Day: April 26, 2016

From 1.25.16 post, titled “Deflating, To Say The Least”: “This morning I saw Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg‘s Weiner, a fascinating, constantly up-close account of the two Weiner sexting scandals — the first in 2011, the second during his 2013 run for N.Y. Mayor — that ended his political career for life. I thought I knew the Weiner saga up, down, backwards and sideways, but this doc throws a new light upon it. A darkly funny one, I mean.

“It’s mainly about grimly strategizing and growing a tough hide while your staff sits around with neutral expressions and your entire life gradually melts into butterscotch pudding. YouTube videos of wildebeests being eaten alive by wild dogs have more human compassion than many of the events and conversations shown in this film. Oh, and the third-act McDonald’s escape run is a classic.

“And poor, put-upon Huma Abedin, Weiner’s wife and Hillary’s top aide who endured a form of spousal abuse during these two scandals that has rarely been equaled in any area. The looks she gives her husband throughout the film are indescribable.

“All I felt was sympathy for Huma, just as most people felt sympathy for Hillary during the Monica Lewinsky scandal or ’98 and ’99. Almost all politicians have the same ravenous appetites, and almost all men are dogs. All the public asks is that they keep their canine urges private and discreet and consensual. Is that really so hard?

Read more

The other night I was waiting in line inside George’s Greek Grill, or rather the West Hollywood branch (8807 Santa Monica Blvd.). It’s right next to a popular gay bar, and of course is part of the whole Santa Monica Blvd. party-boy strip. There were five or six guys in front of me, one brawny and bare-chested, and they were flaunting their sexual energy, to put it mildly. Dry humping, grab-assing, hormones, whatever. Unspoken thematic undercurrent: “We’re here because we’re hungry, of course, but we’re in the mood to joyfully express other things while we decide what to order because…well, because we fucking feel like it.” I was just staring at the menu and figuring this too shall pass. Then I noticed a guy off to the side giving another guy a kind of grinding lapdance, and then he stood up and started performing a simulated blowjob. Inner dialogue as I waited: “I like erotic abandon as much as you guys do but is there any chance you could give this shit a slight rest? This isn’t a fucking bar — it’s a place to order and eat and chill out. The bar is next door.” I really like that restaurant too — the food is cheap but quite good.

Six days ago I reported that the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival screening of a digitally restored version of Marlon Brando‘s One-Eyed Jacks would offer a mixed blessing. While the vivid, wider-than-ever VistaVsion images will surely look beautiful, the aspect ratio presentation will not be within HE’s favored 1.66:1 aspect ratio, nor 1.75:1 or even 1.78:1, but within the dreaded 1.85:1 — a cleavering of the film’s original VistaVision capturings of 1.5:1.

Is this a tragedy? No, but it’s a damn shame — in my view a rash slicing of a significant portion of Charles Lang‘s cinematography, which could have at least been cropped at 1.75:1 or 1.78:1. If you ask me whacking this 1961 Western down to 1.85:1 is damn near unforgivable.

A day after this post appeared on 4.20 HE nemesis Bob Furmanek, who has repeatedly urged DVD/Bluray distributors to crop non-Scope films shot in the mid ’50s to early ’60s at 1.85:1, posted the following in the comment thread: “We were consulted by the Film Foundation and provided documents on this film to insure presentation in the correct aspect ratio”, which Furmanek maintained was 1.85:1 because Paramount recommended this a.r. in a way-back-when message to exhibitors.

This despite the studio having admitted in the same statement [see above] that VistaVision is “flexible and compatible, and [can] be played in any aspect ratio from 1.33:1 to 2.0:1.”

I don’t know where the 1.33 option came from as basic VistaVision photography captures images at 1.5, but Universal and The Film Foundation certainly could have gone with a 1.66, 1.75 or 1.78 aspect ratio.

Read more

Bernie Sanders announced his White House candidacy almost exactly a year ago, on 4.30.15. He didn’t make it but oh, did he change the conversation. For the first time since the 1930s, it’s now completely legitimate and accepted to openly question the validity of balls-out Darwinian capitalism, which until recently was seen as being a hallowed, God-given system that has worked hand-in-hand with American democracy. The Sanders message has basically been that democracy is vital but not so much rapacious, blood-in-the-water Wall Street game-playing, which over the last ten years has led to many getting the shaft while favoring the very few. Who today would argue that analysis with a straight face?

European socialist democracies, Sanders has said time and again, deliver more fairness, more compassion and a better quality of life for a broader spectrum of people. It’s all there, chapter and verse, in Michael Moore’s Where To Invade Next?. The U.S. of A. is not #1 — we’re down in the middle of the list, at best. Which is entirely due to unbridled, unregulated market forces, which have been manifesting since the ’80s in the form of elite corporate gangsterism, plain and simple.

And it took a Jay Bulworth figure, a white-haired guy whose candidacy was initially regarded as eccentric and boutique-y, a guy whom the pundits said had almost no chance of even competing strongly against Hillary Clinton, to slip that message into the mainstream conversation.

Read more

A new trailer for Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow‘s DePalma (A24, 6.10.16) popped the other day. A24 is beginning to show it in screening rooms — a Manhattan viewing on Friday, 4.29, and an L.A. showing on Tuesday, 5.3, for openers. Neither of these fits with my travel schedule as I leave for New York on Friday night. I’ve been asking the A24 guys if I could have a looksee before I leave for France on Thursday evening, 5.5. (I like to acclimate in Paris for three days before training down to Cannes.) A lot of people are leaving for Cannes soon so I suspect I’m not alone. It would all be so simple if there was a willingness to allow for online viewings, but alas, not yet. There’s always early June when I return but…well, I’m jumpy, I guess.

A 5.6.16 Newsweek story says that Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canovery is set to perform (no fooling) a human head transplant procedure. The guy whose head will be attached to a new body and thereby gain a new lease on life is Valery Spiridonov, a 31-year-old Russian software development manager who’s suffering from Werdnig-Hoffman disease, a muscle-wasting disorder.

Will the operation succeed? Perhaps not but then the next neurosurgeon will try it, and then the next and the next. And then one day head transplants will become routine. And then we’ll have vanity head transplants — old people looking to acquire a great new body so they can start all over. The possibilities! My head is spinning.

The procedure, which may happen next year, is the first real-world attempt in this vein. No one is likely to ever graft two heads on a single body, but the fact is that medical technology has actually begun to catch up with The Thing With Two Heads, a 1972 AIP film in which Roosevelt Greer and Ray Milland shared the same body (i.e., Greer’s). I confess to having had a couple of nightmares in which my head was removed and then re-attached…horrible. Canovero’s head transplant will be performed as a two-step procedure — a head anastomosis venture followed by a subsequent spinal cord fusion. This not a put-on — it’s real.

Read more