At the WOW Report, producer Fenton Bailey names a 42-second TMZ clip of Julia Roberts confronting a cameraman as his favorite movie of 2007. The blurb:
“Julia Attacks!” [The video's actual title is "America's Pissed-off Sweetheart"--Ed.] is a TMZ video in which Julia Roberts chases down and gives a telling off to a paparazzi. Julia — absent from our screens for too long — is completely convincing in this role as an angry mom. The car chase is excellent and the cinematography visceral and immersive. Some moviegoers might be disappointed that this movie is less than a minute long because Julia has her costar turn off the camera before she delivers her speech about children and paparazzi, but most movies are too long anyway.
I love that last last line. Movies are too long, too bloated, too full of filler. If the base motivator to see a Hollywood film is to see a star being a star, then a clip like this reduces it to what’s it’s all about. Julia Roberts asserts her dominance on the celebrity food chain (and thus, in the universe) by convincing a paparazzo to stop plying his trade by turning off his video camera. That she manages to pull it off in twenty seconds of car chase and ten seconds of yelling is all the more impressive.
Actor/game show host/former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein published a love letter to the soon-to-close Hollywood eatery Morton’s in Sunday’s New York Times. A splooge sample:
My wife and I and all of our friends are devastated. I guess we’ll eat seaweed at Mr Chow. But as far as I know, there now is no Hollywood-center-of-power cafe. Mr Chow would be the closest, especially for the music business. Yet for television and movies, it’s a sad, sad time. For those of us who considered Morton’s as much of a home as our own kitchens, it’s tragic.
Dana Harris had a markedly different take, writing up the closing on Variety’s The Knife blog in May:
But have you been to Mortons lately? I don’t think we’re going to be missing much. Nothing is wrong with the restaurant, but beyond its storied reputation, there isn’t much right. The booths are comfy and the servers are pro, but the menu is as dull and innocuous as its French-vanilla walls.
The two paragraphs above seem to reveal an evolution in the notion of Hollywood public space.
…Read more
