“No self-respecting cinefile approves of colorizing black-and-white movies,” I wrote on 10.28.17, “but colorizing monochrome stills can be a respectable thing if done well.”
The Humphrey Bogart-Lauren BacallBig Sleep still below is probably the best colorized b&w image from a Hollywood film mine eyes have ever beheld — ditto the Bogart-and-Ingrid BergmanCasablanca shot below it. I’m aware that monochrome films of the ’30s and ’40s were shaded and lighted to deliver maximum impact in terms of a certain silvery compositional aura, but these really look good.
Okay, not so much the Bogart-and-Martha Vickers shot from The Big Sleep, but even that isn’t too bad.
Ditto: “Remember how colorized images used to look in the bad old days? I don’t know if it’s a matter of someone having come up with a better color-tinting software or someone’s willingness to take the time to apply colors in just the right way, but every so often a fake-color photo can look really good. Incidentally: I approve of carefully tinted black-and-white newsreel footage.”
More than a little dodging and sidestepping went into the Annihilation aggregate critic ratings — 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, 80% on Metacritic. Critics are always afraid of appearing unhip or clueless — even if a movie confounds or irritates or pisses them off, it’s safer to convey knowing approval or respect for what it seems to be attempting. Presumably a good portion of the HE community saw it last night and has seen through the bullshit. And if some “liked’ it, I know they’re also bothered by it. Please share whatever reactions you may be struggling with.
I was reminded this morning of what a brilliant scary-movie director Andy Muschietti used to be. A little less than six years ago, I mean, when he was directing Mama in Toronto with producer Guillermo del Toro by his side. I’m speaking of a classic Mama bit that belongs in the annals of classic high-craft horror. The film is worth seeing for this alone.
From my January 2013 Mama review (“Battle of the Mommies“): “It involves an older sister stealing her younger sister’s blanket, and then a static hallway shot showing the two of them wrestling for control of the blanket in their bedroom but with only the younger sister visible. And then we see something unexpected. I laughed out loud. I mostly hate the geek realm, but for that moment I was in geek fucking heaven.
“Mama is a light-touch horror pic. A concoction that sneaks in with hints and teasing cuts and, okay, an occasional shock cut or shock-music prompt, but mainly little cinematic games that turn you on if you’re attuned, and if not you’ll just sit there like a popcorn-munching wildebeest and going ‘okay, okay but…c’mon, dude, where’s the really crazy shit? Where are the blood-soaked carpets?”]’
“All I know is that Mama is made for guys like myself. It’s not in the least bit gross or revolting, and it’s seriously, fundamentally scary.
“It’s also one hell of a calling card for first-time-director Muschietti as it feels like it was directed by a middle-aged pro. That’s a nod to Del Toro as he developed Mama, finessed it, worked on every aspect (it was shot in Toronto around the time of principal photography of Pacific Rim), and perhaps held Muschietti’s hand the way Howard Hawks held Christian Nyby‘s during the making of The Thing. It’s just that Mama feels so smooth and commanding and sure of itself.”
“Well, I love Andy and [his sister/producer] Barbara Muschietti,” she told Screenrant‘s Padraig Cotter. “I worked with them on Andy’s directorial debut, Mama. So we’ll see. They’re friends, they’re family. Anything that they’re doing I want to be a part of, so I hope we can make it happen.”
Except IT wasn’t nearly as creepy as Mama. IT actually made it clear, if you ask me, that the Muschietti who’d made Mama, a fellow who seemed to believe in the less-is-more Val Lewton approach, had been replaced by a studio-kowtowing hack.
Doesn’t the fact that Judd Apatow‘s The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling (HBO, 3.26 and 3.27) runs four and a half hours…shouldn’t that fact alone warrant special interest among Shandling fans, of which there are still many? I loved Garry’s angst, his depressive personality, his low self-esteem…I’m talking worship here. But I have to say I liked Shandling in his 40s and 50s better than the older version. His hair, for instance. Shandling had great wavy follicles in the ’90s but was down to a tennis-ball cut after Obama got elected. And his eyes got smaller — they were big and expressive in his 40s but slitty and beady in his 60s. And I don’t know about that Zen thing he got into, and I’m saying this as a former Bhagavad Gita guy. Garry once wrote “you don’t need to be anything, you can just be.” The only people who say or think that are filthy rich or completely devoted to abstinence and poverty, and Shandling wasn’t among the latter. The poor guy died of a heart attack on 3.24.16, at age 66. If there’s anything beyond death, Garry is surely part of it now, dispersed into a trillion particles of consciousness or possibly transformed into a perfect smile.
Hold on, let me get this straight. The same woman who called the FBI on 1.5.18 and told them chapter-and-verse about Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz, that he’d bought several weapons with his late mother’s insurance payout and that he’s stupid and has murdered and cut up some animals and that he might be “getting into a school and just shooting the place up” because she knew “he’s going to explode”…that same woman also called the Broward County sheriff’s office, and neither the Broward guys nor the FBI did a damn thing about this, and as a result 17 people inside Stoneman Douglas High School (mostly students) were slaughtered by Cruz on 2.14, or roughly five weeks later?
The best love stories are about relationships that don’t work out. Which is what Dominic Cooke‘s On Chesil Beach (Bleecker, Street, 5.18), an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s same-titled 2007 novel, is basically about. Set in early ’60s Weymouth, Saoirse Ronan plays Florence, an independent-minded lass who develops reservations about getting married to Edward (Billy Howle) and particularly about the confined, straight-laced life she’ll be expected to lead. And then it all falls apart over sexual anxiety.
I saw On Chesil Beachduring last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and I somehow knew it wouldn’t be much even before I sat down. I could feel the minor-ness. The problem, for me, was that it was more about pre-marital misgivings than anything else, and I just didn’t give a damn whether Ronan and Howle “did it” or not, or whether or not they wanted to get married or anything. I couldn’t have cared less.
Honestly? I cared so little about their doomed relationship that I left around the 75-minute mark, and quickly decided I wouldn’t write about it because I’d missed the last half-hour or whatever. Now I’m breaking my promise because the trailer has dropped.
Who wants to see a movie with that title anyway? It’s like calling a movie On Swizzle Stick. I wasn’t even sure how to say “Chesil” when I first saw it on the page — I think it’s pronounced chezzle. (The actual Chesil Beach is located southwest of Weymouth, which is part of Dorset County in southwestern England.) It sounds like a shitty little beach with a lot of rocks and pebbles that will hurt your bare feet if you take a stroll, and who wants to go through that?
Rita Moreno‘s Anita in West Side Story was a great, full-spirited spitfire performance, but let’s be honest — she won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar on the coattails of a massive West Side Story sweep. The 1961 musical won 10 Academy Awards that night, but even its biggest fans were surprised when George Chakiris‘s Bernardo defeated George C. Scott‘s rattlesnake gambler in The Hustler. Nonetheless Moreno was the first Puerto Rican…hell, Latina actress to win such a prize, and that was no small historic thing. But Moreno (who was still involved in her eight-year-long affair with Marlon Brando at the time) was so blown away that she didn’t say anything at the podium — no thanks to director-producer Robert Wise, no shout-out to fellow cast members or other Latina actresses, nothing.
Very few remember and even fewer have seen Separate Tables, the 1958 parlor drama with Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, David Niven, Deborah Kerr and Wendy Hiller. And yet this constipated, dialogue-driven film, directed by Delbert Mann (Marty) and based on a pair of one-act plays by Terence Rattigan, was nominated for seven Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actress (Kerr), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Black and White), and Best Dramatic or Comedy Score) and won two (Niven for Best Actor, Hiller for Best Supporting Actress).
Separate Tables is exactly the kind of solemn, stiff-necked talkfest that was often regarded as Oscar bait in the mid-to-late ’50s. Decorum and public appearances undermined by dark secrets and notions of perverse sexuality, etc. Shudder! Erections and dampenings that dare not speak their name, or words to that effect.
Talk about “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” etc. Two years before Separate Tables appeared a creepy, low-budget sci-fi thriller called Invasion of the Body Snatchers opened and was promptly ignored by the highbrows. Four years earlier (in ’54) The Creature From The Black Lagoon was greeted with similar indifference if not disdain. Today a pair of direct descendants, Get Out and The Shape of Water, are Best Picture nominees, and there’s a better-than-even (though admittedly dwindling) chance that Shape will take the Big Prize.
Yesterday I received a hilarious, spot-on essay by the great David Thomson — about Separate Tables initially, but also about how the appeal and some of the “Academy inflation” of this 60-year-old film are echoed in I, Tonya and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Consider this excerpt especially: “About fifteen minutes into I Tonya, on being bowled over by the vicious hangdog look of Allison Janney’s mother, the toxic lines slipping like smoke from the fag on her lips, I was ready to give her the supporting actress Oscar on the spot. Twenty minutes later I was bored with her because she was still doing the same bitter schtick. She’s an act, a show-stopper, the sort of hag who would get a round of applause as she appears on-stage, severing any prospect of dramatic truth.
“It’s not that Janney is less than skilled, or hasn’t paid her dues for decades. She’s a clever old pro so give her the Oscar. But let’s abandon the myth that she is presenting a real ‘deplorable’ instead of saying, ‘Aren’t deplorables a riot?'”
Here’s the whole brilliant piece (the first 17 paragraphs about Separate Tables, and the rest about Janney and Margot Robbie in I, Tonya and McDormand in Three Billboards):
“I found myself watching Separate Tables on Turner Classic Movies. There it was, offered with the seemingly unassailable claim that it had been nominated for Best Picture in 1958 along with six other nominations. It even had two wins, and I remembered that one of them was for David Niven playing a bogus Major. I had seen the film in 1958 and flinched at it even then (the bogus business was all fusspot), in a year that included Vertigo, Touch of Evil, Bonjour Tristesse, Man of the West, The Tarnished Angels and many others that still seem of value.
Late yesterday afternoon the Academy announced that scuttlebutt to the contrary, Sufjan Stevenswill perform “Mystery of Love” on the March 4th Oscar telecast.
Hollywood Elsewhere has a notion that the Call Me By Your Name guys were just as surprised and elated as I was by this decision. Direct quote from director Luca Guadagnino from his home in Crema, received at 8:28 am Pacific: “FANTASTIC!”
It was pure coincidence that producers Mike DeLuca and Suzanne Todd announced this hours after yesterday’s HE rant about rumors (which were first aired by Gold Derby‘s Chris Beacham) that Stevens might be eliminated from the show. And the announcement was not a reversal of an earlier indicated position when DeLuca and Todd didn’t ask Stevens to perform when they first invited him to attend the show. (In a 2.3.18 interview with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Michael O’Connell, Stevens said that he might not perform “Mystery of Love” during the ceremony since “they’ve only asked if I’m going to attend.”)
No, seriously — I think the Academy did respond to pressure from some quarter. Maybe the Sony Classics guys called up and said “Yo, what da fock?”
From KamalaHarris.org: “Just a few moments ago, NRA executive Wayne LaPierre attacked Kamala directly on stage at a conservative conference, one week after the tragic shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School.
“It was as outrageous as you would expect, and it’s clear from his rhetoric that they’re not just going after Kamala but after anyone who supports gun safety legislation. That includes Chris Murphy, one of the Senate’s strongest voices on gun safety.
“Now, this isn’t the first time LaPierre or the NRA have come after Kamala and her colleagues, and it will not be the last. If they think they can defeat Chris in November, there is simply no end to the amount of dark money they will spend to attack him. That’s why we need to make them pay for their outrageous attacks before they escalate even further in the days and weeks ahead.”
Opening graph of LaPierre’s Wikipage: “Wayne Robert LaPierre, Jr. (born November 8, 1949) is an American author and gun rights advocate. He is best known for his position as the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association and for his advocacy of school children being massacred by far-right wing psychopaths with weapons of war. He is widely viewed as owning the entire Republican Congress, which has received hundreds of millions of dollars in blood money from his organization.”
I don’t know which nominee for 2017’s Best Original Song is most likely to win an Oscar on March 4th, but Sufjan Stevens‘ “Mystery of Love“, from Call Me By Your Name, is easily (a) the catchiest, (b) the most transporting, and (c) the song that should obviously win. The 90th Academy Awards Wikipage lists Stevens as one of the performers so I’ve naturally been looking forward to the big moment when he strums and sings on the Dolby stage.
Except last week Gold Derby‘s Chris Beachum wrote that “we are hearing rumors that only three songs will be performed: ‘This Is Me’ from The Greatest Showman, ‘Remember Me’ from Coco and ‘Mighty River’ from Mudbound.”
The next day Beachum added: “This is confirmed by someone we know involved in booking the show. Producers have blocked out the entire ceremony and say there is only time for three [songs] to be performed.” Beachum later clarified that “the person telling us this information has ties to the show but isn’t working directly on it…I haven’t heard anything so far to counter what is being rumored.”
My response to this heresay was, of course, “whoa, whoa, WHAT?” Call Me By Your Name is Best Picture-nominated, and the Academy is going to (a) ignore a totally hummable tune that everyone associates with Luca Guadagnino’s love story and (b) tell the great Sufjan Stevens that there’s no room at the inn? A lot of people are listening to that soundtrack album now…c’mon!
Last night I wrote Oscar telecast producer Mike DeLuca about this…David Lynch silencio. This morning I wrote Academy publicist Natalie Kojen, who referred me to Oscar telecast publicist Steve Rohr. More silencio.
Apparently there’s some rule that Oscar telecast producers are “obligated by the music branch to either perform zero, three or five songs for each ceremony.”
Actress-comedian Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip) has developed a persona — a spirited cut-up who lives in her own little world — that has worked nicely for her. But during her 1.23 stint as an Oscar nomination announcer Haddish expanded upon this in a way that wasn’t necessarily flattering.
It seemed to me that Haddish portrayed herself that morning as being something of a cultural illiterate (“Ah gotta see this Dunkirk…a lot of people seem to like it”) and mis-pronounced the names of so many nominees (she even murdered Get Out‘s Daniel Kaluuya) that she seemed to be doing this deliberately as a bit. That or she simply couldn’t be bothered to rehearse.
Honest question: If you were the director of the MTV show would you suggest to Haddish that she (a) rehearse the names of nominees so as not to stumble as frequently as she did a few weeks ago or (b) suggest that she double-down on the mispronunciations as a way of furthering her rep as an irrepressible personality who couldn’t care less?
