Sadly, both of these guys are now dead and gone, and Bad Santa was only…what, five years ago? I love Bernie Mac‘s neutral expression as he listens to John Ritter‘s story about Billy Bob Thornton and some woman in a department store dressing room, and (although it’s not shown in this clip) the way he casually considers the reported port of entry. I was okay with Mac’s role in the three Ocean’s movies, and I wept for the guy when he appeared in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (’03). Who dies at age 50 from pneumonia?
Later
I’m already bored silly by the Olympic footage from Smog City. The opening ceremonies were nice, but I feel nothing from it right now. Guys rowing down a big river, girls playing volleyball, guys playing badminton…baaah! I can spot smoggy air when I see it, being a longtime Los Angeleno, and you can see it everywhere in the Beijing footage. And you can feel the vibes from the repressive status-quo Orwells running the show over there. I don’t need it or want it. Sensuous kittens, the Charles Laughton-slash-Night of the Hunter outtake thing at the Hammer this evening, column-writing, lifting weights, finally watching the Mad Men season box set, riding the motorcycle, etc.
Step Aside, Bud
It’s not “official,” but I’m hearing that In Contention‘s Kris Tapley has been nudged out of the Variety blog lineup for the coming Oscar Season. Tapley’s Red Carpet District blog for Variety was a seasonal that launched early last fall and ended six months ago, but Variety isn’t asking him to return. I wrote Variety‘s Dana Harris this morning to check but no reply so far.
Tapley hasn’t been eighty-sixed due to dissatisfaction with his work. RCD was a very sharp and comprehensive daily read for many of us, and I’m not unmindful of the fact that Tapley linked to Hollywood Elsewhere all the time. The issue, as one source puts it, is that Variety has “too many blogs” (Anne Thompson‘s, Michael Jones‘ “The Circuit,” Pamela McLintock‘s box-office blog, etc.) and the bloggy ad dollars can only cover so much ground.
One could interpret the phrase “too many blogs” as another way of saying that “Peter Bart‘s blog is now part of the mix and somebody had to go to make room,” but that’s just a personal view or suspicion. Bart has so far been an occasional poster at best, and almost certainly won’t be delivering half the extensive Oscar season coverage (legwork, updates, exclusives) that Tapley generated during the last go-around. But of course Thompson does a humungous amount of Oscar- season reporting and pulse-readings so it’s not like Tapley was the only one humping it.
This basically means the situation is back to square one as it was during the ’06 and ’07 season, when In Contention was a basic and necessary read along with the other six or seven Oscar-season blogs.
Dark Surge
Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is reporting a Dark Knight surge yesterday that over took Pineapple Express , beating the stoner comedy $7.8 million to $7.65 million — marginal — but with projected weekend tallies of $26.5 million vs. $22.9 million, respectively. This will be the fourth weekend in a row that Chris Nolan‘s film has been #1.
I asked about buying a large-sized Heath Ledger Joker doll the other day, and the guy at the counter said the demand was so overwhelming that sales guys for the manufacturer were actively discouraging retailers from placing any more orders. Has an American manufacturer ever anticipated an extraordinary demand for a faddish product? Manufacturers should have instantly realized after Ledger’s death that they needed to double or triple up on production. Did they do this? Of course not.
Ohio Slammer
That radio ad from Obama for America is a first-rate hammer piece that may hurt John McCain with Ohio voters in November. The ad doesn’t tell the whole truth, but selectively uses some facts to make McCain look like a willing tool of international big-business interests first, and an ally of the Ohio job market second (if not third or fourth).
The ad explains the role that McCain and his campaign manager (and former lobbyist) Rick Davis had five years ago in helping freight-carrier DHL and its German owner, Deutsche Post World Net, acquire a airport-based operation out of Wilmington, Ohio.
Now, however, DHL is looking to cut financial losses by sending its packages aboard United Parcel Service planes — yes, a DHL rival — before delivering them in DHL trucks. UPS flies out of Louisville, Kentucky, so the proposed change would render the Wilmington airport unnecessary, and something close to 8000 Ohio jobs will be lost as a result.
Thing is, when McCain and Davis helped DHL back in ’03, the move resulted in job expansion, not losses. An 8.6 Cleveland Plain Dealer story by Stephen Koff states that “several Wilmington civic leaders said that what happened in 2003 created an economic gain for their community, lasting several years.”
The Obama ad doesn’t lie, but it does narrow its focus — honestly, factually — on what happened in order to create a negative impression of McCain.
Shoe Drops
ABC News and the Washington Post‘s Pete Yost have jumped into the John Edwards extramarital-affair-and-fathering-a-baby story, and Edwards has admitted to an affair with, according to Yost’s report, a “42 year-old woman,” although her name is Rielle Hunter. The ABC story, written by Rhonda Schwartz and Brian Ross, names Hunter and says her age is 44.
Edwards, however, is denying he’s the father of her child. He “told ABC News that he lied repeatedly about the affair with a 42-year-old woman but said that he didn’t love her” and “said he has not taken a paternity test but knows he isn’t the father because of the timing of the affair and the birth.”
I can understand an operator like Edwards lying about the paternity issue (if in fact he is lying, which many believe is the case) but to say in so many words that he doesn’t “love” Hunter strikes me as an inelegant and dismissive way to put it. It’s something a cad would say in this kind of situation. A guy proclaiming that he doesn’t “love” a woman he’s had relations with (and possibly fathered a child with) implies he doesn’t consider her worthy of a serious relationship and that he’s basically been seeing her for sex. That’s a pretty flagrant putdown.
Slate‘s Rachel Larimore has written that while she “may be proved wrong,” she’s not buying Edwards’ claim that he’s not the father. “He and Andrew Young, the ‘admitted’ father, both had an affair with Hunter? Possible, but yuck. And if Young is not the father, and Edwards is not the father, then who the heck is Young covering for? And why was Edwards visiting Hunter and the baby at 2:45 in the morning?”
Edwards won’t be going within 500 miles of the Denver Democratic convention later this month. And don’t expect every mainstream media publication to admit that this story was broken by the National Enquirer.
End Of It
Some are saying that Quartermaine’s Terms was and still is the best play by Simon Gray, whose compulsive smoking and drinking finally killed him yesterday in London, at age 71. But I always had a thing for Otherwise Engaged, a very sharp and funny character study of a British publisher that I saw twice on the Manhattan stage in the mid ’70s — once with original star Alan Bates, and then with Dick Cavett, who wasn’t half bad.
Satire vs. Spoof
“From Robert Downey Jr.‘s purposely racist embodiment of African-American anachronisms to Jack Black‘s scatological humor, everything in Tropic Thunder qualifies as satire, not spoof. It’s an important distinction. Pauline Kael once noted that ‘unlike satire, spoofing has no serious objectives; it doesn’t attack anything that anyone could take seriously; it has no cleansing power.’
“Thus, the movie opens with inane fake trailers to introduce its fictional stars, surpassing the ones in Grindhouse for espousing actual ideas. Director-cowriter and star Ben Stiller offers a catharsis for everyone overburdened by bombastic storytelling, but even when the movie becomes playfully self-reflexive, it remains a keenly layered narrative.
“He returns to the movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie metafilter so many times that the gimmick forces you to pay close attention and believe in the events as they transpire, without sacrificing the absurd edge of the equation. Jumping back and forth between Grossman’s office and the jungle, Tropic Thunder recalls the comical dread of Dr. Strangelove, where Stanley Kubrick cut between the war room and a nuke-wielding B-52. This one could have the subtitle How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blockbuster.” — from Eric Kohn‘s review on premiere.com, posted yesterday.
Crap is Crap
After hearing for years about Quentin Tarantino‘s affection for Enzo G. Castellari‘s The Inglorious Bastards (1978) and how it led to QT’s writing his own version, I was naturally into catching the just-out DVD of the 1978 original. I was presuming that something strange or kinky would pop out — some facsimile of that battlefield Sam Fuller vitality, strange freewheeling dialogue, servings of left-field perversity…something.
So I popped it into the player last night, and in less than 90 seconds I was faced with the inescapable fact that Quentin Tarantino‘s affection for ’60s and ’70s exploitation fare is essentially a con as far as people with actual taste in movies is concerned, and that The Inglorious Bastards was and is a waste of time, celluloid and general expenditure.
I want the minutes I spent watching this DVD last night back. I felt rooked, polluted, flim-flammed. It’s not one of those so-bad-it’s-kinda-good B pics that you can sort of get off on if you’re in a loose and joshing mood. It’s just third-rate crap in every way imaginable way. I’m talking lazy and sometimes ludicrously bad performances, unconvincing violence, way-too-bright lighting, dubbed dialogue, absurd haircuts, zero character involvement, careless plotting, and rifle fire that sounds like amplified cap guns.
Even the skinny-dipping scene with the SS girls in the country stream, which I was looking forward to, is ruined by being too hasty and over-before-you-blink. Why didn’t Castellari decide to have the “bastards” somehow melt the hearts and turn the allegiances of the SS women and have them all team up in a common effort? Why not? It’s just a stupid B movie anyway.
I was thinking that the two stars, Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson, might at least deliver a little warmth and comfort with their natural charisma, but they haven’t a chance against Castellari’s clunky story and fourth-rate Sgt. Rock dialogue.
Senior Dings
I had picked up on maybe four or five of these, but seeing them all together… whoa. Not that this will have the slightest effect on the thinking of the McCain crowd or even the fence-sitters, for that matter.
Rule of Three
The other night Pineapple Express star-co-writer Seth Rogen told Jon Stewart that he’s “26, but I look 50. I’ll probably die in three years. I had back hair at nine. I had ear hair at 13.” Another guy who doesn’t look his age is Philip Seymour Hoffman, 41, who was looking more or less his age in Capote but looked about 59 (white hair, beard, the usual paunch) when he was in Cannes last May to promote Synecdoche, New York. There needs to be at least one other guy in his 20s or 30s or early 40s who looks a good 15 years older. Just one more.