Some Came Running

Drink the long draught, Dan...

Come on, it's a pretty funny albeit somewhat self-aggrandizing name-that-tune headline.

Good Christ am I a tub in that shot. (Which shot also features, from left, non-tubs Jackson Ning and Wayne Chang. No, I am not making any 80s-rock related jokes about Wayne's name up there, either, in case you were wondering. Racist.)

Anyway, for part of Fandor's week-long celebration of the New York premiere and Fandor-streaming availability of Preston Miller's new film God's Land (which I am enjoined from giving much of an opinion on because, no duh), the delightful Fandor blog editor Kevin Lee asked me to write about my experience as a fat fuck playing a priest in that film, and I complied, and the resultant piece is here. 

And now I'm going to the gym. Forever. 

Images of the day, 9/19/09

I was obliged to revisit Otto Preminger's 1959 Anatomy of a Murder for another professional project, and boy, am I glad I was. Such a spectacular film, arguably the ultimate melding of dramaturgy and the cinematograph, as it were. And what acting! I'm particularly falling-in-love-again with the bit at the film's near-finale, wherein a shoe the audience was made privy to is dropped on the head of hot-shot prosecutor Claude Dancer (George C. Scott) by surprise witness Mary Privett (Kathryn Grant, later Crosby). In an unbroken take (of course, it's Preminger), his panther gaze freezes...

...and he rears away, knowing the case that he knew he had sewn up merely seconds before, is now well and truly turned to sand. He seems literally in shock. Judge Joseph Welch is amusingly bemused.

Moments like these—when he distilled nuance from his almost natural over-statedness—are what made Scott really great. Knowing how to contrive and capture them was one of the things that made Preminger great.