SIFF

SIFF held its opening night in Benaroya Hall (for the first time) with a typically SIFF opening night film: The Extra Man, with Paul Dano as twentysomething literature teacher Louis Ives, a shy young man mired in sexual confusion, a fantasy life born of F. Scott Fitzgerald novels and the eccentrics in his Manhattan apartment building, notably his roommate. Kevin Kline is the life of this rather precious coming of age film as Henry Harrison, a former playwright and full time “extra man” (an escort to the wealthy society widows who like a man on their arm for social events) who rents out a room in his walkup to make ends meet.

Directors and co-screenwriters Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (adapting the novel by Jonathan Ames) fail to capture the lively personalities that made their fiction debut, American Splendor, so splendid. Dano is less a man out of time than simply removed from the life around him (his thin, tentative smile and shrinking violet body language presents repression without suggesting the yearnings beneath it) and the film’s evocation of his inner life plays like bad community theater rather than a richly detailed fantasy of an idealized existence. But then there’s Kline, whose theatrical, judgmental Harrison is a genuine eccentric with a full life behind the flourishes and “a strange power over people,” in Louis’ own words. “It’s my constant disapproval,” explains Harrison, tossed off by Kline as an aside to the matter at hand. “Many people find it paternal.” John C. Reilly has less to work with offers a warmly vulnerable man under glaring eyes and a wild-man beard. This is just the kind of film that SIFF regulars have come to expect from opening night: mainstream moviemaking with indie colors and oddball edges just quirky enough not to offend.

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Mattel just announced a whole new retro-line in their Barbie doll line: the cast of Mad Men. Not all of them, just a few favorite fashion icons from the Sterling-Cooper offices: creative director Don Draper; his wife Betty Draper; Sterling Cooper partner Roger Sterling; and bombshell office manager Joan Holloway.

Design your own Mad Men adventures with these retro action figures

Yeah, they’re a little creepy – Roger apparently got a facelift in the transition, Don is reduced to a blank blandness and Betty is generic Barbie with a sixties flourish. But at least Joan doll suggests the bombshell original, even if she doesn’t look much like her.

My Mad Men self portrait

The set, priced at $74.95, will be available on March 23 at BarbieCollector.com, amctv.com and select retailers (including, one hopes, at Corky St. Claire’s memorabilia store, where the Mad Men can have dinner with Andre in Corky’s brand new production). Wet bar not included, sadly. I’d love to see a selection of cocktail glasses as accessories.

More details at the New York Times here.

Me, I’ll just stick with my Mad Men portrait, courtesy of MadMenYourself at AMC.

Everybody should have one.

Heck, everybody should be one.

Rudo Y Cursi (dir: Carlos Cuaron)

Rudo (Gael García Bernal) is a fearsomely aggressive goalkeeper who thinks he’s a gambler. Beto (Diego Luna), aka Cursi (which means “corny”), is a talented striker who thinks he’s a singer. Their talents lay on the field, but they’re pretty ill-equipped to deal with anything off the pitch: relationships, career, reality.

Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna

The half-brothers are country rubes dropped into the dazzle of the big city and media stardom, take their eyes off the ball on their whirlwind rise to fame and short-lived fortune. Beto is a dreamer who wants to springboard his soccer fame (football to the rest of the world) into a singing career. His cover of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me” (accompanied by accordion) is as corny as the cheeseball music video that accompanies it – no wonder he got the nickname Cursi. Rudo takes his soccer more seriously and is indignant when Beto is recruited over him, but he’s no smarter or self-aware than Beto and he’s far more self-involved.

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My feature review of the DVD debut of Stephen Frears’ Gumshoe is now up at athe Turner Classic movies website.

Albert Finney in "Gumshoe"

Gumshoe (1971), the first feature by Stephen Frears, is an unheralded gem of a film. Part parody, part tribute and all unabashed appreciation of old Hollywood private eye movies and hard-boiled detective fiction, it drops the tough-guy attitude and romantic ideals into the dreary world of 1970s Liverpool. Along these mean streets walks a small-time bingo caller and wannabe stand-up comic who plays private detective for a lark and winds up hired to kill a girl for real.

“I want to write The Maltese Falcon, record ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and play Las Vegas,” proclaims Eddie Ginley (Albert Finney) to his therapist in the opening scene. He settles for running an ad in the local paper offering his services as a private detective (under the name Sam Spade), a present to himself for his 31st birthday. When he gets a call, he just assumes his buddies are playing along for a laugh, but the package he gets from the mystery client (whom he dubs “The Fat Man” in his best Bogart impression) includes ₤1,000, a picture of a girl and a gun. Eddie’s no tough-guy and he has no illusions otherwise, but he can’t seem to help following the clues and putting the pieces together. Especially after his big brother William (a sneering snob played by Frank Finlay) first warns him off the case and then has him fired from his job at the club. William has clout. All Eddie has is a quick wit and a stubborn streak.

Eddie’s the kind of guy who can’t help but slip into hard-boiled patter (delivered with a touch of Bogie) when the opportunity arises, even if he’s wearing nothing but BVDs and a ratty bathrobe and devouring a bowl of cold cereal between his tough-guy cracks. It’s the kind of touch that makes Eddie Ginley so genuine. Finney plays him as a regular bloke with a non-stop sense of whimsy, a smart retort for occasion and a penchant for narrating his story in the vernacular of an American wise guy.

Read the complete feature here.

I’m sure there are hundreds, maybe thousands of you out there (well, dozens anyway) wondering why I’ve been mucking with the blog design. It’s a pretty simple story. The original blog design, or “skin,” for the site was called Paalam, a free theme offered to WordPress users by a private designer. It looked great and worked fine. Then WordPress updated its software, and the old Paalam skin started getting buggy. I put in an interim design until I could find something similar to Paalam, and then switched over to this new design, called SynthPop. Thanks to my good friend and web adviser, Nick Henderson of Henderson Graphics, for replacing the generic header and finally doing something I couldn’t do on my own: getting my original graphic header, which he designed for me a few years ago, back on my website.

Hopefully there will be no more abrupt changes to the site.

Let me introduce you to Parallax View, a new website I launched in collaboration with a collective of (potential) writers. We’re not exactly an organized bunch and the site has just launched, but the small group of Seattle-based film critics and writers who have gathered together and expressed interest in getting this off the ground represent an enviable combination of great talent and deep resumes.

Watch this site: I see great potential here.

Years in the dreaming, months of procrastination, weeks in the making, my website is finally live, and I spend mere minutes to mark the occasion with my debut post!

I plan to use my blog largely to alert you, my dear readers, of my various pieces online, but once I get comfortable I hope to have add some original pieces as well.

In other words, watch this space!

Excelsior!

PS: My heartfelt thanks to friends and web gurus Felipe Lujan-Bear and Nick Henderson for all their help in making this happen. The art in the header was designed by Mr. Henderson of Henderson Graphics