Cinema Notes From All Over (A Film's Death in Venice Division)

CELLULOIDLAND, The Universe -- First of All has just seen The Tourist, and we can say without hesitation that it is the worst film ever made. 
   We are delighted to report that at the moment it is in theaters everywhere, so you can see it too. You may wish, however, to wait for the DVD release; you'll certainly save money and emotional pain. You'll also be able to rewind scenes multiple times to deconstruct this splendidly execrable misfire so that you never inadvertently make one of your own. 
   The Tourist was directed by a man with the stirring name of Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck. Mr.FMGCGHvD also wrote the screenplay. He was joined in the effort by three others who evidently bore a ferocious grudge against him. They certainly did every writerly thing possible to sabotage his film. 
   That the movie, supposedly a thriller, is chockablock with A-list stars is indisputable; so is the fact that their utter miscasting is so full-blown that it hovers near being brilliant. 
   Johnny Depp is a math teacher from Wisconsin who falls in love with an attractive financial-crimes agent from Britain, the birthplace of the Beatles and rain. (The Beatles even wrote a song about rain. Aptly, it is titled "Rain.") Beautiful and mysterious though the agent is meant to be, as played by Angelina Jolie she resembles nothing so much as an anorexic drag queen automaton. 
   The Tourist means to be a caper film happily enjoyed over a tub of popcorn, the kind in which the two leads dash about an enchanting foreign locale--in this case Venice, the city of lovers and sinking buildings. But the film quickly deteriorates more thoroughly than have any of Venice's vaunted edifices. 

   If this is the fault of the rousingly named Mr.FMGCGHvD, it is equally the fault of the stars. 
   There was a time when First of All would have sold our firstborn, if we'd had one, in return for a lifelong romantic partnership, not to say the occasional romp in the hay, with Mr. Depp. That time extended from the moment we watched the first episode of 21 Jump Street, in nineteen eighty-seven, until the moment, a few hours ago, we watched The Tourist. 
   Mr. Depp now appears oddly bloated and shockingly aged. His shoulder-length hair is a nonsense tangle and his makeup is only slightly less bizarre than Ms. Jolie's. Note to Mr. Depp: heavy eyeliner? Awesome for that Keith Richards/Captain Jack Sparrow look; not so awesome when you're playing a math teacher from Wisconsin. With his blocky body and ragged goatee, Mr. Depp resembles a female-to-male transsexual; this is not a terrible look for anyone except perhaps a math teacher from Wisconsin. 
   Ms. Jolie, on the other hand, appears to be drugged. She has acknowledged past heroin use; has the habit made a comeback? Well, no; she seems less a junkie than someone enjoying a lifetime prescription for Xanax. She floats serenely through every scene, head high, body taut, chin jutted, makeup caked; she is an affectless queen in her own private parade. 
   Ms. Jolie's character is a stick figure--figuratively and literally. Late in the movie she dons a shoulder-baring black gown. She is dreadfully thin, so much so that First of All, while reviling those who talk noisily in theaters, was hard pressed not to scream, "Angelina! Three words--burger and fries!"    
   The Depp-Jolie pairing is awesomely amiss. Can chemistry between actors actually exist in negative space? The Tourist boldly answers in the affirmative. Mr. Depp and Ms. Jolie make implausible lovers. The problem is not just the bloat and the heroin (Xanax?); it is the vast emotional chasm that yawns between them. 
   Johnny Depp looks like he just arrived from smoking opium with Aleister Crowley under a bridge. Angelina Jolie looks like she just arrived from having her electrical wiring switched on in some shady East European laboratory. The Tourist could have been made with no lead actors a'tall and it would have had more sparkle and star power than it does now.
   Then there is the plot, which involves--well, who knows? Indeed, who cares? In these sorts of movies, the joys of being diverted by a sensible--or even insensible-- plot run a distant second to the joys of watching famous people be themselves in glamorous places. The Tourist is meant to provide pure escapism in the tradition of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood thrillers. But Mr.FMGCGHvD, the director, manages to make Venice look bland. And his misdirection of his stars is so total that it verges on the inspiring. 
   The Tourist falls through all the cracks. It is neither a feather-light caper nor a so-bad-it's-good camp gem. Instead, it is a turd for the ages. One watches it in the same way that animals inspect their bowel movements: to be sure that, yes, this is indeed feces, and then to bolt in order to escape the stench. 
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UPDATE (Dec. 23, 2010): We are extremely pleased to report that in televised interviews promoting the appalling The Tourist, Johnny Depp appears to have returned to his usual state of unbelievable hotness. First of All hereby throws its hat back in the ring viz. having a stable, longterm and physically raucous relationship with Mr. Depp, notwithstanding his really peculiar accent--part Brit-English, part Jack Sparrow, part Pepe Le Pew, part... well, who knows? It's Johnny Depp, for Chrissakes. That alone is enough. To be sure, it is all there needs to be, as one can see below. 

     

Stars in the Firmament (Oopsy-Daisy Comments Division)

   We here at First of All adore the Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. He has been a hero and spirit guide to us for nigh on forty years. 
   His autobiography, Life, due Oct. 26, is bound to be a good read, if excerpts in the current Rolling Stone are any indication. Keith's always been a great interview: lucid, funny, smart, knowledgeable. Even at his most drug-addled he was always elegantly spoken and possessed of a sharp wit and a penchant for analogy. 
   The book is an as-told-to (the writer is James Fox), so it'll be like reading a fifty-hour interview with the musician, a lifelong drinker who says he's not taken cocaine since incurring a head injury in 2006. He gave up heroin in the late seventies after ten years' use. 
   That opiates had a less than salutary effect on him is suggested by these two photographs, the first from 1973 and the second taken on the band's 1975 American tour:  

   The fact that he's good in an interview (and a book), however, does not mean Keith doesn't occasionally put his foot in it. Today's New York Post ran a story retailing some of the book's highlights (as has every other media outlet in the known galaxy), including, alas, this "advice" for singer George Michael, recently incarcerated on drugs charges: 
   "I say stay in jail, George. There's probably some dope and some gays. He probably won't leave." 

   Even allowing for the fact that Keith is old school (he'll turn sixty-seven on Dec. 18), sharp-tongued and provocative, the comment is disgraceful. It trucks in the tired cliche that violent rape between men is "gay" sex. Prison sex isn't "gay"; it's homosexual - that is, same-gendered sexual activity. And in this case it's about power, not intimacy. 
   This is not the first time Keith has heartlessly referenced gay men. In the late seventies, complaining about Studio 54, the au courant beautiful-people New York disco, he said, "They took a perfectly good theater and ruined it with a bunch of faggots running around in boxer shorts waving champagne bottles in your face." 

   It's true that these comments are of a piece with Keith's conversational style; he also refers to women, whom he professes to love, as "bitches." He's a seventies man. 
   Still, it is dispiriting that he needed to make the George Michael joke, because it's dumb and unfunny. It diminishes him. And it's odd, too. His wife, Patti Hansen, was a model; some gay men and lesbians are no doubt part of the Richards/Hansen inner circle. 
   Plus, the Rolling Stones, in their way, had an enormously liberating effect on postwar England and America. They were more than "rebels," though that they were. They were more like aliens, especially in the late nineteen-sixties. 
   Though possessed of a ferocious appetite for women, Mick Jagger back then appeared limp-wristed and lispy; his body, even in his twenties, was that of a thirteen-year-old boy, and he favored eye shadow and outrageously androgynous clothes:

   Keith, too, challenged male norms, although he always had about him the air of a decidedly heterosexual man. Still, dressed in satin shirts and blue jeans, wearing kohl eyeliner and blue eyeshadow, with a scarf wrapped around his neck and a high, frazzled pile of randomly chopped hair topping his head--itself precariously balanced on a heroin-and-cocaine-thinned frame--he cut a dashing if decayed figure, aged twenty-eight, when the Stones toured America in 1972 to promote Exile on Main Street, their masterpiece.

  It is, therefore, a disappointment that, so many years later, Keith would stoop to making a joke as low as the George Michael one. As a friend responded when I emailed him the Post link, "This from one of the main people who helped culture free itself from the old world's conservative shackles? Ouch." 
   Right? 

   A side note: you may have noticed we refer to the guitarist as "Keith" rather than, as we are wont to do, "Mr. Richards." This is because Keith is so casual and familiar that he feels like a pal. He is indeed, even when blitzed beyond belief, a friend to all, except perhaps George Michael and incarcerated men the world over. 

Crime of the Century (Purloined Cruiser Division)

PORT ARTHUR, Texas - It is cheering to know that the women of America are stepping up their efforts to match and even to best the country's men, including in arcane pursuits such as stealing police cars and leading cops on exhilarating high-speed chases. 
   As sport and leisure past-time, pilfering police cruisers is nothing new. As we recently reported, a Greely, Colo. man named Adam Segura, who was allegedly drunk, allegedly pinched a cop car and allegedly raced down a highway for a bit, after which he allegedly came to a halt at the entrance to a mall, where, alas, he was arrested. 
   Not to be outdone, a woman named Candace Broussard pulled a similar stunt late last month. Ms. Broussard, who hails from Beaumont, TX. (pop: 110,099 in July 2009), was arrested for creating a disturbance on the campus of Lamar State College - Port Arthur ("A Great Place to Begin"), according to a Sept. 24 report on the Web site of the Beaumont Enterprise. 
       
   Ms. Broussard apparently kicked up a bit of a fuss when police attempted to guide her into the back seat of a cruiser. So they cuffed her hands behind her back and sat her in the car, the engine of which, as it happened, was running. 
   The Enterprise reports that Ms. Broussard managed to maneuver her hands so that they were in front of her. This Mr. Segura also did. So at this point in the cop-car-filching competition, the two are pretty much even.     
   But in a daring move that requires no little skill - and which, therefore, elevates Ms. Broussard's alleged crime head-and-shoulders above Mr. Segura's - Ms. Broussard then slid open the screen separating the cruiser's front seats from the back ones. She wiggled her way through the foot-wide slot and into the front of the car. 
   Let us just pause here to say that, according to statistics that Blogspot is kind enough to provide, First of All has readers from as far away as Denmark (2), Canada (1), the United Kingdom (1), Lebanon (1), and, bewilderingly, Malaysia (1). (Evidently, they simply can't get enough of ironically re-interpreted odd news stories there.) We have a full ninety readers in the U.S., for a readership grand total of, it turns out, roughly ninety-six. 
   It  possible that some of our U.S. followers hail from, or live near, the Port Arthur area, or are familiar with it. It is with them in mind that we mention that Ms. Broussard, having gained the driver's seat of the police cruiser, shot down Proctor Street and turned north on Woodward Avenue. She managed to hit what the Enterprise referred to as an "occupied vehicle at Lake Charles and Proctor...." No one was injured. In time, she raced up northbound U.S. 69, zipping along at speeds of up to 100 mph. 
   Presently, coppers managed to lay down spike strips, the second pair of which did the trick. Her tires shredded, Ms. Broussard inexplicably pulled into a Conoco gas station. (For our Port Arthur readers, it's the one at U.S. 69 and FM 366, a name which suggests a radio station in a distant galaxy far above the world, where the stars look very different today.) 
   It was there that she was re-arrested, according to a police source, quoted by the Enterprise, who goes by the arousing name of Major Raymond Clark. 
   Major Clark (no relation to Major Tom, who, incidentally, is herewith encouraged to contact Ground Control) told the Enterprise that Ms. Broussard has a history of mental illness. 
   He added that he had no knowledge of whether or not she was under the influence of alcohol or drugs - colloquially, drunk as a skunk or high as a kite, which, incidentally, Major Tom was known frequently to be. ("Ashes to ashes/Funk to funky/We know Major Tom's/A junkie....")

   The mentally ill often excel in particular areas of life, and Ms. Broussard appears to be no exception: her stolen police vehicle of choice happened to be a Dodge Charger that, at that point, had been used for only four months. 
   The moral of the story is this: if you're going to steal a police car, steal a fast, new and sexy one. Doing so will give you something to tell your grandchildren, provided you are not strung out in Heaven's high, hitting an all-time low.