A Bomb for Bastille Day

A busy, strange week, hence, no updates.

Last Friday Rebekah and I saw "A Hard Day's Night" at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. It may just be the most singularly fun movie ever made. No story in the slightest, just four very funny guys who happen to be in the best rock band ever. Who in the last twenty years of popular music could carry a film merely on personality and musical ability?

I went by myself to see the sneak of "The Island." I enjoyed it. Michael Bay's best movie since "The Rock," for sure.

Work has been fairly packed all week. Several premieres to cover and quite a few batches of production stills. I did have time to write up sort of a demo news story. Matchity (Matt Atchity, the guy I report to) suggested I take something that's been in the news and expand on it. So I took the reports about Tom Cruise beginning work on "Mission: Impossible 3" and did 700 words on why it's taken five years to get off the ground. Eventually, I want to be writing for the site on a regular basis, but we're still figuring out in what form that will be.

Then yesterday, I actually left the office at 5 o'clock, a good hour and half earlier than my normal departure time. And all it took was a bomb threat.

I didn't get the full story until today, but apparently a call was put in to one of the other buildings in our complex. So we were told there was a "security concern" and to leave the building ASAP. It's not something I really expected to have to deal with, working in Santa Monica, but I suppose it's all just a way of life now.

Then today we had a farewell lunch for our boss, Doug, who announced rather unexpectedly last week that he was leaving. Ever since Lloyd Braun was put in charge of all the different Yahoo! branches, there's been a steady flow of upper management changes. I met the new guy, David Katz, who'll be in charge of the Entertainment and Sports properties, and he seems like a good guy. He says he's committed to getting us more resources, which ideally means at least another person doing photos and database stuff around here so that I can do more of the writing I mentioned just three paragraphs ago. Lunch was at the Ivy at the Shore on Ocean Ave. in Santa Monica. Tré chic.

Nothing planned for the weekend. Plenty of flicks I'd like to catch. Maybe I'll get something productive done as well. One can always dream.

As Time Goes By

Had a terrific birthday (don't worry, there'll be no meditations on growing older and/or wiser here). Last night we had dinner at Casablanca, one of our favorites. It's a Mexican restaurant, but the décor is based on the movie. So there are pictures of Bogart and Bergman everywhere, and a life-size painted mural of Claude Rains as Louis that looks like there's a guy just hanging around watching you eat.

Rebekah took me there the first time I visited her in L.A., two years and three days before. The food is great; I had the carne asada steak, she had the cheese enchiladas she always gets. They have a Spanish guitarist/singer that plays every night. And she wore my favorite pink sweater.

My wife is super-cute.

Feeling inspired by the ambience, I suggested we watch 'Casablanca' when we got home. I bought the 2-disc special edition a while back, but hadn't watched it until last night. You must own this. The picture quality is incredible. It looks like it's stuffed with interesting bonus material. But mostly you should own it because it's the best movie ever made.

The AFI did a list of the 100 best movie quotes of all time, and six of them were from 'Casablanca.' And that's probably a fourth of the great lines in the flick. But what I noticed this time around is not just how witty the screenplay is, but how it moves. The pace of it is completely different that most of the films of that era. After the introduction, there's the first sequence in Rick's Café which probably lasts 20 minutes or more. But it's so swift as it moves from the bar to the show floor to the casino and back, there's never a moment where it lags. There are three songs, maybe six storylines, over a dozen characters, yet you're never confused and never bored. It's a movie you watch with awe and reverence and just a hint of anguish, because you know you'll never write anything close to it.

If I thought I could, I certainly wouldn't be spending my time writing this.

Hopkins Hugged Hasselhoff, a Hollywood Homily

One of the perks of my job is that I get to go to advanced screening of movies days or sometimes weeks before they open. Or maybe it's not so much a perk as a God-given right to see films for free away from teeming, stinking masses of the non-entertainment-media plebeian caste.

For instance, last night I got to go to a screening of 'Fantastic Four,' the Marvel comic adaptation from 20th Century Fox. It was in a big theater in Westwood. My boss, Matchity, got my name on the list from his contact at Fox publicity. There's always anti-pirate security there; you have to surrender any cell phone with a camera. The crowd, made up of all range of media types, is better behaved than your average movie audience, but nowhere near as responsive.

The movie blows, BTW.

Sometimes you'll spot a celebrity at one of these just there to peep the movie before anyone else. Rebekah and I saw Beck at 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.' Well, I saw Beck and then had to convince Rebekah that it was really him. Jack Black was at the big 'Star Wars' screening I went to two weeks before it opened (John Singleton, sitting right in front of me, whooped every time Chewbacca was on-screen).

Sometimes they give you free popcorn and sodas. We got these awesome flashlight keychains at 'Batman Begins' that project the Batsignal. They're fun and cheap and feel kind of 'inside' so there's still a little thrill that goes along with them.

And that's what I thought I was in for when I went with some guys from work to a screening of 'War of the Worlds' last week at the Chinese theater in Hollywood. But it wasn't the case. We found out when we got there it was a full-fledged premiere.

Red carpet. Paparazzi. Crowd of on-lookers.

It's pretty wild to be in the middle of it. Even when it's obvious no one there gives a rat's ass who you are. We walked down the red carpet, brightly lit even though the sun was still out. I saw Jann Carl from Entertainment Tonight standing on the sidelines looking bored to tears. We spotted the video crew who covers red carpet events for us and chatted with them. Apparently, Tom and Katie had arrived, but didn't stop to talk to the press. First time for everything.

We got our seats and kept our eyes peeled for celebrities trickling in. Anthony Hopkins we spotted first. Then Michael Clarke Duncan. Adrien Brody. Erika Christensen. Will Smith and his entourage (but no Jada). And Hasselhoff (who I saw up close later, and that guy is a giant).

Then the man of the hour, Tom Mapother himself, appeared with Katie in tow. I don't recall them not holding hands; she certainly didn't say a word. But he got on the mic at the front of the house and was charming and funny and smiling and being a movie star. Unhinged or not, there's a reason he's been at the top of the game for so long.

The next day at work I was back to pulling photos off the wire service and posting them on our site. Except this was an event I had been at. And I had proof. The video crew put us into the piece they did from the premiere. You can see it here: http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/waroftheworlds.html.

It's strange to be sort of on the cusp of Hollywood. Not a tourist, exactly, but certainly not a local. But it's not a bad place to stand. You get some of the benefits with none of the hassle. Walking past all those cameras, I couldn't quite imagine having them point at me. I get uncomfortable with just one taking my picture, let alone a hundred. I certainly wouldn't want every action, every decision and every utterance examined like Tom has lived with for over twenty years.

Oscar Wilde said that the only thing worse than having people talk about you was them not talking about you. As far as I'm concerned, Tom and Oscar can have that life. But I do like the free sodas.