Month: June 2011

I see or hear Danny McBride, and I stop laughing. Not only has he never, ever been funny, but there’s something about his Irish warlock eyes and grizzly unshaven hobo face that just suffocates all thoughts of wit or merriment. I see him and say to myself, “Okay, here comes the boorish lowlife with the pot belly who think he’s funny…Jesus.” The only McBride performance I’ve even half-liked is the reluctant birdegroom in Up In The Air.

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Here’s the recently released greenband version.

The Criterion grain monks of the Abbey of St.Martin have done it again. They’ve taken a splendidly captured black-and-white classic — in this case Robert Aldrich‘s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) — and made it look a little bit grainier and fuzzier in certain portions than it did on the last DVD version. And, paradoxically, sometimes a little better. And with a wider image. So it’s not bad, but it hasn’t given me one of those Bluray highs that I live for either.

All I know is that I was 100% delighted with the MGM Home Video DVD (which came out exactly ten years ago) and that I feel a bit mixed about the Criterion Bluray.

I don’t hate it, but I’m not that enamored either. It’s an overly purist monk job, and you know how I feel about those.

I’m not putting down Criterion’s Deadly disc entirely. I’m saying it’s an in-and-outer — at times thrilling and at other times dupey, at times radiant and sharp and looking like a real 1955 movie showing at the Brooklyn Paramount, at other times grainy and then suddenly razor-sharp knockout again. But too often it looks smothered with a billion digital mosquitoes. I’m sorry but I would have been happier if the Universal Home Video guys who slightly DNR’ed Psycho had gotten hold of this one. It looks okay, acceptable, pretty good, very good but also — too often — a little bit crappy.

What can I tell you? When I watched the 2001 Deadly DVD on my 36″ Sony flatscreen analog beast, it looked like a perfect dream — sharp, slick, satiny. Now it looks covered by a Biblical plague, a swarm of micro-sized Egyptian water bugs.

Tree of Life cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski (a.k.a. “Chivo”) has told Cahiers du Cinema that Terrence Malick is working on a six-hour version of the Pitt-Penn-dinosaur flick.

“What I’ve seen [of this] is absolutely incredible,” Lubezki says. “It’s wonderful. The longer version will likely, for the most part, relate to the children part. There were outstanding things…we’ve shot many, many things about Jack’s childhood — his friends, his evolution, his changes, his awareness of the loss of his childhood. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say all of this!”

On 5.17 I wrote the following from Cannes: “I heard from a trusted source yesterday that Sean Penn‘s part in The Tree of Life, which is barely there with maybe ten lines of dialogue, if that, was fairly substantial in earlier cuts [one of which was said to be five hours], but like Adrien Brody‘s character in The Thin Red Line, it was gradually cut down to nothing.”

From Collider.com via The Film Stage via Cahiers du Cinema.

The Regal Cinema theatre where Bernie played last night is huge — as big as the Radio City Music Hall is you don’t count the multiple balconies in that famous house. The ceiling near the front has to be 75 or 80 feet high. The screen is the biggest I’ve ever seen in Los Angeles. (Really.) I was sitting in the fourth row, and it was like I was two or three years old and seeing my first movie. The image was massive.

Bernie director Richard Linklater at LAFF after-party — Thursday, 6.16, 10:55 pm.

(l. to r.) Bernie costar Shirley MacLaine, director Richard Linklater, costars Matthew McConaughey and Jack Black at downtown LA’s Regal Cinema.

Steven Soderbegh, Jules Asner during last night’s LAFF after-party. I asked Soderbergh if he’s seen Bennett Miler’s Moneyball yet. He looked at me quizzically. “You’re asking me if I’ve seen a movie that they fired me off?,” he responded. “Yeah, why not?,” I said. “Water under the bridge. Julie Taymor was whacked as the director of the Spider-Man musical, thrown under the bus by Bono, and there she was taking bows and blowing kisses on opening night. “I’ll see it when I see it…in good time,” he said (or words to that effect). I predicted that his forthcoming retirement from from films will be “a Frank Sinatra retirement” — two or three years of chilling out and then back in the saddle. He said he plans on catching Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive fairly soon (but not at LAFF), and I urged him to see Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur. “If you’re going direct movies, you have to constantly do your homework,” he said.

LAFF Artistic Director David Ansen, LAFF director Rebecca Yeldham,

I went to the opening night of the LA Film Festival last night (i.e., Richard Linklater‘s Bernie plus the after-party). I drove into the underground LA Live lot around 5:15 pm and left around 11:30 pm, and it cost me $25 bills . I’m not going to pay between $200 and $225 to see movies down there over the next nine days. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ll probably park 1/3 or 1/2 mile west of the Regal and then ride my bike the rest of the way.

There’s apparently some friend-of-the-festival deal that lets you park in the West garage for $8 bucks if you stay less than four hours, but a friend tried to do this and got hit for $25 anyway. This is bad, very bad. I’ll take a $10 or $12 hit but not $25.

I love that Donald Sutherland and Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi will be occasional guests on Keith Olbermann‘s new “Countdown” show, which debuts on Current TV on Monday, 6.20 at 8 p.m. I’ve never watched Current before (it’s channel 142 on my Time-Warner system) but I guess I will now. I’m disappointed, of course, that it’s not available in high-def. I don’t like 1.37 to 1 analog images.

Current TV is available in 60 million homes; during the last quarter it reportedly averaged 30,000 viewers in primetime.

I experienced a form of mild humiliation during last night’s LA FilmFest opening-night soiree. It was due to a light-hearted ping-pong volley that was mostly about, I’m ashamed to admit, astrology. I listened because she was somewhere between an 8.5 and a 9, but by the time it was over I got an earful, you bet.

To some extent I can understand, I think, what it was like to be a black man in the Jim Crow South, a Jew in Weimar Germany of the early 1930s, and a gay man in the pre-Stonewall era. Because I am a Scorpio — an astrological sign that has been savaged by astrology writers for decades. People of my sign have been relentlessly described as verbally vicious, emotionally vindictive, hair-trigger whiplashers with razor-sharp talons, and so I’ve been accused aforethought and regarded askance all my life.

Astrological authors really have it in big-time for Scorpios. They condemn them without mercy. No other sign get shat upon like mine. And we’re talking, remember, about each and every person born under the Scorpio sign being some kind of must-to-avoid fiend. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of us walking around with arrogant and sadistic terrorist personalities, ready to pounce on our victims and rip them to shreds and chew their ears off.

I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near a Scorpio based on their descriptions, and yet I’ve been near Scorpios all my life and gotten to know and admire and care for quite a few of them, and the overwhelming majority have been very sharp and resourceful and fascinating blah-blah, or at least interesting mixed bags.

So a long time ago I decided that the people who write these truly ugly condemnations (“unscrupulous terrorist, morbid jealousy, total arrogance, sadistic and aggressive brutality”) are not just ugly themselves but also fucking deranged, and to throw out the whole astrological analysis thing and just trust my own instincts and feelings.

I know what “Scorpio” means, and I’m not a vampire or a werewolf or a zoo animal. I have thoughts and observational powers and experience and determinations that have come from decades of living. And I know what “Taurus” and “Virgo” and “Libra” and “Gemini” and “Aquarius” mean, and it’s mostly sloppy-crap shorthand that sometimes echoes in little ways and sometimes has nothing to do with anything.

No one of any brain size or developed intelligence buys into astrology as anything more than a time-waster. Nobody who knows anything and has been around goes there.

Yesterday afternoon I spoke with novelist-screenwriter Roger Simon, who wrote the early versions of A Better Life (he ended up with a “story by” credit) before being rewritten by Eric Eason. But the basic bones of the screenplay are his. We did about 20 minutes in the offices of IDPR on Hollywood Boulevard.

Simon is CEO of Pajamas Media. He’s the author of ten novels, including the Moses Wine detective series, and six screenplays including Enemies, a Love Story, Bustin’ Loose, My Man Adam and Scenes from a Mall. His first non-fiction book, Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror, was published by Encounter Books in February 2009.

Environmental activist and Last Mountain star Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. delivered some brilliant and impassioned remarks last night following a special invitational screening at the Westside Pavillion. I only managed to capture a small portion of what he said (you don’t want to hear my excuses), but at least I captured a good riff about how you can’t rely on the news media to report the really tough stories because most of the news orgs are compromised to varying degrees by their corporate owners.

Yes, Kennedy has a hoarse and scratchy voice but he’s a real firebrand and he knows his facts and figures.

I ran into Warner Bros. Entertainment president & COO Alan Horn last night during an after-party for The Last Mountain at the Westside Pavillion. I asked him about that $300 million figure that some say is the tab for The Green Lantern. Correct, he said, if you count marketing. The film cost about $200 million and the worldwide marketing total is about $100 million.

Paddy Considine‘s Tyrannosaur, one of the most assuredly artful and emotionally affecting films I’ve seen this year, is playing on Friday (i.e., tomorrow) and Sunday at the L.A. Film Festival. I’d been presuming that an opportunity to interview Considine would be there for interested journalists. But Considine isn’t attending the festival deu to being on a shoot somewhere, and he’s not doing any phoners either, I’m told.

Tyrannosaur costars Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman, Eddie Marsan.

And there’s no YouTube trailer, although I’m informed that one is being finalized as we speak. I don’t get the absence of a trailer for a major film that played at Sundance 2011, which was six months ago, with the film about to show twice at LAFF. What could Strand be waiting for? I’m trying to persuade them to let me speak to Considine anyway.

Here‘s what I wrote last January:

“A publicist asked for a quote about Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, and here’s what I gave her: “The most original adult love story I’ve seen in ages. Easily the biggest shock of the Sundance Film Festival so far. I didn’t see this one coming — it’s a much stronger and more focused film than I expected from a smallish British drama about an older working-class guy with a temper problem. It curiously touches.

“Tyrannosaur is a drama that deals almost nothing but surprise cards — a tough story of discipline, redemption and wounded love. Cheers to director-writer Considine for making something genuine and extra-unique. He’s not just an actor who’s branched into directing with a special facility for coaxing good performances — he’s a world-class director who knows from shaping, cutting, timing, holding back and making it all come together.”

“The performances from Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman and Eddie Marsan simultaneously stand alone and reach in and grab hold. In fact each and every performance (and I mean right down to the dogs) is aces.

“The beast of the title is Joseph (Mullan), an alcoholic, widowed, violence-prone rage monster who lives alone in Leeds. He all but melts when he encounters Hannah (Colman), a kind and trusting shop merchant who shows Joseph a little tenderness. Hannah talks the Christian talk but is just as close to alcohol, which she’s turned to as a sanctuary from her ghastly marriage to a homely, ultra-possessive monster of another sort (Marsan) who brings violence and subjugation to Hannah on a constant basis.

“Once Mullan and Colman have formed a kind of friendship, the inevitable final conflict with Marsan awaits. One naturally expects (and in facts savors, if truth be told) some sort of howling, knock-down, face-gashing fight between Mullan and Marsan, but…well, I’ll leave it there but it’s more than a bit of a surprise what happens.

“I was so taken with Tyrannosaur in the screening’s immediate wake that I shared my reactions with a young freelancer I’d spoken with in the cattle tent. He’d just seen it as well, and basically went ‘meh.’ My mouth almost fell open. ‘You think what we just saw is just okay?,” I thought but didn’t say. Jeezus Christ. It takes all sorts and sensibilities to make a world.”