Nervepop’s Bilge Ebiri has two “Greatest Running Scenes in Movie History” pieces up — part 1 and part 2. The usual suspects (Franka Potente in Run Lola Run, Cary Grant in the Illinois cornfield in North by Northwest, etc.) are written about.
The question — the riveting visual issue — is which actors have looked really terrific when called upon to run in this and that scene? Answers (none of which appear in the Nerve.com articles): (a) Burt Lancaster running around rural France in The Train, (b) Robert Redford running around Chicago in The Sting, and (c) Dustin Hoffman running around Manhattan in Marathon Man.
The awareness and interest in Judd Apatow, Gregg Mottola and Seth Rogen‘s Superbad is still on the soft side, and Sony Pictures, believe it or not, is not planning on sneaking it the weekend after next to give it a boost. This morning’s tracking on the funniest teen-sex movie in recent history indicates a continuing low-energy situation out there — 37% general awareness, 29% of this group have a definite interest, 1% is calling it a first choice and there’s a 1% unaided awareness.
Superbad costars Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse
So the film sells itself, but the only way to change things at this stage of the game is to sneak it. And yet Sony, for reasons that will perhaps one day be understood, is not planning to do this, according to two Sony publicists I spoke to this morning.
R-rated comedies take longer to build awareness. TV buys are very limited with a blue comedy of this sort. There’s a huge word-of-mouth screening program going on right now, yes, but Superbad clearly sells itself like gangbusters so why not sneak it? What could the possible downside be to this strategy?
I saw Superbad again last night, this time with my son Jett, 19. He loved it — laughed, howled, thought everyone and everything was out-of-sight brilliant except for some of the more outlandish stuff with the alchoholic, self-destructive cops (Seth Rogen, Bill Hader). But he was also adamant as we came out that the Sony green-band trailer (i.e., the more widely distributed family-friendly version) has totally blown it in conveying how off-the-ground funny and super-witty this film really is.
“The trailer is not selling what it is,” Jett said twice. “It shows the physical slapstick comedy and the gross-out stuff, but none of the really wild-ass funny material. And the poster doesn’t say much of anything.”
I agree about the poster also. it’s just Jonah Hill and Michael Cera standing there and going “‘huh?”
” I was feeling kind ‘maybe’ about it, based on the trailer,” Jett said. “I knew that Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen being in it meant it would probably be pretty funny, but now that I know that it’s much better than this, I think they’re really blowing it.”
The R-rated red-band trailer does a slightly better job at conveying how Superbad plays. It’s viewable on the Superbad site, but red-band trailers are rarely shown in theatres and can’t be shown on the tube.
This morning’s tracking indicates that others out there have had the same reaction to the green-band trailer that Jett had — one of limited enthusiasm — before seeing it.
A marketing veteran tells me the only way Sony marketers could get the real magic and flavor of this film would to be to show an entire scene — the first McLovin fake ID scene when Hill rips into Christopher Mintz-Plasse for being an idiot — but that would necessitate including profanity and that means the usual restrictios.
In my 7.12 review, I called Superbad “the funniest, most cleverly written youth comedy in I-don’t-know- how-many-years. Produced by Judd Apatow and co-written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, it’s a better teen-sex film — funnier, wilder, more truthful even — than The 40 Year-Old Virgin or Knocked Up are in their respective realms.
“It also marks the return of director Greg Mottola, who’s been working steadily on television but languishing in movie jail since the success d’estime of The Daytrippers eleven years ago.
“Superbad also heralds the arrival of the funniest comic trio since the post-Duck Soup Marx Brothers — Jonah Hill (sociopathic big-mouthed fat guy), Michael Cera (bright, quiet, thoughtful guy) and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (dweeby, pale-faced nerd). I’m serious — these guys are the total dynamo right now.
“You should have heard the crowd laughing last night at the Arclight. The oil was blowing out of the ground and splattering everyone in sight.”
In the Bourne movies, Matt Damon “looks like a bullet [with] short hair, no stubble to speak of, and a blunt nose,” New Yorker critic David Denby observes. “In violent scenes, his eyes go dead, and he has a strong, compact body, which he hurls through the frame, ricocheting off walls, windows, cars, and fences. As Damon plays him — silent, wary — Bourne thinks with his body. He seems to have sensors attached to his limbs and his head, and he reacts instantly to threats.
New Yorker illustration by Frank Stockton
“I used to be a purist about action sequences, demanding that bodies in combat be seen in full frame and without too much cutting. A few directors are still capable of that kind of classicism (Wolfgang Petersen in Troy, David Cronenberg in A History of Violence), but Paul Greengrass, who also made the superb United 93, shoots scenes in tiny fragments, and when he does it I see the point — the gain in speed and power is extraordinary.
“The camera trembles and shakes and hurtles in Ultimatum, as if we were trapped inside the moving Bourne, and yet, on the fly, we see what we need to see. Gathering the fragments, Greengrass keeps some of the chase scenes going for ten minutes at a time. You come out of the movie both excited and soothed, as if your body had been worked on by felt-covered drumsticks.”
At a San Franciso Film Festival seminar last April I asked legendary editor Walter Murch (Cold Mountain, Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Talented Mr. Ripley) about machine-gun cutting in action movies, and at what point does it get to be too much? I was thinking at the time of the editing in 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, portions of which had driven me crazy. Murch said audiences do indeed start to go crazy if you use more than 14 set-ups per minute.
One can obviously cut back to the same set-up — a visual point of view — within a given minute, so Murch wasn’t saying only 14 cuts every 60 seconds. Nor was he necessarily putting a limit on the number of cuts per set-up. But let’s say for the sake of simplicity that during an action sequence you use two cuts per set-up — by Murch’s rule that would mean no more than 28 cuts per minute, or a little more than two seconds per cut. That sounds too frenzied, doesn’t it? But maybe not.
In an 8.2 Hollywod Reporter interview, Carolyn Giardina has spoken to to Bourne Ultimatum editor Christopher Rouse and producer Patrick Crowley about the mathematics of cutting in their new film.
Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has reported The Bourne Ultimatum‘s running time as 115 minutes. Subtract seven or eight minutes of opening and closing credits and you’re down to 107 minutes of actual footage. Crowley tells Giardina that Ultimatum has “about 4000 cuts.” Divide those 4000 cuts by 107 minutes and you’re left with 37 cuts per minute, or a cut every one and two-thirds seconds.
Crowley doesn’t say how many set-ups were used in Ultimatum so there’s room for interpretation, but if you go by Murch’s rule — no more than 14 set-ups per minute — and then a hypothetical 28 cuts per minute if you use two cuts per-set-up, Ultimatum has been cut more than 25% faster.
In other words, according to one interpretation of Murch’s law, The Bourne Ultimatum is going to drive a lot of people crazy. Only it doesn’t. This is probably due to the set-up count. Perhaps Rouse is cutting back and forth between only seven or eight set-ups per minute, or nine or ten. A lot of the film is obviously fluid and moving and hand-held. To repeat, Murch’s law is about not laying too many cuts on an audience within a given minute, but too many points of view.
The funny part is that The Bourne Supremacy was cut slower — 3500 cuts, according to Crowley — and yet it irritated me here and there. During the three or four high-velocity stand-out sequences, that is. And yet Ultimatum, for whatever reason, isn’t irksome at all.
Supremacy ran 109 minutes, so take away 7 or 8 minutes for credits and you’re left with 102 minutes. 3500 cuts means a little more than 32 cuts per minute, or a little more than one every two seconds.
I sat through a memorable showing of Showgirls once at Robert Evans‘ Beverly Hills home in the early fall of ’95. In Evans’ legendary rear bungalow, that is, behind his egg-shaped pool in the backyard of his French chateau-styled place on Woodland Avenue. With Jack Nicholson of all people, as well as Bryan Singer, Chris McQuarrie, Tom DeSanto and two or three others. With everyone hating it but sitting through the damn thing anyway because Nicholson had come over to see it and nobody wanted to be contrary.
All that ended when Nicholson, who was sitting right under the projection window against the rear wall, stretched his arms and put his two hands right in front of the lamp. The resulting hand-silhouette on top of Elizabeth Berkeley and her grinding costars conveyed his opinion well enough, and suddenly everyone felt at liberty to talk and groan and make cracks and leave for cigarette breaks. Nicholson and Singer ducked out at one point, and I joined them. (I had recently seen Paul Verhoeven‘s film and had no desire to suffer a second time.)
I was Evans’ journalist pal that year. I had written a big piece about Hollywood Republicans earlier that year for Los Angeles magazine, and Evans had been a very helpful source. As a favor I’d arranged for him to meet some just-emerging GenX filmmakers — Owen Wilson, Don Murphy, Jane Hamsher, et. al. — so that maybe, just maybe, he could possibly talk about making films with them down the road.
Anyway, it was sometime in late September and Evans, myself, Singer, DeSanto and McQuarrie were having dinner in the back house, and Evans was doing a superb job of not asking the younger guys anything about themselves. He spoke only about his past, his lore, his legend. But the food was excellent and the vibe was cool and settled.
Then out of the blue (or out of the black of night) a window opened and Nicholson, wearing his trademark shades, popped his head in and announced to everyone without saying hello that “you guys should finish…don’t worry, don’t hurry or anything…we’ll just be in the house…take your time.”
What? Singer, McQuarrie and DeSanto glanced at each other. Did that just happen? Evans told us that Nicholson was there to watch Showgirls, which they’d made arrangements for much earlier. He invited us stay and watch if we wanted. Nobody wanted to sit through Showgirls — the word was out on it — but missing out on the Nicholson schmooze time was, of course, out of the question.
There was a little talk after it ended. I recall DeSanto (Apt Pupil, X-Men, X2, Transformers) introducing himself to Nicholson and Jack, who had brought two women with him, saying, “And it’s very nice to meet you, Tom.” Gesturing towards Girl #1, he then said to DeSanto, “And I’d like you to meet Cindy and…” Lethal pause. Nicholson had forgotten the other woman’s name. He recovered by grinning and saying with a certain flourish, “Well, these are the girls!” The woman he’d blanked on gave Nicholson an awful look.
We all said goodbye in the foyer of Evans’ main home. Nicholson’s mood was giddy, silly; he was laughing like a teenaged kid who’d just chugged two 16-ounce cans of beer and didn’t care about anything. I was thinking it must be fun to be able to pretty much follow whatever urge or mood comes to mind, knowing that you probably won’t be turned down or told “no” as long as you use a little charm.
The Sydney Morning Herald‘s 8.1. byline-free piece about the five biggest stinkers of all time — Elaine May‘s Ishtar, Michael Cimino‘s Heaven’s Gate, Paul Verhoeven‘s Showgirls, Oliver Stone‘s Alexander; and Kevin Reynolds‘ Waterworld — finally decides that Showgirls is the worst of all.
I say it’s Waterworld because of two things. One, the decision to shoot in 1.85 instead of 2.35 Scope — part of the idea, obviously, was to convey the vastness of a world covered in water, and the widescreen aspect ratio would have certainly given audiences a better feel for this. And two, the fact that Waterworld‘s huge budget and all that location shooting off the big island of Hawaii led to almost nothing memorable. Alfred Hitchcock did a better job of capturing the magnificent energy, terror and turbulence of the ocean in Lifeboat, which was shot in a studio tank with rear-screen projection.
Of course, these five are only the bad or calamity-ridden films that got the most press. There have been many films more painful to watch than these.
According to Blowup costar Ronan O’Casey, who explained the full, partially-unfilmed plot of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s 1996 classic to Roger Ebert seven years ago, the inattention paid to the murder plot — on Antonioni’s part as well as that of David Hemming‘s photographer character — was a kind of accident. Antonioni was forced to go all mysterious and inconclusive, he says, because producer Carlo Ponti shut the film down before all the scenes were shot.
Ronan O’Casey’s only Blowup closeup
“The intended story was as follows: the young lover, armed with a pistol, was to precede Vanessa [Redgrave] and me to Maryon Park in London, conceal himself in the bushes and await our arrival,” O’Casey explains. “I pick up Vanessa in a nice new dark green Jaguar and we drive through London — giving Antonioni a chance to film that swinging, trendy, sixties city of the Beatles, Mary Quant, the Rolling Stones, and Carnaby Street. We stop and I buy Vanessa a man’s watch, which she wears throughout the rest of the film.
“We then saunter into the park, stopping now and then to kiss (lucky me). In the center of the park, Vanessa gives me a passionate embrace and prolonged kiss, and glances at the spot where her new lover is hiding. He shoots me (unlucky me), and the two leave the park intending to drive away. Their plans goes awry when he notices Hemmings with his camera and fears that Hemmings has photos of her. As it turns out, he has.
“None of this was ever shot. There were other scenes, such as those between Sarah Miles and Jeremy Glover [i.e, Vanessa’s character’s boyfriend who was also the trigger man in Maryon Park] that also went unrealized. Some of the scenes that were shot pertaining to the murder plot ended up in the film, but are completely puzzling to the audience. For example, in the film there is a scene with Vanessa and Hemmings at a cafe.” Wrong! The scene hes’ describing is between Hemmings and his bearded book editor.] A young man approaches, notices that she is with Hemmings, and runs away. That’s Glover. This makes for an odd, mysterious moment because the audience is completely ignorant of his identity.”
Ponti did Antonioni a favor, of course. If the all of this murder-plot, watch-buying stuff had been filmed and integrated into the film, Blowup would have been a much lesser work. That moment when Glover approaches the cafe and then walks away is perfect — absolutely perfect.
Three days ago L.A. Times guy Geoff Boucher wrote about getting sucker-punched by some tattooed, shaved-head, cutoff-wearing hormone monster in San Diego’s Gaslamp district during Comic-Con, and getting knocked to the ground and going home the next day with staples in his head.
And then yesterday Transformers and Shoot ‘Em Up producer Don Murphy posted a comment on Anne Thompson‘s blog saying that he and his wife “suffered a similar attack [last] Thursday night/Friday morning that left us in the emergency room for hours….we were with a group of twelve, six people attacked, two arrested.”
Boucher writes that “the cops at the scene said this sort of incident isn’t that rare” — i.e., is somewhat common — and commenters on the Boucher essay page, some of them San Diego residents, haven’t strenuously disagreed with a with a commenter named “Rob D” calling the Gaslamp district “a magnet for stupidity…on any given night during the summer you’ll see people stumbling into the street, hanging on street lights and yelling incoherent drunken shit..[the area is] literally a haven for the retarded.”
This is an issue that Comic-Con and the city of San Diego need to address. The remedy, obviously, is hiring extra security to patrol the Gaslamp streets, and to keep a particular eye on beefy 20-something apes with shaved heads and tattoos and other sartorial indications of rage and alienation. This is not an issue for geeks — the Comic-Con faithful are generally cool, cerebral, spiritually impassioned types who would never pop anyone — but the simian under-class types that hang out in the neighborhod adjacent to the San Diego Convention Center.
It’s not unheard of for lower-class brutes of any municipality to express loathing for the connected cell-phone class that visits for a film festival or whatever.
Six or seven years ago I was talking to someone on my Motorola while standing on Park City’s Main Street during the Sundance Film Festival, and some townie drove by in a Chevy Silverado and yelled out, “Look — another asshole with a cellphone!” I yelled back, “Look — another asshole in a pickup truck!” The truck immediately pulled over and two guys got out and charged over, obviously looking to get down, but I went into my Matrix Reloaded mode and in less than ten seconds they were both moaning on the pavement, in the fetal position and begging for mercy. I wailed on them again for good measure, and they cried and whimpered like the pathetic bitches they were and always will be.
Okay, everything after the word “truck” is made up. As if I needed to say that.
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