In an interview with Damsels in Distress director Whit Stillman, Financial TimesLeo Robson notes the Stillman sensibility — “a mixture of irony and sincerity, affection and mocking, celebration and mourning” — along with the current success of director-writer Wes Anderson, whom Robson calls one of Stillman’s “followers.”
Stillman’s comment: “I haven’t really spoken to him so I can’t say for sure, but his name is Wes, which is presumably a contraction of Wesley, so I like to think of us as members of the tiny school of Methodist filmmakers.”
I wouldn’t have mentioned this otherwise, but Stillman’s remark tells me that either he or Anderson aren’t especially interested in saying hello or what have you. In late ’09 I met Stillman after a screening of Metropolitan at 92Y Tribeca, and then we talked a bit more and it occured to me that he and Anderson should at least exchange salutations. So I suggested this and gave Stillman Anderson’s e-mail address and vice versa, and that, apparently, was the last of it.
Numerous pieces of art inspired by Alfred Hitchcock films are included in this “gallows humor” selection, but this is my hands-down favorite — Tippi Hedren and Suzanne Pleshette lip-locked in a possibly deleted scene from The Birds, created by Kate Kelton.
The buzz on Armando Ianucci‘s Veep (HBO, 4.22) keeps building and building. Have I been industrious and aggressive enough to wangle a screener? Of course not. Why should I devote 30 to 45 minutes of concentrated calling and letter-writing, etc.? I’d much rather web-surf and daydream and meander my way through the day. Pleading eats up too much energy.
In his 4.13 review, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tim Goodman says that Julia Louis-Dreyfus‘s performance as former Sen. Selina Meyer is “perhaps her best post-Seinfeld role,” and that “she takes to it with such fervor — the constant swearing, the barely veiled desire to become president, the unhappy give-and-take with other politicians and a delightful disdain for average citizens — that you can’t help but applaud what is clearly an Emmy-worthy effort.
“Every actor nails their lines, which keeps Veep moving at a brisk pace. In fact, the episodes seem to end so quickly, you’ll wish they lasted an hour.
“Iannucci hasn’t quite created a character as momentously awesome as The Thick of It‘s angry, foul-mouthed buzzsaw Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), but Veep hits on all cylinders, even with small roles such as that of the senator who swats down a trial balloon from the veep’s office by saying, ‘I imagine I’d mix ape-shit with bat-shit, raise it to a whole new level of fury, and then I’d probably rip your face off and use your eye sockets as a sex toy.'”
30 or 31 years ago I was humiliated as a result of a night’s flirtation with Swedish actress Harriett Andersson. But on some curious level I’ve felt bonded to those 1950s films she made with Ingmar Bergman ever since. Plus I love this Bluray jacket. Criterion designers tend to go in the direction of dweeby oblique, but not this time. The Bluray streets on 5.29.
The fact that The Three Stooges is doing nicely at the box-office and that many of the hipper, more perceptive, free-of-spirit critics have given this Farrelly Bros. farce a thumbs-up tells me that naysayers aren’t seeing the forest for the trees. I think we’re going to see some 2001-style mea culpas down the road. Boston Herald critic James Vernierenotes that “hipsters are turning their noses up at this film…but these same poseurs think the Stooges ripoff Jackass is just brilliant.”
This recently postedDark Shadowsphoto of Johnny Depp-as-Barnabas Collins argues with the jaunty, tongue-in-cheek tone in the recent trailer. To re-quote that guy who’s seen most of Tim Burton‘s film, “[It’s] funny, but also has full-bodied horror elements. Barnabas does kill people in this [and] there’s more of the Burton Sweeney Todd than the trailer implies. This is not Burton’s Addams Family, but a successful amalgamation of his comedic and gothic horror styles.”
If you knew what you were looking at, last night’s TCM Classic Film Festival Screening of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo was a disaster. The great Kim Novak took a bow before it began and the crowd gave her a standing ovation, and then the film began and it looked like dogshit. The image quality wasn’t just poor — it was hideous. Artificially brightened, washed-out color, incorrect tones. To me it resembled what a black-and-white film looks like when it’s been colorized. It was without question the ugliest rendering of this classic 1958 film I’ve ever seen in my life.
A fairly accurate simulation of how the rooftop rain gutter scene looked during last night’s screening, and in fact how much of the film looked throughout.
A simulation of how the same shot is supposed to look, more or less.
The film was digitally projected with a recently created DCP. Before the screening began I called the office of Bob O’Neil, Universal’s vp of preservation and vault services, to ask what the source of the DCP was. O’Neil was at the TCM screening, but the source wasn’t the 1996 Vertigo restoration by Robert Harris and James Katz, I was told, but a new digital scan of some kind.
“Really?” I replied. “But the Harris-Katz restoration was such a beautiful job. Why wouldn’t they use that?” It was suggested that I email O’Neil and ask. I did, twice, and he didn’t reply.
I knew within seconds that I was looking at a degraded rendering. Nobody in the audience said anything or got up to complain, of course. They just sat there like polite sheep, but I was beside myself. How could Universal have supplied this atrocity to the respected TCM Classic Film Festival, which people pay good money to attend? I stuck it out for roughly 40 minutes before leaving in disgust.
The above renderings of the “hanging from the rain gutter” scene at the very beginning are a pretty good simulation of (a) what I saw last night at the Chinese vs. (b) what the same shot looks like under prime conditions. The scene is supposed to be occuring at dusk or in the early evening, but the brightness levels had been digitally pushed.
The way the main-title image is supposed to look, as included on the Harris-Katz restoration.
The way it’s not supposed to look, which is what everyone saw last night.
The opening credits begin with a closeup of a woman’s face. The correct presentation on the Harris-Katz restoration shows the woman in black-and-white, and then the color wheel starts to appear from inside the retina of her eye. In last night’s version her face was covered in an orange sepia — wrong.
James Stewart‘s infamous brown suit is supposed to be a regular earthy brown, and not violet brown or mauve brown or grayish brown, which is how it looked last night.
The opening rooftop chase scene contained the double-shot echo effect that was put onto the soundtrack of the 1996 Vertigo restoration, so maybe the whole film had those extra foley effects. I’m not sure as I didn’t stick around.
The bottom line is that while several scenes looked acceptable from a generic, not-overly-demanding perspective, the general richness of the Vertigo color scheme had a creepy, quasi-bleachy feeling — a look of artificial desaturation. And it made absolutely no sense to present one of Universal’s crown jewels to a well-heeled audience that had every reason to expect the very best.
Kim Novak doesn’t suffer fools. Remember how she lambasted The Artist and the Weinstein Co. when she realized that several minutes of Bernard Herrmann‘s Vertigo score had been used verbatim for The Artist‘s soundtrack? I don’t know if Novak stayed for last night’s screening, but if she did and if I were her I would be on the phone to Universal honcho Ron Meyer or vp technical services Peter Schade this morning and saying, “What the hell are you guys doing? You could have made Vertigo look wonderful if you’d used the restored version created by Harris-Katz as the source of the DCP, and you decided not to?”
