Month: July 2014

Last night and for no particular reason I re-watched Peter Bogdanovich‘s Directed by John Ford, which came out on DVD in ’09. It’s a valentine, a journey, a meditation. Eight years ago I did a phoner with Bogdanovich about the doc. I gave it a fresh listen this morning, and I was moderately impressed. It’s a reasonably decent discussion as these things tend to go.

Here’s a portion of the 11.6.06 article that contained the mp3: “I’ve tried and it’s impossible — there’s no feeling just one way about John Ford. His movies have been wowing and infuriating me all my life, and after seeing Peter Bogdanovich‘s Directed by John Ford — an expanded, unexpectedly touching documentary about the legendary helmer that will show twice on Turner Classic Movies Tuesday evening — the muddle is still there.

Read more

The sixth edition of David Thomson‘s New Biographical Dictionary of Film arrived yesterday on my doorstep. I’ll now regard it as the Marilyn Monroe version. It’s the best all-time reference book about films in the world. It simply has to be on one’s living-room bookshelf or at least on your iPad or Kindle…no arguments. I’ve owned every edition since…when did it begin, the mid ’80s? The book never loses its pungency. I can pick it up any old time and get lost in seconds flat. Some of Thomson’s appraisals are more than brilliant — I could go on for hours but try “bitter”, “hilarious”, “cruel”, “pithy”, “devastating”, “delicious”, “serene”, etc. I know I’m supposed to acknowledge the new arrivals and the new focus on cable stars (Gandolfini, Cranston), etc. Read the following excerpts from Thomson’s profiles of Fred MacMurray and Madonna after the jump. If they don’t persuade, you’ll never be persuaded.

Read more

I don’t know who “Soapbxprod” is but some time ago he/she posted (a) color footage taken by Roddy McDowall of a 1965 Labor Day gathering at Rock Hudson‘s Malibu home (Jane Fonda, Julie Andrews, etc.) and (b) fascinating silent footage of the shooting of From Here to Eternity [after jump] at Oahu’s Scofield Barracks in late ’52 or early ’53 — Fred Zinneman, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr. “Found in National Archives, lost and forgotten…original 16mm was telecined to Digital Betacam in 1998, a U-Matic dub with visible time code was made for editing,” etc.

Read more

Last September I saw half of John Ridley‘s Jimi — All Is By My Side at the Toronto Film Festival and was immediately impressed. I finally saw all of it at last month’s Los Angeles Film Festival. I was convinced all the more that Andre Benjamin‘s performance as the late Jimi Hendrix is one of the year’s stand-outs. The role is more about layers than revelations. The film doesn’t deliver conventional dramatic moments as much as a low-key immersion into a guy who lived deep within his soul but wildly and exuberantly transformed when he performed. Benjamin (i.e., Andrew 3000) totally captures Hendrix’s manner, vibe, voice…that gentleness, that ambivalent but spiritually directed mood-trip thing. XLrator Media will be releasing Jimi: All Is By My Side theatrically on 9.26.14.

Condolences to the family and friends of the late Louis Zamperini, the former Olympic athlete and World War II survivor of a Pacific Ocean plane crash and Japanese prisoner-of-war camp who went to become an inspirational speaker and lived to the ripe old age of 97. Ditto his legions of admirers. Zamperini passed yesterday in Los Angeles. Sorry. Hats off.

Zamperini’s life was turned into a book by Laura Hillenbrand and then adapted into a forthcoming Oscar-bait film, Unbroken (Universal, 12.25), by director Angelina Jolie and screenwriters Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson. Jack O’Connell (whom I admired in ’71 after catching it at the Berlinale last February) portrays Zamperini in the film.

All along the word about Jolie’s Unbroken has been that it’s not so much another survival-at-sea film (a la Life of Pi and All Is Lost) as an inspirational piece about a man’s indomitable spirit. I haven’t read any of the drafts, much less Hillenbrand’s book, but the film may contain a thematic undercurrent that I haven’t paid attention to until now.

Read more

We’ve been assuming all along that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman would debut stateside at Telluride but now I’ve heard it really is happening — no ifs, ands or maybes. Another confirmed Telluride “get “, I’m hearing, is Werner Herzog‘s Queen of the Desert, a dramatic biopic about “British traveller, writer, archaeologist, explorer, cartographer and political officer” Gertrude Bell (Nicole Kidman).

There’s also convincing chatter about Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice, David Fincher‘s Gone Girl and Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar debuting at the New York Film Festival, although the most recent buzz says that Interstellar could play Telluride first. But the other two are thought to be NYFF exclusives.

Read more

I wasn’t paying attention when the celebrated One-Eyed Jacks, the only film Marlon Brando ever directed, played at the New Beverly on April 2nd and 3rd. What was I thinking? I blew a chance to see an allegedly first-rate 35mm print (provided by Quentin Tarantino), which was a rare opportunity indeed. There’s no way to see a decent version of this 1961 VistaVision-shot western as the rights fell into public domain a few years ago and the market has since been flooded with abysmal-looking DVDs. Paramount has the elements in a vault but they’ll almost certainly never pay for a restoration effort, which would probably cost between $90K and $100K all in.

Let’s face it — I’m never again going to see this film in any kind of decent shape (vibrant VistaVision color, crisp focus, 1.66 or 1.85 aspect ratio) unless I attend a theatrical showing here or at MOMA or someplace like that. The chances of a handsome-looking DVD or Bluray being created are probably close to non-existent. Jacks is dead and gone unless Paramount decides to license it to a company that will to spend the money to assemble a first-rate remastering. In a pig’s eye!

The only way to bask in this landmark film right now is to beg Tarantino to offer his print for a special Hollywood Elsewhere theatre or screening-room showing. Maybe at the New Beverly or Cinefamily or Aidikoff or the Wilshire Screening Room. I’ll cough up for the rental fees. How about it, Quentin? For the sake of solemn Brando worship?

Read more

Two days ago the Indiewire guys posted a part-fantasy, part-real Wish List of 50 films they’d like to see turn up at the Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York Film Festivals in late August and September. All goodies, high nutrition. But an overabundance, I think. I’ve trimmed some of the dicey-sounding titles and brought the number down to 36. Simpler that way. And if you include likely festival repeaters like Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan, Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies and Craig Johnson‘s The Skeleton Twins, it comes to 39.

1. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice; 2. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman; 3. Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar (word around the campfire is that it’s an actual possibility for Telluride); 4. Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Wild; 5. Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes (I’ve heard a couple of things); 6. Stephen Daldry‘s Trash; 7. J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year; 8. David Fincher‘s Gone Girl (will Fincher follow the same break-out strategy he used for The Social Network?); 9. Noah Baumbach‘s While We’re Young (New York Film Festival?); 10. Jeff Nichols‘ Midnight Special; 11. Jason Reitman‘s Men, Women & Children (is Reitman on some kind of who-knows streak?); 12. Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater; 13. Saul Dibb‘s Suite Francaise; 14. Thomas Vinterberg‘s Far from the Madding Crowd; 15. Todd Haynes‘ Carol (I don’t even know what this is); 16. Fatih Akin‘s The Cut; 17. Liv Ullman‘s Miss Julie; 18. Daniel Espinosa‘s Child 44; 19. Anton Corbijn‘s Life; 20. Dylan Kidd‘s Get A Job; 21. James Ponsoldt‘s The End of the Tour; 22. Werner Herzog‘s Queen of the Desert; 23. Stephen Frears‘ Untitled Lance Armstrong Project; 24. Alex Garland‘s Ex Machina, 25. Christian Petzold‘s Phoenix (likely Telluride); 26. Michael Roskam‘s The Drop; 27. David Gordon Green‘s Manglehorn; 28. Ramin Bahrani‘s 99 Homes; 29. Tom McCarthy‘s The Cobbler; 30. Rupert Goold‘s True Story; 31. John MacLean‘s Slow West; 32. Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler; 33. Kevin McDonald‘s Black Sea; 34. Michael Cuesta‘s Kill The Messenger; 35. Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth; and 36. Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette.

I saw Rob Reiner‘s And So It Goes (Clarius, 7.25) last night at a KCET screening at the Aero. What do want from me? You want me to say I was knocked out, delighted, turned around? I wasn’t. Mark Andrus‘s screenplay is drawn from the same well as As Good As It Gets (snippy, selfish misanthrope grows a heart) with a little sprinkling of Heidi, and is therefore way too predictable for my tastes. But some of it works. It’s amiable enough and…well, somewhat better than I expected. Aimed, yes, at 60- and 70-somethings. Delivers some above-average insult humor. Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton score every now and then.

Reiner strode down the aisle and spoke with moderator Pete Hammond when it ended, and reminded everyone that he’s definitely sharp and attuned and alive on the planet. The boomer target audience is “100% into seeing the film and 40% able to get to the theatre,” he quipped.

Leaving aside Jeff Sneider‘s perplexing if not appalling admiration for Neighbors and 22 Jump Street as the two finest comedies of 2014 so far, I’m down with his view that the two best male performances have come from Locke‘s Tom Hardy and The Skeleton Twins‘ Bill Hader. Along with Miles Teller in Whiplash, Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Steve Carell in Foxcatcher and Andre Benjamin (a.k.a. Andre 3000) in Jimi — All Is By My Side.

“Men acting idiotically and fearfully while planning to kill bad bosses just isn’t funny,” I wrote in my 7.6.11 review of Horrible Bosses. “Sneaking into the homes of would-be victims without wearing shoe gloves and hair bonnets and rubber surgical gloves is absolute idiocy and therefore not funny. Jennifer Aniston playing a small business owner (i.e. a dentist) who’s an intemperate sexual predator in a dark wig and who flashes portions of her hot bod and risks years of struggle to get through medical school in order to satisfy passing fancy is degrading and ridiculous and not in the least bit funny. It’s doubly unfunny when the object of her lust is little male hygienist with a high-pitched voice who probably has a schlong the size of a rook on a chess board. I could go on and on and on.

“I sat there like a tombstone, studying the screen like a cop studies a suspected felon during a late-night grilling at a grimy downtown precinct and not even tittering (okay, I inwardly tittered) until one partiuclar joke came along, which I really did laugh at. But even then I didn’t go ‘haaaah-hah-hahhh-hah-ahhh-hah…whoa-ho-ho…gee, whoo!’ I just went ‘hah-huh.’

Read more

Six years and four months ago, Vanity Fair contributor Sam Kashner interviewed the extremely press-shy Richard Lester. It happened “on a chilly morning at a gastropub near a marina in Chichester, England,” Kashner writes. One of the topics was Lester’s two Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night (which opened on 7.6.64, or almost exactly 50 years ago) and Help!. In honor of the HDN anniversary or the recently released Criterion Bluray or both, VF has published an article by Kashner about the ’08 encounter. The piece also contains references to the here-and-now.

Richard Lester, now 82, in a still from the website of 2013 Febio Fest, which Lester attended.

Lester might be interview-averse with journalists, but he visited the 2013 Febio Fest in Česke Budejovice, a mid-sized city in the Czech Republic.

Kashner’s article deals with Lester’s decision to quit directing due to the death of actor and longtime Lester friend Roy Kinnear, who suffered a fatal heart attack during the filming of Lester’s The Return of the Musketeers (’89). This was preceded by a performing accident in which Kinnear was “thrown from his horse, fractured his pelvis and suffered massive internal bleeding.” The 54 year-old Kinnear died the next day.

Read more