Day: May 1, 2013

Baz Luhrman‘s The Great Gatsby will have its big New York premiere tonight at Alice Tully Hall. I would expect that somebody will tweet something. What I’d like is some kind of fully considered 250-word reaction. If anyone hears anything or knows someone with a view of some kind, please pass along. It’s time to get into this puppy, especially with Warner Bros. telling me I can’t attend tomorrow morning’s press screening which, given my flight to Germany on Friday night, keeps me from seeing it until 5.15 in Cannes.

A still from the 1974 Great Gatsby with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.

From Richard Brody‘s 4.30 New Yorker piece, “Why ‘The Great Gatsby’ Endures’:

“’The Great Gatsby’ is, above all, a novel of conspicuous consumption — not even of appetite but of the ineluctable connection between wealth and spectacle. The central story of that storied age is slender, sleek, and graceful, neither depicting effort nor bearing its marks.

“Long before the novel found its enduring place in American letters, it was already a movie, one made by a character of real-life myth of whom Fitzgerald wrote in one of his final stories. Citizen Kane is richer in the spirit of true expansiveness and dubious grandeur, of exorbitant pomp, mad desire, and incurable need than any direct adaptation of the book has been; it wouldn’t have taken more than a few tweaks to turn the young Orson Welles, playing the young Charles Foster Kane, into the cinema’s ultimate and definitive Gatsby.

“I’m impatient to see Leonardo DiCaprio’s version; his own deflective opacity was at its most effective in another elusive role, that of Frank Abagnale, Jr., in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can. And Pammy Buchanan would be nearly ninety-three. Perhaps Baz Luhrmann persuaded Olivia de Havilland or Joan Fontaine to make a return in an epilogue that would bring the novel briefly into the present day. I’ll report back.”

Brody is being a little too gracious about DiCaprio, who generally doesn’t feel right in period pieces because of that distinctive twangy voice of his. (His J. Edgar voice was beyond strange.) There’s something about the sound of it that makes him sound like a hick actor trying to win a part at an audition. It argues strenuously with old-world class and cultivation.

There’s something almost shattering about this then & now two-shot, which I found on Hollywood.com. It’s not that little Carrie Henn, who played Newt in Aliens, decided to become a teacher. That part’s fine. But she’s turned into someone I might run into at a mall in Cape May, New Jersey. If I had imagined an adult Newt I would have thought of someone sleek and cool and gazelle-like with longish hair…living in Portland and wearing stylish duds. But this!

From Hollywood.com: “Henn was recruited for the now-famous role of Newt by being one of the only children auditioning not accustomed to smiling during line reading. But she certainly smiled after seeing Aliens success, which won her a Saturn Award. But Newt would prove to be Henn’s only role — the former actress decided to stop acting when her father was transferred to an Air Force base outside of L.A. Now, Henn works as a teacher.”

I beg to differ with Marshall Fine‘s “20-minute rule,” which he explained a week ago in a piece inspired by Ramin Bahrani‘s At Any Price. He basically said that if a film hasn’t engaged you within the first 20 minutes, it’s a dead movie that you might as well walk out of if you don’t have to review it. Wrong. It doesn’t take 20 minutes to figure this out — it takes ten. I can actually tell in five but I usually wait ten to be extra-thorough.

It’s the same thing with scripts. Ask anyone who’s ever read for an agency or a studio, and they’ll tell you they always know within ten pages if the script works or not. The agony of script-reading is that you have to read every awful page and then write about the whole magical even if it clearly stinks early on. The agony of being a reviewer-critic is the same. You know it’s not working (or certainly not working all that well) and you have to watch it to the end because its not fair or professional to review a film based on a fragment.

Unless you’re writing a Hollywood Elsewhere-type column in which you can do or say anything you want as long as you honestly cop to where you’re coming from and why. I’ve walked out of many, manu films at the 10- or 20-minute mark, but I’ve never said of something that I know isn’t very good and have therefore bailed on, “I’ve watched this entire film and this is what I think.” I say, “I tried but I couldn’t take it…I just couldn’t stand it.”

“If nothing’s happening after 20 minutes, sorry, I’m out,” Fine wrote. “At this particular point in our cinematic history, there simply isn’t sufficient time to watch all the movies that come my way – so I’ll take an afternoon, say, and sit down with a stack of the screeners that have piled up. They’ve got 20 minutes to grab me. If they do, I’ll either stick with them or come back to them later on and move to the next one.

“At a film festival, it’s the same thing: so many movies, so little time. So if it’s not doing it for me in 20 minutes, I’m on to the next one.”

There’s no director who’s sharper or more on-top-of-it than Steven Soderbergh, but I hate it when colleagues describe him as “so brilliant” and “so talented” in these effing featurettes. Okay, I don’t “hate” it but my my mind glazes over and my inner voice says to the praising colleague, “Did it occur to you during taping that you’re saying roughly the exact same thing about Soderbergh that every colleague has said about every director or producer in every behind-the-scens featurette ever made?”

Jerry Lewis has long been regarded as a difficult man, but listen to him at this recent Tribeca Film Festival appearance. He’s 87 and yet he seems more engaged and feisty and crackling than the vast majority of his contemporaries. Last week I was listening to 91 year-old producer Walter Mirisch talk at the TCM Classic Film Festival, and he was also sharp as a tack. There’s something about old show-business buzzards. The scrappy survival instincts that helped them make it when young are the same qualities that keep them sharp in their doddering years.

I’ve visited my mom’s assisted living facility many times and spoken to more than a few of the residents, and it hasn’t been altogether pleasant. If your brain isn’t at least 75% alert and engaged then what’s the point? You don’t have to be a prick to be intellectually focused and alert (the elegant Norman Lloyd is in his late 90s and a beautiful man to speak with) but if given a choice between a state of advanced vegetation and being a Jerry Lewis type of old guy, I’d definitely go with the latter. I suspect that Lewis biographer Shawn Levy will go “hmmm” when he reads this.

Here’s Lewis trashing Sandra Bernhard.

I hate whoever those San Francisco Film Festival dicks were who said no video or audio recording of Steven Soderbergh‘s “State of Cinema” speech last Saturday EXCEPT FOR US and then took…what, two or three days to put it on Vimeo? I hate entitled people who sit back and sip their soy lattes and can’t be bothered to hustle, and who basically don’t get the pace of things today. “It’s okay, we’ll get around to it. We have a conference call at 11 and then a business lunch but hang tight…”

Soderbergh: “In 2003, 455 films were released, 275 of those were independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released, so you’re not imagining things — there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. 549 of those were independent, 128 were studio films. So, a 100% increase in independent films, and a 28% drop in studio films, and yet ten years ago [the] studio market share 69%, [and] last year [it was] 76%. You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie.”