The just-released Film DetectiveBluray of Fielder Cook‘s Patterns (’56) has been mastered at 1.66, which is fine by HE standards. I saw it for the first time last August via Amazon Prime streaming (here’s my mini-review), and I’m sure Film Detective will understand my preference for watching it at 1.33, which is how Amazon Prime presents it. Cook directed the live TV version a year before the film came out, remember, and had therefore already composed with a boxy visual scheme. Again — I’m not saying the 1.66 a.r. isn’t acceptable. I’m just a boxy obsessive. In the realm of mid 50s black-and-white films, 1.66 is certainly preferable to Paramount Home Video’s Bluray cleavering of Billy Wilder‘s Sabrina at 1.78:1. I happen to own an Amazon streaming version at 1.33, and it’s quite beautiful.
When actors get into strident on-screen arguments and start jawing their opponents with a challenge of some kind, they always add a “huh?” to the end of each statement. Such as “what will you do if you knock on her door and her husband answers…huh?” or “what kind of brilliant move will this be if your friends wind up hating you…huh?” I’m mentioning this because people in real life never say “huh?” — only actors. It’s something they all pick up in acting school or whatever. I can only say that I’ve never argued with anyone in my life who has ever used a “huh?” at the end of any sentence. Tell me I’m wrong.
I haven’t seen Paul Schrader‘s American Gigolo since it opened in February 1980. I may have actually caught it at a Manhattan press screening a few weeks before, come to think. Soon after I sat down with Schrader for a Films in Review interview piece (Vol. XXXI, issue 5, pages 284 — 276, “Paul Schrader: AmericanGigolo and Other Matters”). It was the beginning of a slicker, less gritty era mixed with the currents of darkness and depravity that you get with any Schrader film.
Richard Gere was young and beautiful then, of course, and the world of Manhattan was a smooth and seductive realm that was at the forefront of change. I recall thinking as I was writing the Schrader piece in my West 4th Street studio that the ’70s were being jettisoned and that “the 80s!” was a whole ‘nother state of mind. Glammy, greedier. Reaganism was waiting in the wings.
I was working hard and feeling anxious about money 24/7. I regarded myself as a so-so writer, at best. I would do cocaine and/or quaaludes whenever fortune smiled, and every so often I’d succumb to momentary feelings of shallow ecstasy. I used to dream about wearing great-looking Italian suits and shoes just like Gere does in this clip, except I couldn’t afford them. And yet somehow my impoverished circumstances didn’t interfere with my batting average, which was around .400.
A few months before seeing Gigolo I had donned a pair of black Raybans at a New York Film Festival opening-night party, and Andrew Sarris, standing nearby, cracked that I looked “like a Roman pimp in a Fellini film” — a moment of brief comfort. No big-gun critic had ever spoken to me with even a hint of affection or bonami before.
I haven’t seen Gigolo in 36 years, and I’m thinking I’d like to catch it again at the Aero this evening, but watching a 35mm print concerns me. How pink will it be? A DCP of Schrader’s Hardcore (’79) will follow. Schrader will drop by for a brief q & a at some point during the evening.
I have so completely given up on Tim Burton that I didn’t even flirt with the idea of seeing Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (20th Century Fox, 9.30). I figured it would just be another design-driven film aimed at the family trade, which is what many are calling it. With the exception of Mars Attacks!, I was with Burton all the way from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure to Sweeney Todd. For me Ed Wood was the creative peak with Beetlejuice right behind it. But I lost patience when Burton began focusing mostly on CG-driven films that seemed to be more about production design than characters or hip attitudes — Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice In Wonderland, Dark Shadows, Frankenweenie. Yes, Big Eyes repped a swing back to adult-level material but it didn’t get me.
Posted on 9.25 by Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson: “I don’t want to oversell Miss Peregrine as some sort of ruminative mood piece about the human experience. It’s not. It’s a kid’s film, co-starring Samuel L. Jackson as an eyeball-eating mad scientist. But it’s the rare kid’s film that has a sense of risk and stakes and tension to it, that admirably dares to be violent and unsettling and sad.
“Those qualities have long been Burton’s bailiwick — but here, he finally synthesizes them together in a way that’s coherent and thoughtful. Miss Peregrine is a testament to finding the perfect material to match a director’s tastes, rather than trying for some hideous compromise, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Alice in Wonderland. As Tim Burton’s best film in almost a decade, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has an exciting air of rejuvenation about it. It’s confident and judicious with its peculiarities, while letting its heart and intellect—not Johnny Depp in a bad wig—be its stars.”
It’s 9:41 am and I’ve nothing to say here. West Coast twitter coverage of last night’s SNL Trump-Clinton debate spoof surged around 10 or 10:30 pm, and was all but spent when I awoke this morning at 7 am. Okay, Kate McKinnon‘s cough, cane + somersault introduction was special. She was the life of the party. Alec Baldwin nailed Trump’s voice, posture and hand gestures (SNL even got the makeup right with the reverse-raccoon white circles around his eyes) but Trump’s relentless self-parody on the campaign trail (his Hillary imitation last night in Manheim, Pennsylvania is an instant addition to his reel) makes a comedic spoof, no matter how sly or skillful, a moot point.
