Month: October 2012

“Over the last few years America has been knocked down,” Clint Eastwood‘s new Romney ad begins. He doesn’t mention that the financial meltdown of 2008 was largely brought to us by a rightist corporate takeover of this country, facilitated by the Wall Street deregulation under Bush (and yes, by Clinton also). The fair-deal, free-enterprise America that Clint grew up in has become a South American-style patriarchal society in which a tiny elite live like pampered sultans while everyone else scrimps — a social scheme authored by Republican scum.

Clint’s solution? American needs to go more corporate, more white bread, more Republican.

It goes without saying that Clint’s ad ignores the fact that the economy is in a strong recovery mode right now. That would spoil the narrative.

Elite-favoring, phony-Christian Republican values are rat poison in the bloodstream of the body politic.

I think Sam Mendes‘ Skyfall is one of three or four best James Bond films ever made, and easily the best one starring Daniel Craig. (Yes, better than Casino Royale.) It rids itself of some of the tired 007 cheese and starts afresh and has an actual theme (the old giving way to the new) and goes a little bit darker, especially in the final act. Actually a lot. I think it’s as good as From Russia With Love or Dr. No, and that means something coming from me.

And Javier Bardem is definitely the funniest and most flamboyant Bond villain since…I don’t know who. Chris Walken? And he doesn’t even show up until the film has been running for 65 minutes or so. And it has the best opening credits sequence since…I don’t know, Goldfinger? Thunderball?

But I have to leave for an early screening and haven’t time to get into it. Tomorrow. This has been one of those lazy, frazzled days in which I can’t seem to dig into anything or push out sentences that amount to anything at all. Here, at least, is my favorite review so far, written by Indiewire critic and 007 aficionado Bill Desowitz

“James Bond films have always been about looking forward and back at the same time, but never more so than in Skyfall, which is both a homecoming and a breakthrough for the 50th anniversary,” he begins. “In fact, it’s all about exploring the old and the new. That’s the central metaphor; it’s embedded in every ambiguous moment. It was worth the extra year taken to craft the script, do the prep, and hone every delicious detail into an organic whole.

“Of course, it helps to have Javier Bardem as a flamboyant baddie with a personal grudge that’s right up there with Dr. No and Goldfinger, or cinematographer Roger Deakins providing such visual elegance. It’s not just a matter of making Bond more relevant. [Director] Sam Mendes has deconstructed Bond so well with screenwriter John Logan in order to elevate him dramatically.

“You have to know the rules before you can break them. Or in this case, transcend them. As a result, Mendes has not only made a great Bond movie but also a great movie. Period. Forget Bourne. Bond is now as thematically rich as The Dark Knight.”

I’ve just watched a few portions of the new Vertigo Bluray that’s part of Universal’s Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection, and I can report that the aubergine tint in James Stewart‘s brown suit — a fairly persistent element in the DCP version that I saw on the Universal lot last August — is now a mostly tolerable, off-and-on thing. It’s become a mood suit that sometimes drifts into faint aubergine brown, depending on the source of light.

The suit is solid brown in sunlight or shaded-sunlight scenes (Stewart following Kim Novak in the car, spying on her at the Mission Dolores cemetery) and aubergine-tinted when he’s indoors in Midge’s apartment or inside the McKittrick Hotel. So it’s still a slight problem but not much of one. I’m done with it. I can live with it, I mean. Yes, I wish the suit was pure brown all the time but the likelihood of the Universal guys re-doing Vertigo properly is very slight so we just have to live with it, and it’s not that bad anyway.

Here’s an alternate take in which I pass along the same observations but in a slightly different way. I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon (except for work out time) sampling these Blurays. Can’t wait. I have a date with aubergine-tinted brown suit destiny!

Last night I chose to see Sam Mendes‘ Skyfall (best Daniel Craig Bond ever, and one of the top four or five 007s ever made) rather than catch the third and final Presidential debate live. As good as Obama sounded last night I just don’t think it matters to the people I’ve respectfully referred to as “low-information dumbasses.” They don’t want to know from debates, and they just want some of that Romney money. Vote for Romney, receive your Romney rebate check ($2789.00 per U.S. citizen) in the mail within 60 days, and doom the country to the judgments and regulations of a rightwing Supreme Court for decades to come.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Stanley Kubrick exhibit will open on November 1 and stick around until 6.30.13 — a full eight months. The first U.S. hosting of the Kubrick show is the same Stanley Kubrick exhibit that I attended at the Paris Cinematheque Francaise in May 2011. Why New York has been bypassed thus far is a mystery. Production designer Patti Podesta hasl designed the LACMA show.

A discussion of Kubrick’s films between LACMA curator Elvis Mitchell and former Kubrick producer Jan Harlan will also happen on Saturday, 10.27, at 1 pm.

Jordan Hoffman: “Gotta be honest — Robert Downey Jr.‘s carefully rehearsed way of sounding off the cuff is starting to get on my nerves.” Wellshwood: “I’ve been feeling this way since at least the first Sherlock Holmes flick — a movie that mainlined green poison into my veins.”

I have to say this carefully as I don’t want to sound unappreciative or ungrateful. The new Criterion Bluray of Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby (10.30) is a very high-grade thing. It makes the 1968 classic look as lustrous and scratch-free as it did when it first opened. And it sounds crisp and full and clear as a bell.

And the disc includes a well-polished, smoothly cut documentary — “Remembering Rosemary’s Baby” — that includes face-time with Polanski, Mia Farrow and former Paramount studio chief Robert Evans. I think I liked the doc better than the film because I’ve seen the film too many times whereas the doc is fresh and new as far as it goes.

So what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong. It looks totally fine except…I’m not even sure I want to say this because I don’t mean to sound like a Bluray peon. All right, eff it, here we go: Baby Blu looks like film, and I was sorta kinda hoping for a blend of celluloid and digital enhancement that would somehow take it beyond what it was when Polanski signed off on the final answer print. No, I don’t want a “shiny” Spartacus– or Patton-level DNR deal, but I wouldn’t have minded a little DNRing. Just a tiny bit of sweetening, just a tad. But that’s not what the Criterion monks do. Their Blurays of older films always look like celluloid running through the gate of a Norelco DP-70, and sometimes that’s fine and sometimes it’s mildly disappointing and sometimes it’s a little “meh” and sometimes it’s great. This is one of the fine ones.

I only know that the Baby Bluray doesn’t have that special plus quality, that look of “whoa!…this looks better than ever!” that Blurays sometimes provide. Criterion’s Sunday Bloody Sunday Bluray has that look, or at least it looks significantly better than I’ve ever seen it on a home screen before. But their Rosemary’s Baby Bluray, truth be told, looks roughly the same as it did when I bought the DVD ten or 12 years ago and played it on my Sony 32″ analog flatscreen. And it looks roughly the same as it does when I play the Netflix version on my iPad 3. And it looks about the same as it did the last time it played on Turner Classic Movies. And it looks roughly the same as when it opened in Boston’s “combat zone” on June 13, 1968.

The Rosemary’s Baby Bluray, in short, wasn’t mastered with the idea of taking your breath away, or at least the idea of taking away the breath of someone like myself, a Bluray-worshipping, semi-sophisticated cineaste and ex-projectionist who doesn’t mind a little tasteful DNRing. It’s made for the grain dweebs who will say “whoa, really nice grain structure!” It looks like it’s being projected at the Criterion theatre a week after Bobby Kennedy was killed with a first-rate projectionist in the booth. Grain purists like Glenn Kenny will probably be happy, and I’m not putting Kenny down when I say this. So I’m not “complaining.” Really. It’s fine. I’m just saying “it is what it is.”

I’ve given up on seeing Rosemary’s Baby at 1.66 in my lifetime, but I would have been just a tad happier if Polanski and Criterion guys had at least used a full-screen 1.78 to 1 aspect ratio and given it just a bit more height instead of faintly cropping at the tops and bottoms in order to give it a 1.85 aspect ratio.

Why am I responding more favorably to samplings of Ben Whishaw‘s genteel, dweeby, soft-spoken Q in Skyfall — by most estimations a mild, anecdotal performance — than to his lead performances in Perfume and Bright Star? Because there seems to be something pained and morose and even (sorry) a tiny bit icky about Whishaw when left to his own devices, but shoehorned into the confines of a Bond film he’s quite agreeable.

And why does Daniel Craig look so creased and grubby and worn-down? He looks like an actor going through a rough streak. And he doesn’t look Bondian. Why not go all the way and shave his head completely and wear a Mike Tyson Maori tattoo on the right side of his face?

A Skyfall peek is happening this evening in Los Angeles…all right!

On one hand I was almost repulsed by Lesley Stahl‘s insipid narration of last night’s 60 Minutes segment on Steven Spielberg. (That fawning tone when she spoke of how E.T. “touched us”…yeesh!) On the other I wrote a Disney publicist this morning and asked for the third or fourth time when I might be allowed to see Lincoln. I can’t seem to harbor a pure, unconflicted thought about this film. Then again what thoughts matter without my having seen it?

“I think you’ve made your point in keeping me away from this film,” I said to the Disney rep, “but I’ve read the reactions about Lincoln clearly avoiding the oppressive sentimentality of War Horse and that Daniel Day Lewis delivering ** a highly commendable performance, at the very least.”

Spielberg told Stahl that “I knew I could do the action in my sleep at this point in my career. In my life, the action doesn’t hold any…it doesn’t attract me anymore.” And yet he’s in pre-production on Robopocalypse and is apparently open to making another Indiana Jones film.

** Last night TheWrap‘s Steve Pond called DDL’s performance “utterly commanding and absolutely undeniable as a charismatic and pragmatic man who has been beaten down by years of civil war and political fights…the world-weariness and pain that Day-Lewis shows in every frame helps save Spielberg from his worst impulses toward grandiosity and overstatement.”

Pond added that “the folks who came out of the New York Film Festival raving about Lincoln…were probably a little more excited than they should have been, the verdict from this coast, absent the enthusiasm of an excited film-festival audience, is more muted.”

Last night a kindly-mannered, liberal-minded friend was talking, God help us, about a possible Romney win. Too many voters don’t know about the economy steadily resurging, and those who know about it don’t think it’s enough. They want to be rich, and believe if Romney wins his tremendous wealth might somehow rub off on them. They refuse to accept that Bush trickle-down and regulatory leniency, which Romney wants to return to, are what led to the economic crash of ’08. They’re determined to vote against their interests, and are clinging like shipwreck survivors to pig-ignorant suspicions and intuitions. **

In short, the fate of the nation is in the hands of a few million spoiled, drunken, sugar-addicted four-year-olds who like to gamble.

On 6.7.12 I wrote that “I’ve been predicting all along that President Barack Obama will squeak through to a victory over Mittens Romney, nudging him by two or three points at best and more or less surviving by the grace of God. If he does any better it’ll be because something will drop into his lap that will make him look better to Joe Schmoe, who always votes like a grunting superstitious dumbass.”

You can’t go wrong with N.Y. Times “Five Thirty Eight” columnist Nate Silver, a brilliant statistician and poll-crunching dweeb who more or less agrees that my early-summer pronouncement is still valid. Yesterday morning he posted the following:

“If you accept the premise that Mr. Obama is ahead by some (small) margin in the tipping-point states, something that all the different methods agree on, it then becomes a question of how much doubt you should have about that advantage given the intrinsic uncertainty in polling.

“Saying that the race ‘could go either way’ is an obviously correct statement — but also one devoid of insight.

“We dare to pose a more difficult question, the one that a gambler or an investor might naturally ask: What are the odds?

“We calculate Mr. Obama’s odds as being about two chances out of three.”

** A Gallup poll released last June stated that only 47% of Americans seem to believe in evolution while 46% believe in creationism (i.e., Adam and Eve). Of the 47% backing evolution, 32% believe that God guided it. 58% of Republicans believe that humans were created within the past 10,000 years.

Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas and I recorded two installments a couple of hours ago for Oscar Poker #98, but the second was much better so I threw out installment #1. And I was in such a hurry to get this done that I didn’t even add intro music or fade-ins — this is unrefined. We went for a good hour and covered most of the top Oscar contenders as they currently stand. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

The big boxoffice story of the weekend, Douglas said, is that in its second weekend Argo only dropped about 15%. That means word-of-mouth has caught on big-time.