translating hollywood
Titles are often tweaked to sound better in the local language, or to provide a hint of the plot to audiences who might be skeptical of what is, to them, a foreign film. That’s why Steve Carell’s Get Smart is playing variously as Max the Menace (France), Agent Smart: Casino Totale (Italy), Is the Spy Capable or Not? (Taiwan), and Confused Spy (China).
um about that off shore oil. . .
According to the federal government’s own Department of Energy, drilling off America’s coasts would not have a significant impact on domestic oil production or prices before 2030. And off-shore leasing wouldn’t even begin before 2012.
Why? Because the leasing process is cumbersome. And currently, there aren’t enough rigs or workers or refineries to handle more oil.
Then there’s this. Most of the U.S. offshore oil, almost 10 billion barrels, lie off the coast of California. But at the current rate of U.S. consumption – about 20.7 million barrels a day – that would be burned up in 16 months.
tart dan callahan piece on the inimitable gloria grahame
Grahame lives on the edges of most of her films, too disturbing an image, too turbulent a consciousness to ever really play a lead role. She could look severe, even plain, when she wasn’t overly made up for gaudy seduction. Almost always, she played tramps of some sort, but she was enough of an actress to make them very different kinds of tramps, and her filmography offers a sort of strumpet cornucopia. She is capable of turning up in anything, even It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), where she’s the flip side of the film’s Donna Reed sweetheart: Violet Bick (how’s that for a mean/sexy name?), boy crazy in a black satin dress, doing the Charleston with older men at a dance. Grahame gives Violet a comic sort of speed and cluelessness, but when we see what would have happened if Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey had never been born, we catch a glimpse of Violet as a wrecked, angry whore being dragged to a paddy wagon, screaming that she knows important people. It’s possible to imagine a whole film about Violet Bick, but it wouldn’t have been made in 1946, and it might make even today’s sexually jaded art film audience flinch.
In a Lonely Place & The Big Heat are 2 of the best films (not just noirs) of the 50s, both devastating and grahame is essential each time.
