Month: April 2013

Substitute “drive” for “live” and Ron Howard‘s Rush (Universal, 9.20) is saying you always need to go for the gusto even if it’s risky or dangerous. You have to accept that death is just around the corner. Presumably the film is a more varied smorgasbord but the trailer seems almost queer for death and wipe-outs as Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brough pursue their adrenalin highs.

Peter Morgan‘s script is about the 1976 Formula One season and the rivalry between drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda. “After a catastrophic crash[3] at the 1976 German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring that could have killed him, Formula One driver Niki Lauda (Bruhl) returns to face his rival James Hunt (Hemsworth) in their pursuit of the 1976 World Championship at Fuji in Japan,” the synopsis says.

The word “rush” obviously sells itself but it lacks dynamic snap with Premium Rush out last year and that narco drama Rush from 20-odd years ago.

I’m presuming that sex with race-track groupies or girlfriends is probably intense and gasping and world-class. Every race-car film starting with Grand Prix and Le Mans has more or less told us that.

I’ve mentioned the “cavalcade of opening doors” metaphor sequence in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Spellbound before, but I’ve never found a clip until now. It’s not embarassing by today’s standards — it’s embarassing by the standards of 50 years ago. But there’s something about the on-the-nose emotionality of this almost insanely overwrought bit (which begins around 2:00 and starts the payoff around 2:45) that’s curiously “right.”

I saw Phillip Noyce‘s Newsfront at the 1978 New York Film Festival. I loved it, and somehow I got my hands on a special Newsfront pin made by the distributor. I lost it a couple of years later (naturally) but last night I was given an exact copy by a good friend. It’s now on the lapel of my best suit jacket.

I used to wear this pin everywhere. I was always given special treatment as people assumed I was some news syndicate hotshot. Hosts and waiters where always obliging when I visited a nice restaurant, which rarely happened as I was dirt poor and living hand-to-mouth back then. Six months before the 1978 NYFF I’d moved into my very first Manhattan apartment, a reasonably-priced, cockroach-infested dump at 138 Sullivan Street — bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. On the fourth or fifth floor.

Another example of a relatively mediocre or underwhelming film that nonetheless looked really exciting as a one-sheet. Here’s the dope on the real guy. Here’s the trailer. Nobody remembers. Dust bin.

This TV ad is something like 53 years old. I’d never seen it before this morning. I found it among several commercials and print ads in a 4.7 Buzzfeed article called “The Very Best Ads From the Mad Men Era.” Here’s a little background.

The legendary documentarian Les Blank has passed away. I’m not much of an authority as I’ve only seen three or four of his films, and because I’m partial to his early to late ’80s period (i.e., Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers, Burden of Dreams, In Heaven There Is No Beer?, Huey Lewis And The News: Be-Fore!, Ry Cooder And The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces). But I’m not the only one who feels that Burden of Dreams is his masterpiece.

From a Werner Herzog riff in Burden of Dreams: “Nature is much stronger than we are. [It’s been said] that nature is full of erotic elements. I don’t see so much erotic. I see it full of obscenities. Nature is vile and base. I see fornicaton and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there is a lot of misery. The trees here are in misery. I think the birds are in misery. They just screech in pain.”

Here’s the last thing I wrote about Blank, which posted in August 2010:

“A little more than six years ago filmmaker Les Blank, best known for his legendary Burden of Dreams (1982), a doc about the making of Werner Herzog‘s Fitzcarraldo, took part in a 2004 Santa Barbara Film Festival panel discussion about documentary filmmaking. I don’t remember what Blank said (a video of the discussion sits below), but I do recall his decision to lay out DVDs of his films on a blanket outside the theatre and offer them for sale.

“The fact that Burden of Dreams is now free on Hulu indicates that it’s not exactly a hot-selling Criterion Collection title. It is nonetheless one of the most stirring making-of-a movie docs ever made. It is arguably equal to Fitzcarraldo itself, as both films deal with a white man’s manic obsession and borderline lunacy in a remote South American jungle, and how it impacts a native culture. Klaus Kinski‘s Fitzcarraldo = Werner Herzog = Fitzcarraldo and back again.

“In my book BOD is in the same realm as George Hickenlooper‘s Hearts of Darkness, Laurent Bouzereau‘s two-hour-long ‘making of Jaws‘ doc (i.e., originally included on a Jaws special edition laser disc in the ’90s, re-appeared on a 30th anniversary Jaws DVD that came out in ’05) and Charles Lauzarika‘s Tricks of the Trade, an innovative 71-minute doc about the making of Ridley Scott‘s Matchstick Men.

In a 4.7 N.Y. Times interview with Dave Itzkof, Louis C.K. is asked to compare his surging career (his “Oh, My God” HBO special, the digital-download success of “Live at the Beacon Theatre,” a role in David O. Russell‘s ABSCAM film) with the opportunities and accomplishments of lesser-known performers. And he says something about the difficulty of making it that hits home.

Itzkoff: “Does it matter that what you’ve achieved with your online special and your tour…[that this] can’t be replicated by other performers who don’t have the visibility or fan base that you do?

Louis C.K.: “Why do you think those people don’t have the same resources that I have, the same visibility or relationship? What’s different between me and them?”

Itzkoff: “You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.”

Louis C.K.: “So why do I have the platform and the recognition?”

Itzkoff: “At this point you’ve put in the time.”

Louis C.K.: “There you go. There’s no way around that. There’s people that say ‘it’s not fair, you have all that stuff.’ I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by ‘new at it’ I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction.”

I’ve been doing an online column for almost 15 years now (the Mr. Showbiz column started in ’98), and the online adventure has been a step-by-step, brick-by-brick process. It only really started to get good and semi-fulfilling about seven or eight years ago. But the print days of the ’80s and ’90s were sometimes horrible. I remember being so miserable around ’94 or ’95 that I used to dream about ways of moving to Australia or Asia and never coming back and maybe even changing my name. I wanted to move to Europe and never return in ’03. (I wound up moving to Paris for the entire summer that year.)

I wouldn’t say that making it has taken “my whole life,” as Louis declares, but it was anything but easy. In the ’80s and ’90s it sometimes felt like I was hauling Fitzcarraldo’s boat over the muddy mountain.

In Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation, a professional-class married couple (Leila Hatami, Peyman Moaadi) with a bright and perceptive teenage daughter (Sarina Farhadi) was shown going through a breakup, which was largely about whether or not to live in a repressive Iran. In Farhadi’s The Past, a Parisian couple (Berenice Bejo, Ali Mosaffa) with two kids (including Pauline Burlet‘s teenaged daughter) is divorcing over the husband’s decision to return to Iran.

Except when Mosaffa returns to Paris to sign divorce papers, he finds Bejo and the kids living with a younger French-Middle Eastern guy (A Prophet‘s Tahar Rahim). Duhn-duhhhn! Duhn-duhn-duhn-duhhhn!

Everyone understands, of course, that Marc Forster‘s film having had its third act re-written and re-shot matters not to 97% of the audience out there. So it’s not the calamity-waiting-to-happen that some think it is. Most of of the paying public hasn’t read about it and doesn’t want to know. They’re committed to being as ignorant and/or ineducable (in a pre-release sense) as they feel like being, and that’s how the big studios like it. I suppose in my own way I’m guilty of the same. But not really.

What do I really know? Maybe the third act really works now.

I’ve long felt that Terence Fisher‘s Horror of Dracula (’58) is scarier, grabbier and definitely sexier than Tod Browning‘s Dracula (’31). And that Christopher Lee‘s bloodsucking count is far spookier than Bela Lugosi‘s. The original British title was just plain Dracula — it was re=titled Horror of Dracula for the American release. The U.K. Bluray, in any event, is at the top of my list.

Surely some regulars have seen Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color by now. If you’re among them please share impressions. Here’s yesterday’s re-posting of my Sundance reaction. And here’s Carruth’s explanation of what the film is basically about, as posted by Filmmaker magazine’s Scott Macaulay:

Upstream Color costar Amy Seimetz.

“What I wanted to do was have a story where I break some people apart and make them have to figure it out all over again — what it is that they are, how they see themselves and how they behave. They’re going to wake up — whatever ‘wake up’ means — in a ruin of some kind, and they’re going to have to understand or explain to themselves what happened to them. That was sort of the kernel of it.

“I wanted to explore the concept of trying to recognize that you’re in a narrative, one that you may have made up yourself, or one that was [impressed] on you from an outside force. Thematically, this is everything in the film for me.

“And then you have a potential romance in the midst of it all, and I found that incredibly compelling. I think I had The Hustler on repeat last year for months. That’s where it comes from, the romantic possibility that exists when everything has been stripped away. I don’t know a better premise for a love story that that.

“And then, I needed this mythical cycle to be happening around them. They’re not aware of it, because if they are, then that changes everything. Then they know that their story is affected by it. I wanted these mythical elements to be there, but that [the two central characters] not touch them. Once I knew that, then it’s like you get to play with these things.

“You’ve got a Thief, you’ve got a Sampler and you’ve got the Orchid Mother and Daughter as the three points of this continuing cycle’s triangle. The Thief is clearly a pretty negative force, for the most part. The Orchid Mother and Daughter don’t know what they’re doing. They’re just cogs in the machine. They’re completely benign. And then, you’ve got The Sampler, who is a complete unknown hanging in the middle, this character we can read into. Is he just observing, or is he gaining something from his observance? Is he saving people from this worm that is constricting and controlling them? Or, is he just using this device to grow his own fishbowl full of emotional experiences?

“I’m trying here not to talk about God; it’s like, that is what we’re talking about. There is an offscreen force that we attribute things to that we can’t explain. Anyways, that’s way too many words, but that’s where that story came from.”

Sometimes writing this column is a huge blast, and sometimes it’s drudgery. Sometimes the back-and-forth gets really funny or passionate and sometimes angry, but it’s always an adventure. I always try to cut the fat out and get down to the nub of things as a rule. I can be mouthy and egoistic at times, but you know what I never do, ever? I never go after another columnist or critic or reporter and say, “God, that person is a waste of skin” or “Jesus, what a slimy disreputable jerkwad” or words to that effect.

Unless they go after me first, of course. Then all bets are off. But I never take the first shot because I don’t believe in hating on fellow journos unless, you know, they’re lying or being slanderous or are dealing heroin or molesting minors.

But I get hated on all the time. Every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Haters on comment threads are part of the rough and tumble — you have to roll with that — but what kind of a journalist/columnist/critic likes to shove a sword between the ribs of somebody who works on the same side of the fence? Life is hard enough, guys. I mean, seriously…how do you grow your uglies into a permanent tumor? I read one of their comments and I ask myself, “Oh, so I’m really bad, huh? Okay. So am I supposed to…what, stick my head in an oven? Throw myself on the steps of the nearest church and beg for forgiveness?” And then you have to stifle an urge to write them back and say something even snarlier.

Yesterday I posted a little note called “Little Marty Nudge” in which I asked the great and powerful Martin Scorsese to try and give a little thought to the Shane aspect-ratio scandal, which I wrote him about a week ago. It was just a thought so I posted it…big deal. And in response Newark Star Ledger critic Stephen Whitty tweeted the following: “Is there anything more sadly self-aggrandizing than ‘An Open Letter To’ someone who’d never take your call?”

The fuck? I’ve never been dumb enough to call Scorsese for that reason, but after I’ve received no response to a note I wrote a week earlier I don’t see what harm a little nudge-note amounts to. The shape of a Bluray-ed Shane is an important issue that I’m sure Scorsese has a strong conviction about so what’s the problem? Is Scorsese too important to be addressed in this manner? Does he poop Tiffany cufflinks? Is he given to secrecy and subterfuge and would therefore be grossly offended by an open letter?

I can tell you that if Whitty ever writes something that I don’t agree with, I will never tweet that he has disgusted or appalled me. Not my style.

An hour or two earlier JHoffman6 tweeted that “I can’t deny that I’m a little impressed Woody Allen weighed in on wellshwood’s windmill tilting.” In response to which Kris Tapley tweeted, “Yeah, but if he knew what we know…” What kind of a shitheel do you have to be to throw little dingleberries like that? “Yeah, we know better about what a problematic ayehole wellshwood is,” blah blah. Allow me to respond by saying that Tapley is a cranky, judgmental sourpuss who’s always looking to piss on something I’ve written or throw some kind of “nyah-nyah” or whatever. That is the kind of sour and diseased attitude I never fire at other journalists…unless provoked.

All I know is that there are some journalists who seem to live in order to condemn others in their field. It gets them off on some level. These are people who have Alien acid blood running in their veins. And I really get sick of this from time to time.