Day: July 7, 2010

Hollywood Round-up, 7/7

From "Tron: Legacy."

By Jason Apuzzo. • The LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein talks today about Inception hysteria among critics, and the potential of a backlash.  I think Patrick basically nails this one on the head, but the real issue is not so much Inception as Christopher Nolan.  Not everyone is sold on him yet as a ‘visionary.’  He may simply be overindulged at this point in his career, riding the long wave of the Batman franchise.  There are too many iffy projects in Nolan’s recent past (The Prestige, Insomnia, Following) to uncritically accept the hype about one of his offerings right now.  And nothing I’ve seen in the Inception reviews suggests that Nolan has suddenly developed a sense of humor in his writing, to counterbalance his compulsive and somewhat amateurish philosophizing.  We’ll see.

Bar Refaeli.

• Matt Damon is apparently gearing up to play Liberace’s love interest in a new Liberace biopic. Provide your own punchline for this. I believe this is what was once quaintly referred to as a ‘career risk.’ For this role Damon may need to stretch and add a second facial expression to his repertoire.

• Tron will be featured in the forthcoming edition of Empire magazine. I’m beginning to develop a soupçon of enthusiasm for this project. Perhaps. Am I committing myself too much?

• Some new photos from the set of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides now appearing on-line. They’re filming these movies in Hawaii now instead of LA.  Whatever happened to those California tax incentives?

• Actor Chris Evans talks about his snappy new Captain America duds today. I wasn’t aware that they were actually setting this film in the 1940s-50s.  This project is looking better by the day.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Model and Leonardo DiCaprio girlfriend Bar Refaeli, posing in the latest edition of V Magazine, speculates thoughtfully on the nature of her sex appeal today. Her theory is, I think, not lacking in insight – although surely limiting, in its own way.  Click on over for her full, detailed explication.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.

Posted on July 7th, 2010 at 3:17pm.

Michael Moore Voted to Academy Board of Governors

By Jason Apuzzo. As reported at Deadline Hollywood, Michael Moore (along with Kathryn Bigelow, and Lawrence of Arabia editor Anne Coates) has been elected to the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors.

Forgive me, but the election of this Riefenstahl-in-a-fat-suit is repulsive.  Utterly contemptible, divisive – and richly evocative of the climate of fear that currently pervades an industry in which dissent from the left-liberal line is not tolerated.  I could not be more disgusted by this.

What most people don’t know is that at least one of the Motion Picture Academy’s Board of Governors is a conservative.  But I can’t say who it is – because of course, I don’t want this person getting in trouble.  That’s the way this town really works.

I don’t even know where to begin on this one, folks.  The ongoing ruination of what was once a special institution continues unabated, apparently with no adults around to stop it.

[Update: The LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein links to this post today (7/7) in his own piece on Moore’s election.  I’d like to respond to one point in Patrick’s article:

Inside the industry, reaction was more muted, with one screenwriter musing: “If the academy has any brains at all, they’d better frisk Moore before every meeting to make sure he doesn’t try to bring a hidden camera. If you thought Wall Street and General Motors were fat targets for muckraking, that’s nothing compared to the academy.”

This is actually the first thing I thought of when I heard about Moore’s election – not so much that he would bring a camera into board meetings (a droll idea, by the way), but that he would grandstand in public over matters that might otherwise be kept in-house.  The basic métier of people like Moore is to turn everything into a public, political controversy – essentially a circus spectacle, with him as ring master.  It’s all too easy to imagine this sort of thing happening in the case of, say, the awarding of honorary Oscars.  An acquaintance of mine on the Board, for example, was involved some years back in the controversial decision to give Elia Kazan an honorary Oscar.  What would Moore have made of that?  Would he really have kept his mouth shut?]

Posted on July 7th, 2010 at 12:55pm.

The World Cup

The Italians in their moment of triumph, 2006.

By David Ross. Every four years conservatives go into nativist-moron mode. I’m not speaking of presidential politics but of World Cup politics, and of the favorite conservative meme that soccer is a subversive plot to deprive us of our precious bodily fluids (see here and here and here). Libertas, for one, loves soccer. Like a Max Ophuls tracking shot, it has a beautiful, hypnotic fluidity, in comparison to which American football is like a bumper-to-bumper mess on a Southern California freeway. Among conservative organs, only Powerline has blown the vuvuzela on behalf of soccer. Relatively bright bulbs, those Dartmouth-educated lawyers.

The present World Cup has been high entertainment due to the creeping parity in the world game and the amusing fallen souffle of the French team, though the tournament has not been long on individual genius. Argentina’s Lionel Messi, clearly the best player in the world, could not figure out how to integrate his talents, while the other big guns were probably a bit overrated to begin with. Argentine coach and former world superstar Diego Maradona offers a surprisingly subtle theory in explanation of the general fizzle. Breaking with p.c. cliché, he suggests that today’s stars are not too selfish, but not selfish enough. They have absorbed too much of the wussy zeitgeist, as it were, and lack the bravado and ego of the matador. Continue reading The World Cup