Day: October 27, 2007

This Telegraph profile of Lions for Lambs costar Andrew Garfield is about as clueless as it gets. Writer Isabel Albiston presumes that Garfield acting in a film directed by Robert Redford will act as a launching pad for his career, when the backstage rumble says otherwise. Supporting actors never get the blame when a film bombs with the critics and/or the pubic, but they never benefit from this. Lambs certainly won’t catapult Garfield to stardom.

Odds are he’ll get a much bigger bump d’estime out of John Crowley‘s Boy A, which I saw at the Toronto Film Festival. The Weinstein Co. has acquired it. Harvey, don’t shelve this one!

Another article about the public’s unwillingness to see Iraq War movies….it won’t stop. The only reason I’m linking to A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times piece is to suggest that Brian Stauffer‘s art — a U.S. solder-in-Iraq action figure with a celluloid magazine feeding out from his rifle — works better with the solder lying on his side.

Having now seen the wonderfully vivid and deeply affecting Criterion Collection DVD of Terrence Malick‘s Days of Heaven, it needs to be said that Criterion producer Lee Kline misrepesented the truth of what this DVD contains in a ridiculously over-amped piece that he posted on the Criterion website on 8.16.

With Malick himself presiding over the final tuning, Kline said the DVD images have been “deliberately unsweetened and “very different” from the previous version because Malick “wanted it to look as natural as possible.” Kline explained that Malick didn’t want the film to look ” too postcard-like” so the watchword during the color correction session was “not too pretty.”

With the “gold and the warmth” taken out, the transfer went “to a really different place” than previous versions,” Kline wrote, and the version that finally emerged was something “beautiful but boy, was it different! I told Terry people were really going to be pretty surprised by this new transfer, since it was such a radical departure from before.”

I saw Days of Heaven in 70 mm on the day it opened — 9.13.78 — at the Cinema 1 on Third Avenue, and the Criterion DVD took me right back to that transporting experience. This is how it looked back then, and should have always looked. And what a sound mix! The rumble of thunder and steam engines is just as strong, but the dialogue is easier to hear than it was way back when. (High-end, multi-channel sound systems in the ’70s were more about delivering “oomph” sounds.)

Maybe the version on 1999 Paramount Home Video DVD was a little warmer or richer, fine, but the defining difference between that eight-year-old disc and the Criterion version is clarity, sharpness and a more delicate rendering of the almost eerie natural beauty of Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler‘s photography — a feeling of Andrew Wyeth-y purity made all the more breathtaking by the careful application of God’s natural light. Criterion absolutely needs to produce a high-def version.

Kline, no offense, is an idiot for thinking that fans of the film would be “surprised” by this transfer — it’s a God-send — and a serious boob for having written all that hooey on the Criterion blog, which he knew damn well would stir things up. Kline was trying to sell DVDs in the manner of a flim-flam man hawking stuff from the back of a horse-drawn wagon. I will never take anything he writes about a Criterion DVD seriously again.

Go to this DVD Beaver page to see a couple of decent frame-capture comparisons between the old Paramount DVD and the Criterion. Gary Tooze, the site’s hard- to-please critic, calls the Criterion “close to a must-own for film fans. The ground-breaking ‘magic time’ visuals are discussed in detail in the supplements and this adds to the package’s authoritative pluses. Tremendous DVD!”

The best quote in L.A. Times reporter Robert Welkos‘ 10.26 piece about red-band trailers comes from Chicago-based marketing blogger Chris Thilk. Each red-band trailer, Thilk has written, becomes the “equivalent of sneaking a Playboy into junior high homeroom.” And the opposite effect kicks in when you try to shoehorn the essential appeal of an R-rated film into a “green” PG-13 trailer. “If you’ve got an R-rated movie and you’re creating a PG-rated trailer,” he tells Welkos, “I’m not going to say you’re misrepresenting the film, but you’re certainly watering it down.”

Referring to that 12:18 pm item about the New York “Vulture” guys having removed Charlie Wilson’s War from the Best Picture hot-to-trot list due to rumors about extra shooting, a Universal publicity guy got in touch and set things straight.

“I wish you’d check in before perpetuating rumors. This isn’t studio spin: there were no recent or costly reshoots on Charlie Wilson’s War. Just didn’t happen. There were a couple of days reshot many weeks ago because of a weather impact in Morocco. And that was nearly fully covered by insurance. That’s it. Nothing more.

“This is some sort of manufactured thing that gets passed along as true. It ain’t.

“But even if it were true…good. Good for any director who is willing to keep working on a film and finding its best version. Better that than the filmmaker who thinks the first cut is a perfect and precious thing that shouldn’t be altered in any way. Shouldn’t a filmmaker use the time given to keep working, even if that means adding a couple of different scenes or takes? I don’t understand this rush to judgment about what reshoots mean.

“In any event — the Charlie thing is a myth…didn’t happen.”

For what it’s worth, I completely agree that having the option to augment or re-do with extra shooting is a very good thing that always results in improvement. (Unless it happens under the gun with no time to reassemble and refine, like with Factory Girl.) I always augment and rewrite my column stuff so I don’t see the big deal.

It’s now incumbent upon David Poland to scold and swat down Variety‘s Pamela McLintock for writing an assessment article about the tanking or underperforming of all those serious early fall dramas that’s more or less coming from the same place as that Rachel Abramowitz L.A. Times piece from two days ago.

Time, in other words, to explain once again that it’s all “a bunch of hysteria over a few films that didn’t catch in limited releases” and that “there’s no real story here” and “it’s business as usual when you take a real look at it.”

I’ve saved copies of newspapers reporting historic events for years, and I’m therefore accustomed to the tattered and sepia-toned effect that kicks in after a couple of decades. I was nonetheless a bit surprised this morning when I came upon this copy of the 8.22.91 issue of the New York Times — the failure of the old-guard communist coup, the triumph of Boris Yeltsin — and saw that it looks fairly yellowed and decrepit.

The bottom line is that I’m not quite ready for 1991 to be regarded as a long time ago

Gee…was 1991 that long ago? I guess sixteen years isn’t all that different from twenty, right? Odd little realizations like this kick in every so often and give you a sense of the clock ticking faster and faster along with an onrushing fate.

Yesterday New York‘s “Vulture” column did an odd thing with its Best Picture predictions list: it put a cross-out line through Charlie Wilson’s War because of the reports/rumors about extra shooting. A publicist friend told me last Wednesday that these supposed extra scenes (reports of which have been denied by Universal publicists) have cost many millions besides.

Last week I expressed a concern about the trailer making War seem a little too jaunty and glib — I’ve read the script and know that it plays differently. New York‘s cross-out makes it clear, however, that others have been unsheathing their knives and looking for ways to hurt this Mike Nichols film on general principle. Somehow, some way, a vague wolf-pack mentality has developed. I don’t understand why, exactly. The star-quality aura of Tom Hanks-Julia Roberts-Phillip Seymour Hoffman casting probably seems irksome to some. Let’s take down the big names, rub their faces in it, etc.

The other New York contenders are American Gangster, Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton and No Country for Old Men. With all due respect and affection for Juno, I don’t think it’s quite as eloquent or touching or humanistic as Little Miss Sunshine. It’s a snappy and soulful film, but it’s a big reach to call it a likely Best Picture contender.

And I think that the New York guys are totally dreaming about Michael Clayton being a comer in this circle. Tony Gilroy‘s film is a very satisfying corporate thriller with a moralistic undertow, but it doesn’t have an across-the board resonance for you, me and your mother’s uncle. As some guy said to Kim Masters recently, it’s not “about” anything. By which they meant it doesn’t really deliver a theme. Or at least, not one that sticks to your ribs. If I’m wrong, please explain.

I tried to time the new Zodiac Directors’ Cut screener that I was sent a couple of days ago, and I failed. What happens is that you get so caught up in watching it that you forget about the damn running time. An extra five or six or seven minutes…what does it matter? I know that the extras don’t seem to stand out in a “whoa!…look at this!” sort of way. They just seem to belong, like they should have been there from the start.

That said, I have two favorites: (a) a new scene in which the San Francisco detectives on the Zodiac case (Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards) orally explain all the incriminating evidence and indications against Arthur Leigh Allen to a superior officer over a voicebox, and (b) the five-year passage-of-time sequence in which various TV news reports and songs of the era are heard over a black screen.

Here’s an mp3 of the evidence recitation scene.

I love these sequences — they definitely add significantly to the whole — and they don’t take up very much time so why the hell weren’t they included in the original theatrical cut? It makes no sense to have cut them out…none.

Yesterday’s projection had Saw IV topping $20 million. Scratch that — it brought in around $14.7 million yesterday and will definitely crest $30 million by Sunday night.

HE theory to explain the resurgence of torture porn: Besieged by too many serious dramas, the 18 to 35-year-old gorillas were laying in wait for a cheap, fiendish low-rent wallow as well as a pre-marketed “old friend.” In other words, Saw IV did as well as it did in part because audiences been worked over by the “challenging” (as far as knuckle-draggers are concerned) Michael Clayton, We Own the Night, Gone Baby Gone, Things We Lost in the Fire, Lars and the Real Girl and Reservation Road. In other words, the marketing of Saw IV was, to some extent, a community effort.

Steve Carell‘s Dan in Real Life has met expectations and will end up with a decent $12.7 million. 30 Days of Night has dropped over 60% and is looking at a $6 million weekend at best, and possibly under that. I don’t feel like reporting numbers on the other wide releases — suffice to say they’re all doing blah business. Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead has kicked butt in a 2-theatre opening and will probably end up with $67 thousand by tomorrow — excellent start.