Day: April 20, 2013

When I first saw Thom Andersen‘s L.A. Plays Itself at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival (or was it 2005?), I decided that one day I’d see this fascinating cultural-geographical movie-fantasia again with a hip L.A. audience. Here it is six or seven years later with Andersen’s doc playing the American Cinematheque tonight. I have to go. The big screen makes all the difference.

From five or six years ago: “Daniel Plainview (a.k.a., Matthew Wilder) has criticized documentarian Thom Andersen as an ‘inexplicably revered megasnob.’ He also raps him for having said that Point Blank “was liked only by people who hate L.A.” Wilder is alluding to a quote from Andersen’s L.A. Plays Itself, but that’s not the phrasing. The exact line is ‘people who hate L.A. love Point Blank.'”

Reactions? A fairly cool concept but no girlie action unless…well, I guess Ryan Reynolds could conceivably find himself a dead girlfriend. A little too Men in Black-y? Bridges overdoing the shitkicker accent?

Like almost all Bluray critic-columnists, DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze likes or respects almost everything he sees, and if he’s less enthused about this or that Bluray he’ll always phrase his concerns with the utmost tact and delicacy. He wants those freebies to keep arriving in his mailbox. On top of which Tooze is a notorious grain-worshipper. He actually gets off on that covered-in-digital-mosquitoes effect. The swarmier, the better.

All to say that Toooze’s rave review of the new Champion Bluray (Olive Films, 4.23) has to be taken with a grain of salt.

“What a huge improvement!,” Tooze declares. “Everything is superior about the new Olive Films 1080P transfer. It shows textured grain, there is a lot more information in the frame, contrast is significantly more layered and [the] detail naturally rises, [and] quite dramatically. My words are less-impacting than simply looking at the screen captures below. The sound is lossless mono and also improved — notable in Dimitri Tiomkin‘s powerful score. As typical with Olive, there are no extras. We still give this Blu-ray a BIG thumbs up!!”

I was reminded during the Shane aspect-ratio brouhaha that the Bluray websites are mostly if not entirely about servicing Bluray distributors and averting their eyes from controversy at all costs. (Home Theatre Forum and Bluray.com are the occasional exceptions-to-the-rule.) The Shane thing was a fairly major story, but if you had been only reading DVD Beaver, Digital Bits, High-Def Digest and DVD Talk you wouldn’t have known it was even happening. The people who run these sites are avid Movie Catholics but they have next to no balls when it’s time to man up. They’re basically in business to get along.

I’m looking for a PDF of a ’70s National Lampoon article about the dumb, vulgar and unfunny dirty jokes that kids share when they’re nine or ten or eleven. You can find this crap all over the net but the NatLamp piece re-told these jokes with just the right tone. You know the kind of material I mean. A mother standing on the front stoop and calling for her son to come home — “Johnny Fuckerfaster! Johnny Fuckerfaster!” And one I remember from when I was eight: Q: “What did the kitchen cupboard say to the toilet?” A: “I’ve seen more cans than you have.” The worse, the better.

There are few things more numbing than reports about the latest blockbuster (in this instance Oblivion) earning serious coin on its opening weekend. Oblivion is a bothersome but moderately decent time-killer with a fine performance from Tom Cruise, and (as I said earlier) is less annoying than Prometheus. But reporting that X millions of Eloi heard the sirens and were persuaded to walk into the Morlock caves and fork over whatever amounts of money…it doesn’t matter.

Okay, it matters to those who are profiting — director-writer Joseph Kosinki, Cruise, the producers, Universal Studios, exhibitors, popcorn industry. But what’s in it for me? I wasn’t in pain when I saw it, and now I’ve already begun to forget it. I won’t buy the Bluray, I can tell you that.

What matters, as always, is what happen attendance-wise during the coming week and especially next weekend, but that’s my standard Saturday mantra.

I like this 4.19 N.Y. Times Magazine riff about Cruise from Taffy Brodesser-Akner:

“How odd that our shiniest celebrity, the man whose image once flashed most easily into our heads when we thought of the words ‘movie star,’ a man who, throughout his career, has grappled with all sorts of questions of privacy and secrecy and image control and damage control, has somehow emerged at this late date as the movie world’s most unlikely symbol of old-fashioned authenticity.”