Alan Horn's diary

March 20, 2008

Many people, eager to put a face on the stray observations recorded on this page, have been urging me to post a photograph. I’m afraid they’ll have to be patient. My digital camera is not in serviceable condition at the moment, having been inadvertently dropped into a large bowl of bouillabaisse.

I’m hoping to get it working soon, but in the meantime let me respond to a related query I’ve been getting: which celebrity, living or dead, do I most resemble? Well, it may sound immodest to say so, but I’ve often been compared to Orson Welles in his F-Is-for-Fake period.

This talk of bouillabaisse is making me hungry, and reminding me of that trying business at lunch today (or breakfast, I should say, since I hadn’t left the table). I was in a private room of my favorite café, hard at work on an abstract charcoal rendering of my lovely twenty-two-year-old lover Dudu, who was posing nude against the balcony. The light was exquisite. A waiter burst in and, before I could look up, spilled an entire tureen of billi-bi on my little sketch.

“Fils de putain de tete de merde!” I cried and grabbed a gigot d'agneau à la provençale, wielding it menacingly. I did not, however, strike the man, who retreated abjectly. Dudu was laughing, in her cruel way, but I was in no mood to join her. My billi-bi was wasted, my sketch obliterated. Thank God I’d had the restraint to spare the lamb.

Out of sorts, I called for coq au vin, foie gras, pot au feu, crème brulet, and a bottle of cabernet sauvingon. A waiter came running--not the same one, unfortunately--slipped on a steak au poivre that had somehow ended up on the floor beside me, and broke his collarbone.

March 8, 2008

Last night I had the strangest dream sequence.

I couldn’t make out just what sort of a place it was that I was in. It seemed to be a gambling house, but there weren't any walls, just a lot of curtains with eyes painted on them. A man was walking around with a large pair of scissors cutting all the drapes in half.

A girl came in with hardly anything on and started walking around the gambling room kissing everybody. She came to my table first. She looked a little like Ingrid Bergman.

I was sitting there playing cards with a man who had a beard. He said, “That makes 21--I win.” But when he turned up his cards, they were blank! Just then the proprietor came in and accused him of cheating.

I saw the man with the beard leaning over the sloping roof of a high building. I called out to him to watch out. But he went over--slowly--with his feet in the air.

I saw the proprietor again. He was hiding behind a tall chimney, and he had a small wheel in his hand. I saw him drop the wheel on the roof.

Then I was running and heard something beating over my head. It was a great pair of wings. They were chasing me and almost caught up with me when I came to the bottom of the hill. Then I woke up.

The funny thing is I kept thinking that all this meant something, that there was some other meaning in it that I ought to find out.

March 4, 2008

Is there any other film actor who can match the charisma, the wit, and the sheer energy of Jack Nicholson? Admittedly I'm not familiar with the entire range of his oeuvre, having only seen him for the first time this afternoon in The Bucket List. Unfortunately, his performance, astonishing as it was, could not completely save that mannered and precious production. But I'm eager to catch up on the rest of his career, and in fact have just added Anger Management to my Netflix queue.

February 24, 2008

Many people feel that Holocaust movies are dreary and manipulative. They say that all such films do is exploit a horrifying historical setting to evoke a set of stock responses.

What such people fail to understand is that people in a Holocaust movie audience, unlike people in the Holocaust, are there by choice. If we wanted emotional subtlety, we wouldn't be watching a Holocaust movie.

I bring this up because there is a subgenre of the Holocaust movie that has never received the attention it deserves. The films I am speaking of add to the melodrama and sentimentalism typical of cinematic treatments of the death camps an element of bittersweet comedy. If there could be a more perfectly well-rounded entertainment package I personally cannot conceive of it.

Those who are of the same mind will be excited to learn that I am putting together the first-ever festival devoted to films of this sort (date, time, place, price of admission, and corporate sponsorship to be announced).

While the schedule has not yet been finalized, I am proud to say that we have already lined up three of the finest examples of the genre: Jakob the Liar starring Robin Williams, the Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful, and the world premiere of Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Died.

This last work, though completed back in 1972, has never been released until now. Some have speculated that its auteur’s heavy Percodan use at the time may have marred the production of the film and even its conception. While these suggestions are baseless, as we shall see, there do seem to have been fears for whatever reason that audiences of the time would not be receptive to the film’s merits. I speak for many in saying: We are ready!

February 13, 2008

Saw the documentary Bus 174, about what happened when a small-time attempted robbery on a city bus in Rio de Janeiro went wrong, turning into a hostage drama that played out over four hours on live television.

The hijacker had grown up on the streets in a country where there are as many as twelve million such street children. Thousands of them are killed every year with impunity by police or vigilante death squads. In fact, the hijacker had been among a group of seventy-two children sleeping in front of a church one night when, in an infamous incident, off-duty cops pulled up and sprayed them with bullets. A social worker interviewed in the film recalls that on a radio show that week many called in to defend the cops, saying that this was just the sort of thing that was needed to clean up the city.

The film could have been better edited. While it was necessary to show the hijacking in its social context, the resulting digressions on Brazilian street life, police brutality, prison conditions, and the like went on too long, draining a lot of the tension out of the story.

Descriptions of oppression soon begin to numb, especially when no way to understand it is offered. There was a good deal of commentary in the film, but only of the liberal, how-could-“we”-let-this-go-on type. No mention of capitalism, of course. Certainly no recognition that there may be something basically wrong with a social system that leaves twelve million children to fend for themselves, and with no way to do so but to beg or prey on others.

January 31, 2008

Saw the animated film Persepolis, based on the appealing comic book by Marjane Satrapi about growing up under (and, for a time, in exile from) the early years of the theocratic regime in Iran.

Satrapi’s upper-class, well-connected, Westernized family were supporters of the leftist popular movement that brought down the monarchy in 1979. In its place the leaders of that movement, instead of building a workers’ government, treacherously installed a clerical regime which immediately turned on those same leaders and their constituency. This is all presented fairly honestly, if obliquely and with no political conclusions being drawn.

The film was very good, if not quite as good as the book, I thought. Then again my appreciation may have been impaired to some extent by the roar and rumble of the subway trains passing right under my seat every eight minutes.

Local moviegoers will instantly know which theater I went to. But everyone else reading this must think I’m talking about some low-rent screen in a questionable part of town where a French-language art film is unaccountably rotating with Aliens vs. Predator. Not at all. This is a place that specializes in so-called independent cinema and has the nerve to charge $4.50 for a small cappuccino in the lobby.

Perhaps the Aliens vs. Predator crowd wouldn’t put up with this shit. In any case, I would like to think so. For my own part, I left a strongly worded note in the suggestion box on the way out and once again promised myself never to return.

January 22, 2008

Caught the new horror flick There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis’s accent. It costars Paul Dano, Kevin J. O’Connor, and Daniel Day-Lewis’s eyebrows, who are all very good. It was without any question one of the all-time best Upton Sinclair adaptations I’ve ever seen.

(By the way, I discussed my personal encounters with Daniel Day-Lewis in an earlier entry.)

That was yesterday. This morning I tried some target shooting in my salon. That may not sound like much of a challenge, but it’s a fairly large room--a good twenty yards from one end to the other.

I pulled out a few old trunks I had lying around and piled some targets on top of them: a bull trophy, an antique clock, a fishbowl, some bibles, several objets d’art. I checked my aim from across the way with a surveyor’s scope, and I’ll be damned if I missed more than half a dozen shots in over 80 rounds. I only wish I could have shown those foolish doctors who keep warning me about my drinking.

It was the most fun I’ve had in ages. I suspect it rattled my valet a little, though he knows better than to show it. Whereas Dolly, my Dalmatian, barely lifted her head the whole time, lying peacefully in her place on the black and white marble floor she matches so well.

This afternoon I may go down to my private lanes and do a little bowling.

January 17, 2008

Haircut today. With the busy holiday season just past, I’d missed my last appointment, and as a consequence my hair had grown out considerably. So there was a lot to work with, and I couldn’t pass up the chance. I opted for the retro-classic cut made newly fashionable these days by Javier Bardem in the film No Country for Old Men.

I haven’t seen too many of these in New York yet, so maybe a lot of men are waiting for their hair to grow out first. Could it be that my sloth last month has ironically put me in the lead?

January 8, 2008

When the first movie version of Vladimir Nabokov’s famous dirty novel came out in 1962, its posters all asked, over a coy picture of the film's young star, “How did they ever make a movie of LOLITA?” The answer, as the New York Times reviewer put it at the time, was: “They didn’t.” Director Stanley Kubrick had left out everything of interest, filling out the running time with footage of Peter Sellars doing funny voices.

A second version was released in 1997 starring Jeremy Irons which, as the phrase “starring Jeremy Irons” already implies, was more faithful but no less dull.

So I was glad to see a third version has just come out that, from the look of the packaging, appears to have finally found the right balance between delicacy and frankness. I notice they have taken some liberties, however, transferring the setting from New England to Long Island and even altering the eponymous character’s name by one letter. These are both relatively minor changes. More worrying is the lead actress, who seems old for the part, looking to be at least fifty. Still, I for one am hoping for the best as I look forward to receiving my copy in the mail any day now.

January 7, 2008

Few people know that the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, star of the current action blockbuster There Will Be Blood, is the son of the noted British poet C. Day-Lewis.

As a neighbor of the Day-Lewises when I was staying in London in the early 60s, I was occasionally asked to tea with Jack (as C. Day-Lewis was known, quite arbitrarily, to his friends) and his charming second wife, the actress Jill Balcon. His children were usually not at home, but Jack would sometimes speak darkly about Daniel’s emotional difficulties, which had already come to light.

I’ll never forget my first sight of the boy. It must have been November of 1964. He was only about seven, as I recall, though tall for his age. He was standing in the parlor dressed in a sort of long, coarsely woven tunic and sandals and leaning on a wooden crook. But I was struck less by this outfit than by the boy’s manner, starting with his look of astonishment as I walked in. “God bless me!” he cried. “But who comes here? Welcome, good gentleman! Welcome to Bethlehem!” Taken a little aback, I turned to his father, who muttered something about Daniel’s getting a part in the local church’s nativity play. I understood.

The last time I saw Daniel it was on the sad occasion of his father’s memorial service. Once again his appearance was unconventional. His head was shaven clean, he had a gold ring in one ear, and instead of a jacket he had on a silk pajama top, worn open in front to expose his chest and abdomen. I couldn’t help feeling this was in poor taste under the circumstances, but as everyone present appeared to have agreed to let it go, I decided to follow suit and offer him my condolences. “Hah!” he replied. I mentioned that although I had seen little of his father over the last few years, my acquaintance with him had always meant a good deal to me. “When my father was a king,” Daniel agreed, “he was a king who knew exactly what he knew. Et cetera, et cetera, and so forth!” At this point his mother took me aside to explain that they were doing The King and I at Bedales that spring and Daniel had got the lead.

Update: I finally saw There Will Be Blood and give my impressions of it here.