Day: May 4, 2010

I watched the just-released Saving Private Ryan Bluray last night, and I must say that the first half of the over-praised D-Day landing sequence gets a little less impressive every time I see it. Some of my beefs about the first few minutes of this sequence are as follows:

There’s a shot of the landing craft in the beginning that allows us to see a vast ocean area behind it, and there’s no armada whatsoever. No ships, no fog, no planes…nothing.

Some troops splash into the surf and are shown sinking twelve or fifteen feet down in an underwater shot. I don’t believe that any landing craft commander would drop troops into water that deep, which is almost tantamount to killing them with the heavy gear on their backs. I also don’t believe that machine-gun bullets can zap guys who are ten or twelve feet below the surface. I’m not a D-Day invasion veteran and I’ve never been in combat, but I think director Steven Spielberg made this stuff up.

I realize, of course, that the sea water in The Cove was totally red after the slaughter of dozens of dolphins, but that was a small body of water undiluted by currents and unchurned by waves. The sea in Saving Private Ryan is affected by these elements, but is nonetheless shown as 100% popsicle red after ten minutes of fighting — as if a ship had poured hundreds of gallons of blood (or vegetable dye) into the water offshore so that Spielberg could make a point about young soldiers bleeding and dying.

There’s no reason for any troops to have survived the first assault wave, given the German machine-gun fire that mowed them down like ducks them the second the landing-craft flaps went down. From what Spielberg shows us, there’s just no way for anyone to have made it onto the beach, much less overrun the concrete bunkers. My understanding is that the first waves at Omaha and Utah beach took absurdly heavy casualties, and that it wasn’t until the fourth or five waves that any kind of serious pushback happened against the Germans.

Tom Hanks, playing an Army Captain, goes into shock at the very beginning as he squats near the water — not ducking or shielding himself, just sitting there with a dumbfounded expression as various men are either blown into pieces or their arms are blown off or whatever. In the real world any Captain who mentally checks out in the heat of battle would have been quickly relieved of duty — the Army can’t afford fog-heads and battle-fatiguers leading its troops.

This is all apart, of course, from Spielberg’s shameless cheat at the beginning tn which the old veteran’s eyes are shown blending into Hanks’ peepers on the landing craft — a move that deludes viewers into thinking they were looking at an elderly Hanks in the opening cemetery sequence. Has there ever been a major director who’s deliberately misinformed his or her audience as baldly as Spielberg does here?

If nothing else the LA Film Festival gives me an excuse to visit old friends and revisit old stomping grounds, so I was kind of looking forward to flying back for next month’s event, which happens from 6.17 to 6.27. But I’m not at all thrilled at the idea of seeing movies downtown, and today’s just-announced slate is underwhelming, to put it politely.

I saw Animal Kingdom, Cyrus and The Kids Are All Right at Sundance…very good, good and meh. I don’t care much about Despicable Me. I spit on Eclipse, the latest Twilight film. I haven’t seen Mahler, Waiting for Superman, The Couch or Revoluccion, but is it worth it fly out to LA, I’m asking myself, so I see them in some LA Live venue? I’ve never much liked downtown LA, although I worship Al’s Bar and Chinatown.

You can define “it” however you’d like, but it was obvious to me a decade ago that Emma Watson had it in spades. It was incorrect and imprudent, of course, for an adult to say or even think such a thing at the time. I was mainly recalling what it was like to be hormonal at age nine or ten, which I definitely was, and saying that if I was in her sphere and age-appropriate, etc. I got funny looks anyway. Some things can’t be said, no matter how you phrase them.

It’s even a bit icky of me to say this now, I guess, but Watson has certainly come into her prime, as this photo (taken last night at the Met) shows. Okay, I’m not really “saying” this. I’m making a measured observation from a respectful distance.

Could there possibly be a more toxic symbol of the utter nowhereness of girlie America than the forthcoming Sex and the City 2 (Sony, 5.27)? What could have better inspired that jerkoff who tried to blow up Times Square the other day? Wallowing in the backwash of the Bernie Madoff and Goldman Sachs-styled profiteering that brought the U.S. to the brink of economic disaster, Carrie and the girls are glaring symbols of everything that was excessively rank about the pre-meltdown 21st Century economy.

If it weren’t for the sexual component there’d surely be a price on their heads. To me the visual import of this poster, which is starting to show up in NYC subways, is no different than, say, photos of naked obese winos defecating on the sidewalk. You think it’s just an HE thing? How then to explain this clip from a parody video on theonion.com?

The news about Lindsay Lohan intending to star in a Linda Lovelace biopic called Inferno is not some idle threat. The project, to be produced by The Killer Inside Me‘s Chris Hanley and directed by Matthew Wilder, will reportedly be officially “announced” at the Cannes Film festival. (With what — a billboard?)

So in addition to gathering a rep as a self-destructive burnout druggie who’s ruined her career, Lohan wants to portray a tragic oral sex queen. Brilliant career move! And classy! On everyone’s part! Let’s see….can’t be hired, heading down the tubes, an obit waiting to happen…I know, let’s hire her to simulate blowjobs and clean up in Asia and Russia and Eastern Europe!

The Inferno announcement means there are now two Lovelace projects, the other being a forthcoming drama from Howl‘s Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and screenwriter Merritt Johnson.

Go to the six-minute mark in this clip from Sullivan’s Travels and watch until it ends. And then read this apparently legit copy of Preston Sturges‘ screenplay for this scene, but with deletions included. Veronica Lake: “Is Hitchcock as fat as they say?” Joel McCrea: “Fatter.” Lake: “Do you think Orson Welles is crazy?” McCrea: “In a very practical way.”

I would have respected Steven Spielberg‘s ambition if he’d decided to remake Robert Bresson‘s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), a classic Christ parable about the suffering of a donkey as he’s transferred from owner to owner and is mostly treated with cruelty. Spielberg would have added the usual sentimentality, of course, but it would have been ballsy to step onto Bresson’s turf — I for one would have saluted — and it would have played into Spielberg’s strength as a distinctive helmer with keen mise-en-scene instincts.

A scene from the 2009 London stage production of The War Horse.

Instead, Spielberg has decided to direct The War Horse, a film version of a 2009 London play about a poor put-upon horse named Joey as he’s transferred from one owner to another during the time of World War I — from a British farm boy to the British cavalry to the German army and back again.

Nick Stafford‘s play, which is based on a children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo, is closer to Spielberg’s natural wheelhouse. It’s an anti-war piece that has simple strokes, and which was aimed at kids to begin with. Plus it has ample sentimentality — (a) a kind of Lassie Come Home story about a boy and his horse being separated, (b) a scene with German and British soldiers impulsively ceasng hostilities in order to save the wounded Joey’s life, and (c) a finale that some book reviewers have described as contrived and cloying. Plus it will also allow Spielberg to half-riff on Bresson’s film without having to acknowledge this, and to try and out-shoot the trench-warfare scenes in Stanley Kubrick‘s Paths of Glory.

So that’s the deal with The War Horse — a possible lunge at Oscar-level kudos, a Spielbergian hack move, another attempt at mass emotional manipulation, a sprinkling of art-film pretension, and yet a chance for Spielberg to show his stuff as a strongly visual storyteller who doesn’t need the engine of dialogue.

Plus it’s another way for Spielberg to avoid directing the Abraham Lincoln movie, which he’s always been intimidated by regardless. He wouldn’t pull the trigger on this project for years on end, presumably because it didn’t look commercial enough to the studios, and is now cowering even deeper in the closet with Robert Redford‘s The Conspirator having stepped in as a similar-type period drama about Lincoln’s assassination.

When I think of Spielberg these days, I think of a rich bearded toad wearing spectacles and a baseball cap.