Month: June 2011

Here’s the story according to paulreverehouse.org: “In 1774 and the Spring of 1775 Paul Revere was employed by the Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety as an express rider to carry news, messages, and copies of resolutions as far away as New York and Philadelphia.

“On the evening of April 18, 1775, Revere was sent for by Dr. Joseph Warren and instructed to ride to Lexington, Massachusetts, to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were marching to arrest them.

“After being rowed across the Charles River to Charlestown by two associates, Revere borrowed a horse from his friend Deacon John Larkin. While in Charlestown, he verified that the local Sons of Liberty committee had seen his pre-arranged signals. Two lanterns had been hung briefly in the bell-tower of Christ Church in Boston, indicating that troops would row “by sea” across the Charles River to Cambridge rather than marching “by land” out Boston Neck.

“On the way to Lexington, Revere alarmed the countryside, stopping at each house, and arrived in Lexington about midnight. As he approached the house where Adams and Hancock were staying, a sentry asked that he not make so much noise. ‘Noise!’ cried Revere, ‘You’ll have noise enough before long. The regulars are coming out!’

“After delivering his message, Revere was joined by a second rider, William Dawes, who had been sent on the same errand by a different route. Deciding on their own to continue on to Concord, Massachusetts, where weapons and supplies were hidden, Revere and Dawes were joined by a third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott. Soon after, all three were arrested by a British patrol. Prescott escaped almost immediately, and Dawes soon after. Revere was held for some time and then released. Left without a horse, Revere returned to Lexington in time to witness part of the battle on the Lexington Green.”

Here’s the other version offered a couple of days ago by Sarah Palin.

I don’t necessarily agree with Emma Stone being honored as 2010’s Best Comedic Performance in Easy A, but I can tolerate the opinion. But imagine being genuinely convinced that The Twilight Saga: Eclipse was the best movie of 2010 on some level, and that Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson gave the year’s Best Female and Male Performances in that…God, that numbingly trite film! Jesus!

And if you weren’t genuinely convinced of this, imagine being willing to publicly and shamelessly declare this all the same on the MTV Awards. Imagine the green scum hanging in hunks and seaweed gobs on the stalagnites of your soul.

And imagine giving a Best Breakout and Biggest Badass award to Chloe Moretz for Matthew Vaughn‘s Kick-Ass while completely ignoring her even more breakoutty-badassed performance in Matt Reeves‘ Let Me In….imagine how breathtakingly stupid and shallow you’d have to be to make that call.

And imagine what kind of corporate-kowtowing whore you’d need to be to dream up the idea of giving Ellen Page the award for 2010’s Best Scared-As-Shit Performance in Inception when all she did was nail that role in a professionally assured, get-the-job-done sort of way, and at the same time ignore her truly electric superhero-geek performance in Super because of the MTV Awards’ idiotic focus on 2010 films only despite 2011 being almost half over.

And imagine giving an award to Grown-Ups costar Alexys Nycole Sanchez for 2010’s Best Movie Line (“I want to get chocolate wasted!”). Which is especially noteworthy given that Grown-Ups was directed by the notorious Dennis Dugan, whom Slate writers Christopher Beam and Jeremy Singer-Vine have just named as the Worst Director Since 1985 according to the Rotten Tomatoes careeromatic. (Dugan’s average rating is 23.6 %.)

Imagine being genuinely convinced that Reese Witherspoon deserves the MTV Generation award in the wake of having given her two least interesting performances in her two biggest failures, How Do You Know and Water for Elephants. Witherspoon’s career peaked six years ago when she won the Best Actress Oscar for Walk The Line, and she gave her best all-time performance 12 years ago in Alexander Payne‘s Election. Wait…is the MTV Generation award one of those “we know you’ve made some bad choices but we’ll always love you regardless” type deals?

Imagine being consumed by such sightlessness that you actually believe that one-note blondie Tom Felton gave a villain performance of any positive distinction in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.

If I genuinely believed that these awards were reflective of even half-serious merit (Emma Stone’s aside) I would be truly be damned and covered with invisible blisters. I would stroll around and make good money and smile all the time and vacation in Cabo San Lucas and Portugal and have children and love my ex-wives and find mysticism in my 50s, and when I die little red-eyed demons in black cloaks would snarl and growl and swarm all over me and take me down to hell.

This scene is not taken from the new Barry Lyndon Bluray; it looks considerably better than this. And five or six interior candlelit scenes have values that haven’t been seen since Stanley Kubrick‘s classic opened theatrically some 36 years ago. And for the first time in my life I’ve realized that the man walking outdoors with Barry’s mother near the beginning isn’t Ryan O’Neal, but an actor playing a suitor. The Bluray finally allowed me to see his features that clearly.

But it’s wrong, wrong, terribly wrong to present this film at 1.78 to 1. If I had my way there would be a formal inquest at which Leon Vitali and “the Kubrick estate” would submit to questions under oath from a prosecutor, and they would be asked how, exactly, it could have possibly been Kubrick’s intention that Barry Lyndon be shown at this aspect ratio (or at 1.77) when it didn’t exist in 1975, and in fact didn’t come into being until high-def TV screens became popular in the early aughts. Some day this wrong will be righted.

“And may the first child be a masculine child…” Not only can bloodless vampires achieve a nonsensical state of rock-hard tumescence; they can also produce crystalline ejaculate that can merge with a fertile human egg to produce “results,” as it were. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you…Little Edward?

X-Men: First Class will pull down about $56 million this weekend — fine. But that’s only a little bit more than Bryan Singer‘s first X-Men, which cost $75 million to make compared to the current version’s $160 million. Plus it didn’t perform as well as X2 or X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and it made a lot less than the most critically loathed of all the X-Men films, Brett Ratner‘s X-Men: The Last Stand, which earned a first-weekend gross of $102,750,665.

This is a fitting parody of an obviously bright and perceptive but notoriously crabby, internet-hating critic. Not as funny as FakeArmond, which has a jauntier put-on attitude, but worthy of a man called a “sourpuss supreme” by Vanity Fair‘s James Wolcott.

“The problem with the old guard [of film critics] is they want to talk about the actual film,” VF talkbacker cowboyandthemonk.com wrote on 6.30.10. “There’s hardly much point in critiquing an art form that has already eaten itself. There was once a time when movies reflected the collective conscious and then served it back to audiences in order to stretch minds. That was the crux of entertainment — it informed and illuminated brains. Now, studio executives produce movies to feed collective baby-food appetites so devoid of nutrition that nothing grows. Digestion, deconstruction or analysis is not why people seek out this art any longer. In order to awaken a mind to the joy of anti-monarchist thinking, they have to still possess the delusion that being intelligent is an improvement on living. Good luck with that [nowadays].”

Yesterday afternoon’s viewing of the second half of Mike Mills‘ Beginners (Focus Features, now playing) was just as nourishing as my Thursday night viewing of the first 60 minutes. So I’m still in the tank for this heartwarming, patchwork-quilt relationship film — no Sunday morning quibbles or after-thoughts.

Beginners‘ director-writer Mike Mills, Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling during yesterday afternoon’s after-party.

Hands down, this is one of 2011’s best films so far.

I caught Beginners late yesterday morning at Santa Barbara’s Riviera theatre. And then sat through a q & a between Mills and Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling. And then attended a party for Mills at Durling’s home in Goleta.

I can’t see how Beginners‘ costar Christopher Plummer won’t end up as one of the five nominees for 2011’s Best Supporting Actor. He certainly deserves to be, no matter who else comes along. Plummer taps into an array of late-life emotions but primarily (and very convincingly) joy of living and acceptance of the present and past. He should have won for his Mike Wallace portrayal in The Insider so he’s due.

My only problem was not being able to understand some of Melanie Laurent ‘s dialogue in the second half, what with her French accent and the not-great sound system at the Riviera. But there was pleasure all the same in realizing how many moods and colors she has in her actor’s kit bag. Quentin Tarantino got exactly two colors from Laurent in Inglourious Basterds — terror and a silent, steely-eyed commitment to getting revenge. Fascinating.

In this Godather II screen-test clip, Sam Fuller‘s Hyman Roth is a bit too affable, too menschy…no scent of menace or perversity. He could be the manager of a minor-league baseball team. I’ve watched two or three big-name actors run through lines and try stuff out on movie sets prior to shooting, and I was reminded each time that most readings aren’t anything to write home about.

In other words, even the best actors aren’t instant “get it right the first time” geniuses. Like anyone else they need to find their way through trial and error and refinement, etc.

A trailer for a mopey-griefy 2012 Valentine’s Day movie? That’s almost nine months from now. Reminder: Rachel McAdams has always looked better with nut-brown hair, but super-dark or black hair (which she has The Vow) doesn’t work.

Is it okay if I like Super 8 (Paramount, 6.10) for the stuff that really matters and not so much for the scary-spectacular CG hoo-hah? Super 8 was greenlit because of the latter, of course, but what matters most to me (and, I suspect, deep down, to director JJ Abrams) is the material that was woven into this Goonies-meets-Close Encounters-With-a-Mistreated-Alien-Dog film to give it heart, and to make it feel like a special Spielbergian, small-town, emotional time-machine visit.

Lots of stuff is shown in Super 8 and a lot of plot teasers are thrown around, but the fundamental things apply. And what makes Super 8 worth seeing and then some are the echoes of an era in big-budget, big-studio filmmaking (20 to 30 years ago) when things weren’t quite so mechanistic and formulaic and CG-driven, when at least some effort was put into character and feeling and intimacy and plots that felt half-credible, etc. Super 8 isn’t wildly or triumphantly successful in the latter sense (certainly not in the final act), but it gets a lot of other things right. Internal, delicate things…feelings, needs. And that, in my eyes, makes it a better summer film than most.

Everyone will be talking first and foremost about how Super 8 is a first-rate Steven Spielberg tribute. And about Elle Fanning‘s knockout performance, which has already made her into the most sought-after teenaged actress in town. And the way the advanced puppy-love relationship between Fanning’s “Alice” and Joel Courtney‘s “Joe” feels almost as poignant and emotionally tangible as the one between Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in A Place In The Sun. The urgent, argumentative repartee between Joe’s film-nut friends. Kyle Chandler‘s performance as Joe’s small-town sheriff dad (who should have been given a couple more quiet, stand-alone scenes). The always handsome, beautifully-framed and lighted widescreen photography by Larry Fong. The John Williams-like score by Michael Giacchino.

Because right away you can tell Super 8 is going to spin that ’70s Spielberg web while trying like hell to make you feel and empathize with what Joe, the 12 year-old protagonist, is going through (his mom having just been killed in a factory accident as the film begins), and make you see things through his eyes. The unfortunate part is the devil’s bargain that all big studio movies are caught up in, which is the regrettable instinct to use all kinds of familiar sound and flash and fury in order to sell tickets to justify the budget. I tolerated this aspect while feeling very much comforted by the Joe-and-Alice stuff. Presumably I won’t be alone.

This is why I suspect Super 8 will play very well with general audiences, and why it currently has an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes with Time‘s Richard Corliss calling it “the year’s most thrilling, feeling mainstream movie.”

And that’s very good because I could kick hell out of several aspects of the plot if I felt like it. I don’t care to do that, as noted, because the thing-locked-inside-the-traincar element is for the primitives, but boy, could I do a Jake La Motta-meets-Tony-Janiro on the third act! But I can’t get into it without spoiling.

The opening 20 to 25 minutes (i.e., before the train wreck sequence) really are quite captivating (for me anyway), and JJ does capture that late-’70s-to-early-’80s Spielberg vibe throughout. I think that’s what he was primarily doing here (along with recalling his own youth), and that the movie might have turned out better in a plot sense if JJ had been harder on himself by bringing in a couple of snarly, seasoned, no b.s. screenwriters…guys who would have sauntered over to Bad Robot on Olympic like Jack Palance in Shane and put their feet up on the desk and said, “Yeah, the Joe-and-Alice emotionalism and the Spielberg homage stuff is intact, but we have to sit down and address the dramatic fundamentals and make it all work without regard to paying tribute to Close Encounters and E.T and The Goonies….it has to stand on its own two feet as a movie of its own.”

“That’s exactly fucking right,” a critic friend wrote me yesterday. He complained about some third-act elements that I won’t divulge, but concluded by saying that “the ending was so bad, it soured me on the entire film…it makes absolutely zero sense. But the stuff with the kids was wonderful. It almost felt like Abrams didn’t trust himself enough to make a movie without a giant monster in it.”

I’m watching the new Bluray of John Huston‘s The Man Who Would Be King (’75), and marvelling…where do I start? At Oswald Morris‘s vibrant, immensely comforting photography and how each and every shot seems so perfectly, naturally framed. And how young Christopher Plummer, who plays a moustachioed Rudyard Kipling, looks compared to his chuckling, white-haired self in Beginners. That’ll do for now. I’ve got a screening to catch.