"I’ve worked with far lesser actors who would leave me to read with an assistant when they’re off-camera."

"But Tom does not play that way at all. At one point, his face was literally smashed against the [side] of the camera, to get in my eye line as much as possible, even if I could only see the corner of his eye. He was like, 'What do you need, what can I do, how can I help you?'" 

Said April Grace, about making the movie "Magnolia" with Tom Cruise, quoted in "Tom Cruise is here to help/For more than four decades, the actor has attained near-mythic status by giving us what we want — including seven ‘Mission: Impossible’ movies." (WaPo).

The article, written by Ann Hornaday, a film critic, continues:

It’s easy to be cynical about Cruise’s messianic energy, his zealotry on behalf of an art form that, when he practices it, looks less like a profession than a holy vocation (is it any coincidence that he once contemplated becoming a Franciscan priest?).

Why be "cynical" about "a holy vocation"?! 

"The summer begins with a new crop of sexually explicit, mostly European movies set off from Cannes to the festival circuit and eventually to brief art-house runs..."

"... while Hollywood churns out its chief export of gun-happy escapism and wholesome kid stuff. Between those two channels the classic sex scene — once a staple of high-gloss, adult-oriented, mainstream movies — has been largely forgotten and ignored, recommitted to very esoteric margins it sprang from generations ago.... Today, whether it’s in 'Long Shot' or 'Rocketman,' the sex scene has been reduced to a shorthand, an instantly recognizable grammar that begins with some jokey or flirtatious foreplay, cuts to some flesh (tasteful enough to honor the actors’ no-nudity clauses), then discreetly cuts away....  [A]udiences are now far more attuned to how life and art can’t be separated: Stories of Maria Schneider feeling manipulated and misused on the set of 'Last Tango,' or [Abdellatif] Kechiche’s actresses expressing similar misgivings about how they were treated in 'Blue Is the Warmest Color,' force the discomfiting realization that, all too often, our visual pleasure has been generated by means of an exploitative and dehumanizing production process.... To be sure, there’s precious little to mourn in the death of the kind of ogling soft-core wish-fulfillment fantasies that male directors foisted on viewers for nearly a century. But is abstinence really our only option?"

Asks Ann Hornaday in "Sex is disappearing from the big screen, and it’s making movies less pleasurable" (WaPo).

The top-rated comment: "Could not disagree more. What is implied is always more erotic than what is shown. It is the same with horror movies these days. Every gory act is shown in excruciating detail. With both sex and horror in film, audiences are too rarely given the chance to use the imagination."

I don't go to movies anymore, but I'd say the problem is a lack of adult material but I don't mean the extended, graphic sex scenes. I mean the stories and the emotions. I don't see enough of what's there to really know, but it seems to me there are a lot of flashy spectacles with quick cutting and loud noises and sudden surprises. It's boring unless you're a child or feeling childish.

"Do you know what the ‘Hunger Games’ movies are about?... It’s teenagers killing other teenagers."

Said Rush Limbaugh, quoted in Politico, "Rush ties killings to 'Hunger Games.'" The father of the Santa Barbara murderer was an assistant director on that movie, so what does that mean?

“Why not blame Hollywood movies here? Oh, we can never, ever go there...” [Rush] said, sarcastically.

The "sarcastically" is helpful, because people who don't listen to the show really do have trouble understanding what Rush is trying to say... especially if they are anti-Rush, and the fact is that Rush loves to rope in his antagonists and laugh at the way they don't get him. Listeners — and I am one — are encouraged to think of ourselves as in-the-know insiders. We get it.

I don't think you have to be that smart to get it if you listen and hear the performance of the words, especially if you're on Rush's side, and this interplay between Rush lovers and haters creates energy that Rush endlessly recycles and amplifies. It's a very popular and high-profile show, and yet, listening, you feel included in a pretty friendly little circle. It's magic. A different kind of magic than movies, and so it's interesting to get the radio man's take on Hollywood.

But Politico moves on to something a WaPo columnist wrote and the reaction it got from 2 Hollywoodland critters:

“How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like “Neighbors” and feel, as [suspect Elliot] Rodger did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of “sex and fun and pleasure”?” [Ann] Hornaday wrote over the weekend. “How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them.”

Both [Seth] Rogen and Apatow slammed Hornaday and called the critic misinformed, with Apatow adding that she “milked tragedy.”

Here's the transcript of the Rush show segment, "The Left Takes Another Human Tragedy and Converts It Into a Political Issue." Excerpt:

I can't tell you the number of guys I knew growing up that were bragging about all the sex they were having and it was simply a dream.  They wanted everybody to think it, but they couldn't get past first base any better than this kid could.  And the ones who weren't talking about it were the ones that you learned later on that were the studs. And they weren't talking about it because of manners, self-respect, respect for the girls involved, who knows what.

Of course, movies are that teenboy dream, the bragging of sexually unattractive males like Apatow and Rogen who — via Hollywood — get into a position to make the dream look real through the magic of cinema. Unlike the consumers of the cinema, the filmmakers acquire the money to make the dream real in their lives, even as Rush, through his radio magic, has acquired the money to get him the women he could only dream of in high school.

Rodger was the rich kid who reasoned that since he already had the money, he should already be the man to whom women yield. They didn't, and in his impoverished mind, he couldn't get any farther than that. He had to walk out of the rom-com showing on screen 1 in the multiplex and into the slasher film on screen 2.

"When Franco says the word 'prestidigitation' behind his stoner’s grin, it’s as if he’s uttering it for the first time in English class."

Apparently the new 3D Disney "Oz the Great and Powerful" is terrible and James Franco is "woefully miscast" as the Wizard of Oz.

Is anyone ever miscast and not woefully miscast? Woefully is to miscast as scantily is to clad. Sorry, but the reviewer (WaPo's Ann Hornaday) invited English class thoughts.

Starting with a woefully miscast James Franco in the title role, continuing through a lame story line that’s merely a warmed-over version of the 1939 movie adaptation, and extending to visual effects that never approach the dazzlement and wonder of its revolutionary forbearer, “Oz the Great and Powerful” is a big, over-processed misfire that with a little more care and ingenuity might have lived up to its name.

Okay. Tough luck for fans of 3D children's material for kids and adults. It's all the same to me. But back to English class. Do you know the difference between a "forbearer" and a "forbear" (or "forebear")?  Hornaday doesn't. A "forbearer" is someone who refrains from doing something. If anyone is not a forbearer, it's a revolutionary.

An ancestor/forefather/progenitor is called a "forbear" or "forebear." You may think "forbear" is only a verb, but "bear," the suffix, comes from "beer," which means "one who is or exists." Does that seem weird? Break it in half. It's be-er. So you see why you don't need the "-er" on "forbear"? It's there already, in the "-ar." Don't let the drink "beer" or the animal "bear" confuse you here. Your forefathers are your forbears, and if they were forbearers you would not be a beer.

The OED quotes a 1786 Robert Burns poem "The Death And Dying Words Of Poor Mailie, The Author's Only Pet Yowe" which isn't about a bear but a sheep (yowe = ewe):

An' may they never learn the gaets,
Of ither vile, wanrestfu' pets—
To slink thro' slaps, an' reave an' steal
At stacks o' pease, or stocks o' kail!
So may they, like their great forbears,
For mony a year come thro the shears:
So wives will gie them bits o' bread,
An' bairns greet for them when they're dead.