LINDA, A Highly Successful Call Girl

A Hong Kong lady of the evening with dignity and business sense is superior to her circumstances.
 

Linda is so beautiful, so refined, so aloof that her clients fall in love with her.

She's making a pile with American businessmen—who introduce her to the Chief Executive—who falls for her too.

Her passion for independence only inflames him—he wants to marry her, have children!—they all do, but she is resolutely herself.

Professional cool is the secret of her success, and the allure that enslaves powerful men.

Cops, pimps, hookers, judges, prison guards, psychiatrists, politicians—there isn’t much she can’t deal with.

And when the Chief Executive introduces her to the American President…

Proposed cast: Bingbing Fan (Linda)

 

LINDA is a call girl, a businesswoman and an independent spirit.  Presidents fall in love with her, though she’s not that interested, and she winds up in the Oval Office advising one of them.

Proposed cast: Peter Sarsgaard (Barry)

BARRY is the American  junior executive who’s in love with her.  He will do anything to have her, and ultimately kills for her, which finally gets her attention.

An actor who specializes in playing  Sir Donald:

An actress who does a good Pau Siu-Mei:

Proposed cast: Timothy Watters ("the former American President")

Proposed cast: Teresa Barnwell ("the American Secretary of State")

Proposed cast: Gerardo Puisseaux ("the President")

A Pretentious Pictures production of a dry comedy.  

Going Number Two on Some Recent Movies:

The promising UP IN THE AIR , with classy Vera Farmiga and a beautifully chilling beginning, is a grandchild of Frank Capra (not a bad lineage), and like the Whitmanesque Capra sings the body American and its weathers and wet snow and visible breath. But like all Capracorn it turns into a Christmas movie.

Not one of the reviews of AVATAR I've read remarks that it's an indictment of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—though that's the whole thrust. There's nothing else going on in it but a nod at astral-body metaphysics.

In SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK Ionesco for some reason isn't credited among the writers, but then it lacks his grace. I approve of theft (bad poets borrow, good poets steal, etc.), but why hijack something as hard to sell as miserablism?

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (is that still recent?) is a poisonous Presbyterian vision of sinners in the hands of an angry God.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS treats us to the sight of women being shot in the back by a sniper as they try to escape a burning cinema because they sleep with the wrong soldiers. No more Tarantino movies for me—he insults the intelligence of a nine-year-old.

And no more Oliver Stone. He gets nothing right.

AMERICAN BEAUTY (is that still recent?) is a hypocritical mass of clichés. The Marine disciplinarian who's secretly gay—we haven't met him for the past ten minutes. A man lusts after his teenage daughter—this simply cannot be faced, so they substitute her nude rose-petal-covered girlfriend and then we have a nice safe little film.

NINE: Fellini didn't smoke. And Sophia was in none of his films.

DATE NIGHT: two characters in search of an author.

IT'S COMPLICATED: does a movie have to be ghettoized for the wrinklies to be watchable?

Not as long as the Coen brothers are around. Their A SERIOUS MAN, a retelling of the Book of Job, is not a happy affair but they're our best American filmmakers.

Nevertheless, after sitting through IRON MAN 2 my Precious One says she doesn't want me to take her to any more American movies.

On YouTube:

Boccaccio’s "The Husband" 

Boccaccio's "The Horse Trade" 

Boccaccio's "The Stupid Friar" 

Chaucer’s "The Miller's Tale"

"Red Devil Rag"

"Attack of the Giant Feminists"

"But Is It Love? Or, The Destruction of West Los Angeles"

CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE, a comedy in the spirit of Lubitsch

Reg’d © Library of Congress

A Beverly Hills woman wakes up middle-aged and finds her life with a younger man undignified.

The stage version was performed in New York at the Creative Place Theatre.  Think of...

...only this is her movie, and she gets the younger guy.

Diana, a woman of a certain age, deals with a birthday by throwing out her younger live-in Jim.

They're right for each other, and she regrets it immediately, but she can't take him back: her daughter Jackie, who idolizes and competes with her, tells her Jim has seduced her, and Diana believes it.

So she makes do with the respectable but empty new life she'd thought she needed—with older lawyer Griff.

Jim gives a driving lesson to frantic neurotic Betsy, who almost shoots them off a cliff.  He calms her down and she takes him home. But he can't forget Diana.

Proposed cast: Debra Winger (Diana)

DIANA, the Hamlet at the heart of this comedy, is a clothes designer with a boutique on Rodeo Drive, a house in Beverly Hills, and a younger lover, Jim, her kept man for two years now. There’s nothing she can’t handle—except getting older.


Proposed cast: Adam Kaufman (Jim)

JIM is happy with a champagne-and-sports-car life, but he’s also a talented script-writer who’s postponing seriousness into a future that never comes.  Together they’re fast company.  They must have been brilliant at her birthday party last night.

This morning, though, even while he’s making love to her, she’s spooked.  She tells him he has to go.  She wants something more presentable, more—respectable—before it’s too late.

Which shocks him.  He takes life as it comes, but this is a bit violent.


Proposed cast: Marcia Gay Harden (Betsy) 

BETSY, the suicidal widow of a husband she drove to suicide, is too scattered to pass a driving test, takes a lesson with Jim, spins the car onto a Mulholland Drive cliff and is ready to gun it and take him with her.


Proposed cast: Aidan Quinn (Griff) 

Diana's lawyer GRIFF, more her age and on her success level, has been in love with her for years.  Now’s his chance.  When Jackie tells Diana the lie that Jim has seduced her Diana gives up on Jim and tries to make a go of it with Griff.


Proposed cast: Tanit Phoenix (Jackie) 

JACKIE, Diana’s daughter, idolizes her and so misses no chance to pick at and defy her.  Inwardly shaky, she is outwardly impish and sexy.  She thinks she’s in love with Jim; in fact what she needs is a father.


Proposed cast: Devon Graye (Dylan) 

Betsy's son DYLAN—eccentric hair, psychotic eyes, twitches constantly and rhythmically as if keeping time to music he doesn’t much enjoy—is in the same class at UCLA with Jackie, over whom he moans uncontrollably.  He disgusts her.


Proposed cast: Rosie Perez (Maria) 

MARIA, Diana's housekeeper, is the deadpan foil to Diana's Hamlet, secret ally to Jim, and the one person Diana doesn't dare defy.

Proposed cast: Stockard Channing (Gwen)

GWEN is Diana's mischievous best friend and alter-ego.  She'll take Jim if Diana doesn't want him!  Just kidding.  In an attempt to bring them back together she throws a party and invites both of them, but it turns into a confrontation....

And the final character is Beverly Hills— 

—the tone, the climate, the village size and ambiance that make it inevitable for these people to collide.

The stage version of Chocolate and Champagne was produced by Love Creek  at the Creative Place Theatre in New York.

Pretentious Pictures presents a comedy with a dark center.

Reg’d © Library of Congress