Month: September 2009

To hear it from loyal HE reader “Lipranzer,” a Manhattan screening tonight of Capitalism: A Love Story was projected slightly out of focus because the projector was using special night vision lenses to prevent people in the theater from recording the movie and then selling pirate copies. Unless, you know, the security guy who allegedly said this was full of shit. Here’s the story:

“Tonight I attended a screening of Capitalism: A Love Story at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square at West 68th Street and Broadway,” he begins. “Right away the trouble started. After the initial credits over a black screen, we saw out-of-focus images. I headed to the exit to complain. In the lobby I saw two men who’d been guarding the entrance and asked them to get somebody to fix the focus. I was happy to see another moviegoer who was also complaining. I went back to my seat expecting the problem to be fixed.

“A minute or two went by and the projection was still out of focus. I went back to the exit, and this time discovered one of the guards there, and he assured me someone had gone up to fix the problem. As I started back to my seat, I noticed the other guard standing near the back of the theater, as if to check when the film would be coming back on. There was no other theater worker with a walkie-talkie, which is usually what happens when there’s a projector problem.

“And when I got back to my seat, despite all the yelling from the audience, and despite my yelling a general obscenity (I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was something along the lines of ‘fix the motherfucking projector!’), the film was STILL out of focus. Finally, after maybe 3 or 4 minutes, the film finally snapped into focus, to the cheers of the crowd. But near the end the film went slightly out of focus again — not completely, but enough so that people on screen were slightly hazy looking.

“After it was over I saw another moviegoer, a middle-aged man, complaining to those same two guards. He wasn’t raising his voice or anything, so I was surprised when I heard the one of the guards say that he was tired of this discussion and was ending it. The man turned to go in disgust, and I caught up to him and asked if they’d explained what the problem was. According to him, the guards had explained the projector was using special night vision lenses to prevent people in the theater from recording the movie and then selling pirate copies.

“I’m sorry, but this is one of the biggest pieces of bullshit I’ve ever heard. There seems to be two options here. If you’re a conspiracy theorist, the guard was telling a lie — on his own or on orders from his boss or bosses — so that people would leave the movie disgruntled and spread bad word-of-mouth about the film. If that was the aim, it probably won’t work — the audience seemed to be laughing at all the right places and quiet at all the right places, emotional when the moment called for it, and they clapped at the end. And as I was heading to the bathroom, I heard some of the other moviegoers talking and basically agreeing with Moore’s message.

The other option, of course, is the guard was telling the truth, and this was an attempt to curtail piracy.

“Whatever their intentions were, the people who ordered this and carried it out have committed a colossal act of stupidity. Do studios and movie theater owners really believe the way to get people to come see their movies, whether by spending their hard-earned money on it or going to screenings like this that are designed to build positive word-of-mouth, is to completely alienate their customers by purposely making the movie hard to watch?”

“I say no. I’m currently sending an abbreviated form of this message to Michael Moore himself, asking him, or his representatives, to contact other theaters showing his film to make sure this doesn’t happen again. And it might not be a good idea to stop going to movies at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square until they agree never to pull a stunt like this again. I agree in the total scheme of things, this bit of corporate malfeasance ranks pretty low, and this type of action I’m proposing ranks pretty low as well, but it’s a start. Don’t we as moviegoers deserve better?”

Variety‘s Michael Fleming reported today that three key roles in David Fincher‘s The Social Network — a.k.a., the “Facebook movie” by way of Treasure of Sierra Madre — have been cast. Jesse Eisenberg will play Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (rumored, expected); Justin Timberlake will play Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who became Facebook’s founding president; and Andrew Garfield (Red Riding) will play Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who fell out with Zuckerberg over money. The Scott Rudin-produced, Aaron Sorkin-scripted drama will shoot next month in Boston and then move to Los Angeles. Sony will distribute.

As Tip O’Neill said decades ago, all politics is local. The Hispanic Party Elephant who resides upstairs became seriously angered over last weekend’s party-noise dispute (i.e., the one in which I was the bad guy for wanting to get some sleep at 1:45 am) and spoke to his pal the building owner, who then spoke to the lease-holder of this apartment. The long and the short is that the HPE has won and I’m moving out as of November 1st. And now I have to decide fairly quickly whether to hump it back to my affordable West Hollywood apartment or try and find a new place at probably double the rent (if not more) in the Manhattan-Brooklyn-Hoboken area. I’d pretty much decided to be a New Yorker the rest of my life, but the recession economy demands spartan austerity.

Magnolia Pictures has acquired North American rights to Luca Guadagnino‘s I Am Love, the Milan-based, Luchino Visconti-ish melodrama about a wealthy family with Tilda Swinton starring.

Last night Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny didn’t really get into last weekend’s Wizard of Oz original-grain-structure discussion, but he summarized my postings and has gotten hold of a copy and run some screen shots, etc. To be continued.

This columnist will be Straw Dog-ging it down in Shreveport, Louisiana, at the end of next week. Roughly two days, in and out. Director-writer Rod Lurie, costars James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgard, James Woods and Dominic Purcell. I’m going to definitely visit the Stray Cat on Travis Street — i.e., the place where Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright got into a situation with the local fuzz during the shooting of W.. The wifi had better be good or else.

Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man was named the best narrative film of the Toronto Film Festival in a just-posted Indiewire poll of attending critics and bloggers. And Erik Gandini‘s Videocracy was named best documentary.

Narrative runners-up were (in this order) Chuan Lu‘s City of Life and Death, Jason Reitman‘s Up In The Air, Jacques Audiard‘s A Prophet, Giorgos Lanthimos‘ Dogtooth (respectful disagreement!), Lee Daniels‘ Precious, Luca Guadagnino‘s I Am Love, Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch, Tom Ford‘s A Single Man and Samuel Maoz‘s Lebanon.

The doc runners-up were Chris Smith‘s Collapse, Don Argott‘s The Art of the Steal, Leanne Pooley‘s The Topp Twins, and Micheal Tucker and Petra Eppperlein‘s How To Hold A Flag.

Not to be in any way disrespectful, but did anyone know — or know of — Steve Friedman, the Philadelphia talk-radio host and film expert who died the night before last (i.e., Sunday) of kidney disease just hours after completing his Mr. Movie program on WPHT-AM (1210)? I didn’t know the guy but I’m sorry. 62 is too young to be wrapping things up.

Since 1999 Friedman joined Steve Ross and Jimmy Murray on their “Remember When” radio show from 10 to midnight, and then continued with his own show until 1 a.m. Previously, he had stayed on the air all night.

Friedman was also a national film reviewer for Donnelly Directory’s Talking Yellow Pages. He had been a film critic and entertainment reporter for NBC10 and for America Online’s Digital City, where he hosted a weekly chat room for film buffs.

I decided a year ago that Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes (Warner Bros., 12.25) movie would be largely dismissable. Because I knew it would be made, like all super-expensive high-concept CG adventures, for the under-25 mongrel moviegoing culture which “doesn’t want to know from 19th Century London” and “cares only about eating popcorn and scratching their balls during the trailers.” About eight months ago a Sarah Lyall N.Y. Times article reiterated the same impression.

“This is surely evidence of a degraded culture,” I responded. “The general dilution and animalization of rarified values and dashing cerebral derring-do, which were once admired or at least found intriguing by average moviegoers.”

And then the official trailer came along last May and that was it. There could be only one….all right, three responses. One, enjoy the performances by Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. Two, admire the production design, pyrotechnics, CG, costumes, stunts and all the other peripherals. And three, hate everything else about it. For Sherlock Holmes will almost certainly be an Eloi movie, a corporate bullshit movie, a Goldman Sachs and AIG movie, the new Wild Wild West.

Barring a miracle it will almost certainly say the wrong things, do the wrong things, be the wrong things, traffic in bromance humor and poison your soul. Is it unfair that I’m committed to hating Sherlock Holmes come hell or high water? Yes, surely. Is it fair that Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny is apparently committed to finding a way to love it, come hell or high water? Possibly, maybe, you tell me. But I think my attitude is healthier.

Why bring it up again? Because a sequel is on the way, probably in a couple of years.

“Now, I love England,” Downey Jr. told Empire recently. “But we might need to shoot the next one abroad. Jude and I’ll be texting each other. I’ll say, ‘Brussels!; he’ll say, ‘Gstaad!’ We’re really gonna dig deep for the next one.”

Is everyone down with the deal? Downey and Law and producer Joel Silver and whomever is hired to direct the sequel get to text each other and have fun and deposit their fat mercenary paychecks, and we get to pay $12.50 plus parking and popcorn so we can sit there and watch the Holmes sequel while sitting next to wildebeests as they tear open their Twizzlers with their teeth and the ushers pass out sharpened sewing needles so we can stab ourselves in the eye if it all gets to be too much.

“In capitalism as envisioned by its leading lights, including Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, you need a moral foundation in order for free markets to work,” Arianna Huffington writes in a current piece. “And when a company fails, it fails. It doesn’t get bailed out using trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. What we have right now is Corporatism — i.e., welfare for the rich. It’s Wall Street having their taxpayer-funded cake and eating it too. It’s socialized losses and privatized gains.

“Which is why — although you can bet many will try — Capitalism: A Love Story can’t be dismissed as a left-wing tirade. Its condemnation of the status quo is too grounded in real stories and real suffering, its targets too evenly spread across the political spectrum.

“Indeed, Jay Leno, America’s designated Everyman, was so moved by the film he insisted that Moore appear on the second night of his new show, and told his audience that the film was “completely nonpartisan…I was stunned by it, and I think it is the most fair film” Moore has done.

“After a preview screening last week (at which I did a q & a session with Michael), he came over to my home for a late night bite. Over lasagna, he told me…”

Stop right there! Nobody eats pasta and especially lasagna (with all the ground meat and cheese and butter and whatnot) late at night. Anyone who does this is asking for tens of thousands of extra calories and jowly faces and all kinds of surplus bulk.

Back to Arianna: “[Moore] told me about an incident that occurred while he was filming that exemplifies how the economic crisis cannot be looked at through a left vs right prism. It happened while he and his crew were shooting the climax of the movie, where Michael decides to mark Wall Street as a crime scene, putting up yellow police tape around some of the financial district’s towers of power.

“While unfurling the tape in front of a ‘too big to fail’ bank, he became aware of a group of New York’s finest approaching him. Moore has a long history of dealing with policemen and security guards trying to shut him down, but in this case he knew he was, however temporarily, defacing private property. And his shooting schedule didn’t leave room for a detour to the local jail. So, as the lead officer came closer, Moore tried to deflect him, saying: ‘Just doing a little comedy here, officer. I’ll be gone in a minute, and will clean up before I go.’

“The officer looked at him for a moment, then leaned in: ‘Take all the time you need.’ He nodded to the bank and said, ‘These guys wiped out a lot of our Police Pension Funds.’ The officer turned and slowly headed back to his squad car. Moore wanted to put the moment in his film, but realized it could cost the cop his job, and decided to leave it out. ‘When they’ve lost the police,’ he told me, ‘you know they’re in trouble.’

“There is a real sense of urgency to Capitalism: A Love Story. I asked Michael what impact he hoped the film would have. He chuckled and said that, in some way, he had made the movie for ‘an audience of one. President Obama. I hope he sees it and remembers who put him in the White House… and it wasn’t Goldman Sachs.'”