Gigli is getting some The Postman– and Battlefield Earth-scale bad reviews. In the Times, for example, A.O. Scott compares it to a Project Greenlight production.
It’s directed by Martin Brest, whose last film was the glacial Meet Joe Black, (which I affectionately call Architectural Digest: The Movie). It was 20 years ago, but Brest did make Beverly Hills Cop, so go figure.
And, oddly, he’s in the morgue scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which is on my DVD at this very moment. Of course, practically everyone was in that movie, as it turns out. Seriously. check out the cast.
Some thoughts after watching Fast Times for the first time in over a decade:
1. We haven’t–and I’m not saying this in a Judge Reinhold kind of way–we haven’t seen nearly enough of Phoebe Cates lately.
2. Fast Times, Dead Man Walking and The Thin Red Line. We’re No Angels, Shanghai Surprise and (the mawkish Ernest Borgnine chapter of) 11’09”01. Is Sean Penn really just a man?
3. At business school, I ordered pizza during a 4-hour marketing final one evening, a move which yielded me lasting, but dubious, acclaim.
Category: Uncategorized
The symmetry is too good to pass up
Why I Hate DC just turned up on Aaron’s site, and then David Ross just forwarded me I HATE New York City. Thanks to weblogs, I can now hate wherever I live, which is very convenient.
One thing I hate about DC: They take forever to tow a car, which means wrecked or abandoned cars line the roads, Mad Max-style.
New York, on the other hand, tows your car almost instantly, even if you just run into the post office for a few minutes. Bastards.
For the calendar:
Tax Law & Order
Ah, summer, when screenplay-ready drama emerges from the investment banking industry. Last summer, it was CNBC’s Mike Huckman, who, in a scrappy burst of journalistic energy not often seen during the analyst-stroking bubble years, chased Salomon’s Jack Grubman into the street (Fifth Avenue) seeking comments on the breaking MCI Worldcom fiasco. And we all know how that turned out (hint: his kids are now at P.S. 6).
This year, it’s not street theater, but courtroom drama. At stake is a $56 million tax bill, not an eyebrow-raising amount by i-banking standards. But it’s everything, if market reversals leave your entire net worth sitting well within the $112 million spread of the court’s decision. And it’s even more everything if the star is not a mere Master of the Universe, but An Architect of the Universe itself, Dr Myron Scholes.
MBA’s have the Black-Scholes model for pricing options burned into our heads. In hyperbolic shorthand (this is for a screenplay, remember?), Black-Scholes made modern capital markets possible, creating the common language of risk and return. Grubman’s a cog in the machine. Scholes helped define. For all the good that‘ll do him. In a NYTimes article that’d make Dick Wolf proud, David Cay Johnston tells of The Architect’s encounter on the stand with a crack federal prosecutor.
“Make way, coming through!” Room at the bottom
Kimberley Jones writes the scrappy tale of independent filmmakers who have to keep bootstrapping their films after Harvey Weinstein’s check surprisingly fails to materialize. It’s a fairly clear-headed, if mostly analysis-free, look at how promising films can be well-received, but still not “make it” into the “marketplace.”
Over at GreenCine, David Hudson puts these woes in context, though, pointing out that truly independent filmmakers have a long history of busking, throwing their print in the back of their car and hitting the road to show it wherever they can. More significantly, at least form my perspective, is the unexamined (here, anyway) potential for indie DVD distribution, using off- and online promotion to find a film’s audience. I know from my own experience that the audience SN01 has reached through this weblog far outnumbers the butts in the theaters when it screened. And that’s cool
When Business 2.0 wrote about Netflix’ potential as an independent film distribution channel, I kept doing a mental find-and-replace with GreenCine, which combines an independent sensibility with film-loving community. While Netflix may offer potential reach for an independent filmmaker, GreenCine’s subscribers seem far more likely to actually care about (and watch) non-studio films.
What Jones doesn’t mention until the end is the…endgame for first films in the…first place. If you use them as calling cards, as a base for building your long-term career, as a tool for making better the films you need to make, then it ultimately matters a little less that Harvey’s not yet returning your calls.
Iran and The Ninth of July
There’s been a great deal of political turmoil in Iran lately, most of it homegrown and not driven by the US administration’s “you’re next” rumblings. Jeff Jarvis has trained a consistent blogging eye on Iranian weblogs, which provide varied and in-depth accounts of student and public protests against the hardline religionists. The ayatollahs and their militant supporters answer calls for reform with violence.
Today, July 9th, is the four-year anniversary of student-led demonstrations at Tehran University, and politically explosive events were feared/planned/anticipated/rumoured as it approached. [As the BBC reports, they happened, too.] But you didn’t learn that from any of the major US news sources. Oh, Iran led the news, but with the sappy story of conjoined twins dying on a Singaporean operating table.
The timing and the ubiquity of this irrelevant tearjerker made me think back to, oh, Sunday, when the NYTimes ran an almost corny article on recently declassified State Dept. documents from the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of the Guatemalan government. When the CIA’s activities were discovered and reported in Guatemala, Headquarters recommended, “If possible, fabricate big human interest story, like flying saucers, birth sextuplets in remote area to take play away.” If it ain’t broke, I guess…
But I was also reminded of an amazing film I saw in April, one which seems eerily important now. It’s making the film festival rounds, and should be turning up on Sundance, the sooner the better. It’s Thierry Michel‘s 2002 documentary, Iran, Veiled Appearances. Michel gives a clear-eyed view at exactly the forces at play in Iran right now: swelling numbers of youth grown tired of revolution, and tightly wound religionists holding back the tide.
I spoke with Michel at length when his film screened as part of the Sundance at MoMA festival a couple of months ago. I suggested he might make a similar film here, in the US, and he admitted that he’d already become fascinated by the possibility. Turns out for a previous film, the excellent doc, Mobutu, King of Zaire, he had interviewed a friend/supporter/partner of the dictator, a man who left quite an impression on Michel. That friend: our own American ayatollah, Pat Robertson.
(via cel)
judging from this train car, cel phones strapped to heads, sucking conversations out of us = the start of the matrix.
“A magazine without a cruise is like a Muscovite without a stockbroker”
Q. You’re posting about magazine cruises?? If TMN told you to jump off the Empire State Building, would you?
A. Could I basejump?
Mr George Loper and Ms Molly Ivins, aboard the MS Ryndam
for The Nation‘s 1998 reader cruise. image: loper.org
Eric Wemple’s report of the failure of The New Republic‘s reader cruise is good, but doesn’t reach the hilarity of Eric Alterman’s New Yorker account of The Nation‘s near-mutinous first cruise.
A cruise consultant who had helped set up the trip was taken aback by the ambience. ‘I’ve never seen a cruise audience be so ornery to its guest speakers,’ he confided to me by the Stairmasters, adding, ‘and it’s not only the New Yorkers, either.’ He was grateful, though, that no one tried to unionize the crew’s largely Indonesian wait staff.
It’s part of Mr George Loper’s [pictured above] The Nation Cruise Anthology. Nick’s experience with one Nation editor begs the [gender biased. So sue me.] question, “Would YOU go on a cruise with this woman?”
Able efforts all, but for my money, David Foster Wallace is still king of the Reportage From Cruises You Don’t Want To Go On hill.
Ebay Find: Smart Car in the US
There’s a 2000 Smart Car for sale on Ebay, which appears to be legal in the US. Colorado registration, 12.5K miles. No mention of the EPA/DOT paperwork, but you can email the seller for details.
We’ve rented a Smart in France, and we beat our heads against the Smart dealership wall in Nice for several days, trying to get them to tell us how/why they helped Sally Jesse Raphael get one into the US, but they wouldn’t help/tell us. [But isn’t it because she was a star, you ask? Non. Any one of us is arguably more famous in France than Sally Freakin’ Jesse Raphael.]
On the people in my neighborhood, v6
He’s since learned the importance of location–and foot traffic–to a retail operation. And he’s got his schtick down pat; as the neighborhood ladies marvelled at the marble cake (“And is that red velvet? I make that!”), he let it slip that he’d baked it himself last night. That’s right, those kids over on Fifth may be foisting their nanny-cake on the doormen, but on Lex, the law of the retail jungle prevails: it’s every man for himself. By the time his parents brought the Range Rover around for the drive to Southampton, he’d sold out his entire inventory of brownies and (bundt and red velvet) cakes.
Lizzie Grubman, if you ever actually open a bakery here, you’ll have some stiff competition.
On, Apparently, Not Getting the Memo
I broke down and subscribed to Harper’s after they jacked up their newsstand price. I can’t go without my Harper’s [You shouldn’t either.] But apparently, much like David Remnick before him, the illustrious Roger Hodge somehow neglected to notify me of Harper’s Weekly Review, which resides online. I had to learn about it from The Morning News. Not bad, but still. When is Big Media going to realize it’s real problem is not paying me enough attention?
But nevermind that for now. Here’s an excerpt from this/last week [Urgent note to Mr Hodge: What, no archive??]
President George W. Bush staged a handshake between the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers at a summit meeting in Jordan. President Bush, Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, and King Abdullah II of Jordan stood outdoors together in the hot sun wearing suits and ties but were kept free of unsightly perspiration by tubes installed by White House operatives that blasted cold air from an ultra-quiet air conditioner that was hidden nearby. Sharon and Abbas read statements about the “road map” to peace that were largely written by American officials. “I think when you analyze the statements, you’ll find them to be historic,” Bush told reporters later. “Amazing things were said.” Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade responded to the summit with a joint attack on an Israeli military outpost in Gaza, killing four soldiers. Elsewhere, in the West Bank, Israeli forces shot a seven-year-old Palestinian girl in the abdomen.
Speaking of the End of The World…
Maybe a Tarkovsky movie works best as a memory; watching The Sacrifice again after many years was a little trying. However easily I got distracted by some of the antic, theatrical acting, the make-or-break single-take scene at the end, where the < SPOILER ALERT> house burns < /SPOILER> has a langorous, unassuming awesomeness. It’s not your typical one-shot, in so many ways.
Anyway, The Sacrifice’s post-nuclear armageddon setting reminded me of a good Wim Wenders film, Until The End of the World. Actually, it was listening to the even greater soundtrack, which reminded me.
Here’s what you gotta do
What are the odds?
What are the odds that Eric Rudolph, NC mountain man and religious fundamentalist extremist suspected of bombing a gay bar, would look so much like late Queen lead singer, Freddie Mercury
cf. From the mountains to the sea. Artist Donald Moffett’s courtroom sketches from the murder trial of “Christian soldier” Mr. Ronald Gay, who a shot up a gay bar in Roanoke, VA. Also, Larry Clark’s Bully, not on the DVD list.
Who, then, is this Michael Wolff person?
Because people are asking. From his online bio:
“[I’m/He’s] a seasoned pianist/composer with a wealth of straight ahead jazz credentials as well as an impressive body of movie soundtrack work…
In 1975, [I was– I mean] Wolff was hired by the great alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who also enjoyed a wide appeal at the time. “When I was with Cannonball, Miles would come to check us out. Everybody checked us out. There was a real scene surrounding that band. It was like you were on a wave of forward motion.” …
Taking his talents to television, Wolff became the musical director for the popular “Arsenio Hall Show.”
TJVGIF