Day: April 24, 2017

I own a razor-sharp HD-streaming version of John Frankenheimer‘s Seven Days in May (’64), and I really don’t see how the Warner Archive Bluray can look much better. It’s a nicely done A-minus film, but it only has one great scene — i.e., when Kirk Douglas (Col. Jiggs Casey) first informs Fredric March (President Jordan Lyman) and Martin Balsam (Paul Girard) that a military plot to overthrow the government may be underway. It’s all dialogue, but the late-night atmosphere and just-right performances seethe with tension.

There’s only one big problem. Every scene that features or alludes to Ava Gardner‘s Eleanor Holbrook character, the vaguely alcoholic ex-mistress of Burt Lancaster‘s General Scott, is weak. The movie tells us that a few steamy letters about their affair might compromise Scott’s standing with the public. However prudish or naive American culture might have been 53 years ago, this is a huge subplot sinkhole today. Sexual dalliances can harm the reputation of a politician running for office, but who could care about a little wick-dipping when it comes to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? So what if a Curtis LeMay-like figure has been playing “poke-her”?

I ignored Acorn’s Smiley’s People Bluray when it popped in August ’13. I’d watched it two or three times on DVD, and I figured that high-def resolution wasn’t worth the candle. But I’ve just bought it for two reasons: (a) the price is down to $26 and change, and (b) I realized that Acorn hadn’t cleavered it down to conform to the aspect-ratio fascism of 16 x 9 screens — they actually stuck with the original 4 x 3 boxy shape, which was de rigeur when this legendary miniseries premiered in ’82. My heart warmed over. I couldn’t help myself.

From Hugh Hart’s wheretowatch.com’s piece about the silhouette-y main-title sequence for Feud: Bette and Joan: “Kyle Cooper, who first turned industry heads in 1995 with his famously gritty main title sequence for David Fincher’s Se7en, decided to render the Feud stars in silhouette after studying Saul Bass‘s 1955 title sequence for The Man With the Golden Arm. He also checked out the 2002 opening for Catch Me While If You Can and revisited paper cut-out collages produced by Henri Matisse. The wiry sculptures by Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti were another key influence.”

Quote: “I set these parameters that everything had to be in silhouette, so we wouldn’t see any details in the people’s face and there wouldn’t be any kind of shading.”

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Nobody needs to make a big thing out of this except myself and the SRO, but we’ve decided to tie the knot at a sunset beach ceremony this Friday. West of Trancas around 7 pm, actually. Ourselves and three or four friends. No band, no formal wear, no caterer, no crossed lances. Just the vows, the sand, the magic-hour light and the sound of the waves. Chris the “officiant guy” will conduct the ceremony and make it all come out right.

I haven’t been married in 25 years, but I’ve sampled enough iffy, mezzo-mezzo or inharmonious relationships to know what the right chemistry and a lucky connection feel like. Do I have a deep and abiding need to get married? No — I could be very happy just living in sin. But if I don’t pull the trigger before long the SRO will be obliged to return to Russia so why fiddle around? The family thinks it’s happening too quickly, but I know a good thing when it’s fallen into my lap. I’m holding five hearts, queen high. Plus we’re doing Italy after the Cannes Film Festival, and we might as well call it a honeymoon.

Plus she needs to dive into the job market and make it happen as best she can, and she really can’t do that without the necessary credentials. She’s executive material with an impressive job history. She’s my idea of whipsmart and well-organized. No, I don’t remember the plot of Peter Weir‘s Green Card, but I assure you I’m not Andie McDowell and the SRO is not Gerard Depardieu.

We’ve been shoulder-shrugging about the doubters. They might be right, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. I’m basically that Warren Zevon guy in “Lawyers, Guns and Money” — “I took a little risk.”

If it doesn’t work out, I’ll survive. I’ll always have the column, which I’ve been married to for 18 and 1/2 years now. But I suspect it will, at least for a few years. Or maybe longer. She’s beautiful and blonde and laughs easily. I trust her. When you meet someone who’s “great partner material”, you just know. (I had the same instinct about my first wife, Maggie.) Like me she loves to hike and ride bikes and travel, and she loves my cats. I’ve never been with a smarter, more loyal and super-focused lady in my life. And, like I said, if things go south I’ll always have my wordsmithing.

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I’ll be getting around to this before the week’s out. By the weekend for sure. Have to get ready, think it through, prepare, etc.

Lewis Gilbert‘s Damn The Defiant!, a British-produced tale of a 1790s mutiny aboard a British warship, opened in England on 4.15.62, and then in the U.S. in late September. Two and a half months later Lewis Milestone‘s Mutiny on the Bounty, a bigger, American-financed, star-driven stirring of the same basic ingredients, opened in reserved-seat theatres. Mutiny was a bust ($13.7 million gross vs. $19 million in negative costs) but it sold more tickets and attracted a lot more attention than poor Damn The Defiant!, which was regarded as an also-ran even though it beat Bounty to the box-office by several weeks.

A similar dynamic is affecting a pair of upcoming Winston Churchill dramas. Jonathan Teplitzsky‘s British-produced Churchill, will open on 6.2.17 in the U.S. and 6.17 in England. Nearly six months later Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour, a seemingly bigger, brassier, possibly more dimensionalized Churchill drama with Gary Oldman in the title role, will open stateside via Focus Features.

You know that Wright’s film is going to blow away Teplitzsky’s in terms of press attention, award-season heat and ticket sales. Then again you can’t dismiss Brian Cox, whose Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter was just as malevolent as Anthony Hopkins‘ in The Silence of the Lambs. Cox does it first, and then another actor with bigger backing redefines.

France’s Emmanuel Macron, the pragmatic businessman and centrist who heads En Marche!, will face nationalist rightwing candidate Marine Le Pen in a 5.7 runoff election. After doing some research and particularly after reading this 4.17 Guardian profile by Angelique Chrisafis, Hollywood Elsewhere is rooting for Macron. He’s certainly a more acceptable candidate than Le Pen, whose anti-immigration stance makes her the French Trump. On top of which Macron was only 16 when Kurt Cobain died.

Incidentally: The 39 year-old Macron is married to 63 year-old Brigitte Trogneaux, whom he met when he was 15 and she was 39. She was his drama teacher in La Providence high school in Amiens. His parents tried to break it up but Macron wouldn’t fold. He and Trogneaux were married in ’07. Imagine the prosecutorial rage and tabloid frenzy if a similar-type relationship had happened in the U.S. back in the ’90s.

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Michael Mann producing and partly directing an eight-to-ten-hour miniseries about the battle of Hue, based on Mark Bowden‘s forthcoming book about same? Are you kidding me? Of course I’ll watch it, devour it, buy the Bluray, etc. I’m there.

Mann and Michael De Luca have acquired the rights to Bowden’s “Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam” (Grove Atlantic, 6.6). The key factors are (a) what’s the budget?, (b) who will write the screenplay? and (b) will Mann and DeLuca be able to shoot in the Vietnamese city of Hue as well as the Citadel (which I visited in 2012) or will they have to recreate?

I’ve been to Hue twice, actually, so don’t tell me.

From the release: “Hue was the epicenter of Hanoi’s 1968 Tet Offensive, in which Hanoi sought to win the war in one stroke. Part military action and popular uprising, NVA infantry crossed mountains, completely undetected, to the outskirts of Huế while VC cadre infiltrated weapons and ordinance into the city. On January 31 at 2:30am they launched a surprise attack, overrunning the city except for two small military outposts.”

Mann statement: “Mark Bowden has written a masterpiece of intensely dramatic non-fiction. [His] achievement is in making ‘them’ into us. We are them. There are no background people; people abstracted into statistics, body counts. There is the sense that everybody is somebody, as each is in the reality of his or her own life.

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