Day: April 21, 2018

Not sure when Warner Bros. decided to hold special celebrity screenings of Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born (Warner Bros., 10.5), but I’m guessing sometime in early to mid March. All I know is that three big names — Barbra Streisand, Sean Penn and Robert De Niro — have spoken highly of it.

First it was Streisand (“Oh, I can’t say too much…I haven’t seen too much, but it’s good…it’s very, very good.”). Then Penn (“One of the most beautiful, fantastic, it’s the best, and most importantly commercial film I have seen in so many years”). And now De Niro, speaking during a Tribeca Film Festival discussion with Cooper (“It’s terrific and Bradley is excellent in it…the movie is wonderful…I hope it gets the attention I feel it should when it opens…Bradley learned to sing…he really worked hard and it paid off…you see all the hard work he did, it’s special”).

Hollywood Elsewhere to other celebrities who’ve seen it: We get it. You liked the film and you’re happy that Cooper’s debut effort turned out well — great. But that’ll do for now.

In a 4.9 New Republic piece called “Will Hollywood Ever Make Another Children of Men?,” the answer is a simple “no.” Why? Because the apes have decided that theatres are CG funhouses, and that smarthouse, soul-stirring flicks are for streaming, and never the twain small meet.

The article is actually a chat between Alex Shepard and Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz, author of “The Big Picture.” The book basically explains how it’s all turning to CG shit in theatres, but we’re actually in a golden age if you focus on non-theatrical.

Shepard: “2017 was an outstanding year for movies but it does seem like Oscar-bait movies are working on a smaller scale, for a smaller audience, in part because Hollywood has stopped investing in big budget Oscar-bait movies that aspire to a mass audience. In The Big Picture, you argue that three of my favorite recent movies — Michael Clayton, Captain Phillips and Children of Men — would have a much hard time getting made right now.”

Fritz: “That specialty market will certainly survive. If you live in a big enough city you’ll be able to see the next Ladybird in a few years. But most people won’t. They’ll see it on streaming or whatever. And that will be fine. But Children of Men, that’s a great example. I don’t know what it’s budget was — $80 million maybe. It’s not cheap to make that film. You’re making a film that’s really worth seeing on a big screen.

“But there’s no Children of Men cinematic universe. There’s no franchising. There are no tie-ins. There are no sequel possibilities. That’s a one-off film and that’s the type of thing that won’t get made anymore. It’s also the kind of thing that’s tough to replicate for a streaming service. It’s the kind of movie we’re losing and that’s a bummer.”

Bummer? For those of us who’ve been watching aspirational, high-craft, spiritual-deliverance movies in theatres for the last 30 or 40 years, this is a major cultural tragedy. It’s enough to make you think about getting into opioids, brah.

In an 11.20.06 HE piece called “Children = Guernica,” I wrote the following:

“Many critics were impressed by Children of Men‘s virtuosity and bravado,” writes Hollywood Reporter/Risky Biz blogger columnist Anne Thompson, “while industry types were seeing a downer film that’s going to lose money.

“The movie is a brilliant exercise in style, but it’s another grim dystopian look at our future — like Blade Runner or Fahrenheit 451 — that simply cost too much money.”

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Last night I read some Bluray.com comments along with a review that made me gasp. Actually they made me fall out of my chair. The thread was about Criterion’s curiously re-colored, teal-tinted Midnight Cowboy Bluray (5.29), which I wrote about a couple of days ago.

The Criterion jacket says that the Midnight Cowboy Bluray is a “new 4K digital restoration, approved by cinematographer Adam Holender.”

To go by recently posted comparison shots, this is easily Criterion’s biggest Bluray boondoggle** since the Dressed To Kill calamity of 2016, when Criterion went along with Brian DePalma‘s request that the images be narrowed (i.e., horizontally compressed) and the colors tinted yellow-green without much of a black layer. Criterion gradually admitted to error and released a corrected disc.

Natural-looking capture from 2012 MGM Bluray.

Same shot rendered by Criterion’s “teal team.”

Many times I’ve gazed upon the green Atlantic Ocean while basking in the hot-sand warmth of Miami Beach.

In a 4.15 review, Bluray.com’s Dr. Svet Atanasov refuses to even acknowledge the teal-tint issue, which automatically makes you wonder what he’s up to. “The color palette [of Criterion’s Midnight Cowboy Bluray] is a lot more convincing,” he writes. “On the old release [the 2012 MGM Bluray] some of the primaries were not as stable and well saturated as they should have been and now the new 4K restoration makes this painfully obvious.”

What the hell is Atanasov talking about, “not as well saturated”? I own the six-year-old MGM Bluray and it’s totally fine, and it doesn’t have any space-alien tinting.

Please read this thread. It includes a few fair-minded, sensible-sounding remarks, but also comments from some real lunatics.

One of the latter is a guy who calls himself “RCRochester.” In a remarks about contrasting shots (Criterion vs. MGM) of a small-town Texas motel [see above], he claims that “the sky looks blue in both…it’s just that the Criterion cap looks brighter. The movie’s title in the same shot looks bright white, if the image was ‘tealed’ I would expect that to have a bluish tint to it as well.” The man has gone over the waterfall in a barrel — he actually maintains that the sky in the Criterion image is blue when it’s obviously an eerily bright blue-green.

A looney-tune named “The Green Owl” exclaims that “the screenshots look great to my eyes,” and that he’s ordering the Criterion as a result.

A guy named “Markgway” doesn’t like what he sees, but says he might go along regardless. “Unless someone can say for sure that the film was meant to look teal, I’m going to assume something is awry,” he says. “It happens too many times that older films are remastered to a modern grading standard and wind up looking suspiciously different to the way they had before.”

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