Day: August 1, 2013

The Shane Bluray is “simply astonishing,” Blu-ray.com’s Michael Reuben wrote on 7.30. “Details, densities, black levels, textures and colors are all revelatory. I literally felt that I was seeing a film I had never seen before.

“It’s not just in the obvious scenes, such as the mountain vistas around the Starrett farm. It’s also in the subtler shadows of the day-for-night sequences (what director George Stevens called the ‘Rembrandt lighting’), such as the encounter between Ryker and Joe Starrett after the Fourth of July celebration, where the shadow detail is just sufficient and the shades of black and blue layer over each other in just the right proportions to create the sense of depth and danger that Stevens and dp Loyal Griggs intended.”

“J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost has completely blown everyone away at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s a knockout — a riveting piece of pure, almost-dialogue-free cinema, a terrific survival-on-the-high-seas tale and major acting triumph for Robert Redford, who hasn’t been this good since…what, Brubaker? All The President’s Men? A long time.

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I have to fly back to Los Angeles this evening. I’ll return to New York after Telluride (9.2) and stay until flying to Toronto on 9.5, and then I might return here again. (Or not.) But that’s not the issue. The issue is whether or not to re-launch an L.A. screening series that I ran in the late ’90s, which I called Hot-Shot Movies. It would be no different than all the other screening series around town. $175 or $180 bills for nine sessions consisting of a new un-opened film plus the director or one of the stars doing a short q & a (i.e., no longer than 30 minutes).

I have a relatively high profile these days and a bit of a following. Plus I have good talent relations (especially with directors), and I’m guessing I’ll have a pretty good shot at getting guys like Alfonso Cuaron and George Clooney and other big dogs to drop by. Hopefully. Maybe.

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In the view of Grantland‘s Wesley Morris, 2 Guns boils down to Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg “having a good time robbing banks and blowing up buildings and barreling through military security checkpoints and double-crossing people and shooting each other because none of it really means anything. You rarely get to see a pair of stars mired in this much danger but playing the whole thing as if they were on vacation. Wahlberg all but walks around the film with a paper umbrella behind one of his ears.”

I said roughly the same thing on 7.25, calling it “a silly late-summer jagoff that’s about Washington and Wahlberg playing ‘catch’ with each other — i.e., the old chemistry-rapport-mutual backscratch put-on/goof-off thing. Call it ‘attitude-surfing.’ The movie has no undercurrent, no themes — nothing except the wank-off vibe of everyone just making the damn thing and collecting their paychecks and taking their dicks out and stroking them as they cash their checks and hack around between takes.”

Peter Berg‘s Lone Survivor (Universal, 12.27) is basically about an anti-Taliban military operation that went wrong and resulted in the deaths of a lot of good homies. The source of Berg’s screenplay is Marcus Luttrell‘s “Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10.” Pic costars Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Eric Bana, Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster and Alexander Ludwig. Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported on 3/17.11 that Berg wanted to make Lone Survivor immediately after The Kingdom, but Universal wouldn’t do it unless he agreed to make Battleship first.

I don’t doubt the veracity of Linda Lovelace‘s “Ordeal.” She was used and abused by the porn industry, and especially by her Svengali-pimp boyfriend Chuck Traynor. Which is what Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s film (Radius-TWC, 8.9) essentially conveys. I just don’t believe this is the whole story. I especially don’t believe that Lovelace was the innocent, wide-eyed, golly-gee victim that Amanda Seyfried portrays. I think she was more of a willing if not enthusiastic participant in her porn celebrity (at least during the early ’70s) than the film lets on. I was touched and saddened by Lovelace, but I finally felt more skeptical than persuaded.