Month: March 2011

Paramount Home Video’s Bluray of The Ten Commandments (out 3.29) is fairly close to magnificent. It’s a visual bath of the first order. The costumes, the golden armor, the beards, the wood grain, the jewelry, the matted hair on the donkeys and oxen…all the remarkable little details that are part of any well-photographed, large-format, big-event film just keep on coming. The glossy, freshly-painted chariots are a trip in themselves.

I’m not exaggerating — this is one of the most excitingly detailed Blurays I’ve ever seen.

The soundstage scenes constitute 98% of this film, and are therefore the most carefully lighted and colorful and delectable. The glistening palace floors, the stone facades of the Hebrew homes, the Hebrew garments, the shimmering idols and battle helmets and chestplates, the gleaming swords, the mustard-colored deserts, the red headresses and deep-blue palace drapes…wow! Forget the thematic and story contents of this 1956 film, and forget most of the performances except Yul Brynner and Edward G. Robinson‘s. It has always been a tedious and tiresome sit. But the colors and detail are amazing. I feel like I finally understand what this film is really about — i.e., production values!

Watch the following in 1080p to get the full low-rent effect:

The extras contain a short doc about the film’s New York City premiere, and in it there’s footage of John Wayne without his rug.

I’ve told my sons over and over that few things in life are more painful than to discover that your significant other has cheated on you. It’s like a knife in the heart and will most likely destroy your relationship so don’t go there. But if you do, don’t get caught. Take it seriously. Play your cards like you’re an undercover agent in East Germany in a John Le Carre novel. Which means short-term flings only because long-term affairs are always found out sooner or later.

This isn’t a roundabout way of saying it’s okay to cheat — it’s not. It’s a very cruel and selfish thing to hurt someone you care for and are committed to out of erotic whim. But people are fallible and no one is perfect and a dalliance or two doesn’t have to be fatal. Just be careful.

Massy Tajedin‘s Last Night will play at the Tribeca Film Festval (4.20 through 5.1). Keira Knightley, Sam Worthington, Eva Mendes, Guilaume Canet and Griffin Dunne costar. Tadjedin directed and wrote the script. It’s basically about two couples dealing with temptation, etc.

The only thing giving me pause is that Last Night began shooting in October ’08, and here it is almost two and a half years later. It played at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, but that represents approximately a 20-month gap between wrapping and being seen, and that’s still a little prolonged.

Why am I getting a feeling that this film about cool young photographers — sweaty, edge junkies, cynical but passionate — is going to be a ho-hummer? You’d think that a movie about photographers would pay tribute to their profession by looking absolutely immaculate, but the trailer has scenes that are obviously too dark and murky. Honestly? There’s one short clip that really caught my attention, and it happens at the 41-second mark.

The Bang Bang Club, a Tribeca Films release, opens on VOD on 4.20, and theatrically on 4.22.

That guy I know who often see films months in advance caught a version of Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball (Sony, 9.23) last night, and…well, here he is: “I loved it, and I didn’t expect to. It’s a baseball-from-the-business-angle movie, for goodness sake, and to be honest on my way over I was asking myself, ‘why am i even going?’ But this film is a triumph of storytelling, editing and a little bit of star power.

“I gather the story is more or less the same as the one in the Michael Lewis book, so there shouldn’t be any news about the plot. Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, the onetime general manager of the Oakland Athletics who created a moderately hot team through shrewd analysis and a “sabermetric” approach (whatever that means) to scouting players, etc.

“Jonah Hill and Phillip Seymour Hoffman give the two biggest supporting performances. Robin Wright, Kathryn Morris and Tammy Blanchard have the lead female parts.

“Pitt is great in a non-Oscar-bait role — a renegade tough-love hardass at work, and laser-twinkling as an estranged dad. Hill is fantastic as a number-crunching nobody, and is really wonderful underplaying everything. And the baseball scenes…honestly, you won’t know if you’re seeing archival footage or recreations, and the guys playing the players…! For the most part you don’t know if you’re watching amateur actors play real ballplayers or vice versa, but it totally works.”

The producers are Scott Rudin, Michael DeLuca and Rachel Horovitz. The script was originally written by Stan Chervin. Stephen J. Rivele, Steven Zallian and Christopher Wilkinson wrote drafts under previous director Steven Soderbergh, or so I’m given to understand. Aaron Sorkin rewrote everyone when Miller took over or Soderbergh.

Update: Another HE reader was there also and has this to say:

“Sports films are almost never really ‘about’ sports. They always have a primary, more traditionally cinematic concern on their mind: a relationship on the rocks or a budding romance, the rise of the downtrodden or the triumphant return of the forgotten or discarded. Even the notion of the big game being won is a well-trodden, pedestrian conceit that serves as the usual metaphor for the final challenge a protagonist or team must face.

“Moneyball may well be the first sports film not seen through the prism of a romance a la Bull Durham, a character drama a la The Blind Side, a tragedy a la Brian’s Song, or a comedy a la Major League. Rather, it is the first of its kind: a sports film seen through the prism of sports.

“The plot concerns Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) the general manager of the Oakland A’s, a team that has just lost several of their star players going into their 2002 season. After hiring a Yale-educated economics genius named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), Beane comes up with a completely new way of drafting players using a complex method of number crunching and statistical analysis.

“Beane and Brand figure out that by hiring certain players who are under-valued by the league, they can mathematically improve their chances of getting players on base, thus scoring more wins. Given the process’ completely experimental nature, Beane faces constant pushback by colleagues and must struggle to see his theories through to fruition.

“Pitt and Hill both turn in great performances, with Hill in particular killing every scene he’s in. The dough that’s settling into Pitt’s angelic features serve him well here, giving him the feel of a beat-up man cutting a path through exhaustion and frustration.

“Director Bennett Miller, writers Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, and Sony Pictures have gone ahead and come up with something truly unique and special. Moneyball has little concern for things like drama, character arcs, or third-act thrills. There are elements of each of these things to be found in the film, but it is first and foremost a movie about baseball, about the intricacies of sports and statistics, and how a passion and deep understanding of the minutia can lead one down the possible path to victory.

“But the victory at the end of said tunnel matters less than the process of digging through the numbers and dealing with the politics to get there. Oddly enough, a film that comes to mind when thinking about Moneyball is David Fincher‘s marvelous Zodiac. The films share DNA in their obsession with obsession, a fixation on the moment-to-moment procedure of things. Moneyball is not as good a film as Zodiac, but the similarities are there.

“Miller’s direction is subtle, leaning heavily towards clean frames and smooth steadicam movements, letting the dialogue and information pitching to take center stage. It’s hard to know where most of Moneyball‘s dialogue comes from, but it doesn’t feel completely like an Aaron Sorkin screenplay and comes off more as something from Zaillian. Certain scenes feel very Sorkin-esque however (such as one where Billy sits in a room before his cadre of scouts and hilariously announces the new direction the team will be taking).

“The film is very well written in terms of presenting large quantities of information in a way that’s digestible, but it’s not a script filled with ‘big scenes’ or ‘powerful moments.

“Rather, it’s largely a distillation of the very things the characters are pouring through: data and theories. The filmmakers seem to have purposely avoided doing the cliched moments we’ve come to expect from sports films, such as the ‘big locker room speech.’ Just when Moneyball seems to be heading in such a direction, it boldly takes a left turn and refuses to pander to genre expectation, a move that should be applauded from a creative standpoint.

“Contradictorily, the very things that make Moneyball special also present problems. Its deep, deep focus comes at the expense of traditionally satisfying moments. There’s very little tension present, and the story is low on drama. Granted, this is intentional by the filmmakers, but does result in a feeling that the stakes are not as high as they could be. Moneyball is always interesting, but rarely gripping. It also feels a little flabby in its current iteration, and could use some trimming.

“Flaws aside, Moneyball is ultimately a very special studio release. Uniquely nerdy, obsessively wonky, and yet still compelling and engaging, it’s a rarity: a baseball film rife with inside baseball and proud of it. It’s a movie that becomes about itself: the filmmaking on display feels as experimental (for a big studio film) as the one taken on by the characters. In spite of the niche-like nature of its focus,

“Moneyball is well made enough to be appreciated by anyone who digs original filmmaking, and it’s not afraid to take a chance. Kudos to the filmmakers and Sony for taking a risk.”

High-end design monger Christian Annyas (“online curator of all things typographic in cinema”) has posted twice about fabled Saul Bass — one showing how his original poster designs have been ignored by DVD marketers in favor of blah boilerplate art, and another showcasing his corporate logo designs, which have had an average lifespan of 34 years.

What’s all that black about? Too much of it. Where’s the “love”? Just show the May-December lovers and let it go at that.

A green face with a black teardrop…is she supposed to be sick or something?

I saw Zach Snyder‘s Sucker Punch last night, and the first review I read this morning was from Marshall Fine. His admiring assessment mainly said three things: (1) “If you’re looking for Sucker Punch to make sense, see another film,” (2) Yes, it has “some flaws” but (3) “Snyder, in the space of three films” — i.e., this + Watchmen and 300 — “has become the most distinctive visual storyteller since Brian DePalma.”

Calling the LexG’s of the world! Emily Browning as “Babydoll” in Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch.

That last statement is true in a faintly-tragic, merrily-we-go-to-hell way. Snyder does have a DePalma-esque visual paintbrush married to a crazy-maestro attitude . But I couldn’t let that “some flaws” remark stand so I wrote Fine immediately and said this:

“‘Flaws’? ‘FLAWS’? Sucker Punch is many things, but one of its goals — and it succeeds in record time, before the first act is over — is to torture people like me. Snyder has said he meant to make “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns”…machine guns and thunderclouds and samurai swords and red-eyed, medieval Japanese soldier-giants and hot kewpie-doll babes with false eyelashes, he meant. Either way the putrid remnants of the body of Lewis J. Carroll are now reanimating and reforming and adding flesh and bone and clawing their way out of the grave in order to find Snyder and his wife Deborah and strangle them in their bed.

“Snyder is a kind of visual dynamo of the first order who has created in Sucker Punch a trite-but-fascinating, symphonic, half-psychedlic, undeniably ‘inspired’ alternate-reality world — gothic, color-desaturated, Wachowski-esque — that is nonetheless ruled by so much concrete-brain idiocy and coarsely “mythic” cliches (i.e., an evil father figure so ridiculously vile and gross beyond measure that he makes the cackling, moustache-twirling villains of the Snidely Whiplash variety seem austere if not inert) and ludicrous, charmless, bottom-of-the-pit dialogue and cheaply pandering female-revenge fantasies that you literally CAN’T STAND IT and WANT TO HOWL and THROW YOUR 24 OZ. COKE AT THE SCREEN.

“Snyder is a masterful visual maestro (loved the proscenium arch ‘theatrical’ touches at the very beginning) but also — this is crucial to the Sucker Punch experience — an Igor-like, chained-in-the-basement, genius-level moron at dumbing things down. The movie is a digital torture device for those seeking at least a hint of compelling narrative, a tendril-ish remnant of logic, a tiny smidgen of story intelligence, and dialogue with a hint of flair or some kind of tethered-to-the-world normality.

“Apart from sending people like myself into tailspins of depression, Sucker Punch is essentially about the Warner Bros. corporate uglies giving loads of money to a wild-eyed 21st Century primitive and in so doing trying to turn on the younger female ticket-buyers with fantasies of power and revenge against all the oily men in their lives who’ve sought to exploit or use or treat them with cruelty. It is putrid ComicCon swill of the lowest order.

“In fact, Sucker Punch strongly suggests that there is, in fact, a ComicCon screenwriting software that is being secretly peddled to GenX and GenY filmmakers that insures that the exact same mythical imaginings and the exact same high-flying Matrix-y sword battles and the exact same wild-action-fantasy, go-to-the-next-video-game-level story progressions are repeated ad infinitum.

“Yes, there’s a worlds-within-worlds scheme going on (i.e., a dream-world-within-a-play-being-performed blahdeeblah) but it’s basically about LexG horndog lust and notions of hotpants girly-girls with onlinehookerblowjobslut fantasy names like Babydoll (the lead blondie played by Emily Browning) and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (as in “you’ll go off like a rocket,” played by Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung)…oop-poop-pee-doop! Sucker Punch delivers like VHS porn, and I’m not just speaking of the dialogue but the acting. And to think of these nice, attractive, presumably intelligent actresses collecting a paycheck for their willingess to be chained in Snyder’s basement…the shame of it.

“How infuriating that a guy who really knows how to direct and whip up a frenzy with all kinds of serious, high-style production-design lather, is such a prisoner of his own sub-mental “holy shit, that’s so cool!” imaginings…such atrociously labored, poisonously cliched comic-book/video-game sludge that the mind reels & the stomach turns as the vomit goes splat on the sidewalk.

“This was Snyder’s first creation that came straight from his own imaginings (and also from the head of Steve Shibuya, “the guy who wrote the original score that Sucker Punch is based upon”). The tragedy is that there are no guiding hands or creeds or mechanisms or mentors in 2011 Hollywood to rein Snyder in and urge him to refine or re-shape or otherwise up his game. His producing-partner wife Deborah has obviously goaded him in this flamboyant direction, and the WB corporate hell-hounds are basically saying ‘yeahh, Zach…go for it, whatever, video-game fantasy crap…love it!”

“No offense but Sucker Punch feels to me like a ghastly, deranged and darkly depraved thing…it’s the apocalypse, the end, the flames of hell…and yet, at the end of the day, conversely brown and gooey.”

Yesterday afternoon The Hollywood Reporter‘s Jay Fernandez quoted an amsuing excerpt from Peter Bart‘s “Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob, (and Sex)” (Weinstein, 5.3.11). It concerns the fabled Julie Christie-Donald Sutherland sex scene from Nicolas Roeg‘s Don’t Look Now (’73), and whether or not the couple actually “did it” during filming.

According to Fernandez, who’s read galleys of the book, Bart unequivocally says “they were fucking on-camera.”

The following exchange happened between Bart and Roeg on the Venice set as this scene was being shot. Bart: “Nic, don’t they expect you to say cut?'” Roeg: “I just want to be sure I have the coverage.” Bart: “His dick is moving in and out of her. That’s beyond coverage.”

I have surely heard the cries of HE readers, complaining of slow loading. I myself have felt the anguish of the drip-drip-drip. So today we cut down the number of postings on the front page — formerly 50, now 30. And we’re going to be more vigilant about accepting flash ads, which can also slow things down.

Variety‘s Andrew Stewart reported earlier today that Sony “many finally be conjuring up its long-gestating Harry Houdini project” with Francis Lawrence (Water for Elephants) directing and Jimmy Miller producing — and that’s fine. But I’ll bet serious money that neither Lawrence nor Miller have thought about what would make a good movie about the legendary escape artist (and what would make a bad one) as much I have. Seriously.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s the late Stuart Byron and I had a small business called re:visions that sold analyses of stalled or otherwise troubled film projects. 22 years ago we co-researched and co-wrote an exhaustive 36-page analysis about why Rastar Prods. (the Columbia-based filmmaking company run by the legendary Ray Stark) had repeatedly tried and failed to get its own Houdini movie before the cameras in the ’70s and ’80s, despite having commissioned scripts from the highly skilled James Bridges, Carol Sobieski and William Goodhart.

Our opinion, in a nutshell, was basically “forget it.” We delivered our opinion on page 4, as follows:

“We began our immersion into the Houdini material under the hope that we’d strike oil, some structural flaw or hidden theme that everyone had missed, and thus resurrect the [Houdini] project as it was originally conceived. But after slogging through three Houdini biographies, two-and-a-half stage treatments done for Ray Stark, all of the scripts (some Rastar-owned, some not) and treatments, and various research materials assembled in the Rastar riles through the years, we came to a conclusion which surprised us — certainly one for which we were unprepared.

“The material isn’t there.

“It is not the fault of James Bridges, Carol Sobieski or William Goodhart that none could write a producible script. Harry Houdini may have had a fascinating career. His stage act may have been the biggest knockout of his day. And he may have had, on some deeply repressed level, strong inner conflicts that render him a subject for psychological discourse.

“But he did not lead an interesting life. Indeed, of all the major celebrities of the 20th Century, it could be argued that Harrry Houdini led the dullest and most uneventful off-stage existence. Houdini may have led a life that, to him, was incandescent, but reading about requires great amounts of coffee and fortitude. The dramatic dullness is unrelenting. We wished that once, just once, Harry Houdini had failed in some performance and been publicly humiliated. Or that he’s suffered some crisis of confidence. But it never happened.

Page 4 of our report

“Houdini’s is an example, in fact, of the sort of life in which, dramatically speaking, nothing happens.

“He never fell in love with a woman other than his wife (this no adulterous conflicts or guilt, leading to some cinematic flashpoint). He did not have to leave his country and become an exile. He had no serious rivals or feuds (except for the wars of rhetoric between himself and the spiritualists, fought with terminology and metaphor of an obscure, hard-to-grasp nature). His career never stalled due to some interruptus, like having to fight in World War I, or suffering injury or serous illness, or becoming an alcoholic or dope addict.”

And so on and so on. None of this will stop Lawrence and Miller from making something up that is wholly fictional and CG-flamboyant, but the whole reason for focusing on Harry Houdini is the metaphor of escape, and the fact many of his escapes were done in “real” environments and not as a showbiz presentation.

Aahh, forget it. It’s a different world, a different set of rules. Lawrence and Miller are going to do whatever the hell they want, but they may as well invent something out of whole cloth instead of trying extract something true and historical.

I don’t think there’s anything terribly thrilling in the official announcement that Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life will have its world premiere at Cannes 2011. The big news would have been if Fox Searchlight, the film’s distributor, had decided not to show it there. But we all knew this was coming, just as we know that if Malick could have figured a way to delay showing Tree another year, he would have done so.

Things have changed since The Tree of Life was a no-show at Cannes 2010, and I’m telling you that this Sean Penn-and-Brad Pitt darn-my-dad family dysfunction flick is no longer enough to truly quicken the pulse of the Cannes cognoscenti. In terms of showing a film by a major American auteur and/or some sort of prestige-level director, Cannes 2011 needs something else to make itself vibrant and whole.

Because Tree, I fear, is going to deflate when it finally screens. Too much time in post-production always indicates convolution and a lack of clarity — let’s face it — and it often means double-trouble when the film in question is based on a decades-old idea and a dust-covered script that a director has been waiting half his life to put before cameras.

No, we need something else from this country to play Cannes. As George Clooney said to Tilda Swinton in the finale of Michael Clayton, “I want more.” Something bolder and out of the blue — ballsier, more exciting, cooler, more flamboyant, etc. Because Malick, gifted fellow that he is, has fiddle-faddled for too long. I’m sorry, but that’s how it smells now. And I’m saying this as someone who would dearly love to be proved wrong, if warranted. But I know in my heart and in my insect-antennae vibrations that this film is going to be trouble.

A couple of hours ago on KCRW I heard a quote from Jeanine Basinger stating that the late Elizabeth Taylor launched the era of the superstar salary by hardballing it with 20th Century Fox executives during initial Cleopatra negotiations by saying, “If you want me, you’ll have to pay me a million dollars.” As I heard it the million dollar demand was actually meant in jest. She didn’t want to do effing Cleopatra and figured, “Okay, this’ll get rid of them — ask or some ridiculous amount.”

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The new King of Kings Bluray (Warner Home Video, 3.29) arrived yesterday. I’ve said before that it’s not the spiritual content of this so-so 1961 Biblical canvas flick (which I can take or leave) as much as (a) the lusciously detailed Super Technirama 70 photography, which looks mouth-watering on the Bluray, (b) Miklos Rosza‘s legendary score and (c) Jeffrey Hunter‘s performance as Jesus of Nazareth, which seems wooden and posed at first but gradually deepens and sinks in during the second half.

Jeffrey Hunter’s blue eyes were radiant in this film — no question about that.

Golgotha tableux

The best journey-of-Christ movie is Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ followed by Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s The Gospel According to St. Matthew. But in an odd way King of Kings has a special vibe about it due to Hunter’s Nazarene, who is at once Hollywood-fake and yet captivating and soothing. That handsome face, that nut-brown hippie hair, those light blue eyes, and that red-and-white outfit that he wears during the Sermon on the Mount scene.

I might as well just spit it out: there’s a vaguely erotic appeal to Hunter’s Christ. All the King of Kings characters look at him with half-goofy, half-awestruck expressions, but it’s hard not to presume or imagine that they’re also taken by his physical beauty. (Even Ron Randell‘s Roman Centurion seems to regard him in this light.) There’s no question during the watching of King of Kings that Hunter’s Christ is far and away the best looking….okay, I’ll say it…the hottest guy in the film. If I were a gay Judean and he wasn’t the Son of God…

Two or three years ago I mentioned a sartorial similarity between Hunter’s Jesus and Rebel Without a Cause‘s James Dean with both wearing bright red tunics on top of white T-shirts in climactic scenes. One assumes this was at the urging of Nicholas Ray, the director of both films. Let’s not forget that Ray, according to one or two Dean biographies, had some kind of sexual affair with Dean during the making of Rebel. So it’s at least possible that he injected a subtle erotic undercurrent into King of Kings….maybe.

Technical sidenote: Super Technirama 70 provided 70mm release prints, but not from a 70mm (or 65mm) negative. It used a horizontally-run, 8-perf film almost identical to VistaVision, but with an anamorphic squeeze during the photography so that both 35mmm anamorphic and 70mm prints can be made from the negative.