Month: May 2013

Last night’s screening of William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer (’77) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was fine. A packed house filled with cool people. (I sat right next to Glenn Kenny!) No Tangerine Dream overture on the print — a huge disappointment — but maybe it’ll turn up on the Bluray. Variety critic Scott Foundas handled the q & a with Friedkin following the screening. Clip #1 is about the genesis of the project, and clip #2 is about Friedkin’s discussions with Steve McQueen about playing what became the Roy Scheider part.

I’ve seen Sorcerer (a terrible title in terms of what the 1977 Joe Popcorn crowd was led to expect) six or seven times, but until last night I’d never wondered about the gas. The two trucks make a 200-mile journey through the jungle, and driving entirely in first and second gear. Surely they couldn’t make the trip on a single tank each, and yet I didn’t notice any extra cans of gas strapped to the flatbeds. And how long did the journey take? Two days? A single day? Three? The film gives you no real clue about the clock.

And Scheider getting iced at the very end seems wrong. The trip was hell but he made it through and had earned redemption by delivering the nitroglycerin. I wanted hsi character to taste the satisfaction of a job well done, and perhaps a little serenity. Scheider apparently wasn;t happy with how he came off. From the Wiki page: “Scheider was angry that in the final cut Friedkin removed a subplot that showed his character in a more sympathetic light; it involved him befriending a small boy from the village. For that reason, Scheider consistently refused to comment on the film.”

In about 90 minutes I’ll be seeing what I understand will be a mint-condition print of William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer (’77). I heard the Tangerine Dream overture once and only once, when I saw this near-great remake of The Wages of Fear at the Post Cinema in Westport, Connecticut. If it’s not attached to tonight’s print there will be trouble — that’s all I have to say.

I’m presuming this Wolf of Wall Street teaser poster isn’t legit, but if it is I have a problem with the slogan “The Rise and Fall of a White-Collar Gangster.” Is “bankster” not a commonly used term these days? It should be “The Rise and Fall of a Bankster” or, better yet, “The Rise and Fall of a Gangsta Banksta.” Why run a slogan that sounds like like it was written by one of Charlie Rose‘s staff writers?

Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini‘s The Girl Most Likely (Lionsgate/Roadside, 7.19) screened at the Toronto Film Festival under the title Imogene. Michelle Morgan‘s screenplay is about a playwright (Kristen Wiig) who stages a suicide in an attempt to win back her ex, only to wind up in the custody of her gambling-addict mother (Annette Bening). Matt Dillon, Christopher Fitzgerald and Darren Criss co-star.

The just-released one-sheet for Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac. Yeah, I get it.

“Would you still be attracted to me now if we happened to meet for the first time…today, as I am now? Would you come over and talk to me and try to pick me up if you saw me on a train?” Answer: Damn straight, no hesitation, in a New York minute. Is that an honest answer? Perhaps not, but any wife who asks her husband of 10 or 15 years that question doesn’t want candor. She wants to hear that the current is crackling and the batteries are still charged. She doesn’t want to feel like a leftover. Who does?

That said, I think it’s fair to say that guys will rarely toss ambush questions at their wives or longtime girlfriends. When women ask them they’re basically saying “okay, here’s your chance — will you give me the answer I want to hear or not?” Guys never do this. Guys never say “I want to believe in a fantasy — will you tell me that this fantasy is real? Because if you don’t, I’m going to be very disappointed in you.”

Tom Shone has posted a complaining but moderately favorable review of Baz Luhrmann‘s The Great Gatsby, which had its big U.S. premiere last night at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. The operative terms are “handsome,” hectic” and “very impressive yet slightly boring at the same time.” Leonardo DiCaprio‘s rendering of Jay Gatsby is “the most rock-solid presence in the film,” Shone feels. He gives it a B-minus at the end of the review, but it reads more like a C-plus to me.

The funniest…okay, the only funny paragraph addresses the narration by Tobey Maguire‘s Nick Carraway character: “”No act of Dionysian revelry is quite as laborious as the one narrated in voiceover by Tobey Maguire,” Shone states. “He’s all over this movie, regrettably. Luhrmann has clearly tried his utmost to rev up Maguire’s notoriously lethargic delivery, he still he manages the excitement levels of a small marsupial, recently awoken from hibernation by the roaring twenties and now anxious to get back to sleep.”

What’s the point of my quoting any further? Just read the piece.

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.