Kirsten as Blondie?

"One little tease of a line at the end of Liz Smith’s column in Variety suggests that Kirsten Dunst is going to play Debbie Harry in a big screen version of Harry’s life story.


Our immediate reaction is not the same you’ve-got-to-be-fucking-kidding-me thing we felt when it was announced that Zooey Deschanel had won the epic battle to represent Janis Joplin onscreen, but it’s close.

As revealed in this side-by-side shot, Dunst actually looks a bit like Harry — heart-shaped face, the wide-set eyes, the cheekbones, the being-blond thing.


But, like, no! It’s fine with us when rockers want to do TV or movies (we just watched Johnny Cash play a version of himself in an old Columbo episode the other night — freaking awesome) but no actor can actually play a rock star. There is no one the movie-making world could offer up that would be worthy of playing Debbie Harry, or Janis, or Joey Ramone, or Iggy Pop (Elijah Wood?!?? Please, god, no!)


Are we insane? Who would you like to see in the Debbie Harry role?" (by Elizabeth Goodman) Source: Rolling Stone

Lonely Halloween

"Hey little dreamer's eyes open and staring up at me
Oh little lonely eyes open and radiant

Wait until I come and I will steal you
Wait until I come I'll take your soul
Wait until I come and I will steal you
Wait until I come and I won't go

Darlin' dreamin in the night
Shadows on the windows
Lead oh and everyone go
Well leave me on the night
I will give you lightning
I will not relinquish light

Oh little dreamer eyes open and raving here

Wait until I come and see you little girl
When we come I'll leave with you too
When we come I'll let you come low

Hey we'll leave it all behind
Oh and then the nightmares
I'll fill them in good time
Oh they will seat your mind
When the light hits
And you maybe'll ask me

Why do you run around here
Why do you come inside of me
Why does it rip me out in dream
Why then why then watch this little fuck

Going away

Why this lonely
Why this lonely
Why this lonely love

Halloween
Carry on
Bury all
Bury all

And in this dream
Tell us are you satisfied with fucking

Don't walk away
Don't walk away
Don't walk away
I'm talking to you

Lovey Dove
Love is hell
Love is hell
Love this I'll tame you

Love
Love this not me here

Love
Love him up to you"
(Dave Matthews Band "Halloween" song)

Reese from Splitsville

Reese Witherspoon in a scene from Just Like Heaven (2005).

"Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe have separated. The couple's rep released a statement to TMZ Monday morning that says "We are saddened to announce that Reese & Ryan have decided to formally separate. They remain committed to their family and we ask that you please respect their privacy and the safety of their children at this time."

Sources tell TMZ Witherspoon has contacted celebrity divorce lawyer Robert Kaufman, who has represented Jennifer Aniston, Roseanne and Lisa Marie Presley.

Sources say Witherspoon spoke with Kaufman about divorcing Ryan Phillippe, her husband of seven years. The couple has two children.

They met at Witherspoon's 21st birthday party.
As for why Witherspoon contacted Kaufman, we're told it was not triggered by one event. Rather, one connected source says it was "cumulative."

Divorce papers have not yet been filed." Source: TMZ
"Witherspoon, 30, and Phillippe, 32, have two children, daughter Ava, 7, and son Deacon, 3.

The couple met when a mutual friend brought Phillippe to Witherspoon's 21st-birthday party. Two years later, after they had costarred in 1999's "Cruel Intentions", he proposed. They married in June 1999 and had Ava three months later.

Though the couple seemed to have it all – a successful relationship, thriving careers and beautiful children – they both spoke openly about having to work on their marriage.

In 2002, Phillippe told New York's Daily News that they were in couples therapy. "The biggest mistake," he said, "is not doing that, ignoring it and having the marriage fall apart because of laziness."

Similarly Witherspoon told PEOPLE at the time: "I'm not interested in the fallacy of the Hollywood relationship: 'We have perfect children who never cry; we never have problems; we never argue, we're always best friends,'" she said. "That's just not true. We're normal people with normal problems."

Witherspoon, who won an Oscar for her role in last year's hit "Walk the Line", is next expected to appear in the drama "Rendition". Phillippe is currently starring in the WWII drama "Flags of Our Fathers". Source: People
More information available in Barbie Martini.

Marie Antoinette Soundtrack

"The music reflects Coppola’s intention to tell the story in a modern way. While writing the script, she found inspiration from the New Romantic pop music movement of the 1980s -which was itself heavily influenced by 18th century ideals of extravagance. New Romantic artists such as Bow Wow Wow ("I Want Candy") and Adam Ant (“Kings of the Wild Frontier”) celebrated glamour, luxurious fashion, and hedonistic fun during that period as a kind of counterpoint to both the boredom of classic rock and the primal anger of punk music.

Coppola saw the music as a modern lens through which to view Marie Antoinette –and songs such as “I Want Candy” seemed to serve as a perfect, modern expression of Marie Antoinette’s impulses to find fulfillment through pleasure.

Coppola turned to music supervisor Brian Reitzell (who worked on her previous films, Lost in Translation and The Virgin Suicides) to discuss music in the tone she was thinking of while writing. Reitzell mixed “Versailles CDs” that included such artists as Bow Wow Wow, New Order (“Ceremony”), Adam Ant, and other post-punk romantic music.”

“It was all very organic,” he continues. “The story dictated the music, which follows the dramatic arc. We set it all up in the opening credits with the Gang of Four song “Natural’s Not in It” -which prepares you musically and lyrically for what’s going to happen. Later, there is an Aphex Twin piece, "Jynweythek Ylow”, which is played when Marie Antoinette first enters Versailles, which actually sounds like that place. What I love about it is that you can’t tell if it’s a harpsichord or string instrument that’s playing.”

Also included on the soundtrack are even more modern groups such as The Strokes (“What Ever Happened”), Squarepusher (“Tommib Help Buss”), Air ("Il Secondo Giorno [Instrumental]"), The Radio Dept. (“Pulling Our Weight,” “Keen on Boys”), and Windsor for the Derby (“The Melody Of A Fallen Tree”).

The eclectic blend of sounds, Reitzell maintains, “makes it a lot easier to put yourself in the movie. The music resonates because it shows how these people really were. For most of the movie, Marie Antoinette is an adolescent and it would have been a lot harder to get across her teen angst with a Masterpiece Theater type of soundtrack.” The result is this double disc Verve Forecast release, “a post-punk-pre-new-romantic-rock- opera odyssey with some 18th century music and some very new contemporary music,” as Reitzell calls it." Source: Vervemusicgroup.com

Disc 1

1. Hong Kong Garden
2. Aphrodisiac
3. What Ever Happened
4. Pulling Our Weight
5. Ceremony
6. Natural's Not In It
7. I Want Candy
8. Kings Of The Wild Frontier
9. Concerto In G
10. The Melody Of A Fallen Tree
11. I Don't Like It Like This
12. Plainsong


Disc 2

1. Intro Versailles
2. Jynweythek Ylow
3. Opus 17
4. Il Secondo Giorno
5. Keen On Boys
6. Opus 23
7. Les Barricades Mysterious
8. Fools Rush In
9. Aphex Twin - Avril 14th
10. Sonata in D minor, K.213: Andante
11. Tommib Help Buss
12. Tristes Apprets, Pales Flambeaux
13. Opus 36
14. All Cats Are Grey

Three More M.A. Reviews

"POURING Coca-Cola in the cabernet, Sofia Coppola's dazzling "Marie Antoinette" couldn't be more anachronistic if it showed the queen of France saying, "Let them eat sushi." Coppola works in weird ways, but the real Versailles was so much weirder.

Just as Tobey Maguire proved that the superhero is about the vulnerability, Kirsten Dunst nicely unveils the innocence in the doomed queen of France.


The 1980s score and 818 dialogue ("I love your hair! What's going on there?") may strike you as a little too droll for l'école. But the story follows Antonia Fraser's biography, and the crazy flourishes simultaneously blast away the musty mists of history and make the audience feel, as the Austrian-born queen must have, lost in translation. [...]

Dunst, tearfully parting with her pug as her character exits Austria, practically has a dotted line around her neck with instructions to "cut here," and she makes no effort to starch up her squeaky American cuteness. But though the real Marie Antoinette was born an archduchess, she was no older than a highschool freshman when she married. After that, she was just a victim of fashion, a pleated skirt when history went Goth. Her story could just as easily be called "Clueless."

kyle.smith@nypost.com Source: The New York Post
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"Sofia Coppola is the Veruca Salt of American filmmakers. She's the privileged little girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory whose father, a nut tycoon, makes sure his daughter wins a golden ticket to the Willie Wonka factory by buying up countless Wonka bars, which his workers methodically unwrap till they find the prize. If Coppola's 2004 Academy Award for best original screenplay for Lost in Translation was her golden ticket to big-budget filmmaking, Marie Antoinette is her prize, a $40 million tour through the lush and hallucinatory candy land of 18th-century France. Of course, Roald Dahl's insufferable Veruca Salt was eventually seized by angry squirrels and hurled down a garbage chute. [...]

Given the film's cavalier treatment of their country's history, French critics, understandably, head up the haters' brigade. Agnès Poirier, the London correspondent for Libération, scoffs, "There are two things [Coppola] likes, dresses and pudding. ... Cinema is for Coppola a mirror in which she looks at herself, not a mirror she holds to the world." But many critics on both sides of the Atlantic defend the film, in indulgent language that often seems to apply to its creator as well. To Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum, Marie Antoinette is "the work of a mature filmmaker who has identified and developed a new cinematic vocabulary to describe a new breed of post-postpostfeminist woman." (The triple negative threw me for a minute, but I think she means "not feminist.")

There's no question that making movies is, at least in part, always a matter of shopping. A director must select, and find a way to pay for, the right cast, the right music, the right cinematographer. And, as this recent piece in the Times travel section shows, Sofia Coppola is a peerless shopper. The movie's signature set piece is a montage of Louis-heeled Manolo Blahnik shoes in Easter-egg colors, filmed in fetishistic close-up to the strains of Bow Wow Wow singing "I Want Candy." It's exhilarating in the style of a high-end television commercial or magazine fashion spread. But, by linking the excesses of the French court of the 1780s with the pop culture of the 1980s, does Coppola intend to suggest that we're overdue for another revolution? Or just that, then as now, les filles just want to have fun? [...]

In a Vanity Fair profile last month, Evgenia Peretz wrote about the director's nontreatment of the rioting French proletariat in Marie Antoinette: "In neglecting them she has unwittingly taken a political stance." Unwittingly? It seems disingenuous to suggest that a movie about the fall of the French monarchy could be anything but political. I don't ask Coppola to be unsympathetic to the young queen, or even to devote any screen time to her arrest and decapitation. (The film ends abruptly as Jason Schwartzman's King Louis XVI and his queen flee Versailles in their royal coach after the storming of the Bastille.) But just because the film's heroine has nothing to say about politics, revolutionary or otherwise, doesn't justify Coppola being similarly dumbstruck.

"It's not like I'm a royalist," Coppola protested in a recent interview, when asked about her curiously blank take on the French Revolution. I'll take her word for it, but you'd never know it from the movie she's made, which is at least as nostalgic about the ancien régime as Gone With the Wind is about the antebellum South. Coppola's heroine lodges a similar protest in the film upon hearing about her alleged wish for the starving masses to nourish themselves on cake. "I would never say that!" the queen comments, shocked, to her ladies in waiting. According to the Antonia Fraser biography Marie Antoinette is based on, she never did say those actual words—but the rest of the film shows her as exactly the kind of person who would say them, so what's the difference? [...]" Source: Slate (by Dana Stevens)
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And the most negative, the third review by Lawrence Toppman for "The Charlotte Observer":

"After seeing Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette," I realize there was no need for the bloodshed and turmoil of the French Revolution that made Marie and husband Louis XVI shorter by a head. Had the mobs left them alone, they'd have bored themselves and everyone else in the aristocracy to death. [...]

Marie celebrates her 18th birthday in 1773 in the scene just before Louis decides to help America in the Revolutionary War. (Nice of him, as it didn't start for three more years.)

Even Coppola's infamous decision to set the movie to New Wave pop music seems ill-judged, because she's not consistent. We get a "Pretty Woman"-style clothes-and-footwear romp to Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy," and then we're back to baroque-style chamber ensembles droning away for 15 minutes.

The casting is also unhelpful. Kirsten Dunst alternates between giddy smiles and a faux-pensive look as Marie, though the prospect of imminent death troubles her as little as an absence of petit-fours. (Or "petite fours," as Schwartzman's Louis would say.) Schwartzman tamps down his California cockiness but looks perennially uneasy, as if wondering whether his wig might be tumbling off. Both are as pinkly prettified and devoid of emotion as fresh corpses.

Supporting characters have energy, but the wrong kind. Rip Torn leers genially and blankly as Louis XV. Italian-born Asia Argento sneers as his mistress, Madame du Barry, like a high school girl from North Jersey planning to poke out a rival's eyes with a rattail comb. Judy Davis, whose twitchiness suggests the affliction of St. Vitus' dance, manages to overact even in scenes where she doesn't speak.

Coppola has said in interviews that she doesn't want to explain the movie, which follows an apparently ageless Marie and Louis from their nuptials in 1770 to arrest by the mob in 1789. But what can she want us to take away?

Are we supposed to accept the fatuous idea that teenagers have behaved the same in all eras? (Hardly true. Royals took on adult responsibilities as teens back then and were trained and educated differently.) Should we have special sympathy for this vacuous creature who stood by her equally clueless husband en route to disaster? The movie's not particularly kind to either: She comes off as a gluttonous airhead, he an amiable plodder.

The ultimate irony of the project is that Marie and Louis' main crime was self-indulgence: They had too little awareness of the discrepancy between themselves and their people, and they paid for ignorance with their lives. But if self-indulgence justified regicide, Queen Sofia would be ready for Hollywood's guillotine."

Thursday Dining

" · Thursday, October 26 at about 11 am

-Just as [Bryan] Singer was arriving with the boy caravan, Jake Gyllenhaal was just finishing up breakfast at Hugos. Not sure if they greeted each other.

· Thursday night late @ Little Door on 3rd in Hollywood. Love this restaurant it's cute. So it must have been date night. Jake Gyllenhaal was seated next to a short sexy brunette @ a big table of friends. The two of them talked all night and were the last to leave. Marcellas Reynolds came in and joined a big table and made out all through dinner with an older German guy. My wife and I could tell he was German because all night long they spoke German and French @ the table while laughing and taking tons of pics." Source: The Defamer

I liked very much what I consider Bryan Singer's masterpiece "The Usual Suspects" (1995),

Kevin Spacey had a key role in "The Usual Suspects" as Roger 'Verbal' Kint, chiefly his character was the atmospheric catalyzer of its plot twist. However I'm not nearly as much fan (more a hater) of his "X-Men", "X2" saga or "Superman Returns" (2006).
My brother insists that Singer's best film is "Public Access" (1993), which I haven't watched it yet.

Rocket Boy

In consonance with the review Part I by Anneka in Jake Watch of "October Sky" film (1999) directed by Joe Johnston, inspired in the book "Rocket Boys" relating the true story of Homer Hickam, a homage to the first important film who launched Jake's career:

ROCKET MAN

"Young Homer Hickam, had rockets on the brain.
To be a rocket-man, he had always hoped, to train.

His Daddy the coalminer, he was well respected,
but Homer's "Crazy Idea", he totally rejected.

"You'll be a coalminer, just like your old man,
on anything else, there is no need to plan."

This was a fate that Homer was not keen on.
Luckily, he had friends, that he was able to lean on.

His rockets, he did build, with the help of his buds.
Some of them, successful, most of them just duds.

After many struggles, a contest they did win.
His Daddy, the coalminer, was finally proud of him!

Somtimes a dream, can change your very life,
overcoming many obstacles of hardship and strife!"

(poem courtesy of Roco, previously published in the Jake Watch Messageboard)