Sometime in the early to mid ’90s, or roughly 16 or 17 years ago, the Criterion Co. put out a laser disc of Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita that — hold on to your hats — presented the film in alternating aspect ratios of 1.33 and 1.66, or the same way that an early 2001 DVD presented Dr. Strangelove, which is the way Kubrick shot both films and wanted them seen.
Before, that is, the fascist mindset took over and cropped Dr. Strangelove down to 1.66 to 1, blowing off the 1.33 portions entirely. Don’t listen to the 16 x 9 absolutists on this. They lie, they cheat, they maim…and they call information for numbers they could easily look up in the book.
The only way Lolita has been viewable since it began appearing on DVD is within a 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio. The recently released Bluray is also in 1.66 to 1. I’m fine with these, but I’m deeply sorry I never saw the alternating a.r. version.
I realize that relatively few people out there believe that “boxy is beautiful,” and that an alternating 1.33 and 1.66 version of Lolita means little or nothing to them, but I never bought this disc and never saw it anywhere, not once. And it’s killing me that today’s general fascist mindset (i.e., all non-Scope ’50s and ’60s films must closely conform to the 16 x 9 aspect ratio of high-def screens) makes it all but certain that this version of Lolita will never be exhibited or offered ever again. We all know who to blame for this so I won’t name names. I’m posting this as a lament.
Stanley Kubrick, Sue Lyon during filming of Lolita.
Every four or five years I re-post an article that I wrote in 2003 about Frank Perry‘s Play It As It Lays and particularly the absence of of a Universal Home Video DVD on Amazon. I know it’s played on the Sundance Channel and that it may be available as a download. The last I checked Universal had the home video rights, and as far as I know the ball is still in their court.
The article was originally written for my Movie Poop Shoot column — I last re-ran it in ’09 when the producer, Dominick Dunne, died. I’m running it again today because I’ve found a YouTube clip of the opening.
“‘The corruption and venality and restrictiveness of Hollywood have become…firm tenets of American’s social faith — and of Hollywood’s own image of itself,’ Joan Didion wrote in an essay 30-plus years ago.
“Then as now, it follows that people high up in the Hollywood food chain have a reputation for living spiritually arid or perverted lives, and more than a few of them being very sick puppies. I don’t know how many books and movies have used the old Hollywood Babylon thing as an atmospheric starting point since Didion’s prescient pronouncement, but I think we can safely say ‘a lot.’
“Tuesday Weld‘s Maria character (it’s pronounced Mar-EYE-ah and not Mar-EE-ah) walks around in a state of shutdown. She doesn’t seem to be in pain as much as caught up in some kind of drifting, unable-to-play-the-game-anymore mentality. Maria’s life doesn’t seem to amount to anything purposeful or self-directed as she only seems to function as an enervated wife, friend or lover to this or that Hollywood player-with-a-penis. It has failed, in any event, to coagulate for her in a way that feels rooted or worth being a part of.
“The film is Maria’s recollection of her recent past as she recovers from some kind of breakdown in a sanitarium. She has gotten divorced from her director husband (Adam Roarke), partly due to his rage over her having had an abortion after getting pregnant by one of her lovers (Richard Anderson). She has an emotionally disturbed daughter who barely speaks. One of her core sentiments, repeatedly jotted down during her stay at the facility, is that ‘nothing applies.’
“Maria’s closest friend is her husband’s producer, B.Z. (Anthony Perkins), who closely shares her nihilist leanings.
“There’s a scene in which Maria, B.Z. and B.Z.’s wife (Tammy Grimes) are driving in a car, and Maria has just said something very spacey and who-cares? ‘You’re getting there,’ B.Z. says to Maria. ‘Where?’ she asks. ‘Where I am,” B.Z. answers. His wife quickly rejoins, ‘Where you are is shit.’
“The movie has lots of acidic, bitter-pill dialogue like this, a good portion of it dished out by Perkins. Kael said that ‘when his lines are dry, [Perkins] is the best thing in the picture.'”
“If an actor gets so much plastic surgery that they’re not quite the same person, they have to change their name so it’s not quite the same name. Example: ‘Did you see Lindsey Lowland on SNL last night?’ ‘No, I was watching an Arthur Schwarzegger movie.’ ‘Which one was that?’ ‘You know, that one with Dickie Rourke and Sylvester Scallion.'” — Rule #1 from Bill Maher’s New Rules for Hollywood (posted today on the Hollywood Reporter website at 4:45 pm).
Of course the MPAA should allow kids under 17 to see Lee Hirsch‘s Bully (Weinstein Co., 3.30) by downgrading the R rating to a PG-13. And it’s a good thing, of course, that Katy Butler has gathered over 200,00 signatures protesting the MPAA rating as it can’t be shown in schools without a PG-13 rating. But really…all this over Hirsch’s insistence that a few f-bombs be kept on the soundtrack?
The MPAA’s CARA ratings board is enforcing a system designed to appeal to the Rick Santorum-minded parents of the world. Parents who fear f-bombs and depictions of sexual activity more than depictions of violence represent a kind of neurotic constipation, and MPAA is endorsing a form of bureaucratic idiocy by catering to these people.
But as Ellen DeGenereres says in the clip above, most kids are quite familiar with f-bombs so what’s the difference? Just create a bleeped version of Bully so schools can show it and put the f-bomb R version in theatres. Or…what the hell, remove the f-bombs altogether. Who cares if we hear bullies in the film using f-bombs or not? The idea is to make the film viewable to kids so why not? How many tens of thousands of times have we heard f-bombs in other films? What difference can it make? The basic essential goal is to forcefully persuade that bullying in schools is horrific. What are five f-bombs compared to that?
Sidenote: It was announced today that a ratings (or film censoring) board in British Columbia, apparently called Consumer Protection B.C., has given a PG rating to Bully.
Sarah Palin did us all a favor during the 2008 Presidential campaign by revealing her stunning ignorance of nearly everything essential for a Vice-Presidential candidate to know. Her name is now and forever synonymous with the term “rural rightwing cluelessness,” and thank God for that clarity. Not that this matters to the righties in the bubble. They can shut out anything. They’re Jedi Masters at that.
If you’ve read John Heilemann and Mark Halperin ‘s “Game Change,” a well-vetted history of the ’08 campaign on both sides, the content of Jay Roach‘s Game Change, which focuses only on the McCain-Palin side of things, will add nothing to your knowledge of Palin’s antics. The film does, however, make clear how thick she really was, and it does, in my view, seal her political tomb with fresh warm cement.
Game Change (HBO, debuting Saturday) is absolutely vital viewing, and not just because it’s great truth candy. It also delivers two superb performances — Woody Harrelson‘s as McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt and Julianne Moore as Palin. Both will be up for Emmy’s later this year, trust me.
There are two phases in both performances. For the first 30 or 35 minutes Schmidt and Palin are about ambition, anticipation and excitement. And when it starts to becomes clear what a myopic boob Palin is and how little she knows (and what great fodder this is becoming for the liberal media), they’re both enveloped by increasing levels of shock.
Harrelson is especially effective at conveying a sense of steadily building alarm that gradually morphs into something close to terror. Moore is playing the source of that, of course, so I didn’t feel the same empathy, but she’s awfully good at portraying a woman under the influence of all sorts of horrible denials and suppressions.
On top of which Game Change is a fascinating political drama that just tells what happened (everything has been vetted and verified), and yet is not really about “what happened” as much as a portrait of how the political arena changed four years ago — how an insubstantial woman and a very substantial man both ascended to great political heights on the strength of their personal metaphors and natural charismatic appeal. Barack Obama had the smarts and the patter and political background and Palin didn’t…but they were both manifestations of the same cloth.
I was also moved and persuaded by Ed Harris‘s portrayal of John McCain and especiallly Sarah Paulson‘s as Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain campaign adviser who was charged with trying to prepare Palin for her various press encounters. In fact, this is the first performance Paulson has given that has prompted me to stand back and go “whoa.”
Because it’s an accurate retelling Game Change is not on Palin’s side. It couldn’t be. It’s mainly Schmidt’s story with a seasoning of Wallace for added pathos. They both suffered greatly, but it was Schmidt who urged McCain to pick Palin as his running mate so he’s got the python wrapped around his neck. I’ve been there. I’ve made mistakes that won’t go away, and I know what kind of hell that can be. This is one of Harrelson’s best-ever performances. I liked it better than his work in Rampart, and that’s saying something.
I’m kicking around five reactions to John Carter, which I saw last night and which will surely die this weekend in relation to cost. (A three-day haul of $25 million may result in a $75 million domestic total vs. $250 production costs plus marketing…forget it.) I was in a kind of neutered middle zone about this Disney-financed, Andrew Stanton behemoth. I wasn’t succumbing to hate convulsions but I was somewhat bored at every turn.
I sat there with my legs sprawled and my lids at half-mast and muttered snark to myself: “A worm hole, right, and a blue-light medalllion…wow, he can leap distances at a single bound…big deal… yup, saw that cliche coming…that one too…what kind of natural selection process poduces a species with four arms?…a flying fortress a la Return of the Jedi?…nice production design but who cares?…wait, isn’t that the same narrow rock canyon they used in The Professionals?…Mars looks like effing Utah…Jesus, another hour to go,” etc.
Impression #1 is that it contains one too many warring Martian species. You’ve got your tall, green, four-armed Tharks, which I kept calling Tar-Tars because on some level they reminded me of a race of spear-chucking Jar-Jars. You’ve also got your henna-skinned, English-speaking Red Martians and a strong, intellectual, take-charge princess (Lynn Collins) and her politically powerful dad (Ciaran Hinds). There are also the Red adversaries, the sorcerer-like Therns, and the corruption of a power-seeking Red Martian called Sab Than (Dominic West) by a senior Thern villain (Mark Strong). And then you’ve got John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) in the middle of all this, basically playing another generic, ripped, long-haired Clint Eastwood type — a gruff-spoken humanoid of few words and some difficulty voicing anything more than the simplest of sentences (“Get outta here!,” “You’re speaking English!,” “My name is John Carter…I’m from Virginia”).
Impression #2 (which I conveyed in last night’s Carter post) is that Kitsch kept reminding me of a blend of Jim Morrison and Jeffrey Hunter in King of Kings. I also kept thinking that the 5’11” Kitsch doesn’t seem tall or broad-shouldered enough to meet the macho requirement. A third-act dialogue scene shows him to be at least two inches shorter than the 6’1″ Strong, and this not-tall-enough feeling is underlined by his being surrounded by nine-foot-tall Tar-Tars…I mean Tharks…during the first two-thirds.
Impression #3 is that Collins is a first-rate actress who conveys a solid inner life, but she isn’t fetching enough for my taste. Especially after catching a shot of her at the recent John Carter Moscow premiere. Sorry but why was she chosen again? This is a fanboy movie. We all know what the game is, and if LexG were still around he’d be saying “why didn’t they cast someone actually hot?”
Impression #4 is that Carter is similar in some ways to Richard Fleischer‘s The Vikings (’58). Collins’ princess being forced by her father (Hinds) to agree to a political marriage to the detestable West = Janet Leigh‘s Princess Morgana being promised in marriage to the loathsome King Aella (Frank Thring) by her father. And at the same West resembles Kirk Douglas‘s Einar, a brute who sexually desires Leigh’s princess but can never have her emotionally as Morgana has fallen for Tony Curtis‘s Erik. Who is almost as primitive and monosyllabic as Kitsch’s Carter, who has won Collins’ heart in Carter. It all ties together, see?
Impression #5 is that I, sitting there all bored and distracted and slumping in my seat, would have much preferred to see a remake of The Vikings rather than John Carter. The Vikings story is more politically complex and yet less confusing, and better motivated and easier to follow, and I would have had no trouble buying Kitsch, Collins and West in the Curtis, Leigh and Douglas roles.
As I thought about this last night I was reminded that there’s nothing in John Carter that matches a certain emotional moment at the end of The Vikings — a moment that I described some six years ago in the wake of Fleischer’s death.
“The other thing that still works is the film’s refusal to make much of the fact that Douglas and Curtis, mortal enemies throughout the film, are in fact brothers, having both been half-sired by Ernest Borgnine‘s Ragnar,” I wrote. “Leigh begs Douglas to consider this ten minutes from the finale, and Douglas angrily brushes her off. But when his sword is raised above a defenseless Curtis at the very end and he’s about to strike, Douglas suddenly hesitates…and we know why.
“And then Curtis stabs Douglas in the stomach with a shard of a broken sword, and Douglas is finished. The way he leans back, screams ‘Odin!’ and then rolls over dead is pretty hammy, but that earlier moment of hesitation is spellbinding — one of the most touching pieces of acting Douglas ever delivered.”
I’m not trying to build The Vikings up beyond what it was — a primitive sex-and-swordfight film for Eisenhower-era Eloi. But it did invest in that unacknowledged through-line of “brothers not realizing they’re brothers while despising each other,” and this does pay off. It is one measure of John Carter that it doesn’t invest in anything that pays off and sticks to the ribs…nothing. It’s all about concept and production design and adherence to the original Edgar Rice Burroughs serial and all the other blah-dee-blahs. This is one of the things that really stinks about big movies today. They don’t invest in compelling story threads that build into emotional hooks.
