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I just watched the trailer for Sorkin and Fassbender's new film, Steve Jobs, and... well, maybe it's this new strain of weed I picked up this afternoon, but it just hit me that Josh's character in August, Tom Sterling, is a gloss on Steve Jobs. The parallels are numerous: pushy, narcisstic, ego-driven, insensitive, demanding, unreasonable, wounding. He talks but never listens, demands everything but won't give an inch, has a vision that's so out there it's almost incomprehensible to anyone else. He shows no love whatsoever to his family, and I'm sure if his brother weren't the linchpin of his company, he'd have cut off contact with them entirely. (The only really stark difference I detected was that there's no way that ditzoid receptionist would have lasted ten seconds around Jobs, let alone weeks or months.)

What made this AHA moment happen was the point in the trailer where Jobs is fired from Apple, and is told the board wants him out. I instantly flashed to Bowie so witheringly telling Josh much the same thing - that the company he founded would be better off without him. (Oh, OUCH.) Light bulb! "Oh hello, Tom," I thought, and then followed that train of thought and realized that I should have thought, "Oh hello, Steve," the first time I saw August. Not sure why I didn't see it until just now, for the Goddess knows I've never had even a gram of love for Steve Jobs. (Steve Wozniak, on the other hand, always seemed like a cool guy. You wouldn't catch Jobs dead throwing a $25M party open to anyone and everyone.**)

So that's another interesting layer of thought surrounding that character. An oddly fascinating guy. And yeah, a prick of truly Jobsian proportions. Whew.


Oh, and I'm so going to see this. It looks really good.

Trailer for Steve Jobs, starring Michael Fassbender and Seth Rogen



** That would be the US Festival, in September of '82. I remember being livid that I wouldn't be able to go.
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For the Birthday...


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"Are you shitting me?"

"No."

"You've actually read this?" Casey's holding up Zeke's ancient, water-stained copy of The Lord of the Rings.

"I was bored at camp and it was the only book around." Zeke sounds annoyed. "What's the big deal?"

"I dunno," Casey replies, ( thumbing the browned pages... )

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Watched August last night. Uh...yeah. Seems Josh has been wilding on camera for a while now. Mm, mm, mm. Yummy, yummy man.

I'm getting a little jumpy at the way sex scenes are just THROWN at you these days, though. There doesn't seem to be a lot of buildup anymore. Two characters are having a conversation and then BAM, they're rutting like crazed animals. It's a bit...abrupt. I'm not exactly complaining - the slam of erotic energy I got when the film cut from a sexy look to full-on FUCKING!!! was certainly enjoyable. I'm just glad nobody else was in the room, because I made a pretty bizarre sound when that happened, LOL.

The film itself was surprisingly good. It's one of those Some Guy indie films, like Thumbsucker. Some Guy (or Some Gal) films don't really have plots so much as they have spans. Here's a guy, here's where he works, here are the people he knows. He goes places, he talks to people, things happen, and then it's over, but you haven't necessarily gone any great distance. They don't have plotting in the classic film sense, and they depend on the characters' ability to engage the audience, so the actors are really important.

This one is about a Zuckerberg type who runs a start-up, and right from the get-go I was rooting for him to get a massive bitchslap. Wow, he is a shit. And Josh played it beautifully, all smug manipulation and manic narcissism, spouting off that terminally annoying techie nonsense as if it actually meant something. Gods, the self-stroking horseshit was astounding. I wonder how hard Josh had to work to learn those lines, because there is absolutely NOTHING to hang your understanding on unless you actually do that kind of work. He might as well have been speaking in numbers: "Nine fifty seven eight hundred thousand? ZERO FOURTY NINE AZIMUTH MILLION SQUARE ROOT SKEWEY, ASSHOLE!!!" It really did sound like that - just mouthfuls of hot air, but he rattled it off like every word had import. That's something I really admire in good actors - their ability to inject real meaning into things they might not understand at all. I guess those "recite the alphabet as if you were breaking up with your girlfriend" theater games really do pay off.


( SPOILERS )

Yeah, this is one I'd definitely recommend if you're looking for things he's been in. It's a tour-de-force, too - he's in every single scene. The movie is completely about him, and yet it never really enters him. I mean, it's not terribly hard to figure this guy out, but he never gets explained. Know what I mean? I don't know if the filmmakers actually want to you to sympathize with him or not; it's really hard to say. But I enjoyed it, and I think you will, too.

P.S. The character's name is Tom Sterling. I find that incredibly funny, myself. It's a name seemingly crafted to put across every bit of his egocentrism and superficial charm.

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From Amazon.com:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who has purchased or rated "The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition)" or other films in the ( M ) > McKellen, Ian category, you might like to know that "Acting Shakespeare" will be released on January 12, 2010. You can pre-order yours at a savings of $6.99 by following the link below.

Acting Shakespeare

Ian McKellen

List Price: $29.98
Price: $22.99
You Save: $6.99
(23%)

Release Date: January 12, 2010

To learn more about Acting Shakespeare, please visit the following page at Amazon.com:
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OMG, how cool is this?? I got to see that show back in 1984, and again in 1986, when McKellen brought it to the U.S. on tour. It was at the Geffen Playhouse, a wonderful little theater-in-the-round in Westwood. He was not a very well-known actor in the States back then, but I'd seen him in a couple of BBC productions, and it was in the middle of my Renaissance Faire days when I was steeped in learning about Elizabethan culture and Shakespeare, so I was WAAAAYYYY jazzed to get tix to this show.

It was SO FABULOUS. An entire evening of hearing him teach about Shakespeare. I learned so much from that show - about the history, the speeches, the language. About creating a character from Shakespeare's words, and how to take apart the lines and mine them for emotional information.

Here's how the show started. (Keep in mind that the first time I saw it, I had front row seats in this little 300-seat theater, so I was about eight feet away from him.) He's sitting in a beautiful old armchair, kind of lolling with one leg propped up on the arm, very casual/disdainful/sexy. He looks slowly around the theater, and begins to do Richard III:

Ay, Edward will use women honourably.
Would he were wasted, marrow, bones and all,
That from his loins no hopeful branch may spring,
To cross me from the golden time I look for!

Beautiful. He swung his foot idly as he did this, with a little half-smile on his face, and you almost got the feeling that he'd had a bit to drink and was having fun murmuring to himself. It was fascinating hearing him roll the words around, how much he obviously loved the language. And then he got to this bit:

Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard;
What other pleasure can the world afford?
I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap,

And right there, on that line, he turned his head and looked STRAIGHT AT ME. And yowza, lemme tell you I damn near MELTED in the seat cushion. It was quite direct, his gaze very piercing. Of course I knew what he was doing, picking a random audience member to play with and acting the hell out of the moment. But it was certainly a ton of fun to get that gaze and give it BACK full measure with a nice lascivious smile. This is the absolute irreplaceable brilliance of theater, something that films cannot possible ever achieve - a moment of connection with a character, with an actor, with another human being.

And then came an even more amazing thing. As he continued on with the speech, he pulled his leg down off the arm of the chair, and slowly got up. And we saw that what we'd taken for a languid, sensual pose was actually the deformity of his spine, so as he rose his body stayed in the same bent, hunched posture. It was an exquisite transformation, the more so because it only happened in the audience's mind. He'd been twisted and crippled all along, we just didn't know it. His character had such force and intensity that we'd never questioned what we saw. So amazing. I'll never forget it.

There were other wonderful things about that night. So many fantastic anecdotes from his career (which at the time was almost all stage work), including the one about John Gielgud that still makes me laugh. In one section, he presented Macbeth's speech about his wife, "She would have died hereafter...", first in the manner and cadence of an actual Elizabethan actor such as Richard Burbage, and then he took some time to take the speech apart, line by line and word by word, telling us how he and his fellow thespians approach the beautiful language, and all the complexities that exist in it, and how the colors and shades and intricacies inform a performance. And then he did the speech again, but this time as he himself would perform it, and the contrast was truly extraordinary. I learned so much about the evolution of theater from that one section of the evening alone.

And then the finale! He asked how many people in the audience would like to come up onstage and act with him. O'course my hand flew up along with a bunch of others. He picked out about 12 of us, and invited us up. Then we went into a huddle and he explained what he wanted us to do, which was to place ourselves randomly on the stage and stand quietly until he signalled with his hand behind his back, at which point we were to drop like a sack of potatoes and lie dead on the floor. He introduced an anecdote to the audience about what happened to an actor friend of his who had to play a scene (I think it was from Henry V) where he was supposedly standing on a field of battle and would read a long list of the names of the dead, but when he opened the scroll found it blank, so he had to improvise the names. He then signalled, we dropped, and then came the hard part - trying like hell not to laugh as he re-enacted his friend's utter consternation and bumbling attempts to come up with a long list of plausible names. I cannot tell you what a fun and fitting ending that was to such a great, great evening.


So yeah, you better believe I'm gonna be buying this DVD. *runs to pre-order*

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I just found out from honeyandvinegar that Cracker, the Robert Pastorelli series that Your Humble Narrator worked background on, is out on DVD. The whole series. So of course I ran straight to eBay.

Now, from my memory, I never got any real shots, so any obsessive watching I do will probably be for naught, except for fuzzy me in the back of the office and shots of the back of my head, etc. But you know, it was a really cool series which was never given a real chance, so I'll be glad to watch it regardless. (And you never know - I might have gotten in there somewhere!)

Pastorelli, who starred in the Robbie Coltrane role, was a great guy. Funny, fairly friendly, and surprisingly sexy in person. We spoke a couple of times - work related - and I found him pretty approachable. What's he been up to lately?

Plus there's Josh Hartnett as a young pup. Total unknown at the time. Gets tied to a bed with tape over his mouth in one episode. That'll be fun too.

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Ran across an interesting post over here: Jesus and the Gays.

In it, a guy posts an anecdote about a friend's encounter with a bible-thumping bigot. Said friend came up with a good sarcastic scripture-twisting to poke said obnoxious jerk with. Whether the jerk had the wit to understand that sarcasm is not revealed, however.

But the fun is farther down, in the comments. A discussion ensues (started by a particularly clueless person) on whether Jesus was nasty or humble or sanctimonious or whatever - it's a thread full of opinions on the guy. Watching the interactions in this thread, and reading the particular thoughts of each person, got me thinking about how we view history, and how we believe in things. (Not why, how.)

( See, believing in a story is like making a movie... )

Man, oh man. Seeing all these posts about the devastation, I hesitated about putting up the rest of my observations from last night. But then I thought, "Maybe everybody needs a break from all the awfulness." And felt better about continuing. :)

So without further ado, here's the next part of EII Night.


( Q&A with Liev Schreiber and Eugene Hutz after the screening... )

No, Elijah wasn't there. But hey, next week FIND is screening Hoolies, so maybe he'll show up then!

I've been collecting the Variety and Hollywood Reporter Oscar ads for all three films over the past three years, so I get to see a lot of the buzz and such. Here's what I think will happen.

The film will get nominated, for BP and Best Director. The effects and technicals will get nominated. Howard Shore will get nominated. But the actors?...

( My two pesetas... )