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Sep 20 2010
Love0

“I was on the bottom of everyone’s list.”

By Asides, Cinema, TV

Jon Hamm (“Mad Men”) describes the life of a not-very-successful Hollywood act­or in The Guardian:

And there’s this hideous thing they make you do when you go up for a tele­vi­sion show: they make you sign a con­tract before you walk into the final audi­tion. The last thing they want is for you to have every­one fall in love with you, and then you not have a deal in place. So you sign this thing – and I had no money; I was broke. You’re star­ing at the five-figure pay cheque you’ll get… if… If! A crazy amount of money for someone who has none. So I was think­ing: I’ll pay my loans off and do this and that and maybe get my car fixed… and by that time they’re call­ing you in, you’re like: ‘Shit! I have to do the scene! What the fuck are the lines?’ I would get hung up on that stuff and be an utter fail­ure in the room.”

Hamm dis­plays an admir­able amount of self-awareness in this inter­view, pro­mot­ing his new fea­ture film The Town (dir­ec­ted by Ben Affleck). Part of Hamm’s suc­cess as Don Draper is the tiny amount of “I can­’t quite believe this is hap­pen­ing to me” he man­ages to project.

Hat-tip to The Story Department.

Jul 09 2010
Love0

World Cup Interlude

By Football, meta

Once again, things have gone a bit quiet around here but I have been pro­du­cing some writ­ing for the Internet at Russell Brown’s Public Address blog for the last week or two. Hadyn, Peter D and I have been World Cup guest-blogging and you can read my con­tri­bu­tions here, here, here and here. My final piece, try­ing to reach some con­clu­sions about the tour­na­ment, will appear after the Final is con­cluded some time next Monday.

On the sub­ject of the World Cup, I came across this art­icle at The Guardian today, again try­ing to sum the tour­na­ment up with two games to go:

As we saw in this year’s European Cup, and are now see­ing in the World Cup, foot­ball is going through a phase in which the sci­ence of coach­ing has the upper hand over the tech­nic­al skill of indi­vidu­al play­ers. That emphas­is gives an advant­age to the rich European clubs, and by exten­sion to their nation­al teams, who bene­fit most imme­di­ately from the rising levels of tac­tic­al sophistication.

Which seems a reas­on­able con­clu­sion to come to, I guess, but quite dif­fer­ent to what was being said a fort­night ago. I would add that the argu­ment about the primacy of the coach is con­firmed by the suc­cess of New Zealand (the best coached and led side at the tour­na­ment?) and the fail­ure of England, whose coach failed to over­come the neg­at­ive influ­ences of player-power and media bullying.

Anyway, the World Cup has taken a lot of my time recently, and the Film Festival kicks off in Wellington next Thursday so that’s anoth­er fort­night spoken for. Indeed, I have been beaver­ing away at screen­er DVDs from the Festival for my Capital Times pre­view which goes to print next week – and I’ll post it here (and at Wellingtonista) as soon as I can.

Mar 15 2010
Love0

Writing is a deep-sea dive

By Asides, Literature

Dave Eggers in The Guardian:

“Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you’re called back to the sur­face every couple of minutes by an email, you can­’t ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he has­n’t writ­ten any­thing for a year.”

This is a great inter­view. Eggers is a real hero of mine.

Mar 05 2009
Love0

Review: Dean Spanley, Big Stan, Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Welcome to the Sticks

By Cinema, Reviews

My favour­ite post-Oscars quote came from David Thomson in The Guardian: “When the Slumdog mob – Europeans and Indians, adults and kids – took the stage to claim the best pic­ture Oscar, a land­mark was being estab­lished which dir­ectly reflects America’s reduced place in the world.” And as if to illus­trate that very point, this week Hollywood have offered us a piteous pris­on com­edy called Big Stan and Zack and Miri Make a Porno. It’s like they aren’t even try­ing anymore.

Big Stan posterBig Stan is the debut fea­ture by com­ic act­or Rob Schneider, best-known for a pair of ghastly adult com­ed­ies fea­tur­ing his hap­less male pros­ti­tute alter-ego Deuce Bigelow. Schneider amaz­ingly main­tains a sol­id career (largely via the pat­ron­age of his great friend Adam Sandler) but there’s no sat­is­fact­ory explan­a­tion for how he was let loose with a cam­era except that Hollywood is genu­inely out of ideas.

Schneider plays a real estate con man who is con­victed and sen­tenced to jail. Terrified at the pro­spect of immin­ent anal rape he enlists a mar­tial arts mas­ter (David Carradine) to make him, er, impreg­nable. Like being punched in the swing­ers by an angry dwarf for 90 minutes.

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Aug 26 2008
Love0

Curse these human feelings ...

By Asides

I still fully expect to dance down the street singing “Ding dong, the witch is dead” when she finally snuffs it, but I was still quite moved when I read this quote from a new book by Margaret Thatcher’s daugh­ter Carol:

Dementia meant she kept for­get­ting he (her hus­band, Denis) was dead. I had to keep giv­ing her the sad news over and over again. Every time it finally sank in that she had lost her hus­band of more than 50 years, she’d look at me sadly and say, ‘Oh’, as I struggled to com­pose myself. ‘Were we all there?’ she’d ask softly.”

You don’t wish that on anyone.

[via The Guardian]
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