Sent this morning to Wade Williams, the Kansas City-based film archivist who owns the largest independent library of science-fiction film rights, and more particularly owns the rights to Invaders From Mars (’53) as well as, I presume, all material elements:
“Greetings, Wade — Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere here. Journalist for 35 years, former projectionist at Sono Cinema in Norwalk, former employee of Sid Geffen, friend of the late L.M. Kit Carson and big fan of William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders From Mars.
“When, if ever, will Invaders be HD scanned and made available for HD streaming? Or perhaps even for a Bluray? The 50th anniversary DVD came out…what, 12 or 13 years ago and nothing has happened since, and the world is moving on.
Todd Kessler‘s Bloodline, a 13-episode Netflix series beginning on 3.20, is a family melodrama set in what looks to be Southern Florida…cool. A story about the Rayburns with Kyle Chandler as John, the apparently responsible #1 son…fine. And Linda Cardellini as Meg, presumably his wife. Sam Shepard and Sissy Spacek appear to be playing the parents…fine. But oh, God…oh, please, no…dear God, help us all…Ben Mendelsohn, the grungiest and sleaziest-looking character actor working today, is playing Danny, the bad-news brother. I don’t know if I can take much more of Mendelsohn. Except for his low-key gambler in Mississipi Grind he always plays lowlife scumbags who are up to no good and probably have halitosis. He walks into the room and it’s “okay, here’s the sweaty scumbag who’s going to poison the well and drag everyone to hell.”
Jake Gittes: How much are you worth? Vladimir Putin: I have no idea. How much do you want? Jake Gittes: I just wanna know what you’re worth. More than 150 billion? Vladimir Putin: Oh my, yes! Jake Gittes: Closer to $200 billion? Vladimir Putin: Quite possible. I really don’t have an exact figure. Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can’t already afford? Vladimir Putin: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future! Jake Gittes: You need $200 billion to wrangle the future with? Some would consider a billion dollars to be an enormous fortune. Vladimir Putin: It’s not the amount, Mr. Gittes. It’s the fact that it’s there for the taking and no one can stop me.
An Olive Films Bluray of Billy Wilder’s old-hat, close-to-excruciating Kiss Me Stupid streets tomorrow. No way am I buying or watching it. I’ll watch almost anything in black-and-white Scope, which I happen to be queer for, but I draw the line at Kiss Me, Stupid. It’s not so much the overbearing lead performance by Ray Walston, who was hired at the last-minute when Peter Sellers suffered a heart attack, and Kim Novak is…well, not too bad even though Polly the Pistol is a pathetic character. It’s Dean Martin I can’t stand. He’s playing himself here — a rich, big-name Italian crooner who’s so smug and lazy he can barely say his lines without putting himself to sleep…thinks he’s the center of the universe but in fact is completely out of swing with mid ’60s culture and doesn’t know it and doesn’t care, and who has no funny lines…just a smug, oily-haired lech trying to bang Novak while getting half-bombed.
(l. to r.) Kim Novak, Ray Walston, Dean Martin in a rare color snap from the set of Kiss Me Stupid.
From a 3.27.11 Glenn Kenny Some Came Running piece called “I’m With Stupid: “One thing I find perverse enjoyment in with Kiss Me, Stupid, is its coarseness, or more precisely the way that coarseness manifests itself. It was made just as the sexual revolution was revving up and the studio system was circling the drain. While Wilder’s comic sensibility was always at least partially about pushing a joke or double-entendre past whatever the acceptable breaking point for the Breen Office was, the man himself was in some ways a bit of a prig. His ’60s films were getting more and more frantic, but with Kiss Me, Stupid, there’s an almost palpable sense of Wilder saying ‘screw this.’
With the Best Picture Oscar nearly in the bag for Birdman, this morning I wrote the usual Oscarologists a question many didn’t want to hear. Who has attempted an honest, warts-and-all, what-really-happened explanation about why so many Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby-ites predicted a Boyhood Best Picture victory for so many months? Me: “Some of you have to ask yourself and your Boyhood brethren, ‘Were we just smelling our own asses the whole time or was there something out there that seriously conveyed that Boyhood was a winning horse?”
This morning Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and I discuss the current state of Oscar-releated mea culpas and second thoughts in the wake of the Birdman surge.
Only three responded to my letter — Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil (with whom I recorded a 25-minute discussion” about an hour ago) Variety critic Scott Foundas and an entertainment journalist who asked for anonymity.
But first, an excerpt from an “oh, fuck it, fine…Birdman wins!” piece posted this morning by Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, a longtime Boyhood ally who is basically ascribing the popularity of Birdman to old-boy industry narcissism, which is an idea advanced earlier this month by Grantland‘s Mark Harris.
