Year: 2009

An open letter about the Fox-Warner Watchmen conflict from producer Lloyd Levin, passed along by Drew McWeeny.

Can anyone imagine being diseased and sadistic enough to name their just-born child Nakoa-Wolf Manakauapo Namakaeha Momoa? Can anyone imagine the actual child who’s been given that name (i.e., a son born to Lisa Bonet) not devising revenge schemes all through elementary school and beyond? “How do you do? My name is Nakoa-Wolf Manakauapo Namakaeha Momoa! Now you’re gonna die!”

I’m enormously relieved I wasn’t singled out for my writing style and/or judgments by Defamer‘s Stu Van Airsdale in his annual Listys Awards, which are basically about slapping around critics who, in VanAirsdale’s judgment, have written about ’08 movies in a “mystifying, patience-testing and all-around terrible” way.

Today’s Top Five starting at #1 are Fox 411’s Roger Friedman , Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum, the Baltimore Sun‘s Michael Sragow, MTV News critic Joe DeShano, and In Contention‘s Kris Tapley . The only thing worse than being dissed is being altogether ignored so at least these guys aren’t suffering that fate.

Slumdog Millionaire‘s Danny Boyle, The Dark Knight‘s Christopher Nolan, Milk‘s Gus Van Sant, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button‘s David Fincher and Frost/Nixon‘s Ron Howard were announced this morning as Directors Guild nominees for top feature film of 2008.

I’m fixing myself a coffee in the morning and I’m thinking Boyle, Fincher, Howard, Nolan and Van Sant. I’m taking the bus into the city and I’m thinking Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, The Dark Knight, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Milk. I’m walking down Varick St. in the windy frigid cold and I’m thinking Van Sant, Nolan, Boyle, Howard and Fincher. I’m ordering a Pinot Grigio at Balthazar and I’m thinking Milk, The Dark Knight, Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I’m throwing up in a gutter in Little Italy and I’m thinking Fincher, Van Sant, Nolan, Howard and Boyle. I’m in a taxi heading down Ninth Avenue, etc., etc.

Oh, I’m sorry…did I forget to mention the Writers Guild nominees yesterday? I did, didn’t I? Well, you can read about them somewhere else.

For three years, from ’36 to ’38, Shirley Temple was the country’s top box-office star, and then Mickey Rooney had the title from ’39 to ’41. (And then it was Abbott & Costello.) Imagine. Temple and Rooney knew how to entertain, for sure, but the last thing you could call moviegoers back then, to judge by their six-year reign, was urbane or sophisticated.

Hollywood-s Top Ten Box-Office Stars — 1936 to 1945 — thanks to Bob Lascaro for providing the scan.

P.J.Hogan‘s Confessions of a Shopaholic (Disney, 2.13.09) may or may not turn out to be decent, good or even entertaining. It’s based on the three known ‘Shopaholic’ books by Sophie Kinsella, and Lord knows there are enough sufferers of this syndrome out there to command attention.

TImes Square billboard, corner of 45th and Broadway (or something close to that).

But talk about a movie that fairly screams “yesterday,” “Bush era” and “before the subprime mortgage meltdown.” What reasonable person in this economic climate is even thinking about being a shopaholic these days, outside of the fairly loaded? Even the well-off are probably telling themselves to curtail the impulse. I’m not saying that lots of people don’t still use shopping in the same way others use cigarettes, drugs, sex and work, but it’s an activity that has lost much of its relevance in the current configuration.

Unless, that is, you’re a quarter-inch-deep Sex and the City fan who refuses to let go of indulgence fantasies and your mantra is “mememememe!” In which case all bets are off.

I’m not going to want to miss the inaugural activities on Tuesday, 1.20, which will extend from the early morning to early afternoon. I can catch it all later online, of course, but there’s something about watching it live. I’m generally inclined to bypass any Sundance Film Festival screenings (press or otherwise) set for the first few hours of that day.

Obama Spider-Man issue discussed here.

To go by early dvdforum reactions to the forthcoming French Connection Bluray (out 2.24), director William Friedkin has purposely degraded his Oscar-winning 1971 film by using a “pastel” process in order to present the originally intended feeling of New York grit. The result, say some, is “out of synch” and “bleeds horribly” — a VHS experience.

French Connection Bluray; the excellent 2005 standard DVD edition

One viewer claims it looks “almost disconnected from the image…it bleeds horribly and looks like something from a dodgy VHS copy…no, I’m not exaggerating…if you pause the picture when Gene Hackman‘s Popeye Doyle is running in his Santa outfit, you’ll see swathes of red hanging in the air around him.”

Another writes that Friedkin “even says on the featurette that the film did not look this way originally , but with the advent of Blu-ray we can finally see his film(s) as he intended . [But] there’s a difference between looking authentically grainy and grubby and what Friedkin has put out here. It’s cruelly ironic that he’s used state-of-the-art HD post-processing to produce something that looks like a well-worn VHS rental. The color is so out -of-sync it’s laughable.”

In other words, it appears that Freidkin (a) agreed with what I wrote on 12.25, (b) tried to give his film a raw funky look in keeping with the spirit of the film to begin with, but (c) overdid it to the point that people are feeling ripped off.

“I was delighted with the sharp, robust, extra-clean image quality of the Fox Home Video French Connection DVD that came out in February ’05,” I wrote two weeks ago. “William Friedkin’s 1971 crime classic probably looked and sounded better than it ever had in Nixon-era theatres.

“But it’s not supposed to look too good. Too much attractiveness would take away from the raw-grit vibe that Owen Roizman‘s photography tried very hard to capture as he shot in various Manhattan, Brooklyn and other-borough locales. So I’m wondering what the point is going to be of the French Connection Blu-ray disc that’ll be out on 2.24.09.”

The above reactions have given me pause. I may just stick with the ’05 standard DVD and leave well enough alone.

“The sun floods the wide sky in Silent Light like a beacon, spilling over the austere land and illuminating its pale, pale people as if from within,” begins Manohla Dargis‘s N.Y. Times review. “A fictional story about everyday rapture in an isolated Mennonite community in northern Mexico — and performed by a cast of mostly Mennonite nonprofessionals — the film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith.

“Mr. Reygadas’s faith may be more rooted in his own gifts than in God, but it’s the sheer intensity of this belief — which he confirms with every camera movement — that invests his film with such feeling.

“This stubborn, passionate intensity is evident in the mesmerizing, transporting opener, in which the seemingly unmoored camera traces a downward arc across a nearly pitch-black night sky dotted with starry pinpricks. Accompanied by an unsettling chorus of animal cries and screams (what’s going on in there?), the camera descends from its cosmic perch into the brightening world and then, as if parting a curtain, moves through some trees onto a clearing that effectively becomes the stage for the ensuing human drama.”

Wall Street had a grotesque party, the lavishness of which has never been seen or experienced in the history of economically developed civilizations, and now the people who cruised along on the backwash of that party are going to have to pay for it. You, me, our children especially…sucking it on our knees for years to come, coping with annual deficits of $1.2 to $1.5 trillion on top of the usual burdens. Awful.

Taxes are going to have to go up and entitlement programs are going to have to scalpeled down. “If we do nothing,” Barack Obama has told the N.Y. Times, “then we will continue to see red ink as far as the eye can see.”

But without a sense of justice in this process, average middle-class citizens — especially the seniors — will be beside themselves with rage. Obama needs to go after the greedy bad guys and make them suffer for their misdeeds in ways that are vivid and theatrical and dramatically satisfying. Send the worst of the Wall Street scalawags to jail. Make the greedheads who don’t go to Sing Sing or Danbury or Leavenworth pick up trash in public parks while dressed in orange jumpsuits, and not just for 30 days — make them do it for two or three years, day in, day out. And take their money — take it right out of their bank accounts the way Charlton Heston led the Hebrew slaves to the grain silos of the high priests in The Ten Commandments — and distribute it to struggling small banks, deficit-plagued municipalities, crippled companies and the desperate poor.

People understand that everyone is going to have to make do with less, but they want and need to see justice meted out in a way they can see. All governments know that a failure to dispense and demonstrate an appropriate sense of justice will sooner or later result in a citizen’s revolt against the government. Make the bad guys suffer, President-Elect Obama, or else.

Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling has won the 2009 Mensch Award for Compassionate Programming by deciding to open the festival (1.22 through 2.1) with Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth. A first-rate political drama, NBTT was dealt a severe blow last month when its distributor, the Yari Film Group, filed for bankruptcy. “It deserves to be seen,” Durling told me earlier today.