Former University of Memphis kicker Stephen Gostkowski has earned the starting job for the NFL’s New England Patriots in this, his rookie season.
Now Spanish-based news agency noticias.info is running an interview with Gostkowski (or Meat, as he admits some of his current teammates call him) on their site. Other Gostkowski revelations include a story about a sweltering summer job in Mississippi and his disdain for mayonnaise. But what about on barbecue?
Go here to read the full interview.
Twenty-four years ago, Barry Levinson made Diner, a classic film about a group of twentysomething male friends confronting adulthood in the days surrounding another friend’s wedding.
A quarter century later, veteran actor/director Tony Goldwyn (who has worked behind the camera on television series such as Grey’s Anatomy and Law & Order since his underdog 1999 directorial debut A Walk on the Moon) offers an update of sorts with The Last Kiss, which tracks four old friends approaching 30 and negotiating different states of romantic crisis.
Most of the film’s relationships and developing conflicts are introduced efficiently at a wedding of a fifth friend. On the perimeter of the main plot, playboy bartender Kenny (Eric Christian Olsen) is shocked out of his complacency when his latest conquest seems to be looking for something more, and Izzy (Michael Weston) is stalking an ex-girlfriend while confronting his ill father’s impending death. At the center of the film, Michael (Zach Braff) has just found out his longtime girlfriend Jenna (Jacinda Barrett) is pregnant and is panicking about what he perceives as the finality of “making a home” with her, while Chris (Casey Affleck) is increasingly unhappy about his strained home life with his wife Lisa (Lauren Lee Smith) and infant son.
More drama than comedy, The Last Kiss is not as good as Diner, but it might be more honorable. It’s like an indie-rock update and with a sexual evolution that the 24-year gap suggests. It’s less funny, more earnest, and — most crucially — has a much greater interest in and respect for the perspective of the women in the film.
The other movie you can’t help but compare it to is Garden State, with which The Last Kiss shares a lead actor (Braff), a supporting player (Weston), an indie/alt soundtrack (here heavy on British bands such as Coldplay, Snow Patrol, and Turin Brakes), and a sensibility.
Braff’s character in The Last Kiss is sort of a cousin to his protagonist in Garden State, moving the earlier film’s anxiety from mere rootlessness to life-altering decisions about parenthood and marriage. Braff’s character is a more active agent in his own troubles here, but the characters have a similarly woozy engagement with adulthood.
This is a very honest film: the rare commercial movie about young adults that is very much for young adults, illustrated by its “R” rating and its not-so-tidy conclusion. There’s also some attempt to make the emotional complications The Last Kiss traffics in generationally specific. Rachel Bilson’s collegiate seductress utters a key bit of early dialogue: “The world is moving so fast now that we start freaking long before our parents did because we don’t ever stop to breathe anymore.”
Ultimately, though The Last Kiss courts an audience much like its protagonists (see that soundtrack), it knows better. Tom Wilkinson and Blythe Danner, as Jenna’s sometimes estranged parents, offer a constant reminder that though the questions the film’s younger protagonists face may be the growing pains of young adulthood, time doesn’t always provide an answer.
Writer/director Bart Freundlich, who is best known for the late-’90s indie family drama The Myth of Fingerprints, is the would-be auteur behind Trust the Man, a seemingly semi-autobiographical film starring his wife, Julianne Moore, and set in the couple’s upscale West Village neighborhood.
The film follows the romantic and sexual complications of two interlocking Manhattan couples. Rebecca (Moore), a moderately famous film actress working on a stage play, is married, semi-happily, to former ad man Tom (David Duchovny), who has quit his job to be a stay-at-home dad. Rebecca’s younger brother, sportswriter and grunge-era refugee Tobey (Billy Crudup), is in a long-term relationship with Elaine (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a publishing assistant and aspiring children’s book author. Siblings Rebecca and Tobey have also developed close friendships with each other’s mate.
Freundlich reveals the couples’ complications with a low-key deftness. Rebecca has grown uninterested in having sex with Tom, who wants it twice a day and begins to think he might be a sex addict. (Surely, when you’re buying porn at a corner newsstand with your infant daughter strapped to your back, all is not well.) Meanwhile, Elaine is growing impatient with a seven-year relationship that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and a significant other stuck in arrested adolescence.
Though far slighter than The Last Kiss (see review here), Trust the Man is refreshing at times for much the same reason — because it’s become so rare to see movies about recognizable human beings in recognizable places. The film’s strength is in its acting.
Duchovny is modestly appealing in a way that suggests he’s been underused in what has been a very erratic movie career. But, unsurprisingly, it’s Gyllenhaal who truly shines. Since busting out with a breathtaking performance in Secretary a few years ago, the young actress has become something of a female Morgan Freeman — consistently better than the movies she’s in. She owned the otherwise shabby indie Happy Endings last year and gave the most believable, most affecting performance in World Trade Center. Here, she’s magical again. There’s an extraordinary moment in one bar scene, where Elaine’s talking up her relationship with Tobey and he comes back from the bathroom and makes a crude comment. In that small moment where the ideal and the reality clash, the look of brief devastation on Gyllenhaal’s face is a heartbreaker.
Unfortunately, the flaws outweigh the strengths with Trust the Man (starting with that terrible title). There’s an underlying self-satisfaction that makes the movie feel like a less witty version of Woody Allen’s class-bound New York movies. And, Gyllenhaal’s Elaine aside, Freundlich doesn’t make the audience care enough about these rather self-absorbed characters for you to follow him when he tries to sweep the naturalistic movie up in a contrived romantic finale.
According to The Protector, for centuries in Thailand, herds of elephants have been kept so the king can draw supernatural and physical power from them for war and defense. A class of warriors is trained to guard the elephants from the king’s enemies who wish to poach the pachyderms for their spiritual ivory. When two elephants are stolen and taken to Sydney, one of the protectors, Kham (Tony Jaa), follows and has to punch his way up the food chain of the local crime syndicate to retrieve them.
The Protector‘s derring-fu is captured by director Prachya Pinkaew, who teamed up with Jaa for 2003’s Ong-bak: The Thai Warrior. The Protector is suffused with whacked-out visuals and crack editing, and sometimes the screen is so saturated with grainy color that the Sydney underworld looks as humid as a rain forest. Even so, Pinkaew knows his greatest asset is Jaa, and more often than not he stays out of the way and lets his lead lead. Together they produce two fight scenes that are instant classics.
Get past some of the plot’s forays into silliness, occasional painful overacting, and the film’s dialogue-dubbing inconsistencies inherent to the genre: Like Jaa, The Protector is one of the most exciting things seen in martial-arts film since Jackie Chan in Drunken Master II.
Now playing, multiple locations
The two most dangerous leaders in the world are George W. Bush and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. The lights seem to be out upstairs in both men. Neither man can see the world as it really exists.
I wish to stress that point. It’s not a question of having a difference of opinion. Rational people can easily disagree
on what is the right policy. When people see things that are not there, however, reasoning and debate are useless. It’s like a demented person who believes someone is hiding in the trunk of the car. No amount of explanation will convince that person otherwise.
For the president to compare Osama bin Laden, a crank with maybe a thousand followers scattered around the globe, to Hitler and Lenin is preposterous, absurd, and even laughable. To suggest bin Laden could take over Iraq is even more so. We have 140,000 troops, a navy, and an air force, and we can’t take over Iraq. How in the name of heaven could bin Laden do it with no soldiers at all? He is, after all, a Sunni with only a small following among Sunnis, and the majority in Iraq is Shiite.
Human beings are controlled by their minds. We can’t pick up a pencil or scratch our ear without the brain first instructing the body to do so. The mind is our means of survival, and we survive by correctly identifying reality. Often when we fail to correctly identify reality, it kills us, as with the person who believes he can beat the train through the crossing.
Not only is this more serious than a difference of opinion, it is more serious than lying. Rational people can lie. The used-car salesman doesn’t really believe that the pickup truck with a squirrel tail on the antenna and Styrofoam dice hanging from the rearview mirror was previously owned by a retired kindergarten teacher. He just hopes you’re stupid enough to believe it.
Politicians lie all the time because they want to plant a distorted view of reality in your mind, lest you discover the truth about how worthless they are. I used to say the only difference between Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter was that when Nixon lied, he knew he was lying. Carter seemed to believe his own lies.
Let’s not play around. Am I saying the president is crazy? No, not in the clinical sense. But, if he believes that bin Laden, Hitler, and Lenin are comparable, if he truly believes he is leading the free world in the great ideological war of the 21st century, then he has cut his anchor chain and drifted off into the Sea of Delusion.
Karl Menninger, one of the most sensible psychiatrists, defined sanity as staying in touch with reality, but he pointed out that all people depart from reality on occasion. We do it when we dream, we do it when we fantasize, we do it when we become enraged, and we do it when we rationalize.
The president, I believe, is desperate to be what he knows he is not: a great man. He has fantasized that he is a second Winston Churchill leading the forces of democracy in a great crusade against the forces of darkness. The only trouble is, there is nobody out there in the dark.
Sure, bin Laden and his small band of followers hate our guts. So what? They are half-a-drop in the bucket of 6 billion people on the earth. Bush has so distorted his view of reality, he does not seem to realize that most of our “allies” in the Middle East are dictators, and the people he calls terrorists — Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah — participated in free elections.
Even his so-called war on terror is phony. You can’t wage a war against a tactic. Most of the groups he labels as terrorists are local groups with local grievances who don’t think twice about us.
We should remember the warning of Ayn Rand:
“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.”
Charley Reese writes for King Features Syndicate. Tim Sampson will return next week.
How do you measure fame? That’s easy — by the number of items a celebrity has listed on eBay. So we did a quick scan of the online auction and made some surprising discoveries.
There’s only one item for sale for man-about-town David Gest, a September 2006 Daily Mail article about his ill-fated marriage to Liza Minelli. We’ll pass on that. Next was our hometown movie star, Cybill Shepherd, with precisely 52 listings, including an autographed photo posing in just bra and panties, seemingly a bargain at $24.00, but last time we checked, no bids. The next biggest star was Pau Gasol, with 69 items up for grabs, the most expensive being a Nike Jersey (size XL) for $54.98.
Okay, now we come to the real stars in Memphis. Fans of action movie hero Steven Seagal have posted more than 382 items on eBay, some of them rather surprising. The most expensive item is a Kershaw-brand pocket knife, with Seagal’s signature engraved on the blade. It’s yours for $75. Don’t cut yourself with it!
And then — drum roll, please — we come to the biggest star in town, a humble hillbilly fellow by the name of Jerry Lee Lewis, who tops the list of living celebrities with more than 494 items. Some of the stuff is genuinely cool, such as this 1965 poster for “Jerry Lee Lewis and His Band.” The starting bid is $500.
Even so, all these people combined have quite a ways to go to catch up with the real king — not only the King of Rock-and-Roll but the King of eBay. Elvis Presley tops the list with more than 11,649 items.
“Moore, 70, was already a veteran of gospel and R&B groups when he met Dave Prater at a club in Miami, Florida, in 1961. Musically, the two fit together like bacon and corn bread, and when Jerry Wexler signed them to the Atlantic Records family in 1965, assigning them to Atlantic partner Stax Records, they finally had a label that knew how to use them.
“The duo was teamed with writer/producers Isaac Hayes and David Porter, and with the crack musical support of Booker T. and the MG’s and the Memphis Horns, cranked out a series of soul classics: ‘You Don’t Know Like I Know,’ ‘When Something Is Wrong With My Baby,’ ‘Hold On, I’m Comin’, ‘Soul Man,’ ‘I Thank You.’
“Their nickname was ‘Double Dynamite.’ But socially, the two got to the point where they could barely stand each other, a condition that affected their shows. …”
Read the rest of this profile of Soul Man Sam Moore here, including news about his new album with American Idol’s Randy Jackson. Dawg!
Romeo Dallaire, a U.N. commander in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, will speak tonight as part of Facing History and Ourselves Community Conversations.
To get more information on the talk, go here.
Over his two seasons with the Memphis Grizzlies, Bonzi Wells averaged 11.3 points and 3.3 rebounds . . . and apparently got along with no one. Chris Mannix at SI.com ponders just why Wells remains an unsigned free agent (he spent last season in Sacramento) as the NBA season approaches. Send some good karma poor Bonzi’s way as you read.
A generous 2003 Ferrari Enzo owner has donated the $1 million auto to be auctioned off during St. Jude‘s lavish Runway for Life gala Friday night in Beverly Hills.
The car goes up to 217 mph, and only 399 of the 2003 model were manufactured and sold. Another car was made and given to Pope John Paul II.
Bidding opens at a measly $875,000.