Breaking the Line

Marianne Faithfull: "I Was Awfully Beautiful — That Was the Trouble"

Suppose I'd better catch up a bit so a talking vagina isn't the only thing I've posted in a week. How about this interview with Marianne Faithfull, which starts with her new album, Horses and High Heels, works its way back through Brecht and Weill, Broken English and heroin abuse to the mid-'60s, when she was an icon of Swinging London and Mick Jagger's inamorata? I talked to Faithfull two years ago for the movie Irina Palm, in which she played a small-town widow who turns to priming men's pumps for money in order to pay for her grandson's operation. (Yes, really.) This time, we met in person, at a table outside New York's Standard Hotel, where she could smoke freely and reminisce about the bad old days. Through an accident of timing, we met just days before the final edition of The News of the World, an occasion on which she had a few choice words for her longtime tormentor.

Separated at Birth?

   

Jenna Fischer: A "Tragic Misfit" Gets A Little Help

Usually when people say stars are "ordinary," it means they're occasionally spotted in hoodies on the way back from the gym, but The Office's Jenna Fischer actually seems as down-to-earth as the character she plays on the show. That's never entirely true, of course; she may share some of Pam's sweetness and self-deprecation, but she's also, as she told me in an interview, fond of "Excel spreadsheets and five-year-plans," which is why she's an office manager on a hit TV show and not one in real life. For a Hollywood actress, she keeps eccentric company; she was married to Troma alumnus and Super director James Gunn for seven years — they were divorced, she remarried, and is now pregnant with her first — and is good friends with cartoonist Joe Matt, who apparently squeezes social engagements in between the epic bouts of masturbation he chronicles in his comics. A Little Help, the story of a high-school beauty whose dead-end adulthood worsens when her husband abruptly drops dead, is an unremarkable if impressively downbeat indie dramedy — full review when it opens in Philadelphia next week — but there's real heart to Fischer's performance. She was also great in last year's Solitary Man, where the character, a no-nonsense adult who cuts off her irresponsible father, is, she says, much closer to herself.

Archives: Interviews with Fischer's Office co-star Brian Baumgartner, and Solitary Man dad Michael Douglas.

Errol Morris' Tabloid: Villains, Victims and Mormons in Chains

Hey, remember this thing? Me neither, almost. The idea was to keep use this site to keep tabs on my various articles for a far-flung variety of publications, and then I got so busy writing for all those places I got out of the habit of updating. (A midly patchy recent history can be found via my Facebook page). Anyway, before I spend so much time preambling that I lose the will to continue, allow me to point you in the direction of my review of Errol Morris' Tabloid, the director's latest documentary, which investigates the case of Joyce McKinney (the Russ Meyer dreamboat above), whose arrest for imprisoning and assaulting a Mormon missionary is only the beginning of an extremely strange story.

Archives: My interviews with Morris in 2004 for The Fog of War and, way back in 1997, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. Reviews of Standard Operating Procedure, Mr. Death, and his TV series First Person as well as his essential early features.