing, the 1930s in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the late 1930s (or early 1940s) in Barton Fink, the late ’40s in The Man Who Wasn’t There, the ’50s in Hudsucker Proxy, the ’60s in A Serious Man, the ’80s in a Coen trifecta of Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men and Fargo, the ’90s in The Big Lebowski, and the 21st Century with Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading.
Barackobama.com is asking people to submit a 30 second video that makes the case for passing health insurance reform. Does this mean, given the Obama administration’s half-hearted, all-but-abandoned support of public-option insurance, that the spots should avoid mentioning this? Because that’s bullshit. The site’s choice of suggested topics certainly indicates that they’ve forgotten about a public option component. Wimps.
I saw two films today — Nowhere Boy at 11 am and Fantastic Mr. Fox at 2 pm. It’s too early to discuss either but that’s what I’ve been doing. And I’ve been sitting at a Starbucks at Eighth and 52nd for the last couple of hours, sending emails and doodling around.
Less than two months ago David Mackenzie‘s Spread, a moralistic drama in the vein of Shampoo and American Gigolo about a young Los Angeles poon-hound (Ashton Kutcher) boning his way through a stunningly vapid life, opened and quickly died. It was guillotined by critics (earning a ruinous 14% Rotten Tomatoes rating) and had only made a lousy $249,590 by 9.6.09.
But I saw it on a screener last night, and to my surprise didn’t have that many problems with it. It’s too formulaic by half, but it struck me as an honest and fairly ballsy look at a certain strata of Los Angeles culture — every scene felt straight and candid and well-rounded — and Kutcher gives a fully inhabited, honestly shallow ace-level performance — equal in my mind to Warren Beatty‘s in Shampoo or Richard Gere‘s in American Gigolo — as a guy who finally starts to wake up to the life-is-hard-and-short aspect of things in Act Three.
And Jason Hall‘s screenplay is tart and clean and to the point, and Steven Poster‘s cinematography is luscious and beautifully framed at every turn. Spread didn’t deserve to die in is crib. It’s nothing to write home about, but any movie that has a narrator referring to “six foot tall women who weight 98 pounds” can’t be all bad. it’s a better-than-half-decent film, and certainly worth a rental.
I’d write more but I have to be at an 11 am screening.
An Education, I realize, is delivering its opening week promotional assault, but this Variety-produced video is probably the smartest and best-edited promo piece I’ve seen about this film, and the three or four clips are particularly well chosen. Peter Sarsgaard, especially, delivers a choice quote or two. Scott Feinberg, by the way, has laid out an argument for Sarsgaard being nominated for Best Supporting Actor (along with Alfred Molina).
