March 11, 2004
Lost in Translation mega-fansite
[via GreenCine] Are You Awake? Crissy has created the most dauntingly comprehensive fan site for Lost in Translation I've ever seen. [And it's on MT, Anil.]...
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March 10, 2004
The Wages of Dying for Our Sins
[via Anil] Martin Grove looks at all the Caesars being rendered unto Mel Gibson as a result of his owning The Passion of The Christ. The money's enough to make believers out of more than a few Hollywood types, that's for sure. Hallelujah, indeed. So what exactly is Gibson's reward for flogging his movie so relentlessly and for suffering so much at the hands of imaginary critics? Well, if Grove is right, it's about $600 million net, including profits from...
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March 08, 2004
Anarchist guerilla cinema in Morocco
The Guardian has excerpts from the expat Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo's Cinema Eden: Essays from the Muslim Mediterranean. In a memory straight out of the seedy phase of Cinema Paradiso, Goytisolo writes about packing into "fleapit" theaters in Barcelona, Tangier, and Marrakech, to watch kung fu movies with raucous crowds of semi-literate cinema junkies. One film he remembers stands out: The Dialectic Can Break Stones, a Taiwanese chop'em up given the What's Up, Tiger Lily? treatment by '68-ist activists. Supposedly,...
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February 27, 2004
The Hollywood Gospel According to John Lesher
While the NYT's Sharon Waxman finds plenty of righteous indignance among (anonymous) studio executives over ever working with Mel Gibson again, the scales have fallen from Endeavor agent John Lesher's eyes. As a result, he wins the award for best Passion-related quote of the week: "People here will work with the anti-Christ if he'll put butts in seats."...
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February 21, 2004
Chasing Shadows
BU professor Ray Carney tells about his maniacal decades-long search for a copy of the "original version" of John Cassavetes' first feature, Shadows, in a riveting, suspenseful, and enlightening Guardian article. It feels like he doesn't leave out a single twist or turn (i.e., it's both entertaining and long). Here's the trailer: Cassavetes was so displeased with audience reaction to late 1958 screenings of Shadows, he re-shot much of the footage in early 1959 and re-edited it with some...
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Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein Monday at 9PM
Just let me program your whole Monday viewing schedule for you. 6:30 - MoMA curator Barbara London screening classic video art and talking about how to collect it. (email for details) 9:00 See Derek Jarman's 1993 film, Wittgenstein, at Passerby, the used-to-be-a-gallery/bar on WWW 15th St. Then head to SoHo house for some kidney pie with Fammke Jensen or whoever. You're welcome....
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February 18, 2004
Antonioni's Blow-Up now on DVD
It was just released today. Buy it or rent it now. There's a commentary track by Antonioni scholar Peter Brunette, (author of The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni), but read J. Hoberman's excellent contextual discussion of Blow-up in his latest book, The Dream Life instead....
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February 03, 2004
Piss Off Barbra: Buy Lost in Translation on DVD
Michael Musto points out an unexpected upside to Sofia Coppola's winning the First American Woman To Be Nominated For Best Director: it rescues that historical recognition forever from Barbra Streisand's French-manicured clutches. You can celebrate this karmic retribution by buying Lost in Translation, out today on DVD (complete with a half-baked making-of documentary and no director's commentary track. Where's Carrot Top when you need him?). Or you could rent it. Mecha-Streisand was defeated by The Cure's Robert Smith in the...
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January 24, 2004
when Word of Mouth meets Speaking in Tongues
From Scott Evans, CEO of Outreach, Inc, retailer of evangelical swag via the (Godless and/or Anglican) Guardian:Dear Pastor, The release of The Passion of the Christ is the most exciting outreach opportunity I've seen in my lifetime... In fact, I see this opportunity as unprecedented since the day of Pentecost... Ask God: How will we as a church encourage people to experience this film? How can we build a bridge from the movie theatre to our church? I encourage...
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January 15, 2004
This isn't gonna help me win "Best NY Blog..."
But what can I do? It's Kieslowski. The Decalogue is playing at the AFI Silver Theater in DC, starting tomorrow (through 1/22). The marathon back-to-back screening of all ten episodes on Saturday includes, inexplicably, the only screenings of episodes I-IV. This was probably my last chance to see Decalogue uninterrupted in theaters for the next 15 years, give or take a month. And to think, I just found out about it. Well, maybe you should just watch them on DVD...
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January 05, 2004
On Learning from The Battle of Algiers
First, Peggy Siegal, take a lesson from Pontecorvo's publicist, who got such excellent blurbs from the Pentagon screening of The Battle of Algiers, who cares if the people giving them wouldn't know credibility if it blew up underneath their Humvee: "How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas!" "Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range! "Women plant bombs in cafes!" "Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar!?" But no, when it...
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December 10, 2003
One Reason to see The Last Samurai
not that I've seen it yet, mind you, but the cinematographer is John Toll, who also shot Terrence Malick's Thin Red Line. On second thought, why not just rent or buy Thin Red Line?...
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December 08, 2003
Amar Kanwar at MoMA Documentary Fortnight
Ahh, that's a better. Now I can endlessly praise the programming acumen of the MoMA Documentary Fortnight without it sounding like pure self-promotion. Three of Amar Kanwar's most recent works--including A Night of Prophecy, which I killed my Friday night in Miami for, and his unsurpassed A Season Outside, a poetic Cremaster-meets-nuclear-brinksmanship documentary which was one of the greatest finds at last year's Documenta XI--will be shown as part of MoMA's Documentary Fortnight festival. Three films screen together on Sunday...
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November 14, 2003
The World's 40 Best Directors
The Guardian tallies up the 40 best directors in the world today, complete with ratings in Zagat-style (or beauty pageant-style) categories: Substance/Look/Craft/Originality/Intelligence. Setting aside the unavoidable grade inflation--seven critics rated them from 1-20 for each category, but the totals fall in a narrow range, from 89 (David Lynch at #1) to 73 (the Gus Van Sant "who didn't make Good Will Hunting" at #40)-- it's a pretty safe, festival-y list. But it does have it's share of Eurotrashing quirks (David...
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November 13, 2003
Sandra Bernhard's Best Movie is
still her first one-woman show, Without You I'm Nothing. It's on Trio right now. Looks like I'll be up for another hour to see the grand finale, her cabaret rendition of "Little Red Corvette." (Complete with backup, it turns out, by Tori Amos) For years it was extremely and annoyingly hard to find; it's still not on DVD, but at least now you can buy it on VHS....
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November 06, 2003
On My Architect: The Path of Kahn
[STANDARD SPOILER ALERT] Despite what the global saturation ad campaign may imply, it's better to approach My Architect as a spinoff--like a feature-length installment the Animatrix--not as a sequel. (That none of the actors from The Matrix films were in My Architect should've been my first clue.) Once I made this distinction, I was able to appreciate the movie much better; it turns out to be a moving, well-told story which happens to have an extremely misleading marketing strategy behind...
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Understanding The Architect
I attended a private screening of the film, My Architect last night at the Sutton Theater, followed by a sumptuous dinner in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons. Normally, I eschew the Four Seasons for reasons that Jake Brooks spells out clearly in the Observer: "Few V.I.P.’s want to risk not being recognized at the door and then having to wait at the bar with a crowd full of unwashed punks wearing nose rings." That, and they have a...
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November 01, 2003
Just got back from seeing Elephant
Call me irresponsible, but I/we really liked it. We'll never send our kids to public school now, of course, or let them out of our sight, ever, but we thought it was subtly and extremely well made. David Edelstein's already written a good review, some of which I can agree with: above all else, this movie is the result of directorial decisions and intentions. His take on the supposedly amoralist or non-judgmental approach to obviously abhorrent teen-on-teen killing is right...
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October 14, 2003
On Sylvia
After seeing Sylvia last week, I thought I wouldn't write about it again; I couldn't make it to interview Christine Jeffs, the director, and I posted in August about John Brownlow's extensive discussion of the challenges in writing the script (two crazy poets, one suicide, no rights to use the poetry itself in the film, etc etc.). Besides, Anthony Lane used the best line, the only line I wrote down during the screening, in his New Yorker review: "'You must...
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October 12, 2003
Seeing Lost In Translation on the Upper East Side
Context isn't everything, but it counts. We just got back from seeing Lost In Translation with a multi-generational crowd, in the movie theater around the corner from Holly Golightly's brownstone. As they say, it's the little differences: "Gorgeous sheets." --Woman of a certain age behind us, upon the cut to Bill Murray sitting on the Park Hyatt bed. [300-count egyptian cotton? Nice, but could be better, lady. Now pipe down.] "hahahaha." --me, laughing alone at the previously unrecognized 4:20...
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September 09, 2003
More on HBO Directors
I'm reading and enjoying Steven Soderbergh's book, Getting Away With It, where he intermixes his self-hating journal entries and deeply interested conversations with Richard Lester, the director credited with "launching" the British New Wave. (He did The Beatles movies, The Three Musketeers, and other stuff. Fascinating, funny guy, though.) Soderbergh tries on an authorial style, with David Foster Wallace-style, self-conscious footnotes [DFW-lite], but basically, he plays a very well-informed fan. But now that he's in production on the first episode...
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September 07, 2003
Ozu in New York
I know Venice is barely over and Toronto's just getting started, but I'm already getting pumped for the New York Film Festival in October. Is "pumped" the right reaction for an Ozu centennial retrospective? All 36 films by the greatest Japanese filmmaker ever will screen at Lincoln Center. Also on the schedule: A 2-day symposium on Ozu's work and influence (Oct. 11 and 12) and, batting cleanup, Wim Wenders' 1985 Tokyo Picture, his filmed diary exploring Ozu's world....
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September 06, 2003
On the Directors of HBO Series
I should have mentioned it earlier--maybe when I asked for DVD rental suggestions--but HBO's Band of Brothers is one of the best series I can think of. (Except that I can also think of Kieslowski's Decalogue and Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, which are probably the #1 and #2 greatest "mini-series" of all time; that's not the category we're dealing with here. Decalogue has been re-released on DVD, by the way. Run, don't walk.) Last week, I watched Part 5, the one...
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August 29, 2003
OY! Recommend me some movies! [update: the Mob has spoken]
My DVD rental queue is down to dangerously low levels. What you should see is... You should sign up with GreenCine, by the way, not the big red DVD subscription service Gawker sold it's soul to (I'm sure they used the money to buy an expanding T-Rex sponge. Chum...p). Most recently in the machine: Punch-Drunk Love (Ouch. I had to stop, finally. Maybe my stereo settings were wrong, but it was so assaultive... the Bonus Disc is on the way,...
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July 30, 2003
"Punch-Drunk Love is less a story than it is a poem"
How'd I miss this? GreenCine has a lyrical article/review about Punch-Drunk Love, PT Anderson, and Jeremy Blake, by Tom Tykwer, the German director of Run Lola Run and Heaven. Punch-Drunk Love is FINALLY available on DVD, by the way. And it includes Blossoms & Blood, a short Paul and Jeremy made with John Brion's music, which was previously only available to friends and family. And people on Paul's Valentine's Day card list....
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July 17, 2003
Fox Searchlight's new weblog
also via GreenCine: The indie mini-major studio Fox Searchlight Pictures has launched a weblog with the ambitious tagline, "All the independent and arthouse movie news that's fit to blog." Fortunately for what still feels like a one-man operation, the first post narrows the spotlight to Searchlight and news of their release slate. It seems intended to supplement the studio site's Weekend Read mailing list, where FS filmmakers write about their work. Welcome to the phenomena, kids. Now all you need...
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June 21, 2003
What the world needs now: a DVD Commentary API
It's Rashomon meets Inside the Actor's Studio over at the Guardian, where Sam Delaney cross-references contradictory behind-the-scenes accounts from various score-settling or credit-grabbing Hollywood memoirs. His movie matching list: Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Rosemary's Baby, Jaws...and Flashdance. Truth is not exactly coin of the realm in Hollywood, Delaney notes, "but - with reference to this array of movie-making exposés - it can occasionally be pieced together." Good luck. Considering the sources he's quoting-- a talented megalomaniac (Copolla), a mobster (Sinatra),...
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June 02, 2003
Apparently, The Matrix is all around us
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June 01, 2003
Update: DVD Recs
Thanks to the folks who've emailed suggestions for DVD's to order up. Here's a sample, along with recommendations from some other people: Kurosawa's Ran; Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour; and any Kubrick (I decided on Full Metal Jacket and Lolita) I culled The Iron Giant from Jason. By buying it the other day, Roger Avary recommends The Breakfast Club, from which I extrapolated Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (Added Avary's own Rules of Attraction, esp. for the commentary track by Carrot...
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May 29, 2003
Help me with Netflix, help yourself with GreenCine.
Only a couple of weeks after Agent Smithing my brother's early adopter, $10/month-for-life Netflix account, I've run out of movies I want to rent. Or more precisely, movies I want to rent that Netflix actually has. (Note: if you're reading this from Netflix, my brother lives with us now. As do his wife and their two lovely children. Coincidentally, after tiring of Pooh's various adventures, my four-year-old niece suddenly developed an interest in Ozu and Tarkovsky.) So, please help me...
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May 16, 2003
Have you heard of this movie, Matrix Reloaded?
You know how Justin invented Shoutcast so he could listen to Loveline in Arizona? Well, if weblogs never existed, I'm sure they would've been invented yesterday as a way for everyone in the world to review Matrix Reloaded. [Warning: major spoilers and countless review links in Jason's comments thread]. Until Nick and Meg figure out how to find me the good ones, though, I'm sticking with the pros. Like that Agent Smith of MR reviewers, David Edelstein, who first loves,...
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May 08, 2003
On X2, briefly
Good movie. Nice bones tossed to the comic book readers. Just a suggestion: maybe if their hair wasn't so uniformly weird, people wouldn't hate the mutants as much....
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April 10, 2003
On Panic Room's Opening Credits
DVD Talk's Gil Jawetz takes a great, informative look at the development of the opening credits for Panic Room. David Fincher's credits are almost always events in themselves, and apparently Panic Room is no different. Jawetz makes the connection to Saul Bass's North by Northwest credits, to which I'd add Bass's opening for West Side Story, another tour de force montage of NYC skylines. You can buy Panic Room on DVD, but only if you've already bought Fight Club. It's...
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April 08, 2003
On Matrix Reloaded, aka The Burly Man
Insanely great article by Steve Silberman in Wired on John Gaeta and the CG--no, virtual cinematography--they developed for the Wachowskis' Matrix sequels. They created ESC, a "CG skunkworks company" for (at least) one fight scene, where Neo kung fu wire-dance fights with 100+ Agent Smiths. To shoot it, they created the world's largest motion capture studio, ran the flying wire fighters through "hundreds of takes" per day, scanned Keanu and Hugo's heads with 5 HD cameras capturing 1Gb/sec of...
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March 29, 2003
On Sokurov On His Film On Art
In the Guardian, Jonathan Jones talks with Aleksandr Sokurov about his latest film, Russian Ark, and he retraces the path of the single 96-minute Steadicam shot through the Hermitage with the museum's director, Mikhail Piotrovsky. I've written about this before, but what comes through here is a double view of serious passion for art. The Hermitage dominates the lives of those who work there: It "has its own school where children can learn archaeology and art history from the...
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March 23, 2003
On TV: IFP Independent Spirit Awards
Eh. Who needs to watch the Oscars, with their self-serious, press conference-addicted producer, Gil Cates, and their Chicago faits accomplis. The IFP Spirit Awards are like a hundred times better. It's on Bravo right now (and it repeats, uncensored, on IFC, again and again). Some highlights: Host John Waters quote: "Technique is nothing more than failed style." The presenter of Best Debut Performance nearly had a meltdown three, four times, as she tried to read, over shouts of protests from...
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03:22 AM
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March 18, 2003
Hit Decasia At Anthology, Miss Oscar-Nominated Shorts At Pioneer
Decasia is Bill Morrison's fascinating, expressive film composed of beautifully deteriorated nitrate film stock. Last December, Laurence Wechsler wrote about showing it to Errol Morris: "I popped the video into his VCR and proceeded to observe as Morrison's film once again began casting its spell. Errol sat drop-jawed: at one point, about halfway through, he stammered, 'This may be the greatest movie ever made.''' Morrison will be at some Anthology Film Archive screenings. The film's website has a growing...
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06:29 PM
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February 24, 2003
More On Punch-Drunk Love and Jeremy Blake
Been making arrangements for a private preview of a new work by Jeremy Blake, who I've been friendly with for many years, since his first NY show. While putting together an email of links and background for people, I went back to the official site for Paul Anderson's film, Punch-Drunk Love [DVD, someday]. Under "movies", there is a collection of 14 haiku-like clips, which use liberal doses of Jeremy's abstracted work and Jon Brion's film music, often without any...
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January 31, 2003
On Seeing 11'09"01
Just got back from 11'09"01, the collection of eleven short films produced by Alain Brigand. It's at Lincoln Center today and tomorrow. Short answer: overall, it's impressive, and some of the shorts are quite powerful and moving. Others suck. [Stills and director interviews are at the official site. Also, check posts from Dec. and Sept. for various synopses, articles and links.] Longer answer: Alejandro González Iñárritu's mostly audio submission is easily the most wrenching. It's far more than enough to...
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January 02, 2003
About being right about About Schmidt
A couple of weeks ago, I called About Schmidt the Thinking Person's My Fat, Greek Wedding and linked both back to the 1955 Academy Award sweeper Marty. Now, after giving it some thought, Vogue's Sarah Kerr notes an "odd coincidence" in a Slate discussion of the films of 2002: "Did you know that Payne is of Greek extraction and that in his boyhood his father owned a Greek restaurant in Omaha? Ring a bell with another movie this year?" [Listen...
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December 13, 2002
About Schmidt: The Thinking Person's "My Big, Fat Greek Wedding"
Nobody's Perfect, indeed. If Anthony Lane can't get beyond Jack's celebrity, fine. He saw the movie at the NY Film Fest opening. His unabashed pinky-extended criticism almost always gives an enjoyable read. (Need some holiday cheer? Get his collected reviews, Nobody's Perfect, today Don't even think you can stuff a stocking with it or take it on a plane, though.) But Salon's review by Charles Taylor seems to be such a bitter, willful misread of the film, it defies explanation....
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November 15, 2002
P&A: Print & Advertising, Pot & Auctions
Print Talked to MoMA today to finalize the exhibition format for Souvenir November 2001. A film transfer would be really lush and sexy. Yesterday, I saw a video projected version of a short I'd seen at the New Directors/New Films series last spring. The difference in the image, particularly in the color intensity, was marked. A film transfer would also be a couple grand, and given that I still feel a slight itch to finetune the sound (and/or music) a...
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November 14, 2002
Directorspotting and Fansite Trends
Ewan, up close. Image: Eccentricity-online.com The Guardian has an interesting interview with Ewan McGregor who talks about singing, about directing his first short, and about working with directors. There's audio as well, in case you're into the accent. Ewanspotting, an awe-inducing McGregor fansite confirms a trend: names derived from the first/big movie. Ex. Being Charlie Kaufman and Paul Thomas Anderson's Cigarettes & Coffee (named after his first short)....
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On the Distribution Challenges of Independent Film, Again
Listen to director Harry Shearer (he's the voices in your head, you know) and another independent filmmaker talk about getting people interested in their films and getting their films into theaters [10.5 min.]. From WNYC's On The Media (via Romenesko's MediaNews)....
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October 19, 2002
More on the influence of art on film, and Contact as Dante's Paradiso. Seriously.
Last night, I talked about the artists and filmmakers post with an artist friend who passed through town. He pointed out Lars von Trier's collaboration with the Danish romantic painter Per Kirkeby on Breaking The Waves. Kirkeby created deeply romantic landscapes to introduce each chapter of the film. Von Trier points out that the movie's setting, the Isle of Skye, was a favorite destination of many 19th century English Romantic artists and writers. Interesting because it dovetails so nicely...
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September 27, 2002
If you wonder what happened to the movie Palm Beached...
Apparently, the project went into turnaround when Mollie Wilmot objected to being portrayed by Bette Midler or Melanie Griffith. Disney executives may be smiling through their tears to learn that Wilmot, "the socialite with the oversize white sunglasses who rose to celebrity in 1984 when a tanker ran aground at her Palm Beach, Fla., mansion," has passed away. In the NYTimes obit, the subject is Mrs Wilmot's life in the media, especially in the paper itself. In addition to covering...
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August 08, 2002
On Robert Evans and how you want to drive around with him in 70-minute spurts
Even though a friend at Vanity Fair is so sick of hearing about him she puts her hands over her ears and starts screaming "la la la la la la" when I mention his name, I've been listening to Robert Evans read his book, The Kid Stays in the Picture. It's a grating riot. And I will see the movie, which I think will be overkill, but I've seen clips where they have done some interesting-concept animation of still photos....
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12:06 PM
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May 26, 2002
Congratulations to Paul Thomas
Congratulations to Paul Thomas Anderson, co-winner of the Best Director Award for Punch-Drunk Love at Cannes. The Palme D'Or for Short Film was awarded to Péter Meszaros for Eso Utan (After Rain). And congratulations to HBO for their documentary, In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01....
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11:22 PM
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