The Doctor of Love
Harry Houdini
I can escape from anything. Chain me up, tie me down, blindfold me, sink me in a river, whatever. You name it, I can escape it. Even the worstest, evilest horribilifying trap that has plagued mankind since Eve decided to eat that dumb fruit thing cannot hold me for long. And what is that super-bad, kinda terribilifying trap of which I speakest? A bad relationship.
AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaHHHHHHHHhhhhhhh!!!!! That’s what I had to say about my last relationship. As you can tell, it went very well. So well, in fact, that I decided to leave before things could get any better. I just didn’t know how much lovifying I could take from Helga, that sweet-souled 6’7” 350 lb. Scandinuvian Seductress.
Let me tell you, it weren’t easy getting out of her grasp, but I managed to escape with only minor cuts and contusions. And a cast. But anyway, let me tell you how I managed to get out of this relationship.
Helga decided to bring home her favorite delicacy from the local Scandinuvian grocery. Mmm. Lutefisk. What is Lutefisk? Presumably it’s some sort of codfish soaked in lye and is a real delicacy in some parts of the world. In reality, I’d rather smell the business end of a gaseous canine before trying to actually consume the stuff. It was the last straw, and I had had enough when she brought it home with her from the store.
My first step in getting away was to slowly step towards the door. I use a little slide-step-slide move that throws off a Scandinuvian’s perception of motion. Their simple brains can’t comprehend the movement.
Here’s where my whistling skills came in. Whistling throws off a Scandinuvian’s brainwaves. (Good thing to remember if you ever have to perform in front of a bunch of Norvegan Swedes.) So’s I whistled a little ditty and it helped to throw her off the scent of my next move.
Step two was to make like I was cleaning the doorknob. “Oh ya, nice shine dere on dis doorknob, you betcha.” And then I run. Run like the wind. Run like that dude who runs after that other dude in that one chapter in the Bible who is running toward another dude who was in that one place. I run and run and run and run and run some more. And then I drag myself to the nearest pub, drown my sorrows in a Guinness and try to forget the whole situation.
I know it is a little unorthodox ending a relationship in this way, but let me tell you, there is no better way. I am an escape artist by trade, so you’ve got to believe. When you have a bad relationship that needs ending, just follow my advice and run and you’ll be Helga-free forever. This is the Doctor, signing out.
The movie centers on a troubled Glasgow youth who tries to turn a talent for whisky-tasting into a ticket out of his dead-end life.
An audience favorite at Cannes, it could do for Scotch what "Strictly Ballroom" did for ballroom dancing: make it cool.
"The awful thing is, a lot more vodka is drunk in Scotland than whiskey, especially amongst younger people," MacLean said during a beachside interview in Cannes, where he is serving as an unofficial ambassador for Scotch, as well as for the film.
"When you buy a bottle of whiskey, you buy a hell of a lot more than liquor in a bottle," said the affable, mustached MacLean, who is passionate on the subject of his favorite beverage.
MacLean was initially hired as a script consultant on the film — tutoring some of the actors on whiskey appreciation — before being asked to appear on-screen.
MacLean is well used to public speaking, but he found it daunting to film a scene in which he had to lead a tasting in front of an audience of extras.
"On the Road" premiered Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, far away from the American roads crisscrossed by Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, the characters modeled on Kerouac and Neal Cassady, respectively.
The Brazilian director Salles became involved after making another road movie: 2004's "The Motorcycle Diaries," which chronicled a South American trip by a young Che Guevara.
Much of the problem in adapting "On the Road" is its meandering narrative in which Paradise (played by Sam Riley) and Moriarty make a series of cross-country road trips in post-World War II America, where their intellectual, passionate bohemian ways (and copious amounts of cigarettes, booze and marijuana) sometimes clash with a more conservative society.
"On the Road" gets the group's passionate, carnal camaraderie, but it struggles more (as was perhaps inevitable) to capture the white hot pulse of Kerouac's book, which was famously written in three weeks on a long scroll (though that story underestimates Kerouac's earlier notebook writing).
Stewart, who plays Moriarty's girlfriend Marylou, says she poured over audio tapes of Luanne Henderson, her character's inspiration, and met with Henderson's daughter.
The most rapturous audience reception at the Cannes Film Festival has gone to "Holy Motors," a disorienting, whirling dream of a movie by French director Leos Carax.
Starring Denis Lavant as a man who adopts a dozen wildly different personas during the course of a long Paris day, the film includes surrealist scenes, tender moments, a song by pop star Kylie Minogue and the unexpected appearance of bonobo monkeys.
The film, which has its red-carpet gala on Wednesday, drew whoops and cheers at the end of its first press screening — but left other baffled viewers shaking their heads.
All I know is that it is a bunch of people who will be dead very soon, said the director, waving an unlit cigarette at a Cannes press conference.
Minogue, who plays an old flame of Lavant's character — or one of his characters — said she had been "slightly terrified" to take an acting project very far from her performing start on shows like the Australian soap opera "Neighbours."
There's a moment early on in "Men in Black 3" when Will Smith's Agent J sits down next to his longtime partner, Tommy Lee Jones' Agent K, and bemoans the fact that he's too old for this sort of thing — for running around New York in matching dark suits, chasing down aliens and zapping them with their shiny metal weapony doo-hickeys.
Long-gestating and written by a bunch more people than actually get credited, the latest film shows the glossy style and vague, sporadic glimmers of the kind of energy that made this franchise such an enormous international hit.
Smith and Jones don't seem to be enjoying themselves, either, in returning to their roles as bickering secret government agents.
Boris busts out of the high-tech Lunar Max prison — with the help of his girlfriend, played by Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger clad in dominatrix gear and carrying a cake — in order to jump back in time and kill the Young Agent K, who put him there.
[...] Boris returns to the summer of 1969, a few days before the historic Apollo 11 moon mission, and takes out Agent K. Agent J shows up for work in the present day and wonders what happened to his partner; once he figures it out, he jumps back a bit earlier to kill Boris before Boris can kill K. Time-travel plots can make you feel dizzy and nauseous if you try and pick them apart to determine whether they make sense, but once we reach our destination here, the jokes provide no pleasant escape.
The best part of our trip to the '60s — the best part of the movie, period — is the arrival of the Young Agent K. Josh Brolin channels Jones in eerily dead-on fashion, from the bemused Texas twang to reticent demeanor to the slightest facial tics.
[...] all the familiar and rather flat comic elements lead up to a revelatory climax that comes out of nowhere and in no way earns the sort of heartrending emotion it aims to evoke from its audience.
"Men in Black 3," a Columbia Pictures release, is rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence and brief suggestive content.
Comanche tribe makes Johnny Depp honorary member
Comanche Nation tribal member LaDonna Harris said Tuesday that the tribal chairman presented Depp with a proclamation at her Albuquerque home May 16.
Depp has been the topic of much discussion in Indian Country and online since he was cast as Tonto, with comments ranging from his costume, to the selection of a non-Native for the part, to how the role itself has historically epitomized Hollywood's misrepresentation of Native culture.
LONDON (AP) — The stars of the romantic comedy "What to Expect When You're Expecting" had plenty of praise for each other — and a warning about making out on the hood of a car — during the film's British premiere in London on Tuesday.
Cameron Diaz, Chace Crawford and Matthew Morrison, Anna Kendrick and Rodrigo Santoro were among the actors who walked the red carpet at the British Film Institute's IMAX theater.
The film — inspired by the bestselling book by Heidi Murkoff, and also featuring Jennifer Lopez, Dennis Quaid, Cheryl Cole and Chris Rock — looks at love through the eyes of five interconnected couples as they experience pregnancy and childbirth.
"The concern as the director is always that you turn up on set, and an actress doesn't want to give her all because she'll be thinking, 'I don't want to look too sweaty, I don't want to look too red, you know, I don't want to really go for this,'" he said.
With a Scottish cast, it tells the tale of a young unemployed trouble-maker who finds redemption through whisky — a result of his fine palate, not through turning to drink.
The film — showing in competition at the French festival — then matures into a liquor heist, with newcomer Paul Brannigan playing Robbie, a young Scottish criminal.
CANNES, France (AP) — Paul Brannigan, the untrained actor who stars in Ken Loach's latest movie, has gone from being unemployed in a rough Glasgow neighborhood to nude scenes with Scarlett Johansson.
The movie, which screens Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival, follows Robbie and his jobless chums as they plot to get their hands on some priceless single malt.
There's a trip to Cannes to be snapped by photographers and quizzed by journalists, and a love scene with Johansson in "Under the Skin," a forthcoming film about an alien who visits Scotland in human form.
Things were tough, I had no money, it was Christmastime, and I'd got a loan I wanted to pay back.
[...] the 75-year-old director hasn't lost his seriousness of purpose or eye for society's outsiders.
In some ways Robbie resembles Billy Casper, the central character in Loach's landmark 1969 film "Kes," who finds a sense of purpose in training a hawk.
The film will bring Brannigan plenty of exposure — something he also got in "Under the Skin" as a man who is seduced by Johansson's alien.
Brad Pitt arrived at the festival with the stylish, hardboiled film "Killing Them Softly," which he produced and stars in.
While many were wrangling with the film's audacious juxtaposing of a story of violent back-stabbing criminals with an overt political subtext, others were being gently let down by Pitt:
Pitt stars as a kind of fixer who organizes the necessary retribution of two thieves (Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn) who rob a poker game of gangsters.
Pitt said he doesn't intend "Killing Them Softly," which is scheduled for theatrical release this September, to be read as his views or to be fodder for the upcoming election season.
CANNES, France (AP) — The first half of the 65th annual Cannes Film Festival has completed a life cycle in films that range from the motivating spark of child birth to the despair of slow death in old age.
The latter came by way of Michael Haneke's "Amour," which is by wide consensus the favorite thus far for the festival's top honor, the Palme d'Or.
Cannes audiences sit down for a movie with expectations of nothing less than a masterpiece, and "Amour" has been the only film generally considered worthy of that label.
For Haneke, a provocateur of mysterious terrors, it's a film of exceptional intimacy, where death slowly disassembles love.
" ''The Angel's Share" stars first-time actor Paul Brannigan as Robbie, a young troublemaker in Glasgow, Scotland, who narrowly escapes a jail sentence.
Macabre master David Cronenberg's "Cosmopolis" screens at the film festival on Friday — but first off the bat was "Antiviral," the debut feature by his son, Brandon Cronenberg.
A horror-meets-satire take on celebrity culture in which eager fans pay a clinic to infect them with their idols' illnesses, the film is competing in Cannes' Un Certain Regard sidebar, which focuses on emerging film talents.
First Class as a clinic technician who becomes an unwitting guinea pig for celebrity infection, and Sarah Gadon as the star whose illnesses are the company's best sellers.
"I was delirious and was obsessing over the physicality of illness, the fact that there was something in my body and in my cells that had come from someone else's body, and I started to think there was a weird intimacy to that connection," he said.
Shot in creepy, antiseptic whites and sanguinary reds — "blood is incredibly visible against white," the director said of the aesthetic choice — the movie creates a creepy world where fans can not only buy designer viruses but eat "celebrity steak" grown from the cells of A-listers.
[...] it features the fetishistic obsession with production and costume design that is his trademark; nothing ever happens by accident in Anderson's films, which are frequently and accurately described as dollhouses or dioramas.
Despite its rigid structure, which includes exact tracking shots from room to room or person to person, the look of the film is alive and inviting, the work of Anderson's usual director of photography Robert Yeoman.
The screenplay, which he co-wrote with Roman Coppola, has resulted in his sweetest and most sincere live-action movie since the one that remains his best, 1998's "Rushmore" ("Fantastic Mr. Fox," from 2009, which he crafted through painstaking stop-motion animation, was also a real charmer).
In his post-"Rushmore" films — especially "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" and "The Darjeeling Limited" — Anderson seemed too preoccupied with all the clutter, all the idiosyncratic doo-dads that defined his characters at the expense of character development itself.
Sam, an orphan, flees his Boy Scout-style troupe of Khaki Scouts (Edward Norton plays their loyal leader); Suzy, the only daughter and eldest child of married lawyers who ignore each other (Anderson regular Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), feels neglected and has been acting out.
Longtime Anderson friend and collaborator Jason Schwartzman rounds out the excellent supporting cast as the fast-talking, highly efficient scout leader who helps Sam and Suzy with their plan; the performance will put a familiar smile on your face as it suggests who "Rushmore's" Max Fischer might have grown up to become.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — "The Avengers" torpedoed "Battleship" and Hollywood's other newcomers to remain the No. 1 film for the third-straight weekend with a domestic haul of $55.6 million.
Debuting at No. 3 was Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy "The Dictator" with $17.4 million, while the ensemble pregnancy tale "What to Expect When You're Expecting" premiered at No. 5 with $10.5 million.
The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Sunday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday by Hollywood.com are:
"The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," Fox Searchlight, $3,230,584, 354 locations, $9,126 average, $8,228,025, three weeks.
"Think Like a Man," Sony Screen Gems, $2,650,549, 1,722 locations, $1,539 average, $85,838,460, five weeks.
Band of Misfits, Sony, $1,578,632, 1,840 locations, $858 average, $25,490,136, four weeks.
"The Five-Year Engagement," Universal, $1,110,375, 1,175 locations, $945 average, $27,103,010, four weeks.
Universal and Focus are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of Comcast Corp.; Sony, Columbia, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount is owned by Viacom Inc.; Disney, Pixar and Marvel are owned by The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is owned by Filmyard Holdings LLC; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a group of former creditors including Highland Capital, Anchorage Advisors and Carl Icahn; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC is owned by AMC Networks Inc.; Rogue is owned by Relativity Media LLC.
Before a screening of a restored version of his 1979 film "Tess," starring Nastassja Kinski, the Polish director showed the short, titled "A Therapy."
The festival earlier screened the documentary "Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir," which features conversations between Polanski and his friend Andrew Braunsberg about his U.S. arrest in 1977 for unlawful sex with an underage girl and his subsequent flight to France before sentencing.
[...] he said when "people everywhere are endorsing the film, back home they suddenly take it very seriously."
Kashyap has another film titled "Peddlers" showing in the festival's Critic's Week section. |
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