Two seconds after I saw this pre-Super Bowl spot sometime in early ’07, I was 95% certain that Barack Obama would be elected president the following year. No question. Dozens in in my liberal circle were stubborn Hillary fans and stayed with her until the spring of ’08. But I knew.
Day: January 22, 2023
Endearing Blanchett Moment
Gather round and time-trip with yours truly back to Saturday, 12.2.06 — the day of the press junket for Steven Soderbergh‘s The Good German, held on the 18th floor of Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria. I’m mentioning this because of an impression I had that day of costar Cate Blanchett, who kiddingly called herself “so old!” at the Critics Choice awards a few days ago but was all of 37 back then.
It was the doodling that got me. Holding a #2 pencil, Blanchett was doodling on a note pad as she answered questions, and my heart kind of melted when I saw this. Here’s how I described her:
“Blanchett was extraordinary. Honestly? I stared at her more than I listened.
“It was obvious within a minute or two that she was living deep in her own realm. One with little electric cracks of lightning. She looks down and does little fidgety things — pulling her wedding ring on and off, drawing a doodle on a note pad. It’s not that she’s shy or avoids eye contact, but a lot of the time she talks to the tabletop or her eyes dart around as she’s answering. (Always a mark of a fine creative mind.) Plus it’s been a while since I’ve heard her native Australian accent. She’s done so many different accents recently she could be channelling the Meryl Streep of the ’80s.”
Here’s the mp3 from the conversation, but again — it wasn’t what she said but how she said it. Here’s George Clooney’s interview.
The round tables (which also included Soderbergh) ended just after 1 pm. I took a snap of Blanchett’s doddle pad and a pair of Good German DVDs, but the image quality is atrocious by today’s standards.
The Good German got creamed by critics — 34%.
Posted on 11.27.06: “I’ve seen The Good German twice in Los Angeles, both times with seasoned industry types, and nobody’s gone into a dismissive neg-head chortle about it. Not in my presence, at least. The reactions have been…well, okay, muted but always respectful. No one I spoke to was deriding it or grumbling on their way out to the parking lot.
“Set in the post-World War II rubble of Berlin, The Good German is a very periodesque, Third Man-ish experience, but it’s not spoofy in the slightest. Except for the final scene it’s relatively earnest (as far as a film like this can be) and straight and about itself. It’s partly a tribute piece — a recreation of a military whodunit drama as it might have actually looked and moved if, say, Michael Curtiz had directed it in 1946 — and partly a Phillip Marlowe detetective story in uniform.”
2.16.06: “Pete Hammond tells me he was casually praising Clooney at a party last weekend for helping to keep the monochrome tradition alive with both The Good German and Good Night, and Good Luck, and Clooney answered, “Yeah, well, I think after The Good German that’s about it for the black-and-white thing.”
Old HE Gripe, Refreshed by Vox
I’ve been complaining about muddy, murky movie dialogue for years, and enduring constant derision from the HE commentariat (“It’s your fault…hearing aids are cheaper now”). Will the shit talkers apologize now that the actual problem (bizarre sound-mixing habits) has been exposed? Of course not.
Vox copy: “Have you ever been watching a show or movie, and then a character delivers a line so unintelligible you have to scramble to find the remote and rewind? Or activate subtitles?
“Gather enough people together and you can generally separate them into two categories: People who use subtitles, and people who don’t. And according to a not-so-scientific YouTube poll we ran on our Community tab, the latter category is an endangered species — 57% of you said you always use subtitles, while just 12% of you said you generally don’t.
“Why do so many feel that they need subtitles? We got straight to the bottom of it in this explainer, with the help of dialogue editor Austin Olivia Kendrick.”
“Shitty Bull Sound,” posted on 8.5.07:
Every now and then someone writes a looking-back-on-Raging Bull piece (like this one from the Guardian‘s Ryan Gilbey, a nod to the film’s re-release in England on 8.17). And they all report that Martin Scorsese‘s classic wasn’t tremendously popular critically or commercially when it first opened in November of 1980. But what’ s never mentioned is that moviegoers couldn’t hear many of the quieter dialogue scenes with any real clarity, even in the better big-city theatres. And that this almost surely had an effect upon the general reception.
I distinctly remember watching a public screening of Raging Bull in the Sutton Theatre on 57th Street just before Thanksgiving, and leaning forward and cupping my ears and getting angry as I asked myself, “Dammit, why don’t they turn the damn sound up?” I had this reaction every time Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci or Cathy Moriarty were murmuring or muttering their thoughts in their middle-class Bronx apartments, or when “Tommy” the mafia guy was laying things out in his two quiet scenes.
Raging Bull‘s sound was apparently rendered with an intentionally murky-crude quality so it would seem unaffected and working-classy — the idea being that naturalism was equivalent to a kind of aural muck. This almost certainly resulted in tens of thousands of ear-cuppings across the nation given that the sound systems in all but a few big-city theatres back then were atrocious, for the most part. By today’s standards, it was truly the aural Dark Ages.
Permanently Terminated
Around two or three weeks ago Tweetbot, purchased eight or nine years ago and my favorite Twitter app by far, stopped functioning. At first the alerts called it a temporary or pending situation. I didn’t investigate or even focus all that much on the problem — I figured it would eventually shake out. A few days ago Tweetbot began working again, and then not. Now it’s permanently neutered. Elon Musk has deliberately zotzed all third-party apps. Fucker.
