Life is fantastic here

Right now in Walnut Creek.  Work was fine, the walk home propulsed by Squeeze on the iPod and loosened up by a cheap, v small cava.  I arrived home, made pasta and watched An American in Paris on TCM.  (Still on! as of 8:14 pm PST.)

(And I love you, David Thomson.  You introduced me to Belle de Jour, Simone Signoret, L'atalante, Sunrise, Jean-Pierre Melville and much more but you are totally off-base when you state that The Band Wagon is the best Freed Unit musical.  So wrong.  Singin' in the Rain is the best and An American in Paris next.  Meet Me in St Louis is better than The Band Wagon, too.  Anyhoo,)

There will be no baseball talk tonight.  I am hunkering down and going scattershot o'er a number of topics, mostly films.

And it begins thusly,

This is a sandwich named after my Sweetie.

• So, I am reading the current Hollywood edition of Vanity Fair on a break today.  Naturally there is a gorgeous photograph and brief discussion of Ms Portman, who may beat out Ms Bening (an injustice in my eyes) for Best Actress two and a half weeks from now.  This discussion mentions that there is a "all you can eat" sex scene between Ms Portman and Ms Kunis in Black Swan.  I have a few things to say about this revelation:  First, let me quote "Fosse's" daughter in All That Jazz, "To me, lesbian scenes are a real turn-off,"; and, second, I will always prefer Sarandon and Deneuve in The Hunger; lastly, I will stick to the Archers' The Red Shoes, thank you v much.  
• Speaking of Vanity Fair, (Graydon Carter was the co-founder and Editor of Spy magazine but is now Editor-in-Chief of Vanity Fair, which has lots of little Spy tricks and sidebars, gimmicks, etc, ... [incl in this current issue a "Create Your Own Oscar Film" page/chart,] as I was perusing my latest Spy back-issue, July 1989, I noticed a couple of mentions and realized that The cast never changes.  Both of them were in the William F Buckley article, as in who would be his heir.  In the Ayn Rand sidebar they mention Miss America 1988, Gretchen Carlson, as being a big fan of Ms Rand and The Fountainhead.  Of course, Ms Carlson is now co-host of perhaps Fox News' most heinous program, Fox & Friends.  The other mention was this quote re Ben Hart:  " 'The neoliberals used to say that the scandal isn't what's illegal,' ventures Malcolm Gladwell, a Washington Post reporter and former American Spectator writer."  
• And speaking of the July '89 issue of Spy, I checked out cover star, Emily Lloyd's debut and break out picture, Wish You Were Here.  It is damn good but not like the preview which I watched, as well.  The preview makes Wish You Were Here out to be more like Monella by Tinto Brass than what the film is really like.  It is actually a v serious little film about what it is like to be a sexually liberated woman in late '40s England.  Ms Lloyd is fantastic and it is a shame that her mental health problems derailed what could have been a v fine career.  Ms Lloyd was supposed to play the Mandy Rice-Davies role in Scandal, too.  It stinks that that did not work out.  She would have been much better than Bridget Fonda (and her awful English accent.)  Tom Bell, from Prime Suspect, stars also.  Wish You Were Here is v good.
• Interlude:  my pasta came out v well, farfalle and red sauce, one of my best sauces.  
• It hurt to see Fabio go out last night.  They shoulda sent Tiffany packing.  Great to see Carla win, though.
• I really liked Winter's Bone despite Jennifer Lawrence's ho hum performance.  You can tell v early on she does not have the stuff to carry a movie on her own.  My example would be the first scene she shares with Thump's "ladyfriend".  Ms Lawrence is not nearly tough enough to stand up to her when the script is telling all of us she is.  It is a stilted, eye-rolling sequence that hopefully Ms Lawrence will nail going forward.  What makes Winter's Bone good (but not great) is the script.  I love the early Odyssey sequence of Ms Lawrence having to hit each holler, speaking to folks that would rather kill her than speak to her, each holler revealing a more sinister, more formidable foe.  But the thing that really cinches Winter's Bone to me is the language.  As the script is based on a novel, I am assuming that much of the language/dialogue is lifted straight from the book.  The dialogue reminds me of the novel, Warlock.  It is formal, polite and v elevated.  I love it.  I imagine I will be talking like those hill people meth-addicts for a while now.  I asked my Mum, who lived in a holler in Arkansas for a few years if folks talked like that.  She said, No.  But where she lived, Eureka Springs, is a tourist town, full of hippie artist types and rich folks.  I really want to read the novel.  I thought John Hawkes' performance was especially rich and chewy.  He was the big stand-out to me, along with Lauren Sweetser and Dale Dickey.  
• I have always loved the film, The Sweet Hereafter.  (Thanks, Mo.)  One day, a friend and I were riding BART together.  He had a lot of time on his hands, I suppose, I cannot remember exactly, but he went to the Albany theater to watch Felicia's Journey and I went home.  Later I asked him what he thought of Felicia's Journey, director Atom Egoyan's follow up to The Sweet Hereafter.  He hated it.  I forgot about it andthereyouhaveit, except, ... For whatever reason (maybe because they both have contemporary English stars?) I have always confused Felicia's Journey with another film that came out around the same time.  And in my confusion I have always avoided a film that I should have watched years ago, simply because my friend said Felicia's Journey stunk.  That film is Sexy Beast.  Sexy Beast is just like its' title.  It is a sexy, violent, surreal, nightmarish fucking masterful film that I am kicking myself now for not having seen until two nights ago.  Uh, when you see Ben Kingsley (nominated for best-supporting actor) on the screen you are riveted.  The airplane scene is one for all-time, up there with the Five Easy Pieces diner scene.  And the airport security interrogation scene with Kingsley might be even better.  Kingsley is just un-worldly, alien-like, and like a car wreck in the sense that despite your guilt or misgivings or dread of rubbernecking, you cannot turn away.  You have to watch him.  But there is so much more to like about aboot this mesmerizing picture.  The brill score, the boulder scene early on, the performances by Ray Winstone; Ian McShane (my gawd, he is good); Amanda Redman; and Julianne White, my goodness, this is a film I will own.  A v different, mind you, British gangster film that deserves a spot next to John Mackenzie's also brill The Long Good Friday on my shelf.  Fucking fantastic, other-worldly picture.  

And that is it for me tonight.  More kisses,

Daddy and Mavis, 2/9/11.

xxxxxxxxxx

"Meanwhile, the Most Influential

Who will fill Buckley's shoes?

Ms Lloyd has def struggled.

Conservative in Young America Is ... Dead-and She Has a Hard-to-Pronounce Name" (Spy Magazine July 1989.)

Hoo-ray!

I got my latest back issue of Spy today and it is a doozy.  It is their July, 1989, Summer Fun Issue.  Emily Lloyd is the cover star and I will have pictures for you soon.

Spy, even in their late 80s heyday, did not always publish the greatest feature articles every month.  For me, if the feature articles were good that was just icing.  I always loved the charts, Kurt Anderson's flawless intro essays, Review of Reviewers, their Mailbag, the letters to the editor, their letters to the New Yorker (at that time the New Yorker would not publish letters to the editor), their "stunts" (Spy published a New Yorker masthead, another thing the New Yorker did not do back then), their New York Times gossip column, their Hollywood gossip column, the Liz Smith tote board,  and on and on, etc, ... Spy was so brilliant, and pithy, yet so dense, cram packed with miles of text.  It was like a little book you got every month and if you loved it (as I did/do then/now) you wanted to devour the whole thing, savoring every word.  It could take you a month to read and digest the latest issue.

S'funny, one of Spy's most loved items was Separated at Birth.  I never really got it, I guess.  It was amusing sometimes, I suppose.  And I still, to this day, do not understand The Spy List but I am probably just over thinking it.

This Summer Fun Issue has some of my all-time favorite feature articles that I remember from back in the day, though.  The Boys Who Would Be Buckley (about young up-and-coming Conservatives, with a nifty tote board chart ranking the contenders in different attributes); The Ugly European (about rude, low or no tipping European tourists); and Twinkie, Twinkie, Little Suet-Filled Sponge-Cake Crisco Log, Now I Know What You Are (in which Spy elucidates just what a Twinkie is, how it is made, what is actually in one and then hosts a bake-off between six great New York restaurant chefs.)  Great stuff.

Now that I think of it, that should be a quickfire on Top Chef, make them make Twinkies in 25 minutes.

I just got the magazine today and all I have read so far is Review of Reviewers.  (Which is brilliant, they skewer Esquire, Lee Eisenberg, and J. Hoberman.)  I will be snacking on Spy in to the wee hours for the next few weeks.

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The Oscar nominations were pretty ho-hum for me this year.  Three of the Best Picture noms are films I have no intention of seeing any time soon, if at all.  (Those would be True Grit, Black Swan, and The Fighter.)  I will be cheering for Colin Firth (he shoulda won last year), Annette Bening, and The Social Network.  I would not mind seeing Amy Adams win an Oscar, natch.  She is one of my faves.  I still have not seen Winter's Bone or 127 Hours and they are def on my to-see list.

My fave Oscar nomination story concerns James Franco.  The NYT arranged a phone interview with Franco to ask him what it would be like hosting an event in which he is up for a big prize, Best Actor.  Franco had to cut the interview short however, to go to class, at Yale, where he is pursuing a PhD in English Lit.  James Franco rocks.

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TCM is naturally pulling out the big guns tomorrow for the last installment of Peter Sellers, their star of the month.  We get Being There, Doctor Strangelove, and Lolita.  But we also get a Boulting Bros satire, Man in a Cocked Hat, which I know v little about and will be dvr-ing tomorrow.

Sellers' performance as Quilty in Lolita has aged poorly, perhaps.  And when Adrian Lyne's godawful remake came out a decade (or two or whenever) ago Sellers' Quilty took a minor beating.  You know, the usual complaints:  Sellers is over-the-top, he is performing (gosh, what  was he supposed to do?), etc, ...  Those who complain are wrong.  Nabokov wrote the screenplay, for crying out loud.  The novel the film is based on is a comic, parodic novel with maybe the most unreliable narrator of all-time.  Quilty is supposed to be a mischevious, base quick-change artist.  Sellers nailed it.  A masterful performance in my eyes.  

One more Sellers note re Strangelove.  Sellers was supposed to play the Slim Pickens role, too.  He came down with a mysterious leg injury right before the Kong scenes were to be shot.

I will always love Strangelove, even if it is a little long and Kubrick cut the pie-fight scene.  Just shows to go you what male sexual frustration can lead to if not properly released or dealt with.

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Simone takes Oscar home for good.  

Not all the films I saw this past weekend were bad.  I dvr'd Room at the Top off of TCM and it is a sooty little diamond.  Every part of the film is good.  The score is excellent, the performances are great (Simone Signoret won an Oscar for Best Actress and Laurence Harvey with his spot-on Yorkshire accent was a real revelation; I think I had only seen him in Darling before), the photography is phenomenal (Freddie Francis was the DP and I loved all the texture and grit and grime he gets out of those bombed out, factory filled Yorkshire villages), and the script and the direction really bring out the nuanced adult dramatic nature of this social-climbing story.  Jack Clayton directed and it is bloody obvious frame after frame what a massive impact this film had on British cinema and TV.  There was one scene where Renee yelled out, "That's like Hot Fuzz!" and she was totally right.  Those films have nothing in common other than they are both English productions with English directors but I imagine Edgar Wright, whether he thinks Room is daft and campy or a moving drama, knows Room at the Top v well, indeed, and cannot help but be influenced by it to even the slightest extent.  Great movie.  V highly recommended.

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That is it for me, tonight.  Mwah, ...