Can you imagine being dead for 48 years, just floating around in some airy-fairy, non-material way, when a bulletin from earth suddenly punctuates your cosmic head-space? The news being that a guy named David Bret has nailed you in a book for having had halitosis, hepatitis, rotting teeth and “shovel-like” hands? I don’t know that these and similar revelations concerning Clark Gable‘s life are things that I need to know. I can deal with his halitosis (read about it years ago) but that’s as far as I’d like to go, thanks.
Nourishing, semi-leisurely Sunday activity is a good thing. Tomorrow, if you live in Los Angeles, satisfaction on that level could and perhaps should include (a) Word Theatre’s 11 a.m. event at the Venice Canal Club (brunch plus readings about sex and death) with Tess Harper, Rae Dawn Chong, Gary Dourdan, Sarah Maclay, etc., and (b) a 5:30 pm screening of Sydney Pollack‘s The Yakuza (1974, w/ Robert Mitchum, Ken Takakura, Brian Keith, Richard Jordan) at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre.
Honoring the recently-departed Richard Widmark‘s performances, N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr shows a little more passion and vigor that he usually does within the boundaries of his tweedly-deedly prose style. Here‘s a graph about Widmark’s work in Jules Dassin‘s Night in the City (1950):
“It’s hard to imagine another tough-guy actor of the period allowing himself to come as close to tearful impotence as Widmark does, at the moment his character realizes that there is no escape from the vengeful associates he has betrayed. Running toward the camera, as well as toward his death, Mr. Widmark allows his face to go slack and his limbs to loosen; he seems to become a panicked child before our eyes, shrinking into infantile helplessness.
“A jump cut might take us to the opening scene of Rebel Without a Cause, when James Dean‘s drunken teenager collapses on the sidewalk, playing with a toy monkey.”
I’ll post a thought or two about Stanley Weiser‘s W, formerly known as Bush, on Monday. I couldn’t get my hands on a recently revised draft, but if the film that Oliver Stone will begin shooting next month is at all similar to what’s on the page, W won’t be any kind of breathtaking, guns-blazing, political-zing movie. It’s primarily a modest, brick-by-brick character study about who George W. Bush really is deep down. We tend to bring a certain level of expectation to Stone’s films. We’ve been conditioned a certain audacious, holy-shit element, but sometimes a movie simply is what it is. W, which might be shot, cut and released in near-record time (i.e., before the end of the year), may be seen as more performance-driven than anything else.
John Edwards is the essence of petty equivocation. He’s a phony. Obama didn’t provide the right kind of oral pleasuring so he didn’t endorse him, this 3.28 John Heilemann New York article reports. He’s a slinky performance artist who likes power and money, y’all. The mere sound of that awful buttery drawl gives me the willies. He’s selling vacuum cleaners.
“I realize this will sound geeky, but for me a good character match for Hillary Clinton is the old Star Trek character of Dr. Janice Lester, played in the original late ’60s series by Sandra Smith. All it takes is her breakdown scene at the finale when she sobs, ‘I’ll never be the Captain!’ If you haven’t seen it or don’t recall, I’m sure plot capsules abound on the net.” — HE reader ChuckW, writing this morning.
A reliable-seeming online synopsis of episode #79 (original airdate: 6.3.69) states that Dr. Lester, “once involved with Captain Kirk, harbors a deep hatred of the captain, because she, herself, has never been able to captain a starship.”
The best Hillary/Obama analogy so far has come from HE reader Nate West, to wit: “Hillary is Orson Welles‘ Hank Quinlan character in Touch of Evil. Obama is [Charlton Heston‘s] Vargas.”
I’ve been told that producer Jean Doumanian is partnering with the Weinstein Co. to produce a film version of Tracy Letts‘ masterful August: Osage County, which N.Y. Times critic Charles Isherwood called “the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years” in his 12.5.07 review.
Deanna Dunagan (r.) as Violet Weston, the family matriarch; Amy Morton (l.) as her daughter, and Rondi Reed (center) as Violet’s sister.
As always, a Broadway hit (Osage County is certain to triumph at the ’08 Tony Awards in June) is one equation and a satisfying hit movie is another. The stage-to-cinema process is always about rethinking, reshuffling, compressing, diluting and, in one way or another, downgrading to some extent. A broader audience = the need to make a play more accessible to Average Joes = problems from the viewpoint of Broadway purists.
The big questions are (a) will the movie version hold to the play’s three-hour length (there will certainly be pressure to trim it down at least somewhat, perhaps as much as a third), (b) will they try to movie-ize it (visually “open it up, etc.) or stick to the pure theatrical scheme of everything happening in the Weston family’s two-story home, (c) who will Doumanian-Weinstein get to direct…Mike Nichols?, and (d) which middle-aged screen actress will play the key role of Violet Weston (i.e., “an evil mom to end them all”), presuming that Deanna Dunagan, whose on-stage performance is said to be legendary, will be shunted aside in favor of a Meryl Streep-level actress with a bit more in the way of marquee power.
21 will crest $25 million by Sunday night — the exact rival-studio estimate is $25.7 million — after earning $8.6 million yesterday. Dr. Horton Hears a Who will come in second with $19.9 million, give or take. The Weinstein Co.’s Superhero Movie is disappointing with a distant third-place showing with a projected weekend tally of $9.4 million. Tyler Perry’s Meet The Browns will be fourth with about $8 million, and Drillbit Taylor will be fifth with $5.9 million.
Shutter will come in sixth with about $4.8. Poor Stop-Loss — the finest new film of the weekend, and second only to In The Valley of Elah in the Iraq-War arena — will do about $4.7 million (averaging $3300 to $3400 a print). 10,000 BC will be eighth with $3.9 million, followed by College Road Trip ($2.7 million), The Bank Job ($2.6 million) and Never Look Back ($2.25 million). David Schwimmer‘s Run Fat Boy Run will do about $2 million.
These are the late-winter dog days.
“I think we’ve reached a signal point in the campaign,” the eloquent Peggy Noonan has written in her 3.28 Wall Street Journal column. “This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don’t. There’s no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don’t. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don’t, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will.”
People have written in and said, “How you can admire Peggy Noonan, who used to shill for Poppy Bush in the ’80s and early ’90s?” Answer: because she’s always been a superb writer, because she gets it, and because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I know a guy — a very good hombre who toils in the same trenches that I do — who will never accept the reality of the Hillary malignancy. He can look at it and go, “Yeah, there it is,” but he seems to lack the moral revulsion element. I haven’t talked to him in two or three days, but he was the first guy I thought of when I read the above paragraph.
Slate‘s new “Hillary Death-Watch” feature, written by Christopher Beam, Chadwick Matlin and Chris Wilson. They estimate she has a 12% likelhood of winning the Democratic nomination, and they consider this rating “generous.”
Offering a Hollywood analogy on the Democratic primary race, Sen. Barack Obama told a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania crowd earlier today that running against Sen. Hillary Clinton has been like “a good movie that lasted about a half hour too long.” He and Clinton have been running in the Democratic primary so long, he explained, that they could reverse roles and recite each others’ lines without missing a beat. He added, “I think there are some people who felt like, God, when will this be over?”
What other movie analogies are apt? N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written that Hillary bears at least a passing resemblance to (a) Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s unkillable Terminator monster (in the original ’84 version), (b) the 1930s criminal Ma Barker (who was played by Shelly Winters in Bloody Mama) and (c) Glenn Close‘s clinging-psycho-bitch character in Fatal Attraction who “won’t be ignored,” etc.
The only movie character who remind me even vaguely of Barack Obama (or vice versa) is Cleavon Little‘s sheriff in Blazing Saddles. Because he never blew his cool or lost his dignity. I’m trying to think of some white guy characters (guys from any tribe or culture…anyone) who’ve had his personality and temperament and smarts, and I can’t seem to think of any. There must be dozens.
In order to qualify Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar, HBO has, like, sneak-booked it into the Coliseum Cinemas on West 181st Street in Washington Heights. A similar-type booking is now happenign at Laemmle’s One Colorado in Pasadena. (Thanks to HE reader “RP” for the information.)
Defamer‘s Stu Van Airsdale spotted the New York-area ad and ran a JPEG of same. Good reporting. He’s wrong, however, in describing the doc, one of the four or five best films at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, as one that “painstakingly makes the case that Polanski’s conviction for unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor was a travesty.”
That statement implies that Polanski was innocent and therefore shouldn’t have been convicted. As I wrote last January, the film “doesn’t take Roman’s side of the mid ’70s unlawful-sex-with-a-minor scandal that led to his leaving this country as much as it slams the judge who ignored justice in his handling of the case.”
As VanAirsdale points out, HBO Documentary Films purchased Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired at Sundance for $1 million, “planning a cable premiere and a DVD release — but no theatrical run. Except that to qualify for an Oscar, you have to screen ‘for a minimum of seven days in both Los Angeles County and the Borough of Manhattan.'” Hence the current bookings.
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