Uh-Oh

Are those...Colts' colors?

Steve Guttenberg received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame yesterday. Congratulations, "Eddie"!  

"Forever Marilyn"

I bet Joe DiMaggio never wore a gas mask.



From the Denver Post:

Nick Valenza helps to put some finishing touches on ''Forever Marilyn'', a sculpture by Seward Johnson, on July 14, 2011 in Chicago, Illinois. The stainless steel and aluminum sculpture which stands 26 feet tall and weighs 34,000 pounds will be unveiled tomorrow and remain on display in Chicago through the spring of 2012. The sculpture was inspired by Marilyn Monroe's iconic scene in the 1955 movie Seven Year Itch. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Why Isn't Mickey Rourke in More, Better, Movies?

Edit: "Why Isn't Mickey Rourke in Better Movies?" (See: "More")

I've been a fan of Mickey Rourke's work since first seeing him in Diner. (Jesus, has it really been 29 years since that film was released?) Yes, he's seemingly bat-shit insane, has a reputation of being hard to work with, and has chosen to be in some awful movies, but, if nothing else, his performance is almost always the best thing in those otherwise lousy films. Why not bigger, better, roles? Well, here's a somewhat humorous tidbit that I stumbled upon at NYMag.com that may offer one explanation:

When we spotted Mickey Rourke leaning against a wall at the after-party for a screening of Scream 4 at the Mondrian Soho's Mister H last night, we made a beeline for the man. Was he there because he loves horror movies? Or to support the night’s celebrity headliner, 50 Cent, who he co-starred with in the unreleased 13? Nope, he wasn't there to do either. Rourke isn't a big fan of horror, and he's even less of a fan of 13, which he described as a "terrible" movie. Also "terrible" according to Rourke: Passion Play, his movie with Megan Fox, an actress he previously described as "the most talented" he'd ever worked with. Once you get Rourke talking candidly, he can't be stopped. Enjoy the brutal honesty.

Let’s start with horror movies: You a fan?
Depends.

On what?
If there’s nothing else to watch. I came here to see Harvey. I don’t know nothing about the movie.

What about 50 Cent? He’s hosting.
I haven’t seen him.

You guys are in a movie together, right?
A really bad movie, yeah.

What?! Is it out?
No, it’s so bad it can’t get out.

Tell me why you made it.
For the money.

But you think the movie’s bad.
Terrible.

Why?
You have to watch it.

What about your movie with Megan Fox and Bill Murray?
Terrible. Another terrible movie. But, you know, in your career and all the movies you make, you’re going to make dozens of terrible ones.

You called Megan Fox, like, one of the best actresses of all time.
That I worked with [smirk].

That movie’s getting limited release.
That’s because it’s not very good.

I know a good movie we can talk about: your rugby movie.
That’ll be a great movie. We start shooting February.

***

Twins, The Early Years

I've come up with an idea for a sequel to the classic Schwartzenegger and DeVito film, Twins - it's along the same lines as the no-stars Dumb & Dumberer leeching off... er, I mean building on... the success of Dumb & Dumber. Here are (fingers crossed!) the starring players (contracts pending):





I'm looking for savvy investors (such as yourself!) for this can't-lose venture. Have your girl call my girl.
.

Musical Worm-Home

I was listening to Aloe Blacc's new album recently, which is a throwback to the golden age of R&B (1969-1974 in rocky's estimation), when this song came on at the end of side 1. It took me a while to get it, then I laughed. You might get it sooner outside the context of the album. The video by the way is cool--very stylin' except for the digital camera almost ruins it. He should be carrying a Leica or one of those miniature Minox spy camera.

"I don't know, Bob...what's a transom?"

Drugstore Cowboy, Stuck in a Loop


By WILLIAM YARDLEY (NYT)

SEATTLE — James Fogle was in prison when a critically acclaimed movie based on his novel “Drugstore Cowboy” was released in 1989. Starring Matt Dillon and directed by Gus Van Sant, the film portrayed a fumbling band of thieves and addicts who roamed the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s stealing drugs and money from pharmacies.

You can still find the movie on DVD and the book on Amazon. And after his arrest this week, you can again find Mr. Fogle behind bars.

The novelist, now 73, was ordered held in $500,000 bail here on Thursday, two days after the police say he and another man, both armed, tried to steal narcotics from a pharmacy in the Seattle suburbs, binding employees’ hands with plastic ties and locking them in a storeroom.

Mr. Fogle, hooded and wearing a pink bandana over his face while holding trash cans filled with drugs in both hands, was arrested as he walked out the back door of the Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy on a busy street in Redmond, Wash., about 9 p.m. on Tuesday, the police said. He and another man, Shannon Benn, 45, surrendered quietly.

“We didn’t think it was anybody special,” said Jim Bove, a spokesman for the Redmond police.

Then the phone started ringing. It turns out that Mr. Fogle’s convictions have been piling up steadily since the movie was made. Court records show a series of arrests and prison stints over the past two decades in Washington and Oregon — and Mr. Fogle is a suspect in still more crimes.

Detectives in Centralia, Wash., say they believe that he was involved in robberies and attempted robberies at pharmacies there last year. “America’s Most Wanted” aired a segment about the cases this year.

The police in Centralia said they at first did not have enough information to arrest Mr. Fogle in those crimes, but DNA evidence eventually led them to a man seen with Mr. Fogle near the crime scene, Marvin Flowers Roscoe.

“At that point they said these guys are part of the ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ deal,” said Warren Hall, who noted he owned three pharmacies that had been broken into in Centralia, two of which have since closed.

Investigators were not able to match a second DNA sample from the Centralia crimes to Mr. Fogle, but he remains a suspect. “It’s going to come down to him confessing,” said Sgt. Carl Buster. “In my heart, I know it’s him.”

Noting Mr. Fogle’s extensive criminal history, Judge Arthur R. Chapman of King County District Court said there was a “substantial likelihood” that Mr. Fogle would flee if he were not held in a high bail. Mr. Benn was also held in $500,000 bail. Both are being held on suspicion of first-degree robbery.

“Drugstore Cowboy” includes several scenes in which the thieves taunt and play pranks on the police. On Tuesday, the police said a 911 caller and a store alarm silently alerted them to the robbery. When officers confronted Mr. Fogle, he did not resist, and he volunteered that he had a weapon hidden in his waistband, a BB gun. A loaded .32-caliber handgun was found in the store.

“They were caught red-handed,” said Mr. Bove, of the Redmond Police. “It is a pretty open-and-shut case, not a lot of drama.”

The Magic of Movies

Best fucking review of 2010 (s0 far) by Robert Edwin Haines in the Amoeba 'zine Spring/Summer 2010:

Wings of Desire (Criterion Collection Blu-ray)

"When I was 16 years old. I went to the only (at that time) art house theater in San Jose called the Camera One to see a film called Wings of Desire. I had seen a previous film by the same director called Paris, Texas on VHS, which I only checked out because I had a massive crush on Nastassja Kinski, but I ended up finding the film heartbreakingly sad and beautiful. I was just starting to make the connection that directors and not actors were the real driving force behind films and even though I had heard that this film was in German with English subtitles and I knew no one wanted to go see it with me, I decided to feign illness, cut school and take the bus from my shitty duplex neighborhood to downtown by myself to check it out. A little over two hours later, I was crying like a newborn fucking baby at how impossibly strange, beautiful, and spiritual this work of art was/is (and I'm about as atheistic a degenerate as you are gonna find). Assholes throw around terms like "life changing" and "magical" at mediocre creations all the time. Seeing this film made me a different person, a kinder person, a more thoughtful person, a more patient person and--most importantly--a less angry person. It made me feel like after a lifetime of being alone that there were people in the world who understood, who didn't scoff at beauty, who didn't look at the world with blinkers on, who weren't afraid to listen. This re-issue Blu-ray has a bunch of cool extra documentaries and ephemera, but ultimately it has the treasure that is this film. And after over 20 years, that's still more than enough for me."

I love the review because I think Wings of Desire is one of the greatest films ever and the thing that stays with me after experiencing a work of art is not so much the details of the art, but rather the interior life that it stirred. In fact, I may have first seen this with some of you (at the DIA perhaps?) but I truly don't remember.

The Hard Way

"Shoot straight, you bastards! Don't make a mess of it!"

Edward Woodward, a British actor with a long résumé in television and theater who was best known in the United States as the star of “The Equalizer,” a dramatic series about an ex-spy turned righteous vigilante in New York City, died on Monday in Truro, Cornwall, England. He was 79 and lived in London and Cornwall.


The cause was pneumonia, said Janet Glass, Mr. Woodward’s agent for more than 30 years. Mr. Woodward had heart problems and other ailments, she said.

Mr. Woodward’s career began in 1946, when he first appeared onstage, and lasted for more than half a century. He was a versatile actor with an accomplished tenor singing voice who played a number of Shakespearean roles on the English stage; starred in the Broadway musical “High Spirits,” which was based on the Nöel Coward play “Blithe Spirit” and directed by Coward himself; recorded several albums as a singer and reciter of poetry; and played leading roles in films as various as the occult thriller “The Wicker Man” (1973) and the historical courtroom drama from Australia “Breaker Morant” (1980).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/arts/television/17woodward.html?_r=1
 
 
...

Goodbye Cain

You've probably seen this by now. An apparent suicide in a Bangkok hotel room.

Jesus, this day better end quickly...

(Photo from Bound For Glory. He'll always be Woody Guthrie to me.)

Salvaging the 70s

Forgotten unserious brilliance!

What It's About

THAT movie, available today on DVD.

McSweeneys

Movies headed for development

Gregory McDonald RIP

Irwin Maurice Fletcher was young, cocky and smart but no white knight. A Southern California newspaperman turned beach bum, he flouted authority wherever he found it. He was a slob (at least early on), whose sartorial taste ran to T-shirts and jeans. He was a cad, a deadbeat (unpaid alimony), an opportunist and a sometime accumulator of vast ill-gotten wealth. He was, in short, the perfect hero for the countercultural ’70s, and the public ate him up.

(more in Comments)

A Hero for Our Time

A short collection of articles in the last issue of Rolling Stone (September 4) celebrates the 10th anniversary of The Big Lebowski. An essay by Walter Kirn argues that "The Dude" is a kind of touchstone for our troubled times - an antidote to the current zeitgeist.

One revelation (for me, anyway): the first actor the Coens approached about playing "The Dude" was... (cont'd in comments)

Circus of Confusion

I realize I am four decades late to the party, but last night, in an idle moment of channel scanning (cage fighting, home improvement, local news,) I bumbled into the tent just as the "Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus" took the ring on the public TV. This thing starts innocently enough with Mick Jagger on stage as ring-master, introducing a really big show. We're in the safe and sanitized world of variety TV. Immediately though Jagger struggles to read a line from cue-cards and the game is afoot: "Yuve 'erd of Oxford Cirgus. Yuve 'erd of Piggadilly Cirgus. And this is the Rolling Stones Cirgus." There is no applause.

As time recedes, it becomes hard to resist allowing an era or a movement to simplify itself into a brand -- the 1960s! Rock and Roll! All the ambiguity, confusion and conflict wash away and you're left with the costumes and the pose.

What a joy then to see the Stones in a never-aired BBC concert special where everything seems to unravel. Apparently, cameras kept breaking in an amazing chaos that took most of a day and a night to film. The strain shows on the audience, who are forced to wear bright red, green and yellow capes. By the end they have become the medieval mob they are being asked to portray: stupid, riotous, brutish.

At one point, the camera cuts away to show a visibly bored family who have mutinied by removing their color-coded caps. By the end, when Jagger wades into the audience mid-song and singles out a blonde girl to tell her "you can't always get the man you want," she seems oblivious. Is she stoned? Exhausted? Her friends poke her in the arm to get her to react.

It's also amazing what a mash-up this music had become -- and how campy and obvious the borrowing was from the English music hall and the blues of black America, with the occasional dash of Eastern mysticism for zest.
The result is disorienting: Jethro Tull doing a yoga pose while he plays the flute and sings in a weirdly put-on American voice, Taj Mahal covering "Ain't That A Lot of Love" while dressed in a Howdy-Doody costume.

But what makes it impossible to look away is that by the end an undertow of real weirdness has swept away all the artifice. John Lennon chats with Jagger and insists on calling him Michael. He hands Mick a bowl of noodles with chopsticks: "I'd like to give you this on behalf of the British public." Jagger is not amused and calls for the song cue: "Yer blues, John. Yer blues, John."

Well, "Yer Blues" happens with Lennon accompanied by both Eric Clapton and Keith Richards. (Lennon to Jagger re. Richards: "Your soul brother." Jagger, ominously: "Dirty. Dirty." Lennon, smiling: "Great.")

Then Yoko Ono is pulled onstage for "Whole Lotta Yoko." Accompanied by this all-male British invasion super-group and an electric violin for good measure, she begins wailing and speaking in tongues. She looks like one of the ghosts from a J-Horror movie.

It's hard to forget everything you think you know about Yoko, but this does it for me. First of all, her self-possession is astounding. She is punk before punk. What is she thinking? She's upstaging Eric Clapton and Keith Richards -- not to mention John Lennon. What she's doing is not musical, and she must know this. It's also not quite a primal scream. It's just grating, that voice. Clapton and Richards never smile or show they're in on the joke. What are they thinking? Is she testing the limits of John's love? Is she going where no groupie has gone before?

But then you think: if boys from England can get rich riffing on black American music, why can't a girl from Tokyo expose the whole thing for what it is by shrieking over their music? Maybe she's calling them out. And then again maybe she's just the biggest rock star on that stage because she doesn't even need the adulation. In fact, she seems to feed on the hostility and indifference. It is a moment unlike anything else.

(The only other woman to take the circus stage, incidentally, is Marianne Faithful, who is striking for her haunting beauty and apparent chemically-induced inability to stand up. The stage hands seem to have improvised a shot around her on the floor. In the big number at the end, seated at Mick's feet, she collapses. )

But I'm saving the best for last, because when the Stones take the stage everything has already gone to hell. Cues are missed. Jagger is looking into the wrong camera. Richards is so tired he's playing the guitar sitting down. The audience, at this point, are hostages.

But here's the thing: Jagger's sexuality is molten. He's both coquettish and threatening. He's prancing. He's Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando. He has a look that says, "come hither...so I can fuck you to pieces." He's Dionysus. If we listen to him, the orgy is on now. By morning, we will have resorted to cannibalism.

(I'm reminded at this point of my appearance as an extra in an outdoor college production of "The Bacchae." While a fake orgy raged offstage, I stood by holding a spear -- a representative of civic society, a straight. By the end rehearsals and the performance, I had a raging sunburn and horrible nipple chafing from my polyester tunic.)

It's a bit of a further digression but I'm also saddened, watching Mick at this moment, by how much cultural literacy has been lost in the past half century of moving faster and thinking less. Here he is singing "Sympathy for the Devil," inspired apparently by Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita." He uses "politesse" in a rhyme. He suggests a collective guilt for the way the dreams of the decade have gone wrong. Does anyone get that? Is it thought provoking?

But who has time to think? You can't stop watching Mick writhing and then shedding his purple baby-t (this was before the fashion category existed.) He emerges shirtless with crudely drawn fake tattoos of satan on his chest and arms. Aha! He's the devil. Well, we knew that.

If you've all already seen this, I apologize. If you haven't, you must. But don't rent or buy the DVD, you should properly wait until you can accidentally encounter it on late-night television and then just let it happen.

Rough Week at the "Roadhouse"

Guitarist Jeff Healey died Sunday of cancer. He was 41.

Healey was considered a prodigy and earned numerous Juno and Grammy nominations in the course of his career.

He lost both his eyes to retinoblastoma before he was eight-months-old, but never let that slow him down.

His career took off when he appeared in the movie Road House, which starred Patrick Swayze.


Patrick Swayze has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, according to a statement issued on Wednesday by his publicist.

Although tabloid reports claimed Mr. Swayze, who is 55, has terminal cancer, the statement said those reports were not correct.

Cinematic Titanic

features the original cast and writers of MST3K, which is Hodgson (Joel Robinson), Trace Beaulieu (Crow), and J. Elvis Weinstein (Tom Servo). Filling out the ensemble is Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester) and Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank).

CT LAUNCH PARTY AT ACME COMEDY CO. IN MINNEAPOLIS, MN, Tues. FEB 12th, 8pm. Join the whole cast of Cinematic Titanic for this evening of Stand-up comedy, peeks at “The Oozing Skull”, and a toast to MST’s 20th anniversary.

708 N. 1st St.
MPLS MN, 55401
FOR TICKETS CALL ACME COMEDY CO – 612-338-6393


Cinematic Titanic

Wes Anderson is Back!

If, like me, the disappointment of the ill-formed, charmless "Life Aquatic" sent you into weeks-long depression, you'll be glad to hear that Wes Anderson is back in form with "Darjeeling Express". "LA", let's hope, was just a mometary hiccup and not the start of a slide toward irrelevance.

"Darjeeling Express" gives one hope. Go see it! Well, you probably would anyway.