Day: January 31, 2012

Joss Wheedon‘s The Avengers opens in less than four months and Disney marketing chose to limit their Super Bowl spot…oh, I get it. This is a ten-second tease for a trailer that will debut during the game. I still maintain that Wheedon is a lightweight (i.e., moderately talented) clock-puncher and journeyman, and nowhere near the realm of James Cameron or Bryan Singer even. Here’s the most recent trailer.

Last Sunday I wrote that facial stubble was mandatory for lead actors in Sundance 2012 films, and that “every single actor in every single film I saw in Park City complied.” The mandate also includes mainstream cinema, as this still from Skyfall, the latest 007 installment, makes clear. Daniel Craig‘s James Bond was absolutely clean-shaven in Casino Royale, but I can’t recall if he wore GQ stubble in Quantum of Solace.

Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan is a four-CD package of many, many artists signing Bob Dylan songs. The revenue goes to Amnesty International, hence the copy line “this album saves lives.” But my reaction when I saw this poster was that music itself can do this. Regularly, I imagine.

All great art in fact — films, plays, paintings, novels — has the power to lift people out of the doldrums and turn them on and nourish their souls to some degree. Dylan’s music alone made a huge difference to hundreds of thousands in the ’60s, I’m sure. You could list any number of albums, films, books, TV shows, documentaries.

So what movie, if any, has saved anyone’s life out there? Or at least delivered some kind of spiritual bloom effect? You were in a kind of downish, despairing place when you went into the theatre or popped in the disc, and when it was over you felt significantly different — aroused, aflame and no longer fluondering. Jim Hoberman was recently quoted saying that Jules and Jim had this effect when he was 14 or 15. Costa Gavras‘s Z had this effect upon me, to some extent. I’d never felt politically engaged by a film until I saw it in my mid teens…wow. Second most arousing: Hearts and Minds.

What movie changed LexG‘s life? Or Glenn Kenny‘s?

Earlier today I was buying some regrettably expensive sunglasses at Macy’s at the Beverly Center, and I asked the sales girl to just let me wear them out and to forget the imitation leather case and the cleaning cloth and the plastic carrying bag and the receipt even. I just wanted the glasses.

“Are you sure?,” she said. “Because you’ll need the receipt if you want to return them.”

“I won’t. They’re just sunglasses.”

“You’d be surprised how many people come back and want to return or exchange,” she explained.

“What do they say when they do that?,” I asked. “What…’excuse me but these sunglasses that I bought yesterday don’t seem to be working out’?”

“I’m just saying, people change their minds,” she said.

“It’s like returning a handkerchief. ‘Excuse me but I bought this handkerchief yesterday and I blew my nose last night and it doesn’t seem to be functioning correctly so I need to return it.’ Or ‘excuse me but I bought this T-shirt yesterday and wore it during a date with this girl I just met and we went to a couple of bars and I don’t know…the T-shirt just isn’t working out. I’d like to exchange it for another.'”

People are so impulslve, compulsive, lame, scattered. Waddling around in their little fantasy-whim bubbles. They buy stuff without thinking and the next day they’re Marie Antoinette. “Eeeewww, Louis…this rack of lamb doesn’t taste right,” etc.

To me, Universal’s decision to advance the opening of Oliver Stone‘s Savages from 9.28 to 7.6 means (a) they’ve decided it has definite mainstream popcorn potential and (b) they don’t think it fulfills the requirements of a “fall movie” (however you want to define that term) to quite the same degree. I haven’t read the script but it’s basically a drug-dealing movie costarring Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch that’s about saving Blake Lively from Mexican drug cartel kidnappers. Benicio Del Toro, Demian Bichir, John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Emile Hirsch, Mia Maestro and Salma Hayek costar.

“Even The Artist‘s most vocal detractors — who would likely not be vocal at all about it under normal circumstances — would have to confess that the film is not some bloated sop to the Academy, like so many other major studio productions crafted specifically for year-end consideration,” writes AV Club‘s Scott Tobias.

“Its goals are modest, its pleasures refined — not a whiff of self-importance or middlebrow grandeur, no issues more pressing than a general appreciation of love and the cinema, and certainly no ambition to heal a nation a decade after 9/11 or credit white audiences with a behind-the-back, Ricky Rubio-style assist in ending black oppression.

“And yet the resentment is there. Late last year, in a tribute to the absurdity of cinematic riches in 2011, I expanded my Top 10 list to 20 and added another 30 Honorable Mentions. Though even I’m not quite nerdy enough to keep ranking, The Artist would likely fall somewhere toward the back half of the next 50, so quickly did it slip like sand through my fingers.

“But then, the Oscars — and to varying degrees, all awards — are not about greatness, but about consensus. And The Artist is a point of agreement, much like a bill that’s been haggled over, kicked around by powerful special interests, watered down in committee, and passed to the majority’s tempered contentment.”

Martin Scorsese, the most gifted, tireless, prolific and devout Movie Catholic director of our time, sat down last night for a longish (160 minutes, give or take) on-stage interview with Leonard Maltin, and it was some kind of beautiful and sublime to take a surface-level nostalgia trip into Martyland and to revel in 40 years of Marty memories, Marty anecdotes and Marty insights.

Murky, not-quite-focused shot of Martin Scorsese taken by yours truly from my seat.

It happened at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre from 8:20 pm to 11 pm, more or less, as part of a presentation of the American Riviera award. I sat on the right side, about six or seven rows from the front, right next to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone.

“Surface-level” because a good three-quarters of Scorsese’s films, spanning over 40 years, weren’t verbally mentioned, much less discussed. This was necessary in order to keep the presentation in the vicinity of two hours, or course, but it felt like a greatest-hits primer for people who have only an ADD understanding of Scorsese’s life and career…no offense.

Maltin told me at the after-party that Scorsese himself chose the clips.

A brilliantly-cut career montage started things off, and then clips were shown from Mean Streets,Taxi Driver, Italian American, Raging Bull, The Last Waltz, Goodfellas, No Direction Home and Hugo.

The best clip was one of Muddy Waters singing “Mannish Boy” in The Last Waltz.

Honestly? The Hugo clip, shown in 3D, was by far the least intriguing one shown. It was all about Ben Kingsley‘s Georges Melies fuming at Asa Butterfield‘s Hugo, and then Hugo being chased by Sacha Baron Cohen and the Doberman through the train station, blah blah. I thought they might take a cue from people like me and show a clip from the glorious third act with those recreations of Mellies’ career, but no.

No clips were shown from Who’s That Knockin’ At My Door, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, New York, New York, The King of Comedy, After Hours, The Color of Money,

The Last Temptation of Christ (one of Scorsese’s absolute greatest), Cape Fear, Casino, Kundun, Bringing Out The Dead, Gangs of New York, Il Mi Viaggio in Italia, The Blues, The Aviator, The Departed, Shine A Light, Shutter Island, Letter to Elia or George Harrison: Living in the Material World.

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, Stone and I had natural notions about chatting with Scorsese at the after-party. But it didn’t happen. This was partly due to Scorsese’s decision to huddle in the back of the room with inner-circle homies (his wife, Hugo costar Ben Kingsley, festival honchos), partly due to our lack of hunger and aggression and partly due to the aggression of others. A trio of super-model blondes barrelled right in there and got their photos.

It was a metaphor for life, in a way — you can’t hang back in the corner and expect things to happen. You have to be direct and willful and even coarse to some extent to get what you want. Tapley, Stone and I were too respectful of Scorsese’s space, and so we missed our shot.

I asked Kingsley about why there’s still no DVD or Bluray of Betrayal, which will observe its 30th anniversary next year. I said that I’d been told it has something to do with the family of Betrayal producer Sam Spiegel refusing to accomodate would-be distributors. Kingsley said he’d heard the same thing. “I’ll look into it,” he said. And I said, “Okay, cool, but…uhm…well, how could I follow up…?” Kingsley smiled like Don “ya ponce!” Logan and said, “I’ll look into it and we’ll run into each other again at another party and we’ll see where it is!”