Year: 2013

I was reading a N.Y. Times Manohla Dargis piece this morning called “Pushing Grisly Boundaries Since 1895” (which is part of a bigger ensemble piece called “Big Bang Theories: Violence on Screen.” She writes that “execution films” were a popular subgenre in the early days of cinema, and mentions “Executing An Elephant” (1903), which shows poor Topsy, an Indian elephant who had killed three men, getting zapped with 6600 volts.

For whatever reason I’d never seen the Topsy death short before this morning. So less than 60 seconds after reading about Topsy’s fate in Dargis’s piece…you guessed it. The guy who not only filmed the execution but turned on the juice? Thomas Alva Edison. Topsy was going to be killed anyway (she had probably been mistreated and had reacted with appropriate hostility) and Edison wanted to show how lethal alternating current electricity could be.

Emotional ties exist between the Smoke House restaurant (4420 Lakeside Drive, Burbank — right across from Warner Bros. studios) and Argo producer George Clooney, who’s eaten there several times over the years and even named his production company after the joint.

Juke box at Mel’s on the Strip (taken tonight).

I saw Sam Raimi‘s Oz The Great and Powerful tonight on the Disney lot, but the invite came with my pledge to not review it until Friday, March 8th, or opening day. Anyway Oz screened in the main Disney theatre with grade-A 3D projection, and when it ended around 9:20-something a review by Variety‘s Justin Chang had posted. Plus five reviews are now up on Rotten Tomatoes so all bets are off, it would seem. But I’ll hold for now.

Chang is calling Oz diverting family fare with a few portions that connect, but he’s mainly saying that it’s composed of thin material that’s not very involving — “rings hollow,” “gaudily depersonalized,” “visual Baum-bast.” He adds that it makes you want to rush home and pop in the Bluray of the original 1939 The Wizard of Oz , which is where the real nutrition still resides. But he praises the film’s “exquisite” black-and-white prologue, composed in a 1.33 aspect ratio, set on “a windy strip of Kansas prairie” and showing James Franco‘s wily circus magician-slash-con man performing and sweet-talking a couple of ladies.

I have to at least say that Chang is right-on about this portion. The opening credits (also in black and white 3D) are inventive and beautiful and altogether quite masterful. Handsome naturalistic black-and-white 3D hasn’t been seen since…what?…The Creature From The Black Lagoon? (Tim Burton‘s Frankenweenie was animated.) “This is amazing…delightful,” I was saying to myself. “I haven’t watched anything like this ever on a big screen…the first time in my life!”

This section recalls the opening of Victor Fleming‘s The Wizard of Oz in that it lays out character issues and plants a couple of character seeds that will sorta kinda pay off later on. (Of course, if Raimi really wanted to pay tribute to the original Oz he would have rendered this sequence in monochrome sepia.)

Honestly? The lensing, writing and acting in this portion of Oz the Great and Powerful (which lasts maybe 14 or 15 minutes) are better than in the rest of the film, which runs another 110 minutes and has been shot in widescreen color 3D. So I can at least say for now that Oz the Great and Powerful is worth the price just to catch the black-and-white 3D.

Note: Variety is now running high-contrast, Benday-ish, Wall Street Journal-styled images of critics and other contributors.

If I were you I’d copy and paste the names of all the Metacritic reviewers who’ve given Park Chan-wook‘s Stoker a 70% or better. Then I’d do the same with the Rotten Tomatoes reviewers who gave it a thumbs-up. And then arrange their last names alphabetically and print the list and tape it to your refrigerator door or…whatever, paste it on your Notes app on your iPhone.

Because anyone who gives any kind of pass to Stoker is either smoking something or eating something they shouldn’t or I-don’t-know-what. Either they have a liking for the kind of oppressively flamboyant style that screams “oppressively flamboyant style!”, or they’ve decided that directors who present characters who wallow in cruel or deeply perverse behavior are themselves deliciously perverse (and that critics who get and/or celebrate this are extra-hip), and that anyone who directs by way of Brian DePalma-on-steroids has to be cool because…well, because he/she has lots of nerve! That or the critic is overly liberal or charitable. Either way I would henceforth regard them askance.

If by clapping my hands three times I could somehow erase this kind of lunatic, high-style, absurdly over-telegraphed approach to murder-and-revenge melodramas from the face of the earth and then send it to hell and into a pit of snarling, salivating dogs, I would clap my hands three times. If you’re any kind of fan of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Shadow of a Doubt, or if you have the vaguest respect for the basic premise (perverse Uncle Charlie and his teenaged admiring niece who “gets” Charlie on a certain level) and what a clever, resourceful writer and director could potentially do with it, you’ll find it damn hard not to be appalled by Stoker.

I love Andrew O’Hehir‘s line about it being “The Addams Family meets The Paperboy.”

The first time I noticed a historical adventure-romance in which the lead male character (and only the lead male character) spoke in a glib and casual modern-American manner was Richard Donner‘s Ladyhawke (’85). The critically-despised Warner Bros release was set in 12th Century Europe and Matthew Broderick — 22 or 23 at the time of filming — played Phillippe Gaston, a ne’er-do-well who used the attitude and idioms of Ferris Bueller.

The idea, obviously, was to make 1985 audiences feel more comfortable within an exotic milieu by offering one of their own as a guide. It’s totally standard practice now, but back then (27 years ago!) it was a relatively new way to go.

It could be argued that Tony Curtis did the same thing in Son of Ali Baba (’52) by speaking in a New York accent while saying lines like “this is the palace of my father, and yonder lies the Valley of the Sun.” (Curtis was unfairly chided for allegedly mouthing a similar-sounding line, “Yonda lies the castle of my foddah”, in The Black Shield of Falworth (’54)…which in fact he never said.)

But Curtis, one could further argue, was at least trying to muffle his borough accent and lend as much historical realism as possible, or at least not flaunt the fact that he was a 1950s actor who’d been raised in the Bronx. Ladyhawke‘s Broderick, by contrast, emphasized his Ferris Bueller-ness. The point was to sound like a wise-ass mall rat transported to medieval times by a time machine.

James Franco, portraying Oscar Diggs in the 19th Century realm of Oz, The Great and Powerful (Disney, 3.8), talks as if like he’s backstage at the Oscars or hanging in his trailer while shooting Spring Breakers or chatting with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. Exclamations like “I don’t want to die…I haven’t accomplished anything yet!” tell the under-35 sophistos they won’t have to adjust to a damn thing, that Oz won’t challenge them in the slightest.

I haven’t written until now about the financial convulsions hitting the visual effects industry because I have mixed feelings. I feel badly for any reputable VFX company that’s getting shafted by the Hollywood big-boy fraternity. But on the other hand (and I realize how twisted this sounds on a practical, fair-minded level) I hate conspicuous CG, and therefore feel only a certain kind of sporadic, case-by-case-basis love for those technicians who deliver more subtle work. Either way the CG industry has helped to dumb mainstream movies down over the last 20 years, and who feels good about that?

I honestly feel that CG options have in a sense become the worst all-time influence upon films, filmmakers and financiers in the history of the film industry. The cheapest, most mind-numbing slop has come out of the expansion of the CG mentality over the last 20 years, and by the CG options made available through the hundreds of VFX outfits operating worldwide.

CG is obviously indispensable to the health of the film industry. I’m not not a radical Luddite and therefore am not against any tool that might enhance the experience. But it’s the musician, not the instrument. I love CG realms when guys on the level of James Cameron are running the show but I frankly found the visual atmosphere in Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi to be exquistely fake and paintboxy. Richard Parker looked like an immaculate CG beast from start to finish, and when I know I’m looking at a hard-drive creation my eyes glaze over. To me the words “directed by Joseph Kosinski” are a major threat, and almost all CG is the same unless it’s rendered by someone with exceptional vision like Cameron or David Fincher or Steven Soderbergh or Flight‘s Robert Zemeckis. Or anyone who understands that CG needs to be invisible or seamlessly blended with reality as much as possible.

Should VFX outfits receive fair or ample compensation for quality work? Of course. Is Hollywood management constantly trying to chisel them down, in part by turning to overseas outsourcing? So I’ve read. Is it getting harder and harder for VFX outfits to turn a decent profit given astronomical research and development costs? Yes. Did Life of Pi director Ang Lee say last weekend, “I would like [VFX] to be cheaper”? Yup.

So yeah, I feel badly for the VFX supervisors and their employees grappling with what everyone is describing as a dire financial situation. But at the same time a voice is saying the following: “You guys are just servicing the Hollywood creatives with your CG effects and therefore shouldn’t be blamed for often making my moviegoing experiences feel degraded, dumbed-down and miserable. The VFX industry is going through a tough period and I’m sorry. I know how it feels to be squeezed and gasping for air. And it’s not logically fair, of course, to blame skilled technicians for simply delivering a service for their employers. But in the same sense is it wholly unfair to suggest that South American growers of coca plants and the Middle Eastern growers of poppies (along with the overseas refiners of same) share at least some responsibility for drug addiction in the U.S.? Are you going to tell me that CG isn’t a form of dope?”

VFX guys are just trying to do the best work they can and pay their bills, of course, but they’re nonetheless supplying the know-how that is making at least half of the movies these days feel like animated phony-baloney.

During last Sunday’s Oscar show I felt badly for Rhythm & Hues and Life of Pi VFX supervisor Bill Westenhofer when his remarks about his company’s recent Chapter 11 filing were “played off” with the Jaws theme. (And then his mike was killed.) But Westenhofer’s previous credits include Speed 2: Cruise Control, Mouse Hunt, Elf, The Rundown, Stuart Little 2, Men in Black II, Cats & Dogs, Along Came a Spider, Frequency, Stuart Little and Babe: Pig in the City. I hated every one of these films, in part because of their use of CG-that-really-looks-like-CG.

So basically I feel (a) let’s all stand up and demand justice for CG companies who are struggling to stay afloat, (b) VFX suppliers who are exceptional at what they do deserve to be commended for pushing along a new digital art form, and they certainly deserve to be fairly compensated for their work, but also (c) fuck these guys for helping to kill the sense of tangible, recognizable reality that one absorbs in mainstream movies these days.

Here’s a SlashFilm posting of a “brief outline of the state of the VFX business, condensed in part from one VFX industry employee’s account on Reddit”:

* Studios and production companies want VFX work done quickly and cheaply.
* Those companies don’t only pressure VFX houses to work for less, but to do more work for that ever-smaller amount of money.
* That results in long hours for VFX artists, with overtime not covered in contracts.

But at the same time, studios are doing two things:

* Outsourcing jobs to countries such as China and India, who will do the work more cheaply
* Taking bids from companies in locations that offer tax breaks. But the tax break goes to the studio, not the effects house.

This creates a demand for cheap, young labor, and an environment where companies have no leverage with studios, and VFX employees little leverage with their effects house — they can be replaced.

Profit margins at VFX companies have grown very thin. Some companies can only pay workers for their last job by taking on a new gig. Other companies close divisions (Hugo FX house Pixomondo did this) or lay off dozens to hundreds of employees (Digital Domain and R&H).

I’d love to read a longish, fully-sourced, deep-drill article about why Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln failed to win Best Picture, but Melena Ryzik‘s 2.27 Oscar aftermath piece in the N.Y. Times only scratches the surface.

Key passage: “This season, insiders said, the team behind Lincoln — executives at DreamWorks and Disney — overcampaigned, leaving voters with the unpleasant feeling that they were being force-fed a highly burnished history lesson. ‘It was a good movie, not sliced bread,’ one veteran awards watcher said.”

But in precisely what ways did D&D ostensibly over-sell it? The “insiders” might be partly referring to Bill Clinton‘s plug at the Golden Globes, but in what other ways? C’mon, let’s see the list and hear what various people have to say about whatever worked or didn’t work.

Grantland‘s Mark Harris, the husband of Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner, has tweeted the following about Ryzik’s article: “You can buy the ‘Lincoln overcampaigned’ theory or not, but the blanket granting of anonymity in this story is cheap.”

Another possible reason Lincoln didn’t make it , says Ryzik, is that it was “dimly illuminated, to replicate the lighting of the period, and stuffed with long passages of speechifying by waistcoated, bearded men,” and so “the film did not play well on DVD screeners.” She mentions cynical talk that Spielberg “was primed for a takedown — envy being as motivating a force as greed in this industry — and that voters were enthralled by the comeback story that [Argo‘s Ben] Affleck represented.”

I haven’t seen many March films, but the good ones seem few and far between. By my yardstick the two best will emerge at the end of the month. Wayne Blair‘s The Sapphires (Weinstein Co., 3.22) is a partial knockout, but entirely worth seeing for Chris Dowd‘s landmark performance as a road manager who’s also a major Motown fanatic. If you’re a fan of The Shining, Rodney Ascher‘s Room 237 (IFC Films, 3.29) is the shit, a hoot, a trip — the smartest and sharpest film of the month. And no, the trailers haven’t done it justice

3.1: Ixnay on Stoker and the reviews for Jack the Giant Slayer haven’t been good. I still haven’t seen The Sweeney. If anything, Kim Nguyen‘s War Witch is probably the one to see. Honestly? I’ve only watched half of the screener. That’s not a criticism — just an admission of laziness.

3.8: The only interesting thing I’ve noticed so far about Sam Raimi‘s Oz: The Great and Powerful (which I’ve only seen traielrs for) is the black-and-white beginning. Cristian Mungiu‘s Beyond the Hills is deliberately paced, austere, and in my book first-rate. David Riker‘s The Girl has a commendable Abbie Cornish performance but is otherwise a bit of a mixed bag. I still haven’t seen Michel Gondry‘s The We And The I. I’m sorry but I felt underwhelmed by Peter Webber‘s Emperor.

3.15: I caught Sally Potter‘s Ginger and Rosa at last September’s Telluride Film Festival — distinctive, intriguing, less than fully satisfying. I won’t see Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers until Thursday. < strong>3.22: I haven’t seen Paul Weitz‘s comedic Admission but it’s apparently quite slight.

In his swaggering party-boy period Colin Farrell played leads in glossy, well-funded mainstream films from ’03 to ’06 (Daredevil, Phone Booth, The Recruit, S.W.A.T., Alexander, the intelligent and historically atmospheric Terrence Malick flick The New World and Michael Mann‘s fumey, aromatic Miami Vice). Then he checked into rehab in December 2005 and switched to character roles in smaller, smarter, indie-ish films (Ask the Dust, Cassandra’s Dream, Pride and Glory, In Bruges, Ondine, Triage, Crazy Heart, The Way Back).

And then in ’10 Farrell changed course again and started doing violence-flavored material (London Boulevard, Horrible Bosses, Fright Night, Total Recall, Dead Man Down, Winter’s Tale along with the semi-violent satiric-attitude flick Seven Psychopaths).

One glance at the trailer for Dead Man Down (Film District, 3.8) tells you Farrell needs to get fawkin’ back to smarter, cooler films, yeah? Because the newbie looks like dogshit. Farrell’s most recently completed gig was playing a supporting role in John Lee Hancock‘s Savings Mr. Banks, which costars Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson.

N.Y. Times political pulse-taker and numbers guy Nate Silver is reporting that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is on the outs with the wacked-out Republican right (i.e., the party of corporate elites, angry old white guys and Tea Party yokels) due to his being perceived as too moderate.

That right there tells you he has a better-than-decent shot at becoming the 2016 Republican candidate for president because — hello? — he could actually win. He’s a real-deal, hot-dog-eating man of the people and not a country-club phony like Mitt Romney.

But the metaphor that goes along with being dangerously obese means he can’t run if he doesn’t drop at least 100 pounds, or better yet 125. A little more than a year ago The New Republic‘s Timothy Noah offered a “crowd-sourced” estimate that Christie weighs around 334 pounds, give or take.