This is our friend Nate, who is a rockstar songwriter. Literally. He’s working on his own solo album right now, and he’s looking to raise money to complete the recording. This is a clip of him singing the song with Dutch singer Ilse DeLange.
When we first heard the song, we were at one of Nate’s shows at Rockwood. Tom and I both turned to each other, trying to figure out where we’d heard the song before. Turns out, we hadn’t - it’s just that catchy and that good. Definitely check it out.
Pygmalion was quite good, and I can heartily recommend it for anyone in New York . . . if you can get tickets. Claire Danes is going to lose her voice from it, but she and the rest of the cast are delightful, and Jefferson Mays is as far from Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins as you can really get (and more believable because of it).
Saw Eastern Promises on Saturday. It’s graphically brutal and bloody in a few choice spots (I closed my eyes). However, not only is David Cronenberg a confirmed genius (storytelling, the look of it, everything is just so interesting), but Viggo Mortensen has finally reached the upper echelon of my personal list of great living actors, playing a member of the Russian mafia in London with completely convincingly and without any hints of Aragorn. Not for the faint of heart, though.
We met with friends who are in from Scotland for their first trip to the US. (NYC is a very weird place to go on a first trip to the US, too.) We brought them out to Brooklyn, and after they got lost and then found again, we had dinner at Miracle Grill (southwestern American), then dessert at the Cocoa Bar. They were intrigued by the discovery of blue corn, which, we informed them, does indeed grow in the US and does not involve food coloring. Who knew?
On Sunday, the Village Church had our annual outdoor service in Washington Square Park:
It was actually the first one I’d gone to, and it was a lot of fun. Perfect weather, plenty of people dropping by to listen in, and some really good discussion during the question & answer time. It’s so good to hear people asking civil questions and giving civil answers in a public forum, you know?
Afterwards Tom and I went to see Across the Universe, which was a giant disappointment and probably not worth your ticket money unless you’re really, really into Julie Taymor or the Beatles. The acting was ok, and the music was totally re-imagined and therefore fun to listen to, but the story and script were so bad that it was dead in the water. I think she was trying to make an extended music video, but . . . it wasn’t. It’s quite lovely to look at, but wait and rent it. (And most of the people walking out of the theater were saying that as well.)
Tomorrow night we’re seeing Flight of the Red Balloon in press screenings at the New York Film Festival. We’ve only just seen another of Hsiao-hsien Hou’s earlier films (the lovely and meditative Cafe Lumiere) and saw Three Times last year when it was in theaters; this one is actually in French and stars Juliette Binoche.
On a non-movie note, we had some standing credit at the local Community Bookstore (they have the best fiction section EVER), and Tom went by the other day and brought home Annie Dillard’s new book The Maytrees and an older Lorrie Moore book, Anagrams. Can’t wait to tackle them.
Lastly, we were introduced to this last night while having dinner with our friends Victoria and Sam. Enjoy.
This is a clip from Todd Haynes new movie ‘I’m Not There,’ a riff on Bob Dylan’s biography, where Bob is played by six different characters throughout the film to represent the different phases of his life, as producer Christine Vachon put it, “The film is going be inspired by Dylan’s music and his ability to re-create and re-imagine himself time and time again.” In this scene Cate Blanchett proves herself to be one of the greatest actors of our time. Other people already knew this, but I’m just now being convinced. She is WONDERFUL in this role!
Trailers are out for three movies I’ve been waiting for all year, plus one film I’ve been waiting all year to get out of my life.
The first is only a teaser trailer and the film actually won’t come out until summer 2008, but it’s nice to see Pixar rocking it all over the place with their new movie Ratatouille coming out in a week and a half to rave reviews. Wall-E is the creation of Andrew Stanton, director of my favorite Pixar movie Finding Nemo. That film set a new bar for the beautiful work that can be done with CGI; the underwater lighting is truly a marvel. I think my favorite part of this trailer, though, is the music. It makes me want to dance.
The second comes from one of Alissa’s and my favorite directors, P.T. Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia). Based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood has me a little worried considering it’s P.T.’s first adaptation. On top of that, the trailer is a little odd, it doesn’t get me all that excited. No matter, the film should be great!
In terms of Hollywood, I Am Legend took over New York for shooting this year, at various times shutting down the Fifth Avenue and the Brooklyn Bridge. It didn’t affect my life too much, but it is nice when the big productions finally leave. For all of that though I think the trailer rocks; Will Smith is a great actor, totally underrated.
And my favorite trailer of them all, because it’s the Coen Brothers, because it got wonderful reviews at Cannes, because it’s based on a Cormac McCarthy book, because I’m currently reading another Cormac McCarthy book and want to adapt it into a movie, and because that book currently has me obsessed with modern day westerns, No Country For Old Men stands to be one of my favorite movies of the year. I just felt like calling it now.
I applied this week to direct a staged reading — that’s theater we’re talking about — so hopefully something will come of that. Before golden boy Orson Welles made Citizen Kane at the ripe age of 26 he was doing theater here in New York. His infamous broadcast of The War of the Worlds was in 1938 at twenty-three, but even before that, two years prior, when he was just twenty-one, Welles staged an all-black production of Macbeth set in Haiti with voodoo witch doctors. It later went on a national tour and served as the concept for Welles’ 1948 film of the same play. Here are some newsreel clips from the production:
