from an old episode
- David Letterman: I love your dress.
- Amy Sedaris: Looks better on the floor, Dave.
Today is International Women's Day
Take advantage of it while you can, ladies. You only get 24 hours, and you lose one tonight.from Page Six in today's New York Post
JEREMY Piven doesn’t seem to know he has a serious girlfriend. The “Entourage” star, who’s supposedly in love with model Lillian Grant, continues to hit on women at every party he goes to in New York. The Microsoft bash at the Twelve21 club Monday was no exception. “He collected a lot of numbers,” said a source. “Later that night, he was texting two different models he picked up separately, telling each, ‘Come meet me.’ He had no clue they knew each other and were laughing about the identical messages.” Piven, who is staying at the Mercer Hotel for two months, told us, “It was my hope that in texting both ladies, I would make it onto Page Six, so everybody wins.”
Tonight I watched “The Kingdom,” a film about an FBI team investigating a terrorist attack on American citizens in Saudi Arabia. It opened in September of last year to mixed reviews and quickly fell off the radar.
This is a great film. In addition to being a well-crafted thriller, it is dripping with verisimilitude and intelligent commentary on US-Saudi relations.
So why did it get a lot of negative reviews? My hunch is that it’s because the bad guys are Islamic terrorists, which led some film critics to label the film xenophobic, pandering and jingoistic. They seemed to dismiss that the film is based on actual events and the villains are presented as human beings with families, not blood-thirsty monsters.
Watch the film for yourself. I think you’ll discover the critics were wrong. Indeed, the most heroic character is a Saudi policeman, a devout Muslim who lost some of his own men in the attack and wants to find whomever committed the crime as badly as the FBI agents do. In the course of doing so, he risks his life to protect them and pursue justice.
It’s too bad that more people didn’t go see this film, which cost $80 million and only brought in $47 million domestically. What it accomplishes is so rare for a studio film and Hollywood ought to be encouraged to make more movies like this, not less.
- Jack Nicholson: The Coen brothers are a couple guys I want to work with.
- Interviewer: Have you ever discussed working with [them]?
- Jack Nicholson: We've talked. We've had some great meetings. I kind of razzed them (at the Oscars) as they walked by and said, "I'm waiting for you guys. Don't you want to make any money?"
“ We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple’s retail stores].
Steve Jobs
ETSY GROSS OUT WAR: part 2. It’s back on, Nathan. Take this dog poop soap and try to top it.
Vagina tissue cover. Only $10. Two currently in stock.
Amanda, you just got served.
I understand what Vanity Fair is trying to do, recreating famous shots from Hitchcock films with contemporary actors (and I actually dig all the other photographs in the gallery), but to put Seth Rogen in the Cary Grant role in North By Northwest is just wrong.
A better choice would have been George Clooney, the closest actor to Grant today, though he’s still miles away. (It’s possible they asked Clooney but he declined. But still, their next call was to Rogen?)
No Country for Old Men < Back to the Future
Bob Gale, a screenwriter whose credits include Back to the Future, is not a fan of No Country for Old Men, at least from a story point of view. If you’ve already seen this year’s Best Picture winner, you’ll probably find his review interesting:
It made no sense at all!
Javier the bad guy wanders around Texas doing a bad impression of “The Terminator,” lugging a big compressed air tank and hose instead of just carrying a pistol with a silencer that he could put in his pocket. Right.
The Deputy arrests Javier, takes him to the station, then turns his back on him (perhaps not noticing he is twice his size) to call Tommy Lee instead of putting him in jail first. Right.
Tommy Lee doesn’t put out an APB for the entire state of Texas regarding the killer of his own deputy. A cop killer is on the loose but no one knows. Right. Of course, maybe he did, but since nobody in the whole movie listens to a radio or watches television because there’s just so much to do in west Texas, how would anyone know?
Then we meet Josh Brolin, hunting deer in the desert – there’s a natural habitat for you – but he doesn’t have a canteen with water. Right.
Then, after ripping off a bunch of dead drug dealers who have been massacred with machine gun fire, Josh decides in the middle of the night to go back to the desert to bring water to one of the dying drug dealers he just ripped off. Great idea. Does he wait until morning? No, he chooses to do this at night when you can’t see shit. And he doesn’t bring a flashlight. Double right.
It just so happens that the very next day when Josh and his wife clear out of their trailer, that’s the day when the phone bill comes so Javier can find it. Right.
Plus, knowing that drug dealers are going to be after him, he decides not to tell the lady who runs the Trailer Park a cover story that might get the bad guys off his trail. Oh, he’s brilliant.
Why does Javier kill the 2 guys who at the scene of the crime who have just hired him to find their money? Did it not occur to him that they would be working for other guys who might not like having their people killed? Does he think this will look good on his resume?
And these guys just happen to have the most powerful transponder and tracking device in Texas, which can pick up a signal from miles away. James Bond didn’t even have this. Right.
When Josh Brolin finds the transponder, he doesn’t throw it out the window to decoy the bad guy or conceive some clever plan to lure Javier into a trap. No, he just sits right next to it. Genius.
Josh Brolin fires a shotgun with double aught buck at Javier who is 6 feet away from him behind a door and he doesn’t kill him, nor blow up his compressed air tank. What planet are we on where the laws of physics work in such mysterious ways?
There’s a big burst of machine gun fire in two different motels, and then a whole bunch of shooting in the main street of a dead quiet small town and it doesn’t bring the police or any armed citizens. Oh, wait – I missed the part that explained we’re on a different planet. Or something.
Josh Brolin can just walk across the border into Mexico AT A BORDER CROSSING, dripping blood, without being stopped by the Mexican authorities. What is this, some special “Bleeding-fugitives-can-get-into-Mexico-free Day?” Where exactly was the sign that was advertising this promotion? At least they could have had Josh bribe the border cop.
Javier is looking all over Texas for Josh and can’t find him, but Woody Harrelson finds him immediately in a hospital in Mexico. I guess I also missed the scene where they explained that Woody had super-powers.
Woody can find the money, but Javier can’t. Wow, those super-powers of his are really amazing. And Josh decided to keep the money in its original suitcase because obviously he knew there would be no way the bad guys would be looking for THAT. Oh wait, I forgot, he’s a Vietnam Vet so the war must have messed up his ability to think.
Who killed who in the El Paso motel? How did the mother-in-law die? In the shootout? Then why didn’t Josh’s wife get killed? And what was the point of the woman at the pool who wants Josh to have a beer with her? What finally happened to the money? There’s a whole bunch of carnage at this motel, but Tommy Lee and the local Sheriff have time to have coffee so the Sheriff can complain about kids with green hair. Sure, why not.
Did Javier kill the wife or not? And how come Javier just happens to have an auto accident at the end? I guess it was because he was looking in his rear view mirror, worried that the 2 kids on bikes might have some serious armament and be coming after him because, goddammit, they look like dangerous bad kids in the employ of a rival drug dealer. The one kid gets money and the other doesn’t. Why doesn’t the other kid rat out Javier to the cops? Meanwhile, Javier is just walking down the street, dripping blood, with police sirens approaching and no one is going to notice? Oh yeah – I keep forgetting that it’s another planet. That would be Planet Deaf Dumb Blind and Stupid.
Meanwhile, Tommy Lee is pontificating about nothing with some crippled fucker in the middle of nowhere. And everybody talks….real….slow….because…it’s….real…important…philosophical….existential…claptrap…and…this….is…a ….real….important…motion…picture…
And then the movie ends with Tommy Lee telling his wife about some fucking dream he had? What the hell was that????? Oh wait – I get it – the whole fucking movie was his dream.
I think that Gale’s criticism is more an indictment of the book’s author, Cormac McCarthy, than the Coen Brothers, who adapted it into the screenplay. And the fact that I didn’t realize any of this — except the ridiculousness of Josh Brolin’s character getting up in the middle of the night to bring the dying man water — while watching the film is a testament to the brilliance of the Joel and Ethan’s direction.
My friend Mike was on the most recent episode of the TBS show Ten Items or Less
“ One small irony: When I googled “Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey,” I only got a couple pages of hits, and Hart’s essay was on the first page. [That’s not true anymore, thanks to events of the past couple of days.] But guess what? Hart spelled the name wrong. It’s Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, he is a noted philosopher, and that Google search turns up more than 32,000 hits. If Hart had spelled the name correctly, a 10-year-old essay that mentioned him in passing have been back in the queue a bit, and the secret never would have come out.
Nancy Nall, who exposed White House aide Tim Goeglein as a plagiarist when she decided to google the unusual name of a philosopher Goeglein referenced in his most recent (and final) guest column