‘True Blood’ Runs Thicker

TUTTLEMODE

by James Tuttle

Gentle reader,

Living in L.A., I get to do a lot of fun things that aren’t exactly common in many other cities around the world and going to premieres is near the top of that list.  First of all, they’re free.  And that goes for the popcorn and soft drinks, too.  Second, if you’ve taken a few minutes to fix your damn hair, the fans thronging the red carpet try to take your picture because they think you must be someone famous.  Finally, there’s a great party with an open bar and dinner after the screening to say, I guess, “thank you for coming to watch our movie…for free!”  How cool is that?

I remember my first big premiere at the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, which is incidentally where the tradition originated in 1922 with Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood, but the one I’m talking about was many years later.  I know I look young for my age but that would be pushing it.

There’s Something About Kristen

BAKER STREET | REVIEW

by Eric J Baker

Kristen Stewart’s critics aren’t wrong: When she isn’t being plain old bland, she’s being morose. She’s not an exotic beauty, nor is she the all-American girl next door. Yet still she manages to captivate us. Maybe it’s that half smile she gives up about an hour into every one of her stone-faced performances. It’s like we’ve been given a great, unexpected gift. And the occasional twinkle in her eye would be a full-frontal nude scene from another actress.

Stewart: There’s a happy girl in there somewhere. (Ph: W Magazine)

Stewart brings her weary good looks (imagine her in a movie with Ben Affleck called Pretty, Tired People) to the role of Snow White in Universal Picture’s Snow White and the Huntsman, which opened this weekend. This Tolkien-esque take on the familiar fairy tale involves a serial usurper named Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) who, like me, needs beautiful women around to feel young. However, whereas I am satisfied with a charitable smile or the occasional act of harmless flirtation, Ravenna sucks the life right out of these girls.

Queer as Comics

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

It’s understandable if you’re confused that Ryan Reynolds might have been outed by DC Comics this past week.  Or rather that the superhero character he played in the colossal 2011 flop, The Green Lantern (not to be confused with the similarly hued disaster Green Hornet), will be transformed into a Ghey when a new issue of the comic hits the stands next Wednesday.

If you’re gonna come out, this is how you do it. Yee-haw!

Don’t worry, girls, Reynolds isn’t being forced to pull a Brokeback retroactively.  The Green Lantern character he played, Hal Jordan, remains a resolute womanizer who could plausibly have landed Scarlett Johansson.  The character whose entire past history is being reinvented is Alan Scott, described by DC as “the leader of the team. He’s a Type-A personality and a successful businessman; he’s gallant, he’s brave, he’s all the things you’d want in a hero.”

Ball So Hard

TUTTLE MODE

by James Tuttle

Gentle reader,

Over the weekend, I took Scott—or The Gimp, as he is known since fucking up his Achilles tendon last week—and braved the democratic hordes of Universal CityWalk with his crutches to catch the new Avengers movie.  This was a happy accident since it happens to be Shoot Your Heroes Week here at PFC.

Chet Corey is available for the next superhero movie.

We’d have normally wandered down the hill to the super-luxe Arclight Cinemas but the movie wasn’t playing there and Disney’s beautifully restored El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard wanted $30 a ticket, which they’ll get from me the day they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.  Universal is just over the hill, though it sometimes seems light years away culturally.  It’s really not so bad once you get the hang of the labyrinthine parking structure and the Mexican kids playing in their underwear in any available water feature.

Joss the Box Office Slayer

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

This isn’t another review of The Avengers, but it is part of our impromptu Shoot Your Heroes Week here at PFC.  While I’m not sure exactly what that means, I think it sounds rather dramatic and subversive enough to be one of our themes.  Perhaps it will one of many, or perhaps this will be the first and last.

My new friend Adam Von Rothfelder isn’t my hero, but I’m certainly a fan. (Ph: P. Reizt)

‘Shoot Your Heroes’ comes from the fact I’ve only had two heroes in my life, one of whom—a producer I admired more than any other in the business—I ended up wanting to kill after she tried unsuccessfully to fuck me over by poaching my investors on a film.  The other, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, died in 1890, but I’m pretty sure I would have want to shoot him, too, at some point.

Too Cool for School?

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

I had a brief email exchange over the weekend with our contributor Eric Baker in which he brought to my attention that our colleagues in the entertainment biz never leave comments on this blog, but rather send them to us in private emails.  Sometimes I might get a “like” or a quick note when I post a link to a PFC piece on Facebook, but that’s still considered private.  “It’s like being in a high school exclusively made up of cool kids,” I explained in my reply to Baker.

The 17-year-old star of "Life of Pi" is just how I imagined him from the book.

James Tuttle has similar experiences.  For example, in a wee incident last year, he was taken to task by a friend of his, an Oscar-nominated actress, for using the word ‘retarded.’  She protested that he was too intelligent and articulate to need to resort to adjectives that disparaged mentally disabled people; a child of a friend of hers was one such person, etcetera.  Even though I pointed out in a post of my own that the definition and etymology of ‘retarded’ was broad enough to excuse Tuttle’s use of it, the actress’ point was legitimate in light of where we are culturally with the bullying issue.

Cult of Personality

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEW

by James Killough

It’s not easy for someone like me—a member of a spiritual group in which the devotees wear all white on ceremonial occasions, perform ablutions before meditation, touch our heads to the floor before a ritual meal and obey the Master of the Path without question—to sit through the first parts of Sound of My Voice, much less be interested in seeing it at all lest it make me squirm right out of my preferred movie theater seat, C22 in the handicapped section of Arclight Hollywood, the most legroom in the galaxy.

The transcendent Brit Marling.

Granted, the secret Sufi handshake of my group isn’t as elaborate as the one in SOMV, but nor is it particularly secret.  A sort of cross between a bro handclasp and a kiss, it is elegant enough to be performed quickly on the street; it doesn’t even look like a secret handshake, more like the Middle-Eastern equivalent of a European air kiss, which is what it is: very Arabian Nights somehow, or how Crusaders in an esoteric brotherhood might have met or left each other in medieval Jerusalem.

Viggle Room

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

“I used to think I had narcissistic personality disorder,” James Tuttle once commented to a post of mine on the subject.  “Then I discovered I just enjoyed being good-looking.”  Tuttle is not just good-looking.  In online parlance he is “VGL,” or Very Good-Looking, which from the early years of hooking up online I have been calling “viggle.”  This is because invariably some total tool who would refer to himself as VGL in his profile is not that at all, and is therefore worthy of ridicule.

If you ever need a dose of viggle, ohlalamag.com is the place to go. This detail is from a recent Dolce & Gabbana campaign, a.k.a. Me and My Boys (I wish).

Indeed, one of the first rules of online dating is that a guy is rarely the adjectives he uses to describe himself.  “Hot,” “sexy,” “hung” are common enough delusions/mendacious cacas, but my alarm bells sound loudest when some dude describes himself as “sane,” “normal,” “fun,” “smart,” or, worst of all, “cool.” 

Objects In Mirror

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

Now that we have this sort of informal alliance with Tuttle’s friends over at Ohlalamag.com, as a content creation shop, PFC has to comment on the effect they are having on our readership.  In a nutshell, Alek and Steph, the primary photographers and editors of that site and a few others, including Bello Mag, are some very powerful homo sapiens.  A mere sentence about us in their “Linkalicious” section will send hundreds swarming to this site.

They have something like over fourteen thousand unique hits a day.  That’s called pimpin’ your blogs, yo.

I was lost in the mass of male pulchritude on Ohlalamag, then I found Benjamin Godfre and I thought, "I'd hit that".... no, I mean, "I want that body." For more pix of Godfre, click on the image.

I keep thinking how disappointed Ohlalamag readers must be when they find few semi-naked male models here, but rather these dense, dark, snarky essays, peppered with lots of grotesquely large penises, still by far our biggest draw.

Here Comes Santa Claus

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

The moment I fell in love with my creative partner Rain Li was in the café of the Tate Britain museum when we were doing a location scout for our film Losing Her.  We were talking about The Business and she said, in that eminently imitable Chinese version of a cockney accent, “I don’t know why everyone take film so seriously, yeah?”

Little cartoon hearts could be seen exploding around my head.

Now that PFC is so cozy with Ohlalamag.com, the images of bare-chested hunks will come fast and furious. Here is my buddy, Israeli actor Michael Lewis, whom I cast to replace Channing Tatum in "Hatter," front and back. No relationship to this article, of course.

In between takes on the set the other day, I was reminded by an actor of one of my great lessons about ego and humility in The Business.  It goes without saying that filmmaking is where the big boys play, the high rollers table at the casino, the ones ready to lose millions on a roll of the dice, and probably will.  I often compare it to thoroughbred horseracing.  The stakes are high, the divas are nutty, the horses are extra skittish, and the mafia is all over the joint.