In my 4.9.11 Sidney Lumet obit I insisted that “Lumet’s masterpiece is Prince of the City — a nearly three-hour-long drama about the morality of finking out your friends in order to find your morality, and entirely about New York cops and mob guys and district attorneys and junkies, most of it set in the offices of this or that prosecutor with guys dressed in suits and shirtsleeves with cold takeout food and tepid coffee on the desk.”
I was therefore delighted to come upon Steven Santos‘ two-part video essay about this 1981 drama, which opened 30 years ago today.
“Lumet is fascinated by the logic behind corruption,” Santos writes. “What is the thought process that causes people to lose their way? The key to Lumet’s success in exploring this theme is the degree to which he does not pass black and white judgment on his characters. The more we see ourselves reflected in people who justify their amoral actions, the more Lumet has made these people human. While Q & A and Night Falls on Manhattan admirably try to explore the gray zone of morality and corruption, it is Prince of the City that is Sidney Lumet’s masterwork on that theme.
“While Prince of the City has many admirers, the film has not gotten its due for its influence on the genre or the complexity with which it presents its subject matter. I consider it to be the Sidney Lumet film to watch to fully understand who he is as a director, a summation of all his work. With its large cast, the film creates a detailed world with communities of lawyers, gangsters, drug addicts and cops. At the center of it all is a performance by Treat Williams that ranks among the best, comparable to the greatest work of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, actors originally considered for the role.”
Joel Schumacher‘s Trespass, a thriller about some baddie-waddies kidnapping a well-to-do couple (Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman), will play mid-September at the Toronto Film Festival, open theatrically on 10.14.11 and then…wham, hit the Bluray shelves on 11.1, only two and a half weeks later. That’s pretty much a straight-to-Bluray release with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical pit stop. Have Cage or Kidman ever starred in an almost-straight-to-video flick before?
No more “every man has a breaking point” — now it’s “the hell with breaking points…the blue-collar Southern apes are trying to bust into my house and have to be stopped.” Taken this afternoon on Santa Monica Blvd. as I drove east towards Beverly Glen.
Rotunda lobby outside Clarity screening room following Thursday morning’s One Day screening.
I went over to the Four Seasons hotel this afternoon to take part in the round tables for Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior (Lionsgate, 9.9), a MMA family drama with Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton and Nick Nolte that I got excited about on 8.2. But the round tables were so crammed with bodies that I politely withdrew. I’d had my Hardy moment in the elevator anyway, and I didn’t want to sit there and grimace as the junket whores hit him with off-topic questions about The Dark Knight Returns .
Congrats again to Sony Pictures Classics on its announcement that Woody Allen ‘s Midnight in Paris has surpassed $50 million at the domestic box office — $50,062,843, to be exact. It’s now Allen’s biggest all-time North American earner even more so. If, that is, you don’t adjust the grosses of Annie Hall (’78), Manhattan (’79) and Hannah and Her Sisters (’86) for inflation. If you do that, as I pointed out on 7.18, their respective earnings are $135,027,530, $129,427,567 and $80,568,922. But there’s nothing wrong with popping the champagne over Paris. Good show all around.
If the Big Lebowski Bluray has been DNR’ed or edge-enhanced, as DVDBeaver’s Gary Tooze and Bluray.com’s Jeffrey Kauffman have charged, then give me more of that. Joel and Ethan Coen‘s stoner classic has never looked so luscious or micro-detailed. The values are richer and more robust than I’ve ever seen in any format, including the damp celluloid print that I saw in a screening room 13 and 1/2 years ago. It’s perfect, delicious, a must-own.
Director Fred Zinnemann was in Los Angeles when From Here To Eternity opened at New York’s Capitol theatre on August 6, 1953. He was a bit worried about an August opening since it was very hot and muggy and the Capitol had no air-conditioning back then. For whatever reason Columbia chief Harry Cohn had decided to open the film quietly. “No premiere, no limousines, nothing,” Zinneman later recalled.
And then Marlene Dietrich, whom Zinnemann barely knew, called from New York at 9 pm Pacific. “She said it was midnight there but the Capitol theatre was bulging,” he said, “and that people were still standing around the block and there was an extra performance starting at one in the morning. ‘How is that possible?,’ Zinneman asked Dietrich. ‘There’s been no publicity!’ And Dietrich said ‘they smell it.'”
What films have opened like this over the last 10 or 15 or 20 years? I’m looking for stories as good as Zinneman’s. Movies that had decent promotion but not massive ad buys or big hoopla or even talk-show tours by stars…but people somehow sensed they had to see them. I remember the first weekend of Silence of the Lambs. Sold-out shows, lines around the block…all of that.
Note: I found Zinneman’s story on page 631 of “Frank: The Voice“, by James Kaplan.
Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive “is stylistically inspired with beautiful cinematography, perfect balance, steely cool grit and truly hilarious gore, and many silent eye-contact moments that are ten times sexier than any steamy motel romp,” writes HE’s part-time Manhattan correspondent Jett Wells. “Not only is this the coolest movie I’ve seen all year, but it’s the best thing Ryan Gosling has ever done.
Carey Mulligan, Ryan Gosling
“There are many things about his nameless character that throw you off. Masked by his half-man, half-machine attitude, Gosling is a quiet gentleman filled with pain and loneliness but who transforms into a V-12 diesel beast behind the wheel. It’s humbling watching Gosling’s character just trying to mind his own business but having to kick ass when he has to, but he still has no idea what he’s doing. There are little moments in his body-language (and his character is 98 per cent body language) that show you he’s screaming in his head, ‘WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!’ And I love that sense of false bravado..
“It’s all in the artful contrasts that Refn uses with music, attitude and the lighting — I can honestly say I’ve never felt so happy to see so much blood mixed with long soulful stares and girl-lead electro-pop. There are so many smart, subtle subtext moments running side by side with tense and gripping chase scenes and classic noir moments.
“Not only does Refn capture some aesthetically gorgeous cinematic shots, but it pushes the noir genre into a quieter, hipper zip code. Sure, I can’t count how many dark mysterious-loner-hero movies I’ve seen, but Refn and Gosling have really done something different here, and I attribute a lot of that to Hossein Amini‘s screenplay (based on James Sallis‘ novel) and the soundtrack featuring Kavinsky and College.
“I’m on the Gosling bandwagon. A lot of actors make like they’re hard-working, but no one totes the rock like Gosling these days (if you ignore Crazy, Stupid Love).
Michael Winterbottom‘s Trishna is an adaptation of Thomas Hardy‘s Tess of the D’ubervilles, which is a fairly dark and fatalistic piece. You’d never know that from the generally pleasant, almost festive tone of this trailer. Pic is about an ill-fated romance between Jay (Riz Ahmed), a well-born smoothie, and Trishna (Freida Pinto), who comes from near-poverty. Will Pinto achieve a performance breakthrough of some kind? She could use that.
It never fails. If you’ve read six or seven pans of a new movie before going to see it, it will never seem as bad as it would if you’d just seen it cold. That’s what happened yesterday when I caught Lone Scherfig‘s One Day. I had spent a good 15 or 20 minutes reading numerous Rotten Tomato slams, and so I went in expecting to despise it. And it wasn’t as awful as all that.
One Day isn’t very likable and is more irksome than not, and it’s certainly draggy and even numbing at times. But I didn’t experience mute nostril agony. I got through it.
That’s mainly because it doesn’t end with a wonderfully glorious hug and a long kiss. Well, it does, sort of…but not how you’d expect. And it’s very nicely filmed by Benoit Delhomme. And the date-announcement titles (which constantly appear due to the story taking 23 years to unfold, starting in ’88 and ending presently) are inventively used. And lovely Edinburgh, Scotland makes for nice scenery.
One Day is an occasionally passable time-killer about Emma (Anne Hathaway), a bright and attractive British lass who for 20-odd years is in love with Dexter (Jim Sturgess), a haphazardly boozy, vapidly charming, commitment-skirting flirtaholic who can’t grow up or commit and isn’t worth her attention, and certainly not ours. I hate good-time Charlies. I’d rather hang with a coke-snorting Latino gangbanger or a fat, Marlboro-smoking mafioso.
A feeling of dull horror settles in as you begin to grasp the scheme. “Oh, no,” you say to yourself. “The movie’s going to be about Hathaway’s impossible-to-suppress affection for a guy who resembles Bradford Dillman‘s character in The Way We Were?” Remember that asshole? Robert Redford‘s best friend who did nothing but drink highballs and act glib and deliver shallow quips all through the film?
The fact that Dex’s father (Ken Stott) primarily regards his son with contempt made him, in my eyes, the film’s most sympathetic and reasonable-minded character. (Stott, by the way, couldn’t possibly be Sturgess’s biological dad, to go by genetic resemblance. Nor could Patricia Clarkson, who plays Sturgess’s cancer-afflicted mom. They don’t even faintly resemble him.)
Sturgess may have given one of those career-killing performances I wrote about last weekend. Key sentence: “Every now and then an actor’s on-screen manner is so odious and unpleasant to settle into that even sophisticated filmgoers find themselves resenting the actor on some level, despite the obvious.” It’s immature and irrational to say this, but I don’t want to hang with Sturgess any more. Not after this and Peter Weir‘s Russian agony-hike movie plus Across The Universe and 21.
I love the way the makeup crew gives Sturgess moderately heavy sproutings of gray hair by the time he’s in his mid 30s. By 40 he looks like a fast-sinking cancer patient, or like a victim of Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion virus with his eyes all puffy and rimmed with redness.
I know I’m supposed to be bothered by Hathaway’s allegedly inauthentic British accent, but I wasn’t so sue me.
Rafe Spall (son of Mike Leigh mainstay Timothy Spall) plays a would-be comedian whom Emma lives with for a few years without being in love. Every time he was on-screen I said to myself, “Anne Hathaway is not only fucking this guy but likes him enough to move in with him?” But Spall has one good line at the very end. His shaggy-sheepdog looks and vaguely bothersome performance are worth enduring for this one remark.
This isn’t a spoiler as I’m not revealing anything. I just need to get something straight. If you’re riding a bicycle through a city in a cautious and responsible way (i.e., signalling turns with your arm and all that) and you’re riding down a kind of walk-street alley that leads to a main thoroughfare with heavy traffic, wouldn’t it be a natural thing to stop at the end of the alley and check for oncoming vehicles before emerging from the alley? It would be kind of stupid to just ignore common sense, right?
