Month: April 2014

One of my earliest big-league Manhattan interviews was with director John Carpenter. He was plugging The Fog so our chat happened in early 1980, at which point Carpenter had recently turned 32 and more or less looked it. (One of the publicists on that film, by the way, was Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson.) Now the semi-retired Carpenter is in his mid 60s and looks at least 80. To me he strongly resembles Charles Boyer‘s High Lama character in Ross Hunter‘s Lost Horizon (’73), who is 300 years old but looks good for his age. Burbank’s Hyaena Gallery begins a Carpenter tribute tonight.

(l.) director John Carpenter; (r.) Charles Boyer as the High Lama in Lost Horizon (’73).

Corrected with apologies: Birdman falling out of Cannes wasn’t enough. Now it’s all but certain that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice won’t be going there either. This morning I spoke to an industry friend who’s seen Vice and who thinks it’s brilliant and mesmerizing in an atmospheric, non-linear sort of way. He says that Anderson, currently doing the sound mix, doesn’t really want to subject Vice to Cannes and would rather take his time and tinker around over the summer and then unveil it in Telluride/Venice/Toronto.

This follows what a friend told me a week or two ago, which is that Cannes topper Thierry Fremaux “has been courting and wooing PTA like mad to get Inherent Vice to Cannes, and that PTA has been telling him since January that it would be very tight for him to get post-production done in time and that he wouldn’t show it to Thierry until then. Perhaps PTA would privately like to go to Cannes, but I’m also told that Warner Bros. is against the idea, considering it too early given its December release date. If PTA insists and finishes the film to his satisfaction over the next couple of weeks, he could probably prevail over WB, but the latest I hear is that everything is still very much up in the air.”

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The furniture movers were done by 4 pm so I had plenty of time to bop over to the TCM Classic Film Festival by dinner hour. The initial plan was to see Harold Lloyd‘s Why Worry at what everyone still calls the “Egyptian” (i.e., the Lloyd E. Rigler theatre at the American Cinematheque). But first I slipped into the TCL Chinese to see how Universal Home Video’s DCP of Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity (i.e., a close relative of the new Bluray) looked on the big screen. Knowing of Universal’s delightful tendency to tastefully DNR black-and-white films (as they did for their Psycho and Cape Fear Blurays) I was optimistic. But what I saw exceeded my hopes.

It was beautiful. It was heaven. It was silvery and satiny and gloriously free of the digital mosquitoes that are all over the Masters of Cinema Bluray version. For the first time in my life I saw a Double Indemnity that looked like monochrome candy — an all-but-grainless version that will hopefully make grain monks seethe. I don’t know what was more enjoyable — looking at the exquisite velvety tones of this 1944 classic and the entirely acceptable waxy complexions of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, or imagining the discomfort of guys like Pete Appruzzese and Glenn Kenny and DVD Beaver‘s Gary. W. Tooze and Robert Harris and the grain devotees at the Criterion Collection.

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I’m so on top of the latest curve that it took me three days to link to Ross Marquand‘s Matthew McConaughey-in-True Detective riff, which went on up on April 9th. Marquand is spoofing those AT&T True Detective spots. A joke we call reality. Time is a flat circle. Grapple with it.

My beloved Birdman, which I haven’t seen a frame of but have really wanted to see for a long, long time, will not debut in Cannes next month. It’ll most likely have its first screenings in Venice and/or Telluride instead. I have to be honest and say that I’m very disappointed and more than a little sad…but I guess I can adapt.

(l. to.) Edward Norton, production assistant, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Michael Keaton during filming of Birdman in New York last winter or early spring (i.e., jacket and scarf weather).

I’ve been presuming for eight and a half months now that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s midlife-crisis comedy, which is about a former superhero actor (Michael Keaton a la Robert Downey ten years from now) trying to produce a stage play, would turn up at the Cannes Film Festival. Why? Because Inarritu screened a cut of Birdman last July for friends, and soon after one of them shared the following: “I know you and I know your taste, Jeff. And I am telling you this [film] is a mind-blowing exercise in pure cinema…it puts AGI in a different league. I was humbled, moved and full of love in seeing him bloom into an artist of a massive calibre…transforming, evolving.

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Two and a half years ago (i.e., in August 2011) Go Home Productions‘ Mark Vidler posted this mix-mash of Paul McCartney‘s “Band on the Run” and John Lennon‘s “Imagine.” It took me all this time to catch up with it, but that’s how hip I am. This sounds great, I swear to God. It almost sounds magical. It’s mostly the McCartney tune, of course, but the more complex chords add a measure of soul. It’s a real-deal Lennon-McCartney collaboration.

Seven and a half years ago a BBC story reported the views of “evolutionary theorist” Dr. Oliver Curry about a Time Machine-like development in human evolution. The forthcoming Bluray of George Pal‘s The Time Machine goaded Luke Y. Thompson into discovering this story and passing it along. It said that Dr. Curry, based in ’06 at the of the London School of Economics, believes that “humanity may split into a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass in 100,000 years’ time. The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said, before a decline due to dependence on technology. People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added. The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the ‘underclass’ humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.” This, of course, is precisely how things are now in 2014, so what’s with the far-in-the-future scenario?

For the unpardonable sin of missing A Most Wanted Man (Lionsgate/Roadside, 7.25) at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, I am apparently doomed to wander the earth in a sack cloth until they finally show it to me…what, in June? I’d really like to catch it sometime this month. Some of those who saw it at Sundance were saying it was too grim and measured and downbeat, but a 91% Rotten Tomatoes rating is nothing to snort at.

The first thing that came to mind when I saw this crowd-funding pitch was a little graffiti cartoon that Griffin Dunne sees on a bathroom wall in After Hours, an image of a shark chomping down on some guy’s appendage. People are still falling for this shite after the Veronica Mars burn? They’re given the privelege of contributing X dollars in exchange for what exactly? What could Sharknado 2 possibly give or share that would be worth it, short of a possible cameo?

A Film Independent member and friend-of-HE has managed to purchase a $200 ticket on my behalf to the Quentin Tarantino Hateful Eight script-reading event at the Ace Hotel theatre on Saturday, 4.19. I don’t pay to attend cool industry events or so I can sample hipster vibes first-hand, but I did this time. I am a sucker, yes, but at least I’ll be there and will deliver a good report. (How fat is Tarantino these days, or has he gone cockatoo?) The reading will presumably happen in the evening. “Quentin, please…please turn this deliciously well-written western into an actual film!…we need it in our communal bloodstream,” etc.

I’m not moving anywhere but I’ve got movers coming at 2 pm, or an hour from now. All the furniture is going outside for the night so new floors can be installed first thing tomorrow morning. I’ve been tossing stuff stuff left and right. I’m dumping 80% of my DVDs, or those which I haven’t watched in years and probably never will watch again. If I want to watch something I’ll just stream it — to hell with leftover physical media. Except for the Blurays, of course. It’s hot outside and I’m fairly damp and the cats are upset. I’ve been packing and dumping since late last night. Plus I have the TCM Classic Film Festival to attend tonight. If anyone knows how to do all this plus a 6 pm screening of Double Indemnity plus Harold Lloyd‘s Why Worry? at 7:15 pm plus bang out the usual six or seven HE stories, let me know.