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Showing posts with label David Letterman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Letterman. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Released this week on DVD: "The September Issue"
Grade: B
The September Issue, a documentary about the creation of a single, very fat issue of American Vogue in a far-off gilded age (i.e., 2007), has little to say about fashion, the real ins and outs of publishing or the inner workings and demons of the magazine's notoriously demanding meanie-in-chief Anna Wintour. Rather, this entertaining, glib movie is about the maintenance of a brand that Wintour has brilliantly cultivated since she assumed her place at the top of the editorial masthead in 1988 and which the documentary's director, R.J. Cutler, has helped polish with a take so flattering he might as well work there.
To judge from the flurries of behind-the-scenes evidence, however, if Cutler did work for the exacting Wintour he would still be doing reshoots. Shot on digital with an eye for sumptuous color by Bob Richman and briskly edited by Azin Samari, the 88-minute movie opens with Wintour explaining that "there is something about fashion that can make people very nervous." Certainly she unnerves her staff, as you soon see from all the huddled bodies and popping eyes. Even the more self-possessed, like Candy Pratts Price, seem in the grip of awe. Is Wintour the "high priestess" of the magazine, an off-camera voice asks. "I would say pope," Price says with a queasy smile.
Many will grasp this distinction, having already watched supplicants kiss the ring in the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada, with Meryl Streep as a thinly disguised, fictionalized and Americanized version of Wintour. Etched in acid and often hilarious, the performance, while not wholly modeled on Wintour, helped humanize her public profile, lessening the sting of the original book, a roman a clef by one of her former assistants, Lauren Weisberger. The documentary continues this humanization largely by showing Wintour very hard at work, rather lonely and sensitive about her British family's low opinion of fashion. She's a poor little rich girl swaddled in fur and iced to the bone.
She's also pretty funny, perhaps at times accidentally so. Much of the movie's pleasure comes from the utter ease with which Wintour plays the Red Queen of fashion and orders off with their heads (and even tummies). In the case of the British actress Sienna Miller, the cover girl for the September 2007 issue, which gives the movie its structure and hook, the head in question receives the 21st-century version of a severing: It's Photoshopped to unreal perfection. However lovely, Miller proves a problematic Vogue ideal for the editors, many of whose own faces are somewhat surprisingly scored with wrinkles. It's a mark of how pitiless Wintour can come across that you end up feeling a bit sorry for Miller.
In truth Wintour was just doing her job. Yes, there's cruelty here, but of the most attenuated kind: she says no, employees tremble. The strongest, like the flame-haired Grace Coddington, the magazine's longtime creative director and the documentary's hugely diverting stealth star, seem to have figured out how to survive with their dignity intact. Most of the truly ugly stuff in fashion -- the models starving themselves, the exploited Chinese workers cranking out couture fakes and the animals inhumanely slaughtered for their fur -- remains unnoted in The September Issue, much as it often does in Vogue. And while the movie shuns any overt discussion of money, it includes an instructive scene of Wintour playing the coquette with one of the magazine's important advertisers.
Of course it really is all about money. Despite being crammed with glossy images of beautiful, weird, unattractive, ridiculous and prohibitively expensive clothes and accessories, Vogue isn't about fashion: It's about stoking the desire for those clothes and accessories. It's about the creation of lust and the transformation of wants into needs. Almost everything in this temple of consumption, including its lavish layouts and the celebrities who now often adorn its covers, hinges on stuff for sale. Some of that stuff comes with a price tag, but some of it is more ephemeral because Vogue is also in the aspiration business. Cutler doesn't notice or doesn't care about any of that, which makes his movie as facile as it is fun.
Given this, it's no surprise that Wintour is doing her part to flog the documentary: she gave a party in its honor and appeared on David Lettermen's show, with and without her signature sunglasses, her glazed stare and tight smile firmly in place. The movie affords you many opportunities to marvel at the parsimony of that smile and wonder if she's as bored as she looks, even while waiting for an agitated Stefano Pilati. the creative director at Yves Saint Laurent, to show his newest collection.
"That's pretty," she says, in a voice so drained of affect it's a wonder he doesn't commit seppuku with his scissors. You feel bad for Pilati, but it's Wintour's hauteur that makes you laugh and keeps you willingly at her side.
The September Issue, a documentary about the creation of a single, very fat issue of American Vogue in a far-off gilded age (i.e., 2007), has little to say about fashion, the real ins and outs of publishing or the inner workings and demons of the magazine's notoriously demanding meanie-in-chief Anna Wintour. Rather, this entertaining, glib movie is about the maintenance of a brand that Wintour has brilliantly cultivated since she assumed her place at the top of the editorial masthead in 1988 and which the documentary's director, R.J. Cutler, has helped polish with a take so flattering he might as well work there.
To judge from the flurries of behind-the-scenes evidence, however, if Cutler did work for the exacting Wintour he would still be doing reshoots. Shot on digital with an eye for sumptuous color by Bob Richman and briskly edited by Azin Samari, the 88-minute movie opens with Wintour explaining that "there is something about fashion that can make people very nervous." Certainly she unnerves her staff, as you soon see from all the huddled bodies and popping eyes. Even the more self-possessed, like Candy Pratts Price, seem in the grip of awe. Is Wintour the "high priestess" of the magazine, an off-camera voice asks. "I would say pope," Price says with a queasy smile.
Many will grasp this distinction, having already watched supplicants kiss the ring in the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada, with Meryl Streep as a thinly disguised, fictionalized and Americanized version of Wintour. Etched in acid and often hilarious, the performance, while not wholly modeled on Wintour, helped humanize her public profile, lessening the sting of the original book, a roman a clef by one of her former assistants, Lauren Weisberger. The documentary continues this humanization largely by showing Wintour very hard at work, rather lonely and sensitive about her British family's low opinion of fashion. She's a poor little rich girl swaddled in fur and iced to the bone.
She's also pretty funny, perhaps at times accidentally so. Much of the movie's pleasure comes from the utter ease with which Wintour plays the Red Queen of fashion and orders off with their heads (and even tummies). In the case of the British actress Sienna Miller, the cover girl for the September 2007 issue, which gives the movie its structure and hook, the head in question receives the 21st-century version of a severing: It's Photoshopped to unreal perfection. However lovely, Miller proves a problematic Vogue ideal for the editors, many of whose own faces are somewhat surprisingly scored with wrinkles. It's a mark of how pitiless Wintour can come across that you end up feeling a bit sorry for Miller.
In truth Wintour was just doing her job. Yes, there's cruelty here, but of the most attenuated kind: she says no, employees tremble. The strongest, like the flame-haired Grace Coddington, the magazine's longtime creative director and the documentary's hugely diverting stealth star, seem to have figured out how to survive with their dignity intact. Most of the truly ugly stuff in fashion -- the models starving themselves, the exploited Chinese workers cranking out couture fakes and the animals inhumanely slaughtered for their fur -- remains unnoted in The September Issue, much as it often does in Vogue. And while the movie shuns any overt discussion of money, it includes an instructive scene of Wintour playing the coquette with one of the magazine's important advertisers.
Of course it really is all about money. Despite being crammed with glossy images of beautiful, weird, unattractive, ridiculous and prohibitively expensive clothes and accessories, Vogue isn't about fashion: It's about stoking the desire for those clothes and accessories. It's about the creation of lust and the transformation of wants into needs. Almost everything in this temple of consumption, including its lavish layouts and the celebrities who now often adorn its covers, hinges on stuff for sale. Some of that stuff comes with a price tag, but some of it is more ephemeral because Vogue is also in the aspiration business. Cutler doesn't notice or doesn't care about any of that, which makes his movie as facile as it is fun.
Given this, it's no surprise that Wintour is doing her part to flog the documentary: she gave a party in its honor and appeared on David Lettermen's show, with and without her signature sunglasses, her glazed stare and tight smile firmly in place. The movie affords you many opportunities to marvel at the parsimony of that smile and wonder if she's as bored as she looks, even while waiting for an agitated Stefano Pilati. the creative director at Yves Saint Laurent, to show his newest collection.
"That's pretty," she says, in a voice so drained of affect it's a wonder he doesn't commit seppuku with his scissors. You feel bad for Pilati, but it's Wintour's hauteur that makes you laugh and keeps you willingly at her side.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Letterman vs. Palin -- Decision: Palin
I'm a big David Letterman fan. Always have been. Never could stand Jay Leno, but I always appreciated Letterman's inherent anarchy. Sarah Palin? Not so much. In fact, I thought she was an embarrassment who hurt John McCain far more than she helped him during last year's presidential campaign and election.
However, in this current issue involving Letterman and Palin, I'm coming down hard on Palin's side.
In case you are not familiar with this whole affair, here it is in a nutshell: Sarah Palin and her daughter visited New York City and, while there, took in a Yankee game. Letterman joked about it and said while they were at the game, Ms. Palin's daughter was "knocked up" by the Yankees' Alex Rodriguez.
Heaven knows, I'm no prude, but I find that joke offensive and not one bit funny. I'm thinking it was crafted by one of the show's writers, but Letterman should have exercised good judgment and cut the joke before the program's taping.
But it gets worse. Letterman claims he thought Ms. Palin was traveling with her 18-year-old daughter Bristol who was in the news during the presidential campaign because she was pregnant and unwed. (OK, but this fact doesn't give Letterman the right to make offensive comments about her.) It turns out, however, Ms. Palin was actually in the company of her 14-year-old daughter Willow, so now Ms. Palin is going around saying Letterman is condoning statutory rape (an argument I don't agree with).
Letterman went to great lengths on his show Wednesday to say he would "never, ever make jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a 14-year-old girl." I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one, but, I think the age issue here is irrelevant. He should have known the joke was not funny (which we all know is not a crime), in extremely poor taste and bordered on being slanderous.
Most, if not all, of my friends and associates will also confirm the fact that I am an A-Number-1 cynic and I can't help but think all this has more to do with Conan O'Brien than it does with Sarah Palin. I think Letterman saw that O'Brien, who has just succeeded Leno as the host of NBC's late night talk show, was vulnerable ratings-wise and decided to strike immediately with something that would draw attention to his program. Apparently it has worked. For the first time in more than four years, Letterman has drawn higher ratings the last couple nights than his NBC rival and is poised to win the week's ratings battle. And, of course, unless you're convicted on corruption charges, it's difficult for an Alaskan politician to remain in the headlines and I'm positive Ms. Palin is jockeying to be the GOP presidential nominee in 2012. So it's to her benefit to keep this "moral outrage" of hers on the front burners as long as possible.
Now I have one more question and I'm through with this subject: Why has Alex Rodriguez been so quiet during all this?
UPDATE: If you're planning on watching Letterman tonight to see if he stokes this fire, you'll be disappointed. Letterman always tapes his Friday shows on Mondays.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Letterman on Newman
I missed David Letterman's heartfelt tribute to Paul Newman when it was first shown, but it is too good to let slide and be completely ignored.
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