Posted during Cannes Film Festival on 5.17.15: “Gabriel Clarke & John McKenna‘s Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans (FilmRise, 11.13) is a fascinating time trip but mostly a sad, bittersweet mood piece about failure and a movie star swallowing his own tail. Clarke and McKenna have certainly made something that’s heads and shoulders above what you usually get from this kind of inside-Hollywood documentary. Heretofore unshared insight, a lamenting tone, an emotional arc. Plus loads of never-seen-before footage (behind-the-camera stuff, unused outtakes) plus first-hand recollections and audio recordings. A trove.
“Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans may seem at first glance like a standard nostalgia piece about the making of McQueen’s 1971 race-car pic, which flopped critically and commercially. (I own the Bluray but I’ve barely watched it — the racing footage is authentic but the movie underwhelms.) Yes, in some ways the doc feels like one of those DVD/Bluray ‘making of’ supplements, but it soon becomes evident that Clarke and McKenna are up to something more ambitious.
Ten days ago an HE headline asked if James Vanderbilt‘s Truth (Sony Pictures Classics, 10.16) was being “Zero Dark Thirty‘d” — i.e., relentlessly fired upon and controversial-ized for not presenting facts in a way that certain critics prefer, and thereby tarnished as a hot-potato movie that Academy voters may come to regard askance. The answer is yup, uh-huh, you betcha — the film is being ZD30‘d and torpedoed and what-have-you. Scott Feinberg‘s 9.17 Hollywood Reporter hit piece started things off, and yesterday a N.Y. Post slapdown article by Kyle Smith threw another log on the fire.
The attacks will continue and this somewhat melancholy, well-crafted and extraordinarily complex film will almost certainly be discredited by industry milquetoasts as a Best Picture contender for a very simple reason, and the kneejerk simplicity of this reason is why I just used the phrase “will almost certainly be discredited.”
The reason, I suspect, is that most critics and journalists will decide they can’t afford to support Truth because to do so would be seen as an endorsement of the incomplete vetting of the infamous Killian documents that were used in a 9.8.04 60 Minutes episode that explored whether George W. Bush received preferential treatment during his National Guard service in the early ’70s. So just as CBS felt it had no choice but to bow to the Republican attack machine by throwing producer Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) and Dan Rather (Robert Redford) under the bus, journalists and critics will dismiss Truth because to give it a thumbs-up would allow any critic or enemy who pops up down the road to call their journalistic standards into question.
The fact that Mapes’ Bush story was essentially true is of little concern now or then; the fact that the documents may (emphasis on that word) have been forged or copied is everything. That is how the game of journalism works.
So unless a vigorous defense is immediately mounted by Sony Pictures Classics and Vanderbilt and their allies, the “word” will continue to spread and Truth will be dismissed, save for the praise coming from this corner and from Sasha Stone and a few other fans. Truth won’t open for another couple of weeks and the game is all but over, trust me, unless SPC and Vanderbilt come out guns blazing like the Wild Bunch, and unless they keep firing for the next three or four weeks at least. You can’t just put out a press release and let it go at that.
James Dean bought it 60 years and one day ago at the intersection of 46 (then called 466) and 41, near Cholame. If you live in the Los Angeles area, I don’t see how you can call yourself a serious devotee of Hollywood lore and not visit this historic site. (Then again I’ve never been to the North by Northwest cropduster site near Bakersfield so who am I to talk?) A friend and I stopped by on a road trip in the spring of ’98. I took the usual pictures, hung around, pondered death, etc. The “James Dean memorial junction” sign wasn’t there at the time, but there’s a roadside eatery up the road with a chrome memorial plaque of some kind wrapped around a tree. Remember the recreation sequence in David Cronenberg‘s Crash with Elia Koteas driving the Dean car? Weird.
Sometime in the early ’90s I tried to reach Donald Turnupseed, the Ford-driving guy whose abrupt left turn from 466 onto 41 more or less caused the collision, but he never spoke to anyone about the accident. Turnupseed died of lung cancer in ’95.
A respectful farewell to John Guillermin, who passed two days ago at age 89. I don’t think there’s any point in glossing over the fact that he was a thoroughly capable, middle-range journeyman type who delivered less-than-exceptional but satisfactory entertainments when so requested. There’s nothing that wrong with The Towering Inferno, probably his best known effort and a reasonably sturdy disaster film. No issues either with Waltz of the Toreadors, House of Cards, The Blue Max, The Bridge ot Remagen, Skyjacked, Shaft in Africa, King Kong, Death on the Nile — all perfectly acceptable second-tier films that Guillermin delivered on budget and which brought in reasonable profits and paid the bills. Condolences to family, friends and fans.
Jon Favreau‘s The Jungle Book, obviously live-action mixed with CG, pops in various 3D formats on 4.15.16. Pic stars Neel Sethi as the kid with Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o, Scarlett Johansson and Christopher Walken voicing.
Two and a half months ago I insisted that the forthcoming One-Eyed Jacks Bluray, which is now being rendered by Universal senior vp technical operations Michael Daruty and Film Foundation vp Jennifer Ahn, has to be 1.66:1 and not the dreaded 1.85:1. Marlon Brando‘s film was shot with 8-perf VistaVision, which was more or less Paramount’s “house” process during the burgeoning widescreen days of the mid 1950s. VV delivered an in-camera aspect ratio of 1.5 but aspect ratios of 1.66:1, 1.85 and even 2:1 were allowed or recommended. Plus the Paramount laser disc of One-Eyed Jacks was cropped at 1.66 and that’s good enough for me. But these two clips (one after the jump) are cropped somewhere between 1.78:1 and 1.85:1, and to be fair and honest I must admit that they look decently framed. So I’m offering a 1.78:1 compromise, which I think is gracious on my part. I would prefer 1.66, of course, but there are still plenty of 1.85 fascist jackals insisting that adding a little extra height is somehow a bad thing, and I am only one person. So I’m willing to accept 1.78.
21 years ago O.J. Simpson was a tallish musclebound guy (6’2″) with heavy broad shoulders. The shirtless guy at the end of his mini-teaser is presumably the medium-sized Cuba Gooding (around 5’10”), who plays Simpson in Ryan Murphy‘s forthcoming 10-episode miniseries American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson. I’m sorry but the illusion simply doesn’t work. “Has Cuba Gooding ever killed anyone in a film? If he has I don’t remember, and if he hasn’t there’s a good reason. You know who Gooding should play? Al Cowlings, the guy who drove O.J. around the L.A. freeway system that day in the white Bronco. Cowlings was O.J.’s sensible, mellow friend, right? Gooding could do that in his sleep.” — from 12.9.14 post called “Cuba’s No Killer Man.”
“I’ll never forget my first and only viewing of Irwin Allen‘s The Swarm at the Quad Cinema on 13th Street. It was maybe a week or two after the 7.14.78 opening. By then it had tanked and word has gotten around it was mythically awful, so a few feisty types were seated in the smallish Quad theatre. The heckling started between the one-third and halfway mark, and then it got better and better. But the film was so impossibly square and tedious and ogygen-sucking that you couldn’t help but feel sorry for the mostly middle-aged or long-of-tooth cast — Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Lee Grant, Jose Ferrer, Patty Duke, Bradford Dillman, Fred MacMurray, Henry Fonda. They were being humiliated, plain and simple. As it ended with a shot of Caine and Ross watching the killer bees burn to death at sea, I remember the guys sitting in the front going ‘aaauuughhhhh!,’ like they been gored by a bull.” — from a 4.6.14 post called “Shoulda Been There.”
One of these weeks or months I’ll see Anton Corbijn‘s Life (Cinedigm, 12.4), a drama about a brief professional alliance between James Dean (Dane DeHaan) and LIFE photographer Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson). I gather Corbijn, who began as a photographer, was more interested in exploring Stocks’ journey than Dean’s, and that’s fine. But I’ve never been interested in DeHaan playing Dean. He’s too small and mousey and round-faced. I’d rather watch an actor who really looks like Dean and can project some of his natural charisma. In short, the 21 year-old James Franco who starred in Mark Rydell‘s James Dean 14 years ago needed to be put into Rod Taylor‘s time machine and introduced to Corbijn’s casting agent. Hell, the 35 year-old Franco could have taken a stab at playing the 24 year-old Dean. He was so perfect in the Rydell film he probably could’ve pulled it of.
ABC News is reporting the Vatican has confirmed that the meeting between Pope Francis and Kentucky bigot Kim Davis took place last Thursday in Washington, D.C.. “I do not deny that the meeting took place,” Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said in a statement. The defiant Rowan County clerk and her husband met with Pope Francis at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C., for less than 15 minutes, said her lawyer, Mat Staver. “I was crying. I had tears coming out of my eyes,” Davis said. “I’m just a nobody, so it was really humbling to think he would want to meet or know me.” Davis said that the Pope told her, “Thank you for your courage.” Good God.
Peter Landesman‘s Concussion (Sony, 12.25) was announced today as the centerpiece screening at the 29th AFI Fest (11.5 to 11.12). The Hollywood-based fest will open with Angelina Jolie-Pitt‘s By The Sea (Universal, 11.13) and close with a showing of Adam McKay‘s The Big Short (Paramount, 12.11). Is it possible to express slight concerns about all three without sounding like a dick? Concussion is dogged by the Will Smith uh-oh factor (he’s a micro-manager who favors light escapism and has starred in only one critically-acclaimed film — 1993’s Six Degrees of Separation — over his entire career), plus Landesman’s last film, the well-scripted Parkland, was a wipe-out. The trailer for By The Sea felt mopey and lethargic and seemingly uninterested in competing with the gold standard for conflicted marital two-handers — Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight. The Big Short seems like the most interesting and ambitious of the three, but McKay having directed all of those low-rent Will Ferrell comedies is enough to give anyone the willies.
