Pedro & Penélope / Quentin & Diane

My best friend Jensen, whose favorite filmmakers are Andrei Tarkovsky and Pedro Almodóvar, brought me home this Spanish Vanity Fair (pictured left, April 2009) from his trip to Barcelona. Before he left he kept imagining fourgies with Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson. He was okay with any combo should one of them be unavailable. His cinematically inspired fantasy did not come to pass but things did heat up: he nearly burned down his hotel room. True story (!) albeit not for this blog.

Here in the States April's Vanity Fair cover gave us the overexposed Apatow boys. I demand a refund!

I can't read Spanish but I like pretty pictures and they require no linguistic skills.


I love pretending that Penélope is a badass harpist, don't you? Not every actress can pluck those multi-colored strings. It's a rarified skill.

Speaking of directors and their muses...

Did you see Sunday's NY Times Magazine? The piece on Quentin Tarantino is a good read and the photos are wicked, saucily playing up QT's well known foot fetish. Wiggling those big toes aside for a moment, I love this quote when he's asked about Pulp Fiction's Palme D'Or win in 1994 and who the jury president was.

Clint Eastwood. And the second head of the jury was Catherine Deneuve. I think of her as the queen of France. So having the queen judge your movie is scary until you remember that she did Belle de Jour. She turned out to be one of my bigger defenders. She's spent an entire career supporting directors who pushed the envelope, from Buñuel to Jean-Pierre Melville to Godard

You mean Deneuve isn't the queen of France? Someone needs to fix that maintenant -- let's make it official. Tarantino can be annoying but he knows cinema and great actresses and every director should.

Still, I have to admit... seeing these photos of QT drooling on Diane Kruger's gams (which somehow promotes Inglourious Basterds. Don't ask me how) made me jealous on behalf of one Uma Thurman.


If Tarantino is suddenly going to be prolific again (here's hoping) can he please put Uma back in the driver's seat where she belongs? Few other filmmaker seem likely to do it.
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