The inaugural euphoria residue was still lingering a week ago, but now it’s over and done with. We’re now into string-up-the-spendthrift-bankers mode. Symbolic slapdowns, getting all medieval on their ass, public floggings, mobs chasing them down streets. The time for taking bows and smiling for Annie Leibovitz is over. Stand up, show your mettle.
New York/Vulture’s Chris Rovzar has pointed out that Vanity Fair used the same cover shot of Obama several months back. Whoa.
Gay enough, obviously, but not funny enough. It starts to sag after the first minute.
The Sony Classics/Whatever Works distribution rumor that was kicking around last month has been confirmed. Woody Allen‘s latest film, a New York-based dramedy starring Evan Rachel Wood, Larry David, Henry Cavill, Ed Begley, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson, will open sometime next summer with the Sony Classics logo attached. The U.S. rights were purchased from the Paris-based Wild Bunch.
The plot is more or less about a May-December relationship (marriage?) between David and Wood, and her mother, played by Clarkson, somehow persuading a Manhattan-residing British actor, played by Cavill, to try and seduce Wood in order to break up her thing with David, whom Clarkson feels is too old for her daughter.
An HE reader asked last summer, “If you were Evan Rachel Wood’s parents, wouldn’t Larry David (or Woody Allen, who he’s theoretically standing in for) be an improvement over Marilyn Manson in the I Can’t Believe Who My Daughter Is Screwing department?” That’s no longer pertinent as Wood’s relationship with Manson went south last November.
Patrick Frater‘s 2.1.09 Variety story didn’t say Martin Scorsese is 100% locked into shooting an adaptation of Shusaku Endo‘s Silence — it said Scorsese is “determined” to make it his next film. It also said he and Graham King‘s GK Films are negotiating with Daniel Day-Lewis, Benicio Del Toro and Gael Garcia Bernal to star, and that the grim 17th Century drama is expected to begin shooting later this year in New Zealand.
Obviously this has the earmarks of a high-pedigree historical drama, but before getting too excited consider a synopsis on the Endo/Silence Amazon page, to wit: “The plot centers around a band of Portugese priests who land in Japan in the 1600s to spread the gospel on a culturally and spiritually unfertile soil. Their theology is eventually challenged in ways that only persecution and suffering can do. Can I carry on here? Should I? Can I forgive my tormentors? Should I?
“Ultimately, they wrestle with public apostasy” — i.e., a renunciation of faith — “and whether or not they could ever be forgiven if they commit such an act. This is not a feel-good book by any stretch. It deals with failure, defeat, abandonment, pain, and the silence of God through it all.”
In other words, it’s going to be a grim slide, Catholic guilt suffer-fest in Jesuit robes.
Remember the tragic-downer tone of Scorsese’s previous two collaborations with Day-Lewis — The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York. Keep in mind the catatonic stupor that enveloped viewers of Kundun, Scorsese’s last exploration of spirituality in an exotic culture. If it gets made, Silence will almost certainly be showered with admiration and respect from critics, and lose money hand over fist in commercial theatres. I for one can’t wait to suffer through this as I relish the performances, which you just know are going to be kick-ass. Not to mention the photography, sets, costumes, etc.
I was scorned last year for saying Scorsese should restrict himself to goombah gangster films. I didn’t exactly mean that. I understand that Scorsese has to do movies like Silence, Kundun and The Age of Innocence in order to expand his range and fortify his artist-auteur cred, and I respect that process. But in the old days the thick-fingered, cigar-chomping studio moguls would have told him to forget the Jesuits and get back to the loan sharks, drug dealers, wayward women, crooked politicians and hitmen. Because that’s what sells the friggin’ popcorn.
Only the flakiest would-be distributor would ignore the Great Depression 2.0 factor. With everyone terrified of losing their jobs and being unable to house and feed their families, who’s going to pay to see this thing besides dweeb cineastes who read Scott Foundas? I’m just asking.
if the deal goes through for Lionsgate to buy Summit Entertainment’s library of six films and the rights to the Twilight franchise, some level of creative influence/interference by the Lionsgate gore-hounds upon the next two Twilight films is at least imaginable. It could mean, in short, that New Moon will be a little bit bloodier than anticipated. Or certainly the Twlight film after that. Is there any filmmaking/distribution outfit with a more pronounced reputation for arterial gushings? That and Tyler Perry — Lionsgate in a nutshell.
A part of me would like to do the alpha male thing and watch the Super Bowl game, but it seems more fitting on my first night back in Manhattan to squirrel down to the Film Forum and watch Jerry Schatzberg‘s The Panic in Needle Park, which I haven’t seen in ages. (Why is there a “The” in front of the rest of the title? This implies that there was one famous/notorious panic in needle park that made headlines.)
Speaking of Al Pacino, he and someone who looked an awful lot like John Cusack and a couple of others were watching a screening of Salomaybe? last Friday afternoon at the Aidikoff screening room, just before the 7 pm screening of Crossing Over. It appears that Salomaybe is an exploration of Oscar Wilde‘s Salome in the same way that Pacino’s Looking for Richard was about Shakespeare’s Richard III.
It hit me yesterday that Gossip Girl Blake Lively is the same classy blonde lassy that Bridget Fonda was 17 or 18 years ago. Not in terms of acting chops, but appearance-wise. In her prime Fonda was the best. I wrote a Fonda profile for the N.Y. Times that appeared in late ’92. It involved visiting her on the set of Bodies, Rest and Motion in Arizona a few weeks/months earlier. Now married to composer Danny Elfman, Fonda hasn’t made a film since ’02.
Any new film starring Matthew “king of the empties” McConaughey exudes toxicity, but his latest — Ghost of Girlfriends Past (New Line, 5.1) — looks especially grotesque. The thought that some will certainly pay to see it makes the mind go into a fetal tuck. Here’s a brilliant critique of the trailer by Burbanked.
I was accused of having plebian taste buds a few days ago after expressing profound disappointment with the sandstorm-level grain on Criterion’s Third Man Blu-ray disc. A tiny bit shamed, I popped it again after arriving home last night from Los Angeles, trying this time to watch it with a Glenn Kenny attitude. Wow, love that grain. Grain is so beautiful. Oooh, yeah! It didn’t work. I still felt burned. I felt angry, in fact.
Old black-and-white films shot under less-than-optimum conditions (like The Third Man) look too filmy on Blu-ray so they need to be moderately de-grained. End of discussion. Not wiped clean like that 2002 Paramount Sunset Boulevard DVD, but definitely cleaned up a bit. Because low-rent peons like myself don’t want renderings that are overly celluloid-looking (i.e., grainy, speckly, eight-at-the-gate). We want an image that looks better than what the original filmmakers and labs were able to render. An image quality that the old-time filmmakers would have chosen for sure if it had been put before them.
This is what I can’t stand about the grain purists. They actually maintain with a straight face that Billy Wilder and Orson Welles would have said if given a choice, “Oh, no — don’t make the image look too clean and silvery! We prefer our classic films to be a little muddy, a little clouded up by that grain-storm effect. Better that way.”
Why aren’t the big home-video outfits putting out Blu-rays of the big-format films of the ’50s and ’60s? All the classic 70mm roadshows (Lawrence of Arabia, Mutiny on the Bounty, Dr. Zhivago, Oklahoma!, Around the World in Eighty Days, Ryan’s Daughter, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, the mediocre ’63 Cleopatra, West Side Story), VistaVisions (North by Northwest, Vertigo, To Catch a Thief) and whatnot. Not because they were uniformly great films, but because they’d look terrific on Blu-ray.
Note: Yes, I’m aware that Sony is working on a Lawrence Blu-ray, but it’s taking them forever. I was told last year that they may actually wait until 2012 to put it out so they can call it a 50th Anniversary edition.
Last night Slumdog Millionaire‘s Danny Boyle won the Directors Guild of America for best director of 2008. I don’t want to go out on a limb, but the industry seems (stressing that word) to have arrived at a consensus winner. Congrats to Boyle and to the Fox Searchlight team for a brilliant marketing job.
I was 35,000 feet in the air when Boyle’s win was announced. I should have caught this in the plane and re-posted straight away but my battery gave out. The airlines all need to offer power outlets to each and every passenger — not just business and first-class.
Note: I chose “Shocker” for a headline before seeing the same on MCN. I’ll stand my ground, won’t back down.
