I’ve twice seen the general-release, famously-truncated version of The Magnificent Ambersons — Welles original 135-minute cut is gone forever — and the second time was a bit difficult to get through…sorry. Everyone loves the production design and the first 20 to 30 minutes (an affectionate evocation of America’s gentile, horse-and-buggy days before the automobile) but Tim Holt‘s arrogant scion is such a drag to hang with.
All my filmgoing life I’ve had a special regard for Sophia Loren‘s bedroom striptease scene in Vittorio DeSica‘s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (’63). Or stills from this, rather. And then two or three years ago I saw the film for the first time. And I learned that sometimes frame captures should be valued for their own merits. YT&T, which costars Marcello Mastroianni, comes out soon on Bluray.
By declaring an instinctual resistance to including made-for-cable movies into the Oscar realm, a genuinely good and brave idea passed along by director-screenwriter Paul Schrader, I regret to say that Roger Ebert has painted himself into a nostalgic 20th Century corner.
“Why not?,” he says in a 5.15 Newsweek/Daily Beast article. “It’s tempting, Paul. I could relax before my big eight-foot home-theater screen, and the work would come to me. The problem is, that goes against my grain. A movie is shown in a movie theater, and I like to sit there and see it. That’s how it’s supposed to be. I’m not ready to bowl alone.”
No…no. That’s over. That ship has sailed. The collusion of corporate calculation and mass Eloi taste buds have all but ruined the upscale movie business, and the only way to get past this (or get around it) is to finally and completely jettison the idea that the best high-end, intelligent or semi-intelligent films open only in theatres first. The whole theatres-first distribution concept is out the window when it comes to movies with a brain…has been for years. The best are the best, no matter how they arrive.
Schrader, says Ebert, claims that “grown-up films and creative projects are ‘over’ in the new Hollywood, and that many of his friends are turning to long-form television.” Here’s how Schrader put it :
“The quality of theatrically released films has been dropping so precipitously in recent years that the Academy Awards are no longer a fair gauge of audiovisual entertainment. Several decades ago audiences could expect a film such as The Social Network every week; now we are lucky to have one or two a year.
“Add to this the fact serious dramas have more or less migrated to television, and it’s clear that the Oscars have become progressively less relevant.
“A veteran film critic — by this I mean you, Roger — should take it on himself by unilaterally abandoning the distinction between theatrical and nontheatrical films in year-end best-of lists. All long-form audiovisual entertainment, released on any distribution platform, would be eligible for consideration. The Academy, of course, would regard this as a nightmare. It would downgrade the ‘specialness’ of theatrical films. But this is all happening anyway so why not get ahead of the curve?”
The sound of Tintin alone grinds into my soul. A young adventurer character with a small dog is a problem right out of the gate. Steven Speilberg directing, as always, is a problem. The hand of Peter Jackson being anywhere near this thing only compounds the problem. Jamie Bell as Tintin is a nonstarter. The impossibly hammy Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock is an all-but-guaranteed problem.
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as “bumbling detectives named Thomson and Thompson” obviously reps a huge problem. Plus another appearance by Daniel Craig, who may be on the verge of stealing the paycheck crown from Liam Neeson. The whole enterprise has a rank corporatized odor about it.
Terra Nova is clearly a second-tier, hand-me-down bullshit adventure fantasy casserole using elements from Avatar, Jurassic Park and Lost. The authoritative drill-sergeant tone used by Stephen Lang as he says “Welcome to Terra Nova, folks!” has a familiar ring.
And exec produced by Stephen Spielberg? I’ve explained this before but here goes again: You can’t direct Tintin and exec produce Terra Nova and be that kind of guy (you know what I mean) and expect to make the right kind of film about Abraham Lincoln.
I’ll be leaving for Paris at dawn on Friday morning, so there’s today, Wednesday and Thursday. And there’s no bus leaving early enough, I’ve just discovered, to get me to Nice airport by 7 am. Plus I’m having some trouble — an internal debate — about the drive and desire to see Aki Kurasmaki‘s Le Havre.
Carlton beach pier.
L.A. Weekly critic Karina Longworth, Brigade publicist Emily Lu at today’s N.Y. Film Festival party at Stella Artois/Carlton beach.
Lincoln Center Film Society honcho Rose Kuo, Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy.
Note: I’ve been experience photo-[psting coding issues. For whatever reason the standard coding that I’ve been using for years to post a photo occasionally disintegrates and causes a chain-reaction coding disintegration that ripples through the whole column. So I have to eliminate this or that photo until I find the problem.
Bellfower producer Vincent Grasha, South by Southwest honcho Janet Pierson, Indiewire critic Eric Kohn at NY Film Festival party.
Sasha Stone and I recorded Oscar Poker #33 yesterday at the Hotel Aldo in Juan les Pains. It was pre-Tree of Life, of course, but otherwise we covered most of the Cannes Film Festival bases. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.
Tree of Life star Brad Pitt is quite thoughtful and considerate when it comes to signing autographs. The last time I saw him at the Cannes Film Festival was in ’07, when he was here with the Ocean’s 13 gang. Like today, he signed in the Salon de Presse Conference and then lingered in the lobby doing the same for those who couldn’t get into the q & a. Doesn’t hesitate; always signs.
I was standing in the right-rear section of the orchestra when The Tree of Life ended and didn’t even hear the booing, which reportedly came from the upper balcony. In any event I think it’s beastly to boo a film as hauntingly beautiful and immensely ambitious and spiritually directed as this one, and which is so dazzling and transporting during its first half-hour to 40 minutes.
I understand the frustration, mind, because The Tree of Lifedoes lose itself in its own impressionistic quicksand after the first half-hour. It begins to drown, sink, swallow itself. The center cannot hold. But it’s entirely worth seeing (and praising) for the portions that clearly and unmistakably deliver. I’m especially referring to what people will soon be calling the 2001/Douglas Trumbull section. Who in the big-budget realm is even trying to make pure art films like this except Malick?
But over time he’s been given, I feel, a bit too much freedom and time to do whatever he damn well pleases. There’s a part of me that would dearly love to see Malick suffer under a brutal Harry Cohn-like taskmaster producer because as unhappy as that would make him personally, he’d make tougher and more rigorous films.
Malick’s staunchly non-linear, 136-minute poem about beauty and Godliness suppressed and the unfortunate legacy of brutal paternal parenting in the 1950s is a sad and beautiful…wank? The ultimate refutation of narrative? An often captivating but rudderless impressionistic exercise?
Yes, I know I twittered the last passage only minutes after emerging from the theatre, but it came out well and on-target so there.
I understand why distributors and exhibitors were apoplectic about this thing last year. It’s not going to sell a lot of popcorn. Or tickets, for that matter. But fuck those guys. The Tree of Life is, of course, essential viewing if you care at all about movies that aspire to more than showing us Johnny Depp mugging and rolling his eyes and pocketing another paycheck.
You know what? I’m just going to re-run and in some instances re-write my tweets and possibly elaborate here and there:
Tweet #1: “Terrence Malick made The Tree of Life in this free-flowing, free-associative way because he could, because he doesn’t have Bert and Harold Schneider riding his ass in post, and because God told him to…like it or lump it.” That’s pretty much on the money. I adore hundred of things that Malick captured in The Thin Red Line and The New World, but there was more discipline in Days of Heaven because (I’ve read) of Bert and Harold, and Badlands was just as tight.
Tweet #2: “Terrence Malick needs a trainer, a tough collaborator, a friend with a stick. No such luck.This movie is the fault of his many enablers.”
Tweet #3: “The first half-hour of The Tree of Life is magnificent. But then it begins to dissipate because the center cannot hold. Airy fairy.
Tweet #4: “The Tree of Life should have been shorter. It’s the first ten minutes of The Thin Red Line — meditative, jungle-leafy, reptile in water — only set in 1950s suburban Texas” — the film was primarily shot in Smithville, about 40 miles southest of Austin — “rather than an island in the South Pacific.”
Tweet #5: “Shorter Tree of Life: Life sure could be symphonically, heart-stoppingly beautiful if it wasn’t for my hard-ass, totally frustrated, spirit-suffocating dad” — i.e., Brad Pitt’s character. Imagine The Tree of Life without those tree shots, those kick-the-can moments, Jessica Chastain‘s looks of disdain for Brad Pitt, etc.” I can’t. But there are an awful of those tree shots. Scores. This must be acknowledged because I think it’s overdone.
Tweet #5: “Don’t get me wrong — The Tree of Life is, at times, transcendent poetry. I’m glad I saw it, but I’m not sure if I’ll buy/get the Bluray.”
If nothing else The Tree of Life is one prolonged Emanuel Lubezski orgasm. Every shot is captivating, sublime, amazing, heavenly.
I love this passage from Justin Chang‘s Varietyreview: “[At] roughly 20 minutes in The Tree of Life undergoes arguably the most extreme temporal shift in the history of cinema. Comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey are perhaps intended, not least because Stanley Kubrick‘s special-effects creator Douglas Trumbull served as a visual consultant on Malick’s eye-candy evocation of the dawn of time (conceived by several visual-effects houses but designed with minimal reliance on CGI).
“We observe a flurry of awe-inspiring images at astronomical, biological, macro- and microscopic levels: a nebula expanding in outer space; cells multiplying in a frenzy; a school of shimmering jellyfish; darkness illuminated by a volcanic eruption; a bubbling primordial ooze.”
Pitt plays the villain, all right, and delicate, red-haired Jessica Chastain plays his tender, spirited, angel-like wife. Their taxed and tormented son Jack is played an adolescent by Hunter McCracken, and as an adult by Sean Penn (who’s barely in the film, and has maybe five or six lines).
There’s a young blonde kid who plays McCracken’s younger brother, and who resembles Brad Pitt quite unmistakably. It’s almost like he’s Pitt’s actual son, which is all but unheard of in movies. There’s one rule that Hollywood casting agents seem to go by when casting families, and that’s to never, ever allow for the faintest resemblance between on-screen parents and children. On this point alone The Tree of Life deserves high praise.
If Terrence Malick could somehow swing it, I’m sure, The Tree of Life wouldn’t be about to screen in 70 minutes’ time. (It’s now 7:20 am.) However good or great or whatever it turns out to be, there’s a certain satisfaction in one of the most prolonged hiding-from-the-world acts in modern cinematic history about to come to an end. I briefly discussed it last night with a friend. Friend: “So how sucky is the Malick going to be, do you think?” Me: “It might not be what some want, but it can’t suck — it’s Malick.”
Earlier today I tried to catch a 5:15 pm screening The Snows of Kilimanjaro at the Salle Bazin. This is what I saw when I arrived 15 minutes before showtime. I went to the end of the line and stood and waited and stood and waited. I knew I’d never get a seat but I toughed it out to the end. And then I said “eff it” and got on the train to Juan-les-Pains.
