Day: March 18, 2013

Last fall Scott Foundas was graciously drop-kicked out of his Film Society of Lincoln Center/NY Film Festival programming position when Kent Jones was brought in to run the NY Film Festival. Two or three months ago he moved back to film criticism by taking the top film critic position for the Village Voice. And now Foundas has jettisoned the Voice gig to accept a new job as Variety‘s chief film critic, ranking above Justin Chang and Peter Debruge.

Formerly the top L.A. Weekly critic, Foundas left Los Angeles three (or was it four?) years ago when he took the FSLC/NYFF job, and he’ll remain there for Variety.

So who’ll land the now-vacant Village Voice film gig? Who trusts that the Voice will remain strong and vibrant enough to keep a major film critic on salary?

This is Hollywood to some people. One slippery rock and you’ll fall in…chomp! This town is a lot more about cowardice and complacency than predatory behavior. But as I wrote six years ago, there are some who believe that Life in the Big City is a “steaming cauldron full of rat’s tails and slithering serpents.” And sharks! Can you imagine waking up every day with that vision of things in your head?

I’ve been attending press junkets since the ’80s, and I can tell you that whenever you hear a journalist use the word “pressure” in a question to a director, actor or screenwriter (i.e., “how much pressure did you feel in having to accomplish this or that?”) that is a guaranteed tipoff that the person asking the question is a second-rate tool. All they have to do is say the word “pressure” and right away you’ll know.

The essence of pressure is being stuck with a tough problem that you’re not sure you can handle and especially not having enough time. Something like, oh, Sean Connery trying to figure out how to defuse that nuclear bomb inside of Fort Knox at the the end of Goldfinger with 37 seconds to go. Zen artists don’t look at creative challenges that way. There’s no bomb about to go off. A composer either knows how the tune sounds or he doesn’t. What’s the point of writing anything if you don’t have something in your head to start with? Any writer worth his or her salt knows what what needs to be said or explored or drilled into. The writing process is simply about putting it down in some kind of legible blueprint form. It changes and evolves during that process, but there’s no pressure in that.

To hell with pressure as a concept. Do people feel pressure to get out of bed in the morning? No — you get out of bed because you’re all slept out or because you’re hungry for the day to begin or whatever. Did I feel pressure when I worked as a waiter at the Spring Street Bar in the late ’70s? I guess so but who cares? Do people feel pressure to hit the gas wen the light turns green? Do hikers walking across the Golden Gate bridge for exercise…do they feel pressure not to jump off and commit suicide? I suppose you could say that there are different degrees of pressure and expectation that go with almost any activity but it’s a banal way of looking at it.

Douchebag journalist to James Cameron: “Do you ever feel the pressure of topping yourself? And do you have a release date you can share with us for Avatar 2 and 3?”

Cameron: “Pressure, no. It’s a little daunting because sequels are always tricky. You have to be surprising and stay ahead of audience anticipation. At the same time, you have to massage their feet with things that they know and love about the first film. I’ve walked that line in the past, so I’m not too worried about it. At the same time, I definitely have to deliver the goods. As for a release date that will be determined by when I get the script out. No pressure!”

Most of the reviewers and columnists who write about Blurays tend to praise noticable grain structure, especially on Blurays of classic black-and-white films. On DVD Beaver or Bluray.com it’s not uncommon to read high praise for a monochrome film that’s swarming with hundreds of billions of digital mosquitoes. These same critics also put down Universal Home Video’s tendency to modestly apply digital noise reduction (DNR) to black-and-white films, as they did with the excellent Blurays for Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho and J. Lee Thompson‘s Cape Fear. DNR’ing means these films have been slightly degrained.

I, on the other hand, am probably the only columnist who loudly complains about digital mosquito swarms and who worships good DNR’ing. I don’t just love the Psycho and Cape Fear Blurays — I think their clarity and delivery of detail is orgasmic. They make me purr with delight. And I feel the same way about the recently released Schindler’s List Bluray. I recently called it “sheer black-and-white heaven…rich, razor-sharp, super-textured.” Steven Spielberg‘s film is only 20 years old, of course, and would naturally be expected to look all that much clearer and sharper. So I didn’t presume it had been DNR’ed.

But a couple of weeks ago Universal Senior Vice-President of Technical Operations Michael Daruty told Time‘s Wook Kim that some level of DNR’ing had been applied to the Schinder’s List Bluray. That’s why I like it so much, I guess.

Daruty: “Even though Schindler’s List is mostly a black-and-white film, we are still dealing with black levels and white levels and managing a broad range of highlights and contrasts. Our goal always is to preserve the cinematographer’s vision, while at the same time minimizing undesirable artifacts.”

Kim: “Minimizing artifacts? You mean ‘cleaning’ the picture? Can you explain how that works?”

Daruty: “We have technicians sitting at monitors examining the film, frame by frame, looking for anomalies: dirt, film scratches, stains, anything that shouldn’t be on the image. When they spot something, they move a cursor over the anomaly and paintbox them out.”

Kim: “That sounds like both a labor- and time-intensive process.”

Daruty: “It is. We had anywhere from 20 to 30 people working on it. The whole process took 5 months.”

Kim: “I suppose working in 4K must have brought out details — and imperfections — that were invisible in the DVD version?”

Daruty: “There’s so much finer detail in the clothing and the hair and the skin textures. So we’re trying to bring that out and, at the same time, finding and managing an acceptable level of film grain. Every film has grain — take out too much and it stops looking like film.”

In other words, Universal removed a certain amount of grain from Schindler List. And with Spielberg’s approval, Daruty adds. And this is why the Bluray not only looks cleaner and sharper than any previous DVD version, but cleaner and sharper than the film looked on theatre screens in 1994. It’s really marvellous and should be seen by anyone who cares about this stuff.

This morning’s hoo-hah is that Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni, the guy hired to play the Devil in Mark Burnett‘s The Bible miniseries on the History Channel, strongly resembles President Obama. The association of evil is intensified by Quazani wearing an Emperor Palpatine hoodie cloak. The resemblance hasn’t been exaggerated. Quazani is a dead ringer for an older Obama (i.e., 10 or 15 years from now).

(l.) Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni as the Fallen Angel in Mark Burnett’s The Bible miniseries; (r.) President Obama

Unless The Bible casting director who hired Quazani (either Noureddine Aberdine, Amine Louadni or Carl Proctor) is a drooling idiot, he/she was fully aware of the resemblance.

Ditto Burnett, the reality-show promoter and multi-millionaire (Survivor, Celebrity Apprentice, The Voice, The Job) who produced The Bible along with his actress-wife Rona Downey. They knew exactly what the shot was. They’re rich and almost certainly not stupid. And I seriously doubt that they were entirely disinterested in stirring up reactions among those who would most likely watch The Bible, and I’m not referring to college-educated blue-state urbans. They certainly knew they’d get a lot of press…c’mon.

I have reason to suspect that anyone who even vaguely equates the power of God and teachings of Jesus to powerful engines in hot cars, as Burnett did not long ago, is probably some kind of moderate dimwit.

I also suspect that anyone who has produced a religious-themed film or mini-series who tells a reporter that “the hand of God was on this,” as Burnett recently did, is basically a hustler trying to attract the religious-minded to watch his show.

That goes double if the same Malibu-residing producer has co-authored a Bible-for-simpletons book that will help promote his religious-themed mini-series, which critics have incidentally called a flashy and synthetic exploitation of Bible tales.

Any hustler can get rich off the God-exploiting business, but some take it more seriously than most. If God touches your movie or miniseries, perhaps He/She/It is also touching the heart and soul of its producer[s]. It doesn’t necessarily follow that people who talk about the hand of God affecting this or that human enterprise are idiots, but people who talk this way do tend to be conservative traditionalists, and this tends to overlap with Republican theology.

We all know the score. You can be a liberal and still be a devout Christian, but generally speaking the God who lives in the narrative of the Holy Bible was co-opted by the religious right decades ago, and anyone who says things like “the hand of God” helped us make this movie knows what he/she is saying and who they’re getting through to. You know it. I know it. Cut the crap.

The Bible series airs each Sunday at 8 p.m. on History Channel. The series’ finale is Easter Sunday.

Update: “This is utter nonsense,” Burnett and Downey said in a statement Monday. “The actor who played Satan, Mehdi Ouzaani, is a highly acclaimed Moroccan actor. He has previously played parts in several Biblical epics — including Satanic characters long before Barack Obama was elected as our President.”

A History Channel spokesperson also said the resemblance was not intentional. “History channel has the highest respect for President Obama,” some flack wrote. “The series was produced with an international and diverse cast of respected actors. It’s unfortunate that anyone made this false connection. History’s The Bible is meant to enlighten people on its rich stories and deep history.”