Month: November 2009

A high-def version of the recently-posted “Cinema Italiano”/Nine music video appeared today. Nobody will be free to say anything about the film until mid-December, but I can at least mention that Nine offers a three-second shot of Positano (also in the trailer from the 10 to 12 second mark), and that this gave me a pleasant jolt, sending me back to my brief visit there in late May 2007.

I completely understand and agree with the view of Italian sophistos that Positano has been degraded by the tour buses and hee-haw Americans who keep the local economy going. I remember being in a Positano internet cafe and overhearing a guy with some kind of Kentucky or Tennessee accent using the international land line and speaking or bellowing too loudly (“Great Italian fewd!”), and immediately flinching and saying to myself, “Uh-oh…the Cancun crowd is here.”

But it’s such a beautiful place anyway. The feeling of being cut off from the world is so special and serene. The magnificent Moorish architecture, the 45 or 50 degree incline, the view from a cheap hilltop restaurant that Jett and I visited during magic hour, etc. I’d go there again in a heartbeat.

I took this video myself with my old silver Canon with the fish-eye lens:

The all-media screening of Chris Weitz‘s New Moon happens tonight on 42nd street. No plus-ones, I’ve been told. I wouldn’t normally run an excerpt of anything from the UK News of the World but this 11.17 review by Robbie Collin has an interesting passage in which he calls it “unnecessarily good.”

Weitz “kicks off with an eerie dream sequence that says more about the main characters in two minutes than the last Harry Potter film managed in two and a half hours,” he writes.

“In fact, special effects aside — which, by and large, are still a bit pony — New Moon grinds recent Potter efforts into the dust because it takes the time to flesh out its characters rather than just slamming them from one manufactured crisis to the next.”

(Pony? Presumably meaning second-tier, not good enough, etc. Great term!)

“These are convincing, fully-rounded teenagers right here. They sulk, they stew, they agonize and they lust. They don’t run around playing kiss-chase in magic school.

New Moon is “a visually serious step up too. Weitz knows how to use pictures to tell a story — a pretty important skill for a director, you would think — but it means the film’s not bogged down with unnecessary chatter.

“Take a short scene in which three months pass, with the camera circling Bella as she sits by the window. Or the masterful chase sequence between the werewolves and bad vampire Victoria (Rachelle LeFevre) scored with a Thom Yorke track. Or the nicely-staged climax in Italy, complete with flashes of James Bond glamor and a predictably ace turn from Michael Sheen as vampire royalty Aro.”

This is over a week old, but on 11.10 Digital Bits columnist “Two Cents Worth” wrote the following about a Martin Scorsese remark heard via satellite at the recent Blu-Con 2.0 conference, to wit: Scorsese “spoke very positively about the Blu-ray format:, saying it has ‘the potential to replicate the original theatrical experience” and “is the best I’ve seen in forty years of [movie] collecting. Blu-ray offers the ability to see the film as it was intended.’

And then comes a passage straight out of the grainstorm monk’s handbook. “The most interesting quote [Scorsese] offered, however, was something I hope was not lost on the audience of studio executives and mastering engineers on hand. He noted that Blu-ray is capable of displaying ‘a film grain texture which I think is very important in recreating the film experience.’ Can I get an AMEN on that?”

Good God. A breakthrough of sorts has just happened with Warner Home Video releasing an almost entirely grain-free Gone With the Wind Bluray — a revelation! — and here’s this guy apparently pining for more grainstorm transfers in the vein of Criterion’s The Third Man. This shows how fanatical grain monks can be. They’re the Islamic fundamentalists of the Blu-ray fanboy world.

There’s no talking them out of their views, I know, and I’m saying this as one who fully understands and respects the concept of proper grain levels — who understands the difference between appropriate grain and digital wipeouts in the unfortunate tradition of the Patton Blu-ray. The only thing to do with these guys, I suppose, is to hang tough and…I don’t know, wait for them to die out or whatever.

You may not find this fact in film-history books, but 1987 was a seminal year for the tarnished moral and ethical authority of the proverbial investigator and law enforcer (i.e., the loosely-allied private dick and big-city cop) in Hollywood films. For this was the year in which they both succumbed to the forces of darkness and crazy-hood.

It was 22 years ago when Shane Black‘s (and Richard Donner and Joel Silver‘s) Lethal Weapon introduced the then-radical idea of a cop who was screwier and possibly more dangerous than the criminals he was chasing. ’87 was also the year when Alan Parker‘s Angel Heart told the tale of a wise-guy shamus who turned out to be the very same grisly murderer he’d been looking to find all through the film.

Before these two movies cops and private eyes were thought to be more or less safe — corrupted and flawed to varying degrees (like Treat Williams‘ narcotics cop in Prince of the City) but still vaguely decent, semi-trustworthy, on “our side,” exuding a recognizable sense of morality. These two films changed all that.

After that pretty good teaser trailer this Salt one-sheet has to be called a disappointment. It’s been obvious from the get-go who Salt is. The fact that Angelina Jolie plays her has been well established by the trailer, as well as the fact that she’s Russian and smoky-eyed and given to various feats of acrobatic derring-do. The other problem is that the face could almost belong to someone else. Is it Angie or a cyborg or Megan Fox‘s malevolent sister?

Through the kindness of a friend, I too have now read Wes Anderson‘s The Rosenthaler Suite, a Universal/Imagine-funded adaptation of Patrice Leconte’s My Best Friend (Mon Meilleur Ami), theatrically released in ’06 and issued on DVD on 10.16.07. Or most of it, I mean.

Wes has thoroughly Wessified the Leconte piece and made it his own. And it’s a very enjoyable read. I could see this movie in my head right away, and I quite liked it. More than The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic or The Darjeeling Limited, and more than Fantastic Mr. Fox, to be honest. I’d really like to see it made and released soon, or at least soon by Anderson standards, which would be within two years, or Christmas 2011. So let’s get on the stick.

I’ve read four of Wes’s scripts now and they’re all of a piece, each one cleanly and tidily and fastidiously written with that singular sense of dry, understated, cosmopolitan pocket-drop humor, or rather humor that isn’t really “humor” because it’s about an ensemble of vaguely depressive glumheads who are anything but “funny” and yet are amusing in a heh-heh, LQTM, chuckle-about-it-later-as-you’re-sitting-on-the subway-in-the-wee-hours type of way.

It’s basically an emotional growth story about a 40ish New York art dealer named Nicholas who’s myopic and self-absorbed and aloof in a typical Andersonian way (i.e., intelligent, driven, sophisticated, inwardly anxious, looking for serenity). You’re with this guy for less than a page and you’re immediately recalling Jason Schwartzman‘s Max in Rushmore, Bill Murray‘s Cousteau-like undersea explorer in The Life Aquatic, Gene Hackman‘s paterfamilias in The Royal Tenenbaums, and Owen Wilson‘s Dignan in Bottle Rocket.

The point is that Nicholas isn’t especially “likable,” which is never here nor there in Andersonville. (So?) The fact that he has no real friends is noticed and commented upon by an older rich Manhattan woman named Lucinda who occasionally funds Nicholas’s art-gallery purchases and who knows him well. She bets the entire value of a just-purchased cache of paintings by a dying painter named Moses Rosenthaler that Nicholas has no real friends. This is actually true but Nicholas disputes it, of course, and takes the bet, which means he has to find a friend who will stand up to scrutiny.

He zeroes in on an amiable, easygoing, classical-music-loving Polish cab driver named Zbigniew (as in Brezsinski). The relationship between Nicholas and Zbigniew is the heart of the thing, of course. You can guess where it goes from here, or you can rent the DVD or make up your own story.

A much more thorough review was posted yesterday by The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez, complete with speculation about who would play Nicholas (George Clooney), Lucinda (Meryl Streep) and Zbigniew (Owen Wilson might not work because he’s doesn’t seem able to handle a Polish accent, and yet he’d be the best, I think….hey, how about making Zbigniew a Texan and calling him Dodge or Dobbs or Shep or Ben Sliney?).

The wifi in the apartment went down early last week and has stayed down. I’ve been using the iMac by piggybacking on a neighbor’s wifi but it’s a very weak and skittish signal and mostly a waste of time to mess with. Using the flaky AT&T air card with the laptop has been close to pointless and mostly futile due to the apartment being located in a weak-air pocket. On top of which the laptop touch pad has Parkinson’s disease. The Time Warner guy is finally coming today between 2 and 6 pm. It’s been hell.

When a new trailer comes out I like to play it almost simultaneously (i.e., slightly staggered) on two or three screens and then not watch either (or any) of them but listen to the dialogue out of the corner of my ear. “I’m 57 years old and I’m broke…why don’t you write the damn song?…what’s your real name?,” etc.

And it starts to really sink in that way if I repeat the loops two or three times, more so than from the watching of the film itself in a certain way. It’s like learning a language by constantly playing language tapes as you do other stuff.

Here’s my 11.13 reaction to Crazy Heart, a very decently put-together film with an unmistakably bold, neckdeep-in-quicksand, Orson Welles-in-Touch of Evil-like performance from Jeff Bridges.

Movie City News had this first and then The Playlist, etc. On top of which the video was posted two days ago. But I’m copy-pasting this 11.15 video of Tree of Life composer Alexandre Desplat talking about Terrence Malick‘s film at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival for a reason.

I’m running it in order to address a quote from Desplat about the film, which deals with families and anguish and infinite time streams and dinosaurs, and which will presumably come out sometime in 2010…unless, you know, Malick needs more time to finish it.

Tree of Life, Desplat said, is “a deep story about love, how you transmit love, through your family; from the parents to the children. And the evolution of mankind…since the creation. Heavy things, but with everyday life things. That’s one of the great ideas that Terrence has been working on. We see a family in the ’50s in Texas in their everyday lives, but there’s more, of course, connections to the big picture.”

The thing that gets me is Desplat’s decision to describe the basic thematic bones and/or philosophical through-line of Malick’s tale as “deep” and “heavy.”

There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t say to myself, “Well, here I am, debating whether or not to order a Ceasar salad with or without chicken/buy or not buy a new Criterion Bluray that costs $40 and change/call or not call her back to either explain or elaborate or simply hear the sound of her voice/sign up with that health club despite the exorbitant monthly fee/write emails to publicists and ad buyers or put it off…all these things on my sponge brain, a mind trying to sort through and make sense of my life on this planet, and yet all the while I know — have always known, from the time I was four or five — that life is a constant refrain of struggle and pain, and that to find our way through it we all need to express love and worship rather than bicker over prices and invoices, but mainly that we’re all connected to dinosaurs.

“Which is to say time is relative, existence is relative, and my life will one day be as over and extinct as the life of a certain Tryceratops who may have had or felt similar grunting concerns during his/her time on the planet, and that one day my skeleton might well be hanging in a natural history museum and that people who’ve paid $12.50 to get into the museum will wander up to my skeleton and say, ‘Wow, for all we know this guy was one of the beautiful people!” and I won’t be able to say anything back, obviously, but if I could I would say to them, ‘Laugh now but you’ll be dead too someday, so keep in mind as I tried to keep in mind when I was alive that time is a river and it’s all over before we know it and…you know, whatever, we’re all connected to dinosaurs.'”

Their most striking similarity between Werner Herzog‘s about-to-open Bad Lieutenant and Abel Ferrara‘s 1992 original “is that each stars an actor whose performance is so intensely played and thoroughly inhabited, it can feel like psychosis, possession, a bit of both,” N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote yesterday.

Lucius Baston, Nicolas Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

“They’re performances that make you wonder where the character leaves off and the man playing him has taken hold, a slippage that can lead to greatness, but also to moments of such excess and even grotesque comedy that they leave you squirming. Nicolas Cage revels in that slippage, though it was only after seeing Bad Lieutenant that I was reminded of how freaky he can be — and how exhilarating it can be to watch an actor go far and then just a little too far.”

So is Dargis saying that Cage perhaps isn’t “acting” as much as you might think he is and therefore isn’t really delivering a performance as much as exploring a form of on-camera psychotherapy, which isn’t necessarily the sort of thing that might result in a Best Actor nomination? Or that Cage is venturing into new territory by giving a kind of performance that is more than just “acting” although he is, obviously, playing a New Orleans detective on the ragged edge?

Should Cage’s Bad behavior, in other words, be primarily processed by the fact that he’s not playing a character as much as being queerly and flamboyantly meta? Or should we all just kick back (Manohla included) and just say “whatever…he’s acting and he isn’t or he is and his therapist is in on it…don’t worry about the machinations.”

Today’s tracking has Summit’s New Moon (opening 11.20) with a 24 unaided awareness, an 84 total awareness, 46% of the totals definitely interested and a 26 first choice open & release. Somewhere between the high 50s and low 60s? [Note: I was way too low earlier — wasn’t thinking it through.] The numbers will bump up as the week progresses and Friday gets closer.

Warner Bros. The Blind Side (11.20), the John Lee Hancock-Sandra Bullock true-life drama, has a 68 total awareness, 48% of the totals definitely interested and a 13 first choice open & release — exactly half that of New Moon.

The third 11.20 opener, the animated Planet 51, has a 65 total awareness, 28% of the totals definitely interested and a 4 first choice open & release.

Every knows that New Moon is a romantic triangle piece focusing on the mortal Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and a hottie werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner).

As I wrote during last summer’s ComicCon, “Lautner is clearly the most ambitiously press-friendly among the three. While Stewart and Pattinson did their usual usual — i.e., giving answers that suggested they’re a lot more complex and aloof and thoughtful than their participation in movies based on the Twilight series might suggest. It’s the age-old ‘I’ll do this but only if I can answer questions like Marlon Brando’ routine.

“But Lautner, who has a bee-stung Beagle Boy nose , exhibited the personality of a publicist or a glad-hander. He clearly enjoys smiling and wants everyone to like him. He could be the next Regis Philbin if he wanted to go there.”