Month: June 2008

Lamenting the destruction of numerous 35-millimeter theatrical prints of classic films in last week’s Universal Studios fire, UCLA film professor Ron Kuntz has written in a N.Y. Times 6.7.08 op-ed piece that Universal “has already canceled screenings of Rear Window and Howard Hawks‘ Scarface for the U.C.L.A. film history class I teach, along with all their other titles for the indefinite future.
Kuntz says he hopes this disaster “will prompt Universal and its fellow majors to better preserve not just key titles like Duck Soup, Dracula or Vertigo — which will surely be reprinted and return to circulation — but also the other 90 percent of their inventories, the less famous and therefore more vulnerable titles that the studio may not feel justify spending thousands to save. These are exquisite samples of 20th-century American culture and deserve to always be seen in their extravagant, sensual, big-screen glory.”
Of course, Kuntz wrote the article and the Times ran it precisely because they don’t believe — no one does — that Universal execs will make a concerted full-boat effort any time soon to replace the destroyed prints, and certainly not the less-well-known ones.

Covering yesterday’s farewell-and-thank you party thrown by Hillary Clinton for campaign workers, N.Y. Daily News reporters Kenneth R. Bazinet and Michael McAuliff have described “tears and hugs and lingering bitterness that will take some time to heal among Clinton’s soon-to-be-unemployed foot soldiers.” They’ve also run an astonishing kicker quote — an anonymous “campaign aide” saying, “I will never forgive Obama for what he did to Hillary…I will vote for him, but that’s it.”
What do you say to such a statement? Do you say, “Yeah, I hear you…Obama played it low and dirty while Hillary held high the torch of dignity and appealed to the best in voters”? What kind of prescribed medication do you have to be on to buy into this?
Trust me — in her noon speech today in Washington, D.C., Clinton’s carefully parsed words will provide comfort to the person who voiced the above. Clinton’s heart-of-hearts is not in this charade — we all know that. Many of her rabid supporters regard today’s concession speech as a kind of funeral. She’s something of a political realist, of course, and knows what she has to do, but many of us will be flabbergasted if she convinces everyone that she really and truly means what she’s about to “say.”
We all know who and what she is — do we not?
N.Y. Times reporter Jodi Kantor has offered a more carefully measured view of the situation.

Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is reporting that Kung Fu Panda is the weekend’s #1 ass-kicker, having grabbed an estimated $17.75 million on Friday with a likely $55 million haul by Sunday night. Adam Sandler‘s You Don’t Mess With The Zohan earned about $13.25 million and is looking at an estimated weekend take-down of $36.25 million. Sex and The City: The Abomination and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will apparently be duking it out for third place.

A tribute to the late Sydney Pollack by Bill Horberg, who worked for him a long time at Mirage, on Anne Thompson‘s site. And here, finally, are those Husbands and Wives clips I was looking for before.

A seemingly new site for The Dark Knight.

Looking to explain coming editorial staff cuts at the L.A. Times, Tribune Co. chief operating officer Randy Michaels yesterday told Variety‘s Cynthia Littleton that “the average journalist in Hartford or Baltimore does over 300 pages a year. [And we have found that] you can eliminate a fair number of people while [not] eliminating very much content. We think we have a way to right-size the papers and significantly reduce our costs.”
I wonder what the average output is for internet columnists? You probably can’t measure it in “pages” (well, maybe) but I’ll bet it beats “over 300 pages a year” all to hell.

“People talk about this grand, epic quality in [David] Lean‘s films, but I love them because they are pure. Clean, simple — even minimalist. He never uses anything he doesn’t need, and, like the match and the sunrise, it encapsulates more than a million words.

“No one else comes close, but it gives me something to aspire to.” — Atonement director Joe Wright writing yesterday (6.5) in the Times Online on the occasion of a British Film Institute tribute.

I wish I could think of something to add to the Clint Eastwood-Spike Lee argument. I do at all. I don’t see why there’s a debate at all because (and I got this straight from my old man, an ex-Marine who fought at Iwo Jima) there were no black solders doing any early-wave fighting during that horrific encounter, so Lee is wrong.
My beef with Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers has never been addressed or answered, to wit: why were the grunts who went for a swim at the finale wearing white underwear when every G.I. in the Pacific theatre wore skivvies, socks and T-shirts colored olive drab?

“Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval. But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up…Barack Obama. He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’llhave to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù — Bob Dylan speaking to Times Online‘s Alan Jackson in a 6.6 interview piece.
This is what visionary poet-gods do when they get older. They come down to earth and say sensible things and stand on the side of positive upheavals. Which is fine. Of course, the Dylan of Legend — the one who held mountains in the palm of his hands — would have never endorsed anyone. Not out of apathy or disdain, but because he had bigger fish to fry. Politicians — the brave ones — endorsed him.

The fact that TV commentators are genuinely wondering if Hillary Clinton will say the right things tomorrow (and in the right way) speaks volumes. Her reputation for egocentric ungraciousness is now the stuff of legend.