Month: August 2012

Indoor personal hygiene options were at a relatively early stage when Abraham Lincoln lived in the White House. While sources contend that Millard Fillmore was the first U.S. President to enjoy indoor plumbing while residing in the White House from 1850 to 1853, a 1989 article about White House plumbing in Plumbing and Mechanical magazine reports that Lincoln may have been “the first President of the United States to splash his way to cleanliness in a White House bathtub, the first tub having been installed during his presidency.”

This is precisely the kind of thing that I like to see and learn about when I see a historical film of any kind. What did everything smell like back then? How well did contraptions work? What kind of soaps, perfumes, bath towels and scented fragrances did they use? Did bathrooms have absorbent floor mats or did water just collect in pools on the marble or hard-tiled floors? Did the toilets function fairly well for the most part or were there issues? Did general stores sell rounded rolls of toilet paper like they do today, etc.?

This is what I want, partly, from Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln. Not just toilet and bathtub information but various hints of the quality and texture of life in the 1860s. Imagine how amazing it would be if Spielberg had decided to present the film in Smellovision or Aroma-rama, then we’d have an idea of what the White House might have actually smelled like from time to time. Think of the transportation!

Will we get this kind of thing from Lincoln? Of course not. Will there be even a fragmentary amount of quality-of-life information? Doubtful. You know Spielberg. Half the time he was shooting Lincoln he was probably preparing for Robopocalypse.

This clip of Steven Soderbergh discussing conservative-minded resistance to digital filmmaking is a Side by Side outtake, but it’s an indication of the film’s spiritual and intellectual energy. Chris Kenneally and Keanu Reeves‘ doc, easily one of the best of the year and certainly the most historic, peeks out in Los Angeles on 8.17, on VOD 8.22, and then on 8.31 at Manhattan’s Quad Cinema.

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Warner Bros.’s 48 frame-per-second Hobbit rollback was first announced at ComicCon on 7.12…”scared rabbits,” etc. Eight days ago I predicted that WB and Hobbit director Peter Jackson “are probably going to limit 48 fps venues when The Hobbit opens in December and characterize 48 fps as some kind of eccentric experiment.”

Today Variety‘s David Cohen reported that Warner Bros.will be “keeping the first high-frame-rate release of The Hobbit fairly small [in] select locations, perhaps not even into all major cities…hoping to test the marketplace and expand the HFR release for the second and third installments…provided auds are enthusiastic.”

In other words, WB has next to no confidence in 48 f.p.s. Adverse reactions from old-fart exhibitors and big-mouth bloggers at last April’s Cinemacon scared them silly and they still haven’t recovered. So they’re going to peek out with the 48 fps Hobbit and test the waters and determine if Joe and Jane Popcorn are going to approve or not…and if they don’t, 48 f.p.s. goes under the bus. Or something like that.

As I said yesterday, I took no texting or bathroom breaks during Tony Gilroy‘s The Bourne Legacy (Universal, 8.10), and that is a form of tribute and respect. (This isn’t to imply that I routinely step out for text messaging, but I sometimes do when a film blows.) And I’ve always admired and respected director-writer Tony Gilroy, who spent two years on Legacy, he said, in the manner of a captain going on a whaling voyage. And yeah, he brought home the oil and the blubber.

Bourne Legacy director-cowriter Tony Gilroy.

Gilroy and I spoke last week for a half hour or so. Here’s the mp3.

“Every time I re-watch my Bluray of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, which seems a bit more masterful each time, I feel a little bit worse about not being more enthusiastic when it first came out 40 months ago. I didn’t put enough feeling into my riffs about it. Calling it “never boring,” “a tense adult thriller about some unsettled and anxious people” and “as seasoned and authentic as this kind of thing can be” didn’t get it. I held back and over-qualified. And I’m sorry.” — posted on 1.31.11.

Please, please, please don’t let Gabriele Muccino‘s latest film be as emotionally cloying as the trailer indicates. I say this as a fan of L’Ultimo Bacio and one who was at least okay with The Pursuit of Happyness. Presumably they changed the last word in the title from “field” to “keeps” because the former alludes to the adventures of a hound and the latter to the promise of a real man.

I just watched the Fox Home Video Bluray of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and it’s absolutely beautiful, scrumptious, dazzling. A breathtaking Technicolor high. Watching it is like eating an ice cream sundae with whipped cream and a cherry. On top of which it’s been mastered at a 1.37 aspect ratio…heavens!

Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

In going with 1.37 Fox Home Video’s Schawn Belston has delivered a gentle reminder to the Bluray community that 20th Century Fox wasn’t part of the 1.85 aspect ratio mandate that swept across Hollywood in the spring of ’53. 1.85 fascist theology says that all films released after April 1953 were projected at 1.85…nope!

This may sound anecdotal to some, but to me the 1.37 presentation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which originally opened in July 1953, is a slight crack in the dike.

Projectionist #1 at New York’s Roxy (on or about July 12, 1953): Here are the prints for that new picture, Gentleman Prefer Blondes. We can run it after the show tonight.

Projectionist #2: With what aperture plate?

Projectionist #1: You ask? 1.85, of course. That’s the new rule, what the boss wants.

Projectionist #2: Wrong. We’re showing it at 1.37.

Projectionist #1: Whaddaya mean? Everything is supposed to be shown at 1.85. The rule came down three or four months ago. S’matter with you?

Projectionist #2: It’s wrong, I tell ya. I’ve heard this one has to be shown at 1.37. Fox films are a different deal than ones from Columbia and Warner Bros. and Paramount.

Projectionist #1: Except Paramount wants 1.66.

Projectionist #2: And that’s not all. When From Here To Eternity opens next month we’re not showing that in 1.85 either. That’ll also be shown at 1.37.

Projectionist #1: But that’s Columbia!

Projectionsist #2: Whatever. We’re showing it at 1.37.

Projectionist #1: How’s anyone supposed to keep this shit straight?

“I’ve never found any evidence in [Fox’s] studio files of a ‘1:85 starts at midnight’ dictum,” Belston told me this morning. “There is plenty of documentation, as you probably know, about Fox from 1954 on making every movie possible in CinemaScope. Ditto the development of stereo and CinemaScope55 later.

“I can tell you from looking at the non-Scope Fox films of 1953 (Call Me Madam, Niagara, Inferno and Pickup on South Street come to mind particularly) that they look more correctly framed in 1.37 than in 1.85, in my opinion. Additionally, whenever these films have screened within the last decade, projectionists/archives/museums have always shown them as you might expect in a 1.33/1.37 aspect ratio.

“Neither of these points is proof of how they should be shown, but for whatever it is worth to you, I’m fairly certain most if not all academics would agree with the 1.37 approach.”

If something in the refrigerator is looking stale or moldy or icky, I don’t throw it out. That takes too much effort — putting it in the garbage, pulling out the plastic garbage bag and tying it up, and then taking it outside and downstairs to the dumpster. It’s much simpler and easier to just put the moldy-stale thing in the freezer. That way it’s out of sight and won’t smell the place up, and when I’m ready (and I mean good and ready), I can take all the frozen discards out to the dumpster in one trip.

I’ve never seen any photos of Abraham Lincoln in which he looked quite this gray. His hair is flecked with gray around the temples in those portraits he sat for in early 1865, but Daniel Day Lewis almost looks like a silver fox here. Plus his hair is too neatly combed. The photo below shows you the real Abe wasn’t into clean parts.

Is this the very first piece of criticism levelled at Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln? Possibly.

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Film critic Judith Crist, who called Cleopatra “a monumental mouse” and was the model for the screening series host in Woody Allen‘s Stardust Memories, died in Manhattan today at age 90.

Crist loved the good films, of course — she cared and worshipped and adored. You can’t write about movies if you don’t feel the passionate uplift. But if she thought a film was crap, she said so and then some. She didn’t play games and could really carve when so moved. She was one tough bird.

Crist had four significant berths as a film critic — as the first full-time female critic at The New York Herald Tribune, starting in April 1963; on the Today show for ten years; for New York magazine, where she was the founding film critic; and then TV Guide. She also wrote for Saturday Review and Ladies Home Journal, and for Coming Attractions magazine in the ’80s and ’90s.

One of Crist’s more famous quotes was contained in her review of Spencer’s Mountain, which nobody and I mean nobody even rents today. Crist described it as “sheer prurience and perverted morality disguised as piety.” The review led Warner Brothers to pull their advertising for the Herald Tribune, but the publisher stood behind her and the ads soon returned.

What are the odds that a publisher or editor would do the same today if a film critic had pissed somebody off? If a critic causes trouble, throw ’em under the bus…right?

Crist was threatened with banishment from screenings after her Cleopatra pan, but this wasn’t followed up either.

Douglas Martin‘s N.Y. Times obit quotes Roger Ebert as having said that these attempts at bullying “led to every newspaper in the country to say ‘Hey, we ought to get a real movie critic.'”

Crist was interviewed just before her 90th birthday (i.e., 5.22.12) by Sree Sreenivasan and Melanie Huff [see above].

“The most enjoyable part of living a long time is that it happens so quickly,” Crist said during the chat. “I have to stop and think, ‘My word, it’s a long time.” When I think of all the things that have changed, I don’t look back because I’ve had a wonderful life and so I have nothing to bitch about…which would be the easy way. I don’t think I want to live another 90 years, because enough is enough. There are still people I enjoy reading, things I enjoy doing; I think it’s the journalists credo of ‘what’s around the next corner?’ I still have that.”

The terms “musician” or “composer” tend to summon images of a slightly rumpled creative type — the kind of man or woman who stays up late and leads a distracted, impulsive life and lives on egg salad sandwiches and doesn’t dress all that carefully. But Marvin Hamlisch, the famed tunesmith who suddenly died yesterday at age 68, always looked and dressed like an owner of a midtown Manhattan jewelry shop or the head of a savings and loan.

The late Marvin Hamlisch — 1944 to 2012.

Hamlisch was a fast talker and a witty, amusing guy, but he couldn’t have looked more stodgy and straight-laced. He didn’t just wear three-piece suits all the time — he looked like he might have been born in one. He also seemed to have the body of a banker, like a guy who didn’t work out much and who liked his evening meals and apertifs. I’m not judging — just sharing what I saw and perceived.

There’s nothing wrong in and of itself with being a square or looking like one, but what impulse led a genuinely gifted guy like Hamlisch, who lived for music and melody and the radiant joy of that, to want to appear to the world like the director of the mortgage department for a Midwestern bank or a well-heeled New York accountant or an executive in the pharmaceutical industry?

Hamlisch was part of that Tin Pan Alley-influenced clique of motion picture composer-musicians like Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager (whom Hamlisch was hooked up with romantically for a time) and Marilyn and Alan Bergman.

Hamlisch was best known for his scores for A Chorus Line and The Way We Were and The Sting, of course. And for the “Nobody Does It Better” song from The Spy Who Loved Me. (I always loved the chord changes that play when Carly Simon sings “is keepin’ all my secrets safe tonight.”) Hamlisch also did the scores for Ordinary People (although that film is known for Pachelbel’s “Canon in Plain D“), Sophie’s Choice, The Swimmer, Three Men And A Baby, Take The Money And Run, Bananas, Save The Tiger and Steven Soderbergh‘s The Informant!. Halmisch had also done work on Soderbergh’s currently-lensing Behind The Candelabra but I don’t how you score a film before you see it.