¿Which Came First? On Broken Noses

We seem to be obsessed with the wounded male, temporarily damaged by the hand of another, resulting in a broken nose.

Bandaged or unbandaged, the broken nose has taken residence on the face of a youngish male actor, often not necessarily the most attractive, but certainly an endearing sort with a charm of his own. In 1974, there were two bandaged/broken noses of note in cinema, Elliott Gould in California Split and Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. (There is debate as to which director, Robert Altman or Roman Polanski, came up with the gimmick first. Altman fans, Am/Mex included, would say California Split was in production first, thus making his Charlie Waters character, played by Gould, the original.)

It's hard to miss the obvious revisitation of the same visual quirk on Wes Anderson's Owen Wilson character in this year's The Darjeeling Limited. (The first thing to strike Am/Ex was this visual similarity to the two previous films in 1974. No attempt was made to downplay this particular broken nose, as this image and others splash the pages of most every promotional st still of this film.)

Snow Blow

The city of Boston has a snow removal problem.

Am/Mex has just discovered that the city basically surrenders to the snow from December through April. Plowing happens on main thoroughfares, but that's about it and there are no alternate-side-of-the-street parking schemes to clear the streets after snow storms. Meanwhile, residents of Boston and Cambridge hunker down and A., leave their cars until Spring or B., shovel them out and claim their clean spots for the long winter (with the help of orange cones, etc.). The moral: leave your car at home, or just move back to New York City.

More on Super SUVs

The New York Times is writing about the pair of Fox News "Election Link" SUV's that are on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire. Loyal Am/Mex readers will remember seeing those live internet streaming SUV's somewhere... a blog perhaps?... oh yeah, right here, last week. Anyway, they seem to be here to stay because A., they're cheaper than satellite trucks and B., tech toys are hard to resist in the news business. Expect major newspapers to be jumping on the bandwagon soon.

Still Speechless

United Hollywood's "Speechless" campaign silently plods along on the Internet and now Woody Allen has gotten into the act. For more clever fare by striking screenwriters, read on. First bookmark Ken Levine's blog. Then check out the writing team of Jonathan Green and Gabe Miller. They're trying to stick it to the AMPTP (the producers and movie studio muckety-mucks) with a daily log of all the brilliant projects they are not writing, including "Witchbot" and "A Bucketful of Forever" (a janitor finds the Fountain of Youth in the bottom of his mop bucket). Finally, for a more New York-centric view of the strike read The Adventures of Strikey courtesy of the bored and restless writers over at the Late Show with David Letterman. Speaking of dark humor, it appears the strike has no end in sight. On Friday reps for the studios broke off talks.

Is This Front Page News?

The Daily Item in Sunbury, PA published this photo on Page One this week. Editor Len Ingrassia said it "wasn't too graphic" because it didn't have any "blood or guts". He then called it "the most compelling photo... to run anything else would not seem to be serving the reader." Really? Two cows escaped from a trailer and police shot them dead (the owner gave them permission because the cows were on their way to be auctioned for slaughter). Sounds less like a big story and more like suicide by cop - and the poor cows weren't on a major highway or anything; they were just wading around in a creek. So the need to run a story with this horrible photo seems sleazy.

Anyway, in a weird life-imitating-art moment, Am/Mex realized the above picture had a familiar feeling about it. And that's because it reminded us of this photograph:


This picture was made by Amy Stein as part of her Domesticated series. And that's her husband John in the lumberjack coat faking aim. Unlike the image above, no animal was threatened in the staging of this photo, despite their uneasy similarities. It's a fantastic photo on many levels, obviously eerily prescient.

Without context, these images could easily be mistaken as having the same dreadful conclusion, both capturing the moment just before an animal's imminent death. Amy Stein's image, conceived of and produced long before this week's top story in Sunbury, PA, is only more powerful in this new context, an imagined narrative unknowingly anticipating a future, actual event.

The SUV Makes Nice

This is The Star Car - the pride and joy of The Star newspaper in Cleveland Co., North Carolina. A Wi-Fi cloud surrounds the SUV at all times enabling their reporters to report live from the scene of the action. They can stream a live written report or use the dashcam video camera. It's really a virtual TV live truck for much less (the cost of the technology and the SUV add up to around $60k). The mighty news networks are taking advantage of this new technology as well - Fox News Channel has one tooling around Iowa. And today they stuck GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee in the Election Link for a live chat while he was being driven down I80. How long will it take for this Wi-Fi cloud technology to hit the U.S. car market?

Is This Man the Devil?

NBC's "Last Call with Carson Daly" plans to resume taping tomorrow, according to Reuters. A spokeswoman says Daly wants to "support his staffers" while becoming the first late-night TV talk show host to cross the WGA picket line. Good luck getting A-list guests - or any guests at all - to come on the show.

Meanwhile, a WGA insider in L.A. tells American/Mexican that he thinks an agreement over "basic guidelines" has been made (in a meeting between the Guild and the CEO's for Disney and Fox) and that there is "room for optimism." An inked deal could still take a month to produce, but what better Christmas stocking stuffer for TV viewers? Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily reported similar insider-speak yesterday.

Left Speechless

United Hollywood's "Speechless" campaign, first promoted here Wednesday, is now online but the results so far are mixed. Videos featuring "A-list Screen Actors Guild talent" like Sean Penn, Nicolette Sheridan and Eva Longoria, and Harvey Keitel all disappoint. Making matters worse, the videos take too long to upload and play out in a choppy manner. Up to five people are listed as part of the creative team that envisioned the videos. It appears the world really does need writers, but also directors, editors and (shudder) producers to say yea or nay to an idea. The only compelling one up to this point - Sunday afternoon - is by Andre 3000, pictured above. Still eagerly awaiting Tina Fey's video, but if she can't write, then how good can it really be?

WGA Talks Turkey

As the long holiday weekend gets underway, the WGA says it will head back to the negotiating table on Monday. Until a new contract is signed, the Guild is encouraging fans of specific network shows to send a pencil to the AMPTP or to TV studios in support of writers and their craft. Tomorrow, Sean Penn, Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette and other actors begin starring in the "Speechless" campaign broadcast exclusively on the Internet.

Going West

Broadway's still dark, but who cares. Ode to the Man Who Kneels, now playing at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street, is written, directed and composed by Richard Maxwell. The musical is just the latest sign that the western genre is alive and well in American theater and film. Like 3:10 to Yuma (2007) - one of several recent examples - the familiar western themes are touched upon - impending death, bleak landscapes, lawlessness, and drought (of several kinds). But what sets "Ode" apart are the catchy songs. One in particular - maybe titled "Endure" - leaves one feeling oddly hopeful and humming along. Here's Ben Brantley's NY Times review.


Theatergoer beware. Maxwell has a cult following of sorts and based on last night's performance, the squeezed-in crowd can be annoying. Watch out for adult twins dressed exactly alike, sleeping and wheezing older couples and cackling young ladies. If this means you, take a moment to brush up on your theater etiquette.

A Fistful of Pennies

Told with (Frank) Capra-like conviction and stylistically modeled after his famous World War II “promotional” film of the same name, Why We Fight covers the issues behind the WGA strike. Viewers get a glimpse of how television studios haven’t and still don’t properly compensate writers for their work, the details of which are explained in a straightforward and effective manner.

Though the delivery of this information could be interpreted as propagandistic, one-sided, and perhaps misleading, there is no denying that a four-cent increase is not too much to ask. Sometimes a strike is the only way to get anyone’s attention, and that means ours, too.

Psychodrama Meets Sugar

On Tuesday, October 30, 2007, composer Melissa Grey held a preview screening of her work, Psychodrama, an experiment of sound, narrative, perception, and investigation of horror film score at Sugar Bar/Lounge in NYC's Tribeca. Over a hundred guests gathered -- some in Hitchcock inspired Halloween costumes -- to watch the well-known shower sequence in his 1960 film Psycho, set to the eerie but contemplative sounds of Grey's sonic compositions.

Many audience members believed the sequence -- pulled directly from the film and left intact -- was actually re-edited by Grey to accompany her scores, when, in fact, viewer perception is slightly thwarted when watching this popular scene to a score that registers reactions at different moments than the original score by Bernard Herrmann.

While this work is not a criticism of Herrmann's brilliant score, it intends to play with the manner in which we read film and sound as viewers/listeners. It deliberately works with and against our expectations, both those formed through having previously viewed this film, in some cases multiple times, and as long-time audiences of other horror films.

Variations No. 9 and 11 were featured from a total of thirteen variations, which will be performed by a live chamber orchestra in winter 2008 in NYC.