Day: May 10, 2010

Posted by Moises Chiullan: Just as Jeff boarded a plane to Cannes, Deadline Hollywood posted the news that Bob Berney abruptly resigned from his post at Apparition.

This came completely out of the blue, shocking Bill Pohlad and the entire Apparition staff. Apparition has abruptly cancelled plans to attend Cannes as a buyer, since Berney was the only one empowered to make deals. This means au revoir to Apparition touching anything, in the market or otherwise. According to Finke’s sources, Tree of Life is still an Apparition movie and coming in the fall as planned.

My wild, unfounded speculation: could the sudden nature and timing of this be related to the now-expected Burkle/Weinstein/Miramax deal being announced in the coming days?

Gate 6, Delta Airlines, JFK, 9:06 pm. Several Cannes-bound journalists waiting for the same flight to Nice — Eric Kohn, Richard Corliss, Anthony Breznican, Ann Hornaday, Anne Thompson, Jim Hoberman, Lou Lumenick, Duane Byrge, etc. Plus Oliver Stone, N.Y. Film Festival honcho Richard Pena. Boarding has nearly begun. Radio silence until 7:30 am New York time or thereabouts.

Last weekend New Orleans radio/movie guy Dave Dubos discovered a 1980 issue of Films in Review in which he found a review by yours truly of Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining. At the time I was working as a host at a Lincoln Center restaurant for money, and writing reviews for nickels and dimes.

Last night Matt Zoller Seitz asked his Facebook pallies which movies, foreign or domestic, past or present, do they think were most strongly influenced by Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis? Blade Runner, Brazil and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, of course…but what else?”

Certainly the most glaring in today’s realm is Steven Spielberg‘s Minority Report. And the image of those guys trudging along in grim formation inside the big factory was also appropriated by Spielberg for the finale of Close Encounters when he showed those red-jumpsuit drones preparing to board the mother ship. It made no sense at all (many things in Spielberg’s films fail to make sense or add up) except as a Langian thing.

Metropolis was also a major influence upon Klaus Nomi.

The most completely and fully restored version of Metropolis so far is now playing at the Film Forum.

Delta/Air France has delayed my Nice flight by three hours — an 8:30 pm departure rather than 5:40 pm. That’s okay, I suppose. It affords a little more time to attend to last-minute clean-ups and tweedly-deedlies. My Nice arrival will now be at 11:10 am Tuesday. 2:35 pm update: Delta now says the flight is leaving at 9:30 pm tonight and arriving in Nice at 12:10 pm. Do I hear a 10:30 pm flight and 1:10 pm arrival? Can we go for 11:30 pm departure and a 2:10 pm arrival?

D*HOLLYWOOD has posted one-sheets for two Cannes 2010 films — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful and Olivier Assayas‘s Carlos. I’m sorry but the latter is almost comically bad. It’s akin to those ludicrous internet photos of the devil’s face being formed by smoke from one of the 9/11 explosions. It’s the kind of thing that Cannon Films might have gone with in the mid ’80s. Dump it.

Doug Liman (Fair Game) will soon direct a 3D Three Musketeers — apparently intended to be a kind of goofball japey Eloi-friendly version in the vein of Sherlock Holmes. This is a futile endeavor in the sense that no one — no one! — will ever out-score or out-attitude Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73), which is coming out on a new DVD on 6.1.10. So Liman’s film is double-doomed by way of comparison and the cousin-of-Sherlock Holmes continuity factor. Okay, he’ll probably make a better Musketeers than Stephen Herek‘s version — big deal.

No Lena Horne obituary will be candid enough to say this so I will. She was the first African-American actress-performer to inspire tumescence among mildly racist white guys of the 1940s and ’50s. Horne was a great singer with wonderfully soothing pipes, but she was plain hot besides. The racist joke used to go, “Who would you rather do — Kate Smith or Lena Horne?”

HE reader Kevin Bowen is wondering if Iron Man 2 might have worked better if it had ended with a cliffhanger in the vein of The Empire Strikes Back. One of the reasons that this second Star Wars film is so highly regarded is that it’s the only franchise actioner in the history of cinema in which the main characters do nothing but lose, lose and lose. Their only heroic accomplishment is escaping with their lives…barely.

“Would Iron Man 2 be a better film if it went the Empire Strikes Back route and had Tony Stark/Iron Man lose, with the third film available for vindication?,” Bowen asks.

“I’m going to say yes. Iron Man 2‘s biggest problem is that the bad guys aren’t particularly threatening or challenging. Mickey Rourke is underdeveloped, and Sam Rockwell, God love him, is too goofball to be a threat. The minute we see robots we know they can never beat a human in a movie.

“If the villains had been more genuinely menacing, the film would be better. If we ended the film with Stark stripped of his suit in captivity or left for dead somewhere, with his rival and his robot army in charge of a fictitous ‘world peace,’ we could have had a cliffhanger worth discussing for a couple years.

“Instead we get just another bland CGI shoot-em-up without much imagination.”

The Cannes Film Festival has added Ken Loach‘s Route Irish, a romantic triangle drama set in Liverpool and Iraq, to the competition slate. Written by Paul Laverty, it’s about two ex-soldiers in love with the same lady. Pic includes “a number of action sequences employing stunts and pyrotechnics — a rare terrain for the British helmer,” says Variety. Chris Menges is the dp. Boning scenes will most likely be subtle or bypassed entirely, given the usual wont of older directors.

I’ve just been invited to see Craig McCall‘s Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, on Sunday, 5.16 at 7:45pm — six days hence — at the Salle Bunuel.

My favorite Cardiff-shot films (in this order): John Huston‘s The African Queen, Richard Fleischer‘s The Vikings, John Irvin‘s The Dogs of War, and King Vidor‘s War and Peace. Oh, and I’ve always had a liking for the look of Girl on a Motorcycle, that late ’60s soft-porny leather-zipper thing with Alaine Delon and Marianne Faithful.

Cameraman screened at the BFI in London last week. It was hosted by the indefatigable Martin Scorsese who described the late director as “one of the last pioneers of filmmaking and one of the first artists who gave us color…he was able to create images of heart-stopping beauty and dynamism…once seen, his images are never forgotten, [and] will never fade.”