“It wasn’t until the 20th century that modern-type sunglasses came to be. In 1929, Sam Foster, founder of the Foster Grant company, sold the first pair of Foster Grant sunglasses on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, NJ. By 1930, sunglasses were all the rage.” — from ideafinder.com‘s page on sunglasses.

Robert Downey, Jr., as Sherlock Holmes — fictionally born in 1854, first appearance in an Arthur Conan Doyle story in 1887, etc. It’s fairly safe to say that shades weren’t around during Holmes’ youth or middle age. Unless, of course, Holmes invented them.

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My just-received copy of Nick Dawson‘s Being Hal Ashby, taken inside the good old Skylight Diner on 9th Avenue and 34th Street following 6 pm screening of Observe and Report.

First bloom, 9th and 42nd Street, 3.31.09, 4:10 pm.

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I knew something was wrong last night when a friend and I walked into Sant Ambreous, a little restaurant at the corner of West 4th Street and Perry Street. It was around 9:30 pm. The atmosphere felt a little too stiff and formal, and they were all too glad to see us. Restaurants that have their act together never show excitement when a customer walks in. It’s always a sign of desperation. They need to just smile and keep their zen cool.

On top of which the waiters wore pink shirts with black ties. Village restaurants should always use waitresses who look like Sylvia Plath and who wear black leotard tops or somewhat tight sweaters, or…whatever, young, sharp-looking guys who may or may not be gay but who look it. But nobody wears ties — what is this, the Radisson in St. Paul?

Another trouble sign was that the bartender, a young girl from...

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I was talking an hour or so to this Expedia customer service guy about a flight to Spain that would initially land in Lisbon, Portgual. Which this Expedia guy kept referring to as Lizbonn — Liz Taylor plus Bonn, Germany. My irritation grew with each mispronunciation. “Look, it’s pronounced Lizbuhn…okay?,” I finally said. “Lizbuhn. You should kinda know how to pronounce these cities.” How cut off from civilization do you have to be to get a six-letter word wrong? Is it a matter of education, ethnicity, rural dialect? I knew how to say Lisbon when I was seven or eight after watching Casablanca on the tube.

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I actually don’t have a problem with these Japanese-produced Nicolas Cage Pachninko TV spots because however dopey or doofusy, Cage seems like a relatively sane and good-natured goof-off. He’s loose, animated, self-mocking. Which is quite the contrast from his projections of quietly obsessive insanity in Knowing.

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Last Friday’s announcement of the death of Steven Bach, the former UA exec and author of “Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate” (which was later retitled as “Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate“) reminded me what a legendary Hollywood filmmaking book it was and is.

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“With just five features in 13 years, Wes Anderson has established himself as the most influential American filmmaker of the post-Baby Boom generation,” says Matt Zoller Seitz in the first of a five-part narrated video series (along with a printed essay) that will run over the next five weeks.

(The video is very nicely done, Matt — hats off. But the automatic play-reboot function is impossible. Send me a code without it and I’ll put it up again.)

Publishing a pro-Anderson manifesto is, at the very least, an idiosysncratic if not brave thing for Seitz to have done. I mean, is it not the prevailing view that Anderson pretty much shot his wad with Bottle Rocket and Rushmore? And that he’s been...

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I met briefly with We Live in Public director Ondi Timoner and her five-year-old son Joaquim early this afternoon inside the Manhattan offices of Murphy P.R. Her film, which won the 2009 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury prize, is about living virtual at the expense of natural, and how we’re all sinking deeper and deeper into it. (It’s certainly the story of my life, I can tell you.) We Live In Public is showing at New Directors, New Films this week. I’ll most likely run the piece along with the audio tomorrow.

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The legendary movie-score composer Maurice Jarre died yesterday in Los Angeles at age 84, following a long bout with cancer. I’m probably not the only one who’s feeling a bit forlorn about this. Jarre’s music could be a little sappy at times, a little too on-the-sleeve. But his melodic gifts seemed almost heavenly at times, and he was one of Hollywood’s most impassioned old-time maestros — right up there with Miklos Rosza, Dimitri Tiomkin, Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann, Alex North, etc.

You can love or admire various films, directors, actors, screenwriters, choroegraphers, directors of photography, screenwriters, etc. But music goes right into your heart and makes the spirit take flight. Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia music is arguably a more...

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The first thing I saw on the iPhone after coming out of my second viewing of State of Play this afternoon was the NC-17 rating given to Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Bruno. This is surprising? What kind of rep would this 7.10 Universal release have if the MPAA’s ratings board had given it a nice obliging R? Please.

The idea with Bruno is to make average folks in all socio-political realms (i.e., not just red-state males) cringe and go “eeeww!”, and to do that right it has to top the naked wrestling “eewws” in Borat, so what else could have happened?

The Wrap‘s Sharon Waxman reported last night that the offensive footage includes Cohen having “anal sex with a man on...

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Another story I missed last Friday (and all weekend, for that matter) was the last gasp of L.A. City Beat, the smallish alternative weekly. They’re dead, buried, a memory. I was going to use “financially afflicted” as an adjective, but is there any print publication anywhere that isn’t sliding down the slope?

The only reason I picked up City Beat year after year was to read the esteemed film critic Andy Klein, and when they whacked Klein last January in a cost-cutting move I said to myself, “The hell with these guys.” I was actually thinking of a scene in Out of the Past when Jane Greer hopes for the quick death of Kirk Douglas . To which Robert Mitchum replies, “Give him time.”

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“The New York Times, as we know it, has been disappearing for some time,” Newser‘s Michael Wolf wrote last Friday morning. “It may — diminishing as though by half-lives — have degraded to the point where, in any practical sense, it has long since ceased to be the leading voice in either journalism or the establishment.

“This is partly of its own doing: Almost all of its strategies to deal with the changes in the newspaper business — its national strategy, its online strategy, its regional strategy (buying the Boston Globe), its international strategy (buying the International Herald Tribune) — have bitten it in the ass. Nor have its strategies to deal with the changes in news itself been so successful — the featurizing and softnews-ifying of the front page has made the...

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I woke up this morning and looked up at the ceiling — or rather, at the low-cost bullshit styrofoam ceiling (favored by low-end contractors, all the rage in North Bergen) that I’m stuck with for the time being. And it hit me that each styrofoam rectangle is precisely the same proportion as a widescreen 70mm aspect ratio — 2.21 to 1. I was recalling this and that scene from Apocalypse Now, particularly Martin Sheen inside that bamboo cage. This is my life.

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A friend sent along this video piece featuring Once Upon a Time in America costars Rusty Jacobs and Scott Tiler — the guys who played young James Woods and Robert De Niro in Sergio Leone‘s 1984 gangster classic — visiting some Manhattan-Brooklyn locations. “But they’re wearing T-shirts!,” came my reply. “So it was taped last summer. Or maybe two years ago. Or five. In any case, what’s the point?”

It’s interesting to hear Tiler say the following about Leone: “It’s almost unheard of that a director spends 11 years conceptualizing a film and not making any other movies in the interim….this...

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It’s criminal and appalling, but the apparent fact is that quality-level DVD rips of The Hurt Locker have been on Pirate Bay for a long while now. And last night a journalist pal told me that a bootleg bum sold him a “clean” DVD of Kathryn Bigelow‘s film the day before yesterday in the Bronx. For a dollar. Which means that other bootleg gypsies are selling it also, not just in New York but in grubby, down-at-the-heels areas of every city in the country.

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A Manhattan all-media Observe and Report screening is happening tomorrow night. I consider it vital to attend and report. I was told last night that the ending is (this may be putting it too specifically) Travis Bickle-ish. Whatever. The guy I spoke to called it Seth Rogen‘s last fat role — his no-holds-barred kiss-off to the fat chapter in his life.

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Collider‘s Steve Weintraub has just posted some pics of various new standee posters being displayed at Showest, which starts tomorrow in Las Vegas. The only one that got me besides the Hurt Locker poster is the one for Robert Downey, Jr., and the Curse of the Crystal Indiana Holmes.

“If he doesn’t die today, there’s always tomorrow.”

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As I began to say last Thursday, Greg Mottola‘s Adventureland (Miramax, 4.3) is modestly pleasing — a period relationship drama with comedic spritzing that’s unforced, settled down, not bawdy or coarse, and proportionately buyable. That’s another way of saying it’s a piece of recognizable realism with two solid, nicely unpretentious performances from Jesse Eisenberg and the always sublime, rock-sexy Kristen Stewart.

Broadway near Bond Street, 3.29.09, 1:55 pm

When I begin to watch a film about kids in their early 20s doing whatever, I silently pray to myself, “Please don’t let it be stupid.” Or “please let the characters not be...

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Interview has done Zac Efron no favors. He’s too generic, too pretty, too mild, and too accomodating to be any kind of tomorrow guy. If anything he’s the past in the sense that he’s Guy Madison, Troy Donahue, Tab Hunter, the Bay City Rollers, etc. His best performance so far was in Me and Orson Welles (which I saw in Toronto). His cautious manner in that film is oddly appealing in that he seems to know he’s not much of an actor and is wisely staying within a safe perimeter.

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Borys Kit‘s 3.26 story about Summit Entertainment buying film rights to William Kalush and Larry Sloman‘s “The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero” invites mockery, as Summit intends to do the same thing with Harry Houdini that Joel Silver and Guy Ritchie are doing with Sherlock Holmes in their upcoming film, which is to turn him into a generic bullshit superhero with washboard abs.

The operative portion of Kit’s story says that “the studio is not looking to make a biopic but rather an action thriller featuring a character who is...

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Ramin Bahrani‘s Goodbye Solo, which no one invited me to see at a press screening but which I was going to pay to see at the Angelika this weekend (largely because of Tony Scott’s review), has reportedly grossed $40,540 from three screens in New York and Chicago. The reason I didn’t go Friday night or yesterday is because I’m only feeling intrigue and/or interest, which is not the same thing as serious hunger.

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Yesterday afternoon Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel reported that David O. Russell is attached to direct The Silver Linings Playbook, his own adaptation of Matthew Quick’s novel, for the Weinstein Co.

Russell’s last teaming with the Weinstein brothers was on Flirting With Disaster, which was released in ’96. Wow….doesn’t seem like 13 years ago.

Seigel rotely mentions Russell’s Nailed, the Jessica Biel-Jake Gyllenhaal dramedy which had a troubled stop-and-start shoot due to Capitol Films’ shaky financial footing. But she doesn’t even hint when the film may be seen. Isn’t that the chief pressing issue...

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Death threats from Mexican gangs have reportedly persuaded the makers of Queen of the South, an adaptation of a popular pulp novel about murder and revenge among Latino mafiosos, to not only abandon shooting in Mexico but shut down altogether.

Queen of the South costars Josh Hartnett, Eva Mendes, Ben Kingsley.

The initial graph in Guy Adams‘ 3.29 story Independent story reports that the death threats led director Jonathan Jakubowicz and his producers to abandon plans to shoot...

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Maureen Dowd is in double-lite mode this morning, reacting to Lula’s statement that the worldwide economic crisis was caused by “irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes.” Which he meant metaphorically, of course, which Dowd chooses to ignore for humor’s sake. Life does occasionally favor those with blue eyes, but the things that can trip you up despite this supposed advantage are myriad. I should know, having (a) blue eyes and (b) made more mistakes than I’d care to mention.

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3.28.09, 11:55 pm

3.29.09, 9:35 am

Pear cake purchased yesterday afternoon at Dean & Deluca. All natural tasting, no sugary flavors, good as it gets, enjoyed by all.

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There are so many newspaper buyouts, layoffs, firings and salary rollbacks these days that every time I see a flurry of fresh reports along these lines, I write anyone I know who’s working for one of the beseiged publications and I say “how goes it?” I wrote this to two friends today. One of them wrote back with the following: “Am I okay as in ‘do I still have job security’? Yeah. Am I okay as in ‘how do I cope with an 11.5% paycut’? Remains to be seen.”

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In an essay that introduces Newsweek‘s Paul Krugman-profile cover story, titled “Obama Is Wrong,” editor Jon Meacham notes that “every once a while, a critic emerges who is more than a chatterer — a critic with credibility whose views seem more than a little plausible and who manages to rankle those in power in more than passing ways.

“As the debate over the rescue of the financial system–the crucial step toward stabilizing the economy and returning the country to prosperity–unfolds, [Krugman] has emerged as the kind of critic who, as Evan Thomas writes, appears disturbingly close to the mark when he expresses his ‘despair’ over the administration’s bailout plan. …

“There is little doubt that Krugman — Nobel laureate...

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The Film Forum’s 12-day Jules Dassin retrospective began yesterday. I’ve never seen Night and the City (Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, 1950), and so I’ll be catching the 5:40 pm show. I’ve never seen Dassin’s Up Tight! either, but the rep on this one — a militant black revolutionary riff on The Informer — is pretty bad. Such that it’ll probably never make DVD. I’m guessing that another late ’60s black-militant melodrama, Robert Alan Aurthur‘s The Lost Man with Sidney Poitier and Joanna Shimkus, will never see DVD either. Like they never existed.

Posters for Dassin’s Up Tight!, Authur’s The Lost Man.

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Eight days of play and Tony Gilroy‘s Duplicity, by any measure an above-average, extremely satisfying film on the terms that it lays out and works with, did $2.3 million yesterday, and will probably end up with $6 million and change by Sunday night. That’s a greater-than-50% drop from its opening weekend tally of $13,965,110, which wasn’t that great to begin with. Which basically means over and out.

Gilroy’s Michael Clayton cost about $26 million to make, and took in $92,991,835 worldwide not counting DVD and whatnot. Duplicity was much pricier — a guy in a position to know told me $80 million, give or take — and will probably finish with less than half of Clayton‘s take, ancillaries aside.

I’m sorry. Life is unfair. Gilroy did as good a job as anyone could have with a sophisticated corporate-suspense brain teaser...

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I’ve been fuming all my life at the martian-head rule that dominates each and every full-body statue in every corner of the world. A naturally proportioned full-body statue will create an impression, viewed from below, of the figure’s head being too small. The age-old solution has been a rule that all statues must have disproportionately large heads. Except every sculptor in the known world has over-submitted to this rule, and — this is the odd part — to the exact same degree. I’m talking 100% uniformity.

The bizarre result is that every statue in the world, from Beijing to Bangor to Timbuktu, seems to have a genetic commonality in the same way that people afflicted with Down’s Syndrome seem to have the same kind of slanted eyes and doughy bodies. Every statued figure in the world (including John Wayne on his horse...

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