Dennis Magee, directors, Che and The Rock
Former Herald & Review chief photographer Dennis Magee and his family lost their home Monday in the tornadoes that went through Iowa.
There were no injuries, but the house suffered so much damage, the Magees have decided to start over.
If you wish to contribute to a relief fund for the Magees, or simply wish to send along best wishes, e-mail H&R staff artist Jean Zerfowski at jean.zerfowski@lee.net.
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Take the “Director Who Films Your Life” quiz, and let me know if you get a different director than my friends and I wound up with.
(Just for your information, you don’t have to register with the site. When you get to the screen that asks for your birthdate, just ignore that and click the blue button to carry on.)
My director is Ingmar Bergman. (Ingmar Bergman? Really? As I told my friends, that must be because I’ve already worked with Steven Soderbergh.) The other directors friends landed: Woody Allen, Cameron Crowe, Sofia Coppola and Penny Marshall.
One co-worker said she’d direct her own movie. But she’s a well-known control freak already.
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Reader Ross Keefer posted this video on YouTube of filimg of “The Informant” outside of the Macon County Courthouse on May 17. In it, you can see Dick Smothers and Patton Oswalt.
Keefer also noted Oswalt blogged (nicely) about his time in Decatur.
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Maybe Steven Soderbergh would have preferred to stay in Central Illinois. We were certainly treating him better.
Soderbergh’s four-hour film “Che,” a biography of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, made its bow at the Cannes Film Festival, and was not particularly well-received in its unfinished state.
(Reportedly, a little bit of tweaking of the film was done at Forsyth’s Hickory Point Mall. Soderbergh and his cohorts took charge of one of the screening rooms to apparently view a rough cut before the film was taken to Cannes and suggest changes. According to the reviews, they didn’t suggest enough changes.)
I’m particularly fascinated by the headline on the New York Magazine story: “Is ‘Che’ This Year’s ‘Southland Tales’?” I hadn’t written about this previously, because it’s a bit of a tangled tale, but here goes.
During this year’s Oscars, I live-blogged. I wrote this:
8:09 - I’ll go out on a limb and suggest this is the closest The Rock ever gets to an Oscar.
That line got a little bit of attention. In fact, it went out on an Associated Press story.
About a month later, “Southland Tales” — which didn’t play theaters here – came out on DVD, and I rented it. (Truth to tell, the main attraction was Sarah Michelle Gellar as a porn star who stayed clothed throughout the film. I wanted to see how they’d pull that one off.)
Dwayne Johnson, “The Rock,” has a pivotal role in the film. And he was really quite good. I almost feel like I owe him an apology.
As a whole, I was interested in “Southland Tales.” Probably not enough to watch it again, and I won’t argue it was one of the great films of 2007, but I didn’t detest it, either. Unlike a number of people who reviewed it. Some went so far as to put it among the worst films of the year.
And it has this scene, which is great. (It’s Justin Timberlake lip-syncing the second half of The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done.”)