Tomorrow (7.1.19) is the 60th anniversary of the opening of Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest, which premiered on 7.1.59 in Chicago, and on 8.7.59 at NYC’s Radio City Music Hall. Which was never, by the way, the greatest place to see a film — too cavernous, echo-y sound, too long a “throw.”
The anniversary prods a recollection — a NXNW-related incident that happened 38 or 39 years ago. A titanic projection error plus management failing to respond in a timely manner led to a general over-reaction. I was partly to blame.
Excerpt from review of Kino Lorber’s Lost Highway Bluray, posted by DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze: “Having lamented that this Bluray is not from the original camera negative, director David Lynch has disavowed this release. Kino requested David’s involvement in preparing the Bluray, [but] for whatever reason, the collaboration didn’t transpire and Kino has released this Bluray edition.
“How does it look? Solid. Even if not from the original camera negative, it looks superior to the 2010 mk2 Bluray out of France. I prefer the colors (warmer flesh tones, earthier hues), it is authentically darker, shows more information in the frame, etc. It’s the best this film ever has ever looked on my system.”
Kino Lorber statement: “We reached out to Mr. Lynch via email to oversee and color grade a new 4K transfer (from the original camera negative) and get his approval on the dozen or so extras we had planned to include. Once we knew he was not interested in working with us, we had no choice but to go ahead with the current Universal master and the few extras we had already produced and acquired.
“To our surprise, the master in question was a very good one, so we were happy to release it with some extras. We found out later that the extras and packaging also had to be approved by him (not the norm) and we sent email after email without one response.
“We delayed the release by a month, hoping we could at least get him to approve the trailer, the essay and our packaging. At this point we knew the interview and commentary were not possible, but after a few more weeks we dropped the essay, the trailer and changed our front art to the previously approved DVD art. The BD only includes the film on a dual-layered BD50 disc, maxing out the feature at 30mbps with 5.1 surround and 2.0 lossless audio. We were planning to take the high road and not play the blame game, but after his tweet this weekend, we felt like we had to respond.
“We’re still huge David Lynch fans and are proud to release one of his masterpieces on Bluray.”
I ran into Stuber costar Kumail Nanjiani (accompanied by wife and Big Sick co-writer Emily Gordon) at last Monday’s Midsommar screening. As an ice-breaker I said I was somewhat depressed by a story Nanjiani shared with N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” Kyle Buchanan, the one about a friend casually proving that 20somethings don’t watch movies as a rule, and at best incidentally.
We’d last spoken at a Santa Barbara Film Festival party, although neither of us could remember that particular detail at the moment. Nanjiani is cool, casual, unpretentious. HE hereby conveys a stamp of “bruh” approval.
Stuber screens in Century City on Tuesday night. Excerpt from Peter Debruge’s 3.14 SXSW review: “One other detail that differentiates Stuber from your average action comedy: The movie embraces the real-world physics of gunplay, car crashes, and hand-to-hand combat –— obviously bent for both dramatic and comedic effect. People die, often and quite brutally, while the characters attempt to pull off tricks they’ve seen in other action movies, but frequently with far different results.”
Don Lemon: “There seems to be this idea that Joe Biden is the strongest candidate [who could] beat Donald Trump. But you actually look at past Democratic candidates who won…Bill Clinton was a fresh face [in ’92]. Barack Obama was a fresh different face. Al Gore, who had been in office a long time, did not win. John Kerry did not win as well. What do you think about this idea that it has to be an older white male who can beat Donald Trump?”
Pete Buttigieg: “The pattern you’ve just described shows that possibly the riskiest thing we could do is to try and play it safe in that way. Think about this. My home state of Indiana went blue once in the last 50 years. And it wasn’t for Bill Clinton or John Kerry or Jimmy Carter. It was for Barack Obama. Now, if we were sitting here in late June of 2007 and saying ‘let’s find somebody so electable, so palatable, so easy for swing voters to get comfortable with that [candidate X] could even carry Indiana for Democrats.’ I’m not sure that a lot of people would have said the name of Barack Obama. But we was able to move people and inspire people.”
I hadn’t watched A Clockwork Orange for a good five or six years, perhaps seven or eight. Quite a while. So I gave it a go yesterday, and it’s still brilliant, of course — perfectly composed and designed and punctuated to a fare-thee-well. It’s looking, I should add, a bit less for wear by current standards. It looks “okay” but not as sharp or robust as I’d remembered. It’s high time for a fresh 4K remastering as well as an actual 4K disc — why piss around at this stage? I want my Clockwork bump.
Stanley Kubrick‘s 1971 classic remains a chilly, dead-on capturing of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel mixed with a portrait of the chilly German-like social scientist that Pauline Kael imagined that Kubrick had become, and indeed the fellow that Kubrick had more or less evolved into since he made Dr. Strangelove seven or eight years earlier.
It’s still a crisp, clean, jewel-like film, and I’ll never stop worshipping that final shot of those well-dressed 19th Century couples clapping approval as Alex and a scampy blond cavort in the snow. But man, it’s really cold and almost induces nausea from time to time. And a fair amount of humor. I laugh every time I see that fat, middle-aged fuckface making kissy-face gestures at Malcolm McDowell‘s Alex in the prison chapel.
And anyone who says that the first act wasn’t meant as a darkly enjoyable romp is self-deluding. In the second and third acts Kubrick was lamenting or frowning upon the perverse, animal-like behavior of Alex and his three droogs, yes, but not in the first. Those who claim otherwise are ignoring the obvious out of loyalty to the legend.
Orange obviously delivered a moral point (morality without choice isn’t morality) but re-watch that first act and tell me Kubrick wasn’t getting off on some level…that he wasn’t savoring a certain enjoyment while shooting those acrobatic beatings and that horridly cruel musical rape in Patrick Magee‘s home, not to mention the one that almost happens before Alex’s gang challenges Billy Boy’s crew to a rumble.
And that long, slow third act in which Alex has to suffer an endless post-penal gauntlet…punished and clubbed and condemned ad infinitum. And those idiotic deux ex machinas! Meeting the same old alky and getting beaten up by his old friends, discovering that his old droogies have become hooligan police officers, accidentally staggering into Magee’s home a second time and apparently not recalling what had happened there before, as evidenced by Alex moronically singing “Singin’ In The Rain” while taking a bath…the mind reels.
I worked as a tree surgeon in my madness-of-youth days. Scaling, shaping, cabling and removing portions of trees. Ropes, leather saddles, climbing spikes, chain saws, pole saws, pole clippers and so on. The first time I ascended to a height of more than 20 feet I was scared — holding on for dear life. But you gradually get past that and before long you’re almost a spider monkey. You know what to do and how to go about it, and any fear of falling is pushed into the depths of your psyche or, you know, more or less ignored.
Early this morning or during the hour of the wolf, I dreamt I was 80 or 90 feet high in a huge, century-old eucalyptus tree, but without my climbing gear and once again hanging on for dear life. It was my task to somehow cut loose a huge leader that had snapped and half-fallen but was still hanging onto the main trunk. No way was I even thinking about how to accomplish this task. I would have had concerns about this kind of job during my tree-climbing peak days, let alone in the year 2019.
The feeling I had as I evaluated my situation was a metaphor, of course, for how I sometimes feel about writing Hollywood Elsewhere, and the thoughts of possible doom and tragedy that nibble at my soul, and of the hungry salivating wolves waiting below if I should fall and crash into the ground and break my back in the bargain. Then I felt myself slip. I woke up like Jimmy Stewart did from his Madeline Elster nightmare in Vertigo.
When I’m feeling down and low I sometimes browse the Daily Mail and check out photos (and sometimes videos) of hot rich couples vacationing and lying on beaches and bopping around. Like, for example, former model, reality star, designer and businesswoman Heidi Klum, 46, and her 29 year-old fiance Tom Kaulitz, the German-born lead guitarist for Tokio Hotel.
They’re in Paris (or were a day or two ago) while Klum was shooting footage for “Making The Cut“, an Amazon fashion competition series with her Project Runway collaborator Tim Gunn.
What the hell am I doing, sitting in my home on a Sunday afternoon and writing about Heidi Klum and Tom effing Kaulitz? I’ll tell you what I’m doing. I’m sighing and shaking my head over the fact that she and Kaulitz visited Paris Disneyland (presumably for the benefit of her kids as no ostensibly hip, ahead-of-the-curve, self-respecting traveller visits that nightmare destination) as well as the Louvre (which ISN’T pronounced “Loov-RAH” any more than ensemble is pronounced “ehn-sahm-BLUH”), and the video they posted was in portrait mode. Klum has been rubbing shoulders with sophistos for a quarter-century, and even SHE shoots videos like a high-school kid roaming around a North Carolina shopping mall.
Our natural eyesight delivers a Cinerama- or IMAX-like panorama, for several decades movies and TV shows have delivered images that are more wide than tall, and just about everything of a visual presentational nature over the last several centuries has been more wide than tall. And yet when people shoot video on their phones they default to effing portrait mode, which instantly eradicates any semblance of visual intrigue. What kind of submental impulse leads people in this direction?
Before shooting video you need to (a) hold your phone vertically and then (b) tip it 90 degrees to the left so you’re shooting with a 16 x 9 aspect ratio. How hard is that? Where’s the difficulty? I’m asking.
There’s a great Charles Bukowski line from one of his short story volumes, a line about how good it feels and how beautiful the world seems when you get out of jail. I can confirm that. Not only does it feel like the friendliest and gentlest place you could possibly experience, but it smells wonderful — food stands, car exhaust, sea air, asphalt, window cleaner, green lawns, garbage dumpsters. Compared to the well-scrubbed but vaguely stinky aroma of the L.A. County Jail, I mean.
Pete may or may not do well in Iowa (2.3.20) and New Hampshire (2.11), but African-American voters are most likely going to shut him down in the South Carolina primary (2.29). They’ll go with either Joe Biden for his Obama administration cred (just like they went for Hillary Clinton in ’16) and general currents of trust and familiarity, or they’ll support Kamala Harris (works for me) or Elizabeth Warren.
A bit more than three weeks after the South Carolina primary, the 14-state Super Tuesday primary (Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia) happens on 3.3.20.
If it can’t be Pete and has to be either Biden, Harris or Warren, I’m split between the latter two. A friend insisted yesterday that Harris can’t make it with hinterland voters. I don’t believe that. I think Harris’s no-nonsense, tough-prosecutor handle might catch on but who knows?
What if Harris or Warren can’t assemble sufficient delegates to top Biden? Then we’re stuck with him. I’ll vote for Joe, of course. We all will. But what a drag if it comes down to this.
The more I think about what’s coming, the more scared I get.
Mayor Pete’s African-American problem stems from what happened in March 2012, of course. The 29-year-old Buttigieg, no doubt facing all kinds of internal pressure from upper-echelon allies of South Bend’s white police ranks, fired South Bend police chief Darryl Boykins over an illegal phone recording incident. This plus Pete’s not demanding the badge of Sgt. Ryan O’Neill over the veteran police offer’s failure to turn on his bodycam prior to the Logan shooting.
Last night I finally caught Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis‘s Yesterday, which is mostly a likable but harmless so-whatter. Alternate title: “I Was A British Beatles Admirer Who Managed To Become Them When They Were Erased From Memory (and Managed to Live High On The Hog For A While Until I Was Overwhelmed By Guilt).” I actually found it mildly diverting in the early stages. But I can’t say I loved or even really “enjoyed” it all that much. Well, I did here and there. And the audience seemed happy.
I hated the fact that the producers chose only the most banal, saccharine and/or over-played Beatles standards to populate the soundtrack with. I despise “Let It Be.” All my life “The Long and Winding Road’ has made me want to throw up. If I never hear “A Hard Day’s Night” again, it’ll be too soon. (I liked it when young but it gradually wore out its welcome.) But I love “”Happy Just To Dance With You” — why didn’t they use that one? Or “Things We Said Today”? Or “A Day in the Life”? Or “Cry Baby Cry”? Or “Here, There and Everywhere” or “Good Day Sunshine”?
I did, however, like one thing about Yesterday. Tremendously, I mean. Around the two-thirds or three-quarters mark comes a scene that I hadn’t read about in reviews, and it totally blew my mind. Because of this one passage (and BE WARNED because I intend to discuss it, which will mean nothing because everyone is writing about it) I was suddenly very happy that I was watching Yesterday. Because of a certain fellow’s return to the planet earth.
Otherwise this Boyle-Curtis concoction kept boring or bugging me in little ways. I always feel put off when movies “try” to be charming or cute or huggable. I really hate it when they’re selling that shit. But Yesterday is passingly or momentarily saved from this self-defeating approach whenever the camera is on Himesh Patel, whose performance is — this is highly unusual — winningly one-note.
Patel plays Jack Malik, an adept singer-guitarist from northeastern England who becomes a worldwide phenomenon when the Beatles are suddenly erased from memory after some kind of cosmic EMP blackout, which allows Malik to begin performing the entire Beatles catalogue as his own songs because no one knows any differently. What I loved about Patel is that he plays almost every scene with the same vaguely glum, vaguely stunned “uhhm, wait, hold on…what the fuck?” expression. “One-note performance” is always a negative judgment, I know, but not this time. I seriously loved Patel in this thing, and I’m not being facetious. “This guy’s on my team!” I kept saying to myself.
Whenever a good thing happens to Jack, he kind of half-smiles but blends it in with a vaguely glum, vaguely stunned “uhhm, wait, hold on…what the fuck?” expression. Whenever something draining or dispiriting happens, he responds with what can best be described as a vaguely glum, vaguely stunned “wait, hold on…what the fuck?” expression. And so on and so forth. Nothing shakes him out of this default attitude about life, about everything.
In my head I began to believe that Patel was speaking to grumpsters like myself with this expression. He seemed to be saying “Look, I’m just playing this guy, right? I love the money and the promotional boost that this film is giving my career, but c’mon…this movie is piffle! And here I am sort of half-behaving in a piffly fashion on its behalf. Except I’m not because of my nonstop ‘what the fuck?’ expression. Which you understand.”
I could understand roughly 20% to 30% of the dialogue spoken by Lily James, who plays Jack’s manager and secret romantic admirer. She’s about as understandable as any British working-class character in a Ken Loach film, and before you start in with the cracks about my hearing understand that I’ve seen many British films in Cannes that were shown with English subtitles. There’s a reason for that.
Seth McFarlane at 3:12, responding to Bill Maher‘s observation about how all the Democrats were trying to out-elbow and out-jawbone each other: “I warmed up to Kamala [Harris] hugely last night…I thought she was fantastic. But the one candidate who seemed immune to [the competitive shouting] was [Pete] Buttigieg. If the audience was there or not, you would have gotten the same performance [from him].”
Maher: “Yes, I think that’s true. We both had that same feeling. Pete could be the guy. And again, this is so interesting about age. You can be old and dumb. He was the youngest one on the stage and I thought he looked the most mature. He looked the most real. He looked like he didn’t have to [struggle to] think…he’s like the smartest kid in the class. And we’re not just saying that because we’re gay.”
