This frame-capture from Orson Welles’ visit to the Dick Cavett Show on July 27, 1970 is misleading. It makes it look like Welles was the Colossus of Rhodes, like he could stop trucks in the street with one arm. But all the sites say he was only around six-foot-one. Cavett was only seven inches shorter but you’d never know it from this shot. One thing is clear, and that’s that Welles had a bison-sized head.
Tonight author and film essayist Karina Longworth will sign copies of her coffee-table book, “Hollywood Frame by Frame: The Unseen Silver Screen in Contact Sheets, 1951-1997” at Santa Monica’s Aero prior to a 7:30 pm screening of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up (’66). I naturally assumed that a few choice Blow-Up stills are contained in her book, but Longworth informed me otherwise. She was just invited to show up and sign, and is not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. So I dug around yesterday and found a few pics online. I’ll be attending the Aero screening but I’m very, very afraid of how this exquisitely captured film will look on the Aero screen. If it’s a DCP, fine, but if they’re showing a 35mm print it’ll probably look dicey. I’ve almost gotten to the point where I hate 35mm these days. Either way I’ll be flabbergasted if the Aero version looks anywhere near as good as the immaculate HDX high-def version I own on Vudu.
“Have you seen the Mortdecai trailer?,” a critic friend wrote this morning. “I’ve seen it in theaters twice recently, and each time I thought ‘who would find this crap funny?’ The answer: the people sitting around me, guffawing at every lame riff.” In other words, it’s going to do pretty well with the none-too-clevers. Congrats to Johnny Depp, director David Koepp and everyone else who was significantly involved.
Last night I watched a high-def feed of Sam Raimi‘s A Simple Plan (’98), which still seems like his finest film ever — the best written (by Scott Smith), the best acted (particularly by Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda), the most thrillingly plotted, and certainly the most morally complex. I hadn’t seen it for 15 or 16 years. It holds up and then some. A filthy lucre film on the level of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Fargo, Macbeth (particularly when you think of Fonda’s Lady Macbeth-like wife), Of Mice and Men, etc. But it got me to wondering why Raimi never again came close to making anything like it. For The Love Of The Game followed, and then The Gift. And then, for the last 12 years, web-casting and fantasy — Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Drag Me to Hell and Oz the Great and Powerful. Raimi mades his bones in cult horror (Evil Dead flicks, Darkman, Army of Darkness), and then seemed to step into the world-class, award-calibre league with A Simple Plan, and then…you tell me.