Discussing Christopher Nolans' Odyssey with Daniel Mendelsohn

Having watched Mr. Mendelsohn's "seminar" on Nolan's film, I was surprised he made the very same criticisms, almost verbatim, that Emily Wilson made in her LRB review. Yet Ms. Wilson's review is called "scathing" by The Guardian and causes even Joyce Carol Oates, no less, to run to Nolan's defense. No one bats an eye at Mr. Mendelsohn's pan of the film nor when he himself mentions Ms. Wilson's review and ALSO calls it "scathing"!

So you have two people saying pretty much the same thing in the same way and one is characterized as "scathing" and "a take down" and the other is an even-handed critical assessment. Misogyny is not going away apparently, not for a long, long time.

Javier Bardem on Defending Palestine and Loving Penelope Cruz

Talking to Bardem is not unlike talking to another parent at school dropoff in Brooklyn; his concerns, beyond what film to make next, are similar to my own. Bardem’s 15-year-old “got his first phone less than a year ago. No social media, of course,” he says. “They work with computers at school, which we are OK with and not OK with.” What Bardem and Cruz hope for, the actor says, is that their children learn to sit with themselves, and they’ve tried to teach them to meditate. “We try to make them understand the importance of being bored, of wasting your time, of sitting down and looking at the ceiling.” This refusal to be distracted is where creativity originates. “The younger generation has less patience, less attention, less care in detail,” he says. “We are all living on a fast pace, and it takes a lot of courage to take the time to sit down and enjoy something for what it is, without thinking you are missing something else. It’s what we are consuming on a daily basis through our phones — and this attention deficit we are all having.”

“Megadoc” Shows Francis Ford Coppola Going for Broke on “Megalopolis”

A revelatory sequence in “Megadoc” shows Coppola arguing with the cinematographer, Mihai Mălaimare, Jr., about the lighting of a shot, which Mălaimare wants to keep consistent with other shots in the scene, for the sake of a conventionally smooth edit. Coppola says that Mălaimare has no business anticipating how the film will be edited, and the director lays down the law: “To me, your job is not to match all the light. Your job is to get beautiful images of the scenes that we have.”

Modern cinematographers need to learn this.

Alexander Payne on What's Wrong With Modern Films

You’re planning on making a Western as a possible future project.

I’m moving to Denmark in the Fall. I’m going to make a proper European art film. I got European citizenship about four years ago. I’m Greek. I don’t care that much about Greek citizenship, per se, but I got it with a very practical goal in mind, which was to make films in Europe and qualify for state funding, and the Film Gods brought me this project in Danish [“Somewhere Out There”]. Renate Reinsve is going to be in it. When I finish that, then I’m going to start work on a sequel to my film “Election,” that I made 25 years ago, and then I’ll get to the Western. The one I’m really most interested in doing. And I’m about 30 or 40 bad pages into it.

Hugh Grant - The Talks

What did you like about playing the baddies?

It’s more fun. Actors prefer being baddies! Audiences prefer the baddies, and it's a very interesting question of why that is so. My personal belief is that it's the antagonist, the bad guy, who represents our true selves. And that is thrilling. I think it's thrilling to experience our true selves through that character. I think we are vicious, violent, selfish, unpleasant. And that's why good characters are quite difficult, because the good characters are the superficial, civilized veneer that we put on our true brutish self. It's less interesting.

...

Is that how you’d like to be remembered as an actor? Through the myriad of different kinds of roles you’ve played?

Oh, man. Well, I hope when we die, it's the same as before we were born. No one's really frightened of that enormous, infinite blackness before we were born. No one sits there thinking, “Oh, God, how awful. I was nothing.” So I don't really see why we should be frightened of that after we die, as long as it is black. I really don’t want to be up there on a cloud playing a harp, meeting some of the people I’ve hated in my life. I can’t imagine a greater nightmare. That would be hell, in fact.

'A Complete Unknown' Director James Mangold on Making Bob Dylan Biopic

But the biggest kind of truth test for me is just that you’re trying to kind of carve out how much all of these people are wonderful. I love them all. I hope the movie conveys that I adore this world — not just Bob — and that the fracture that happens isn’t because I picked a side, but that it’s just like a Tennessee Williams play or anything else. It’s just a fracture that happens among people who love each other when they all are growing in different directions. And it happens to be on a public stage, because that’s where they live. But it’s analogous to all our lives.

Robert Towne Dead: 'Chinatown' Screenwriter Was 89

Prior to his death, Towne had collaborated with David Fincher on a “Chinatown” prequel series for Netflix, which would explore the police days of Jack Nicholson’s character Jake Gittes. In an interview with Variety one month before his death, Towne confirmed that all episodes of the project had been written.

‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’ Francis Ford Coppola’s 40-year battle to film Megalopolis

As if that wasn’t enough, Coppola made life even harder for himself: “When he arrived in Atlanta, he was looking for accommodation for his extended family and he wasn’t finding anything he particularly liked. So he bought a drive-in motel which had just closed, and decided to renovate it. So all the way through the shoot, he lived there. The construction noise started at six in the morning.” When Figgis (who opted to stay in a different hotel) asked Coppola how he handled it all, “He said, ‘Look, it’s all the same thing. Movie business, construction business: it’s telling people what you want, and making sure they do it.’”

Ripley (TV Mini Series 2024) ****

I could quibble about casting, but the production design, photography, script and performances are so spectacular. Terrific adaptation, really captures the feel of the novel.

An Unlikely Life | David A. Bell | The New York Review of Books

A film like Gance’s, long and complex, would not do well at the box office today. Scott has said, “I couldn’t get through it, honestly.” But we need films that take history as seriously as Gance did. In the global culture wars of the twenty-first century, history has become a major battleground. Vladimir Putin’s Russia criminalizes criticism of the Red Army, British conservatives defend the legacy of the British Empire, Israelis and Palestinians duel over the events of 1948, American progressives cast 1619 as an alternate national origin story, and everyone squabbles over statuary. Historical films like Scott’s Napoleon make for reasonable entertainment, but they also represent an opportunity lost. Today, more than ever, we could use more translations of the past that engage seriously with it, rather than just riffing on it or reducing it to a colorful but empty spectacle.

Denny Laine, of Paul McCartney's Wings and Moody Blues, Dies at 79

Denny Laine, the British singer-guitarist best known for his work with Paul McCartney & Wings and the Moody Blues, has died after a long battle with interstitial lung disease, according to a social media post from his wife. He was 79.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog: Books

I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become “uninhabitable.” I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

Patricia Highsmith: Notebooks: 10/29/1949

On the insane: they are only trying to find a reality. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to find a reality in existence. The greatest philosophers have never found a satisfactory reality, or its explanation. Going under gas, for instance, the world is quite different, more overwhelmingly convincing than the so-called normal world, as to its reality. There is really no reality, perhaps, only writing a system of expedient behavior, action and reaction, by which people have come to live. That is, most people, who live like this for the same reason most peas fall into the center compartment when dropped from a central point above.

Helena Bonham Carter: ‘​I’ve got so many issues, but as you get older you go: whatever’

What’s yours [complex]?
I’ve got so many issues, but as you get older you go: “Whatever.” The curse of being young is you take your complex too seriously. Or you take your opinion of yourself too seriously. As soon as you’re a bit older, you tell the demons to shut up because they’re boring.
Does that make you happier?
There’s no doubt that I’m happier now with my 56-year-old envelope than I was any time before that.

Florence Pugh called John le Carré an “old f*cking fart,” which… inspired him?

The new friendship turned out to be a very good one, at least for Le Carré, who would lament to Pugh a year later that he was suffering from a serious case of writer’s block, to which Pugh replied, “What do you mean your writing days are over? Just keep writing. Keep stretching your brain. Do it.” And it worked.

Why John Waters, the Pope of Trash, keeps returning to the Bay Area

SFGATE: Anything else you think our readers should know about?

Waters: Other than, “Come to the Mosswood thing!” that’s the best I can do. I do Camp John Waters [a summer camp for adults], which is sold out. That’s in Kent, Connecticut. About 500 people come and live as my characters and live their lives for four days. We have guest counselors every year — this year it’s Deborah Harry and Colleen Fitzpatrick, who played her daughter in “Hairspray” and went on to be Vitamin C, the pop star. It’s really amazing. People have contests, we speak, we have dinners. Then I do a 20-city Christmas tour, so I’ll be back with a musical. I’m writing that. I’m writing new shows. I’m so busy, I think I’m overexposed. Maybe you shouldn’t hear about me for a while.

Vangelis, Oscar-Winning Composer, Dies at 79 | Pitchfork

In 1973, Vangelis started his solo career with his debut album Fais que ton rêve soit plus long que la nuit (Make Your Dream Last Longer Than the Night). During the ’70s, he was widely rumored to join the prog-rock band Yes, following the departure of keyboardist Rick Wakeman. After rehearsing with them for months, Vangelis declined to join the group. He and Yes lead vocalist Jon Anderson reunited later in the ’80s, and they went on to release several albums together as Jon and Vangelis.

Personally, extremely influential musician.

Francis Ford Coppola Shares His Oscar Memories - Deadline

What’s really going on with CNN and Fox and this addiction to daily news? To me, it’s very simple. They give you four minutes of bad news that there’s nothing you can do about. I mean, you look at the kids in Afghanistan and you cry about these babies. I want to help. You look at what’s happening in Ukraine and you say, oh my God. But there’s nothing you can do about it, and they give you that. Then they show you six minutes of commercials, options you can do something about it. You can give yourself a treat and buy a bad unhealthy hamburger, or you can…but everything they suggest that you can do involves you spending money. So that’s what’s going on.

DEADLINE: I never thought of that.

COPPOLA: Commercials are basically subliminally telling you that you’re not okay the way you are. And you’d be better off if you could have a Mercedes, because then you can have a pretty girlfriend. In other words, it’s not telling you you’re okay. It’s telling you you’re not okay, repeatedly. Some poor guy is working in an office and he’s working as hard as he can, and he can’t get any more money. So he can’t have a Mercedes and he can’t get a nice girlfriend that looks like Cheryl Tiegs. And so he just goes berserk and he shoots five people, or some 17-year-old kid commits suicide because he’s being bullied. That stuff is not all necessary. I finally figured it after I looked very carefully at what the news was saying, and I realized everything that I feel bad about is because the news is telling me I can’t do anything about it. It’s very frustrating because I want to help the Ukrainians. I want to help, but I can’t. It’s beyond my ability. But then the next commercials are things I can do. And some of them will give me a little shot of dopamine. I could get that pizza. I can act. I can just do it.

Francis Ford Coppola’s $100 Million Bet (GQ)

Okay, I said. The Godfather started off as a studio project that had nothing to do with you. Did it become personal to you in the end?

“Well, I believe that. I believe… I'm going to have to say this fast. I once read a Balzac article—I wish I could find it, but it's not published, and I don't know where the book is.” (I think this was Coppola's way of telling me he owns, or once owned, an unpublished work by Balzac.) “But people said, ‘Oh, these young people are stealing your stuff.’ To Balzac. And Balzac said, ‘That's why I wrote it. I want them to take everything, whatever I have, they're welcome, these young authors. Take all you want. One, because it can't really come out like me because each one of them is an individual and it's going to come out like them, so they can't steal it. They can appropriate it, but it's going to come out through them. And number two, it gives me immortality, so whatever I do, if young people take it, are influenced by it, and so and so, it's great. Because that then makes me part of their work. And I go on.’ So what was your question?”

Elvis Costello is a more perceptive, skilled and thoughtful writer than ever

And I did write another record that was just a literal representation of a transition in my life that took place about 17 years ago. People were deeply shocked by how plain-spoken it was and didn’t like it. A lot of people didn’t like it because it wasn’t tricky and ironic and all these things that I had become supposedly known for. The couple of times that I spoke directly to people, they kind of stepped back, not cause the songs were bad, but because they don’t like truth. I’m that guy that’s got the smart-arse line you know but that’s not really me, that’s them, that’s what they’re hearing. You know I have no control about the way people listen to my songs, I have to write what I honestly think is the right story.

17 years ago was 2004/2005. EC released "The Delivery Man" in 2004, but that was well received. "North" was released in 2003 and wasn't as successful but it was a piano ballad album and I doubt folks were turned off by the lyrical content. I wonder if he's referring to 2002's "When I Was Cruel"?