We’re adding a new regular feature to the PFC site, a mixed salad of items we’ve mined from various sources, namely our friends and likes and contacts who have pilfered them from their friends and likes and contacts. As if you weren’t sick of Facebook already… But at least here we won’t be showing off our vacation snaps and apparently making everyone else depressed and envious. Not that we care enough
I had a conversation with a young, exceedingly good-looking actor last night about a script of mine that is currently in development. He’d read it at his own request—it’s still a few drafts away from being camera ready, so not in wide circulation—after he heard me talking about it at a dinner party and realized that the description of the male lead was perfect for him: it’s about a guy in his mid-twenties, of German descent, from the Midwest. Even though I promised to have him read for the role when the time comes, in my mind I am pretty sure I’m not going to cast him. I can’t: I just don’t see this particular character as being that beautiful—someone who looks like that would be unlikely to suffer the same way as my hero.
THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW
by James Killough
Killough ponders Cannes and Kidman, dreads the new Gatsby, pokes at Bladwin and Anderson, and finds a Fantasy Cellmate.
TUTTLE MODE
by James Tuttle
Gentle reader,
I’m going to tell you about an HGTV show that I would love to like. It’s called Secrets From a Stylist. I know that I complained about HGTV’s programming a couple of weeks ago, when constant airings of House Hunters were beginning to erode my mental state. I’ve since stopped automatically tuning to HGTV when I sit down after a long day of dressing my girls or playing my ponies but this show is already in our DVR queue. It pops up every Saturday night like clockwork and I just watched the most recent episode.
The premise of the show is really quite good. Perky stylist Emily Henderson analyses the style of each member of the homeowner couple with an interesting multiple choice test, designs their room for one person’s style, then layers on the other person’s style to create a perfect blend in which the inhabitants can live happily ever after. What could go wrong?
The well-adjusted Dan Vickery adjusts himself (right).
In the beginning, I felt very close to this show. I’d watched Emily win the Design Star competition over that very cute gay guy, Dan Vickery, whom I couldn’t watch without thinking whether or not he had a corrected cleft palate. We need more cute, well-adjusted gays on TV to show America that we’re not always wearing leather halters or snorting cocaine on dance floors lit from below while listening to Gloria Gaynor or Cher but, in spite of all that, I actually rooted for Emily.
THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES
by James Killough
Tomorrow is the opening of the Cannes Film Festival, the Olympic Games of film, as I like to call it, except the participants in the real Olympics don’t drink and drug nearly as much as they do at Cannes — well, not with fun drugs, at least. I have it on good authority that Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin is absolutely brilliant and the one to beat. Based on a Lionel Shriver book that was so harrowing I couldn’t finish it, Kevin features a score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, and is about a teen who massacres a bunch of students and teachers at his high school, as seen through the eyes of his mother.
The mother is played by Tilda Swinton, whom I met for the first time a few years ago at the sixtieth anniversary of the festival. I can’t imagine better casting for that role. The person who gave me the sneak review about Kevin said he felt like taking a shower afterwards, always a good sign that a grisly film has hit its mark. I loved both of Ramsay’s earlier films, Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar. A former photographer, Ramsay has a way with composition and silence that is worthy of a Roger Ebert adjective like “electrifying.”