Looker

My Heart Can't Go On

Two weeks ago, in my first post for Nothing Sacred, my Nextbook movie blog, I complained that a brilliant filmmaker like Roman Polanski had no business visiting Auschwitz, the site of his mother's death, with a filmmaker as crummy as Brett Ratner. I wanted to believe that a genuine artist would want nothing to do with a young hack whose films happen to have earned more than a billion dollars. But now I'm eating my words. (And not because Ratner's uncle seems to have left me a comment.)

In an interview last year with The A.V. Club, Ratner told the story of how Polanski came to appear in Ratner's Rush Hour 3:

After I did Rush Hour, I got three calls: Jonathan Demme, Warren Beatty, and Roman Polanski. I was like, "Wait a second, I thought I just made a contemporary version of Beverly Hills Cop." But the fact is that directors aren't snobs. After meeting them and talking to them, they appreciate a good movie, it doesn't matter what the genre. They know how hard it is; even if it's a comedy, an action-comedy, they know how hard it is to make a movie that's good, no matter what kind of movie it is. Roman became my friend. He called me, I went to Paris and visited him, and he was like, "Oh man, you don't understand, I love Rush Hour."

Roman Polanski loves Rush Hour. Has the world gone mad?

Reinforcing this cognitive dissonance is a passage in a book I happen to be reading right now, Carl Wilson's brilliant Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. It's his attempt to discern why millions of people love Céline Dion's music while millions more, apparently, hate it. Noting that Phil Spector "regards Céline as every bit the singer, indeed the artist, that she's made out to be," Wilson adds: "And he's not alone. Elle magazine reported in 2007 that Prince had been to her Vegas show three times, joining the likes of Rick Rubin." With admirable understatement, Wilson concludes, "It's not uncommon for musicians to bypass taste categories when they hear technical achievement, and Céline seems to be such a case."

In his opening chapter, Wilson (who detests Dion's music) admits, "Much of this book is about reasonable people carting around cultural assumptions that make them assholes to millions of strangers." Speaking for myself re Ratner: guilty as charged.

Wack Job

The Wackness, which opened in New York and L.A. on July 3rd and is spreading to other cities, is a sepia-toned tribute to New York City in the summer that its writer-director, Jonathan Levine, graduated from high school—the long-ago year of 1994. Its 18-year-old protagonist, Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), earns money for college (he's headed for his safety school) by selling weed; he has a mini-fridge full of it in his bedroom in his parents' Upper East Side apartment.

The weed is also handy for barter: Luke pays his shrink, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), in dime bags, which the good doctor inhales from a bong behind his desk. As cool as Luke is—aside from the dealing, he's tuned in to the now-classic hip-hop of the day—he's hopeless when it comes to girls. "I'm mad depressed, yo," he tells Squires in the opening scene.

Read the rest of this post on Nothing Sacred, my new movie blog on Nextbook.

Repulsion

Of all the things that could disappoint me about Roman Polanski—that he seduced a 13-year-old girl with Champagne and a Quaalude, say, or that he occasionally makes movies as silly as The Ninth Gate—nothing comes close to learning of his recent trip to Auschwitz with the young Hollywood crapmeister Brett Ratner.

Read the rest of this post on Nothing Sacred, my new movie blog on Nextbook.

Ride the High Country

Last week my family and I traveled to Montana for a cousin's wedding, and the trip turned into a film geek's dream. We spent our first night at the Murray Hotel in Livingston, which opened in 1904; Sam Peckinpah passed most of his sad last years (1979–85) in a suite of seven rooms on the top floor, where he shot bullets into the ceiling and kept the bartenders very busy. (The preserved suite, complete with bullet holes, is available for rent.) We spent the next few days living it up at the Chico Hot Springs resort, in aptly named Paradise Valley. Our room—purely by chance!—was in the Warren wing, devoted to Peckinpah's muse, the inimitable Warren Oates. Chico's owners got to know Oates during his frequent stays there in the '70s, and they've covered the walls with fan letters, news clippings, and photos, including a head shot of Oates looking young, pillow-lipped, and beautiful (rather than old, wrinkly, and scraggly, as he came to be known). For me, being in a part of the country that Oates and Peckinpah loved so much only increased its mountainous grandeur.