Month: May 2014

If I was the sort of person who uses postage stamps even occasionally, I would own a book of Harvey Milk stamps. Definitely. The Times of Harvey Milk made me a lifelong admirer of the late San Francisco supervisor. I’ve watched it a good six or seven times at least. In any case I’m appalled by current attempts by the American Family Association to persuade the USPS to discontinue selling the stamp by goading anti-gay bigots into refusing to accept mail with the Harvey stamp (or something like that). The AFA is a right-wing hate group — the same kind of people who were behind the 1978 Briggs initiative, which sought to keep gay people from teaching at schools, and which Milk campaigned against and helped to defeat.

Have you ever seen The Indian Fighter, a 1955 Kirk Douglas actioner directed by Andre De Toth and co-written by Ben Hecht? I didn’t think so. Have you ever heard of it? There’s no reason you should have. Why should succeeding generations pay the slightest attention to a film made on auto-pilot? By people who wanted only a commercial success and not much else? Don’t kid yourself — the fate of The Indian Fighter awaits 80% to 90% of the films that have opened in the 21st Century. Deep down producers and directors know it’s not just a matter of dollars and cents, which is why some of them occasionally try to make films that try to sink into people’s souls on some level. Because they want future generations (including their own descendants) to speak about them with affection or at least respect. It’s about legacy. What are the Indian Fighter-level films that have opened (or are due to open) in 2014? X-Men: Days of Future Past, A Million Ways to Die in the West, Maleficent, 22 Jump Street, etc. A special Indian Fighter Lifetime Achievement Award should be given Liam “paycheck” Neeson (except, possibly, for Martin Scorsese‘s Silence and A Walk Among The Tombstones).

Restoration guru Robert Harris recently stated that in terms of a potential decent-quality restoration, the photo-chemical elements of the 202-minute, 70mm roadshow version of John Wayne‘s The Alamo (’60) are all but half-ruined. He’s told Digital Bits editor Bill Hunt that “[even] if a last-ditch restoration were started today, the best that could be achieved would be to return the film to perhaps 60% of its former glory,” Hunt writes. “But 60%, while disappointing, is certainly better than nothing.”

Is The Alamo a great film? No, but it’s a pretty good one — watchable, sturdily performed and generally well-constructed. In my view the fact that it was shot on 70mm mandates a proper preservation. But a petty Catch-22 imposed by rights holder MGM is standing in the way. They won’t fund a restoration on their own (okay, fine) but they won’t allow a crowd-funding effort either because it’ll make them look like pikers.

“There is no restoration effort at this time,” Harris has said on Home Theatre Forum. “Which means that there may never be a restoration effort. Several people have raised the concept of going to outside sources for funding [but] MGM has no interest in the concept, even if the film is lost. It appears that MGM has chosen to allow the film to die, as no immediate action will be taken with elements just one stage above that of industrial waste.”

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Obviously Liam P. Neeson was cast to play Matt Scudder, a tough guy with a guilty past, in Scott Frank‘s adaptation of A Walk Among The Tombstones (Universal, 9.19) , because of his swaggering middle-aged badass rep. But something about this trailer is telling me not to use the word “paycheck.” I may be naive to presume this, but this one seems a tad less opportunistic than the others.

The N.Y. Post‘s Emily Smith is reporting that the below poster for the Weinstein/Dimension’s Sin City: A Dame To Kill For (8.22) was “disapproved by the MPAA ‘for nudity — curve of under breast and dark nipple/areola circle visible through sheer gown.’ Dimension declined to comment but it is believed execs are working on a compromise with the MPAA.”

I’m not approaching Bong Joon-ho‘s Snowpiercer with an attitude. Seething class warfare on Runaway Train sounds like a great concept. But Joon-Ho’s Mother struck me as a little too Brian DePalma-esque, and I’m a bit afraid of that flourishy, operatic style. “There’s no doubting that Bong Joon Ho is a DePalma devotee in the same way that DePalma was a Hitchcock acolyte in the ’70s and ’80s,” I wrote five years ago. “Mother was by far the most interesting sit because of his immaculate and exacting composition of each and every element — deliberately unnatural, conspicuously acted, very much a director’s film.” Joon-ho himself has proudly declared that DePalma is a major inspiration. In my book that means “caveat emptor.”

Where will Ukranian celebrity prankster-masher Vitalii Sediuk, who accosted Brad Pitt Wednesday night at the Malificent premiere, end up in life? What’s the difference between guys like Sediuk and Travis Bickel? Obsessive celebrity stalkers who want nothing more than to brush up against the famous, and in so doing perhaps acquire a little fame for themselves? We’re talking about a culture of instant ADD pestilence that’s manifesting more and more. Sediuk, 25, is reportedly the guy who attempted to kiss Will Smith at the Russian premiere of Men in Black III and hid under America Ferrera‘s dress at the How to Train Your Dragon 2 premiere in Cannes.

“I should be clear that I know and like Ann Hornaday. But this isn’t about having a friend’s back; Ann can definitely take care of herself. This is about the idea that the images and stories we consume matter, that they affect us profoundly, although not always in ways we can see and rarely or never in some clear cause-and-effect fashion. That idea is what Hornaday is struggling with here, and it’s an idea we confront over and over again, in slightly different forms, after every one of these mass shootings that seems to have been deliberately designed by its perpetrator as a media spectacle.

“For Seth Rogen to boil all that down, for his 2 million-plus Twitter followers, to ‘@AnnHornaday how dare you imply that me getting girls in movies caused a lunatic to go on a rampage?’ is a black-comic example of movie-star narcissism. (I originally wrote that Rogen’s phrase about ‘getting girls’ sent an unfortunate signal, and it rubbed a lot of other people the wrong way too. Various commenters have correctly observed that Hornaday put it exactly the same way, so let’s chalk that one up to the endless game of Telephone that is the Internet.)” — from Andrew O’Hehir‘s 5.27 Salon piece titled “How Seth Rogen proved Ann Hornaday’s point about Elliot Rodger.”

The idea behind Maleficent (Disney, 5.30) is to re-imagine Sleeping Beauty along feminist lines so as to reach a female audience that has no use for the old fairy-tale mythology about put-upon female characters finding happiness by hooking up with a gentle dashing prince at the finale….and who can blame them? Malificent is about commanding woman power in the form of Angelina Jolie‘s vengeful sorceress of the flaming cheekbones, no longer a wicked fairy godmother and Mistress of All Evil but a girl who was betrayed and mutilated by a loathsome turncoat (Sharlto Copley, who always plays scurvy creeps) so who can blame her for wanting a little revenge? She’s never entirely sincere about being evil, in short, and even if she seems wicked-ish at times she certainly has her reasons so calm down and give the girl a break.

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Did the dysfunctional family reunion dramedy begin with Arsenic and Old Lace or The Big Chill or…where did it begin and when did it become a genre? Everybody comes home for a funeral or because someone is dying, and they all hash their lives out and one or two fall in love with someone new. One of my favorites is Thomas Bezucha‘s The Family Stone (’05). The 21st Century has seen a few films in this vein (okay, more than a few) but I don’t mind seeing another one. I like the title and I’m definitely down with anything Jason Bateman does, but I’m a tiny bit scared of “directed by Shawn Levy.” But no reason to fret. Tina Fey, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne (who has costarred in a lot of films lately), Corey Stoll, Jane Fonda, Dax Shepard, Connie Britton, Timothy Olyphant and Kathryn Hahn. Warner Bros., opens on 9.12.14.

It’s a bit after 6 pm. I saw Maleficent (decent, handsomely composed but basically the same old family-friendly CG fantasy package that turns up at the start of every summer) but not until roughly 3 pm today so I just got back to the pad. Now I have to catch Doug Liman‘s Edge of Tomorrow at 8 pm at a Gaumont plex on the Champs d’Elysee…starts in 50 minutes. Update: After I heard from a WB staffer around 11 this morning that it was fine for me to attend, a senior Warner Bros. publicity who had been cc’ed on the approval message met me at the door of the Champs d’Elysee screening to tell me I couldn’t attend as there was no room due to overbooking. That wasn’t the reason, of course, but since when has Warner Bros. publicity made an exceptional effort to be friendly to Hollywood Elsewhere? Then again it’s just another summer movie. I won’t be back from Paris in time to catch the June 2nd all-media so I’ll just have to see it opening day.