Angelina Switches to Signature Black

the real tita

I used to live in LA, hindi ako yun.

Kayang kaya mo yung kaaway mo. I’m pretty sure hindi mo kailangan
ang tulong namin.

briseis, kamusta ka ?

The Majestic Assassination of Jesse James
by Christopher Orr
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 10.05.07
Gentleman bandit. Heartless killer. Confederate martyr. Rank opportunist. Inspiration. Abomination. Jesse James has been considered all of the above by various people at various times, but Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is largely agnostic regarding such disputes. The film is concerned less with the content of James’s character than with the meaning of his murder. Insofar as it asks a question, it is whether a man who has been elevated to myth can continue to coexist with mere mortals. The answer is right there in the title.

The film opens in September 1881, seven months before its titular act. James (Brad Pitt) is 34 years old and living in Kansas City under the name Thomas Howard. The legendary James-Younger gang–which had for years preyed upon banks, stagecoaches, trains, and even a county fair–is no more, its members all caught or killed, save for James and his older brother Frank (Sam Shepard). For a final train robbery, the two men assemble a motley crew of “petty thieves and country rubes,” among them Charley Ford (Sam Rockwell) and his young brother Bob (Casey Affleck), an uncomfortably eager young outlaw. Frank does not take to the boy (”You don’t have the ingredients, son,” he explains), but Jesse is less discerning: “I don’t care who comes with me, never have. That’s why they call me gregarious.”

The train job takes place at night in the Missouri woods, and Dominik stages the scene with uncommon beauty. The gang has thrown a lumber barricade across the tracks and, as the locomotive approaches it, its lone eye shines like a porthole to another world. If the opening heist in 3:10 to Yuma, the season’s first attempt at revivifying the Western, had all the rowdiness of a sporting event, The Assassination’s resembles opera. It is the first of many wonders in a stately epic that, at two hours and forty minutes, takes its time and rewards those willing to do the same.

he robbery itself goes smoothly enough, but the associations it entailed will gradually prove fraught. Frank James soon abandons the gang to move East, leaving Jesse with no comrades beyond the miscreants assembled for the job: his cousin Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner); hyperarticulate ladies’ man **** Liddil (Paul Schneider); slow, nervous Ed Miller (Garret Dillahunt); and, of course, Charley and Bob Ford.

The bulk of the film concerns itself with the shifting dynamics between these men, the affection and jealousies, alliances and betrayals. The others are all in awe of James, but terrified of him, too, and not without reason. The tension is most acute for young Ford, who has kept a stash of Jesse James storybooks under his bed since youth. He craves James’s attention with a lover’s ardor; for him, the famous outlaw is tonic and talisman, an opportunity to transcend his dismal existence. “I been a nobody all my life,” he confesses at one point. “And ever since I can remember it, Jesse James has been as big as a tree.”

James, for his part, has begun to shrink inside himself. Years of being hunted by lawmen and Pinkertons have taken their toll, burying his gregariousness under layers of paranoia and superstition. He is a man who knows that death is coming for him but is uncertain from which direction.

The temptation for Pitt to deliver a Big Performance in such a role must have been considerable, but he (and Dominik) wisely opt for understatement. Unlike Russell Crowe’s Ben Wade in Yuma, James is a man with nothing left to prove, no one he needs to impress. His legend, already secure, is evident less in his own demeanor than in that of the people around him. “Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them,” an authorial voiceover declares at the opening of the film, and, not infrequently, we see the sweat on his companions’ brows.

This becomes an ever more common occurrence as the film progresses and James’s suspicion that his men might betray him grows. As he calmly interrogates one gang member or another, his reputation hovers around him like black smoke, sapping their resolve even as it bolsters his own. There are a few occasions when he resorts to his pistol; more typically, an ominous, attentive silence is weapon enough.

One might expect Ford, with his nervous smile and schoolboy bravado, to be the first to crack, but he manages to endure James’s scrutiny even as he prepares to betray him. “I got qualities that don’t come shining through right at the outset,” Ford announces at one point, and while it’s a laughable boast, it is not an entirely empty one. Ford’s glaring weaknesses do mask underlying strengths, and Affleck captures the contradiction with skill, hugging the line between sympathetic and merely pitiable.

The rest of the cast, too, is exceptional. Shepard, unsurprisingly, seems an actor born for Westerns who’s had the misfortune of working in an era when there have been few worthy ones made. Rockwell and (especially) Schneider give sharp, telegraphic performances as members of the ill-fated gang. Even peripheral characters–Mary-Louise Parker as James’s wife, Zee; Kailin See as the unhappy bride of a despised old man–make the most of limited screen time thanks to Dominik’s meticulous direction and the literate script he adapted from Ron Hansen’s eponymous novel.

To describe the film as a breakthrough for Dominik would be to damn it with understatement. The director’s only previous outing, the Australian film Chopper (2000), was a fascinating criminal psychoportrait, but it had nothing approaching the epic sweep, narrative texture, or sheer cinematic ambition of The Assassination. It is true that the film could perhaps be a touch shorter (an earlier cut ran to more than three hours), but Dominik’s unhurried pace and care for detail offer rewards in every scene.

He is immeasurably aided by the contributions of cinematographer Roger Deakins. His luminous landscapes are reminiscent of Terrence Malick; his interior shots, often candle-lit, are compositions of light and shadow as elegant as oil paintings. Had Rembrandt lived in 19th century Missouri, this is what his work would have looked like. Deakins, who is probably best known for his work with the Coen brothers, is enjoying a remarkable run this year, having also shot Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah and the Coens’ upcoming No Country for Old Men. At Oscar time, the question may come down to which film he wins for.

n the end, though, it is the thematic richness of Dominik’s film that makes it not only the best film of the year so far but a strong contender for the greatest Western since Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West nearly 40 years ago. Like most modern variations on the genre, The Assassination takes the form of an elegy, not merely for the Old West but for the Western itself. Yet Dominik succeeds in conjuring a sense of loss deeper than that of era or genre: the loss of the belief, naive but nonetheless sustaining, that giants might still walk the earth.

In Once Upon a Time in the West, the gunmen who once bestrode the American wilderness were pushed aside by commerce and technology, the relentless encroach of civilization. In Dominik’s more melancholy telling, they were laid to rest by wannabes, boys with picture books and pop guns and a gnawing hunger for notoriety. After Ford shoots James, he briefly becomes a national icon–more recognized, for a time, than the president–but it is an empty, parasitic fame, the ghost-twin of James’s legend. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the story of this transition, of the moment in America when myth was murdered by mere celebrity and we were left, perhaps forever, with only the latter’s meager consolations.

Christopher Orr is a senior editor at The New Republic.

Hi Guli, wish your daughter a speedy recovery. Take care.

Credit JJB.

SB depot to be film set
Eastwood directing movie starring Jolie
By Melissa Pinion-Whitt, Staff Writer
San Bernardino County Sun
Article Launched:10/08/2007 11:04:20 PM PDT
SAN BERNARDINO - “The Cat in the Hat” careened down Antique Row in Pomona, the “Transformers” smashed into a bus on the 210 Freeway, and the former site of Fontana’s Kaiser Steel transformed into a German factory in “Mission Impossible III.”

Hollywood will return to the Inland Empire in a few weeks. This time, the set will be at the historic San Bernardino Santa Fe Depot, for the Clint Eastwood-directed “The Changeling.”

It’s going to be a juggling act for the train station, because the depot will be open for business while filming is under way.

“This is going to be a challenge for sure,” said Mike Fortunato, property manager for the depot.

Crews are scheduled to film in San Bernardino Oct. 23-25, but will be setting up and tearing down a week before and after filming. Fortunato said an old train will be set on the tracks for the shoot.

“The scene does involve an old railroad station, but not the one in San Bernardino. It’s to replicate another Southern California station,” Fortunato said.

He did not know if the film’s star, Angelina Jolie, would be on set during the three-day shoot. Universal Pictures officials released few details about the film and said the movie set would be closed to the media.

Meanwhile, the depot’s Metrolink and Amtrak service won’t be interrupted.

“The Changeling,” based on actual events in the 1920s in Los Angeles, focuses on a woman (Jolie) whose son is kidnapped. The boy is eventually returned, but she soon suspects he is not hers, according to the Internet Movie Database. The woman then confronts corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department, according to Variety.com.

It is scheduled for release in November 2008.

http://www2.sbsun.com/news/ci_7122907

OH WHATEVER!!!! THIS FAMILY IS BEAUTIFUL AND ADORABLE, PERIOD!!!!

191 sara : 10/09/2007 at 8:49 pm

On bunch of Korean news shows, they had segments on the Jump show with footage of Brad and Angelina. I think the camera crew that was there to shoot the show spent quite a bit of time filming the Jolie-Pitts. Brad and Angelina sat next to each other with Pax. Maddox sat in front of them with the Aronson family. Before the show, they were flipping through the playbill and talking to each other. During the show, Angelina was really enjoying the show with huge smile on her face and Brad was sitting comfortably, smiling and chewing gum. Maddox was smiling. When they were leaving, the news crew followed them out to ask how they enjoy the show, Angie said it was amazing and Brad said it was great. But then the crew kept following them out onto the sidewalk! At that point Brad just told them, “Ok man, let it go, yeah?” and they were left alone.

___________________

Thaks :)
It was nice of them to leave them alone.

the real tita

ROTFLMAO!! I love love your wit humor! We love to have you!!

please answer me -leah

” After Ford shoots James, he briefly becomes a national icon–more recognized, for a time, than the president–but it is an empty, parasitic fame, the ghost-twin of James’s legend.”

I wonder if Ford’s fate is also in store for x. Time will tell.

#213: did you send me an e-mail? I’ll send you one right now if you haven’t yet. Huli ka!!!!!

217 the real tita : 10/09/2007 at 9:48 pm

LOL..asan ang sulat mo? hinihintay ko!

#219: nandyan na!

#21*: Prue H…didn’t realize you were a kababayan. What a small world. Love your posts.

Ay mali, iyong isa ko palang pangalan ang nagamit ko (iyon ang default ko sa trabaho). Kumusta ba, ellen at no longer a lurker. Beauty talaga si Miss Jolie, ano?

221 the real tita : 10/09/2007 at 10:03 pm
#219: nandyan na!
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Wala pa ah ? Mali ang hula mo!