Month: May 2013

It’s been denied that Cannes Film Festival jury chairman Steven Spielberg and fellow jurors will watch the 20 competition films aboard Spielberg’s yacht, The Seven Seas, during the festival. The 282-foot yacht, which sailed from Ft. Lauderdale over a month ago so Spielberg can live on it during the festival, has “an infinity pool with a 15-foot glass wall that doubles as a movie screen so guests can watch his [films] while swimming or lounging poolside,” according to one description. If I was Spielberg I would do that without apology. I would wallow in pig luxury and tell the complainers to kiss my ass.

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I’m not presuming that Hollywood Elsewhere’s special Google Glass window screen (due to be installed sometime in either late 2014 or certainly by 2015) will be immediately popular. It’ll just be a screen to consider and look in on from time to time…that’s all. Sometimes blank, sometimes active. I’ll never transmit anything private, but imagine how cool it will be to broadcast a discussion about a film that has just debuted in Cannes with two or three other critics, right from the halls of the Palais. Or an interview as it’s happening. The images will have to be clear and steady, of course, but this and other bugs will gradually be ironed out.

“A certain naivete or innocence or an unwillingness to face reality…that’s the key to a lot of successes. Many women in the arts or in business or even in the professions require a certain degree of belief in themselves when other people see no reason to believe in them. Most great products have been made over the dead bodies of experts.” — producer David Brown (The Verdict) speaking in a YouTube clip uploaded about five years ago.

When the 310 area code was introduced to L.A.s westside over 20 years ago, the editors of Beverly Hills 213, a lightweight glamour weekly that had launched in the early ’80s, had to decide whether to keep the old name or change it to Beverly Hills 310. They stuck with 213, and in my mind that ended their relevancy. And yet by the same token Rupert Murdoch’s decision to create 21st Century Fox, an independent media and entertainment company….aahh, who cares? The main thing is that the TV and movie corporation called 20th Century Fox won’t be fiddled with.

The Great Gatsby opens today in the States. This spoiler podcast (intended for listening after you’ve seen the film) by Slate‘s Dana Stevens and Brow Beat editor David Haglund put me into the film more than the reviews. The aggregate review ratings are low, but more than a few respected critics have been friendly. Lou Lumenick‘s enthusiasm for the 3D renderings of 1920s Manhattan has me going.

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So much for my fleeting idea of a minimalistic, 2001-like sound design being used for Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity. I knew they would heap the sounds on. The idiots need their whumps and roars because their cow brains need those Michael Bay prompts in order to feel involvement. I get that. I’d do the same if I were in Cuaron’s shoes. But like I said yesterday, it’ll be cool if Cuaron remixes a realistic version for the Bluray.

The only serious standout element in JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek Into Darkness, the only thing that makes you sit up and go “whoa, wait…this is good,” is the lead villain performance by Benedict Cumberbatch. The poor guy has a somewhat oddly shaped face and weird demon-cat eyes so he’ll never play the good guy, but he’s a serious world-class actor with a kind of young Richard Burton quality and an energy field that just grabs hold and lifts all boats.

Cumberbatch is playing an impassioned, duplicitous intellectual-terrorist-with-feelings named John Harrison (there’s more, actually, but this all that I can divulge), and of course he has to end up vanquished, but he’s so volcanically vital and charismatic that I wish he wasn’t stuck having to fulfill the fate of a baddy-waddy. I wish the rule book could have been thrown out in his case.

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Various public screenings skeds for Cannes 2013 — competition, non-competition, Un Certain Regard — were made available today. (No skeds yet for Critics Week or Directors Fortnight.) An exceptionally rich and demanding festival with very little relaxation time. The 5.15 screening of The Great Gatsby (Warner Bros, 5.10) is going to seem fairly anti-climactic for me with the critical verdict already in and the coming weekend’s box-office numbers the only thing left to ponder. If TGG dies or even underperforms this weekend (will it?) the Cannes showings will feel like a wake.

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“In Frances Ha, Scene 63 is 28 seconds long. We did 42 takes in total, two hours of shooting in a bathroom with no breaks or pauses other than for direction and blocking. In 50 days of shooting, we averaged around 35 takes per scene. Most independent films shoot in 25 days with, at most, 10 takes per scene. A take in this case is the scene — the entirety of the above printed text, acted from beginning to end. Meaning that Mickey Sumner, playing Sophie, and I, playing Frances, said those words and performed those actions 42 times in a row.

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A thought just hit me about the soundtrack of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity (Warner Bros., 10.4), a floating, zero-gravity disaster drama with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock. It should ideally emphasize the same kind of minimal sound design that Stanley Kubrick used for 2001: A Space Odyssey. No crashes, no impact sounds…nothing. It almost certainly won’t as audiences have been trained since Star Wars to expect the opposite. But it would be great if an alternate all-but-silent version could be offered on the Bluray.

At the very least Steven Price‘s soundtrack would do well to show restraint.

“Don’t let go” is an okay copy line. It’s fitting. (I’m saying this having read the script.) It recalls an old Roy Hamilton tune from the ’50s, but without the slightest echo or linkage.

The Saul Bass online tribute movement continues unabated with Google getting into the act. They posted this yesterday to acknowledge Bass’s 93rd birthday.