Screen Test

  When Anthony Bourdain came to Hawaii a few years before his death to film an episode of his CNN series “Parts Unknown,” someone threw a big party in his honor. I have friends who were there. It hearkened back to the luaus that greeted Mark Twain on his visit to the islands a century and a half earlier.  Bourdain and Twain were cut from the same cloth – world traveling adventurers whose glib humor and popularity with mass audiences masked the deep compassion and wisdom of their writing. They were working class, men of the people. Guys whose curiosity and love for life stemmed from not placing themselves above it. Memories of the CNN episode are fading now, but I recall that the star of the Emmy- and Peabody- winning series went spear fishing with some bruddahs off Molokai. They snagged an octopus, and Bourdain, as instructed, gamely proved his mettle by chewing on its head to remove its brain as they all bobbed in the channel.  He was into karate at the time, pursuing it...

       poynter.org photo Are we over Will Smith yet? Doesn't look that way. The notorious  Slap  is still sparking a veritable feeding frenzy across the mediaverse. So many columnists, professors and pundits have weighed in, I feel like I got PhD's in sociology, psychology and toxic masculinity in the week since the infamous moment that distracted the Academy Awards from the more hopeful messages of award winners “CODA,” Jessica Chastain, Ariana DeBose and “Drive My Car.” Aside from echoing Denzel Washington's biblical sentiment on the matter – who are any of us to judge? – I don't have much to add. Based on a decades-long career, Will Smith is a veritable monument; most of us are no more than flies buzzing around his edifice. But for all the probing of residual racism or the fragile insecurity of manly men, let me nominate two other candidates for boogyman in the superstar's tragic fall: Fame. And fortune. We didn't know it on Sunday night but now we have ...

     Hidetoshi Nishijima and Toko Miura in “Drive My Car.”  Bitters End photo via IMDB A red Saab 900 Turbo is a co-star as much as any of the human actors in Japan's powerfully moving “Drive My Car.” It won the Academy Award Sunday for best international feature amid nominations including best picture, best adapted screenplay and best director Ryusuki Hamaguchi. In the film's almost three hour run time, the Saab is in more than half the scenes. Many were shot inside the vehicle, moving in traffic. But a lot were shot from outside, from helicopters, from other vehicles or from the Saab itself, front or rear, mostly on picturesque roadways in and outside Hiroshima. The effect captures mesmerizing tranquility, the opposite of road rage. Driving a car – navigating a pathway through life – is one of the endless metaphors in the script adapted from “Men Without Women,” a short story collection by Haruku Murakami. Hidetoshi Nishijima plays renowned theatrical actor and dir...

Best comment on last night's Oscar moment came in a tweet from comedy writer Jena Friedman: "'Love will make you do crazy things' –Will Smith and most people in prison for murder."  I'd rather remember this year's Oscars this way (warning: spoiler alert): https://youtu.be/A0UR1IkJvlg

                    Ansel Elgort and Rene Zegler in “West Side Story.”  20 th   Century Studios photo via IMDB Granted, there’s something very First World even bringing up the subject of movies as the refrain of Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” echoes in your brain and each day's news brings images of unfathomable courage enduring a crazed tyrant's murderous cruelty. But readers of this blog have spent the last several months with me getting ready for moviedom’s big night, Sunday on ABC. It would be a shame to quit now, with the finish line in sight. Unfortunately,  I haven’t quite finished my to-do list where the Oscars are concerned.  Despite several attempts I haven't been able to get past the first 10 minutes of “Dune,” likely winner in many of the tech categories. Big worms are all I remember from reading Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic decades ago, but whenever I try to watch it on a screen at hand, it just f...

  Photo by Steve Granitz - ©WireImage.com  IMDB Image courtesy  WireImage.com After an endless stream of bad news from elsewhere, we learned of William Hurt's death Sunday night, a week short of his 72 nd  birthday. The loss of any actor strikes a sad, sentimental note, as the Oscars' In Memoriam segment reminds us each year. They are in the business of creating fantasy but they're so real to us. We feel like we know these people intimately, even though we don't know them at all. We've only seen their shadows, projected from afar on huge screens.  For all their well documented glamorous excesses, their chosen profession also calls for lots of heavy lifting. They act out life, usually its most challenging and messy parts, for the rest of us. In William Hurt's case, I did know him. Sort of. Once. In 2007, he and Claire Danes were honored at the Maui Film Festival. It was my job to interview them for The Maui News.  In those days the festival's opening recepti...

  Director Sian Heder (in red dress) joined cast members of “CODA” Troy Kotsur, Daniel Durant, Emilia Jones, Marlee Matlin and Eugenio Derbez at the 28th Screen Actors Guild Awards.  Reuters/Aude Guerrucci photo Explosions rocking Kyiv were half a world away, but they still reverberated in the spaces between the words in a Santa Monica airplane hanger converted into a Hollywood ballroom Sunday night. Producers of the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and several of the artists who would receive them, marked the occasion by lauding the courage and unbreakable spirit of the tough soldiers, the volunteer resistance and the innocent families under merciless attack in Ukraine. While the SAG awards offered moments of glorious escape from the apocalyptic nightmare weighing on us all, the artists also added valuable perspective to the dangerous, heart-rending coverage from the front lines we've been getting on CNN since the shelling began.  It's acting – not performing that other act –...