This two-day-old quote from Jennifer Love Hewitt is the single most interesting and amusing thing she’s ever said in her life, in all her years of being in the shallow spotlight: “I wish I had been nude from the time I was 12 until I was 28. I looked great! I want to tell all young girls to walk around in bikinis all summer…and enjoy it. I want to tell them to never, ever feel bad about anything, because there will be that one day in your 20s when you’ll eat a hamburger and actually see the hamburger on the side of your leg.”
I’m sorry but that’s funny, the side-of-your-leg thing. And JLH has been banal all her life, so this is a kind of small but significant breakthrough, even if she’s been over for years.
In a related topic, before today I had never heard much less conceived of an ass bra. I happened across this thing in Amy O’Dell‘s “The Cut” on the newyorkmag site. From this day forward, a fair-game term that anyone can use.
“In his entertaining book ‘Richistan,” Robert Frank of The Wall Street Journal declares that the rich aren’t just different from you and me — they live in a different, parallel country. But that country is divided into levels, and only the inhabitants of upper Richistan live like aristocrats. The inhabitants of middle Richistan lead ample but not gilded lives, and lower Richistanis live in McMansions, drive around in S.U.V.’s, and are likely to think of themselves as ‘affluent’ rather than rich.
“Even these arguably not-rich, however, live in a different financial universe from that inhabited by ordinary members of the middle class: they have lots of disposable income after paying for the essentials, and they don’t lose sleep over expenses, like insurance co-pays and tuition bills, that can seem daunting to many working American families.
“Which brings us to the dispute about tax policy.
“[John] McCain wants to preserve almost all the Bush tax cuts, and add to them by cutting taxes on corporations. Mr. Obama wants to roll back the high-end Bush tax cuts — the cuts in tax rates on the top two income brackets and the cuts in tax rates on income from dividends and capital gains — and use some of that money to reduce taxes lower down the scale.
“According to estimates prepared by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, those Obama tax increases would fall overwhelmingly on people with incomes of more than $200,000 a year. Are such people rich? Well, maybe not: some of those Barack Obama proposes taxing are only denizens of lower Richistan, although the really big tax increases would fall on upper Richistan.
“But one thing’s for sure: Mr. Obama isn’t planning to raise taxes on the middle class, by any reasonable definition — even that of the Bush administration.” — from Paul Krugman‘s 8.22 column in the N.Y. Times, called “Now That’s Rich.”
I sent a message to a friend who always goes to the Telluride Film Festival, which is starting six days from now but never announces its slate until the night before (or Thursday, 8.29). I actually wrote three…no, four guys about it, fishing around for anything.
“I’m hearing Mike Leigh‘s Happy Go Lucky,” I told friend #1. “I’ve never loved a Leigh film, although I’ve liked or at least respected each one. And I know about a special tribute presentation for a major director (which will include a short 10 or 12-minute reel from his latest film, which will open later this year), along the lines of a tribute TFF had last year for Paul Thomas Anderson that included a short There Will Be Blood reel.
“I’m also hearing that Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Burning Plain won’t be there. I’m hearing…okay, intuiting that Jonathan Demme‘s Rachel Getting Married may be included, but this is based on a long history of fall Sony Classics releases showing up there. What else?”
As today is probably the day when Barack Obama‘s actual vice-presidential pick will be text-messaged around, I am taking this opportunity to say (a) Joe Biden….please, and (b) if Obama had truly man-sized cojones (which means, in part, not caring if your friends and enemies think you have big ones or not) he would suck it in, allow his penis to revert down to the size of a cashew nut and persuade the demonic Hillary Clinton to join him.
Just like JFK sucked it in and got the slippery, conniving, wheeler-dealing Lyndon Johnson to be his vp.
Because then, at least, BHO would have a genuine shot at winning because those Hillary holdouts might finally say “okay, I’ll vote for him.” Clinton is a conniving diabolical fiend and a fang-toothed, baggy-eyed monster from hell, but she shares many of the same values and would probably be able to assist BHO in Congress, blah blah, and she’d kick ass on the campaign trail and so would Bill, even with his resentments and whatnot. Politics is about locality, practicality and cutting deals, and you don’t have to like someone to make a deal that will get you what you want.
CNN is reporting that BHO called some of the short-list guys and gals yesterday and told them he’s chosen someone else. I presume that group included Hillary. I presume — hope, pray, need to hear — it’s Biden. A part of all of us will die inside if he picks Texas Rep. Chet Edwards.
It’s a little bit of a deflater when you go to a film that’s been buzzed up, or which you’ve been buzzing up in your head, and then it turns out to be, like, less than that. I had two such experiences yesterday. What happens is that in order to work through your reactions you wind up calling everyone you know who’s seen them and bat it around. That eats up an hour or two, easy. Especially when you’ve got two films to discuss.
I’ve learned from experience to tap something out right away or you’ll forget where you put the fuel. One easy way to get rolling is to bounce of someone else’s reaction, and one thing I heard this morning is that a certain earlybird fellow suspects that one of the films I saw yesterday may be a “near masterpiece.” Yeegodz.
McCain not knowing how many homes he owns is a good score for the Obama team. That plus defining rich as having $5 million in assets are excellent personal-economic-values distinctions that need to brought up again and again. But as Richard Miniter wrote yesterday on pajamasmedia.com, the easiest and least problematic answer to “How many homes do you own” would have been for McCain to say “none — my wife owns them all.”
But that would mean big John McCain acknowledging to the whole world that his presumptive dominant alpha-male posture is that just — a posture — compared to Cindy’s economic power. And righties can’t do that. They need to be able to beat their chests like gorillas in front of their friends and their business or political friends, or they’re nothing. That’s why McCain pretended not to know (or care) yesterday. Because speaking the truth would have made him feel diminished.
I saw Isbael Coixet‘s Elegy (Samuel Goldwyn, 8.8) twice before it opened — once at a screening, again at the Aero theatre –and in so doing told myself and two or three friends that I rather liked it, or at least was okay with it. But I haven’t been able to write a darn thing about it. Despite the fine lead performances by Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz and the secondary Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard, Dennis Hopper, etc. Despite enjoying the upscale pedigree, the obvious intelligence of Nicholas Meyer‘s screenplay (based on Phillip Roth‘s “The Dying Animal”), the tasteful nudity, the general atmosphere of cultivation, manicured toenails and older-guy gloom.
Why did I blow it off? Because there was something too glum and quiet and resigned about it — something overly subdued, sensitive, talky. I enjoyed the quality vibe, I had no real problems with any of it, but it didn’t turn me on in the slightest.
And because — here we go with another shallow thought (and what would this site be without such things on an occasional basis?) — I didn’t like the idea of a fetching 30ish brunette like Cruz going to bed with an old coot like Kingsley. He’s too weathered, too nuts (Kingsley will always be Don Logan, and vice versa), his nose has gotten too bulbous with age (it was just the right size when he made Betrayal and Gandhi in the early ’80s) and I didn’t like the bedroom scene with Clarkson when the camera just sits there and stares at the puffy soles of his white feet and his pushed-together toes for a couple of minutes straight. Call me empty, but that’s why more people haven’t paid to see it.
Early yesterday afternoon I sat down with Jordi Molla, a bearded, blue-eyed, remarkably serene Spanish actor who plays a Bolivian commander in Steven Soderbergh‘s Che. No one in Soderbergh’s four-hour-plus epic has any real “movie moments” — it’s a movie about being there and hanging with Che Guevara during the two most vivid dramatic chapters in his life — but he’s basically a bad guy who has a lot of Guevara’s men shot.
Jordi Molla at Le Pain Quotidien — Thursday, 8.20.08, 12:25 pm
Molla still hasn’t seen Che, and won’t see until it premieres in Spain. Molla was shooting a film in Cannes during the festival and therefore could have seen Che when it showed at the Grand Palais, but the shooting days were long and demanding and he likes to get a good eight hours sleep when he’s working.
There was immediate comfort for me because of Molla’s European attitude — settled, moderate energy, not eager to project positiveness or buoyancy like most actors (but at the same time not sour or downish), okay with the flow of the tide, low-key, que sera sera. Due to his attitude or whatever, the L.A. vibe around us seemed to recede on some level, and I began to feel if I was sitting in an outdoor cafe in downtown Barcelona.
Molla was initially cast by Terence Malick four years ago to be in his Che film, which Malick had been looking to shoot for years although it eventually became Soderbergh’s after Malick fell out. Molla has been in tons of Spanish-produced films (including one for Pedro Almodovar) but his big appearances stateside have been in Blow, The Alamo and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. He’s been in the game since he costarred 16 years ago with Javier Bardem in Jamon Jamon.
I said something about having visited Cadaques, Spain, which isn’t too far from Barcelona, where he first studied acting. I think he said he’d visited there as a youth. If he didn’t say that then whatever, but Cadaques is a great little town either way.
Molla paints well enough to have had his work exhibited at Sotheby’s Gallery, Madrid (’07) and Galeria Carmen de la Guerra in Madrid. Molla has also directed two short films (Walter Peralta and No me importaria irme contigo) and written two books (Las primeras veces and Agua estancada).
“Mr. [Blankety-blank], we have rules that are not open to interpretation, personal intuition, gut feelings, hairs on the back of your neck, little devils or angels sitting on your shoulder. We’re all very well aware of what our orders are and what those orders mean. They come down from our Commander in Chief. They contain no ambiguity. Mr. [Blankety-blank], I’ve made a decision, I’m captain of this boat, now shut the fuck up!” — an oft-repeated quote from (a) Run Silent, Run Deep, (b) The Enemy Below, (c) Captain Ron, (d) Two Years Before The Mast, (e) Crimson Tide, (f) Billy Budd.
Both Variety‘s Robert Koehler and CHUD’s Devin Faraci have recently driven out to Claremont to see Religulous, and have today posted poz reviews, Koehler calling it “brilliant” and “incendiary” and Faraci saying that anti-religion barbs aside, it “stacks up really well” as a film.
On top of which The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, who caught the Bill Maher-Larry Charles doc at a New York screening in Tuesday, is saying it’s clearly “in the derby” due to this week’s Oscar-qualifying bookings, the rave responses and the fact that savvy big-time publicists Michele Robertson and Jeff Hill have been hired to push an awards campaign.
“The only recent comparable example of entertainers venturing into such serious cultural-political territory is Penn & Teller‘s Showtime series Bullshit!, which skewers sacred cows from a skeptical-libertarian perspective,” Koehler notes. “Charles’ previous smash, Borat, used funnyman Sacha Baron Cohen to make satirical/political points, but the particular intensity and seriousness of Maher’s project are nearly unprecedented.
“Indeed, its arrival shortly after the death of George Carlin — a profound influence on Maher’s standup act and politics — suggests the kind of film Carlin might have made in his prime.
“Considering he was once a minor comic on the circuit and a supporting thesp in generally awful film comedies, Maher’s transformation into one of America’s sharpest social critics is remarkable. He takes no script credit, but his periodic monologues to the camera are undeniably written, and written well.
“Ending minutes, though, will catch auds up short: Suddenly, the laughs die down, and as in his closing monologues on Real Time, Maher turns deadly serious with a final statement that will stir raging arguments in theater lobbies.”
Laemmle’s Claremont during construction phase prior to opening last year.
Faraci notes that “the basic concept has Maher traveling around the world talking to believers about what they believe, and most importantly why (or how they can believe it, for that matter). From the Holy Land to the Holy Land Experience theme park in Florida, Maher goes where the believers are and engages them on their home turf. That makes a huge difference in how the film feels, as does the fact that he actually confronts them.
“Religulous is directed by comic genius and Borat helmer Larry Charles, and it would have been easy to do this movie in a similar vein to that one — letting these people dig themselves a ridiculous hole with their own words — but Maher isn’t interested in that. He wants to interact with these people, to confront them with the logic-hating aspects of their faiths and see what they come back with.
“That’s where I think the movie succeeds the most, but also one of the main places where detractors will come after it. They’ll say that Maher is looking just to clown these people, but that isn’t the case. He’s more than slightly exasperated with the cop-out answers that people give him (to the point where he actually gets kind of excited when a Jesus impersonater explains the paradoxical Holy Trinity by comparing it to the three states of water — it’s bullshit, Maher says, but it’s interesting and new bullshit to him).
“This film is supposed to be funny so he’s being funny, but he’s also being fair. He’s asking these people straight, direct questions. In return he’s getting garbage like ‘What if you die and find out you’re wrong?'”
I sat down late this afternoon with Alex Holdridge, director-writer of In Search of a Midnight Kiss, and his two stars, Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds. Easily the best written, most recognizably “real” younger person’s relationship drama I’ve seen since Richard Linklater‘s Before Sunset (and probably the most beautifully photographed), it opens in Los Angeles on Friday. I’ll relate some of our conversation tomorrow.
In Search of a Midnight Kiss costars Scoot McNairy (l.), Sara Simmonds, director-cowriter Alex Holdridge (r.) at West Hollywood’s Le Pain Quotidien — Wednesday, 8.21, 6:15 pm
Holdridge, McNairy
- Really Nice Ride
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall‘s Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year’s Telluride...
More » - Live-Blogging “Bad Boys: Ride or Die”
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when...
More » - One of the Better Apes Franchise Flicks
It took me a full month to see Wes Ball and Josh Friedman‘s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes...
More »
- The Pull of Exceptional History
The Kamala surge is, I believe, mainly about two things — (a) people feeling lit up or joyful about being...
More » - If I Was Costner, I’d Probably Throw In The Towel
Unless Part Two of Kevin Costner‘s Horizon (Warner Bros., 8.16) somehow improves upon the sluggish initial installment and delivers something...
More » - Delicious, Demonic Otto Gross
For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg‘s tastiest and wickedest film — intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...
More »