cheech

A book I saw at the library Thursday, that I'd read before, was Two Weeks in the Midday Sun, a fun little book about the Cannes Festival by Roger Ebert. He discusses the berserk promotion, fighting amongst industry people from fans to critics to actors and studio execs and so on.
He mentions conversationmanship, the process by which critics try to trip up other writers whom they think were sleeping or not thoroughly paying attention to a film. Since the Cannes schedule is 24 hours of relentless screenings, a critic might see a colleague dozing off a few seats over and ask him at a cafe later, "Sowhat did you make of the part with the elephant dying? Was it allegory?" ...even if, in fact, no elephant had shown up at all.
He goes on, in the following page:

My favorite case of conversationmanship occurred some years ago after a Korean film, The Castle and the RoseThis was a film said to break new ground in Korea, because it dealt for the first time with homosexuality. The film was further remarkable for having been shot outdoors on indoor sets, so that interiors of rooms were lit by the sun. This caused some striking effects, as when the characters cast stark shadows on the furniture, and talked with plumes of frost on their breath.
In the film, the heroines husband has run away to St. Louis, Missouri (invariably referred to in the film as St. Louis, Missouri) and, at the time the story opens, has not been heard from in some time. The heroine and her daughter worry about him at great length, and look at his photograph in the family album, until one day the husband turns up again. He has clearly been to St. Louis, since he is wearing a bright red plaid Pendleton shirt and smoking a pipe. He announces he has become a homosexual. There is great lamentation from his family.
At this point in the screening, Gene Siskel slipped quickly down the aisle for a visit to the mens room. While he was gone, the heroine went into her bedroom, where in a scene that brought gasps of disbelief from everyone in the theater, she undressed and had sex with her poodle. The she dressed, dried her eyes, and went back to the living room, just in time for Siskel to return from the mens room.
Did I miss anything? he asked.
Only the wife having sex with her dog, I said.
Very funny.
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Ebert also had a chance to interview Isabella Rossellini:

There is a curious story about Isabella Rossellini. When she was a teenager, she contracted some kind of rare disease, and had to be put in a plaster body cast for 18 months. She told me the story one day a couple of years ago. While she was in the cast she was confined to her room, flat on her back, looking up at the ceiling, unable to move. At first her parents and her twin sister were filled with attention, bringing her books and magazines and supplying her with gossip, but as the months passed their attention drifted elsewhere. They came to see her, but not so often, and the strangest thing was Isabella did not miss them. Her attention faded and she passed into a reverie, night not much different than day, nothing of very much importance.
When they cut me out of the cast after all that time, she said, I missed it. I felt exposed and insecure without it. At night, I would crawl into the two halves of my cast and sleep with it around me, for security. Wherever I went, the cast went with me. My mother was furious because there was plaster dust everywhere. Finally we moved, and when we unpacked, the cast was nowhere to be found. My mother explained that the maid had probably lost it. The maid never lost anything in her life.