Well it’s 1:05am and I just got finished watching City of Ember with Bill Murray, Tim Robbins and a host of others.  Very family friendly movie and I really enjoyed it.  It’s story is based around a problem with the world and the Government sends people down into this underground city that is built for over 200 years and the people as time passes don’t realize there is another world outside.  And these two younger children are inspired to believe there is something beyond their world that is lite only by lights with a failing generator.  So, I give that an F = Fun and Family Friendly – on the nuts for movie scale. 

Here is the trailer if you like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkSFsbv6eUg

Good Night

The Lucky Ones è un film del 2008 diretto da Neil Burger. La sceneggiatura di Burger e Dirk Wittenborn si concentra su tre soldati dell’esercito degli Stati Uniti che si trovano uniti da circostanze impreviste.

Leggi altre notizie su: | Commedia | Drammatico | Neil Burger | Rachel McAdams | Michael Peña | Tim Robbins | Katherine LaNasa,

Everyone here at GRIT would like to wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving!

Also don’t forget the following:

HuDost will be performing at Tim Robbins’ WTF?! Festival this Saturday at 8:30P.  Get your tickets here.

Ya hace algunos años que me había alejado en mis lecturas, de la novela negra, pero tuvo su momento, y los clásicos, Hammett, Chandler, M. Cain, Jim Thompson, Sciascia, Simenon, o Patricia Highsmith, me hicieron disfrutar con las historias que sus creativas mentes habían concebido.

He observado con escepticismo el giro que las editoriales han dado para alejar a los devoradores de bestsellers, de la literatura que se ha estado consumiendo estos últimos años (que marcó “El código Da Vinci”), conduciéndolos hacia la novela negra (con la trilogía de Stieg Larsson a la cabeza). Y seguía sin intención inmediata de volver a introducirme en el género (no me gusta que me dirijan en la elección de lo que leo), pero, visto el retraso con el que se iba a estrenar una película que ha despertado en mí gran interés, si que me planteé comprar un libro que pertenece a la novela negra. Me refiero a “Shutter Island”, de Dennis Lehane, que Martin Scorsese ha llevado al cine, y que se estrenará en Estados Unidos el 19 de febrero próximo.

Con “Shutter Island” me ha ocurrido exactamente lo mismo que con “The road”, llevada al cine por John Hillcoat, sobre la novela de Cormac McCarthy, y pendiente todavía de estreno. En ambos casos, tener que esperar su llegada a la pantalla, me ha “obligado” a leer antes la novela.

Pero en realidad, no es de “Shutter Island”, ni de “The road” de las que voy a hablar en este post, como ya habréis podido imaginar por su encabezamiento, pero como una cosa lleva a la otra…

Como llevar en mente comprar “Shutter Island”, me llevó a comprar antes “Mystic River”.

Y fue casual.

Aunque conocía la noticia de que una editorial había lanzado una nueva colección de libros de bolsillo dedicados a la novela policíaca para la venta en kioscos, no me había despertado ni el interés de conocer los títulos que la componían. Pero hace unas semanas, recargando la tarjeta del bus en uno de esos kioscos, reparé en la entrega que se había puesto a la venta aquellos días. Era “Mystic River”, la novela de Lehane en la que se basó Clint Eastwood en 2003, para realizar una de sus mejores películas.

El recuerdo de la magistral película de Eastwood, mi decisión de leer “Shutter Island”, y, todo hay que decirlo, su asequible precio (4,95€), me decidió a comprarla.

Estaba acabando por entonces “Nocturna”, la novela de Guillermo del Toro y Chuck Hogan (si esto fuera un foro literario, le dedicaría un capítulo aparte, y no muy favorable -pero podéis pinchar en el título y leer una reseña que coincide plenamente con lo que yo diría de ella), y a los pocos días, pasando por alto otros libros que esperaban su turno de ser leídos, comencé su lectura. Aunque, confieso, con ciertas reservas, porque en ningún momento pensé que la novela pudiera ser tan plena como la película. Y me equivoqué.

Sin quitarle ningún mérito a Eastwood, que supo aprovechar al máximo el magnífico material que contiene la novela, el libro sirve en bandeja para su adaptación al cine, una coherente e interesante historia, bien redactada, con unos personajes que derrochan autenticidad y un dominio de los diálogos que la convierte en notable.

Son precisamente los diálogos (y en la novela hay muchos), uno de valores que más he apreciado en esa pequeña joya que es “Mystic River”, y los que al igual que yo, seáis aficionados a la lectura, sabéis a lo que me refiero, pues cuantas veces, un libro que te ha contado una buena historia, te ha dejado un mal sabor de boca porque en la de los personajes han aparecido frases que piensas nadie hubiera dicho de esa forma en la vida real.

Cuando hablamos, sobre todo la gente corriente (que somos los más), no preparamos las frases para que suenen bien, ni introducimos palabras de adorno en ellas. Todo es espontáneo, y salen de nuestra mente comentarios, preguntas o contestaciones que no suelen tener una segunda oportunidad de ser rectificadas como cuando escribimos. Y ese es el fallo de muchos escritores. Por mejorar la forma, abandonan el realismo, lo natural de los diálogos. Y Lehane lo domina. Jimmy Markum, Dave Boyle, Sean Devine (los protagonistas), y todos los personajes que aparecen en la novela e interactúan con ellos, se expresan como lo haríamos cualquiera de nosotros en sus circunstancias.

“Mystic River”, la novela, no es tan sólo una buena historia del género negro o policiaco. Su profundidad en el tratamiento de sus personajes, de sus sentimientos y reacciones, la convierten en algo más.

Si habéis leído este post desde su principio, sabéis que este libro ha sido mi primer contacto con Dennis Lehane, pero… ahora estoy por la mitad de “Shutter Island”.

No voy a hablar de ella hasta que no vea la película de Scorsese, aunque sí quiero comentar una opinión compartida con una amiga tan aficionada y veterana en la lectura como yo. Es nuestra opinión, y discutible, pero nos hemos confirmado con el tiempo, en la idea de que en la producción literaria de un autor (hablamos de los buenos), siempre hay una novela que sobresale sobre las otras. Un libro “redondo”, al que prácticamente no puedes encontrar ningún defecto. En el resto de sus escritos, anteriores o posteriores, volverás a encontrar muchos de los valores de esa gran obra, pero nunca la igualan, y menos, la superan. Creo que “Mystic River” es la obra “redonda” de Lehane.

LA PELÍCULA DE CLINT EASTWOOD

No es mucho lo que puede añadir mi opinión personal a un film aclamado en su momento como uno de los mejores realizados por Eastwood, nominado a seis Oscar en la edición de 2003, y ganador de dos (Mejor Actor, Sean Penn y Mejor Actor de Reparto, Tim Robbins), pero quiero alabar su trabajo.

La película arranca, como en la novela, una tarde de verano, en la que Jimmy Markum, Dave Boyle y Sean Devine, tres niños de once años, juegan en las calles del barrio obrero East Buckingham, situado a las orillas del río Mystic. Una pelea por un desacuerdo entre ellos, ocasiona que un hombre que se identifica como policía, salga de un coche, y obligue a Dave a acompañarle, ante la mirada impotente de sus amigos. Dave aparece unos días más tarde. Ha conseguido escapar del hombre y de su compañero, pero todo el mundo sabe que ha sido víctima de abusos sexuales. La mala conciencia de Jimmy y Sean, que no hicieron nada para evitar que Dave subiera al coche, hace también que su amistad acabe diluyéndose. Veinticinco años más tarde, la vida de cada uno de ellos, ha seguido un rumbo diferente: Jimmy (Sean Penn), que se inició en la delincuencia y pasó un tiempo en la cárcel, se casó muy joven, tuvo una hija a los 17 años y está casado en segundas nupcias, porque su primera mujer murió tempranamente de cáncer, regenta ahora un pequeño supermercado en el mismo barrio que le vio nacer. Sean (Kevin Bacon), en cambio, es policía y abandonó el barrio al casarse, pero su mujer le ha dejado. Dave (Tim Robbins) no ha dejado el barrio, se ha casado y tiene un hijo, pero aunque aparentemente es un hombre normal, lo ocurrido en el pasado continúa atormentándole. Un día, la hija Jimmy de 19 años, desaparece, y su cuerpo sin vida es encontrado a las pocas horas en un parque. Esto motiva que las vidas de los tres vuelvan a cruzarse, pues Sean, junto a su compañero Whitey (Laurence Fishburne) es el encargado de investigar el asesinato, en el cual llega a relacionarse a Dave por una serie de circunstancias que lo convierten en sospechoso. Jimmy, por su parte, inicia una investigación paralela a la de la policía, porque quiere vengar la muerte de su hija…

Muy poco altera Eastwood, el desarrollo de la novela, y a los principales personajes en su película (Whitey, que es un hombre blanco en el libro, y su personaje está más elaborado, sería una de esas mínimas alteraciones), y pone con magistral acierto, escenario y rostros, para contar la trama, en la que los diálogos, tanto exteriores como interiores, al igual que en la novela de Lehane, son los protagonistas.

Y se ve su mano al dirigir a los tres actores principales, sacando lo mejor de cada uno de ellos. El comedimiento de Sean Penn (excelente actor, pero que si no es bien dirigido tiene tendencia a los tic y al histrionismo), aún en la escena más desgarradora de la película, sus expresiones, con las que nos cuenta su tortura interior… La aparente apatía del personaje de Tim Robbins, pero que con su mirada y movimientos, nos dice que algo está ocurriendo dentro de su cabeza… Y la corrección de Bacon, en la que yo diría, la mejor de sus interpretaciones…

Si los tres actores principales nos ofrecen magníficas actuaciones, no quedan atrás las de Marcia Gay Harden (que da vida a Celeste Boyle, la esposa de Dave), y Laura Linney (la esposa de Jimmy Markum), personajes secundarios, pero importantes en el desarrollo de la historia.

Magistral es también el tratamiento que ha dado Eastwood a la violencia contenida que subyace a lo largo de todo el film, y que en algunas secuencias llega a sobrecogernos. Arropado todo, por una adecuada banda sonora compuesta por él mismo.

Y mucho más podría extenderme comentando la película, pero no quiero repetir lo que otros ya dijeron cuando se estrenó.

Lo que sí quiero, es recomendar la novela a los que no la hayáis leído, pues sea o no, vuestro género favorito, sé que os satisfará su lectura. Igualmente recomiendo el film. He vuelto a verlo después de leer el libro, y me he confirmado en la idea de que es una gran película.

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Para ver la ficha de la película, pincha aquí

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Swanson 

Hola Dear Ones,

I hope that you are having an excellent pre-Thanksgiving. Thank you so much to those of you who came to our show last Saturday at the Baha’ii center.

As many of you know, we are performing this Saturday at Tim Robbins’ Theater for the WTF Fest in Culver City. It is a benefit to keep the ‘Actor’s Gang’ alive and prospering and doing wonderful work.

Because we love you all and your presence, we have a special offer for you (not in the greasy, 1980’s, used-car-salesman kind of way). Because it is Thanksgiving, you can attend our performance under the ‘pay-what-you-can’ plan!

The secret code is “Thanksgiving”. And you can order tickets through the following places:

boxoffice@theactorsgang.com

310-838-4264 ext: 15

http://www.wtffestival.theactorsgang.com/tickets.html

Please book your tickets as early as possible as seating is limited to 100!

Here are the show details:

8:30 PM, Saturday, November 28th WTF Fest@The Actor’s Gang,  9070 Venice Blvd, Culver City, CA  90232

We hope to see you there!  Cheers!

Moksha and JJW

WTF?!Fest Logo

O que eu mais gosto nesse filme? A mania de fazer listas.

Top five things I miss about Laura:  1 - Sense of humor. Very dry, but it can also be warm and forgiving. And she’s got one of the best all time laughs in the history of all time laughs, she laughs with her entire body.  2-  she’s got character. Or at least she had character before the Ian nightmare. She’s loyal and honest, and she doesn’t even take it out on people when she’s having a bad day. That’s character. 3 – miss her smell, and the way she tastes. It’s a mystery of human chemistry and I don’t understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home. 4 – I really dig how she walks around. It’s like she doesn’t care how she looks or what she projects and it’s not that she doesn’t care it’s just, she’s not affected I guess, and that gives her grace. And 5; she does this thing in bed when she can’t get to sleep, she kinda half moans and then rubs her feet together an equal number of times… it just kills me. Believe me, I mean, I could do a top five things about her that drive me crazy but it’s just your garden variety women you know, schizo stuff and that’s the kind of thing that got me here.

E não é só uma mania. Tem todo o cuidado por trás (The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention.  Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules)  e o indescritível prazer de dividir isso com os amigos:

PS1: Esse post é dedicado aos bons amigos e a todas as listas que a gente já fez em uma mesa de bar.

PS2: Eu gosto mais do Nick Hornby na telona do que nos livros. #prontofalei.

PS3: Nada de citar o slogan de Tostines. Daqui pra frente é Alta Fidelidade: What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music? 
 

PS4: O Jack pode cantar, mas eu ainda sinto vergonha alheia.

PS4: Quem viu o último American Idol pôde acompanhar a ‘performance’ do Jack com a Gladys Knight, Ben Stiller e o #1 (que, como sempre, roubou a cena né?) para promover Trovão Tropical.

‘Can I help you out with that trash?’

I heard a voice over my shoulder and, sure enough, when I looked up it was Gwyneth Paltrow on a break from up-dating her website, GOOP.

I knew very well she was being ironic. Certainly, she seemed quite tickled by the notion of it. So I left my chore and invited her into my mouse house.

After I’d washed my hands I got some fish fingers out of the fridge. They can defrost together, I thought as I welcomed her warmly.

Gwynnie is a piece of alabaster perfection and she can do long and short hair, as she showed us in Sliding Doors. I asked for some beauty tips, which she surrendered gracefully.

Nevertheless, she roundly dismissed my offer to paint her nails, with a snort through her elegant nose.

‘Do you prefer Luke or Owen Wilson?’ I asked, referring to her roles in the Wes Anderson films.

‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly choose between them,’ she replied coyly.

‘I could,’ I revealed. ‘Owen. More chamomile tea?’

We went for a walk around Ravenscourt Park so she could get some air. She seemed to relax a little but I have to admit I was quite annoyed because she was wearing sunglasses so no-one knew who she was.

She told me about how she thinks shampoo gives children cancer and how she bounces on a trampoline to sculpt the fabulous skyscraper heel legs that tell the world she’s sexy even though she’s the mother of Moses and a piece of fruit.

‘And Chris- well, he’s so talented. He takes his music very seriously,’ she opened up.

‘Do you think he takes quite a lot of stuff seriously?’ I asked, trying to widen my eyes.

‘No, not at all,’ she replied very seriously. ‘Chris has got a fantastic sense of humour. Just this morning over breakfast he was saying something really funny… Now what was that?’

I let her flail around like a weighted puppy for what seemed like an eternity before blowing the whistle and diving in with a basic bacon and egg gag, at which she laughed so hard I began to wonder if she really does find Chris a bit of a card.

I could tell right from the get-go that she wasn’t going to dish the dirt- she’s not desperate enough, having been born into fame and privilege.

So I took the liberty of switching off and playing ’shag, marry, cliff’, teaming her up with Jennifer and Angelina, seeing as they all like a bit of Brad Pitt.

It was a no-brainer she was ‘marry’- hell, I’d already managed to spend a few hours in her company without really listening. The other two were easy as well: ’shag’ Jen and ‘cliff’ Angelina (playing the rules by my original understanding of them, whereby ‘cliff’ is the person you are so crazy about you would be willing to jump off one with them).

When I came round, Gwynnie was talking about Anna Wintour and I regretted not paying attention. She said Anna started inviting her to lunches with John Galliano after her Oscar win and reckoned it was because the Queen of Vogue admired her work.

I let it slide. But it got me thinking about Shakespeare in Love.

‘Joseph Fiennes is quite intense but don’t you think his eyes are too close together?’ I asked, hungry for her professional opinion.

‘I was so blessed to work with Jo. He’s a giant of an actor,’ she replied.

‘Wow. Taller than Tim Robbins?’ I asked.

I think I got the wrong end of the stick but I knew she was relieved I didn’t allude to her acceptance speech debacle.

Instead, I praised her English accent and told her she was much better than Renee Zellweger, who sounds like she’s being goosed by the President but can’t let on.

Gwynnie found this remark distasteful. Angelina had warned me that she was a cut above but did I listen? No.

‘Have some of my Mum’s fruit cake with a thin layer of Lurpak butter on it,’ I suggested as she gathered her mobile phones to leave.

In reply to which- and oh, please God, may I never feel so wrong again- she gave me a look that still sends shivers down my spine.

‘I’m not sure I get you, Sophie,’ she said eventually, as she let two bodyguards help her on with her trainers. ‘But probing characters is my vocation so I’m going to take you to bed with me for a few nights to see what I can figure out.’

O.K, I thought.

As long as you don’t mind Jennifer Aniston joining us.

IMDB: 9.2 / #1 on the Top 250 list
Rotten Tomatoes: 88 / 90 / 97
Production Budget: $25 million / Domestic Gross: $28 million

Every once in a while, you come across a film which just blows you over on so many different levels.
This is one of them.

So many subtleties are captured so wonderfully by the director and the cast in this film — that it could serve as a textbook for acting and direction. No other film in my opinion can enunciate the saying – “A picture is worth a thousand words” – like this film can.

It is so unfortunate that this film was pitted against Forrest Gump for best picture, actor and also director. That would have been a really difficult call. (Forrest Gump won on all 3 counts)

The Shawshank Redemption

Frank Darabont captures the nuances of human emotion brilliantly and Morgan Freeman and Tim Robins portray this to perfection. You empathize and feel one with the inmates immediately.

That sinking feeling of being convicted and sent to prison directly from court for life — without ever getting a chance to go back to your house; Knowing that your parole is going to be turned down and you’re going to be spending another ten years of your life in prison; The feeling of knowing that your best friend is going to kill himself and there is nothing you can do about it; This and a million other things are expressed with utmost sincerity throughout this film – without mostly saying a word.

This is easily one of Morgan Freeman’s best works till date.

Did I also mention that the background score and cinematography were terrific?
Well, they certainly were!

A definite DVD for your collection. Highly recommended.

Watch it with: Alone

My rating: 5 stars definitely

Call it laziness I guess, but I’m revisiting last week’s theme.

Chips Ahoy:

And since I’m already being lazy I may as well go all out. Besides, why try to write some lengthy diatribe when Tim Robbins pretty much covered it in “Nothing to Lose”? Wasn’t sure if I’d find a clip of it at first but sure enough someone edited it into their own cartoon. How fortuitous.

It’s just too bad they cut the clip a little too short.

And now a word from our none sponsors.

This week’s cartoon is Chilly Willy:

First published in the May-June 1996 issue of Film Comment, in time for the broadcast bow of Adam Simon’s The Typewriter, The Rifle and the Movie Camera; offered now as a new Sam Fuller DVD box set hits the streets.–Robert Horton

“Who’s Griff?”

The question has to be asked. If the subject is Samuel Fuller, and the man himself is sitting right there, you’ve got a golden opportunity to find out why a character named “Griff” pops up in so many movies from the writer-producer-director’s filmography. One of the many things to like about a new hour-long documentary called The Typewriter, The Rifle and The Movie Camera is that director Adam Simon and executive producer Tim Robbins do ask the question.

Samuel Fuller

In picking up on Griff, Simon and Robbins cast themselves not as documentarians or reporters but as fans. Their partners in this unabashed love letter are Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino, who offer appreciations, anecdotes, and gruff-voiced Fuller imitations.

The ungainly title of the documentary (co-produced by the BFI and the Independent Film Channel) captures the three phases of Fuller’s career: his beginnings as a copyboy and crime reporter for the great New York newspapers of the 1920s, from which world he bounced into novel and screenplay writing; his service in the First Infantry Division, The Big Red One, during World War II; and his life as a film director, which began with I Shot Jesse James in 1948. Fuller, who has lived in Paris since the early 1980s, is interviewed in a variety of settings by Tim Robbins, and displays all the finger-poking vigor and indefatigable logorrhea that have made him such a legendary storyteller, on and off the screen (some of his anecdotes are clearly streamlined by cutting, lest the program go on indefinitely).

The program is a treat, and crafted with love. We hear just enough from Fuller himself to give us the flavor of the different periods of his life, which he relates with the straightforward (if often excited) narration of a good reporter. His description of what war does to a soldier – a fist inside you that never unclenches – isn’t that of a wounded veteran, or a self-pitying neurotic. It’s more like a piece of reportage, a fact given a vivid description by a good journalist who has boiled something down to its colorful, true, unsentimental essence.

This is something Fuller brings to his movies. It’s true that, in Fuller’s films, you often feel you’re smack in the middle of the action – at times the camera itself is knocked around, by its own crazy momentum, or a fighting actor’s shoulder. But you are also detached, which is a quality that isn’t remarked on much when critics describe Fuller as a primitive or irrational director. Yes, he’ll cut between close-ups so intense you feel you’re standing in the middle of a two-person meltdown; the opening dust-up from The Naked Kiss can leave bruises (the camera whammys around so much that you can actually see Fuller himself in one shot, yanking off Constance Towers’ wig). But Fuller will also shoot the choreography of conflict from far away: the kitchen knockdown-dragout in Shock Corridor is covered in a calm longshot, and much of the intricate fighting in Fixed Bayonets is played out on the huge icy set that lets us see the broad, merciless pattern of men being fired upon. That’s a reporter’s view – watching the scene and getting it down right.

The only time Fuller seems sentimental during the documentary is when he’s describing the help of a mentor or teacher (such as the towering newspaperman Arthur Brisbane, or Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck, whom Fuller acknowledges for his willingness to gamble on the likes of China Gate and Forty Guns). It strikes me that Fuller himself is a teacher in his movies, laying out some of the hard truths that the viewer will need to know, trying to pass along stuff learned the hard way. Maybe that’s why so much of his conversation carries the polished, thought-out conclusion of a lesson plan: “When you kill, you kill the same guy over and over and over again.” Often his films have characters who need to learn something, whether it is the ground-level rules of infantry life (don’t take the dog tags off a dead G.I., because he might be booby-trapped) or the risky rules of trust that make some kind of emotional life possible – a lesson often unlearned by Fuller’s characters (Richard Widmark gets it in time in Pickup on South Street, Cliff Robertson doesn’t in Underworld USA).

Sometimes in Fuller’s films the director seems to be depicting something for the sheer sake of doing it right – not the way the movies have shown it to you before, but the real business. You can practically feel him poking you in the arm. The opening of Pickup on South Street sets the wide-ranging plot in motion with a simple act: a subway pickpocket lifts a wallet from a woman’s purse, and escapes despite being watched by the FBI. This, however, is mere description; Fuller’s treatment of this event places us in a new realm. Watch the scene and you’ll realize that no one has ever caught the stop-and-lurch of a subway car with just this documentary exactness, while at the same time completely stylizing and sexualizing the close-quarters jostling of a sweaty-browed dame and the thief. And we get a textbook lesson in how to pick a purse clean, from initial approach to the definitive snap of the purse being closed (I said it was sexualized). The importance of technical fine points is reinforced in the long-take interrogation scene with street-rat Thelma Ritter, as she impatiently questions the FBI guy on what, precisely, he witnessed – “Was the newspaper rolled-up, or folded? Listen, mister, ya gotta be sure.”

Fuller himself might scoff at the role of teacher; in the documentary, Jarmusch relates a story about Fuller winning a film festival humanitarian award for Shock Corridor, a movie with a riot of social issues and morally twisted-up characters. Jarmusch says Fuller got up on stage and refused the prize, saying, “This isn’t a goddam humanitarian film. This is a hard-hitting action-packed melodrama. Give your award to Ingmar Bergman.” Okay. Still, Fuller’s films often present a kind of blueprint of the way a system – the mob, the battlefield, publishing – works. Like the map of the mined field in Fixed Bayonets, it’ll tell you exactly where to step so you don’t get your legs blown off. The only problem is, the guy with the map is lying incapacitated in the middle of the field, and you’ve gotta tread out there and get it off him. In a final touch that wouldn’t be out of place in an Ambrose Bierce Civil War story, the map turns out to be unreadable anyway – powder or blood has blacked it out.

The Typewriter, The Rifle provides enough clips to suggest why so many filmmakers, critics, and moviegoers have been enthralled by Fuller’s style. The show never quite reaches the heights of Richard Schickel’s 1970s series of director appreciations, The Men Who Made the Movies, which beautifully captured the different styles of six directors (and why they meant something).

But Scorsese puts on his teacher’s cap and contributes some keen analysis on how the violence in Fuller is conveyed through Fuller’s idiosyncratic camera placement and deployment of actors, particularly those strange love scenes in Pickup on South Street, where kiss comes to shove and the feral Widmark looks as likely to bite Jean Peters as make love to her. (It wasn’t method acting, but surely Widmark’s neurotic characters of the era are as appropriate a subject for a study of postwar anxiety as Brando’s.) Scorsese recalls seeing I Shot Jesse James as a child, and being powerfully affected by his identification with the movie’s main character – who was not Jesse James, but the coward Robert Ford. Even to the kid Scorsese’s eyes, the film had the tang of authenticity: “(It was) a more street-corner, daily-life reality. In other words, you might find more people like Bob Ford in your life than Jesse James…and you might be one of ‘em.”

Scorsese also describes the way a sequence from The Steel Helmet was the model for a fight scene in Raging Bull. (Stray thought: could Casino, with its essay-like treatment of The Way a System Works, have been intended as a Fullerian piece of thorough reporting?) Tarantino doesn’t fess up to any borrowings, but he and Robbins prowl through Fuller’s L.A. garage, known as The Shack, where mementos, photographs, and scripts from Fuller’s career are piled together, forming a life’s museum. This is a delightful scene in and of itself, but I will always be grateful to Adam Simon (whose main directorial credit is the Roger Corman Carnosaur) for giving us the spectacle of Quentin Tarantino and Tim Robbins gazing admiringly together at a “badass bayonet” (they do make an odd couple, but then Fuller’s films often depict collisions of cultures). These two nose around the souvenirs, lovingly cradle the bullet-pocked helmet from The Steel Helmet, and read passages from Fuller’s war diary in which specific ideas for later movies are first written down. They find a depiction of the original Griff, too – and no, I’m not going to give away that particular story before you hear Fuller himself explain it.

One of their discoveries in The Shack is a blown-up photograph of Fuller as a still-teenage crime reporter in the office, hat on head, feet crossed on a cluttered desk. He looks like a brash, unstoppable punk; he looks like he rules New York. They admire the picture long enough for Tarantino to cast Johnny Depp as the young Fuller.

I recognize that picture. When I was in college, I cut that picture out of a small film magazine and taped it to the shelf above my typewriter. I loved Fuller’s wild and individualistic movies, and when I was working on a school assignment or tapping out the last-minute contents of a film society newsletter, it helped to look up and see that vision of impertinent style. Maybe Quentin Tarantino or Jim Jarmusch or Adam Simon did something similar in their youths, I don’t know, but The Typewriter, The Rifle is nothing if not a piece of hero-worship. I bring this up only because I’ve been teaching film lately, and I find myself wondering about how I should introduce movie directors to students – not all, but some – who haven’t heard of Citizen Kane except as a reference in a Simpsons episode. I’m aware that the artist-as-hero is not a fashionable approach these days, and indeed I recognize the limits of that approach. Then I read my students’ journals, which hum with excitement over seeing Reservoir Dogs for the first time, and I really get a picture of the video-store population that follows Jackie Chan movies and Pulp Fiction wannabes (and I carefully write in the journal margins that Killing Zoe is really not a Tarantino movie per se, and that perhaps they might be interested in movies by Leone, Kurosawa, Huston…). They know the stories behind Clerks and Slacker, and they know these young filmmakers are speaking to them – perhaps the equivalent of Scorsese’s quickening to the “daily-life reality” of Fuller. Thus we get heroes named Quentin and Kevin and Spike.

I still don’t know whether hero worship leads people to greater understanding or down the path of false gods. What I hope is that fandom creates links, and that when Tarantino’s fans listen to him talk about Sam Fuller, or wonder why he named his production company after a Frenchman named Godard, that maybe they’ll be curious enough to seek out those names out at the better video stores. On the other hand, I’m realistic; most of my students hated Breathless.

The Steel Helmet: Gene Evans

Having that picture of the young Sam Fuller hanging over my typewriter helped me when the blank page looked like the enemy. So I’m a sucker for The Typewriter, The Rifle, and the Movie Camera. It concludes, far too soon, with Fuller musing on one of his own heroes. He and Robbins, who have a height differential of a good foot-and-a-half, stroll through the grounds of the Rodin Museum in Paris, at sunset. They pass Rodin’s mighty statue of Balzac, which prompts Fuller to set a few scenes, including a characteristically smash-mouth opening, from a projected Balzac movie biography. “He was a scoundrel, he was a liar, he was a bullshit artist…he was a wrrrriter!” Flash on a photo of a younger Fuller, sitting in a room with a Paris street sign, Rue de Balzac, above his head (I hope he stole it). Back to the Rodin: the sun is setting in Paris, low enough so the flare from the light obscures the image of the two men in front of Balzac. Sam Fuller is still talking.

“It’s not faith, it’s work.”
~~Sister Helen Prejean

Humanity exists in everyone. Men are not worse than their worst deeds. Talk about ideas that are easy to preach but hard to practice, particularly on death row. The miracle of Tim Robbins’ immensely powerful ”Dead Man Walking” is that every character struggles with these concepts, and many do not swallow them as gospel truths. Here is one of the few — and possibly the most poignant and intelligent — examinations of the death penalty that leaves no scar left unseen, no voice left unheard.

The first voice belongs to that of Sister Helen Prejean (a wonderfully understated Susan Sarandon), who receives a letter from New Orleans death row inmate Matthew Poncelot (Sean Penn) and decides to visit him. There are no thoughts of shining up his dirty soul – she goes, she tells the priest, because “he wrote to me.” She enters the prison unprepared by what she finds: an oily, conceited racist whose manicured goatee give him an undeniable air of evil. But Poncelot gets a surprise of his own: Sister Helen is no Bible-thumper interested in adding another saved soul to her belt. Her motives are genuine; she asks questions and listens to his answers. She treats Poncelot, accused of murdering a teen couple and raping the girl, with respect because he is a person. For her, that’s reason enough, and so it becomes reason enough for us to care.

Soon, more voices chime in. Sister Helen’s tentative friendship with Poncelot opens a floodgate of complications. Poncelot draws her into his case, urging her to help him turn his death sentence into life in prison, and she agrees partly because she’s in too deep to pull back. (Credit Robbins with writing Helen this way and Sarandon with making her confusion palpable; rarely do we see religious figures this openly conflicted.) Poncelot, however, doesn’t make things easy — he tells Sister Helen what she wants to hear, then lapses into crazed, bigoted rants and aligns himself with neo-Nazis on TV. But there is real pain and fear beneath all that bravado*. She must face the wrath of the murdered girl’s parents (R. Lee Ermey, Celia Weston) and the quiet disappointment of the dead boy’s father (a subtle, devastating Raymond J. Barry). Angry, too, are the nuns in her order, who berate her for helping a lost cause like Poncelot instead of working with the disadvantaged children who need her more.

The volume of issues Robbins tackles in his adaptation of the real Sister Helen’s memoir is staggering. Robbins examines everything: faith, fear, revenge, pain, absolution, guilt, redemption. He does so with remarkable patience; he refuses to muscle his characters into acting as puppets meant to advance the plot. Not once does he attempt to force-feed us empty cliches and platitudes about the death penalty. Robbins is too subtle; rather, he elects to let this story develop naturally, allowing the unpredictability of human nature to dictate outcomes.  Consider, for example, Sister Helen’s meeting with the murdered girl’s parents, who believe she’s come to side with them. Their anger is blistering, and it pushes Sister Helen to question her own judgments about what Poncelot has done.

Robbins’ beautifully balanced script is elevated immensely by his actors. Talent doesn’t get much deeper or richer than Sarandon and Penn, two actors who tend to inhabit their characters completely. Saddled with the unenviable task of portraying a nun, Sarandon subverts our expectations; her Sister Helen is not a saint but a flawed woman who know she’s in over her head but won’t give up. She tells Poncelot he’s “a son of God” and honestly believes this to be true. Her directness is unexpectedly moving. Penn offers a fine counterpoint, for Poncelot covers the reality about his involvement with the murders with swagger, foul language and lines he’s pulled from Nazi propaganda pamphlets. But watch Penn’s eyes — they dam up rivers of emotions that threaten to overflow any second. When he finally tells Sister Helen “thank you for loving me,” it’s a moment of honesty so hard-won it feels wholly real. And in the end, that’s exactly where “Dead Man Walking” succeeds: It shows not one side but all of them. Every face we see haunts us immeasurably.

*Nowhere is this more evident than in Bruce Springsteen’s “Dead Man Walkin’,” a haunting song he penned specifically for the film’s soundtrack.

I’m going to try to make this a quick review tonight. It’s not because I don’t care enough about the D: on the contrary, I happen to think they’re one of the funniest musical acts in history and one of the best satirists when it comes to the pomposity of rock music. Jack Black’s atrociously charismatic lyricism combined with Kyle Gass’s virtuoso guitar playing makes for comedy that happens to be musically accomplished to boot. I’m just going to make this short because this is the kind of movie where you already know if you’re going to like it. It’s a musical comedy that is rock-oriented and Jack Black oriented. If you like the things they did on the HBO show or their first album, you get more of the same, and if you didn’t, then you’re probably very much in the dark as to why any of this is terribly funny.

We learn here the origins of the D, a rock duo that came together when rock prodigy Jack meets older, more experience guitar player Kyle busking one day and admires his handiwork. Kyle at first is annoyed by this nobody who has seriously latched onto him, but he grows a fondness for the plucky kid, and eventually they learn to rock wonderfully together. They form a bond and a friendship that will carry on through the coming years, and their music perfectly represents this new-found camaraderie. But they need something special to break into the big time, something that will set them apart from the millions of other bands who play open mics nights as their regular gigs. An opportunity appears from a mysterious store owner, who lets them in on The Pick of Destiny, a magical pick made from the horn of the Devil that will allow for any guitarist to play on an entirely different level. The pick is being held at a rock and roll museum, nobody at the museum knowing its true power, and the two hatch a plan to take it from under everyone’s noses. Along the way, their mental alacrity, their physical prowess, and even their friendship will be tested, because the road to the Pick of Destiny is littered with obstacles. But with the assistance of their only fan, Lee, can they avoid death or a break-up and become rock heroes?

It’s a pretty funny flick that really got dropped by fans and casual moviegoers alike when it came out, probably due to all the other Holiday blockbusters edging it out at the time, not to mention the fact that their last album was five years prior, and they were striking while the iron was freezing cold. But still, all things considered, it’s a good comedy. The jokes are pretty strong, most of them involving how pompous they are in the face of their total obscurity and the fact that rock music is so full of shit sometimes. They love to use the idea that you can rock SO HARD that you can change the physical properties of objects, like “I’m gonna ROCK your face off!” or “I’m gonna kill him with ROCK!” like it’s fucking kryptonite. Rock is just as bogus and self-important here as in the real world, and the gags do a good job of representing that. And while there are a few slow scenes that don’t pan out comically, the overall feel is still very positive, especially in the songs that move this musical along. They’re all for the most part, really good songs, well-made and catchy with all the tasty riffage that we expect from Tenacious D. The songs are a little too attached to the movie, sometimes, and can’t really live very long on their own, but as long as you’ve seen the movie once, you can at least cope with it and enjoy without living in total confusion. My favorite song? A little track called Master Exploder where Jack Black actually blows a guy’s head off with his ROCK!

Kyle and Jack have a good rapport together that translates well onto the screen. A big draw to this is their seemingly ad-libbed humor is that they actually like each other, which seems to be mostly a fleeting thing in comedic pair-ups these days. They play well off of one another, especially in the latter half of the movie where they interact more with one another. Like real friends, they just feel right together, and there’s no amount of coaching you can do to get as close and as natural with someone else as you can see with these two. It’s a real buddy duo for a really good buddy adventure movie. There’s action, suspense, lots of ganja, cameos that range from the expected (Dave Grohl) to the surprising (Ben Stiller) to the completely unexpected (Tim Robbins???) that are all pretty good. Don’t be surprised if you’re not a fan of the D to find this movie a little lacking, but even for the uninitiated, I think you can easily find something to laugh at here. Check it out, but don’t expect anything as epic as what you find on the cover and the artwork. It’s just a good-natured comedy with a great sense of humor that will be remembered for its financial failure but should be remembered for its charismatic leads and for fun that really delivers. I give Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny 7 1/2 ROCKED TO DEATH CORPSES out of 10.

Tomorrow we get magical and mystical with the black-and-white version of Beauty and the Beast! Until then!

Okay, okay, let’s get serious for a minute. I have browbeaten today’s movie around the site very sparsely over the past 11 months. A little here, a little there; not that big of a deal in the long run. But rarely in my history of critiquing movies has there been such a backlash from people when I tell them my dislike for something. If I said right now that I think Citizen Kane is bullshit and I had a reasonable explanation, I think I would be let off the hook if I elucidated enough. But if I tell most people that I dislike watching The Shawshank Redemption and I very plainly give reasons why, I would still be looked upon like I just told everyone I had a plate full of mashed potatoes in my underwear. People are emotionally attached to this movie like it hits close to home or something (I was incarcerated for life, too; don’t feel bad!). Admittedly it has a positive message about the power of equality and courage in the face of despair, but it really doesn’t seem as potent of a film as everyone makes it out to be. I’ve now seen The Shawspank Inflation 4 times now, every time feeling exactly the same as the last. So the two logical conclusions I can come to are either

A). I have a heart made of stone

or

B). Everyone I’ve ever talked to about this movie has an emotional disorder.

I think you know which one I’m leaning towards…

The Sweetsnack Resplendence is really the story of Andy Dufresne. We follow poor, completely innocent Andy as he’s put through the wringer of the American judicial system in the late 40s after being falsely accused of murdering his wife. He receives a lifetime sentence and is sent to notoriously harsh Shawshank Penitentiary (Maine is one fucked-up state; every King novel references it, and seemingly not in a good way). There, he quickly finds a niche with fellow lifer Ellis “Red” Redding, a friendly fellow who recently was denied parole at his hearing. The two bond over a number of subjects, and they become fast friends. Andy even makes friends with some of the guards, with whom he imparts valuable financial information, and in exchange keeps his enemies at bay. But his one real problem in Shawshank, besides being in prison, is the Warden, a heartless shell of a man who uses the prisoners for his own devious profit. So most of these prisoners will be here for the rest of their lives, doomed to stand behind the same four gray walls until their dying breath. But Andy has a plan; a plan for escape. It won’t be easy, and it will take many, many years for it to come to fruition, but it will be a sweet, sweet victory if he can pull it off without a hitch.

See, a nice story, to be sure. I never once said The Shortcake Relation wasn’t a well made film. It’s meticulously produced and executed with a wonderful cast that had the potential to make something great. Almost to the letter there is quality in every aspect of this production. Frank Darabont makes another appearance on this site within a single week to get on his hands and knees for the one they call Stephen King. His direction is again nothing to scoff at, and it should be noted that while this probably isn’t his best Stephen King adaptation, his is still a vivid storytelling style that will appeal to the visually minded. It’s a good try, and I really can’t stress enough how much I respect the cast and crew for their efforts.

But that doesn’t exactly translate to something worth your time, so what’s the catch? Well, it’s simply that this is one of the most listless mainstream films I’ve ever laid eyes on. It’s a story of triumph over adversity that is fun for the whole family (except the rape and suicide parts), but it has no zest, no flavor. It’s a boring gray film that emphasizes only how depressing being stuck in a prison in Maine can be. It isn’t even an artistic decision; there’s a huge difference between feeling a character’s listlessness and being bored by the image and everything it represents. It’s just a spectacularly humdrum affair full of muted colors, Morgan Freeman’s droning narration, an unrelenting cloudy sky, and a time period known for its drab conformity and lack of anything stimulating. I squirm from start to finish during The Sharkbait Rotation, and I somehow sat very patiently through all four and a half hours of Che!

It’s also a certain distance between the main character, Andy Dufresne, played by a prime-of-his-career Tim Robbins, and the audience. We’re seeing him through the eyes of Red, played by a prime-of-his career Morgan Freeman, something that would have worked better had Freeman a more intimate knowledge of the guy. Instead, we get sketches of who Andy is and what his motives are while we see them play out on the screen. Some people might argue that Red is the main character, and that we are really seeing his journey through the exploits and times of a younger, more optimistic prisoner. But we know even less about Red than we do Andy, and for a drama set where people are just sitting around talking all day or curled up in a cell thinking about talking, you think that would be easier. We go off of prison yard legends, gossip, and conversations often had on screen about who these people are, when I’d rather just see it happen.

Don’t get me wrong; I can certainly handle my fair share of longer titles, but this one just seems to drag into infinity. Only spanning about 20 years, the film, while over 2 hours long, stretches out in my brain for about an extra 45 minutes. An excellent production brings all these characters to life, but their lives are apparently duller than a prison shank. I wish I could like The Soreflank Indention, but its reality of banality is as painful as it gets, and I don’t wish to be put through it any more. It is a bore of a film that poses the question to me; could you walk out of this movie and find a better one to say what it has to say in a more concise, artful manner, or are you cursed to stay in frown-inducing Maine state prisons for the rest of your life as a thinking individual? I’ve found enough films in my travels to say conclusively that The Skullblank Retraction is a movie that is all pomp and no circumstance. It’s a little bit of some things, but not enough of anything to make it too exciting or memorable or even intensely endearing. I’m sure I’ll be suckered into watching it again at some point next year, with people telling me how good it is and how insane my ambivalence is, but until that time, I’m so done with Stephen King’s incarcerated fairy tale. I give The Stoolsoft Reflection 5 comically misspelled names out of 10, and a hearty bleh from yours truly.

Tomorrow I will see a movie, but I don’t know what it is yet! Send your requests in today, and I’lll make sure you get your voice heard! Until then, folks!!!

Les Prédateurs, son premier long-métrage, était loin d’être parfait. Pourtant, il laissait espérer un joli avenir à Tony Scott. Il y avait bien là un univers et de vrais partis pris de mise en scène. Avec Top Gun, le réalisateur abandonne sur le bas côté tout élan artistique. Il embrasse l’idéologie reaganienne et propose un film d’une convenance déroutante. Mitchell (Tom Cruise), un pilote de chasse, est choisi parmi son bataillon pour intégrer Top Gun, l’école aéronavale des élites.

Des clichés en veux-tu en voilà. Mitchell est un rebelle au grand cœur : le rôle idéal pour Tom Cruise qui se voit propulsé au rang de star internationale. Le film, quant à lui, se laisse voir quand il ne donne pas dans le sentimentalisme (la relation de Mitchell avec sa prof est d’une mièvrerie sans nom). Allez, on sauvera les scènes aériennes qui ont bien joué leur rôle : un peu de suspense, suffisamment pour nous garder éveillés.

Cette rudimentaire chronique ne pourrait se passer de l’analyse que Quentin Tarantino fait du film dans Sleep with me. Il y affirme que Top Gun est un film gay, rien de moins. J’aborde dans son sens, d’autant plus qu’il en était de même pour Les Prédateurs qui baignait pourtant dans une atmosphère beaucoup moins… “inconsciente” dirons-nous. Pour le coup, Top Gun y gagne un nouvel intérêt, cette fois-ci plus comique. Quentin, c’est à toi…

v

TOP GUN (USA, 1986) R. : Tony Scott, Sc. : Jim Cash, Jack Epps Jr. ; Ph. : Jeffrey L. Kimball ; M. : Harold Faltermeyer ; Int. : Tom Cruise (Maverick), Kelly McGillis (Charlie), Val Kilmer (Iceman), Anthony Edwards (Goose), Tom Skerrit (Viper), Michael Ironside (Jester), Tim Robbins (Merlin). Couleurs, 110mn.

Jacob’s Ladder is a 1990 psychological thriller / horror film directed by Adrian Lyne, based on a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin. It stars Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, Danny Aiello, and Jason Alexander. Actor Macaulay Culkin appears in an uncredited performance.

Tagline:  The most frightening thing about Jacob Singer’s nightmare is that he isn’t dreaming.

Trivia:

• All SFX were filmed live, with no post-production. For example, to achieve the famous ’shaking head’ effect, director Adrian Lyne simply filmed the actor waving his head around (and keeping his shoulders and the rest of his body completely still) at 4fps, resulting in an incredibly fast and deeply disturbing motion when played back at the normal frame-rate of 24fps.
• The Bergen Street station in the film was actually an abandoned, lower level portion of the station, which had to be re-tiled and fixed to look as if it was still in working condition.
• All ads in the subway and Bergen Street station are anti-drug ads.
• According to the original script, the subway station Jacob arrives at in the beginning of the movie was supposed to be Nostrand Avenue – not Bergen Street.
• According to the original script, after Jacob is nearly run over by the subway train, a sequence involving a man being raped in the subway station mens bathroom was supposed to occur. It was filmed but deleted from the final cut (parts of the scene can be seen in the Making-Of featurette Building ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (1990) (V)).
• Writer Bruce Joel Rubin wrote the script for Jacob’s Ladder in 1980 after he had a dream of being trapped in a subway. He spent ten years trying to get it produced, but the script remained languishing in developmental limbo. During this period, Rubin’s agent told him that the film would never be made as “Hollywood doesn’t make ghost movies”. After the Rubin scripted Ghost (1990) became a smash hit, coupled with the success of Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987), studios became more open to the possibilities of Rubin’s script. After taking on the role of director, Adrian Lyne spent over a year refining the script with writer Rubin.
• Adrian Lyne made sure Jacob and his visions never appear together in the same shot.
• The hospital gurney that carries Jacob was deliberately unbalanced by Adrian Lyne. He raised one wheel slightly off the floor, causing it to rattle and spin.
• The confrontation between Jacob and Geary originally takes place in a courtroom corridor. Lyne moved them to the stairs in order to downplay the height difference between Tim Robbins (who is 6′ 5″) and ‘Jason Alexander’ (who is 5′ 5″).
• Some additional scenes from the original script which were changed or removed by director Adrian Lyne: – During the dance scene, ALL the dancers turn into demons. – During one of his Vietnam flashbacks, Jacob has a vision of a “celestial staircase” accompanied by heavenly music. – Jacob watches a reverend on TV who rants about the world coming to an end. – Jacob sees an image of a demon on the wall of his living room, which, when he looks closely at it, becomes a portal to Hell. – A scene following the “antidote” sequence in which the ceiling explodes and Jacob is surrounded by a vision of Heaven. – A different ending, where Jezzie turns herself inside-out and transforms into a huge demon, which Jacob has to fight before ascending to heaven.
• The closing legend of the film mentions the testing of a drug named BZ in Vietnam. BZ is NATO code for a hallucinogen called 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, which was rumored to have been administered to US troops during the Vietnam War in an attempt to increase their combat abilities.
• After initial test audiences reported that the film was overwhelming, director Adrian Lyne cut out almost thirty minutes of material, almost all of which came from the last third of the film. Four major sequences were removed after Jacob (Tim Robbins) first meets Michael (Matt Craven); a scene where Michael gives him an antidote for the Ladder, a scene where Jacob thinks he is cured but turns out not to be; a scene where he goes to Michael’s apartment and finds Michael decapitated; and a scene just prior to his final meeting with Gabe (Macaulay Culkin), where he meets Jezzie (Elizabeth Peña), who shows her true form.
• For all of the chiropractor scenes, director Adrian Lyne ensured there was a real chiropractor on-set, who would work with actor Danny Aiello so as to ensure authenticity. According to Lyne, chiropractors often approach him and thank him for going to the trouble of getting what they do exactly right.
• According to director Adrian Lyne, most of the dialogue in the opening scene between the soldiers was improvised on set by the actors themselves, especially the conversation between George (Ving Rhames) and Jacob (Tim Robbins) about masturbation.
• Prior to the commencement of filming, former US marine Dale Dye took actors Tim Robbins, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Eriq La Salle, Ving Rhames, Brian Tarantina, Brent Hinkley and Anthony Alessandro to a 5-day military boot camp.
• Adrian Lyne also heavily rewrote the scene involving the biblical Jacob’s ladder at the end of the film. Writer Bruce Joel Rubin had written the scene to involve a massive staircase ascending into the clouds, with crowds of people lining it, towering columns, and huge gates at the summit. Again however, Lyne felt that such an image could come across as preposterous (he refers to Rubin’s original conception as the Liberace scene’ on the DVD commentary track). As such, Lyne rewrote the scene to involve simply the staircase in Jacob’s house, basing this on the principal that heaven is wherever you were happiest.
• In the original screenplay, writer Bruce Joel Rubin had created a typical Biblical hell, complete with winged demons, cloven hoofed devils with horns, people with beaks and strange objects lying randomly around (director Adrian Lyne likens Rubin’s vision to the work of Hieronymus Bosch). As with Rubin’s general depiction of demons however, Lyne felt that such scenes could very easily make an audience laugh. As such, he decided to rewrite the scene of Jacob’s descent into hell; ultimately coming up with the hospital sequence where Jacob is wheeled on a gurney into a metaphorical hell which becomes more and more grotesque as he moves.
• In Bruce Joel Rubin’s original screenplay, all of the demons who appear throughout the film were typical biblical demons with horns, wings, cloven hooves etc. Director Adrian Lyne felt that this kind of imagery could very easily come across as comic, which would destroy the film. He felt that the fact that the imagery was so far from human lessened its impact, and as such, he decided he wanted the demons to be humanesque, but not quite human. During his research into this (which was when he discovered the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin), Lyne came across the Thalidomide scandal. Thalidomide was a drug made available for purchase from 1957 to 1961. Ostensibly, it was designed to treat pregnant women; primarily as an antiemetic to combat morning sickness, and secondarily as a sleeping aid. However, prior to its release, inadequate clinical tests were carried out, leading to roughly 10,000 children in Africa and Europe being born with severe physical deformities because their mothers had taken thalidomide during their pregnancy. The most common defects were phocomelia, dysmelia, amelia and polymelia; all conditions which affect the appearance of the limbs. During his research, Lyne studied the Thalidomide case, and came to feel that the birth defects caused by the drug represented the perfect starting place for his redesign of Rubin’s demons. The Thalidomide scandal was also the inspiration for David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981).
• According to director Adrian Lyne, the drug aspect of the story was inspired by the Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain book, “Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and Sixties Rebellion”.
• Director Adrian Lyne used the art of painters William Blake, H.R. Giger, and Francis Bacon and photographers Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin as his primary influences for the visual style of the film.
• The film was green-lit by Paramount Pictures (with whom Adrian Lyne had made both Flashdance (1983) and Fatal Attraction (1987), and with whom writer Bruce Joel Rubin had made Ghost (1990)), but there was a change of leadership in the studio and the new executives were unsure of the film. They demanded that the end of the movie be changed, but both Lyne and Rubin refused, and so Paramount pulled the plug on the film. It appeared as if the project was going to have to be completely abandoned until Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna of Carolco Pictures saved it with a budget of $25 million. They also gave Lyne complete creative control as well as final cut of the film.
• In an ironic reversal, Adrian Lyne turned down directorial duties on The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) so he could direct Jacob’s Ladder. His first choice for the role of Jacob Singer was Tom Hanks, but Hanks turned down the film so he could make The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990).
• According to writer Bruce Joel Rubin, the script was heavily inspired by the Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead), the biblical story of Jacob’s ladder and Robert Enrico’s Oscar-winning short film La rivière du hibou (1962), based on the 1890 Ambrose Bierce short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, in which much of the narrative is a man’s experience of an imagined life in the spilt second before he dies.
• Actors who were allegedly interested in playing the leading role of Jacob Singer included Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Richard Gere. For the role of Jezzie, director Adrian Lyne auditioned roughly 300 women, including Julia Roberts, Andie MacDowell, Madonna and Jennifer Lopez. The role eventually went to the very first person who auditioned – Elizabeth Peña.
• Sidney Lumet, Michael Apted and Ridley Scott all tried to get the project green-lit during its ten-year period of non-production.
• Don Johnson and Mickey Rourke both turned down the lead role.

Amazon Specials!

Prepare yourself for shocking news.  My little recipe experiment is heading straight for the toilet.  Do not pass, go, do not collect $200–head straight for the toilet.  On the double.

Episode 1

Tuesday night I made mushroom-Swiss burgers with sweet potato fries [+ Asian dipping sauce.]  The burgers were great; pretty hard to mess up a burger though–especially one smothered in sauteed mushrooms, fresh garlic, and Swiss cheese. The sweet potato fries were OK, but the Asian dipping sauce was too different to appeal to our youngsters.  With a base of peanut butter, chopped red peppers and toasted sesame oil, it sounded fantastic in theory, but just didn’t turn into the crowd pleaser I was hoping for.  At least the paper plates were festive.

One little detail I neglected to share with you is that the sweet potatoes called for sesame seeds.  Normally, I would not bat an eye at this, but for some reason that night, I was thinking about that old Ryan Phillipe movie “Antitrust” in which he’s an up-and-coming computer processor guy who is hired by Tim Robbins into something like Microsoft.  Anyway, it’s a great thriller if you’ve never seen it.  One of the details that turns into an important piece of information is that Ryan’s character is allergic to sesame seeds.  So, as I’m sprinkling them on to the potatoes to roast, I’m thinking of this movie.

And then, LOOK what happened to my daughter [after I FORCE her to eat it, whether she likes it or NOT!]:

Can you see the redness under her eye?  Can you see the raised white dots and rashy-patch spreading out like eye-black on a Major Leager?

Great.  I’ve poisoned my kid.

I’ve tried a new recipe, which they didn’t even like, and to boot, I’ve given my daughter a rash.   And did I mention it was under both eyes?

Episode 2:

Wednesday nights are always a bit hurried around here.  We have a weekly commitment and have to leave the house at 6:05, so you can imagine what it’s like at about 5 pm.  Craaaaziness! Being the superior home manager that I am [*cough], I try to plan something easy for dinner.  Thus, as I looked through my new cookbook, my sweet little piece of supposed salvation, I selected page 30 for tonight: fried fresh mozzarella and tomato sandwiches.  I grilled them instead, but followed the directions to soak them in egg first, a ‘la French toast.  Another twist that I thought would be a nice change.  A few notes of a different, yet lovely tune.

No.

Note to self:  easy at our house = PB & J from now on, forever and ever AMEN.

Remind me of this should I ever fall down and suffer some sort of memory-altering injury.   Or if I decide to beat myself in the head with a frying pan out of anger that I just cannot BUY a good home-cooked meal.

So here’s what it looked like around 5:40 in the land of bliss:

Image 1:

Fresh mozzarella melted on grilled Ezekiel bread with fresh Romas sliced lengthwise.

Image 2:

“Eeew!  I don’t like this kind of cheese!” ~  “Are you sure this isn’t a fried egg?!” To which I reply, kindly and gently:  “Fine, DOGGONE IT!!  Peel it off, but eat the sandwich!  [then graciously add...] How ’bout we add some ham to it?” They reply:  “OK, but can we take off the tomato, too?”

Image 3:

…And it meets its sad, inevitable end with our dog, who sniffs it over and eats only part of it. I QUIT!!

People > Pigs

A progressive, feminist blogger who agrees with the above? Three cheers for Anna North! Natalie Portman on the other hand is quickly joining the ranks of Sean Penn, Alec Bladwin, Tim Robbins and John Cusack. They pretend to be other people for a living so you, like the turncoat starfucker who came to the astute realization that Hollywood leans left after her divorce Arianna Huffington, obviously care about their opinions. Let’s keep the editorials coming!

He posits that consideration, as promoted by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which has more to do with being polite to your tablemates than sticking to your own ideals, would be absurd if applied to any other belief (e.g., I don’t believe in rape, but if it’s what it takes to please my dinner hosts, then so be it).

That is unless Portman is dining with Roman Polanski…

-RF

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• HuDost selected to be part of Tim Robbins’ WTF?! Festival in Culver City, CA. They will be playing on November 28th at 8:30PM. Tickets are only $20 AND ARE SELLING OUT FAST! Get your tickets now!

• Marcelo Quinonez is working on a new Cuchata album! Due out in 2010. Check back here for more updates!

• The Pimps of Joytime have released the first track from their next disc. Click here to listen!

• Ariel Hyatt’s second version of her acclaimed book Music Success in Nine Weeks is out NOW!

• NOVA Fashion Week continues to add designers to their roster!

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Topically enough, with halloween lurking, I was texting away with friends about Cher, covens and cherries. Susan Sarandon came up which led naturally to (entirely unnatural) thoughts about Tim Robbins. I mean, it’s bad enough that Sarandon is beautiful, politically aware and an excellent actor. But she’s also shagging Tim. Well I assume she is since they’re married.

It was his performance as a talented but petulant baseball player in Bull Durham than turned me onto Tim. Sarandon’s role is as his coach (of sorts), whose methods are somewhat unorthodox, but definitely seem to produce results, in more ways than one. It’s a grand portrayal of sex as sport.
Tim’s later louche performance in The Player cemented feelings we will call ‘admiration’ out of respect for his missus.
He is preposterously tall, has utterly sound politics and a fondness for older women. What’s not to like about him?

Posted by Inkface