Day: July 6, 2011

This crashing-plane sequence from Mike Nichols‘ Catch 22 (’70) is one of the most ambitiously choreographed shots of this type ever. Obviously a single take with no vfx or gimmicks. The smoking plane coming in for a landing disappears frame-left and then, unseen, takes off and climbs up and away. The camera pans left with Jon Voight and Martin Balsam as we’re shown a stationary burning plane pretending to be the other plane, etc. Show-offy? Sure, but thrillingly so.

Hearty congrats to Nichols, production designer Richard Sylbert (who passed in ’02), dp David Watkin.

This scene of the fleet taking off is also quite special. The photography and the production design are the two best things about Catch 22, really, as it isn’t hugely successful in the various other departments — let’s face it. And that longish opening-credits shot as pre-dawn darkness gives way to light? Has to be seen at least once.

In the early ’80s I drove down to the Catch 22 set in San Carlos, Mexico (near Guaymas) and walked around the airfield and took pictures, etc.

I’ve been looking for a decent YouTube capturing of the crash-landing scene for a long time. I don’t know why the person who put this clip together felt the need to use a lame opening title card, or why he/she decided to keep the clip running with the same title card for a minute after the shot ends.

…with the same mind and spirit and perspective that he had before he died in the ’90s but in the body of a go-getter Congressman from Southern California, and he’d probably have a tough time getting re-elected because he’d be considered too moderate, too thoughtful, too practical. He’d be regarded as a sleepy-centrist go-along Republican who doesn’t get the ideological fever of the Tea Party or the debt-ceiling shutdown or any of the things that Eric Cantor or Michelle Bachmann believe in. He could almost be a centrist Democrat by today’s standards.

Nobody who knows anything cares about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2…no one. The franchise has been over and done with for several years. The last one that mattered was directed by Alfonso Cuaron. The fact that each subsequent installment has made tankloads of money means absolutely dead nothing. It’s no surprise that the Variety, Hollywood Reporter and Wrap reviews are favorable. It’s all part of the script.

This clip of Page One reactions by serious journalists was sent to me by the p.r. guys working for Magnolia, the doc’s distributor. I wrote back as follows: “I’m posting this & thanks for sending, but the Page One premiere and after-party in Manhattan happened a good three weeks ago, and this video was posted on July 1st. Why did it take two weeks for the video to be cut together, and why does it take you guys another week to offer it to the likes of myself?”

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo star Daniel Craig to Esquire.com‘s Tom Chirella: “It’s as adult as you can possibly make it. This is adult drama. I grew up, as we fucking all did, watching The Godfather and that, movies that were made for adults. And this is a $100 million R-rated movie. Nobody makes those anymore.

“And Fincher, he’s not holding back. They’ve given him free rein. He showed me some scenes recently, and my hand was over my mouth, going, ‘Are you fucking serious?'” And yet “it’s not that he simply showed me footage that was horribly graphic. It was stuff that was happening, or had happened. And somehow you don’t see it.” (Lifted from Awards Daily.)

For me there’s one decent laugh in Horrible Bosses (Warner Bros., 7.8). And there are maybe 30 or 40 titters (i.e., faintly amusing material that doesn’t resonate or sink in because it lacks the antsy undercurrent of classic no-laughers like Greenberg). But at no time did the entire house at last night’s Arclight screening erupt in gales. Lone oddballs here and there would giggle (the guy sitting behind me wouldn’t stop) but the film clearly wasn’t connecting. That’s because of one thing and only thing only. It’s not good enough.

(l. to r.) Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Jason Bateman.

Okay, it’s not offensively bad by the downmarket comic standards of 2011. I’ll give it that much. The main performers — Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell — give it the old nutso-gusto, and the script (by John Francis Daley, Jonathan M. Goldstein and Michael Markowitz) is loose and limber and raunchy and stupidly “fun” and director Seth Gordon keeps the ball in the air in a manner of speaking. Is this a reason to go see it this weekend? If you have little or no taste, yeah…I suppose. We’re living in grim-slide times so why not?

A lot of critics, not wanting to seem out of step with something dopey and inoffensively thin, are giving Horrible Bosses a pass. Except several have proven themselves completely untrustworthy as far as rating comedies go so forget the 85% Rotten Tomatoes rating that Horrible Bosses currently has. Too many critics are just going along. I don’t want to name names, but I know that some are throwing their hands up and saying “whatever” to themselves only to turn around and do pretzel contortions in order to write semi-complimentary things because they don’t want to seem overly cranky.

I’m different because I judge comedies not by 2011 standards (i.e., you can do or say any finger-up-your-arse, simian-impulse thing that comes to mind and if it sticks to the wall, no matter how coarse or phlegmy, it’s funny) but by classic Billy Wilder standards, which is that it has to be carefully and honestly and realistically written according to the laws of commonly-perceived human behavior, and it has to hold water in terms of plot and motivation and character in the same way that any dead-straight drama (Death of a Salesman, A Lie of the Mind, A Moon for the Misbegotten) has to hold water.

You can’t throw out the rule book because you’re making a “comedy”. Comedies aren’t that different from dramas — they’re just pitched differently and sprinkled with a kind of dust — and are much, much tougher to write and perform. Comedies need to be just as much about what people are facing in life — how they’re coping with loneliness and ambition and financial pressure and growing-up issues — as stage plays or dramas. They have to be real. They’re not excuses to light farts and flamboyantly goof off and just…whatever, go anywhere or try anything.

Men acting idiotically and fearfully while planning to kill bad bosses just isn’t funny. Sneaking into the homes of the would-be victims without wearing shoe gloves and hair bonnets and rubber surgical gloves is absolute idiocy and therefore not funny. Jennifer Aniston being hired to play a small business owner (i.e. a dentist) who’s an intemperate sexual predator in a dark wig and who flashes portions of her hot bod and risks years of struggle to get through medical school in order to satisfy passing fancy is degrading and ridiculous and not in the least bit funny. It’s doubly unfunny when the object of her lust is little male hygienist with a high-pitched voice (Day) who probably has a schlong the size of a rook on a chess board. I could go on and on and on.

I sat there like a tombstone, studying the screen like a cop studies a suspected felon during a late-night grilling at a grimy downtown precinct and not even tittering (okay, I inwardly tittered) until that one joke came along, which I really did laugh at. But even then I didn’t go “haaaah-hah-hahhh-hah-ahhh-hah…whoa-ho-ho…gee, whoo!” I just went “hah-huh.”

The Adjustment Bureau persuaded me to never again watch another angels-and-gods-watching-over-mortal-lovers movie. There haven’t been many, thank fortune. (The Bishop’s Wife, Forever Darling, etc.) I’m cool with Heaven Can Wait because nobody helped Warren Beatty get together with Julie Christie — the angels (James Mason, Buck Henry) were trying to rectify a mistake, not make a match. And Wings of Desire angel Bruno Ganz made his own decision to become a mortal and fall in love, and that was cool.

But I don’t want to know about angels pulling heartstrings. Love is about luck and character and smelling good and having the guts to jump off the cliff without a net. If you can’t go there without the help of Gods or angels, you’re probably not worth falling in love with in the first place.

Which is why I was immediately repelled when I read the synopsis for Gods Behaving Badly, a forthcoming fantasy-dramedy costarring Alicia Silverstone, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Chris Walken, John Turturro, Sharon Stone, Oliver Platt, Edie Falco, Phylicia Rashad, Rosie Perez and others.

Josh Goldfaden and Marc Turtletaub adapted Marie Phillips’ 2007 best-seller. I gagged when I read that the story is about “Greek Gods, alive and well and living in a brownstone in New York City, as they cross paths with a young couple, Kate (Silverstone) and Neil (Moss-Bachrach). The intersection of the Gods and the mortals threatens not only the couple’s budding relationship, but the future of everything else.”

It’s all tied into the female idea that great love affairs are meant to happen, orchestrated in the clouds, pre-ordained, “written.” It’s one of the lamest and stupidest romantic fantasies ever. What’s so unromantic and/or uninteresting about just getting lucky when you’ve met someone you really click with? Life is about genes and connections, yes, but otherwise it’s almost entirely about luck. Ask Woody Allen.

For whatever reason the 111 equation didn’t penetrate until a friend pointed it out last night. Add the last two digits of your birth year plus your age this year (i.e., after your birthday) and the answer will always be 111. No exceptions. George Clooney, 50, was born in May 1961 — add 50 and 61. Scarlett Johansson, born on 11.22.84, will be 27 on her 2011 birthday — add 84 and 27. My son Dylan, born on 11.16.89, will turn 22 on 11.16.11 — add 89 and 22. If Jayne Mansfield, born on 4.19.33, hadn’t died at age 34 on 6.29.67 she’d be 78 today — add 78 and 33. Cary Grant, born in 1904, would be 107 if he hadn’t died in ’86 — add 107 and 4.

N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd has tapped out a post-4th-of-July Twilight Zone riff on Rod Serling…without mentioning that recent Mike Fleming Deadline story about a Serling biopic from screenwriter Stanley Weiser (W, Wall Street). And yet Dowd mentions “Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone” (2009), a 50th anniversary tribute book co-edited by Carol Serling, who will produce the Serling biopic along with Andrew Meieran.

The Twilight Zone, Dowd notes, “was never gangbusters” in the ratings. Then why did CBS keep it going for five seasons? (The original series ran from October 2, 1959 to June 19, 1964.) Presumably the ratings were good enough for renewal although Kennedy-era viewers weren’t exactly watching en masse, cheering each episode and waiting with bated breath for the next. The real adulation didn’t kick in until the ’80s and the second Twilight Zone series, which ran from September 27, 1985 to April 15, 1989. Lasting, legendary stuff is rarely celebrated when it first appears. Classic status almost always develops years or decades later.

This sounds snarky but it seems a bit dated now to talk about 4th of July Twilight Zone marathons on the tube, as Dowd does. There’s only one way to watch the old episodes now, and that’s by popping in the five Buray discs containing the original five seasons, and watching them on a 50″ flat screen. The detail and clarity are realms and worlds beyond anything seen by even the guys in the processing labs who developed the original footage. (I actually haven’t watched and am not likely to watch seasons #4 and #5, which saw a steep fall-off in quality.).

I’m also a little confused by that friend-squashed-during-World-War-II story that Dowd passes along. “During a lull at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Pacific,” she writes, “[Serling] was standing with his arm around a good friend and they were having their picture taken. At that moment, an Air Force plane dropped a box of extra ammunition that landed on Serling’s friend and flattened him so fatally that he couldn’t even be seen under the box.” Serling’s arm was around the guy — presumably around his shoulders — and he himself didn’t get hit by the box? That can’t be right. Update: I wrote Weiser about this, and he answered that Serling “was standing nearby…not next to him. An exaggeration, I think.”

“It’s impossible not to watch a stretch of the endlessly inventive Serling and not notice how many of his plots have been ripped off for movies, and how ahead of his time he was,” Dowd observes.

Twilight Zone book co-author Doug Brode tells Dowd that “everything today is Rod Serling…everything. Nearly 35 years ago, George Lucas told me that the whole concept of the Force comes from Rod Serling.

“Looking at this summer’s lame crop of movies and previews,” she concludes, “you can appreciate Serling’s upbraiding of the entertainment industry for ‘our mediocrity, our imitativeness, our commercialism and, all too frequently, our deadening and deadly lack of creativity and courage.'”

Yes, Johnny Depp — he was talking about you.

[Here are part 2 and part 3 of the 1959 Mike Wallace interview with Serling — part 1 is YouTube’d above.]

The other day I agreed with Clarence Thomas; now I’m siding with Bill O’Reilly. What’s happening? “Do you have chloroform residue in your car, Geraldo?”

Posted this afternoon: “In an exclusive interview set to air on ABC World News and Nightline, Casey Anthony juror Jennifer Ford said she and the other jurors cried and were ‘sick to our stomachs’ after voting to acquit Anthony of charges that she killed her 2-year-old daughter Caylee.

“‘I did not say she was innocent,’ said Ford, who had previously only been identified as juror number 3. ‘I just said there was not enough evidence. If you cannot prove what the crime was, you cannot determine what the punishment should be.’

“Ford described the jury as emotional and upset at their own vote, feelings that led the jurors to decide not to speak with reporters immediately after the verdict was read in court.

‘”Everyone wonders why we didn’t speak to the media right away,’ Ford said. ‘It was because we were sick to our stomach to get that verdict. We were crying and not just the women. It was emotional and we weren’t ready. We wanted to do it with integrity and not contribute to the sensationalism of the trial.'”