Notebook: Night, Noomi and Nolan

NIGHT
As depressing as it is to observe M. Night Shyamalan’s once promising career hemorrhaging like a narf that’s been mauled by a scrunt, I enjoyed the thoughtful (and often funny) analyses of fellow bloggers in the comments of my review of The Last Airbender. My interest in the best of worst of Shyamalan is so severe that I’ve come to realize it is my calling to at some point analyze Shyamalan’s career in more comprehensive detail, perhaps with a video essay (or two). Alas, with various other commitments (including that darn day job), I won’t be getting to that anytime soon. So, while they’re still fresh, here are a few leftover thoughts about Shyamalan in general and The Last Airbender specifically.

M. is for Moodless: The most shocking failure of Shyamalan’s past two films (in a three-film slump) has been his inability to create or sustain a visceral or convincing mood. This is especially shocking because over his first four films Shyamalan seemed able to create mood just by falling out of bed.

Bullitt Points on Steve McQueen

I expressed most of my Steve McQueen thoughts in my two previous submissions to the Steve McQueen Blog-a-thon: the “5 for the Day” piece at The House Next Door and the video essay “Steve McQueen: King of the Close-Up.” But here are a few more ruminations and ramblings related to the King of Cool.

When The Great Escape Got Greater
The first Steve McQueen movie I ever saw was either The Great Escape or The Magnificent Seven. I saw both when I was about 10 or 11 and I loved them immediately. Although The Great Escape didn’t inspire me to dig a tunnel of my own, it opened up my mind to the possibility that “old movies” could be just as exciting as those made during my own lifetime (a novel concept at that age). Soon, I owned The Great Escape on VHS, and I spent my middle school, high school and even college years excitedly showing it to friends, many of whom hadn’t heard of the movie or McQueen. (It almost goes without saying that the movie was always a hit.) By the time I was 21, I must have seen The Great Escape two dozen times. Or so I thought.

It was around then that I got my first DVD player, and of course The Great Escape was among my initial DVDs. One afternoon I settled in to watch a movie I thought I knew by heart, only to find it thrillingly new. Until then, you see, I’d only seen The Great Escape in the standard pan-and-scan format of VHS. My DVD copy presented the film in its full (2.35:1) widescreen glory. What a difference it made! Now shots of Hilts speeding toward the Alps near the film’s conclusion were panoramically breathtaking. Now shots of the prisoners arriving at the camp in the film’s opening revealed more than a half-dozen trucks in a row instead of two or three. Most importantly, now, for the very first time, I knew the size of Hilts’ familiar cell in the cooler.

Stop reading. Look at the image that makes for the masthead here at The Cooler. That shot? I’ve only known that shot for a little over a decade. In pan-and-scan, we never saw Hilts’ entire cell in one shot. Instead, when Hilts tosses his baseball against the floor and walls of his cell, we’d get a shot of Hilts throwing the ball, then a cut to the ball hitting the wall, then a cut to Hilts catching the ball. Over and over again. Rinse and repeat. Consequentially, I always assumed that the cell was at least two times bigger than it actually is. The DVD-inspired renaissance of widescreen restored The Great Escape to its original glory. For me, there’s no better example of the ills of pan-and-scan than its perversion of Hilts in the cooler. Widescreen has never delighted me more.



Misspelled, With a Bullit
As I type this, I’m facing a poster for Bullitt, which is one of two Steve McQueen images among the five framed posters in my apartment (the other one shows McQueen as Virgil Hilts in The Great Escape). I bought the Bullitt poster at an outdoor sale when I was a student at Washington State University, and so I’ve had it for more than 12 years. But it was only about 10 years ago that I realized the poster’s flaw: Though the bold print atop the poster correctly touts “Steve McQueen as ‘Bullitt,’” the blurb underneath reads thusly: “Not many freaky cops like BULLIT around. You look at the Italian shoes and the turtleneck and you have to wonder. You listen to the official beefs about ‘personal misconduct,’ ‘disruptive influence,’ you figure he’s got to be up for trade. But when some rare Chicago blood starts spilling in San Francisco, they give BULLIT the mop. They weren’t exactly doing him a favor. But they’ve done a great big one for you.” OK, first of all: How cool is that blurb?! But, back to the point, how on earth did someone manage to drop a ‘T’ in Bullitt without anyone noticing? Oops.



Portrait of a Kung Fu Wannabe
In preparation for the blog-a-thon, I dusted off my copy of Marshall Terrill’s 1993 biography, Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel, which until recently had been boxed up with some other books I hadn’t touched since college. It’s a good book – personal and revelatory without seeming sensationalistic – and the process of rereading it reintroduced me to bits of trivia that I had forgotten. Perhaps my favorite forgotten factoid was this tidbit: McQueen was a pallbearer at Bruce Lee’s funeral. Surprised? So was I. The two (eventual) stars became connected when McQueen met Nikita Knatz, one of Lee’s training partners, on the set of The Thomas Crown Affair and asked (er, nagged) to get some martial arts training of his own. Soon, McQueen and Lee became companions. “Both men had what the other wanted,” James Coburn says in Terrill’s book. “It was two giant egos vying for something: stardom for Lee and street-fighting technique for McQueen.” When Lee got his first movie deal, he called himself the “Oriental Steve McQueen.” Lee then bragged to McQueen that he’d have a more worldwide audience. In response, McQueen sent an 8x10 glossy to Lee signed, “To Bruce, my favorite fan.” The two weren’t friendly rivals so much as rivals pretending to be friends. And although McQueen’s influence on Lee is difficult to pinpoint, Lee’s influence on McQueen is easy to spot. If you’ve ever wondered why Doc McCoy finishes off a butt-kicking in The Getaway with a rather goofy karate chop, now you know.



He Coulda Been a Defectah
There are several films that McQueen turned down because of a lack of interest or problematic preproduction, among them Dirty Harry, The French Connection, First Blood and even Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The one that’s most intriguing, though, is Apocalypse Now, given how easily it could have been a reality. McQueen was first offered the role of Willard, and then, after turning that down, the role of Kurtz. But McQueen intentionally priced himself out of the running, not wanting to spend so much time shooting in a foreign country, having already had a healthy dose of that for The Sand Pebbles. Francis Ford Coppola clearly wanted McQueen, and the project started roughly on time (though it famously didn’t finish that way). So had McQueen been more interested, he’d have been in that picture. The mind boggles trying to imagine if McQueen would have elevated the film’s twisted greatness, morphed it or neutralized it. McQueen as Kurtz is a strange but potentially interesting twist. It’s hard to picture, but not impossible. On the other hand, one doesn’t have to try very hard to imagine McQueen in The Bodyguard, which was originally conceived for him and Diana Ross.



The Remake I’d Endorse
There are only two McQueen films that I consider sacred and untouchable as far as remakes are concerned: The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven. Those films have a distinctive magic that I don’t think can be adequately duplicated or reimagined (so let's not try, Hollywood, OK?). On the other hand, the remake I would love to see would be Bullitt by Michael Mann. Mann certainly has the resume for it. He seems to be evoking Bullitt in Heat, both in terms of the way Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), like Frank Bullitt, is losing himself to the darkness of his work and in regard to the film’s climactic shootout in and around airport runways. Also, in Miami Vice, Mann created a film that niftily blends high-caliber action with a sort of romantic-cool mood that takes precedence over a muddled and somewhat inconsequential plot. Sounds like Bullitt. I’m not sure who would star in the picture. Daniel Craig might have been perfect, but now he’s Bond. Matt Damon could have worked, but now he’s Bourne. So maybe one of the Miami Vice stars: Colin Farrell or Jamie Foxx. Or maybe a redefining role for Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling or Jeremy Renner. Damn. Heath Ledger might have worked, too.

Notebook: Whatever & Twitter

Whatever Works
Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, which I only recently got around to seeing, doesn’t offer much to get excited about. With its (occasional) sharp wit injected into a plot about a cantankerous old guy whining about life in the presence of a beautiful much younger woman, it is dependably Woodman. And, as such, it’s pretty boringly Woodman, too. Its humor and themes are almost tediously familiar. But then so are these criticisms. So rather than continue the annual reassessment of Allen’s career, let me take a moment to mention what I found to be the film’s greatest weakness and greatest strength.

The weakness is Larry David. And, paradoxically, the problem with Larry David is that he’s too strong. Too tall, too vital, too menacing, too consequential. His Boris Yellnikoff rants and cracks wise like the typical Woody Allen lead. He’s familiarly neurotic and opinionated. He’s typically inflexible. But for all the ways David seems like a natural to fill Allen’s shoes, the fact remains that his feet are too big. Boris isn’t small, meek and unintimidating. He isn’t so awkward that he’s endearing. He doesn’t seem jaded but ultimately harmless. To the contrary, Boris packs a wallop. To Alvy Singer’s ankle-biter, Boris is a Rottweiler who might have rabies. When he barks, we pay attention. After spending 15 minutes listening to Boris growling, I was ready to call animal control. Even at their worst, Allen’s incarnations – like the Seinfeld cast, actually – are fun to be around. Boris is just a jerk who makes time in his presence a chore.

And that’s what makes Evan Rachel Wood’s performance, the film’s greatest asset, all the more remarkable. She plays Melodie St. Ann Celestine, a character even more preposterous than her name. Melodie is capital-S Southern and Stupid. The notion that she would be attracted to Boris, and he to her, is as ridiculous as … as … well, as about any of the hookups that Allen-played characters have had over the past 20 years. But, wouldn’t you know it, Wood finds a way to make it all seem plausible (or as plausible as the film requires). She embraces Melodie’s twangy accent and ditsy personality and plays them surprisingly straight. Melodie is a cartoon character, yes, but Wood’s performance isn’t cartoonish. (What’s the difference? Think of a scenery-chewing performance by Bette Midler. That’s the difference.) This isn’t the first time I’ve enjoyed Wood. She impressed me in Thirteen, Down in the Valley, Running With Scissors and The Wrestler, to name a few. But, one way or another, all of that is pretty dark material. It’s refreshing to see Wood play a character who is so light and loveable. Her portrayal in Whatever Works joins Maya Rudolph’s turn in Away We Go among the most impressive female performances unlikely to get a sniff of year-end awards hype. Too bad.



Twitter
The Cooler is now on Twitter. How long that will last, we’ll see. If you’d like to follow movie-related tweets from this twit, just go to twitter.com/coolercinema. If not, no problem. If you’re not down with Twitter, I’m not here to convert you. (I’m hardly its biggest champion.) I’ve decided to experiment with the annoyingly popular social media tool for two reasons: first, to have further interaction with other movie fans at a more immediate (and, yes, micro) level; second, to create another way to perhaps expand The Cooler’s audience. CoolerCinema tweets won’t be anything earth shattering, believe me. Mostly I’ll be using Twitter to link to articles when I post them (if you’re a regular visitor to The Cooler or use RSS to stay in touch, this won’t help you). I’ll also toss off pithy observations on movies – the kind of stuff you might find in the Etcetera section below – when the mood strikes. Just to be clear, the Twitter feed is secondary to (and hopefully supportive of) this blog. I simply want to make it easier for readers to stay in touch given my irregular posting schedule. (Note to Twitter virgins: You don't need to have tweets sent to your phone to be involved on Twitter. You can do it all online. You can even follow tweets through your RSS reader, if you'd prefer.)

Another step I've taken to make it easier to keep in touch with The Cooler is adding Blogger’s follower feature to the sidebar. It’s a move I’d resisted up to this point because, frankly, I thought it was going to be a fast-dying fad. I was wrong. My impression is that its popularity is growing – I use Google Reader myself, and it saves me hours of time each week. So, if you’d like, become a follower of The Cooler.



Etcetera (aka Tweet-type Stuff)
Here’s how enchanting I find Rachel McAdams: Whenever I see trailers for The Time Traveler’s Wife, I try to convince myself that it looks really, really good. … Leave it to Matt Zoller Seitz to write what I think might be the line of the year. It comes in his review of the latest Harry Potter film. Give it a read and look out for his parenthetical reference to one of the movie’s early scenes. Matt coins a term so slyly clever that at first I doubted its intent. I’m still chuckling. … In other good writing news, Will Pfeifer nails the absurdity of Steven Spielberg’s rumored remake of Harvey. I listed the link in my Sharin’ the Love section, but it was worth an additional plug. … I had to laugh the other day when, flipping through TV, I pulled up the guide for the five or so Encore channels that I get as part of my rather modest Comcast package. Listed in order were the following films: Missionary Man, Odd Man Out and Toy Soldiers. For a moment I thought it was a roundup of Best Picture nominees for the AVN Awards. ... A plug for Tony Dayoub's De Palma Blog-a-thon coming up in September.

Notebook: Poop, Puke & Pop

A Familiar Odor
I haven’t seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and I won’t. Life is too short, and after suffering through the 144-minute original it seems backwards that the Transformers franchise should get to take “revenge” on me. But amidst a busy schedule that has me too far behind on blogging, I have carved out some time in recent weeks to read several reviews. For the most part, reactions to Transformers 2 haven’t been pretty. I’ve seen it called “a literal tsunami of shit” made by “an asshole” or “a jerk of the most obnoxious and insecure order,” and I’ve seen director Michael Bay slammed as a “fucking tool.” Having only enjoyed The Rock among Bay’s films, I can’t say I disagree with the general spirit of those assessments (I might have expressed my displeasure differently), but at the same time I’m puzzled by the timing of this eruption of anti-Bay vitriol.

Could Revenge of the Fallen be that much different than the original? Where was this anger in 2007? For example, here is Roger Ebert on Revenge of the Fallen: “The battle scenes are bewildering. A Bot makes no visual sense anyway, but two or three tangled up together create an incomprehensible confusion. I find it amusing that creatures that can unfold out of a Camaro and stand four stories high do most of their fighting with...fists. Like I say, dumber than a box of staples.” And now here is Ebert on 2007’s Transformers: “How can a pickup truck contain enough mass to unfold into a towering machine? I say if Ringling Brothers can get 15 clowns into a Volkswagen, anything is possible.”

I’m not here to pick on Ebert, but I fail to understand why the original was considered “goofy fun with a lot of stuff that blows up real good,” and yet Revenge of the Fallen is something else. Really? Here’s Ebert again: “The mechanical battle goes on and on and on and on, with robots banging into each other and crashing into buildings, and buildings falling into the street, and the military firing, and jets sweeping overhead, and Megatron and the good hero, Optimus Prime, duking it out, and the soundtrack sawing away at thrilling music, and enough is enough. Just because CGI makes such endless sequences possible doesn't make them necessary. They should be choreographed to reflect a strategy and not simply reflect shapeless, random violence.” That’s a good slam of Revenge of the Fallen, right? Wrong! It’s a passage from Ebert’s three-star review of Transformers.

The point is this: Revenge of the Fallen isn’t new crap; it’s the same old crap. How did people not see this coming? Out to prove that he doesn’t like everything, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone suggests that “Transformers 2 has a shot at the title Worst Movie of the Decade.” Fair enough, so long as Transformers 1 is in the running, too. After all, I agree with Travers that “when Hasbro invented those Transformers toys, the intention was for kids to use their imagination about what those bots would morph into” and that “Bay crushes that imagination with his own crude interpretations that seem untouched by human hands and spirit.” But Bay’s crime against imagination didn’t begin with the sequel.

Personally, I’m more of the mind of Anthony Lane, who called 2007’s Transformers Bay’s “first truly honest work of art” because the director “summoned the courage to admit that he has an exclusive crush on machines.” For better or usually worse, Bay makes one kind of movie, and he’s box office gold. I suspect that both Transformers films share the same thrills (excessive CGI and explosions, mindless entertainment and Megan Fox in skimpy outfits) and have the same turnoffs (excessive CGI and explosions and mindless entertainment). If Transformers 2 is trash, so was the original.

As I noted in my own 2007 review of Transformers, which is hardly worth reprinting in full, Bay’s CGI spectacular subverts the famous “More than meets the eye” marketing tagline for the Hasbro toys: “With Bay’s Transformers there’s what meets the eye and nothing else. Unless you count the noise that meets the ear, which is good enough for a splitting headache lasting well over three hours.” I wasn’t being figurative.



Misadventures in Moviegoing
Last weekend, Hokahey of Little Worlds was in town for his annual visit to our nation’s capital. As usual, we looked for opportunities to go to the movies, and, as usual, Hokahey managed to arrive on a weekend when there wasn’t much worth seeing. (Last year it was The Happening, for example.) And so it was that on the Friday of his visit we decided to take in Year One, because neither of us had seen it, and Hokahey likes Jack Black and I like Michael Cera and we were both in need of foolish entertainment.

As soon as the movie started, I detected a problem: alternately, the sound was coming through all of the speakers or only one speaker in the front left corner of the theater. Mindless comedy doesn’t work well when you’re straining to hear it – there’s a reason your local comedy club does its best to rupture your eardrums – but I could have settled for the one-speaker version. It was the sound coming in and out that was disorienting. So, after about 10 minutes, I appointed myself The Guy Who Would Need to Leave the Theater to Complain. And so I did. Of course Year One just had to be playing at the theater farthest from the lobby, so I walked quickly, made my complaint and turned around to head back.

On my way back, I saw a guy in his early 30s go stumbling across the hall. He looked disoriented and had his hand up to his mouth. We locked eyes for a moment and he gave me a look that said, “Help! I need to vomit, and I can’t vomit here, but I can’t make it to the bathroom, what should I do?” Being the jerk that I am, I pretended I didn’t notice this look of desperation and instead averted my eyes and tried to walk past him. Before I could slip by, however, homeboy bent over and tossed his cookies all over the floor in the middle of the hallway. (Dude! How about aiming for the trashcan!) At this moment, a motherly woman appeared and asked the cookie tosser if he was OK, thus saving me the responsibility of doing the same. Eyes straight ahead, I walked by the puke and headed back toward Year One, but not without turning my head to see which movie the puker had stumbled out of: The Proposal. Need I say more?



Remembering the King of Pop
I had no profound reaction to Michael Jackson’s death June 25. Immediately it struck me another tragic episode in a largely tragic life. Thus, Jackson’s passing seemed to be fitting and perhaps also a blessing; I just can’t imagine that he loved his life anymore, if he ever did. Over the past week I’ve read some remembrances of Jackson, but even those have failed to move me in any significant way, even though Jackson was one of the most influential musicians and pop icons of my childhood, even though Thriller was one of the first cassettes I ever owned (purchased on the same day as Van Halen’s 1984), even though I remember kids in the neighborhood waiting for scheduled airings of the epic “Thriller” video and even though I was still mesmerized by Jackson in his Bad stage, and bought his Dangerous album in high school and was enthused to buy his HIStory double-album in college, both for its new tunes and for its nostalgic qualities. It didn’t take Jackson dying to get me to appreciate his music or to remember that “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” never fails to put me in a good mood.

But in the days since Jackson’s death, as I have wrestled with how to remember a man whose music never ceased to be inviting but whose personal life was as tempting as poison ivy, I have been unable to shake two thoughts:

The first is that our reactions to and jokes about Jackson’s alleged sexual misconduct might say more about us than about Jackson. Here’s what I mean: A year ago, at an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, I saw a photo taken at the infamous Neverland estate that showed Jackson standing beneath two huge painted statues of children wearing boy scout-type uniforms, their outstretched arms creating an arch over the door to Jackson’s bedroom. The photo struck me as creepy in every way, and without ever thinking about it I added it to the circumstantial evidence file against Jackson. But a few days later, I thought about the photo again and had second thoughts. After all, what did it really show? Not evidence of a crime, certainly. Instead, the photo merely provided further evidence of how Jackson obliviously defied social norms. But often our social norms are nothing to be proud of. (Ahem, have you seen how well Transformers 2 is doing at the box office?)

Our society tends to be uncomfortable with effeminate males and adults who cling to childhood pleasures. Jackson was both. But that doesn't make him a pedophile. Sure, it’s unusual that Jackson liked to invite children into his bed – as in, “not usual” by our societal standards. And perhaps rightfully so. But, just for a moment, compare your mental picture of Jackson sitting in a bed surrounded by children to the image of, say, Julie Andrews sitting in a bed surrounded by children. Different feeling, isn't it?

I’m not here to say Jackson was innocent of his alleged crimes (though he was never convicted in a court, it should be noted). Instead I’m here to suggest that many of us, certainly including me, were often guilty of convicting Jackson in the court of public opinion simply because it was easier to exile him than to try to understand him.

Then again, my second post-death thought about Jackson goes like this: While Jackson’s reclusiveness was one of his many oddities that made him difficult to get close to, it was also his saving grace. To see his ghastly appearance in recent years was to be thankful that he wasn’t doing the late night talk show circuit. On the whole, considering his status as a global icon, Jackson had remarkable control of his image and remained out of the public eye, particularly in his later years as he seemed to grow increasingly peculiar. And so with tabloids obsessing over Britney and Paris, Brad and Angelina, it’s easier for us to remember Jackson as he was, back when he was a somewhat public public-figure, back when he seemed more like a colorful original than a deformed monster. Who was Jackson really? I doubt anyone knows.


Etcetera
I think the concept of pointing out plot holes in a movie about transforming robots is hilarious in and of itself. Nonetheless, this is a fun link. … Blogging buddy Ed Howard has created a site dedicated to listing blogathons and other such online fests. If you’re planning to host an event, be sure to add it to The Film Blog Calendar.

Notebook: State Of Play (and Stuff)

Hot Off The Presses
Matthew Macdonald’s State Of Play is another in a long line of films that show how news gets made, but I think it’s the only movie I’ve seen that shows how a newspaper is manufactured. As the closing credits roll, we are treated to a mini documentary that’s a narrator short of being a feature on Discovery’s How It’s Made: a massive roll of newsprint arrives, a plate of the day’s front page is developed and fitted onto the printing press and then the machine goes to work, creating pages that get folded and bundled for distribution. It’s a mesmerizing thing to watch, and it’s a sight made poignant by the sorry state of the newspaper industry. More than that though, it’s a fitting finale for a film that feels like it was slammed together on an assembly line.

In many ways, it was. State Of Play is based on a highly acclaimed British mini-series (which I haven’t seen), and it was adapted for the screen by three experienced writers – Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom, Lions For Lambs), Tony Gilroy (the Bourne trilogy, Michael Clayton) and Billy Ray (Flightplan, Breach) – who leave no cliché unturned. Russell Crowe plays a renegade reporter who has never met a deadline he won’t ignore. Rachel McAdams is the Bambi-eyed young scribe with her ethics still intact. Helen Mirren is the editor stuck between the demands of her publisher and her undying affection for a big breakthrough story. Ben Affleck is the young congressman with the political ambition of RFK and the hormones of JFK. Robin Wright Penn is the beautiful wife who isn’t overly hurt by her husband’s infidelity because she’s in love with someone else. And Jeff Daniels reprises his role from Blood Work as the guy the movie tries to pretend isn’t important who we know must be important because he’s played by Jeff Daniels. Breaking from the herd, Jason Bateman plays a fast-talking PR guy who gives the film a needed shot of comedy. That pretty much covers it.

Wrapped in paranoia, State Of Play is all surprises and no surprises. One plot twist leads to another, which leads to another, and so on, as expected. Our sense that the mystery is nearing resolution has less to do with any understanding of the facts than with our sense that the story is nearing the 120-minute mark. State Of Play isn’t a mystery so much as a diversion. But, here’s the thing: it’s a fun diversion. Macdonald’s film moves along so quickly and with such singular focus that it leaves little time to be critical. The film lacks any memorable shots or performances. In fact, it lacks anything memorable at all. But, like a good Sunday paper, State Of Play feels familiar yet new – and it's momentarily transportive. Often that’s enough. A reporter doesn’t need to be Woodward or Bernstein to write a solid news story. A movie doesn’t need to be All The President’s Men to be entertaining. State Of Play is a story worth hearing, even if it isn’t worth hearing more than once.



People in My Neighborhood
I love movies. I love movie locations. Thus, I would love to see a movie being shot on location, but so far that’s never happened. Since moving to Washington, DC, almost five years ago, a number of films have been shot here: Breach, Body Of Lies and Burn After Reading, just to name three. In each of these cases, and others, I’d usually been aware that a movie project was in town – often thanks to a gossip piece in The Washington Post noting that This Celebrity was spotted eating at That Restaurant. Still, I’ve never sought out any of the rumored shooting locations, because to me that’s cheating – akin to camping outside the Ritz-Carlton so I can say I spotted Brangelina. That isn't fun. I’m not interested in being a movie stalker. What I want is to stumble across a movie shoot within the framework of my daily life.

That might sound unrealistic. Then again, Breach, Body Of Lies and Burn After Reading all include scenes shot in the light of day at places that I frequently pass while running. Amazingly, frustratingly, at no time did I ever see any evidence that a movie shoot was about to happen at one of those locations. Instead, I had to wait for the movie to come out to spot George Clooney running across Key Bridge, causing me to wonder how the heck he managed to do that on a day I wasn’t doing the same thing.

All of this is lead-up, obviously, to mentioning that State Of Play has several scenes shot in an area that I flat-out wore out while marathon training last year. The location of the movie’s opening murders – a place Russell Crowe’s character visits twice afterward – is just a few feet from both a bike path and a running trail that I used several times a week last summer. And here’s the kicker: I ran through that location the very day the crew was setting up shop. “That’s an odd place to be laying cables,” I thought. But did I think to ask someone what the cables were for? No. Of course not. Because I’m an idiot.

And so my quest to stumble upon a movie shoot goes on. In the meantime, it’s only fair that I report that State Of Play is surprisingly accurate in terms of its use of District-area locations. The major exception is when the young researcher who is about to meet her demise walks through Adams Morgan and into the Metro station in Rosslyn, which is the equivalent of walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and ending up in Central Park. Oh, well.



He Even Makes a Splash Reference
Ron Howard did a nice job of defending Angels & Demons at The Huffington Post, responding to charges from William Donahue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, that Howard and author Dan Brown “collaborated in smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales.” Howard writes, “I know faith is believing without seeing (and a boycott would be disbelieving without seeing).” That’s well said. But I wish Howard had said, “Fine, homeboy, I’ll stick to the facts and do a film about the sexual abuse scandals.”


Etcetera
I always knew that Billy Bob Thornton was a jerk. What I didn’t realize is that he’s such an egotistical jerk. The worst part of his proud-to-be-a-dick interview on a Canadian radio program a few weeks ago wasn’t his behavior. It’s that he actually had the balls to compare himself as a musician to Tom Petty. Twice! … I always knew William Hurt gave me the creeps. Now I know why. … I always knew that expecting Chris Carpenter to contribute to my fantasy baseball team was dangerous, given his injury history. What I didn’t know was that Carpenter would go on the DL due to a torn oblique muscle that he injured while batting! That hurts. Equally painful was being in attendance at Nationals Ballpark and watching my fantasy shortstop, Cristian Guzman, stroke his fifth hit of the day into the outfield, raising his average to .515 on the season, only to then see him pull up lame running to first base. At this point, I suppose I should be grateful that another one of my players, Johnny Cueto, wasn’t killed last night when Milton Bradley’s shattered bat nearly decapitated the Cincinnati Reds pitcher. Bradley, by the way, is on my fantasy team.

Notebook: Play Ball!

Searching for Stacy Carroll
Since the major league season opened Sunday night, baseball has been about the only thing on my mind. Meantime, the red envelopes from Netflix sit unopened. I’ll get to them soon enough. For now I’m hanging on every pitch – less invested in any team than in my love of the game itself. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about movies. In recent days I’ve thought about baseball movies. Movies like Bull Durham, so endlessly quotable that, like Pulp Fiction, it would be easier to list the forgettable lines than the classic ones. Movies like The Natural, which ditched Bernard Malamud’s original ending and added Caleb Deschanel’s luscious cinematography and became the most romantic baseball film of all time. Movies like Field Of Dreams, which demonstrates how the action between the baselines can serve as a lifeline in the relationship between fathers and sons.

I’ve also thought about Major League, that silly, rude and undeniably funny R-rated comedy of 1989 with its oh-so-80s primary players: Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, Corbin Bernsen and Wesley Snipes. Rene Russo’s decade of success in the 1990s was essentially launched by this film, while Dennis Haysbert would have to wait until 2001 for 24 to give him a part more memorable than the curveball-cursing Cerrano. Major League’s cast also includes broadcaster Bob Uecker as plaid-coat wearer Harry Doyle, plus prototypical “that guy” actors Chelcie Ross as Vaseline-baller Eddie Harris and James Gammon as manager Lou Brown. And then there was Stacy Carroll.

You remember Stacy, right? She played Suzanne Dorn, wife to Bernsen’s philandering third baseman Roger Dorn. Suzanne is the one who decides to enact revenge on her husband by sleeping with Sheen’s Ricky Vaughn. To do so requires her to transform from this …


… into this …


Now, I know what you’re thinking. You really had to see Major League in 1989 to come away thinking that Suzanne looks sexy in her Jessica Rabbit getup. But, hey, she got Vaughn’s attention. And, truth be told, she got mine; I was 12 at the time.

Anyway, this got me wondering: What’s Stacy Carroll done since? Off I clicked to IMDb, where I discovered that Major League was Carroll’s first film role … and her last. Her only other credit: “Woman Victim” in a 1987 episode of a TV show called Sable. So there’s a stat for you.

Stacy, wherever you are, you’re not forgotten.



Since I Mentioned Bull Durham
Awhile back I had an idea for a fun post that would involve two of my many favorite moments from Bull Durham. Problem is, this post would be best achieved as a video mashup, and since I have neither the necessary video editing software nor the time it would take to learn how to use said software, the mashup is unlikely to come to fruition. That said, let’s just free the cat from the bag, shall we?

My idea was to link several movies (Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-style) via their use of songs. Preferably, the songs selected would be integrated into the drama itself. If not, the songs would at least be memorably employed as background music (think: “The Sound Of Silence” at the start of The Graduate.)

As conceived, the video could begin with the curtains parting in La Vie En Rose for the performance of the titular song by Marion Cotillard’s Edith Piaf. This would lead us to Bull Durham where Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose” is playing at the house of Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), prompting Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) to say, in typical Nuke fashion, “I can hear that crazy Mexican singer.”

From there the montage would fade to Nuke on the team bus playing (incorrectly) “Try A Little Tenderness” (“Women do get wooly...”), and that would cut to Jon Cryer’s Duckie dancing to “Try A Little Tenderness” in Pretty In Pink or Donkey singing a line from the song in Shrek, or something else. It’s here that I always got stuck. Connecting “Try A Little Tenderness” to Pretty In Pink would be easy and ideal (involving two memorable scenes), but what song would I use to get out of Pretty In Pink to connect us to another movie?

An easier way to get out of Bull Durham would be to cash in on its use of “Rock Around The Clock,” employed at the start of a minor league game when Max Patkin is performing on the field. That could segue to American Graffiti, as memorable for its use of music as any film, which has oodles of songs to choose from to send us to something else. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Maybe someday I’ll sit down and finish the outline. (Connecting it to a Kevin Bacon movie is unnecessary.) For the moment, however, without the video mashup capability, it’s not a compelling blog topic. Unless … anyone have ideas?

If you have other pieces to add to the puzzle, even if you can’t connect them to the thread I started above, let me know. If a few of us created a songs-in-movies chain worthy of mashing-up, perhaps one of the blogosphere’s many video talents could be convinced to edit the appropriate footage together into a montage. Until then, it’s an idea best relegated to the minor leagues.



Dorked Up
Last week my movie geekdom took a backseat to another form of dorkiness: fantasy baseball. Since 1993, I’ve been in an NL-only keepers league powered by Scoresheet, a fantasy sports simulator that takes my players’ real-life performances and pits them against my opponent’s players’ performances in fully simulated games that are unmatched in sophistication. I won’t bore you with the details except to say this: while standard fantasy baseball systems generate “points” based on things like wins, losses and offense, offense, offense, the Scoresheet model actually considers things like on-base percentage, player speed and defensive range. In movie terms, you might think of it this way: a standard fantasy league measures quality by performance at the box office; a Scoresheet league measures quality in the ways that really count.

The annual auction for the fantasy league took place Sunday. I participated by telephone, patching in with another player who lives in Colorado to conference into auction headquarters in Oregon. There the owners of the other eight fantasy teams sat around a table with stacks of stats in front of them, as if reprising the terrific scene in Knocked Up, when Paul Rudd’s character, decked out in an Orioles jersey and cap, is caught in the act of playing fantasy sports. To my knowledge, no one showed up to our auction table in baseball gear, but the geek quality was undeniable nonetheless, as typified by this exchange: “I’ll nominate Zimmerman.” Which one? “From Washington.” Which one? “The third baseman.” Oh.

The auction took an intense four hours. By the end, even the best poker faces (or poker voices) were losing composure like Teddy KGB with the Oreos in Rounders. Two days later, my brain is still recovering, cramped for the moment with details that will be mostly useless until next year’s auction. For example, did you know that Jake Peavy’s VORP last season was 50.6 while Dan Haren’s was 53.7? I bet you didn’t. Then again, you probably don’t know what “VORP” is, and you probably don’t care. Nor should you. Like I said, the information in my brain is mostly useless and only further confirms my geek status. You know, as if my movie reviews referencing Jean-Claude Van Damme movies didn’t do that already.


Etcetera
I got a good laugh this week from a piece on Yahoo reporting that “Vin Diesel” isn’t Vin Diesel’s real name. As if it wasn’t obvious. From the first time I saw Diesel a little over 10 years ago in a Dateline special that showcased his efforts (and also Darren Aronofsky’s with Pi) to break out from obscurity at Sundance, he’s annoyed me with his oversized ego. You know, the kind of ego that would lead a guy named Mark Vincent to tell his friends to start calling him Vin Diesel . . . Disturbing news from my old hometown. The other day, someone committed suicide halfway through Watchmen. Sad deal, and I don’t want to trivialize it. Still, I find myself assuming that this person had seen the movie before and perhaps timed his death with a specific scene. I don’t say that to imply that Watchmen is the kind of film that encourages suicide. Quite the opposite. As a film lover, I like to believe that even the worst of movies (which Watchmen isn’t) would make life seem worth living for at least a few minutes longer.

Notebook: Happy Birthday, Steve (and Stuff)

Not Enough Cool
Steve McQueen died of cancer in 1980 at the age of 50. Were the King of Cool still living, today would be his 79th birthday. Seventy-nine. That’s up there, to be sure. Not a take-it-for-granted age, by any means. On the other hand, you know who else was born in 1930? Gene Hackman. Sean Connery. Clint Eastwood. Armin Mueller-Stahl. Just to name four. The first two aren’t working anymore, but the latter two are; Eastwood is as engaged as ever.

On a day like today it’s hard to keep from wondering what the second half of McQueen’s career might have looked like, had he been allowed to have one. In Unforgiven, might he have taken Hackman’s place, or even Eastwood’s? If not starring in Best Picture fare, might he have at least made a memorable TV cameo, as his Nevada Smith costar Karl Malden did at the age of 88 when he heard the confession of Martin Sheen’s Jed Bartlet on The West Wing? Might he have had a Nobody’s Fool or a Road To Perdition, as his The Towering Inferno costar Paul Newman had in his 70s? Might he have broken hearts like his The Great Escape costar James Garner did in The Notebook at 76? Might he have taken up directing, as Eastwood has? Might he have seen his dream project Yucatan blossom according to his vision? (It’s now being directed by McG.) We’ll never know.

Oh, sure. It’s possible that McQueen’s later years would have resembled those of Marlon Brando, an actor with significantly greater talent who nonetheless managed to embarrass himself more often than not near the end. Perhaps instead of celebrating his love of automobiles by giving voice to a character in Pixar’s Cars, as Newman did, McQueen would have instead appeared as some kind of Patches O’Houlihan character in The Fast And The Furious. I cringe at the thought, but it might have happened.

Still, chances are good that McQueen would have given us at least one or two more performances, of whatever size, that would be worth cherishing. I’m grateful for the performances he left behind, but today is a day to wonder what might have been.



Mythbuster?
Speaking of McQueen: Here’s a story (and video) about a recent effort to determine the legitimacy of the famous motorcycle jump from The Great Escape. Oh, there’s no question that stunt man Bud Ekins, not McQueen, was the one who pulled it off. The question is whether the motorcycle Ekins rode was enhanced for the performance.

The conclusion? Read it and see it for yourself. To a degree, the jury is still out. But one thing's for sure: As the stunt rider attempting to duplicate Ekins’ feat says perfectly: “What they lacked in equipment, they sure made up with balls. Wow.”

Wow, indeed!



Making Love in Two Lovers
In his rave of Two Lovers, Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle writes: “The movie has only one flaw, a funny one: Two Lovers is another movie in which pants and underwear magically become permeable in the face of erotic desire. The standing-up, easily achieved sex interlude has become a movie cliché to rival the 555 phone exchange.”

That’s about right. (Spoilers ahead, if you’re picky.) The scene in question involves Joaquin Phoenix’s Leonard, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Michelle, a Brooklyn rooftop and winter clothes (including jeans for Michelle). Anatomically speaking, it isn’t very convincing. On the other hand, it does get the point across, documenting the consummation of Leonard’s romantic obsession while illustrating the tenuousness of their bond. Is this the moment Michelle falls for Leonard, or is it merely the moment she gives in? The brevity of the act and its uncomfortable beginning (it’s a while before Michelle is kissing back) invites us to speculate – like so many other scenes in the film.

To that degree it works. Still, LaSalle is right, too. And it struck me that director James Gray might have been better off utilizing a trick from the silent film age. After Leonard and Michelle share their awkward kiss, he could have cut to an intertitle reading: “And then they fucked.”


Etcetera
It’s easy to forget that Kristen Stewart is only 18. Given the poise of her character in Panic Room she seemed about that old in 2002. Watching Stewart's recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, I was struck by Stewart’s smarts (she’s clever) and her youth (she vibrates in her chair like a kid waiting to be excused from the dinner table). It’s going to be interesting to watch her career develop to see if the Twilight series proves to be her breakthrough or her undoing . . . Quick plug for the “Counting Down the Zeros” project going on over at Film for the Soul. If you want to write (or read) about films from the past decade, in monthly celebrations, that’s the place for you . . . Did you know that David Lean wanted to film a sequence for Lawrence Of Arabia at Petra, the site later made cinematically famous by Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade? I learned that today in Tom Stempel’s latest “Understanding Screenwriting” column over at The House Next Door.


Editor’s Note
A word about the format. This is the first of what will be regular Notebook features here at The Cooler. How regular? It’ll vary, as will the style. From the beginning, I’ve had one hard rule about blogging: post only what I’d want to read. If that means I’m the only one who wants to read it, so be it. If that means that I go two weeks without a new post, so be it. The point is, I’ve strived to keep The Cooler a filler-free zone. But with the demands of the day job only increasing of late, I’m often finding it tough to sit down and write at length (due to lack of time or energy, or both), and sometimes I'm struggling just to get to the movies I want to see (still haven’t been to Watchmen yet). As a result, many little ideas that I might have enjoyed developing into something more are drifting away unexpressed and unexplored. Not good. I’m hoping that the Notebook series will allow me to satisfy my blogging urges even in the busiest of times. Even more, I hope that the items I post here will spark reactions from my readers. Expect to encounter some highlighted notes on movies, some mini reviews, some tales of movie-going and perhaps even notes on sports, politics, life, whatever.