It would seem that one John Derbyshire finds you physically attractive.
UPDATE: By popular, or maybe I should say semi-popular demand, my Ellen Page Cannes anecdote. Not that the above bit wasn’t sufficiently entertaining, I think. But I’m all about added value.
For a long time I was something of what you might call a hard-partying fellow, but honest, it only took me a couple of film festivals to figure out that the best way of working them was to avoid over-late, over-imbibing evenings.
By the time I started going to Cannes in 2005, I had become something like a model citizen in this respect. The press screenings there started at 8:30 in the morning, and I developed a routine that was in effect when I was there in 2006 and staying at the lovely, and spectacularly expensive, Hotel Martinez. Said routine being: up by 6:15 or 6:30 a.m. Call to my soon-to-be-wife in the States. Shower. Dress. Down to the restaurant and its very nice breakfast buffet by 7:15 at the latest. Eat, read the trades, smoke a couple cigarettes, drink a lot of coffee. Off by 8 a.m., at the Palais by 8:10 or so. And I did that every day, without fail. Interestingly, every day without fail for the first few days of the festival, another couple beat me to the restaurant and its breakfast buffet.
The first thing I noticed about this couple, who were very young—the male looked about 18, the female about 12—was that they were clearly not a couple in the romantic sense. They were very friendly with each other, but in a way that cousins might be. Another thing I noticed was how put-together they were. They were young enough that one might have expected them to have been out partying all night, and were just now dragging themselves to the hotel to get a spot to eat before collapsing. But that wasn’t the case. They were both very fresh, cleaned-up, newly dressed. Neither smoked. And again, they were up and at-em before I was every day, and I had been leading what I considered a relatively monk-like festival existence.
And, of course, they were staying at the lovely and spectacularly expensive Hotel Martinez. So they had to be, well, somebodies. And they looked kind of familiar. But I couldn’t place them. Until that Friday morning, when they weren’t in the restaurant anymore, but on the front page of Variety, in a group shot of the cast of X‑Men 3, which had had its red carpet première the night before. Ben Foster and Ellen Page.
Huh. And also, what the heck? Cut to January of 2007, the Sundance Film Festival. I’m walking down Main Street and I see producer Christine Vachon on the front patio of the Clam Shucker or the Claim Jumper or whatever the hell it is; she’s having a smoke; inside is a party for An American Crime. With Ellen Page. Who’s just coming out to the same patio. Christine graciously introduces me to Page, and I say, “I have one question for you, if you’ve got a minute,” and Page is like, “Shoot.”
“How was it that you and Ben Foster got to the breakfast buffet at the Martinez at Cannes earlier than I did, three days running or so? We were the only ones in there that early!”
Page shrugged. “Well, it’s a simple question with a simple answer. I’ve always been an early riser; I like to get my day started in a timely fashion. Ben’s the same way.”
“I have to admit, I didn’t recognize either of you at the time. It was driving me crazy.”
“Yeah, I think we were wondering who you were, too.”
Perhaps she can at least take some solace in the fact that the first link indicates he has no interest in her breasts. Those things are 23 years old!!
I wonder who is creepier when it comes to raphsodizing the features of ostensibly attractive actors, this guy, Jeffrey Wells, or Dan Schneider…
Wow, so women are only hot between the ages of 15 to 20? Nope, nothing creepy about that at all.
Judy, Meg… and Lindsay?
More to the point, Judy Garland as ‘sexy without being pretty’? When was Judy Garland ever sexy, especially considering that she played juveniles in most of her film roles?
I feel a teensy bit bad picking on the man his colleagues call “The Derb,” as he is far and away the smartest of the National Review Online crew…if you wired together the brains of Goldberg, Lopez, Foster, Steyn and Nerdlinger, the resultant, erm, organism still wouldn’t be able to beat Derbyshire at checkers, even. (Rick Brookhiser is close to his intellectual equal. And is indeed perhaps smarter, given the infrequency with which he tends to check in at The Corner.) And quirks and affectations of super-cold crankiness aside, Derbyshire appears to lead a relatively decent existence, in stark contrast to the likes of Breitbart, who’s proving himself a more complete and utter scumbag with his every breath. But still. The Derb’s eccentricities ARE doozies…(And his other complaints about “Inception” are not without interest!)
He’s basically the male version of Ann Coulter, of course he doesn’t like grown women who can tell him to fuck off for being a complete loon. teenagers or people with teenaged brains are the only ones that can take his hate-filled rantings.
why did you post to a link from 2005 though?
D’ah… where is my awesome comment that I spent four minutes on?
GRRRRR.….. PAGE POWER SO HOT, BOW TO HER.
YUM.
Lex G: I wish I knew. Maybe the humidity is making TypePad eat things.
Brad: The point of the 2005 link was to create an icky juxtaposition between “Jennifer Aniston’s objectively perky breasts are too OLD” and “Ellen Page, yum!”
This reminds me, have I told you guys my Cannes story featuring Ms. Page?
No. Please do. There are never too many anecdotes!
“Wow, so women are only hot between the ages of 15 to 20?”
Well, expand it out to 17–25, and that’s about right. Yeah, there’s an occasional Jessica Alba or Angelina Jolie who stays hot after 25, but usually women don’t.
Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Taylor Swift, Taylor Momsen, Amanda Seyfried, Mia Wasikowska, Keira Knightley, AnnaSophia Robb, Carey Mulligan…
The most beautiful women in the world UNEQUIVOCALLY, and not a one of them is older than 25.
And show me a guy from 8 to 80 who doesn’t still fantasize about 18 to 25-year-old girls, and you’ve found one lying motherfucker, or a dude who’s majorly gay.
Nobody cares who you fantasize about. Just keep it to yourself, please.
Jeff McDouche:
See the last paragraph of the post above yours.
Show me a guy who fantasizes about 18 to 25-year-old girls with the bodies of 14 year old boys and I’d say that dude’s majorly gay.
Or trying really, really, REALLY hard to impress us with what he considers his “uniqueness.”
You’ve got to love a young woman who uses the term ‘timely fashion’.
I know X‑Men 3 wasn’t very well-liked or remembered, but surely I’m not the only one who got to the end of Glenn’s story and imagined his unprinted response to Page’s last line as “I’M THE JUGGERNAUT, BITCH!” in his best Vinnie Jones impersonation.
In the aforementioned post that was lost to the sands of time, I had a kernel of a good point that I’ll now unofficially direct at Dan Coyle, Jeff McDouche, and Adam R…
Can one really trust a critic who doesn’t lay his fetishes and perversions on the table? You can freely dislike my writing style or “shtick” if you will… But one of my ETERNAL COMPLAINTS about Film Criticism is too many starched-shirt, backrow ironists who have to be chronically detached and unimpressed.
I realize it comes with the territory when most film writers have journalism training, combined with the Marxist socioeconomic tenets of Film Studies discourse. And I’m not saying every critic has to be Joe Bob Briggs chugging beer and pointing at hooters on the big screen…
But, damn, critics are the most ASEXUAL bunch ever. I much prefer a Wells or a Roeper or whoever just laying it out there that they’re smitten with some HOT CHICK. Other than the apparently acceptable-to-critics Amy Adams– because she’s “incandescent” and “effervescent,” ie reminds these old fogies of some Classical Hollywood Screwball shit from a hundred years ago– you never see a Ken Turan or Nick Schrager or AO Scott writing, “Holy shit did Scarlett Johansson give me a GIANT BONER.”
Why not? What IS criticism but a SUBJECTIVE ART FORM? Why not take the GONZO approach and filter every review through a laundry list of your own lustings, desires, impulses, fetishes?
It seems a shitload more honest than how most critics tap-dance around the issue all PC. Maybe that’s because film writers probably aren’t giant pussyhounds, but most of them write about pussy like they’re grade school kids who still think girls have cooties.
I don’t trust anybody who doesn’t talk about vag and just lay it all out there. And Dan Coyle, my shtick has the ear of James Wolcott, LA Weekly, Defamer, Gawker, HuffPo, and every major film critic in LA and NYC. Obviously I’m as interesting as a motherfucker, so back off, fool.
And that other douche who I’m too lazy to scroll up and look for his name: If you can’t tell the difference between a smoking hot, super feminine 20 year old girl like Taylor Swift or Amanda Seyfried, and a “14-year-old boy,” you got some major issues.
Sigourney Weaver was 37 at the time of ‘Aliens’ and still perfectly (and Hawksian-ly) “hot”.
PS: LexG, ZodiacMotherFucker from AVClub.com called, he wants his schtick back.
Ahem. While I don’t want to encourage a lack of civility here, I must say that, while I don’t at all approve of his ad hominems, I also don’t think Lex G is entirely wrong in some of his larger points. Which is to say that, while I have never been particularly enamored of critics using the term “boner” (and in fact I think I gave Nathan Lee some shit about it back in the day), that there is within criticism a certain tendency for practitioners of the craft to try and cast what one might call “crotch votes” and disguise them as semi-objective assessments. I’ve seen Jeff Wells do it (he seems very partial to British girls with thespian chops and peaches-and-cream complexions) and I’ve seen Robin Wood do it (in an incredibly disproportionate paean to the multiple talents of…wait for it…Ethan Hawke, I think in CineAction). Remember when Gawker used to give Elvis Mitchell a hard time (ar ar ar) about his high professional regard for Zooey Daschanel?
I mock John Derbyshire for his peculiar assertion that women lose their sexual attractiveness pretty much at the same time their adolescence goes, but you gotta give him credit for laying it on the table, even if he thinks he’s only putting forward a self-evident universal truth rather than admitting a festish. But surely there must be a way for a critic to skirt disingenuousness and admit his or her, ahem, biases without being vulgar about it. I recall, vaguely, a short Martin Amis piece for one of Esquire’s old “Women We Drool Over”-by-multiple-famous-authors packages that began “I’ve got a sick thing for Joan Collins.” (This was at the height of her “Dynasty” fame.) That’s the spirit! And for some reason I recall, a whole bunch of years ago, sitting with my future wife and a few friends, some of whom were couples, and somehow the subject of the fantasy celebrity “freebie” came up, and my choice was Stephanie Swift (this was before she had “retired” for the first time). “That doesn’t count,” somebody said. “She’s a porn star.” But I held, um, firm.
This might be an interesting topic for another post. I also sympathize to an extent with Lex’s complaint that critics sometimes seem an epicene bunch. Also, I can’t much argue with Taylor Swift, speaking of Swifts, or the woman I’ve suddenly decided to call Das Seyfried…
I don’t know how much fidelity you employed in reproducing Page’s exact words in the above post, but it makes me think they should have just let her ad-lib JUNO. She could’ve come off as bright and grounded without all the “honest to blogs”.
@ otherbill: Pretty reasonably accurate, I’d say. I have a particularly vivid recollection of the “simple question” bit…
@Oliver_C: ZMF is funnier than LexG. In fact ZMF is one of the only things that makes the AV Club comment sections tolerable.
I understand these things are subjective, but I find it alarming that a grown man could watch “Inception”, which features Ellen Page and Marion Cotillard, and think Page is the sexy one. The mind…boggles…
so…she’s going out with ben foster?! damn it! 🙁
His pedophilia aside, I do give Derbyshire credit for noting what a better dream movie WAKING LIFE is. And for writing that piece years back about how Middle Americans are for conservatives what South American natives are for lefties—symbols of authenticity with which you really have nothing in common.
Sometimes Mr. G’s comments make me feel a little scuzzy, but they’re EASIER ON THE EYES THAN ZODIAC AND ALL HIS SWEARING AND FRICKING RUN-ONS IT IS REALLY UNNERVING IT KIND OF SCARES ME A LITTLE.
I guess this an opportune time to bring this up: http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2010/07/shakedown.php
@ SJ: Very funny. Also: that’s a MAN, baby…
Hey, everybody, what’d I miss?
I’m trying to think if I have a “thing” or a “deal” for an actress which be considered off the beaten path (that’s a poor choice of words, I just now realized). Jesus, off-hand, I’m not sure I do! How said is that!?
Ellen Page is awfully cute, though.
@Glenn: Ha!
“All the boys think she’s a guy, she’s got Marty Feldman eyes.”
Speaking of critics’ fetishes, Andrew Sarris, in an unexpectedly candid moment in reviewing Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, said Isela Vega offers “two big reasons any red-blooded American boy”
should see the film.
It’s not that I don’t find certain actresses a decade younger than I am attractive. I just don’t feel the need to advertise that fact to get people to pay attention to me.
Now If you’ll excuse me, I have to prepare for my weekly viewing of Vampire Diaries.
The big tipoff for me is the tiredass dredging up of PC…as if political INcorrectness is some Voice of Truth in the Wilderness instead of something that can be found in huge quantities all over the net and which, IMO, is just as oppressive in its unrelenting insistence that anyone who disagrees is in deep denial. Please.
Speaking of Vampire Diaries:
NINA DOBREV is hot as August balls.
And why post on the Internet AT ALL if it’s not to “get people to pay attention to you”? You type all this stuff out for your health? Everybody pens their little blog screeds for one purpose: TO GET ATTENTION.
And I CALL ATTENTION TO MYSELF because I AM TRYING TO GET FAMOUS.
If you’re not trying to get famous, you’re a fuckin’ douchebag (paraphrased but TM Ray Winstone.)
Nothing funnier than someone trying to present their own erotic preferences as a universal truth. I gave that up years ago, after horrifying my now-wife by admitting that I found Rebecca Pidgeon in The Spanish Prisoner to be incredibly sexy–something that was so out-of-left-field, and likely so unique to my own personality, that she treated it like the admission of a hardcore fetish. Now I just accept that beauty, for the most part, might be objective, but what turns us on is way too subjective to make much sense to anyone who doesn’t agree with us. That’s probably why critics don’t talk about it in their reviews. Do we really want to know what makes A.O Scott flush and perspire?
Glenn, unless you want your nice little blog community taken over by an outsided, attention-starved personality, I’d suggest thinking about nipping things in the bud.
This is a place where many of us come to avoid the kind of crap we have to read on blogs like Jeff Wells’.
And it’s not like we’re starved for a lack of humor with you at the helm and some very witty commenters.
No need.
Kenny rules, but given the warm response from the lovable regulars here, me and this blog are fuckin’ done, professionally.
Have fun debating the esoteric value of FanFan La Tulipe and how it relates to the socieconomic plight of outer Uzbekistan, or whatever boring shit would be preferable to me being awesome.
Can’t say that I expected this to come up here, but I find Zodiac MF pretty funny in small doses. It’s repetitive, but twitter is a good format for his style.
I think it helps that twitter is an inherently stupid format. For example, I think this is hilarious for some reason: http://twitter.com/ZODIAC_MF/status/18881380803
Now just look what y’all have done. Gone and driven away James Agee. Buncha meanies.
Also, I wish it was possible to buy a DVD of ‘Crank’ with a ZMF commentary track. (And I don’t even like ‘Crank’.)
Jeez, I go for a swim, and look what happens.
For the record, I’m not in the business of banning or censoring commenters. Part of it’s the principle. Part of it’s the fact that I convincingly impersonated the world’s biggest self-righteous asshole over at David Poland’s place for too long a little while back, and was not only tolerated, but indulged. (whether my points were well-taken or not is beside the point; I could have been a WHOLE LOT more diplomatic in making them.) So there’s that. I delete spam and the occasional off-the-wall obscene anomaly now and then, but that’s it. Lex G or anybody else is welcome here if they wanna chime in. That is all.
Wow, what a pleasant surprise this thread turned out to be.
Just to continue the conversation, I agree with Glenn’s post that there’s sure to be a happy medium somewhere between ‘constipated longing’ and ’embarrassing self-exhibitionism’. We all know that Roger Ebert has a thing for thoracic pulchritude, and he’s no less respectable for it.
what a incredible publish, wow.
And Jordans 6 brings it home.
Also, Rebecca Pidgeon! That’s a left-field woman who I have a “deal” for, or whatever.
I’m all for thinking with your crotch (no less than Pauline Kael endorsed that idea) but when film critics do it in print, it can reinforce the point that their profession (1) is overwhelmingly male and (2) spends a whole lot of time indoors, not talking to people. Not that I think critics should suppress that urge if they, er, respond to a film sexually, but there is the risk of setting aside one’s erudite, authoritative public face and exposing the inner slavering fanboy. Or just sounding like a sexist asshole, like LexG.
But as long as we’re playing, am I the only one who finds Ellen Page very butch?
I’ve heard it speculated many times that she’s gay, but I don’t find her “butch” as that word is often described. She still looks very young and seems more a little tomboyish if anything, and during my second viewing of Inception she seems to walk kind of funny.
The other night, I came home from INCEPTION and I fell asleep dreamed I was back in Uzbekistan the outer part of it on the road from Samarkand to Bukhara or whatever. I’m sitting in a roadside diner munching on roasted goat and two hot Uzbek twins who look like Ellen Page slip me a note and then we’re in the men’s outhouse and while one ot them is blowing me the other one tongues my ear and whispers some shit about me being internationally recognized and SO hot and recognized by James Wollcott and how wet that made her, and then she starts talking about FANFAN LA TULIPE and its esoteric value and I say which FANFAN LA TULIPE, the Christian-Jacque version with Gerard Philipe or the Gerard Krawzck version with Vincent Perez, which totally shit the bed and why the fuck was it ahown in Cannes as opening night anyway. Then the other chick bites me and while I’m screaming ahe says, Like THAT has anything to do with our socieconomic plight! Then they start laughing at me and pointing at my dick, and screaming Nerd! And then the outhouse falls apart and thousands of Uzbeks are there laughing at me, screaming Nerd! And then I click my heels together three times and keep saying: I’m totally awesome and I’m gonna be famous, I’m totally awesome and I’m gonna be famous, I’m totally awesome and I’m gonna be famous…and then I wake up in Glenn Kenny’s apartment with my eyes clamped open like in some boring Stanley Kubrick shit watching a loop of some even more boring black and white shit without Scarlett Johansen about a British couple on vacation directed by Rossellonioni starring Ingmar Bergman and George Segal, and then I wake up again for real but still not famous. But totally awesome.
I’ve never even heard of half the girls in Lex’s “UNEQUIVOCAL!!” list of the most beautiful women, but it’s entirely laughable. I would submit Salma Hayek, Diane Lane, Jennifer Connelly, Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry, Beyonce, Marissa Tomei, Juliette Binoche, Sophie Marceau, Elizabeth Shue, Naomi Watts, Mariska Hargitay, Monica Belluci, Christina Hendricks, and many many many more beautiful women from their mid 30s on up are all gorgeous visions of beauty that have so much more to offer my fantasies than any vapid 18 year old ever could. But I guess i’m just funny that way.…
Speaking of “hot” ladies, I’m doing a 10–15 minute phoner with Patricia Clarkson on Tuesday.
That is all.
Alright, I laughed pretty hard at “Rossellonioni”.
“I’m all for thinking with your crotch (no less than Pauline Kael endorsed that idea).”
I once attended a talk by Pauline who began a tirade about writers who write with their penises, paused, pretending to notice someone in the audience she already knew was there, and then said unto the author of Deliverance, “Sorry, Dickey. I didn’t see you there.”
University of South Carolina, 1978
“I’m all for thinking with your crotch (no less than Pauline Kael endorsed that idea) but when film critics do it in print, it can reinforce the point that their profession (1) is overwhelmingly male…”
Given the reference to Kael, this is a strange statement. What, women don’t have crotches now?
Maybe the reason why so many teenage boys think Ellen Page is the bees knees is because she’s basically a teenage boy with a vagina, which is exactly what a lot of teenage boys are looking for in a woman.
I’m not sure there’s any reason to list Derbyshire’s fetishes. The fact that he’s a huge racist is all you need to know about him. Are you saying he’s smart because he’s a “scientific racist?” That has as much science behind it as “scientific creationism.”
But if you’re looking for speculation about his sexuality, I would have to say that, like most racists, he’s a white man with a tiny penis.
Just like there’s always room for Jello, it’s never too late in a thread for some standard-issue indignant lefty puling.
“…like most racists, he’s a white man with a tiny penis.”
I love irony.
Is he a real racist or, a lovabe racist like Walt Kowalski in GRAN TORINO?
Man, all these comments did was make me feel bad that for fantasizing about a life with an early middle-aged female movie critic. (Not giving any names).
Feels bad man.
Now Kristy McNichol…
You know what also rules, is when hot, DEMURE, delicate, NON-THREATENING, wispy, waifish, sensitive, vaguely wounded, circling-age-18 young hot chicks show their feet.
It RULES. Also I’d like to PLANT AN INCEPTION into all the chicks I mentioned above GOOD JOKE.
I love it when trolls SWEAR they’re leaving a site for good and don’t last 24 hours.
I guess it was fair game to point out the contradiction in my (oversimplified) Kael citation and the gender ratio in film criticism … but, still, there are a lot of fanboys in the profession whose fetish objects I would just as soon not learn about.
Late to the conversation, but I just wanted to mention that when David Edelstein wrote about Ally Sheedy setting off his “jailbait meter” in his review of War Games, I was never able to read him again without thinking of that. David Edelstein = perv = his opinion is useless.
Not to belabor the possibly obvious, but I find that a little poignant, Ratzkywatzky, as I strongly suspect your reaction was pretty much the inverse of what Dave E. was going for. I got the impression, back in those days, that he figured that skating on the thin ice of being objectionable would make him look less like a milquetoast. Also, back then he was young and cute enough (in a preppy way, I grant) that such outbursts were more likely to induce a raised eyebrow and a “You’re kidding, right?” than an “Eeew! Dirty old man! Call the cops!”
I’m going to post this here because, though it’s off-topic given how this discussion has evolved, it seems like even worse form to resurrect the INCEPTION thread and this is related.
I just saw SALT and I enjoyed it at least as much as INCEPTION, even though it’s not as ambitious. Like INCEPTION, it’s driven by a marriage and part of why SALT works so well is that I found that relationship much more emotionally compelling than the Cobb/Mal dynamic. Basically, it’s a cartoonish BOURNE IDENTITY with Angelina Jolie instead of Matt Damon, but it handles its reversals and misdirection much better and more lightly than INCEPTION’s endlessly over-explained twists. It’s not doing anything deep, but then again, neither is INCEPTION, though it gets credit for pretending otherwise.
Matt Zoller Seitz has a review that goes further than I would, but which captures SALT’s positives very well: http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2010/07/242257/secret-ambition-salt-and-angelina-jolie
Anyone else have this reaction? Or has this just been such a terrible summer for Hollywood movies that I’m overreacting to the merely competent?
@DUH – I pretty much agree with your sentiments, though I think Seitz’s praise may be a little excessive. Do we know what Manohla Dargis thought of SALT? Seven months ago in the Jezebel Q&A, she said (in response to a Paul Dergarabedian quote): “If Angelina Jolie had been cast in a movie as a good as The Bourne Identity with a filmmaker like Paul Greengrass, I would have gone out to see it, and I’m sure I wouldn’t be alone.” Curious if she thinks SALT is a step in the right direction.