In honor of tonight’s swear-along screening of Scarface at the John Ford Anson amphitheatre, a YouTube clip that features all 226 f-word expletives.
In honor of tonight’s swear-along screening of Scarface at the John Ford Anson amphitheatre, a YouTube clip that features all 226 f-word expletives.
Three of my favorite scenes from Karel Reisz‘s Who’ll Stop The Rain? Rich cryptic dialogue on this level (which is largely taken verbatim Robert Stone‘s novel) has almost completely disappeared from movies. Clip #1 — “I’ve been waiting all my life to fuck up like this.” Clip #2 — “All my life I’ve been taking shit from inferior people…no more!” Clip #3 — “I hate jailbird chess…I hate the style…like a fuckin’ little tweety bird…’eeww, here‘s a move!”
An interview between original Inglorious Bastards director Enzo G. Castellari and Quentin Tarantino on the forthcoming three-disc DVD (out 7.29) of his 1978 film reveals that Tarantino’s new version of the film, which may be shot and released sometime before 2010, will be a two-parter like Kill Bill. This, at least, is what Harry Knowles is reporting. Good God.
The interview, says knowles, also reveals that Tarantino “has been writing almost non-stop on Inglorious Bastards.” Is that why Tarantino said at last month’s Cannes Film Festival that he’d finished a first draft? After talking about wanting to make this thing for…what, the last nine or ten years?
My only concern about Burn After Reading, the comic tone of which seems exqisite in its dry, deadpan-ness (being a smart but broad lampoon of stupid people with delusions of grandeur), is that it’ll be too fully appreciated and digested by the time in opens in mid-September. Meaning that people may go to it saying, “Yeah, yeah, we get all that, fine. But that was last summer and this is September, so what else can you show us?” I’m speaking, of course, about a very small group of online trailer-watching aficionados.
Pierre Morel‘s Taken (20th Century Fox, 9.18.08) is a thriller about an ex-spook (Liam Neeson) using his espionage skills to save his estranged daughter (Maggie Grace) from baddies who’ve kidnapped her and sold her into the slave trade. A rescue is necessary because once a beautiful young woman has been abducted and sold, she has no choice but to do what she’s been told to do, and is of course powerless to attempt an escape on her own.
“Hillary Clinton is taking a month off from her job as senator to rest up from her campaign. How does that work? You’ve been neglecting your job trying to get a better job. You don’t get that job, so you to take a month off from the job you were trying to get out of and go on vacation. Imagine if you tried that with your boss. ‘Hey boss, listen — I’ve been looking for another job, and I’m exhausted. I want to take a month off. Here’s where you can send my checks.'” — from a Jay Leno monologue delivered the night before last (i.e., Wednesday).
“Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today,” writes conservative-minded N.Y. Times columnist David Brooks. “On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.
“This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.
“But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the Ari in Entourage and it all falls into place.
“I have to admit, I’m ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life, all for a tiny political advantage. If he’ll sell that out, what won’t he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain’t beanbag. If we’re going to have a president who is going to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.
“All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naive. But naive is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.”
Okay, Brooks — we all get the Fast Eddie analogy. But think about that Paul Newman character from The Hustler and the concept starts to fade a bit. Fast Eddie was a hustler, all right, but he was nothing if not morally and ethically bothered by who he was and what his life amounted to. He was obsessed with not being a loser, but guilt-wracked over having looked the other way when poor alcoholic Sara (Piper Laurie) begged hjim not to hang with the likes of Burt the operator (George C. Scott). And he ended up following her lead in the end, saying goodbye to the work of hustling and pool-sharking.
The truth is that we all have a little Fast Eddie inside of us. We’re all ambitious and opportunistic to varying degrees, but we all feel a little guilty about it, and the best of us take the high road at the end of the day.
Someone told me about a script that tells the story of when Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese lived together. It’s supposed to be pretty remarkable, but you can’t trust the talk. Does anyone know the title or the history of it? If it’s real and all it’s cracked up to be, does anyone have a PDF they can send along?
Has anyone seen a trailer for Hancock that has significant footage of Charlize Theron? I’m told by someone who’s seen it that she has a fairly large costarring role, but the trailers are entirely (or almost entirely) about Will Smith, his super-powers, his drinking problem, going to prison, getting well, etc.
I’ve never liked that Universal globe that appears at the beginning of their films. Not the one that was around in the late ’80s to mid ’90s (with the Universal logo orbiting the earth and coming to rest in front of the camera), but the luminous funny-looking one that’s been around for…what, eight or nine years?
The oddly intense colors on the continents look like a manifestation of some disease, like electric rashes or earth lesions. The real earth is such a beautiful thing; the colors and textures so soft and yet strong with all those browns and blues and gentle greens. The Universal gang should really think about dropping what they have and devising something new. Anything but the present version.
Sputblog’s Christopher Campbell does a goof piece on 10 Actors Who Changed Ethnicity Using Facial Hair, and doesn’t mention Hugh Griffith in Ben-Hur or Alec Guiness in Lawrence of Arabia?
Entertainment Weekly‘s list of Top Ten Films of the past 25 years isn’t posted online — not yet, at least — but it’s in the issue currently on the stands, according to HE reader Dan Gaertner.
First of all, what does “top” mean? Most popular? Most influential? Most frequently rented from Netflix? If you need further proof that enlightened film culture is withering and dying on the vine, look no further. Pulp Fiction, Blue Velvet and The Silence of the Lambs, okay, but the rest…? This is worse than any list put together by the American Film Institute. The EW editors who put this list together have officially left the planet. They’re floating above us as we speak, breathing air that’s obviously lacking some basic ingredient.
Right off the top we’re going to have deep-six the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for obvious reasons. The last 25 minutes of Titanic is heart-melting and transcendent, but the problems with the rest of it should automatically exclude it from a list of this proportion. I love Toy Story is it but one of the top films of the last 25 fucking years? Neither Crimes and Misdemeanors or Husbands and Wives are as funny or heart-warming but are certainly better and more important than Hannah and Her Sisters in the Woody canon.
Saving Private Ryan is disqualified for the “cheat” fade that suggests that the old man at the Normandy cemetery is Tom Hanks on the landing craft. Die Hard is a beautifully well-oiled thriller and the best thing Joel Silver has ever produced, but again — it deserves to be on a list like this? Moulin Rouge gets the hook because the first 20 to 25 minutes of this Baz Luhrman film made my head feel as if it was going to explode.
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