John Rhys-Davies = massive nerd! – You know, you don’t really forget those moments of insanity where it’s like, “Well, John, with this week’s episode, we really have checked it out with the astronomer.” Hmmm. You have three pulsars entering the solar system. “Yes, well, the astronomer says they can come in clusters.” Cut to the astronomer or astrophysicist thinking of a cluster in terms of hundreds of light years. [Laughs.] You do realize, guys, what a pulsar is? “Yes, they spin a lot, and they give off radiation when they do it, and every 24 hours the earth is going to be bathed in this radiation.” Well, you do realize that they spin a little bit faster than that? I think the slowest ones might spin in about four seconds. The other ones spin even faster than that. Milliseconds. What you’ve got is something four times the density of the sun, condensed into something like 20 miles in diameter. Now, does this not suggest to you that it brings another problem? I mean, do you understand how gravity works? And what do you think will happen to the plants? Add to that that it’s not just the one. There are three! Wow. I think that death from 24-hour radiation is the least of our problems! [Laughs.] Oh, it was just insanity.
Contact With The Real: On ’Cosmopolis’ (Los Angeles Review of Books) – Cronenberg has been scrupulously faithful to the thrust of the novel’s ideas. He has cut a scene or two, put dialogue into a character’s mouth that comes from Packer’s internal monologue, and here and there underlined a concept with less than DeLilloan subtlety, but that’s screenwriting for you, and I can’t help but think that DeLillo must be happy with his director-scenarist.
Peter Bogdanovich’s Howard Hawks cards – While I kept a card file on every movie I saw, 1952-1970, I also kept track of films I watched by directors I was most interested in at that time, fifty-five of those, from Aldrich, Robert, to Wilder, Billy. I had separate cards for these, listing their pictures in the order in which I saw them (see actual cards below).
