Day: August 15, 2019

How Much Better Can You See?

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Not to sound like a tech plebe but I’m having trouble imagining what kind of visual enhancement or “bump” will be delivered by the latest digital RED camera, called the Komodo Dragon. The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez reports that Steven Soderbergh is using RED’s untested 6K Dragon ** to shoot his ôcurrently-lensing film, Let Them All Talk, which costars Meryl Streep and Gemma Chan.

I own the Criterion Bluray of Soderbergh’s two-part, 258-minute Che (’08), which was shot with a then-experimental RED digital camera. And in my uncultured, dumbfuck, outside-the-loop opinion it still looks heavenly. Last January in Park City I saw Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird, which was shot with an iPhone8 coupled with an anamorphic lens, and to my peon eyes it was pure viewing pleasure — clean, vibrant, razor sharp.

So what exactly can be achieved by the RED Komodo Dragon already? 6K, okay, but how much better can it look? (Or, as Jake Gittes said to Noah Cross, “Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat?”) It will all end up, viewing-wise, on 1080p flatscreens in people’s living rooms so…

Let Them All Talk is currently shooting in NYC “before whisking away to a remote location outside the U.S. where no one will be available to do service work on the camera at all,” Perez writes. That’s an allusion to a cruise ship (possibly the Queen Mary 2) crossing the Atlantic or whatever. A scale model of same was posted on 7.26 by “Bitchuation,” who may or may not be Soderbergh.

One likely distributor of Let Them All Talk is Netflix, which streamed High Flying Bird earlier this year and is also distributing Soderbergh’s upcoming, allegedly satiric The Laundromat in the fall.

** “Komodo seems to be RED’s new ‘affordable’ camera. From the teasers we already know it will shoot 6K video, use a Canon RF mount, CFast media, and it will have a headphone jack and a microphone input jack. The body will weigh less than 2 pounds and all the dimensions will be under 4″, which is very compact. There will be no HDMI port. The camera is supposed to work closely with HYDROGEN One phones and it will cost over $5,000 (less for HYDROGEN users).” — excerpt from cinema5d article, posted on 8.9.19.

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Scattershot

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Rambo: Last Blood pops on 9.20.19.

I won’t say where this was taken, but if you were a hotshot director would you choose a highly visible, heavily trafficked place to sit, think, read and maybe get some writing done? I understand how public cafes and whatnot can get the creative wheels turning, but the trick is to choose a small, out-of-the-way cafe, some modest establishment off the beaten path.

Curious “Nashville” Love

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Until last night I was under a vague impression that general regard for Robert Altman‘s Nashville had been sinking, and that other Altman classics — McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Player, California Split, The Long Goodbye, M.A.S.H., Thieves Like Us — had gathered more admirers. The results of Matt Zoller Seitz‘s twitter poll differ with that view. Odd but there it is.

“Withered Nashville,” posted on 12.14.13:

Two nights ago I watched the Criterion Bluray of Robert Altman‘s Nashville (’75). And guess what? It doesn’t hold up. It’s earnestly dislikable. I wanted to shut it off after the first half-hour.

It’s a typical Altmanesque grab-bag of this and that, but it’s mainly a social criticism piece about Middle-American politics, patriotism, pettiness and celebrity. The specific focus is the banal eccentricities and pretensions of the country-music industry, but for the most part the film is snide and misanthropic. Sorry, but I’m removing it from my Altman pantheon. I loved it in ’75 but I’m pretty sure I’ll never watch Nashville again. It’s failed the test of time.

In basic construction terms Nashville is about a troupe of eccentric, improvising actor-hipsters leaning on their default Left Coast impressions of Nashville’s sophisticated-hick culture and dispensing variations on a single dismissive theme: “These people are small and petty and lame and delusional.”

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Whiteness Avoidance Syndrome

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One measure of the present climate is that it feels a teeny bit scary to acknowledge the existence of white culture or white heritage in this country. In some quarters this admission might be interpreted as a vague indication of the wrong kind of social views. In this context quoting statistics from Wikipedia’s White Americans page — “white Americans constitute 72% of the 308 million people living in the United States…the largest ethnic groups (by ancestry) among White Americans being Germans, Irish and English” — could leave a person open to attacks from p.c. purists. Safer to avoid the subject altogether.

I’m mentioning this as context to a brief exchange last night between Devin Faraci and myself, to wit:

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Scorsese-DiCaprio Mountaintop

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It was almost six years ago, but I’ll never forget LexG‘s confession in a comment thread (or on Twitter) that he loved The Wolf of Wall Street “for the wrong reasons.” He loved the debauch, in other words, and ignored the stringent social commentary aspect. Which wasn’t that different from the conservative Academy biddies (Hope Holiday and friends) who hated the debauch (“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves…talented men putting such junk on the screen and thinking it was funny!”) while failing to detect the social critique stuff.

Now that it’s a part of Hollywood history, can we finally admit that despite the film being a metaphorical lament about the nature of elite American capitalism, the reason WOWW grossed more than $392 million worldwide and became Scorsese’s highest earner was because most moviegoers embraced LexG’s attitude?

Could WOWW be funded or greenlighted in today’s punitive climate? I think we all know the answer. It would be seen as too lewd, too depraved, too Trumpian.

Worried About Warren

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From “Many Democrats Love Elizabeth Warren. They Also Worry About Her,” an 8.15 N.Y. Times report by Jonathan Martin:

“Even as she demonstrates why she is a leading candidate for the party’s nomination, Elizabeth Warren is facing persistent questions and doubts about whether she would be able to defeat President Trump in the general election. The concerns, including from her admirers, reflect the head-versus-heart debate shaping a Democratic contest increasingly being fought over the meaning of electability and how to take on Mr. Trump.

“Interviews with more than three dozen Democratic voters and activists in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina this summer, at events for Ms. Warren as well as other 2020 hopefuls, yield a similar array of concerns about her candidacy.

“These Democrats worry that her uncompromising liberalism would alienate moderates in battleground states who are otherwise willing to oppose the president. Many fear Ms. Warren’s past claims of Native American ancestry would allow Mr. Trump to drown out her policy message with his attacks and slurs against her. They cite her professorial style and Harvard background to argue that she might struggle to connect with voters from more modest circumstances than hers, even though she grew up in a financially strained home in Oklahoma.

“And there are Democrats who, chastened by Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, believe that a woman cannot win in 2020.”

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