Day: March 14, 2013

The Boston Phoenix, the alternative weekly that began publishing in 1965 and which helped launch the careers of several top-notch film critics including Owen Glieberman, David Denby, David Edelstein, Paul Attanasio, Janet Maslin, David Chute and Stephen Schiff, has been shut down for good. Phoenix publisher Stephen M. Mindich cited (what else?) ad revenue decline.

Joan Micklin Silver‘s Between The Lines (’77) was set in Boston and about a Phoenix-like staff (played by John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff Goldblum, Bruno Kirby, Michael J. Pollard, Gwen Welles, Jill Eikenberry, Marilu Henner) dealing with a big-business takeover. The script was mostly penned by Fred Barron, who had written for The Phoenix and The Real Paper. Silver reportedly once worked for The Village Voice. There was also a short-lived TV sitcom, also titled Between the Lines.

I learned this afternoon that even though Paramount technicians spent a lot of time and money restoring George Stevens‘ Shane (’53) and spiffing it up for Bluray and high-def viewings, they’ve sold it to Warner Bros. as part of that overall catalogue deal that was announced last October. Does that mean Warner Home Video will release a Shane Bluray this year to commemorate the film’s 60th anniversary? I just asked a WHV spokesperson and her answer was to say as little as possible.

So I asked if she could confirm that the restored high-def digital Shane…can she at least confirm that this version is what will be shown next month at the TCM Classic Film Festival? Nope, she said. Can’t confirm or deny.

As I noted yesterday, dealing with home video operations is like dealing with the Soviet Union in the ’70s or North Korea today. They live in their own realm, and always by stealth and secrecy.

She didn’t explain why I shouldn’t necessarily get my hopes up about seeing a 60th anniversary Shane Bluray this year. It might conceivably happen, she implied, and then again it might not. Remember that Warner Home Video ignored Cabaret‘s 40th anniversary by waiting until 2013 to release the Bluray…even though it played at the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival. And Ben-Hur‘s 50th anniversary was celebrated 52 years after its release when the WHV Bluray was released in 2011. The bottom line is that WHV isn’t much for celebrating anniversaries. They do what they want to do when they want to do it.

The 3D remastering of the 1939 The Wizard of Oz is finished, I’m told. It would have made marketing sense to release it concurrent with the opening of the 3D Oz The Great and Powerful a couple of weeks ago but nope. WHV blew that opportunity also. They’ll be releasing the 3D Oz next fall, according to this report.

A blunt view would be that the Warner Home Video guys are either timid of spirit or asleep at the wheel…or maybe both. The Bluray business is slowly losing steam, I realize, but still….

I used to think the gay guy who lives upstairs was a mental case because he would occasionally play gay disco house music (female soul singers, synthetic Euro pop) on his bedroom speakers at 7:30 am. It’s bad enough that anyone would listen to that shit at all but loudly enough to bother your neighbors, and while they’re having morning coffee? But lately he’s been loudly giggling at something at the exact same hour…”Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!” On the phone with a friend but every damn morning at 7:15 am or 7:30 am. It’s one thing if you’re having a laugh once in a while, but every morning at the exact same time? Hell is other people.

Here’s a nice little 9-day-old piece about director Michel Gondry visiting a video store in Paris (the sign says “Video Club” but what’s the address?) and riffing about human contact and some of his favorite films. One is Wim Wenders‘ The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick; another is Kevin Smith‘s Clerks.

Michel Gondry: A Cinephile’s Labyrinth on Nowness.com.

When I was living in Paris during the summer of ’03 I used to visit a store located southeast of Les Invalides and northwest of Montparnasse that specialized in English-language DVDs and was painted red on the outside. Gondry mentions a place called Videotheque (or is he saying Mediatheque?) but this is the Paris film world for you — less downloady and somewhat more personalized and cinema-obsessive than the way things are in the States.

The color in this video has an odd kind of bleachy pink hue. Which is okay, I suppose, but it’s a tiny bit off-putting. What’s the filmmaker trying to say, that the life of a Parisian film obsessive is bleachy and pink and fucked up?

I need to state clearly that Joe Popcorn and Joe Download are more or less the same person. Okay, they’re somewhat different but Joe Popcorn has been slowly morphing into Joe Download over the last four or five years because it’s easier and cheaper to stay home. They just want to sit back and be entertained by movies written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, or better yet sit at home and watch these movies on their 60″ LED or LCD screens. (They aren’t hip enough to buy a plasma.) And they don’t care if it’s download or DVD quality or whatever. Bluray means nothing to them.

The Two Joes just want to sit there and watch and eat pizza and laugh and text their friends during the film and…you know, relax and have a good time and scratch their balls.

I didn’t have a chance yesterday to watch Ed Schultz‘s MSNBC interview with Scott Prouty, the catering guy who secretly taped Mitt Romney‘s “47 percent” comment at a Florida fundraiser last May.

There have been complaints that the default Disqus comment settings offer the “best” comments first and so they’re posted out of natural sequence. The apparent solve is to hit the discussion tab and click on “newest” (as opposed to “best” or “oldest”). I’m not happy with the out-of-sequence placement at all so maybe this’ll help.

I could almost see subscribing to this service for a year. I could drill into coming trends, stories, themes…naaah. I could be cynical and say that there are no new stories and themes in mainstream commercial cinema. When Matt Damon told an Entertainment Weekly writer the other day that movies as we know them will be dead in 25 or 30 years…something went cold in my heart and I haven’t yet recovered.

Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci.

One of the reasons for the coming demise, I believe, is that way, way too many big-studio scripts have been written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who are probably the most successful super-hacks around or are certainly among the most successful in this realm. A 2011 Forbes magazine profile called them “Hollywood’s secret weapons” and “the quiet force behind $3 billion in box office.”

But successfully churning out one highly efficient, mind-numbing screenplay after another (which is not easy…seriously, not everyone can do it), this malignant duo has probably ushered more despair into the hearts of not only rival screenwriters but untold millions of moviegoers…more than you or I could possibly calculate. It’s not that Kurtzman and Orci are bad guys in and of themselves, but they serve soul-less corporate mainstream packagers who pander solely and entirely to Joe Popcorn and Joe Download, and are therefore incurring mountains of ill will and bad karma.

Over the last half-dozen or so years these guys have written or co-written The Island, The Legend of Zorro, Mission: Impossible III, Transformers, Star Trek, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Cowboys & Aliens, People Like Us (an uncharacteristic stab at modest, human-scale drama that didn’t work), Star Trek Into Darkness, All You Need is Kill, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and…wait, a Sleepy Hollow TV project?

When these guys hit their 50s they’re going to start looking in the bathroom mirror as they’re shaving and go, “My God…what have I done? I mean, I live well in a beautiful house and I’m paying for my children’s ivy league educations but my God!!”