I’m Too Sexy For My Car

BAKER STREET

 by Eric J Baker

Welcome to Pure Film Creative or, as I like to think of it, Tiger Beat for intellectuals (and perverts; you know which one you are).

Regular readers of these pages will often find us opining on who is sexy (Ashton Kutcher, Duran Duran, Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and who is not (Killough’s former landlady Susan Blais, Russell Crowe, pre-Raphaelite painters). It’s easy to do when you’re talking about movie stars and fashionable pop bands, since good looks are a prerequisite for such roles in society. With political figures, the distinction is murkier. Much like the sewage most of them crawled from.

What's not sexy about an Aussie thug in a tub with a stogie, a brew and phone he's about to brain the hotel maid with?

I don’t find ugly liars attractive, but I seem to be in the minority. Last week, before the shocking truth exploded, I wrote on PFC that Anthony Weiner couldn’t have e-mailed his cock-bulge photo to a 22-year-old woman because he’s not that dumb. What I thought, but didn’t write was, “Who the fuck wants to see Anthony Weiner’s dick, anyway?”

Don't Gentleman Me

BLOGIRADE

by James Killough

Never one to be terribly quick on the uptake, I needed time to think about Tom Ford’s “five easy lessons in how to be a modern gentleman” from Another Magazine, which went surprising viral, namely because of the silliness of the fifth lesson about flip-flops and shorts in the city.  Ford is described in Another as a “fashion powerhouse, film mogul and old school romantic.”  I have decided that the second descriptor, “film mogul,” is tongue-in-cheek, although knowing the fashion press as well as I do, whoever wrote that is either sucking up to Ford or actually believes that because Ford’s one and only film was so well styled and shot it has somehow propelled the designer to the top of the film business.

Too close to home: Colin Firth looks into the blue eyes of a dirty blonde half his age in "A Single Man." I wouldn't date a kid in a pink angora sweater, though. A lime-green hoodie, yes.

I was pleasantly surprised by A Single Man.  No, pleasantly is too mild and a cliché.  I was staggered by how good it was.  Everyone in the Biz had been following Ford’s misadventures trying to get it made with not a small amount of schadenfreude.  How dareth the designing fagelah wander into our rarified climes?

I know both the film business and the fashion world intimately, and there is no question as to which is the more difficult to succeed in.  Fashion people are continuously astounded at how long it takes to make a feature film: nine years on average, no matter who you are.  Even the humblest designer working in some storefront in Williamsburg would have churned out at least eighteen collections by then.  What needs to be taken into account is production on one entire collection costs less than a single day’s shoot on an indie feature film.

"It's Just A Governor With A Hard‑On"

Research for my hagiography-in-progress of Eliot Spitzer continued last night with a screening of Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, a companion piece to The Inside Job, which I blogged about in an earlier post.  Regardless of its sensational title, Client 9 isn’t really about hookers and the politicians who love them.  It’s about the worms at the heart of the recent financial crisis, which is now clearly as much of a scandal as it is a crisis, and one man’s crusade to try to eradicate those heartworms.

The hero Spitzer. I brook no criticism of him. If I were truly cheesy, or maybe just a bit more meshugana, I'd Photoshop a halo behind his head.

Spitzer ferreted out the corruption at AIG early on, forcing the ouster of the execrable Hank Greenberg. It would seem from Client 9’s narrative and timeline that this began the process of Spitzer’s own demise at the hands of a cabal of venal old Wall Street and Albany Repubes, who are so unbelievably American Gargoyle that if I cast them in a fictional film about themselves, I would be hauled up by critics for not understanding the nuances of performance, for having brought to the screen unbelievably contrived, Silent Era performativity of nefariousness.

I cannot describe in a blog such as this, which aspires to be as light and fluffy as a Galliano tulle ball gown, just how hamfistedly Machiavellian, how egregiously mendacious, how plain physically repulsive these crotchety codgers are.  You just have to see it yourself.  As for their minions … my landlady, the Wicked Blais, would be envious.

The hero himself admits right from the start that it was hubris that brought him down.  He compares himself to Icarus.  This is no delusional Charlie Sheen narcissist, nor does he possess that most nauseating of personality traits, false humility.  For a man like this — brilliant, successful beyond most people’s wildest aspirations, did I mention sexy? — to own his hubris is humility enough.

The Venerable Johnny Depp

Praise the Lord.  I have seen Johnny Depp’s apotheosis and it is named Rango.  It’s like he’s pulled together all of his work since Edward Scissorhands into one masterpiece symphony in the form of an animated feature.  It all makes sense now.  Rango tips its mottled cowboy hat to Ed Wood, to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but most of all, intentionally or not, to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, the last Jarmusch film I truly enjoyed, as opposed to feeling flattened by enervation.

I don't know why they kept calling Rango a lizard when he was in fact a chameleon. I know, chameleons are lizards, but lizards makes them sound so pedestrian. Maybe the studios felt that American audiences would be too tempted to pronounce the "ch."

If you haven’t heard by now, Rango is truly trippy, brilliantly written, gorgeously animated, superbly voiced, and I have serious doubts it will ever make its real cost back.  If the studio reported a budget of $135 million, it’s bound to be much more than that.  Rango is basically an art film with a big Hollywood finish, which you really don’t mind because the whole journey is so jaw-droppingly audacious and bizarre.  It’s certainly the first time I’ve ever been sexually attracted to a rattlesnake.

One hot motherfucker. If you ignore the fact he is voiced by Bill Nighy, this is the sexiest cartoon character since the Beast in "Beauty and the Beast."

Mourning the Spineless Penis

According to my personal lexicon, a spineless dick is what I call a good friend who won’t go into overdraft to loan me more money.  According to the Guardian, the scientific community is all a-flutter over the discovery that we men have shed the DNA responsible for allowing us to have spines in our penises like other mammals.  The dickhead creationists will probably cite this lack of penile backbone as incontrovertible proof that we were actually created by God, not descended from apes through evolution.  I say to them, Verily, thou shouldst have more faith in science than fruitloops juju mumbo jumbo, for hath not science replaced the penile backbone with Viagra?  Is Pfizer not therefore divine?

Speaking of spineless dicks, I cannot resist reposting this image with a new caption:

Radical feminist poet and playwright Mama Muamah Gaddafi, author of “For Bedouin Girls, Who Have Considered Homicide When the Sand Dunes Are Too Ruff,” shows her followers that you don’t have to wear trousers to behave like a man.

I was right about the atrocities, they’re trickling out already: apparently Mama Gaddafi has swept out the dungeon and has been sharpening her knives and waxing the rack.  Some BBC journalists she had a stab at are reporting widespread torture by Mama’s minions.  Where does evil like that come from, do you suppose?  I’ve been watching Lady Gaga’s new video over and over for the answers, but her creation myth is just as bat-shit loony as anyone else’s.

The Execrable Susan Blais

Well, I’ve had my day in court.  Now that the records are sealed and a settlement has been reached, I can blog the fuck out of this.

For those of you just joining this blog/tirade, or blogirade, and for those of you who have been following it but are confused as to the details of what has led me to chronicle my fight with my landlady, Susan Blais, these are the broad strokes of what happened.

Another iconic image from Nick Knight, the director of Lady Gaga's latest video. I see this as symbolic of what it's like to take me on. So I'm full of myself. Yeah well.