Upchuck Taylors

This might be the most tasteless tribute to Kurt Cobain yet (and that's saying something); this spring Converse, in honour of their 100th anniversary, will be issuing a limited edition line of Kurt Cobain one-star sneakers.

Okay, granted, they are slightly similar to the pair he was wearing when he killed himself, but let's not dwell on that too much. Besides, never underestimate the power of the Insensitivity Dollar: it's a big market, and his estate is wise to capitalize on it.

Is David O. Russell The American Nostradamus?

I'm starting to wonder.

In 1999 he makes Three Kings, a period piece when it was made that also acts as a commentary on current US involvement in the Middle East. To wit:


And if that wasn't prescient enough for you...


Then a few years later he makes an existentialist post-9/11 screwball comedy called, of all things, I Heart Huckabees. Now go turn on CNN.



So if you're wondering what will happen in America in 2012, here's the synopsis of his next project, Nailed (now in pre-production, according to the IMDB:

A political satire in which Jessica Biel plays Sammy Joyce, a socially awkward receptionist who gets hit in the head with a nail in an accident. This triggers her wild, sexual urges which causes her to fight in Washington for the rights of the bizarrely injured. She meets an immoral congressman (Jake Gyllenhaal) who takes advantage of her sex drive and capitalizes on her crusade as Joyce heads into her own career in politics.

You can't deal with his infinite nature, can you, America?

French Pop Holiday

This goes out to those who are still enjoying the holidays...Sheila et ses amis...

Euro Gonna Lose That Girl

Pyongyang Department Store 1989

S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Vision

Here's the juiciest bit of casting news I've heard in a while... my friend Gord told me today that not only is my favourite modern actor, Mathieu Amalric (Kings and Queen, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly) going to be the villain in the upcoming (and currently untitled) James Bond film (sic), but rumour has it he's also going to be playing the ultimate Bond baddie - Ernst Goddamn Stavro Fucking Blofeld (triple sic)!!!

Every few years, the Broccoli family try to get me to see the latest James Bond film, usually tantalizing me by casting amazing contemporary actors as the new Bond villain; sometimes it works (Christopher Walken in A View To A Kill) and sometimes it doesn't (Robert Carlyle in The World is Not Enough). And I can tell you right now that I have mentally already bought my ticket for this one, if only so I can reconcile these two trailers in my brain.





Actually...this Scopitone might help tie everything together...

Going To The Movies In Buenos Aires

The best part about seeing a film when you're travelling is if you luck out and pick a good one to go see, you get sucked into it and when it's over, you walk out of the lobby and are suddenly reminded that you are in another city, not your own.

I saw two films when I was in Buenos Aires. My friend Matias and I had to arrange to get a cab to take us all the way out to a shopping centre in the Bs. As. 'burbs to see Beowulf: La Leyenda (in 3-D IMAX! With IMAX-sized Spanish subtitles!) The tickets cost 14 pesos - or about $4.75 Canadian. You could bring beer into the theatre as well...beer and IMAX goggles, plus the trailer for Soy Leyenda!

On my last weekend in town I went to the Palermo multiplex down the street from the massive Alto Palermo shopping centre to take in a trasnoche screening of Gone Baby Gone. A trasnoche, film-lovers, is a movie-going tradition on the weekends in Buenos Aires - shows start between 1 and 1:30 a.m and are PACKED! You have dinner at 10, maybe an ice cream afterwards, then you roll over to the trasnoche, and THEN you go out clubbing. You can get popcorn either sugared (the local preference) or salted (no such thing as buttered popcorn in this town either way). And no Diet Coke - round here it's called Coke Light. Got to see some amazing Argentine commercials plus the trailer for P.T. Anderson's upcoming Habrá Sangre. Except for kids films, all international movies are in their original language with subtitles en Castellano. Argentinian films for the most part play in their own cinemas.

I couldn't find any of the massive theatres that used to exist in Buenos Aires in their original state; the Monumental, right down on Lavalle (the pedestrian tourist trap) used to have 3,000 seats (you can get a glimpse of it in its former glory in my previous post, at the start of one of the 60's Sandro trailers I linked to) but is now a run-down movie pit - they were playing Supercool, Michael Clayton and El Asesinato De Jesse James Por El Cobarde Robert Ford, plus two films that haven't even come out in North America, a thriller by Andrew Lau starring Richard Gere and some John Travolta / Salma Hayek period piece...

I learned something about Toronto while I was travelling as well, a lesson that left my city in the general deficit column. A small Romanian film like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days wins the Palme D'Or, and that fall it quietly pops up in Toronto and plays at the Cumberland for a couple of weeks, before winding up at the back of the Carlton for a couple more weeks. Meanwhile in Buenos Aires, the very same film plays at every multiplex downtown, often with giant ads for the engagement in the lobby, and when I went over to the Palermo on a Saturday night at midnight, the 1:30 a.m. show was already sold out. What are we to make of this?

(See my modest set of Buenos Aires movie theatre pictures here...)

The Proof!

Proof they knew I was coming down to Argentina!

This One's For Las Chicas

This report is filed from a locutorio in Buenos Aires. Locutorios are internet spots that are all over the city - in Buenos Aires, even the act of surfing the net all day can be part of your active social life.

I'm here because my vacation ends tomorrow and I'm on my way into a Musimundo store (there are no HMVs in Buenos Aires) to grab a couple of DVDs of Sandro, a living legend, a man I had never heard of before until I arrived here. He was all over the papers because he had recently turned 60 and was on yet another comeback trail (his last comeback apparently had him hooked up to an oxygen tank on stage but that wasn't enough to keep him from being snowed under by women's underwear).

But sometimes you achieve something that gets you buried in women's underwear for the rest of your life.



Sandro, the Argentine Elvis Presley (or is he the Argentine Amitabh Bachchan?) was a pop singer who made a dozen or so musicals in the sixties and seventies that were massively popular in Latin America... like Presley's films, they seemed to exist as pure vehicles to deliver the man candy to the ladies...here's a trailer or two of the goods.



If you want your own Sandro DVDs but can't hike it to Buenos Aires, you are in luck.

Taking Care of Bs. As.

I´ve been in Buenos Aires for 5 days now and although I could never say I´m making myself at home, I am starting to get my bearings in terms of geography, if not communications. I can read Spanish somewhat, but I can´t necessarily understand it as it is spoken, especially in the Latin American dialect, where the double L in words is pronounced with a J sound instead of a Y sound (e.g. - a crazy chicken is El Posho Loco instead of El Poyo Loco ).

Buenos Aires is New York as designed by the French with Spanish dialogue. All the pharmacies have the flashing neon green cross out in front and the street signs are often blue plates with white writing on them. No such thing as a house - everyone lives in apartments with grand balconies.

Here´s a defining moment - last night my friend Matias and I took a big long walk from the north of the city back towards my neighbourhood in Barrio Norte - we were on one of the main drags (Avenida Santa Fe) on a Monday night at 1 am and on the other side of the street there were about 50 young people wearing hospital gowns and surgical masks jumping up and down in excitement, gathering up their group that proceeded en masse towards a club - it looked like a flash mob-slash-Sprite commercial. Three young guys passed us watching them as well, and Matias told me one of them muttered en castellano to his friends "God. Every day, the same thing."

Telekino Goes To Buenos Aires

Telekino lands in Buenos Aires on Friday morning (November 30th) - staying in Palermo Viejo until December 11th. I will file my first report as soon as I can find an awesome internet cafe.

Pele-O-Vac

Norman Mailer's Greatest Hits

Norman Mailer died this morning...I'm less familiar with his novels and more familiar with his exploits as a Renaissance Wild Man.

Mailer directed four films through his life and actually received a career retrospective at Lincoln Center earlier this year - I was actually considering flying down to New York just to see the legendary Maidstone - a macho, alcohol-fueled improv-fest about politics and paranoia, filmed with friends in the Hamptons starring himself, Rip Torn, Ultra Violet and Lane Smith. Here's a description of the moment co-star Herve Villechaize (sic) almost drowned on the set, from the biography "Mailer: His Life And Times" by Peter Manso - the incident as remembered by Barney Rosset, at whose home the filming took place.

I was terrified of the violence, which was so thick you could feel it. After the first or second day these people had finished shooting, it was still light, and they'd gone back to where they were staying, in Bridgehampton, five miles away. My mother in law went outside, then came back into the house screaming, "There's a midget in the swimming pool!"

My wife and I go outside, and sure enough, there he is, floating. Someone had thrown Villechaize into the pool, and he was drowning. I was able to reach over the side and pull him out. My reaction was sheer rage, sort of "what right do they have to put this thing in our pool and then go home, just split?" Here we were in our house, this Quonset hut sunk in the ground, with the swimming pool and a lot of trees; this place had been vibrant with maniacs one minute, and suddenly they're all gone. My poor mother in law hasn't been out all day, she's been barricaded inside, then she comes back in screaming. What I said to my wife was, "Goddamn it, we're gonna get Norman!" I wasn't worried whether the midget was dead or alive. I didn't even call the rescue squad.

I got in my car and raced the five miles to the Bull's Head Inn, where they were all staying. I went up to Norman's room and pounded on the door. "Norman, you've gotta come back and get your midget!" And Norman? He and Jose went back with us and scooped up the guy, and I was told later that they took him to the hospital, where his stomach was pumped. Whether he was suffering from booze or drowning, I don't know, probably a mixture of both. The next day, though, to my utter amazement, he was back playing the piano in the Lane Smith scene.

Maidstone is notorious for being the movie where Rip Torn actually assaulted Mailer with a hammer, leading to Mailer biting Torn's ear in the ensuing wrestling match - all caught on film by D.A. Pennebaker.


Of course Mailer's ongoing feud with Gore Vidal is one for the ages - Vidal's quote that "there has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression" enraged Mailer so much that they had it out on the Dick Cavett Show, excerpted here in this documentary on Gore.


Mailer's best-known film as a director was 1987's 100% fucked-up Tough Guys Don't Dance, based on his novel. Sample dialogue: Lawrence Tierney describes his son Ryan O'Neal's ex-wife as the kind of dame "who should wear a sign around her neck that says 'Hang around, I'll make a cocksucker out of you.'" On the half-hour interview with Mailer on the DVD, he considers the film to be a success EXCEPT for this scene:


O'Neal felt Mailer left this incredible part in the final cut in order to destroy his acting career and never spoke to him again. In retrospect, Mailer said he would have taken this part out if he could do it over.

There was a bizarre episode of 'Gilmore Girls' a few years back where Mailer played himself being interviewed in the dining room of the Dragonfly Inn - for no reason except perhaps to pad out the episode. Maybe he thought Lorelai and Rory were distant relatives of Gary...

Make It Suntory Time

(thanks to Kate for the first clip and Mickey Rourke for getting arrested for drunk driving on a Vespa for the second clip)

George Segal: Secretly Canadian

I need to get my hands on a Canadian thriller called Russian Roulette (1975) - directed by veteran editor Lou Lombardo who, judging from his work on The Wild Bunch, must know his way around an action scene. Set in Vancouver, this one stars the underrated George Segal as a burned-out undercover Mountie (sic) who stumbles across a plot to assassinate the visiting Soviet Premier.

When I was a kid I was a bit obsessed with two 1977 George Segal movies - his Sensurround™ enhanced, quasi-disaster film Rollercoaster (a worn-out cop playing cat-and-mouse with an amusement park bomber played by future George W. Bush look-alike Timothy Bottoms) and Fun With Dick And Jane, the broad satire of the middle-class seventies American dream (written by Mordecai Richler) with Jane Fonda and Ed McMahon (sic). Segal was as much of a ubiquitous male lead in seventies American cinema as Donald Sutherland or Elliott Gould (Segal was even in Altman's California Split), but his skill with both comedy and drama may have led to his eventual marginalization as a leading man as the seventies wound down; that and some bad career decisions (turning down the lead in Blake Edwards' 10, for example) led to a future plucking the banjo on Johnny Carson's couch while promoting TV movies like The Zany Adventures of Robin Hood co-starring Morgan Fairchild (sic). Yes, it had come to this.

Roulette is an British-Canadian co-production apparently loaded with quirks and stuffed with weird casting, including Denholm Elliott as a 'greasy informant' as one review has it, and Louise Fletcher, just off her Oscar-winning role in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, in a bit part as a telephone operator. Plus a rooftop climax involving high-powered sniper rifles, helicopters and a seventies Vancouver skyline - damn, this thing has got to pay off!

This might wet your whistle for international intrigue involving George Segal before you track Roulette down - the stylish trailer for the trippy 1966 cold war thriller The Quiller Memorandum - directed by Michael (Logan's Run) Anderson!