Remember that graph of M. Night Shyamalan’s career trajectory based on his movies’ RottenTomato scores over time?  Some Poindexter over at Slate put together an actual application that graphs actors’ and directors’ careers based on their RottenTomato scores.  Obviously, movies aren’t math, and as we’ve learned, most critics are stupid, but it’s still fun. Among their shocking discoveries, the highest average film score belongs to French actor Daniel Auteuil.  Among Americans and people you’ve actually heard of, the top spot belongs to John Ratzenberger.  That’s right, Cliff Clavin from Cheers.  It’s a little-known fact that John Ratzenberger is the best actor in America.

Best Actor: Daniel Auteuil. With an average film score of 86 percent, Auteuil has appeared in the most consistently high-quality films of the last few decades. The French star, best known for his role in Jean de Florette (1986), may benefit from the critical soft spot for foreign films. If you prefer to count only red-blooded Americans, the top honor goes to John Ratzenberger (76.1 percent average), who has voiced a character in every Pixar movie to date. [Slate]

Oh right, Pixar.  Meanwhile, if you throw out his voice work, he’s got scores of 0% (House II: The Second Story, starring Bill Maher, among others), 13% (for That Darn Cat, with Doug E. Doug), and who could forget the 2007 Jamie Kennedy vehicle, Kickin’ It Old Skool, which rated 2%.  The lone positive review came from Caroline Kepnes of E, who wrote, “This is the kind of movie in which a fat guy in a bra gets felt up by three guys at once,” which, to be fair, does make it sound pretty good. Meanwhile, worst actor honors go to Chuck Norris (20) and Jennifer Love Hewitt (18.9). Now, it was at this point in writing this post that I realized that this Slate article is from a few weeks ago, but I’ve included a few notable career graphs below, because God knows I’m not wasting all this work.
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Last month it was reported that Will Smith was close to a deal to play the lead role in Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming spaghetti slave western, Django Unchained.  But shock of all shocks, it sounds like Captain Squeaky-Clean Image won’t be signing up for a movie where six of the characters are probably named the N-word. Deadline says it will be Jamie Foxx instead, who’s a better actor anyway, even if he does seem like he loves himself a whoooole lot.

Quentin Tarantino has made his choice and negotiations will begin. Tarantino’s next film will be distributed domestically by The Weinstein Company and overseas by Sony Pictures. Production begins November.
Foxx will join Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson in a Sergio Leone-style spaghetti Western that Tarantino wrote and has set in Mississippi during slavery. No deal has been made yet, but it shouldn’t take long. While the early focus had Will Smith the likely participant, Deadline told you on June 7 that those talks had gone south, and we were first to identify Foxx as a prime contender for the role along with Idris Elba and Chris Tucker.

Chris Tucker, huh?  DO YOU, UNNASTAND, THE SLAVES, THAT ARE COMIN OUTTA THE SOUFF?

The choice of Foxx is an inspired one.  Django is a slave who’s liberated by a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter and taught the tricks of the trade by his mentor. Django’s major goal in life is to recover his wife, and to do it he needs to get past the villainous ranch owner Calvin Candie (DiCaprio), who runs Candyland, a despicable club and plantation in Mississippi where female slaves are exploited as sex objects and males are pitted against each other in “mandingo”-style death matches. Candie is a slave’s worst nightmare, and that [sic] is where Django’s wife Broomhilda is an abused slave. [Deadline]

Damn, here I was, all set to make a joke about “Foxx is an inspired one”, but I think I just got skullf*cked by that synopsis.  Does… “mandingo-style death matches” mean… cockfights? …”Broomhilda?”  I have to wonder who was a greater influence on this script. QT’s coke wizard, Alan Ball’s minah birds, or the erotic feet of some as-yet-unidentified muse.  In the end it sounds awesome, so I guess I don’t really care.  (*sigh*) I simply adore that coked-up, bird-hating foot f*cker.

“You mean the one with all the sh*t in her face?”

“No… That’s Jody.  …My wife.”

The latest issue of GQ has an oral history of Nirvana (I wonder if my generation will someday talk about grunge as obnoxiously as the Baby Boomers do Bob Dylan), and one of the more interesting tidbits was that, according to Courtney Love, Quentin Tarantino once asked Kurt Cobain to play Lance, the lazy drug dealer part in Pulp Fiction which eventually went to Eric Stoltz (who did an amazing job).

Courtney Love:
At the same time, boy, was he excited when the scripts started coming in. You ever wonder why he thanked Quentin [Tarantino] on the back of In Utero? Quentin asked him to play Eric Stoltz’s part in Pulp Fiction. You can ask Quentin that, because it’s true.

Love went on to add, “Quentin thought Kurt would be just perfect for the part of a laidback hippie married to some shrill, bitchy harpy who looked like trailer trash and was always running her mouth about some dumb sh– HEY WAIT A MINUTE!”

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Our long national nightmare is over.  Quentin Tarantino’s lawsuit against his neighbor, American Beauty writer and Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, has been settled.  Almost too predictably, the suit had accused Ball of owning a gaggle of noisy parrots.  The birds reportedly disturbed Tarantino to the point that he was unable to do lots of coke I mean work.  The complaint was notable for containing the words “exotic bird menagerie” and “obnoxious, pterodactyl-like screams.” Comparing a noise to the sound of something that’s been dead for millions of years seems to me very unscientific, but you know these grandiose Hollywood types.

News that the case had gone the way of the birds was delivered matter-of-factly by Tarantino’s attorney, Marty Singer, in a flattering [read: boring -Ed.] New York Times profile of the celebrity litigator.
According to the lawsuit, after Tarantinto complained about the birds, Ball promised to build a soundproof outdoor aviary to reduce the noise, and until then, the birds would be kept inside until the structure was built. The move temporarily relieved Tarantino of some of the noise, he claimed, but by last June, the exotic birds were allegedly once again left outside for several hours per day, which prompted Tarantino to get Singer involved. [THR]

[The passage in question from the NY Times] “That’s been resolved,” Mr. Singer says. Mr. Tarantino has since finished his latest screenplay.
“Some people said it’s the best script he’s ever written, because he had the peace and quiet,” Mr. Singer says. [NYTimes]

Hence the old saying: behind every great writer is a great bird lawyer.  This also marks the first time one of Tarantino’s complaints about noisy birds wasn’t thrown out on account of him hallucinating.  He and the coke wizard usually settle out of court.

I really need to start checking LettersofNote more often, because they have some incredible stuff on there. You may remember Marlon Brando’s el creepo letter to a stewardess, or Hunter Thompson’s righteous anger at The Shooting Gallery.  Thanks to i09 for today’s find, a 1996 letter from Quentin Tarantino to a 13-year-old fan named Sarah, who’d apparently enjoyed Tarantino’s portrayal of Richie Gecko in From Dusk Till Dawn so much that she felt compelled to write.  This is the transcript of Tarantino’s response, in which you’ll once again notice what an unprecedented combination of brilliantly creative writer and hopeless dyslexic he is (no jokes or exaggerations intended there).

Hi Sarah

Thank you for your very lovley letter. It’s the best letter I’ve gotten all year long. I’m glad you loved “Dusk”, it was one of my favrote times making a movie. And I feel my best performance so far. It’s cool to hear a girl into horror flicks.

Rock on Sarah!!

Do you know about Itallion horror film maker Mario Bava? He did Blood and Black Lace, Black Sunday and Black Sabbith. He’s one of my favrotes. I read your letter to Mira [Sorvino, who Tarantino was dating at the time -Ed.], she loved it too. Write me anytime. I can’t wait for you to get your hands on a camera too.

With all my love

(Signed)

P.S. Sarah, since you liked Dusk so much, coming out soon is a movie we did about the making of “Dusk” called “Full Tilt Boogie”. It shows how much fun we had. I hope you like it.

Not even a cynical-for-a-living prick like me could read that without saying “awww.”  It may not be hard, but writing a heartfelt letter to a young fan will always endear you faster than Mickey Rourke kissing his tiny dog (if the ASPCA would replace that stupid Sarah McClachlan commercial with Mickey Rourke kissing his dog, I would throw my entire wallet at them every time it came on). Now for the weird part: Tarantino’s character in Dusk Till Dawn was a perverted psychopath who offered to eat Juliette Lewis’ pussy after he had a hallucination in which she asked him to.  And this was the character 13-year-old Sarah was so drawn to.  I’m not sure if she’s a Tarantino fan, or a Tarantino character (I picture her basically as the little girl from The Crow).  In fact, I think the coke wizard may have written that letter and slipped it in Quentin’s vest pocket while he was out chopping wood. Q-Ball never chops wood in his vest, always the pith helmet.

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