Coosa Creek Times, 3-29-2008

You know him as the guy from the original Office, you love him as he hapless wannabe actor in Extras and soon, now he’s blogging on the new film he’s directing. This Side of the Truth is Ricky Gervais’ blog about the process of making his new film of the same name. It is hilarious; here’s an excerpt:

CASTING UPDATE….
…Jason Bateman is the latest addition to join the cast.

“I’m a huge fan of Jason” says Ricky. “I love his acting style and he’s a lovely guy. When he kept calling me and begging to have a walk-on part in the film I said yes immediately. Well, I said, ‘why are you so desperate?’ first.”

Apparently “Master Bateman” as he likes to be called, has spent his amassed wealth on crack and a botched sex change operation.

Now he has what he calls, “a mess down there”, but he doesn’t care as he is permanently “out of it”.

There are videos and links to videos, and you can register to get “the odd email from Ricky when he’s got something to tell you.”

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Dave Kehr has a nice tribute to Richard Widmark, who passed away this week. Observing that many leading men of his generation began their careers playing heavies, Kehr notes that Widmark never quite got over it:

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mr. Widmark never quite shook the dark associations of his early roles, even after his studio, 20th Century Fox, rehabilitated him as a leading man. The obituaries that followed Mr. Widmark’s death almost invariably began by evoking his first and still most famous film appearance, as the psychotic killer Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway’s 1947 film noir, “Kiss of Death” — a role that required Mr. Widmark to giggle and grin as he bound an old woman (Mildred Dunnock) to her wheelchair and shoved her down a flight of stairs.

By the time I knew who Widmark was, sometime in the sixties, that partial rehabilitation had been accomplished. He was playing authority figures, military roles mostly, so that when I first saw him as Tommy Udo it was a shock, and a not entirely pleasant one, either. I wanted my comforting, steadfast authority figure, not a giggling, sneering psychopath. I didn’t see any of the subtleties, any of the buried darkness that Kehr maintains was there:

Mr. Widmark’s richest roles were those that placed him somewhere in the middle — in that great swamp of moral ambiguity that four years of active conflict and a shadowy new cold war had made Americans ready to acknowledge.

In point of fact, Kehr says,Widmark’s “psycho killers and military leaders shared one prominent character trait: callousness, a quality Mr. Widmark portrayed with disdainful ease.” It’s this quality that made him more than the usual stock heroic figure, and that enabled him to continue to go back and forth between criminals and good guys for his entire career.

You can read Kehr’s entire piece here.