Month: June 2013

I thought this was going to be a riff about Morgan Freeman falling asleep during that Now You See Me junket interview. Nope…good-natured gluttony! Best College Humor video I’ve seen in ages. Originally posted on 5.6, it took me six weeks to catch up with it. Because, frankly, I tend to bypass this site. Recalculate. I loathed Now You See Me, by the way. Director Louis Letterier‘s decision to CG up the magic acts to such an absurd degree that you can’t possibly believe there’s any sleight-of-hand going on is the main problem. 85% to 90% of the time CG is a cancer. NYSM is totally dismissable garbage. Letterier is a dead man ’round these parts.

I can’t believe that the 1995 Sundance Film Festival happened over 18 years ago, but it did. Look at how many selections are considered indie classics (or at least semi-classics) today — Before Sunrise, The Usual Suspects, The Basketball Diaries, Shallow Grave, Safe, The Doom Generation, Brothers McMullen, Heavy, Little Odessa. This was when Sundance was still modest and manageable and not the hypefest it later became. Bryan Singer was hot as a pistol after that first Suspects screening — you couldn’t talk to him for more than 15 seconds before someone pushed their way in. Peter Chelsom‘s Funny Bones wasn’t a classic, but seeing it led to an opportunity to interview Jerry Lewis at the Stein Erickson. Two weeks later I withdrew from Entertainment Weekly reporting for a while so I could compose a whopper-sized Los Angeles article called “Right Face,” about the struggles of conservative-minded writers and actors in the film industry.

I was a decent drummer but no more than that. Okay, I was mediocre. I wanted to be Keith Moon or Charlie Watts but my gift lay elsewhere. Anyone who wants to be in a band when they’re in their early 20s can be in a band — they can give it a go and play local gigs and meet hot girls and have a good time, and if they’re as good as I was they’ll come to their senses and try something else after a year or less. Like movies or any art form, really good drummers constitute 5% to 10% of those who give it a shot. I was, however, a brilliant thigh drummer (and my old friends will back me up on this). My flat hand against the thigh was the snare, my cupped hands were the tom-toms, and the quarters and dimes in my pockets delivered the high-hat sound.

Some months ago producer and former 20th Century Fox honcho Peter Chernin spoke to producer Lynda Obst for her book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales of The New Abnormal in the Movie Business, and here’s how he described things: “[The] studios are frozen…terrified, not necessarily inappropriately, to do anything because they don’t know what the numbers look like.”

What they don’t know, more specifically, is “how to run a P & L” — a profit-and-loss statement for their board members — “because [they] don’t know what the DVD number is.’ The DVD number used to be half of the entire P & L!” Wait…today’s home video “numbers” are mainly about VOD and streaming before DVD/Bluray, right? Bluray is niche and DVD is strictly bargain-basement. I realize that the collapse of the DVD market four or five years ago cut heavily into profits and that VOD and streaming sales are delivering…what, a third of what the DVD market was at its height? But studio guys can’t at least project what VOD and streaming revenues will be?

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A couple of days ago the Sheffield Doc/Fest screened th World Premiere of Mark Levinson‘s Particle Fever, which is basically about (I think) six scientists who managed to precisely identify and define the Higgs Boson or “God particle” — a subatomic element that informs the size and shape and contour of all physical matter, the missing cornerstone of particle physics. Its existence was proven with “the most expensive science experiment in history” in which the Large Hadron Collider was launched.

When HB was first eyeballed last July I wrote that “this is almost like the discovery of the black monolith on the moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And yet it’s been there all along. The supreme scientific equation…proven.” But listen to Murch talk about the topic — he puts you to sleep! If I didn’t know what this doc is about I would avoid it like the plague after watching this Murch interview. I intend to see it, of course.

Where’s the God/mystical stuff? The mention of intelligent design? The Kubrick angle? My eyelids are drooping, Walter…you’re killing me.

“The ‘intelligent design’ crowd is celebrating this all across America, you bet. I despise what Christianity has become in this country, but I happen to believe in intelligent design also, in a sense. There is obviously a unified flow and an absolute cosmic commonality in all living things and all aspects of the architecture. The difference is that I don’t attach a Bible-belt morality to this overwhelming fact. To me God is impartial, celestial, biological, mathematical, amoral, unemotional, miraculous and breathtaking.

Most of the people you call your “friends” are not going to tell you what you need to hear. Most of them would rather support and good-vibe you, which makes them fair-weather friends by my yardstick. “Friends” are people you like and trust as far as it goes, and with whom you share stuff on the phone and whom you invite to dinners or parties or screenings…or vice versa. But if you’ve begun to look like a beefy, middle-aged lesbian due to compulsive carb indulgence and nightly drinking and not working out enough, your friends will never say “you’ve begun to look like a beefy, middle-aged lesbian — you need to change your program.”

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Two days left in Prague after today (i.e., Saturday), two and a half more in Paris and then back to New York City on Thursday. I’m not doing any tourist shit — strictly working, hiking around, eating grapes, tangerines and apples. Tonight I’m finally seeing Now You See Me, which opened yesterday or the day before.

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Mike Figgis‘s Internal Affairs (’90) has been Bluray-ed, but won’t be out on disc until 10.8. It’s apparently viewable right now via Amazon Prime but all streaming downloads (AP, Netflix, HBO Go) are blocked in Europe. This is precisely the kind of cop drama — character-driven, psychologically layered, smartly written — that the big studios have more or less abandoned and the indies have trouble doing with any pizazz or flair. It’s hard to believe it came out 23 years ago. Richard Gere‘s performance as the psychopathic Dennis Peck is certainly one of his career peaks and Andy Garcia‘s self-righteous, internal-affairs prig is arguably his all-time best. (Garcia is 57 today — he was about 33 when the Figgis film was shot.)

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Lynn Shelton‘s Touchy Feely “is utterly devoid of narrative energy,” I wrote during last January’s Sundance Film Festival. “I started to develop an idea that it’s meant to be a piece of sly self-criticism and as such a parody of a Lynn Shelton film. (And I’m saying this as a big fan of Humpday and one who was mildly okay with Your Sister’s Sister.) I felt narcotized and worn down by Touchy Feely — it slowly vacuumed out my life force. It’s about what happens when somewhat ordinary Seattle types (i.e., people who resemble Shelton or her friends) are either suddenly gifted with exceptional powers or talents or suddenly left without them. It tries to get by on a faintly quirky Seattle sensibility, and I just sat there and slowly counted the minutes and napped for five-minute stretches.”

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Following a debut at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, Lake Bell‘s In A World will play the Los Angeles Film Festival on Saturday, 5.15 — tonight. I haven’t seen it, but the trailer conveys the difference between mainstream movie-star faces and personalities and the faces and personalities that tend to populate indie-world. Bell and her costars (Demetri Martin, Fred Melamed, Michaela Watkins, Ken Marino, Rob Corddry) are intriguing and “attractive” as far as it goes, but they’re more average-looking than movie stars. Their lights don’t burn as brightly. Their faces, no offense, are metaphors for accepting and living within limits. They’re smart but somehow less vivid and engaging than their mainstream cousins.

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On 8.26.12 I ran a piece about The Newsroom‘s Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) calling the Tea Party “the American Taliban” — an assertion that is 110% correct. But let’s remember also that British documentarian Adam Curtis pretty much owns this analogy, having presented a version of it in his 2004 documentary The Power of Nightmares.

The Tea Party and the Taliban share the following traits and/or beliefs: (a) ideological purity; (b) a pathological hatred of the U.S. government; (c) a regarding of education as a problem and in some cases a dark force as it tends to undermine the teachings of the Lord/Allah; (d) a need to control women and their bodies; (e) a fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism; (f) a denial of science, unmoved by facts, undeterred by new information, a hostile fear of progress; (g) a regarding of compromise as weakness; (h) a tribal mentality; (i) severe xenophobia; and (j) intolerance of dissent.

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“The most interesting thing about the popularity of superhero movies is that they are insanely expensive to make, yet they spring from a plebian, populist artform,” The Guardian‘s Joe Queenan wrote two days ago. “Comic books, at least until recently, were cheap. They were beautifully drawn and exciting, but they were still basically cheap. That was the point. Movies are not cheap, especially not in 3D. Comic-book heroes, like football players, have lost all contact with their proletarian roots.

“Some people will read all this and say: ‘You’re over-intellectualizing. You’re reading too much into it.’ This may be true. But these charges are always made by people who never over-intellectualize anything, who never read too much into things. They are made by people who want you to take the X-Men seriously, as legitimate fiction. And then when you do, they say that you are over-intellectualizing.

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