Tonight at Walter Reade, one of P. Kael’s favorites: The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.

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Next up from the Coen brothers…

Flavorwire gives us filmmakers talkin’ bout New York.

Marty:

“I’m obsessed with this city. I just find it so remarkable. You really treasure this city when you go to different countries and you see that there is no mix. When you get back to the city, it’s such an exciting place. New Yorkers, we walk in the street, we talk to ourselves. But the issue is the energy, the excitement, and the different ethnic groups all mixed together. We’re spoiled being here.”

“If I continue to make films about New York, they will probably be set in the past. The ‘new’ New York I don’t know much about. It’s not that I’m against contemporary film. I’m open to it in general, but I find the new colors of the city, the new Times Square, kind of shocking. I guess I’m stuck in a time warp.”

David O. Russell has a knack for chaotic domestic comedy, with the yelling and the screaming and the occasional punching. Silver Linings Playbook has a lot in common with his previous movie, The Fighter–this one is set in Philadelphia not Boston, and there is a Led Zeppelin set piece in this one, too. It also has Jennifer Lawrence who steals the movie. The rest of the cast is good but she’s the straw that stirs the drink.

The story is predictable, you can see everything coming five minutes ahead of time–and not especially credible–but that doesn’t necessarily spoil its charms. And Lawrence’s character  is believable, you’ve likely known a woman like her, which makes the whole thing work. The more I thought about Silver Linings Playbook after it was over, the thinner it seemed, but I smiled and laughed while I watched it.

I’ve shared this before but it’s worth checking out again…

Rest in Peace: Nagisa Oshima.

Last night at the Golden Globes Jodie Foster accepted a lifetime achievement award and gave a long, thought-provoking speech.  Here’s the big moment:

“So while I’m here being all confessional, I guess I have a sudden urge to say something that I’ve never really been able to air in public. So, a declaration that I’m a little nervous about but maybe not quite as nervous as my publicist right now, huh Jennifer? But I’m just going to put it out there, right? Loud and proud, right? So I’m going to need your support on this. I am single. Yes I am, I am single. No, I’m kidding — but I mean I’m not really kidding, but I’m kind of kidding. I mean, thank you for the enthusiasm. Can I get a wolf whistle or something?”
[Audio goes out]

“…be a big coming-out speech tonight because I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago back in the Stone Age, in those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family and co-workers and then gradually, proudly to everyone who knew her, to everyone she actually met. But now I’m told, apparently, that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show. You know, you guys might be surprised, but I am not Honey Boo Boo Child. No, I’m sorry, that’s just not me. It never was and it never will be. Please don’t cry because my reality show would be so boring. I would have to make out with Marion Cotillard or I’d have to spank Daniel Craig’s bottom just to stay on the air. It’s not bad work if you can get it, though.”

“But seriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you’d had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe you too might value privacy above all else. Privacy.”

Wow, a grown-up in Hollywood. Go figure.

From the New York Times Sunday Magazine, here’s Stephen Roddrick on Lindsay Lohan in Paul Schrader’s new movie:

Lindsay Lohan moves through the Chateau Marmont as if she owns the place, but in a debtor-prison kind of way. She’ll soon owe the hotel $46,000. Heads turn subtly as she slinks toward a table to meet a young producer and an old director. The actress’s mother, Dina Lohan, sits at the next table. Mom sweeps blond hair behind her ear and tries to eavesdrop. A few tables away, a distinguished-looking middle-aged man patiently waits for the actress. He has a stack of presents for her.

Lohan sits down, smiles and skips the small talk.

“Hi, how are you? I won’t play Cynthia. I want to play Tara, the lead.” Braxton Pope and Paul Schrader nod happily. They’d been tipped off by her agent that this was how it was going to go. They tell her that sounds like a great idea.

Schrader thinks she’s perfect for the role. Not everyone agrees. Schrader wrote “Raging Bull” and “Taxi Driver” and has directed 17 films. Still, some fear Lohan will end him. There have been house arrests, car crashes and ingested white powders. His own daughter begs him not to use her. A casting-director friend stops their conversation whenever he mentions her name. And then there’s the film’s explicit subject matter. Full nudity and lots of sex. Definitely NC-17. His wife, the actress Mary Beth Hurt, didn’t even finish the script, dismissing it as pornography after 50 pages. She couldn’t understand why he wanted it so badly.

But Schrader was running out of chances. His last major opportunity was about a decade ago, when he was picked to direct a reboot of “The Exorcist.” He told an interviewer, “If I don’t completely screw that up, it might be possible for me to end my career standing on my own feet rather than groveling for coins.” A few months later, he was replaced by the blockbuster director Renny Harlin, who reshot the film. Renny Harlin! Schrader is now 65 and still begging for coins.

Via The Atlantic dig the cool work of Christopher Maloney.

Because Buster makes it better. Without fail.

From “Sherlock Jr.”

Here’s David Thomson on Susan Tyrrell in Fat City:

So you say to yourself, this Fat City is pretty damn realistic, even if you know in your heart that “realistic” and Hollywood should not be printed on the same page—otherwise paper ignites. Still, you’re marveling at it, until Oma sits down at a bar counter and starts to talk to Billy. She is going to be what is called his “love interest” or the woman he fucks, but any part of you that feels for Billy is telling him to get out just as we all might remember we have something else to do a long way away if Oma sat down next to us. Except that she is ravishing and inescapable in her downright wildness and unpredictability. She’s in the book, but just try telling yourself that she’s working to a script. And wonder how she ever got in front of the camera.

Maybe she was twenty-seven, but—it’s no lie—she could have been seventy-two. In bars in classier places, like Las Vegas or Los Angeles, you can find women who have had Botox and liquor enough to look like worn-out balloons. Oma is overweight, over-loud, blowsy, unwashed, out-of-line, trashy, drunk, beaten up, tough but self-pitying. She’s like a plate of hot chile, half-eaten, that has gone cold on the table. She is an astonishing creation, dangerous and pathetic, endearing and loathsome. Tyrrell got nominated as best supporting actress, and lost to Eileen Heckart in Butterflies Are Free, a film I refuse to remember. She was nominated by the New York Film Critics Circle, too. Not that winning any award could have made any difference, except that she might have caused a great scene at the Oscars and had to be dragged off stage. Even in 1972, that show needed juice.

She kept on acting, though she admitted that she only worked when she had run out of money. She was in The Killer Inside Me, a lot of TV, many movies you’ve never heard of and in John Waters’ Cry Baby. A little over ten years ago, she had a rare illness—it must have come from thrombocytosis—whereby she had to have both legs amputated just below the knee. I suspect that if she had been thus afflicted in 1972, the fascinated Huston would still have cast her, and let her roam as she wished. He had a true instinct for wild animals, and I can pay the actress no higher compliment than to say that in Fat City she is not just something the cat dragged in. She is the cat.

Here’s Thorton Wilder in a 1937 letter to Mabel Dodger Luhan:

In Austria or France go to see a Ginger-Rogers-Fred-Astaire movie. Watch the audience. Spell-bound at something terribly uneuropean–all that technical effortless precision; all that radiant youth bursting with sex but not sex-hunting, sex-collecting; and all that allusion to money, but money as fun, the American love of conspicuous waste, not money-to-sit-on, not money-to-frighten-with. And finally when the pair leap into one of those radiant waltzes the Europeans know in their bones that their day is over.

I saw Moonstruck for the first time in years the other day and it holds up. Sure, I like it because it was filmed in and around Carroll Cardens where I lived from 1994-2000 (when I first moved there Cammareri bakery was still around). But it also because it makes me laugh. The script is occasionally too cute–repeating lines in a predictable theatrical rhythm like when Cher’s parents both react to the news of her getting married: “Again?”–but it never becomes painful.

And I love the actors (Danny Aiello, Vincent Gardenia, and the great Julie Bovasso), with the exception of Olympia Dukakis, whose performance I don’t buy. But still, she doesn’t ruin anything and the leads are great–man, wasn’t Nic Cage good at one time? And Cher, was beautiful and funny.

Charles Durning, an accomplished stage actor who later became famous for his character work in the movies, died on Monday. He was 89.

Here’s Robert Berkvist in the New York Times:

Then came World War II, and he enlisted in the Army. His combat experiences were harrowing. He was in the first wave of troops to land on Omaha Beach on D-Day and his unit’s lone survivor of a machine-gun ambush. In Belgium he was stabbed in hand-to-hand combat with a German soldier, whom he bludgeoned to death with a rock. Fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, he and the rest of his company were captured and forced to march through a pine forest at Malmedy, the scene of an infamous massacre in which the Germans opened fire on almost 90 prisoners. Mr. Durning was among the few to escape.

By the war’s end he had been awarded a Silver Star for valor and three Purple Hearts, having suffered gunshot and shrapnel wounds as well. He spent months in hospitals and was treated for psychological trauma.

After the war, still mentally troubled, Mr. Durning “dropped into a void for almost a decade” before deciding to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, he told Parade magazine in 1993. The school dismissed him within a year. “They basically said you have no talent and you couldn’t even buy a dime’s worth of it if it was for sale,” he told The Times in 1997.

Durning was a familiar face on TV and in the movies when I was growing up–he was always there in something worth watching. And even when the movie was lousy he was always worth watching. I recognized his face on the jacket cover of my father’s copy of That Championship Season and of course knew him well from The Sting, Dog Day Afternoon, The Muppet Movie, Tootsie, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Sharky’s Machine, True Confessions, To Be or Not to Be, and Death of a Salesman.

He was one of the great ones. And he is already missed.

Over at Black Book, check out this interview with Amour director Michael Haneke.

The greatest (most drinkingest) couple of them all.

Photos by Steve Schapiro

at Everyday I Show.

I watched Intolerable Cruelty again recently and really enjoyed it. It’s not considered one of the Coens’ better movies but the acting is sharp and the Coens’ get the screwball down here in a crisp, biting way that was missing from The Hudsucker Proxy (though that movie has its pleasures, too).

Maybe it’s because I think Catherine Zeta-Jones is a fox and because I like George Clooney when he does comedy. Their chemistry works in a way we rarely see in war of sexes movies these days.

Billy Bob Thorton really cracks me up in his small role.

“This is Forty” reviewed.