Lawless screenwriter Nick Cave has admitted a basic truism to L.A. Times columnist Steven Zeitchik, to wit: “If beautiful movies can influence you to go out and hug your children, then we have to be honest and say that other movies can inspire you to do bad things. To say they can’t is to deny all movies their power.”
Well…of course! What is lively, impassioned, straight-from-the-heart movie criticism but descriptions of the various mental and emotional states that movies have put us in, and how cleverly or clumsily they’ve managed it?
What movies have put bad thoughts in my head? We’re talking about a very long list, I fear, but almost every film Kate Hudson has made (with the exception of Almost Famous and The Killer Inside Me) has made me want to knock people’s hats off. Yes, including her ass-cancer film. Ditto early Matthew McConaughey. (I’ve twice alluded to Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick here, and this riff is inly three paragraphs long.
The seasoned, storied and widely respected film maven and essayist F.X. Feeney tried and failed to post a response to two recent Heaven’s Gate pieces — last Sunday’s “Don’t Buy The Bullshit” and Monday’s “To All Heaven’s Gate Revisionists.” So he asked for help. Feeney is pretty much the founding father of the campaign to upgrade the reputation of Michael Cimino‘s calamitous 1980 film, and so I’m honored to hear from him and to provide him this forum.
“There’s no such thing as a ‘neglected’ masterpiece,” Feeney begins. “The firebombing Heaven’s Gate suffered at the hands of its first critics is evidence that it played on the deepest nerves in a viewer from the get-go. People wanted a masterpiece, didn’t feel they got one, and reacted with venom and scorn. Fair enough. There’s nothing a filmmaker, or admiring critic, can do or say. A film has to speak for itself.
“This was essentially the argument Jerry Harvey mounted by screening Heaven’s Gate in its entirety on Z Channel, 30 years ago this coming Christmas. The ‘director’s cut’ was thought destroyed. No copies existed in the United States. David Chasman, a studio exec and friend of Harvey, alerted him to the existence of an intact print in a British warehouse. That was what eventually aired at Z, and it was this rather fragile fading copy with its accidental sepia sequences which became the basis of every VHS, laser and DVD copy that has screened ever since.
“No negative of Cimino’s original version exists, and all the surviving elements have long been in decay. This is why he has undertaken a restored version at the invitation of the Criterion Collection, for premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September.
“I haven’t seen it yet, but Cimino’s excitement was palpable when I spoke with him, a few months ago. He has made global adjustments in color and sharpness. The visuals in this next iteration should be newly rich. He has also deleted the problematic intermission. His task ahead was to remix the audio.
“I haven’t spoken with him since he took this on, so don’t know how well it’s been resolved, but one acute technical problem that has afflicted Heaven’s Gate from its beginning, even onto DVD, is that you can’t hear the dialogue. The picture was originally mixed and its sound tested in what is now the Cary Grant theater, on the MGM (now Sony) lot. This optimal setting was deceptive. When Jerry Harvey and I screened the film in that setting, twice, late in 1982, we could hear every pin-drop. Nobody else anywhere has ever experienced the film under such perfect conditions.
“Here’s hoping others now may. This restoration should be a great event for anyone who already loves the picture, and an excellent opportunity for dissenters like my dear Jeff — my favorite sparring partner on this topic — to give this work of epic, unrestrained ambition a fresh chance to disgust them all over again. Or…? Is it possible even you may see it with fresh eyes, my friend?”
Much of Hit and Run (Open Road, 8.22) is a very cleverly written, refreshingly original, angular-attitude comedy that reminded me (in the early stages, at least, and in portions throughout) of David O. Russell‘s Flirting With Disaster (’96), and that is high praise indeed. That classic comedy had inspired character flavor, unusual detours and flaky oddball dialogue, and so does Hit and Run. And while this stuff was happening during last night’s premiere screening, I was delighted.
The story is basically about a former getaway driver for bank robbers (Dax Shepard) whose easy backwater life under the Witness Protection Program with a classy educated girlfriend (Kristin Bell) is thrown into chaos when his past catches up with him. Boil it all down and it’s a premise for a car-chase comedy, for the most part. There are two or three high-speed, burning-rubber scenes that are passable but nothing special. But the character stuff, particularly the intimate give-and-take between Shepard and Bell, is rooted and intelligent and genuinely funny.
Credit goes to Shepard, who wrote the screenplay, but also, I’ve read, to longtime g.f. and fiance Bell, who contributed to the flavor and undercurrent of this material.
And not just the Shepard-Bell scenes but several others. Hit and Run is off on its own road — at times it hums with unusual, off-tempo hilarity. There’s a completely brilliant scene in which Bradley Cooper, playing a hyper, white-rasta blue-collar sociopath, gets into an initially polite dispute with a tall, pissed-off black guy in a supermarket checkout lane about the quality of dog food. (Trust me, it’s a great scene, and ten times funnier than anything Cooper did in either of the two Hangover films.) Costars Tom Arnold. Michael Rosenbaum, Beau Bridges, David Koechner and some red-haired guy who plays a highway patrolman (I’ll eventually find his name) also deliver cool bits and crafty humor. Hit and Run is not your alcoholic brother-in-law’s dumbass comedy.
But Shepard, who also co-directed (with David Palmer) and produced, must also accept blame for the generic car-chase elements and all the super-crazy-ass, muscle-car shit… squealing tires, clouds of smoke, “aggghh!” It’s been done for decades, this stuff. Steve McQueen and Peter Yates got the ball rolling 44 years ago with a landmark car chase in Bullitt (’68), John Frankenheimer upped the ante in Ronin and Quentin Tarantino added lore with some lively back-country road thrills in Death Proof (’07). But there’s nothing new to put on the table.
So how could Shepard have created such a genuinely inventive, unusually well-written relationship comedy on one hand, and at the same time an almost dreary Fast and the Furious thing for yokels?
The burning rubber stuff was inserted for two reasons: (a) Submental males really like fast cars and (b) Shepard is a car and motorcycle freak who sees himself on a certain level as an inheritor of the Steve McQueen mantle. No, I say — he is an inheritor, if he wants to develop his talent, fo the mantle of Billy Wilder, David O. Russell, I.A.L. Diamond, Garson Kanin, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Arthur Richman, the original author of The Awful Truth. He and Bell should step up and write relationship comedies and dramas.
Generally Hit and Run is a major career uptick for Shepard, who before this point had mainly irritated me, to be honest. I found his performance as a none-too-bright L.A. hipster in The Freebie especially irksome, and I hate that grotesque tree tattoo he has on his upper right-arm and shoulder, and particularly those little red leaves or flowers that resemble an outbreak of measles or small pox. But now he’s okay. Now I respect him.
There are currently two Rotten Tomatoes reader reactions to Hit and Run that I find infuriating. A guy named Adam Foidart says “it can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a crazy madcap comedy or lean more towards the dramatic implications…and balance it out with some laughs.” Wrong — this mixture is precisely what makes Hit and Run feel original and satisfying. Films that work only with primary colors are almost always oppressive and obvious. I have the same response to Chris Lee‘s remark that Hit and Run “can’t decide if it wants to be a romantic comedy or an outrageous comedy.” No, dumbass — the best comedies always mix it up.
Update: Just before the start of Tuesday night’s Hit and Run premiere at LA Live, a friend sent me Kim Masters‘ Hollywood Reporter story (filed at 5:10 pm) about Universal having decided to cut Kristen Stewart loose as part of a decision to forget about a Snow White and the Huntsman sequel in favor of a solo-stud Huntsman movie starring Chris Hemsworth. Stewart, Masters reported, “will not be invited to return if the follow-up goes forward.”
Screenwriter David Koepp has also disengaged/been disengaged from the project, says Masters…whatever this actually means or implies.
“Who jettisons Stewart, a star of a certain magnitude, off a sequel to a modestly successful fantasy actioner like Snow White and the Huntsman?,” I wrote in a brief column piece as I sat in the audience before Hit and Run began. “Universal, that’s who. In so doing they [seem to have] essentially proclaimed that KStew is a devalued commodity in the wake of her betrayal of RPatz…no? Are we living in the early ’50s? Box-office-wise, Universal appears to regard her as a kind of Hester Prynne. You’re supposed to ask whether a big studio would jettison a male star off a franchise under similar circumstances.”
But when the film ended and I turned the phone back on, a message from a Universal rep claimed that Masters had gotten it wrong. “THR story is not accurate,” a Universal rep asserted. “The studio is pursuing a Huntsman spinoff but exploring all options to continue the franchise. Nobody has ditched Kristen. No directors attached, no decisions made other than to look at a Huntsman sequel/spin-off. [So] we’re exploring options to continue the franchise and no decisions have been made.”
Update: Universal Co-Chairman Donna Langley has released a statement that says “we are extremely proud of Snow White and the Huntsman and we’re currently exploring all options to continue the franchise. Any reports that Kristen Stewart has been dropped are false.”
I don’t know what the truth is, but Masters has always been a reliable reporter and not given to invention. Did Universal make an early tentative decision about going pure Huntsman and pure Hemsworth sans Stewart, and then experienced severe Twitter blowback and tried to walk it all back? Or is the real truth of the matter contained in Drew McWeeny‘s 8.15 Hitfix piece (“A Full Day of Snow White Speculation Reveals The Tabloid Appetites of Hollywood Press”), which posted at 3:10 am? Key quote: “David Koepp leaving the project is new. That’s it. Other than that, Kim Masters didn’t break news today. She simply repackaged it, sensationalized it. and caused a huge firestorm over the headline.”
Portion of letter to source, sent this morning: “Did it occur to anyone at Universal, whatever their actual calculations & determinations, that at the very least this would LOOK like they were jettisoning Kristen Stewart over a Hester Prynne morals clause? And that jettisoning her RIGHT NOW, a couple of weeks after her RPatz infidelity tabloid blowup, would make them APPEAR to be SEXIST PRIGS & INCREDIBLY CLUELESS? It would have been another thing entirely if they’d announced this a week or two BEFORE the “sordid affair with Rupert Sanders” thing broke. I’m guessing/presuming that Drew McWeeny has it right in his piece, but if you could shed any additional light it would be greatly appreciated.”
Two days ago I did a phoner with Compliance director-writer Craig Zobel. I started by mentioning my admiration of his riveting low-budgeter (Magnolia, 8.17), and that I’d seen it twice (initially at Sundance ’12) and that it’ll remind people of the Milgram experiment of the early ’60s. And it leaves you with two things: (a) Always question authority and (b) be kind and considerate and trust in your own…unless they’re alcoholic assholes. Here’s the chat.
We didn’t discuss Z for Zachariah, a post-apocalyptic drama that Zobel will direct with Tobey Maguire starring and producing with Matthew Plouffe.
Four and a half years ago I paid $10 bucks to see Sylvester Stallone‘s Rambo at a Santa Barbara theatre, and curiously loved it. It was exploitation crap but had some kind of laughably grotesque, pornoviolent element that I “got” on some level. I started thinking that Stallone had kicked himself up to a new meta level. Then I saw The Expendables, a tedious Cannon film, and realized he’d learned nothing and that Rambo had been some kind of dumb fluke.
In any event, Marshall Fine‘s review of The Expendables 2 is a howl, almost on a comedic Borscht Belt level. Fine is always sharp but he doesn’t do “hilarity,” per se. And yet Stallone & co. have pushed him into the funny pit, especially in the matter of cosmetic enhancements
Example #1: “The driving force behind The Expendables 2 — maybe the biggest, bloodiest and most willfully stupid film since the last time Michael Bay stepped behind a camera — is obviously Stallone, who looks like 10 miles of bad road at this point or, perhaps, a four-car pile-up of cosmetic surgeries.”
Example #2: Stallone and his long-of-tooth costars – Arnold Shwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris — “are downright scary-looking, as though they’re runner-ups in lookalike contests to look like themselves. Or perhaps they’re simply trying to elude facial-recognition software.”
Elizabeth Taylor was “a wildly exciting lover-mistress” and “beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography…her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires.” — first two quotes from the forthcoming “Richard Burton Diaries“; “breasts” quote from Sam Kashern and Nancy Schoenberger’s “Furious Love.”
I’m getting sick of the relentlessly cheap snark and the non-stop allusions to my being deluded or sloppy of thought and/or constantly dispensing troll-bait with increasingly eccentric riffs and articles. Yes, okay, I write stuff that I think will be catchy as opposed to dull but sometimes certain items just come across the screen and I respond to them. All I know is that I work too hard on this column to put up with intemperate poisoned darts from low-rent contributors, and I am un-sheathing the sword. I’m ready to quickly and impulsively smite.
I get things wrong from time to time and occasionally don’t think things through enough, like anyone else doing a daily column, but I’m not sitting here and tossing fruit-loops in the air and catching them in my mouth like a seal. The column right now is a late 2012 synthesis of where things have evolved and where my voice, which has taken me many, many years to find and modulate in just the right way, takes me. If a thought feels good or intriguing or amusing before it’s fully articulated, I go with it and work it out and give it shape and propulsion. Except for libidinal longings and that line of country, I trust what surfaces.
If I wanted to I could bang out the straight-laced mainstream journalistic stuff that I used to write in the ’80s, ’90s and early aughts. But things have evolved. It’s a process. And one of the aspects of the here-and-now is that I’m no longer editing the impulse to share my occasionally eccentric views, when and if they happen to arise. When I was writing in the ’90s for Entertainment Weekly and the L.A. Times and L.A. Times Syndicate and Mr. Showbiz and all the others, I restricted that stuff to private memos. In the late ’90s and early aughts I stared to let some of it out. And now if it’s in my head, it pretty much goes right on the page. (Except for icky-intimate stuff, I mean.)
So this is where things are, and as far as I’m concerned people slamming me for saying stuff that they consider to be loopy or beyond-the-pale (like my aspect-ratio rants, which are about what should be by Movie Godz standards as opposed to what Variety reported in a review printed in 1954) is like people complaining about Pablo Picasso painting people with both eyes on the same side of the nose, and asking “why didn’t he stay in his blue period”? I am in no way comparing myself to Picasso in any substantive way, of course, but I understand what he meant when he said in the ’50s or ’60s that it had taken him decades to learn how to paint as simply and directly as a child. What I’m doing isn’t analagous in that respect but I’m letting the personal out more and more and blending it with industry jottings and critical views and coming up with a new synthesis of some kind. Bit by bit, stroke by stroke, you prune away the crap and deliver what is essential and true.
And one of the things that will definitely be true from this point on is that anyone calling me fruit-loopy or wild-eyed or incomprehensible henceforth is going to get heave-ho’ed so fast they won’t know what hit them. Personal insults have been a no-no for years. I’m just re-emphasizing that malignant dissers (including those who write about films for a living) had better watch it.
Note: I wrote this in response to an HE reader who emailed the following three or four hours ago: “I love your site, visit daily and will continue to no matter what, but the right wing dildos in the comment sections, especially DuluozGray and various “Ray’s”, are becoming unbearable. Their smug bile is nauseating. I just had to let you know I very much look forward to any future purge!”
A newly-mastered, slightly problematic 70mm print of Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus (’60) was screened last night at the Academy theatre. And I’m sorry to say that it looked a bit darker than it needed to be (and no, it wasn’t the fault of the Academy’s projector lamp). To indicate the problem I’ve posted crude simulations of the difference between how Spartacus looks on Universal Home Video’s excessively DNR’ed Bluray vs. what we saw last night.
Simulation of how this Capua gladiatorial school scene looks on the “shiny” Spartacus Bluray.
Simulation of how this same scene looked last night during the Academy’s 70mm presntation.
The bottom line is that many of the details didn’t seem as crisp and needle-sharp as they are on Universal Home Video’s “shiny” Bluray, which is considered by grain monks to be just as bad as Fox Home Video’s overly glossy Patton. The close-ups on the big screen were magnificent but many of the particulars captured by Russell Metty‘s Super-Technirama 70 cinematography were simply obscured in shadows. This, I regret to say, is the way it is almost every time I see a 70mm film projected at the Academy or the Aero or Hollywood’s American Cinematheque. 70mm just doesn’t stand up to Blurays or DCPs. The absolute best large-format presentation I’ve recently seen was the big Lawrence of Arabia screening at the Academy, but that was a DCP.
Are Universal Home Video execs listening? You guys need to allow Robert Harris, who co-directed the original Spartacus restoration in 1990, to do a Bluray that’s really right, and I mean in a way that truly captures the textured wholeness of Mr. Metty’s photography. Your current “shiny” version isn’t right, last night’s 70mm print wasn’t really right — and you can’t let the “shiny” version be the last word.
Producer-star Kirk Douglas, 95, showed up before the film began to speak with Pete Hammond, ands was his usual plucky, good-humored self, old-mannish in some respects but very sharp and on-the-stick in others. He and Hammond recounted how Douglas’s tough-darts decision to give blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo full credit in the opening titles had essentially ended the Hollywood blacklist. This story and others about the making of this 1960 film are recounted in Douglas’s new book, “I Am Spartacus!” (which I haven’t read but intend to get into). Douglas mentioned that his son, Michael, has recorded the audio version.
After introducing Douglas and Hammond and before surrendering the mike and leaving the stage, Academy president Hawk Koch said to Douglas, “Kirk, I just want you to know that I’m Spartacus.” At which point pretty much everyone in the seats (and I’m talking about at least a couple of hundred people) leapt to their feet and began shouting “I’m Spartacus!” and “No, I’m Spartacus!” and so on. It was quite a moment. A minute later I was asking myself, “Did that just happen?” Update: I got there about ten minutes before the chat began and didn’t realize that this audience-response thing was orchestrated by Tom Sherak — i.e., he had asked everyone to do this.
“Shiny” Universal Home Video Bluray version
Simulation of 70mm projected version of same shot.
Last December I passed along a funny Spartacus story told by James Toback, one that happened during the cutting. The story came from editor Robert Lawrence, who later edited Toback’s Fingers and Exposed.
Kubrick and Lawrence were editing the finale when Jean Simmons, escaping from Rome with the help of Peter Ustinov, is saying goodbye to Douglas, who’s dying on a cross. Kubrick told Lawrence he didn’t want to use what he felt was a grotesque close-up of Douglas. Lawrence said the shot wasn’t so bad, and in any case Douglas will surely complain when he notices that his closeup is missing. “I don’t care what he says,” Kubrick said. “I’m the director…take it out.” They later showed the scene to Douglas, and his immediate comment was “Where’s my closeup?” Kubrick shrugged and said, “I don’t know, Kirk.” He then turned to Lawrence and said, “Where’s his close-up?”
“This is the first time in history…the first time in the history of the world in which more people are dying of obesity than of starvation…what was once a rich man’s disease has now become socially widespread, and it’s historic. And if we don’t do something to turn this around we’re going to be in deep shit.” Except for the term “deep shit,” this is very close to what New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just said to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell in a little chit-chat segment that aired around 10:10 am Pacific.
I didn’t hear the beginning of the conversation but I think Bloomberg was primarily referring to Americans rather than the worldwide industrial-nation citizenry. Even more specifically he was referring to fat-asses who buy 32 ounce Cokes at movie concession stands, and particularly to exhibitors who insist on selling those 32-ounce drinks. When I ask for the smallest drink at a concession stand, they almost always give me something two or three times bigger than I really want. Huge helpings of food and drink are a lower-middle-class thing in the same way that the only non-young people who smoke are low-rent clock-punchers and layabouts.
