Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Part 2 is a satisfying, well-made, above-average film that concludes a highly successful franchise — fine. But what’s so great about it having made epic truckloads of cash this weekend — a reported $289 million global — other than the fact that it’s broken a lot of records? As Cary Grant said in To Catch A Thief, “It’s only money, Houston, and not even yours at that.”
Does this box-office triumph brighten my life in some particular gleaming way? Has anyone’s life (other than Warner Bros. stockholders) been changed? No. Has the end of World War II just been declared? Has the Taliban disbanded? Has cancer been cured? Have the Red Sox won the World Series? Has the national debt been forgiven by the Chinese? Are we watching the scene in Giant when James Dean‘s oil well comes in and he drives over to Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor‘s home and stumbles out of his truck and says, “Mah well came in, Bick”?
Like I said a couple of days ago, I don’t get it. I’m not any richer, and you’ll never convince me that DH2 has a chance in hell of being Best Picture nominated so who cares at the end of the day?
Some indie filmmakers radiate such a curious obsessive energy that you just can just about figure what their films are going to be like without seeing them. This needn’t result in any kind of conscious decision not to see their films, mind, but it does seem to manifest a strange and concentrated inner force that blocks any attempt to do so. It makes the decisions like a stern parent. My head says “hmm, yeah, I think I’ll see this flick” but the force steps in and says “nope, forget it…you don’t want to go there.” So don’t blame me.
I don’t know why”the force” has kept me from seeing Miranda July‘s films. Or maybe it’s my own determination. I don’t know. I know early on I could sense the ethereal, foo-foo vibrations coming off the posters and trailers and reviews the way a proverbial old-timer can feel approaching rain in his bones.
It first hit me when July’s You and Me and Everyone We Know played at the ’05 Cannes Film Festival. I had it on my list, intended to see it, etc. But I was no match for the higher power.
It happened again when Manhattan-based publicist Susan Norget enthusiastically described July’s latest film, The Future (Roadside, 7.29) , prior to last January’s Sundance Film Festival, where it had its world debut. The second she began talking about it, I just knew. Nobody works harder for or cares more about quirky-weird indie films than Norget, but Norget + July + a little Silverlake movie about a couple thinking about adopting a cat who talks…case closed.
But forget me or “the force” or The Future. Forget all of that. All you need to know about July, I believe, is contained in this short video clip of her doing a kind of whirling stumble-dance on the beach. (The clip accompanies the online version of Katrina Onstad‘s 7.17 N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine profile of the 37 year-old filmmaker.) On one level her dancing is appalling, but on another level it’s brave because true artists never worry about looking foolish — they just dance to their tune and let the chips fall. The dancing tells me July is no poseur. She’s the genuine sum of her parts.
The other thing that provides significant information about July are the leather broad-buckle shoes she’s wearing in the clip. I’ve been around the planet long enough to know that aside from the usual exceptions-to-the-rule, women who wear this kind of footwear are generally not the kind you want to hang with for very long. They may be intelligent and perceptive or even exceptional artists, but they tend to brandish a certain flighty, fickle, tangled-up quality, and are therefore best encountered in small, modest doses. 97% of guys find broad-buckle shoes a massive turn-off. They’re the 21st Century equivalent of those lace-up witch shoes worn by older women who taught elementary school in the ’60s. Women like July know this, of course, and that’s partly why they wear them.
Which is cool — don’t get me wrong. Let your freak flag fly, etc. I’m just saying that those shoes are a blade of grass repping the entire July universe.
But that fucking cat…wow. That and the idea that adopting a cat requires some degree of emotional preparation.
The paragraph that got me in Onstad’s profile reads as follows: “[July] has also become the unwilling exemplar of an aggravating boho archetype: the dreamy, young hipster whose days are filled with coffee, curios and disposable enchantments. ‘Yes, in some ways Miranda July is living my dream and life, and yes, maybe I’m a little jealous,’ wrote one Brooklyn-based artist on her blog. “I loathe her. It feels personal.”
“To her detractors (‘haters’ doesn’t seem like too strong a word) July has come to personify everything infuriating about the Etsy-shopping, Wes Anderson-quoting, McSweeney’s-reading, coastal-living category of upscale urban bohemia that flourished in the aughts. Her very existence is enough to inspire, for example, an I Hate Miranda July blog, which purports to detest her ‘insufferable precious nonsense.’ Or there is the online commenter who roots for July to be exiled to Darfur. Or the blogger who yearns to beat her with a shoe.”
Jane Fonda has complained in a 7.16 Wrap article about QVC having cancelled an appearance today on the network to promote “Prime Time,” her book about aging and fitness. She says QVC has caved in to right-wing pressure.
“The network said they got a lot of calls yesterday criticizing me for my opposition to the Vietnam War and threatening to boycott the show if I was allowed to appear,” Fonda writes. “I am, to say the least, deeply disappointed that QVC caved to this kind of insane pressure by some well-funded and organized political extremist groups. And that they did it without talking to me first.
“Most people don’t buy into the far-right lies,” she states, adding that “the bottom line” is that “this has gone on far too long, this spreading of lies about me! None of it is true. NONE OF IT! I love my country. I have never done anything to hurt my country or the men and women who have fought and continue to fight for us.”
Lies and exaggerations have, I gather, been pushed by Fonda’s right-wing antagonists. But the thing that created the strongest anti-Fonda sentiments is a photo taken of her sitting at the controls of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, and not over Fonda’s general opposition to the Vietnam War. What she said in a statement she read from Hanoi was, by my sights, humane and compassionate and correct and prophetic. But the photo is what stuck in people’s mind. Posing for it, Fonda has said, was not a wise thing.
Fonda’s Wiki bio recounts what she said about this in a 1988 interview with Barbara Walters: “I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of things that I said or did. I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I’m very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families. I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft gun, which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes. It hurt so many soldiers. It galvanized such hostility. It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done. It was just thoughtless.”
On the Catch 22 commentary track, Mike Nichols tells Steven Soderbergh that there’s something to be said for flamboyance and showing off, and perhaps even for vulgarity. “The funniest thing about movies is that they don’t like good taste. They don’t like austerity. All the things…you’ll see…the things that you’re a little embarassed about, the show-off things. Those are things that are most alive 20 years later. It’s one of the most interesting things about movies. It’s that they like showing off. It’s life, it’s vitality. Austerity and classicism just lie there.”
Or to put it more concisely, “Starkist doesn’t want tunas with good taste. They want tunas that taste good.”
I’m not saying Mike Nichols was wrong or incorrect when he began to regard his static, long-take style of shooting as “affected” (i.e., sensing that these shots were beginning to seem more about themselves than anything else) but I do love that style regardless, and I miss it. I wish somebody — anyone — was into shooting films this way today. Wait, has there been a recent film (or two or three) that has used this style?
I’ll be driving out to the 405 Sunset overpass later today to take some shots of the utterly empty 405. Everyone has spoken about Carmageddon as a blight, a plague, a traffic nightmare, an imprisonment. Except totally deserted highways and roads are a profound visual delight, and the only way to capture them is to shoot at 5:30 am and even then, etc. Or organize the emptiness like Stanley Kramer did when he shot On The Beach.
Frame capture from the finale of On The Beach (’60).
Last night Real Time‘s Bill Maher explained how his various laments and complaints about Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann aren’t sexist in nature, as some in the rightwing blogosphere have charged.
A 7.14 L.A. Times “24 Frames” report about a USC Twitter box-office prediction lab contains the following excerpt: “Cowboys and Aliens, [a] superhero movie opening in about two weeks, is barely registering with audiences on Twitter, a fact that doesn’t bode well for its box office potential, according to Jonathan Taplin, communication professor at USC and director of the lab. ‘It’s almost imperceptible the amount of tweets on it, and that’s unusual,’ Taplin said.”
The size of the Cowboys & Aliens balloon is awfully small. It’s about the same size as the one for Crazy Stupid Love, and a tad smaller than the Larry Crowne balloon. Which I’m rather surprised at. I’d been presuming all along that the Joe Popcorn legions would pour into theatres to see this thing, the concept being novel and amusing plus Daniel Craig paired with Harrison Ford, etc. Maybe people are just slow on the uptake? They don’t wake up to a non-sequel until it’s a few days off?
I have to say that I’m not very impressed with the sequence below, in which Craig tries to save Olivia Wilde from the clutches of a dragonfly alien craft. There’s no apparent reason for the craft to fly at a low altitude above a sunken river bed. And there’s no way that Craig could leap off his galloping horse and hope to land on the wing of the craft, which is a good 15 to 20 feet away. It just seems cheesy.
An overheard observation: “You see Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford in a western and it’s a movie you want to see…then aliens come in.”
It’s been seven or eight years since I last watched Trainspotting (’96), so I’m thinking I’ll probably get the Bluray (out September 13th) for old time’s sake. Danny Boyle‘s direction put him at the top of the list, and then he blew it with A Life Less Ordinary (’97) and The Beach (’00) until finally bouncing back in ’02 with 28 Days Later. John Hodge‘s screenplay is one of the all-time finest.
Apart from the obvious ethical considerations, an underlying element in all the Rupert-bashing of the last few days is that the liberal media is revelling in an opportunity to lash Murdoch for creating and enabling the rabid-attack-dog, spread-the-rightwing-bullshit messaging that his news empire (including the especially odious and obnoxious Fox News and the New York Post) is known for, or to at least weaken or modify it some extent.
Whatever prompts Murdoch to modify his methods, in other words, may result in a roundabout fashion in a less arrogant and more temperate approach to news-reporting. This may be flawed or presumptuous thinking, but that’s part of the liberal media establishment mood right now.
The problematic 1950s theatrical technologies known as Smellovision and Aromarama are dead and gone and will never return. And subsequent attempts to bring odors into movie-watching are nothing to hold onto either. The scratch-and-sniff Odorama process used for John Waters‘ Polyester was lame. And a new version being used with Robert Rodriguez‘s Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, a kind of swipe-and-smell deal called AromaScope, is another cheap trick.
The Rodriguez film is in 3D so the added-aroma element creates what they’re calling a 4D experience.
I for one would love it if Smell-o-vision worked — if there was a super-effective, high-function theatrical technology that dispenses aromas to go along with whatever’s being shown on the screen, and then quickly vacuums that aroma back to make way for the next olfactory immersion.
It would be nothing short of ecstatic to watch Lawrence of Arabia this way. Imagine savoring convincing simulations of the aromas of the Nefud desert, of camel shit and tobacco smoke in the British officer’s club, of oranges and grapes in Damascus, and the muddy streets of Daraa.
It’ll never happen in a theatre, but what if some kind of home-based aroma dispenser could be hooked up to specially coded Blurays of new and classic films? It could add a whole new element of serious immersion. I would install this system in a heartbeat if it really worked.
Imaging smelling North by Northwest — the aroma of 57th Street in the late afternoon, the splattering of bourbon onto Cary Grant‘s gray suit, the scent of a warm plate of brook trout and a Gibson martini on the 20th Century Limited, the aroma of sex and Arpege perfume in Eva Marie Saint‘s sleeping compartment, and so on.
Imagine the wet-dog smell of Wookie hair in Star Wars, and the horrible gut stink coming from that dead Tauntaun that Han Solo opens up with his light saber in order to provide warmth to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back (“I thought they smelled bad on the outside!”). Imagine the smell of armpit sweat and stale air and Manhattan rainstorm aroma while watching 12 Angry Men. Imagine the aromas that would accompany a smell-o-visioned Inception — the sea water, the Paris streets, the scent of nearby pine trees and damp snow covering that mountaintop fortress, etc.
There would be very few films that wouldn’t be enhanced with this technology, should someone invent a version that really and truly performs.
There’s a Japanese-produced technology that has introduced aromas into theatres and homes, but the home version, which reportedly costs about $750 or so, works through a machine that “has to be topped up with fragrant liquids which create the scents.” That sounds tedious.
