Month: February 2012

I caught Joe Berlinger‘s Under African Skies, an okay doc about the history and legacy of Paul Simon‘s Graceland, at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. And I liked…well, went with it for the most part. But I couldn’t settle into the substance for a reason that some might find superficial. But I don’t think so.

Under African Skies has two narratives — the making of Simon’s landmark 1986 album and a 2010 South African reunion with the original musicians, and Simon coming to grips with the political blowback to Graceland. Simon was criticized for having swooped in and exploited a South African sound (and the musicians he hired to play it) for selfish or myopic careerist ends, and for ignoring a United Nations-enforced boycott against the apartheid government of South Africa.

Berlinger’s film is a decently constructed recollection and exploration as far as it goes. I felt myself drifting from time to time as the talking heads (South African musicians, engineer Roy Halee, Quincy Jones, friends and flunkies) all seemed to be reading lines from the same script, lines that recalled the elation and excitement of recording Graceland 25 years ago and the delight in everyone getting back together for some new performances, etc. The review of the political climate 25 years ago felt sufficient but rote. A sense of familiarity (we’ve all seen docs like this before) and orchestration began to gather around me like a shroud. But it played well enough. I stayed with it as much as I could.

The fact is that a factor completely out of left field kept interfering with my concentration. I don’t mean to sound cruel or cutting, but the honest truth is that Simon’s curious appearance kept messing with my head. He’s clearly had work done, and there’s something “off” and unnatural about his eyes — something faintly Asian — and his face in general, especially the area under his chin. It just doesn’t look right, and for this reason I was unable to fully settle into the film. Lord knows we all get older but there’s always some kind of rapport between a person’s appearance at age 44 or 45 (i.e., Simon’s age when Graceland was released) and 70, which Simon turned last October. He just looks oddly different, and this fact keeps competing with the other stuff. The result is an off-balance sensation. I kept telling myself to focus on the creative and spiritual, but it was a battle all the way.

Earlier today I sat down with West of Memphis director Amy Berg, former West Memphis 3 defendant and currently free-as-a-bird Damien Echols and wife Lorri Davis. We sat at an outdoor table behind Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre for a little more than 20 minutes. Echols and I talked mostly about right now and what’s coming, and only a little bit about the past. I’ve posted five or six riffs about Berg’s film since Sundance so I’ll let the mp3 speak for itself.

(l. to r.) West of Memphis director Amy Berg, Damien Echols, Lorri Davis.

I wrote a few hours ago that during the q & a portion of today’s SBIFF Directors Panel “three enterprising and obnoxious assholes (one wearing a black cowboy hat) took the mike together and basically asked the panel for help with their filmmaking careers.” They were booed and shouted down. Three hours later the same cowboy asshat tried the same routine during the Movers and Shakers panel. Watch the sudden reaction of moderator Patrick Goldstein as the guy goes into his schpiel.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson has posted a video except of a 9.18.70 Dick Cavett Show interview with Husbands costars John Cassevetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. Cavett is fine but his guests are all gone now, Gazzara’s death yesterday sealing the deal. Here is part #2 and #3.

The just-concluded Santa Barbara Film Festival directors’ panel discussion was a dud for the most part. The only directors I found likable and interesting were Bridesmaids‘ Paul Feig, a clever, well-spoken, fast-on-his feet fellow, and Terry George, helmer of a currently-playing short called The Shore. Moderator Peter Bart did what he could, but the panelists included three helmers of animated film (including the ogre-ish Gore Verbinski, the paycheck-driven director of Rango, two Pirates movies and the forthcoming Lone Ranger) so it was almost an animation panel, which are always boring if you’re not an animation fan.

Today’s Directors Panel at the 2012 Santa Barbara Film Festival.

The exception to the boredom came during the q & a portion when three enterprising and obnoxious assholes (one wearing a cowboy hat) took the mike together and asked the panel for help with their filmmaking careers. This despite Bart having specifically stated that such questions were unwelcome and wouldn’t be allowed. Some people are shameless and some are unreachable — this trio was both. They were hissed and booed down and all but thrown out of the theatre.

During last night’s post-Virtuoso Awards after-party West of Memphis director Amy Berg showed me a mock magazine-cover illustration recently drawn by former West Memphis 3 defendant Damien Echols. It depicts himself and partner Lorri Davis. Echols and Davis arrived here last night to do interviews and take part in a post-screening q & a this evening.

Young Adult‘s Patton Oswalt was the absolute star and the life of the party during last night’s Virtuosos Awards presentation at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre. Rise of the Planet of the Apes‘ Andy Serkis took a close second for apperaring on-stage shirtless, and A Better Life‘s Demian Bichir was charming and affable. Dragon Tattoo‘s Rooney Mara seemed politely subdued. The Descendants‘ Shailene Woodley was fine. And moderator Dave Karger was typically smooth and engaging.

My favorite photo-editing app isn’t an app — it’s a website called Picnik. It’s clean and efficient and dumb enough for the likes of myself. Cropping, resizing, sharpening, tinting, contrasting and red-eye fixes are a snap. And yet Google, the fascist insect that bought Picnic a year or so ago, is closing it down on 4.19. I’m guessing it’ll still be available for Google Plus users, but many people are furious. I’m now looking for an app that’s comparable in terms of ease and simplicity.

At the very least Google should offer a purchasable Picnik app. I would happily shell out. It’s unconscionable to remove a popular photo-editing software without offering some kind of replacement option. Here’s a petition form protesting the Picnik shutdown.

A Criterion Bluray containing a slash-and-crop 1.85 to 1 version of Otto Preminger‘s Anatomy of a Murder will be out on 2.21. DVD Beaver has posted a review with screen captures comparing Sony Home Video’s exquisitely boxy 1.33 to 1 DVD version to the Criterion Bluray. I’m not saying the Criterion (which I haven’t yet seen) won’t have value. A Bluray of an excellent courtroom drama that shows 2/3 of what dp Sam Leavitt originally shot is better than nothing.

A visually compressed, jail-cell cropping, captured from Criterion Bluray.

I’ll allow that the Criterion Bluray seems to offer more visual information on the sides than the Sony Home Video 2000 DVD version. This is a good thing, but there’s still no excuse for whacking off a third of the originally photographed version — one that was seen during who-knows-how-many hundreds of TV airings during the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and which was contained in the NTSC DVD version.

From the ample-head-space version provided by Sony Home Video in 2000.

I was walking up to the Arlington last night to catch the Virtuosos Tribute when I noticed a long line outside the Fiesta Five. “Is this for Chronicle?” I asked a woman near the end of it. “It’s a general line for everything,” she said. I asked what she was seeing. “The Woman in Black.” Something was obviously up. It was a cool Friday night and a certain hunger among a younger, less cultured Santa Barbara crowd (i.e., SBIFF-averse for whatever reason) had made itself known.

Chronicle and Woman in Black were neck-and-neck, as it turned out. At 10 pm last night Deadline had The Woman in Black earning $8.8 million in 2,855 theaters for a $3082 average, and Chronicle with $8.6 million in 2907 situations for a per-screen average of $2958.

I’m out of this personally. I missed last Tuesday night’s Chronicle screening at the Fox lot when I was down in LA and nobody invited me to a Woman in Black screening so I don’t know anything.

My only enthusiastically preferred Democratic Presidential candidate of 2016 is Elizabeth Warren…end of story. I’ll accept Hillary Clinton, yes, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. But a voice tells me it’s Warren’s to lose or fulfill. The Gods have picked her. Plus half the electorate, I sense, really wants to see a woman in the White House…finally.

The great Ben Gazzara has died at the age of 81. He had a long and rich life, and from the 1957 release of The Strange One (which is a very strange film) on he was “Ben Gazzara,” and that really meant something. But what? Gazzara was almost as much of a vibe as he was an actor. He was magnetic but also a bit of a hider. In film after film he was always some variation of a jaded, laconic, laid-back smartass with a very slight grin starting to emerge.

As a member of the ’50s generation that broke through in the age of Brando, Clift, Newman and Dean, Gazzara never really lucked out with that One Big Role that might have made him a star. I’m not sure he was really made of what you’d call “star material.” There was always something aloof and diffident about Gazzara. He was constantly urban and subterranean and coffeehouse and sometimes vaguely snarly and resentful, but at the same time smooth and cool and settled.

For me, Gazzara’s best performance was as Henry Chinaski in Marco Ferreri‘s Tales of Ordinary Madness (’83). There was also his volcanic work in John Cassevettes‘ Husbands (’70) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (’76), of course, and in Peter Bogdanovich‘s Saint Jack (’79) and They All Laughed (’81`). Not to mention his snippy, sharp-mouthed murder defendant in Otto Preminger‘s Anatomy of a Murder (’59) and Jackie Treehorn, of course, in the Coen Brothers‘ The Big Lebowski (’97).

He was married to Janice Rule from ’61 to ’79, and reportedly had an affair with Audrey Hepburn between ’79 and ’81.

Gazzara’s Wiki bio reports the following: “During filming of the big-budget war movie The Bridge at Remagen co-starring Gazzarra and his friend Robert Vaughn, the U.S.S.R. invaded Czechoslovakia. Filming was halted temporarily, and the cast and crew were detained before filming was completed in West Germany. During their departure from Czechoslovakia, Gazzara and Vaughn assisted with the escape of a Czech waitress whom they had befriended. They smuggled her to Austria in a car waved through a border crossing that had not yet been taken over by the Soviet army.”

This is a great story. I wish I could say that I smuggled someone out of a country that had just been taken over by the bad guys. The waitress was probably in her early 20s when this happened. She’s in her mid ’60s today, if alive. Whatever happened to her? How did her life work out?

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