Month: April 2014

Schawn Belston‘s restoration of the roadshow version of Oklahoma! (1955), which replicates the original 30-frame-per-second Todd-AO process for the first time in 30 years, was shown last night on the big TCL Chinese screen at the opening of the TCM Classic Film Festival.

The film itself is impossible — square, complacent, cornball, plodding, slow as a snail — but the visuals were a delight. Congrats again to Belston and his team for a job very well done.

But I have to say I was dumbfounded when TCM’s Robert Osborne omitted any mention of the 30-frame-per-second Todd-AO photography in his opening remarks. He just said once or twice that Todd-AO delivered a big, grand image…but no specifics. Either Osborne forgot or he decided that the term “30 frames per second” would go right over people’s heads. Amazing.

Oklahoma! itself is a glaze-over, for the most part. You sit and watch it, and it goes on a bit longer than you’d prefer. The tunes catch lightning every so often. I really enjoyed Rod Steiger and Gordon Macrae‘s “Poor Judd is Dead” duet. If only there wasn’t this feeling of complacency, of an overly revered stage play being shot by cameras that weight ten tons, of the filmmakers coasting on the laurels of the original 1943 Broadway stage production, which (along with the earlier production of Jerome Kern‘s Showboat) changed the character and upped the game of American musicals.

If only the Curly-Laurey-Judd triangle made a lick of sense. If only the photography wasn’t so conservative and the cutting so uninquisitive. If only Laurey’s dream sequence didn’t use replacement dancers for Macrae and Shirley Jones (why were they even hired if they couldn’t handle a few modest ballet moves?). If only it didn’t seem as if director Fred Zinneman was on a Thorazine drip and wearing a straightjacket during filming. If only those jutting Arizona mountain peaks (i.e., total fiction compared to the typography of the real Oklahoma) weren’t visible in all the exteriors.

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If you’re planning on catching Draft Day this weekend, watch these Moneyball clips and refresh your memory. This is how a really smart, grade-A sports movie walks, talks and soars. Draft Day isn’t a groaner. It’s appealing in some respects. Personable, not offensively bad, a few good lines and scenes. But this is what “confident” and “classy” and “upmarket” is…okay? 94% Rotten Tomatoes, motherfucker.

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Every so often a piece of Bluray jacket art will offer a more interesting visual concept for an old film than the original poster did. A monochrome Rod Taylor and his Victorian time machine whooshing through time so fast that they exude a molten pinkish glow, like some kind of 1965 Gemini space capsule burning through billions of time molecules…that’s cool. On some level this upgrades George Pal‘s 1960 thriller (streeting on 7.8) and makes it seem like it has something people have forgotten about, even if it doesn’t. And it doesn’t.

If I know Grantland‘s Bill Simmons, he’s probably going to blow it when it comes to posting a timely review of Ivan Reitman‘s Draft Day (Summitgate, 4.11). Simmons has the authority to call bullshit or give it a pass or whatever, but he generally avoids movie pieces and rarely posts when the moment is right. So with Simmons presumably out of the game (i.e., due to laziness or not giving enough of a shit), what knowledgable sports writer will step up to the plate? Right now Draft Day is waist-deep in Rotten Tomato quicksand with a fairly crummy 49% approval rating. Rope of Silicon‘s mild-mannered Brad Brevet hates it. N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith wrote that Draft Day is so “lumbering and predictable, and its hero general manager is so dumb, it should have been called Dummyball.”

CBS has hired Stephen Colbert to take over David Letterman‘s 11:35 pm talk-show slot after Letterman departs later this year. And yet Colbert — significant point — will be hosting the show as his own natural self and not under his usual Colbert Report rightwing-asshole “performance art” guise. So basically the guy Colbert has “been” all along is going to be shelved and this other guy, whose actual personality is a semi-mystery and whom no one really knows outside of coworkers and a few journalists and whatnot, is going to be “the new Letterman.” Does this strike anyone else as a bit of a weird call?

CBS has essentially hired Pee-Wee Herman to take over, but with the Pee-Wee persona erased and Paul Reubens substituting. It’s like hiring Red Skelton‘s Clem Kaddiddlehopper to host a talk show, except with Clem pushed aside by the real Skelton (i.e., a nice uptown suit and haircut, just being himself). Ladies and gentleman, Professor Irwin Corey…except the real actual guy, you know, without the wiggy persona and eccentric wardrobe and mumbo-jumbo schtick.

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This morning I received an email from Criterion’s Peter Becker about the forthcoming Bluray of Richard Lester‘s A Hard Day’s Night, which was mastered off the original negative and allegedly will look and sound better than any previous version. (The TCM Classic Film Festival will show the Criterion version on the big TCL Chinese screen on Saturday at 6:30 pm.) But, as explained yesterday, I have a problem with Criterion’s decision to go with a 1.75 aspect ratio, which will needlessly trim off the tops and bottoms of the 1.66 version that has been in circulation for many decades.

Here is Becker’s letter:

“In pure technical terms this new restoration is in another league from any version of A Hard Day’s Night that has been out there before,” he began. “The source we used for the most of the film is the original negative, which is gorgeous. The film has been scanned at 4K resolution, meaning we have massive amounts more information to start with than [what] you have in a simple HD transfer, so the detail in the original negative is rendered with incredible accuracy. All the restoration work was completed at 4K resolution, which means we had extremely fine control of the restoration tools.

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Real-Deal Development Announced Today by Film Independent: “Due to last-minute date and venue changes, tickets to the World Premiere of a Staged Reading by Quentin Tarantino of The Hateful Eight will now go on sale to Film Independent Members this Friday, April 11 at 12:00 noon Pacific. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this change may cause.

“Quentin Tarantino is currently assembling his dream cast for this once-in-a-lifetime event, but due to unforeseen scheduling issues the event will now take place on Saturday, April 19th. Due to venue availability on this date, the location will now be the Theatre at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

“The Hateful Eight is the unproduced Tarantino script that made headlines when he decided to [abandon the project] after the script was leaked [by Gawker and other sites] without his approval. The event will not be recorded or live streamed.”

WHEN: Saturday, April 19, 8:00 pm

WHERE: Theatre at Ace Hotel, 929 South Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90015 

PRICE: $200 orchestra / $150 lower-balcony / $125 upper balcony – limit two tickets per Member



Zach Braff‘s Wish I Was Here (Focus Features, 7.18) is (a) “a warm-hearted, family-embracing Emo version of A Serious Man,” (b) “a little too much into comforting meditations and family-embracing bromides to be comforting or illuminating,” (c) “a caring, open-hearted piece, but a little too calculating in that sense,” and (d) “pretty close to being the exact opposite of A Serious Man in a spiritual/philosophical sense.”

I’ll be seeing Ivan Reitman‘s Draft Day (Summit/Lionsgate, 4.11) a second time this evening. I caught it for the first time at Cinemacon a couple of weeks ago. It’s not bad — a reasonably complex, adult, character-driven Kevin Costner sports movie about the travails of a Cleveland Browns general manager as he tries to land the best players during the high-stakes draft process. But it’s basically aimed at the people who want their sports movies to be more emotionally rousing and on-the-nose than Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball, one of the smartest, most intimate and spiritually profound sports films of all time. That movie made me tingle; Draft Day made me slump in my seat. Outside of Stripes and Meatballs Reitman has always been a right-down-the-middle square, and all the older, not-that-hip types will probably love this thing. It’s a by-the-numbers ensemble piece, in some ways like the old Airport movies of the ’70s, in which all the issues get settled by the end of Act Three and the big star gets vindicated and also the girl, and all the shitheads get their asses handed to them on a plate. It’s nowhere near as authentic or well-made as Moneyball, but it’s a good Hollywood popcorn movie as far as that goes. It’s quite stodgy and formulaic in the way it wraps everything up and lets Costner be the big operator who out-maneuvers the competition. Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny gave it a total pass for some reason. The after-vibe was complacent and relaxed among the exhibitors who saw it at Cinemacon. It’s probably be a hit among the over-40s, but the hardcore football types are going to come after it for being a bit of a hokey-dokey confection.

DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze is saying “there are some fairly big differences” between Universal Home Video’s new Double Indemnity Bluray (4.15) and the Masters of Cinema Bluray that came out in July 2012. Among these are “less grain and richer black levels” and “an overall darker presentation” in the Universal version. “Have they ‘manipulated’? Quite possibly but I didn’t find any excessive waxiness (perhaps a shade in one late scene) or unnatural flatness to the image. Personally I like the grain textures of the UK disc but I can see the appeal, for some, in the smoother, darker image of the Universal.” A 70th anniversary restoration (i.e., the Universal DCP) of Billy Wilder‘s 1944 classic will screen at the TCM Classic Film Festival on Friday at 6 pm.

A digitally restored 4K version of Richard Lester‘s A Hard Day’s Night is screening at 6:30 pm on Saturday, 4.12, at the TCM Classic Film Festival. The screening is basically a promotion for Criterion’s upcoming Bluray (due on 6.24) of this 1964 black-and-white film, which Andrew Sarris once called “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals.” I’m presuming that Criterion’s version, derived straight from the original negative and “approved” by Lester, will beat the pants off the Alliance 1080i Bluray that came out October 2009. Sharper detail, richer blacks, more dynamic sound, etc. And yet there’s a problem. The Criterion guys have decided to cleaver this beloved Beatles pic down to a 1.75:1 aspect ratio for no aesthetically justifiable reason. I’m told that the “leaders” say 1.75 but the eff that noise. The ’09 Alliance Bluray and the 2002 Miramax DVD went with a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, which conformed to the general British standard of the time. Criterion itself masked Lindsay Anderson‘s This Sporting Life (’63) at 1.66 for their DVD; ditto John Schlesinger‘s Sunday Bloody Sunday (’71). There can never be a justification for an arbitrary decision to eliminate perfectly good visual information, as the Criterion guys have done with A Hard Day’s Night. It’s not a criminal offense (very few will notice or care) but it’s definitely not cool in the eyes of the Movie Godz. Cleavering the tops and bottoms of classic films is an eternal no-no. When in doubt always refer to Hollywood Elsewhere’s aspect-ratio motto, to wit: More height is always right. Because Criterion has declined to respect this simple, elegant rule, I’m giving a preemptive thumbs down to this all-new A Hard Day’s Night, although I’m sure it’ll look and sound great in almost every other respect.

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