The Tao of Jerry

Be sure to catch or DVR the documentary His Way tonight on HBO, a gold-framed portrait of the producer Jerry Weintraub, who has the gift of making miracles happen if he keeps talking long enough. Anyone who arranged tours for both Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra has earned his battle stripes and the man who produced Robert Altman's Nashville and The Karate Kid his place in pop culture history. Directed by Douglas McGrath, it's a glossy, funny, celebrity-studded, inside-baseball spin through the last of the old-school Hollywood creative dice-throwers, and I say that not prejudiced in the least by the fact that the producers are Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, Alan and Gabe Polsky, and that I saw it at a special Vanity Fair screening that was preceded by drinks and hors d'oeurvres.

Of special interest to me was the section about how the fate of the movie Diner was salvaged by setting up a personal screening for Pauline Kael, which I was present at, enlightening Pauline on the gourmet splendor of beef gravy on french fries. Though I suppose I shouldn't have stood up in the screening room and done a fist pump when this scene from His Way was over, throwing a shadow on the screen that seemed to startle some of those present, judging from their shrieks.

Last night I watched the first two hours of The Killing, compelled by Mireille Enos's pale-blue-eyed, strawberry-blonde aquatic self-possession, so very Tilda Swinton with a dash of Gillian Anderson in her X-Files days. The moist gloom of X-Files was one of the visual elements, an evocative soupiness that also recalled Twilight and Twin Peaks. (And, of course, the mystery question "Who Killed Rosie Larsen?" is direct steal from "Who Killed Laura Palmer?") I do wish they had turned the volume knob on the drenching rain and the musical score a notch, given the characters' proclivity to mutter as if nothing mattered--I can't imagine the Danish original added that much viscosity to the sound mix. But I'll keep watching, and would advise you to catch the rerun of the two-hour premiere if you missed it due to The Borgias, Mildred Pierce, or whatever other chunk of Quality TV was occupying your screen.

Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/04/the-tao-of-jerry.html

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