One of the hottest sequences I’ve seen in ages. Especially when the older woman says “and then you take him into the lavatory and have sex” and the young girl drops her gaze, bashfully or somewhat ashamedly. And then the cutaway as she enters the train compartment. This is pervy but good. Who’s the teenager?
I always file less whenever I have an event to attend. (Naturally.) When I have two events within six or seven daylight hours I’m barely able to post more than a story or two. Yesterday was the Gandolfini funeral plus a press conference at the Crosby Street Hotel for The Way Way Back. Plus there was such an avalanche of bile and toxicity in response to the Gandolfini thing that I felt as if I’d been infected by a flu virus of some kind.
The poison that coarses through men’s souls! All I did was soberly and respectfully attend the funeral of an actor whose performances I worshipped. My hands were clasped and I said my amens and I took Holy Communion and even gave a hug to two people sitting nearby, but because I had the temerity to use the term “funeral crasher” and talk about Altoid mints I was all but stoned to death. I love you too, guys. Fucking piranhas.
I don’t give a shit if the public was invited. I wrote and asked the right people about attending and they didn’t fill me in. All I know is that there was a platoon of black-clad women checking names at the door when I came in, asking for spellings and whatnot. And then I faced another group of women wanting to know what my deal was. Okay, so as a result of my crashing I was seated farther forward than the hoi polloi and I didn’t have to wait as long to go inside. You think Paulie Walnuts would have given a shit one way or the other?
This morning I attended a memorial service for the great Bert Stern, and during the service I behaved in exactly the same way as I did yesterday at the Gandolfini thing. I’m not a friend of the family so I wasn’t “invited” per se, but it too was open to the public and I’m a rapt admirer of Bert Stern: Original Madman and so I felt compelled to drop by.
We’ve all been reading about how Guillermo del Toro‘s Pacific Rim (Warner Bros., 7.12) isn’t tracking as well as Grown-Ups 2 and yaddah-yah. Well, a highly-positioned industry figure with an interest in Pacific Rim‘s fate is disputing, to wit:
“These tracking reports are exaggerated, snarky and premature,” he wrote. “We started our campaign last week. We had focused on the core group, which is the most vital group for this film. Since then and as of today’s tracking we are steadily rising in a significant way. We are getting on track. The sensationalist headlines about Grown-Ups 2 are just that. Even a slight contextualizing shows that any sequel or reboot has much bigger built-in awareness than a new property with no stars. The numbers they were quoting were the early numbers from last week. There is also a fundamental truism in the summer, which is that your tracking always pops much later in the campaign.”
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