Day: August 11, 2013

With the Ishtar Bluray finally out, it’s permissible to re-post a 33-month-old riff on the oppressively dull jacket art:

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment design guy: “So what about the Ishtar Bluray jacket art? I’ve roughed out some ideas.”

SPHE marketing director: “No ideas. Boilerplate. Use the art from the VHS. Tweak it or re-do the titles, but we’re not spending nickel one on re-design.”

Design guy: “The VHS art…? But we’ve got all this material.”

Marketing director: “We don’t care. It’s a loss leader. Just re-do the lettering. Fuck it.”

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32 year-old Woody Allen was ten years away from Annie Hall when this was shot. The San Francisco TV news guy interviewing Allen is a clod. [Thanks to Joe McBride for passing this along.]

On 8.4 Scott Brown‘s Vulture interview with screenwriter Damon Lindelof appeared. The gist was obvious — robot-zombie Hollywood is bingeing on destruction porn, and in so doing is eating its own tail. I read Brown’s article and went “yeah….so?” I’ve been saying this for years. Strafe the ComicCon faithful in an F4 Phantom jet. The more CG apes and comic-book geeks you can eliminate, the better. The 80-minute finale of Man of Steel was, I suspect, the straw that broke the camel’s back for many of us. It’s gone too far. It’s moderately interesting to hear Lindelof, one of the leading whore-architects of this trend, admit that self-destruction is inevitable but…aahh, I wasn’t excited enough to link to it. But I came back to it today and decided that Lindelof’s quotes are so well-phrased that they deserve a re-reading.

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I could have read Terence Winter‘s script for Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (11.15, Paramount) a year ago, but I was too lazy, cocky, indifferent. It can wait, I kept telling myself. I finally read it last night and this morning, and it’s Goodfellas on Wall Street. Or Casino…whatever. The finale of Scorsese’s American hustler/den of thieves trilogy. Venal and criminal, but wildly intoxicating. Time-shuffling, narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Jordan Belfort (as Ray Liotta and Robert DeNiro narrated Goodfellas and Casino), manna from heaven, adrenalin-plus, woo-woo…and then the crash. If you fell for the first two how can you not like this installment? Same basic story, same engine, same unhappy wives, same juice, same cutting style. Winters’ script is awwwwwl right now, in fact it’s a gas. Best Picture nominee slamdunkaroonie.

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Presumably people used to actually tell Woody Allen that while they enjoy his films, they really like “the earlier funny ones.” I once ran into Allen on 57th Street, right near Carnegie Hall, and the instant we exchanged glances he had a look of total horror in his eyes. The first time I saw Bananas I had recently swallowed a chocolate shake spiked with an ounce of pot. I was so ripped I was missing half the jokes or paying so much attention to the thematic undercurrent that I wasn’t laughing. But this is an example, I suspect, of what most people considered the earlier funny material.

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