Month: December 2009

It’s nice to hear admiring words about Up In The Air from Indiewire’s Reel Geezers. Because supportive words about Jason Reitman‘s film have been scarce in my circle over the last ten or twelve days. It’s locked, of course, for a Best Picture nomination and there’s also the 90%/91% Rotten Tomatoes rating, but in conversation after conversation I’ve been hearing “overhyped,” “good but not great,” “won’t win Best Picture Oscar” and so on.

I’ve already mentioned the Avatar-rising-as-UITA-falls equation, but something else has been happening — I can feel it. UITA keeps getting diminished or knocked down every time it comes up in conversation. At least as far as people saying it can’t and won’t win the Best Picture Oscar. It doesn’t have to win, of course — what matters is what it is and seeing it for that. But as a major fan who has believed since last September that the odds greatly favored UITA winning, I’m feeling a little bit shocked that this vibe seems to have dissipated like that — that things have turned around so abruptly.

I know that guys like screenwriter William Goldman (whom I spoke to briefly at the UITA party at 21) admire it tremendously, and I recognize that maybe I’m just talking to too many sourpusses. Am I?

Can you imagine being on your death bed, as legendary critic and essayist Robin Wood was recently, and being suddenly seized by an urge to name your top all-time films, and as a friend sits down by the bed with a pad and pen, you sit up slightly and say, for openers, “Top of the list…my all-time favorite…Rio Bravo.”

What is that? You’re about to leave the earth and meet the monolith and the greatest film you can think of is Rio Bravo? A zero-story-tension hangin’ movie that constantly subjects viewers to screechy-voiced Walter Brennan, and which features the very soft-spoken, adolescent-voiced Ricky Nelson singing a duet with Dean Martin?

If Wood is listening from his side of the cosmic fence, let me try explaining this one more time. (I explained it in full on 7.27.07.) Rio Bravo, which I’m moderately okay with, doesn’t hold a candle to High Noon, which is more or less the same film — about a lawman facing up to bad guys who will kill him if he doesn’t arrest or kill them first.

The reason is that High Noon is about facing very tough odds alone, and how you can’t finally trust anyone but yourself because most of your “friends” and neighbors will equivocate or desert you when the going gets tough. That’s reality, while Rio Bravo is a nice dream about standing up to evil with your flawed but loyal homies and nourishing their souls in the bargain — about doing what you can to help them become better men.

High Noon doesn’t need help. It’s about solitude, values…four o’clock in the morning courage. Whereas the action in Rio Bravo is basically about the homies pitching in to help an alcoholic (Dean Martin) get straight and reclaim his self-respect. And about Chance (John Wayne) working up the courage to tell Feathers (Angie Dickinson) that he loves and wants her.

We’d all like to have loyal supportive friends by our side, but honestly, which represents the more realistic view of human nature? The more admirable?

Wood chose Rio Bravo, I suspect, because he was facing the void and he wanted warmth in his heart — he wanted to feel closer to others and selected a film that has always made him feel this. He chose a community solidarity film over a solitary strength film.

A very comforting Christmas Eve service at All Souls church on Lexington and 79th — 12.24.09, 7:25 pm. The choir, I’m told, is composed of professionals, and their singing was awesome. It was like watching a Christmas pagent produced by Broadway’s finest. Only in New York.

The Sherlock Homes of literary legend “has never been much for physical violence,” says NY Times critic A.O. Scott. And Guy Ritchie, director of the corporation-serving, would-be tentpole movie Sherlock Homes, has never been much for “intelligence [in terms of his] interests or attributes as a filmmaker.” But here the twain meets…synergy!

“The chief innovation of this new, franchise-ready incarnation is that Robert Downey, Jr.‘s Holmes is, in addition to everything else, a brawling, head-butting, fist-in-the-gut, knee-in-the-groin action hero. In this vein Sherlock Holmes is kind of cool” and “intermittently diverting…but that’s not really a compliment.

“The visual style — a smoky, greasy, steam-punk rendering of Victorian London, full of soot and guts and bad teeth and period clothes — shows some undeniable flair. And so do the kinetic chases and scrapes that lead us through the city, as Holmes and his pal Watson (Jude Law) scramble to unravel a conspiracy so diabolical that it fails to be interesting.

“It seems that an evil aristocrat (Mark Strong), executed for a series of murders, returns from the dead to mobilize an ancient secret society that he may have time-traveled into a Dan Brown novel to learn about. Doesn’t that sound fascinating? I thought not.

“But there will be a sequel, for which this frantic, harmless movie serves as an extended teaser, and it looks as if it might feature Holmes’s literary archnemesis, Professor Moriarty. No doubt Holmes will break a chair over Moriarty’s head, kidney-punch him and kick him in the face. Wittily, though, like the great detective he is.”

HE is wishing everyone a serene and soothing time on this, the ninth Christmas Day of the 21st Century. Not that I really buy into the holiday. Okay, I do buy into it in a sort of in-and-out, half-assed way. I just don’t like all the stores being closed and that On The Beach absence-of-humanity feeling on the streets. And all that sitting around and binge-eating and sipping of fatty holiday drinks.

Dylan and Jett Wells — 12.24.09, 9:55 pm.

The boys and I are attending a gathering today at a good friend’s home. Sit back, settle down, exhale and cherish the good things — I can go there, do that.

There’s no title at the beginning of Avatar, and no opening credits either. It’s just the Fox logo and fanfare and it starts, wham — an overheard moving shot of the Pandoran forest as Jake’s murmured narration kicks in, and we’re off to the races.

Films occasionally begin without a title sequence but not many. No titles is a way of saying to the audience. “You’re in for something ambitious, no fooling around…get ready.” Somehow it wouldn’t play if Paul Blart Mall Cop or Fifty First Dates didn’t have them. It has be a major-type film from a name director or the conceit doesn’t work.

The first film to play without any opening titles was Francis Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now (1979). It was mildly startling (in a cool way, of course) when Coppola introduced this 30-odd years ago. I wonder how many films have begun this way? Not more than 15 or 20, I’m presuming. Maybe a few more than that.

Avatar and all other opening-title-free films end with closing credits, of course. It would be heresy not to do this. All the contributors need their screen time for posterity.

There was at least one film to play without any titles whatsoever, opening or closing, and that was also Apocalypse Now. The 70mm roadshow version, I mean. Closing credits were added on for the 35mm general release version.

Update: A filmmaker friend just wrote to say that “many films now have no opening credits… including two of my films. It’s a very classy approach. Some filmmakers like to have credits at the start of the films because they think an audience will be trucking out of the theater at the end; others feel that the film has to earn the right for the audience to give a fuck who made it.

“I’ll bet ya that more than half of the Oscar winners over the past, say, twenty years are end-credit films.”

I wrote back in response, “When I say no opening credits I mean no title either…..I mean no nothin’ whatsover as the film begins, like Avatar and Apocalypse Now. Are you sure this is as common as you say?”

This was one of the best-tasting glasses of beer I’ve had in my life. Ice cold with a kind of cidery texture, topped with a perfect lemon wedge. One cool sip and I was saying “happy holidays!” I had it yesterday at Fanelli’s on Prince, across from the Mercer Hotel.

Sincere congrats to Karina Longworth for landing the film editor gig (i.e., Scott Foundas‘s recently vacated post) at the LA Weekly. She’s sharp and tough and exceptionally bright, and highly respected all around. A bit of a dweeby monk-type, perhaps, but that’s what many film critics are like. She’ll never gush over a film for grossly emotional reasons (i.e., not the kind that popcorn-munchers might recognize), and she’ll always have that slightly detached, hip-scrutiny thing going on with the thick horn-rimmed glasses and all. Longworth is a very cool brand.

Karina Longworth

What’s with the morning-after revenue reporting at boxofficemojo.com? It’s nearly 1 pm in Manhattan and Avatar‘s Wednesday numbers still aren’t up? It made another $16 million on Tuesday, hitting $109 million total. Jett and I attended last night’s 6 pm show at the AMC Lincoln Square — we wanted to catch the monster-screen “real” IMAX 3D version — and it was packed solid. The lines inside the plex were ridiculous. So where are the Wednesday numbers? I’m guessing…what, another $15 or $16 million?

We sat in the third row, and the film looked much better than the “fake” IMAX version at the AMC 34th Street. Avatar‘s success isn’t just about the visuals and the spectacle. It’s the emotion, stupid. This is something that your emotionally side-steppy critics will never understand in a deep-down way. It’s the primal-ness, the movie-movieness of the thing. It’s all myth and metaphor and fable, and the audience (okay, the partly-Eloi audience) gets this, of course. For once they’re on the money. Nobody’s looking for Tom Stoppard/Alvin Sargent/Bo Goldman-level dialogue. They’re going with the all of it.

What delight and joy in reading the Auburn Plainsman‘s Ben Bartley, some red-white-and-blue type guy from Texas who’s fuming that such an anti-corporate, anti-arrogant, anti-Bush legacy, pro-eco, pro-nativist pantheist tract is raking it in big-time and spreading the myth everywhere, and there’s nothing this guy can do about it. Hah! Eat shit, Christian asshole!

In its own primitive popcorn way Avatar is the craftiest and most persuasive left-wing, fuck-Fox-news political film to come along in ages. Happy holidays indeed.

In a wartime letter to his parents in 1943 excerpted in the current Esquire, Lt. John F. Kennedy referred to an NCO “who always seemed to have the feeling that something was going to happen to him…and when fellows get this feeling, strangely enough, they always seem to be the ones who do get it.”

As soon as I read this I thought of film distributors possessed by this very same attitude when it comes to opening certain films. They know the flick in question is doomed, and everything in their marketing effort seems to acknowledge this. I sensed this attitude from the Sony people when they were plugging Did You Hear About The Morgans?.

They seem to be saying, “We’re just going through the motions, okay? We’re buying ads, sending the stars out on interviews, putting up wild posters, etc. But we know you’re not going to want to see this thing on opening day…okay, some of you are…but the best we can hope for is a Netflix rental six months from now. You know it, and we definitely know it. But we have to spend the money anyway.”