Hold Your Next Film Industry Birthday Party at MoMA!

My inability to cover last night's Alfonso Cuarón/Guillermo Del Toro/Alejandro González Iñárritu panel chat at Hunter College (moderated by David Carr!) has gripped my conscience like a lost $100 bill all day long. But now, thanks to New York Magazine's Jada Yuan, news of Cuarón's subsequent MoMA visit (for a screening of Children of Men) has restored my spirits to pre-failure levels of happy complacency:

Extended Birthday Mix: The "city's best mariachi band," joined by director Guillermo Del Toro (center), serenade birthday bot Alfonso Cuaron at MoMA (Photo: Dave Allocca/startraksphoto.com)

It seems it was a shocked Cuarón's 45th birthday. He accepted a cake from one of his Universal Pictures producers and then stood there for a good five minutes while Del Toro and Iñárritu sang along to the exceedingly long Mexican birthday song, "Las Mañanitas," which translates to "little morning songs." Cuarón shook his head as they finished. "It's kind of embarrassing when you're holding the cake and you're under the spot and you know that it's a damn long song. You never know how many verses they'll sing. If you sing the whole thing, it could be days. There's, like, 30 verses. I don't even know what they're all about. Something to do with birds and flowers, the sun rising around your day, different metaphors around the same thing." Del Toro, the most enthusiastic cantante of the bunch, laughed. "It's a really long song, but I think the longest it ever goes is 20 minutes."

Ha! You know, on a somewhat related note, Sienna Miller's birthday is Dec. 28 -- one day before Factory Girl's limited release. Perhaps MoMA could arrange a screening for New York's surviving Warhol elite and get Lou Reed to sing all 19 minutes of "Sister Ray"? And Miller would wilt with her cupcake and say afterward, "There's, like, 30 verses. I don't even know what they're all about. Something to do with a sailor, sucking on a ding-dong, different metaphors around the same thing..."

Oh, fuck. Never mind.

Posted at November 29, 2006 2:03 PM