Day: March 4, 2009

Why would anyone alive and alert in the city of New York who hasn’t yet seen The Hurt Locker not want to attend tomorrow night’s (i.e., Thursday, 3.5) 7 pm showing at Lincoln Center? What could possibly constitute stiff competition, outside of theatre tickets or a secret meeting at a hotel with someone married?

The Hurt Locker is “less a combat picture than a thriller about the risks and intoxications of professional passion,” N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott wrote the other day. “The main character, brilliantly played by Jeremy Renner, is consumed by his work, at once meticulous in his techniques and reckless in the way he deploys them. In this respect he resembles [director Kathryn] Bigelow, who turns the discipline of action filmmaking into a kind of visceral visual poetry.”

I’ll admit that the $20 per ticket cost might deter me if I was on the fence for this or that reason. $20 per viewing is a little rich for me. For anyone. For any movie. I wonder what’s so damn special about the Film Society of Lincoln Center that they get to charge this amount?

Here’s to the just-passed Horton Foote, whom I’ll always admire and feel really close to because of his screenplay of Tender Mercies, perhaps my all-time favorite rural relationship film played on a subdued and generally calmed-down key. (Whadja think about that one, Watchmen fans? Was it visually fierce enough for ya? The only problem was that Duvall’s Mac Sledge never put a superhero costume on.) His To Kill A Mockingbird screenplay was perhaps the first adult-level thing to get to me as a kid.

“Look at Watchmen from the back to the front,” David Poland finally wrote today at 5 pm Pacific, after seeing Zack Snyder‘s forthcoming weekend winner last night. “Do you care about what has happened to any of these characters, except Rorschach, by the time you leave the theater?

“Not ‘did you think the glass thing on Mars was really cool?’ Or ‘is the prison sequence easily the best thing that Zack Snyder has ever done?’ Or ‘did you like seeing Malin’s ta-tas? Or ‘Is ‘Archie’ cool as hell?’ Or ‘how cool is it watching people explode and then seeing the guts drip off the furniture?’

“And I am not even picking on the terrible wigs, the uninspired fight choreography in all but a couple of sequences, the slow-mo/speed-up thing that is years past being a cliche, the hideously cliched music choices, and other just softball stuff in the film that should have been done better.

“I am looking at the core. Do you care? Do you have an emotional stake in the characters or the world they are trying to save?

“No. And no. For me.

“And yet I don’t hate the film or anything. I just wish it was about something more than recreating the book faithfully on screen. Because you know what? You’re better off reading the book if you want to have that experience. Then you will get all the sidebars and you will have time to consider them. And you will fill in the blanks [even] though, amazingly enough, Snyder, in all his serious effort to be faithful, does what the book does not, which is to fill in those blanks. Perhaps it is not intentional. But again, it is the nature of film. It simplifies, even if you don’t want it to.

“I wish I could say ‘go for the spectacle’ but frankly, you are better off watching The Dark Knight again in Blu-ray. Much better off.”

N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith filed a Watchmen rave last night. Sounds like too much of a rave to me. (“Thrillingly sophisticated”?) But I was expecting Smith to be favorably disposed because he’s a comic-book generation guy, or close enough to it.

I said it a couple of weeks ago but it bears repeating: Take with a grain of salt the views of any Watchmen reviewer who grew up reading superhero comics, which is pretty much anyone under 40, give or take. They have their life savings invested in this bank, so to speak, so I know what I’m talking about when I say they can’t be trusted. In fact, trust no one on this thing. Don’t even trust Barack Obama if he winds up seeing it (which he probably will sooner rather than later).

Except for guys like myself, I mean. Only the stand-up boys who have zero investment in comic book lore can be trusted to tell it straight. We are the blazing truth-tellers — the ones who watch the Watchmen geeks.

Felicity Huffman talking about Piven sushigate on Letterman last night.

Perhaps the funniest Black List script from last year is Kyle Killen‘s The Beaver, about a chronic depressive whose life is taken over by his beaver hand puppet. It’s said by two sources to be in Steve Carell‘s corner. That is, if the term “attached to” means anything. “But he’s also attached to a great many things,” one guy cautions. “I’ve heard they’re readying the next Get Smart for his next hiatus. Carell also has a teaming with Tina Fey in the works, but it’s pricey. He wants to spend time with family, so I’ve heard they’re planning to shoot whatever his next feature is in Massachusetts to accommodate that.”

The next Get Smart?

David Mickey Evans‘ Ace Ventura Jr. Pet Detective hit the video shelves yesterday. I see in the jowly face of that kid, Josh Flitter, the essence of the American cancer that the Taliban is dead set against. And you know what? They’re right. (Thanks to Jack Morrissey for the tip-off.)

As of one hour ago (i.e., 9 am Pacific) 90% of the advance-purchase Fandango action was being slurped up by Watchmen….surprise! 3% of the early-buy money was going to the Jonas Brothers 3-D Concert Movie, 1% was being hammered by Slumdog Millionaire, and so on down the line. We’ll be looking at a cultural avalanche this weekend. See how much effect all those neg-head reviews and pissed-off fanboy postings have had, Warner Bros. publicity?

An mp3 recording of a clip from Armando Ianucci‘s In The Loop, which I creamed over last January and which IFC will be releasing sometime this year: “Don’t apologize for me, apologize for yourself….not a fuckin’ little Jane Austen novel!…walk the fuckin’ line!…not a good time, I’m busy, fuck off!….lubricated horsecock…well within my purview…those kids make you sound like Angela Lansbury.”

“It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with,” Salman Rushdie wrote for a piece in last Saturday’s Guardian. “Or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect.

“Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is authentic; but it’s still tourism. If the earlier films were raj tourism, maharajah-tourism, then we, today, have slum tourism instead.

“In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion.

“But for a first-world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away.”

Jeffrey Wells to William Friedkin: The French Connection was obviously your film when you were developing, shooting and cutting it, and certainly your film when you were promoting it in ’71. And you were most responsible for winning the Best Picture Oscar, clearly. But those days are over, pal, and while you may feel some form of residual parental ownership rights today, you’re out of line. At least as far as revisionist futzing rights are concerned.

Frame capture from David Lean’s revised version of Lawrence of Arabia.

Whatever your attorney has told you or the contracts may say, you do not own The French Connection, Mr. Freidkin — the moviegoing public does. The fans who’ve been watching and worshipping this film for the last 38 years do. Your ownership rights went out the window, sir, once that legendary New York crime film became a huge hit, and they sure as shit were null and void after it won the Best Picture Oscar of 1971. And you can’t just stroll into a post-production house on Highland or Seward and re-visualize it and put out a snow-bleachy version on Blu-ray and say, “This is it — the best version of this film ever made!”

Well, you can because you have. But you have no legitimacy in doing so.

I’m referring to what cinematographer Owen Roizman strongly stated last week, which is that you’ve desecrated The French Connection with a new high-contrasty, snow-grained, color-bleeding, verging-on-monochrome digital transfer that is now watchable on Blu-ray.

The word on the street is that you intend to do the same thing to The Exorcist down the road. I got the idea from listening to you speak the night before last that if you had a chance you’d probably do the same to upcoming remasters of Sorcerer and To Live and Die in L.A..

I’m writing to tell you, sir, that this has to stop because in the eyes of the Movie Gods you haven’t the right to do this, despite what your pallies at Fox Home Video and others in the film-cultivating community may have told you.

You can’t mangle what belongs to the public and to history, Mr. Freidkin. Art belongs to the artist until he or she creates it, and then it belongs to the world. Period. That means forever. That means no retroactive whimsical messing-around rights can kick in. And that means no Greedo-shoots-first revisionism of any kind unless the intention is to try and bring genuine (i.e., nonrevisionist) improvement to the original vision. Richer, fuller, crisper, cleaner…fine. But no “atrocious” and “horrifying” revisions.

That means if Pablo Picasso comes back from the grave he can’t go to Spain and decide that “Guernica” works better in color because he had a recent vision in heaven that painting it in black and white in 1937 was the wrong way to go. That means that the ghost of David Lean can’t come back to earth and decide to reimagine and remaster Lawrence of Arabia as a black-and-white period movie in the vein of John Ford‘s The Lost Patrol (1934).

The same thing goes for The Exorcist, Sorcerer and To Live and Die in LA.. You don’t have the right because they’re not your films, buster. You made them, obviously, but they have a life and a culture and a spirit of their own now. And I am telling you, speaking for myself and I suspect for many others, to back off and leave those movies alone. I mean it. Stand aside, sheath your sword, holster your pistol and find some other way to be creative.

You can do what you can to improve the appearance of these films on DVD, Blu-ray and hi-def digital downloads feeds. You can help to make sure they look precisely as they did when they were shown as brand-new prints in first-run theatres, or help make them look even sharper and cleaner and more vivid than they did back then if you so choose, but that’s all.

Otherwise you’re a brilliant and accomplished filmmaker, and an excellent fellow to discuss the ins and outs of the movie business with. And Bug deserved more attention and acclaim than it got. And all hail Michael Shannon!