For some idiotic reason I paid close to $30 bucks for Criterion’s Bluray of The Blob (’58). It’s a decent low-budget monster flick, primitive and simple and appealing for that, but I felt seriously burned as I began watching it. The smooth saxophone riff during the opening credits is cool (written by Burt Bacharach and strongly reminiscent of Bill Justis‘s “Raunchy“, which was released a year before The Blob came out) but right away there’s trouble.

It’s not the action or the dialogue, but the hideous lighting on the actors’ faces in nocturnal close-ups and medium close-ups. The trouble isn’t the Bluray (typical Criterion work, smothered in grain…what else?) but the film itself. It’s the most ineptly lighted color motion picture I’ve ever seen in my life.

The Blob begins after dark in a woodsy area. No streetlamps, maybe a little moonlight. 27 year-old Steve McQueen (called “Steven” McQueen in the opening titles) is gently kissing his girlfriend, played by 24 year-old Aneta Cousault. They’re sitting in McQueen’s bright-blue convertible, and McQueen isn’t even trying for second base — his kiss is chaste and courtly, but she’s feeling betrayed and hurt and disappointed.

The look on Cousault’s face speaks volumes. It’s almost in the same realm as the look on Sen. Joseph McCarthy‘s face when he accused this or that lefty of Communist allegiances. You just want to get your hands inside my dress, Steve. I thought you cared for me. I thought you respected me. I thought you were nicer than that. But I’m not going to give you what you want, Steve. I’m not going to unzip your fly and bring you to ecstasy with the gentle caress of my fingers.

McQueen smiles and says he’s sorry, but in a way he’s lucky because one look at Cousalt tells you she’s never heard of any form of sexual activity other than the woman just lying there and waiting for the man to finish. Attempted teenaged intimacy used to be like this. So depressing. Thank God I grew up in one of the greatest nookie eras in world history, the Roman Empire included. But I’ve gotten off the subject.

The lighting in the opening scene and in every outdoor-nighttime scene in the entire film for that matter is terrible. The opening shot looks like McQueen and Cousault are sitting directly in front of 2000-lb. klieg light or a pair of truck headlights.

Director Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. and his dp, Thomas E. Spaulding, had surely heard of “day for night” but for whatever reason they just turned the lights on. Every night scene has been flood-lighted to death. When The Blob’s first victim, an old hermit (Olin Howland), steps out of his home at night he’s all lit up like New Year’s Eve. It’s all Howland can do to not squint from the glare.

And yet Yeaworth’s film is more watchable than Larry Hagman‘s Beware! The Blob (’72), which I saw and could barely stand when I watched it on YouTube the other day. And don’t even talk about the 1988 version — garbage.

Last night I went to a 10:35 pm showing of Wayne Blair‘s The Sapphires (Weinstein Co.), which I’ve been praising up and down since catching it 10 and 1/2 months ago in Cannes. It was playing in a smaller Arclight theatre (#12) and there were 20 or 25 people in the seats, if that. I enjoyed it almost as much as that Cannes viewing. It was a tiny better in Cannes because I wasn’t expecting much and I didn’t know how good Chris O’Dowd would be. This time I was just looking for a nice repeat and I got that, but the first time is the charm.

The Sapphires is an Aboriginal Dreamgirls set in 1968, smaller-scaled and flavored/punctuated with rural Australia and war-torn Vietnam. Less flash and razzle-dazzle, no strobe lights and more emotionally restrained than Dreamgirls plus no Beyonce, Jamie Foxx or Eddie Murphy…but with the robust, note-perfect O’Dowd and ripe, live-wire performances from Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens and Miranda Tapsell — great singers, attractive and emotionally pronounced in every scene.

This is a smallish film with heart and charm and humor and rousing music, and yet The Sapphires made beans this weekend in four theatres ($40,9000 = $10 grand per screen or $3300 per theatre per day). I guess I knew this would happen but it still doesn’t feel right. The Weinsteiners know that a character-driven indie film about an Aborginal girl group isn’t hooky or flashy or oomphy enough for the megaplex popcorn-heads and so they’re starting out small, but…I don’t know but it feels a bit frustrating.

I know that the weekend’s biggest hit, Olympus Has Fallen (which took in 30 million and change in 3098 theatres), is one of the dumbest, cheesiest and most depressingly low-grade Die Hard flicks ever and the people who made and distributed it are popping the champagne. The book is called “When Good Things Happen To Bad People.”

I know that the Film Week guys on KCCP didn’t even mention The Sapphires, much less discuss it, during their 3.22 discussion.

Could it be that people are assuming the film might be about a lesbian singing group? Sapphire, sappho, etc. I’m just free-associating here.

From my Cannes Film Festival review: “A healthy portion is cool, snappy, rousing, well-cut and enormously likable. (And dancable.) That would be the first 40%, when the true-life tale of an Aboriginal Supremes-like group assembled and took shape in Australia in 1968. This 40-minute section, trust me, is definitely worth the price.

“But the main reason the film delivers overall is Chris O’Dowd‘s performance as Dave, a charmingly scuzzy boozer and Motown fanatic who steers the four girl singers (Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens, Miranda Tapsell) away from country and towards soul music, and then takes them to Vietnam to entertain U.S. troops. Dowd’s manner and personality are a total kick — an absolute hands-down winner and the best reason to see The Sapphires, even when it turns sketchy in the last half or so.

“I was saying to myself during the first 10 or 15 minutes, ‘Whoa, this is pretty good…not as high-throttle razzmatzzy as Dreamgirls but I like it better.’ And then it kept on going and hitting the marks for the most part. Blair is a talented director who knows how to cut and groove and put on a show. [Even during the parts] when it’s not really working The Sapphires at least keeps the ball in the air with reasonable agility and sass. The analogy, come to think, isn’t really Dreamgirls as much as Hustle and Flow and The Commitments, at least during those first 40 minutes.

“The soul classics are delightful to savor throughout. The music put me in a good mood right away and kept me there.

“The script is by Aboriginal actor-writer Tony Briggs and Keith Thompson, and based on Brigg’s 2004 stage play, which was based on his mom’s true story (as the closing credits infom).”

During a q & a last week with LACMA’s Elvis Mitchell, Phil Spector director-writer David Mamet said that over the last few years hummable motion picture soundtrack themes have either disappeared or are being heard a lot less. This hadn’t occured to me but maybe Mamet is right. It used to be that almost every significant or ambitious film had a musical theme as well as themes assigned to major characters.

I’m not saying that Gustavo Santaolalla‘s Brokeback Mountain score was the last Oscar-winner that had a simple hummable theme, but it’s the last one I recall. Did Mychael Danna‘s Life of Pi score, which won the Oscar last month, have a hummable theme or a character theme? Not that I remember. Were there any hummable themes in Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross‘s Social Network score? I don’t recall any but then it wasn’t that kind of movie. A hummable theme was built into John Williams‘ War Horse score, but my mind has expelled all memories of it. I certainly remembered the two themes that Williams composed for his 20 year-old Jurassic Park score when I saw the 3D version last week, but that was another time.

I don’t accept Mamet’s observation that movie themes are nearly extinct, but they’re certainly becoming more scarce. I think that’s fair to say at this point.

How would you like to be told on Monday that the government has seized 20% of your savings because the bankers have overplayed their hand and put the country in dutch and tough titty if you don’t like it? This is reportedly about to happen to everyone in Cyprus with secured savings totalling over $100,000.

It’s part of a plan by the Cyprus government to raise $5.8 billion that’s been required by European Union lenders before they reciprocate with a 10 billion Euro hand-over that will level things out for a bit.

“A cutoff of central bank financing and the absence of a bailout agreement could cause Cypriot banks to collapse,” says a 3.23 N.Y. Times report by Liz Alderman and James Kanter.

“It could also lead to a disorderly default on the government’s debt with unpredictable repercussions for the euro monetary union, despite the country’s tiny economy.”

It’s possible that a satisfactory deal won’t be struck, of course. One of the Times reporters asked government spokesman Christos Stylianides if Cyprus has a backup plan. Stylianides said if a solution isn’t found “we are doomed.”

The citizens of Cyprus are understandably enraged. Austerity measures are necessary, but you know what would calm things down among those who feel betrayed and ripped off? Look to Stanley Kubrick‘s Paths of Glory and the sacrificial execution of three French soldiers for their failure to take the ant hill. For their failure to play their financial cards in a responsible manner, three major Cypriot bankers should be chosen at random, lined up and shot by a firing squad.

Keep in mind that Colonel Andrea Stavrou, the character played by Anthony Quinn in The Guns of Navarone, was from Crete and only pretended to be “a poor fisherman from Cyprus.”

Yesterday afternoon I spoke with Ken Scott, director-writer of the French-language sperm-donor comedy Starbuck (Entertainment One, 3.22), and star Patrick Huard. I asked Scott about the genesis of the DreamWorks-produced remake, The Delivery Man, which he’s also directed and wrote and which stars Vince Vaughn in the Huard role. Touchstone will open The Delivery Man on 10.4.13.

(l.) Starbuck and Delivery Man director-writer Ken Scott; (r.) Starbuck star Patrick Huard.

Here‘s an mp3 containing Scott’s response, and here are excerpts: “We told DreamWorks — Stacey Snider, Steven Spielberg — that we felt we were ready to move forward and make the film, and not just have a development deal. For us ‘very fast’ would have meant shooting in the spring or summer of 2013, but things happened even faster than that. [And then] right away we got Vince Vaughn, he was ready to go so we shot the film in 2012 [i.e., last fall].

The Delivery Man, he said, is “the same story” as Starbuck “but a different film. I didn’t want to do it differently just for the sake of doing it differently. I wanted all the artists and actors in the movie to come from an authentic place. They’re not emulating something that has already been done. So it’s very difficult for me to say what the differences are.”

If I was eight or nine years old and my parents wanted to take me to a matinee of The Croods I’d say to them, “Look, no offense, but do you think you guys could maybe not patronize me to taking me to movies like this? Not all kids are easy lays who go nuts over CG neverlands. The corporate animated family realm is a prison as real and as tangible as Devil’s Island. This film is Avatar plus The Flintstones plus Oz The Great and Powerful, okay? And I just don’t want this stuff in my head.

Really. Please. I’d really rather spend time reading and surfing around and maybe hanging with Beanie and Binky. You guys wanna get some brunch, cool. I’ll be fine right here.

I admit I myself wasn’t very sophisticated about film when I was eight or nine but I knew the difference between really good, pretty good, blah old-person stuff and shit.

My general attitude is that sleep is fine and necessary in its place but don’t overdo it because…you know, stuff to do. The same losers who take extra-long showers tend to sleep longer than go-getters. (My late sister was like this. For her sleeping was the best part of the day.) I prefer sleeping for six hours and at the same time recognize that every three or four weeks the body will put its foot down and demand a nice long eight or even nine hours. Which is why I started late this morning, and that’s okay. I feel really great now.

At the same time I’ve never forgotten a line spoken by Thayer David in the old Journey to the Center of the Earth (’59) in which he described overnight sleeping sessions as “little slices of death.” I’ve always figured it’s better to stay up a little longer and wake up a little earlier because I’ve got a really long sleep coming. Then again I take afternoon cat naps, and I sometimes catch up during boring or awful movies.

If I wasn’t getting invited to free screenings I’d probably pay to see World War Z despite reports about it being a troubled mess. I’d figure a Class-A zombie-plague film with Brad Pitt would be cool for the first two acts at least, and that the third would probably be tolerable even though the guy they hired to fix the third-act problems is the guy who co-wrote effing Prometheus and co-wrote Cowboys and Aliens. Whoa…wait a minute.

Warner Bros. publicity ixnayed my participation in this weekend’s downtown junket for Brian Helgeland‘s 42, probably because of those raised-fist articles. But I did attend a round-table session for Ken Scott‘s Starbuck, also held in that area (i.e, adjacent to L.A. Live) and publicist Fredel Pogodin gave me this 42 hardball which somebody left around. Now I don’t feel so badly. I’ll have to wait until early April to see the film, which opens on 4.12.

My usual reason for walking out on a film is that it’s suffocating me or making me sick or poisoning my soul. I walk out in order to live again. But my reason for bailing on Paul Weitz‘s Admission (Universal, opening today) was a bit different. It’s not a terrible film — it’s a tightly structured, intelligently written comedy about bright adults involved in parenting and academia — but like so many big-studios comedies it’s broad and arch and on-the-nose and exaggerated in ways that become intolerable after a while.

“People definitely think like this,” I was saying to myself. “But they don’t talk like this with each other…and it’s driving me up the wall to sit through this clever, cloying, punch-line dialogue. Will you stop talking like this, Tina Fey and Paul Rudd and Michael Sheen and yaddah-yaddah? Will you please fucking stop?”

And yet the bullshit contrivances are handled in such a way that I was able to stand Admission for a while. For the first 30 or 40 minutes, I mean. Even with occasionally awful scenes like one in which the husband of Fey’s Princeton admissions executive, played by Sheen, confesses that he’s in love with another woman and that the woman is pregnant and that he’s leaving Fey…during a party they’re giving. And then he leaves with the woman while the guests are eating bruschetta in the next room. C’mon! The most thoughtless asshole in the world wouldn’t break the news to his/her partner that way…except in comedies like this one.

Some comedies are so bad that it’s an effort to watch them for more than ten minutes. Admission is not one of these. I wasn’t delighted but I was dealing with it…at first. But comedy is awfully difficult to get right. There’s a certain pitch or tone that “works” (like in David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook because it feels and sounds natural and believable) and there are others that just don’t. Admission is one of these. I didn’t want to shoot or strangle it or chop it into pieces with a meat cleaver. I just wanted to slip out the door without making any fuss.

Fey and Rudd are…I was going to call them appealing and tolerable for the most part, but they’ve been told to act in a “funny” way and to perform in farcical situations (like sharing tasks during the birthing of a calf) and after a while you have this sensation of the film just sitting there and feeling tiresome. Plus there’s something brittle and ungiving about Fey. She’s limited to a certain territory and I was just wanted to break out and roam free as it were.

Lily Tomlin easily gives the most engaging performance as Fey’s somewhat callous, know-it-all ’60s-generation mom. She’s almost in her own movie.

Is Admission worse than Olympus Has Fallen? No — it’s a much smarter and more self-aware film with at least some bits that work from time to time whereas Olympus is a sick, ludicrous farce. And yet Olympus has a 50% Rotten Tomatoes rating compared to Admission‘s 46%. Metacritic has given Admission a 49 rating vs. a 42 rating for Olympus Has Fallen.

Good fiction isn’t “fiction,” Mr. Roth is saying. It’s what you’ve been through plus spin. Your embroidered, jazzed-up or otherwise reshuffled history with fresh paint. For whatever reason I’ve never been into that. For me it’s always been tell the story as it happened, and then throw in your hindsight confessions and reactions but never add anything. (Or very little.) What happened is what happened. Leave it there.

For whatever reason the poster for the 2013 Cannes Film Festival throws a spotlight on a thoroughly mediocre 1963 Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward film that no one (and I mean no one) has watched since its initial release. A Paris-set romcom about the fashion industry, A New Kind of Love was a glossy confection that tried (or so I recall) to wear a bit of the French nouvelle vague attitude that had manifested most sublimely three years earlier in Jean Luc Godard‘s Breathless. Meant nothing, was nothing — check the reviews.

Woodward’s hair was blonde in the film (as it was in real life at the time) so who’s the brunette in the poster?

If the festival wanted to honor a Newman-Woodward film with a little French aroma, why not choose a slightly more respectable collaboration like Martin Ritt‘s Paris Blues (’61), which was actually shot in Paris as opposed to the phony-baloney New Kind of Love, which was mainly shot on Paramount sound stages? Or they could have paid tribute to the Oscar-nominated Rachel Rachel (’68), in which Woodward starred and Newman directed.

A New Kind of Love was advertised as having been shot “in blushing color.” It was so smug that the script actually had Newman’s character say to Woodward’s at one point, “I think maybe what we got here is a new kind of love” (or something close to that).

ANKOL was written, directed and produced by Melville Shavelson, the Gary Marshall or Shawn Levy of his time. Shavelson was mostly known for churning out coy, cutely constipated mainstream comedies like Houseboat, It Started in Naples, The Pigeon That Took Rome and Yours, Mine and Ours. (Okay, he also directed The Seven Little Foys, Beau James and Cast A Giant Shadow.)

From the festival’s website: “The poster evokes a luminous and tender image of the modern couple, intertwined in perfect balance at the heart of the dizzying whirlwind that is love. The vision of these two lovers caught in a vertiginous embrace, oblivious of the world around them, invites us to experience cinema with all the passion of an everlasting desire.”

“1963 lay somewhere between Ozzie and Harriet and Janis Joplin and A New Kind of Love was raunchy adult fare for the time…but sanitized. If you can imagine Paul Newman as a rakish cad who writes Beaudelaire verses on the bare bottoms of his nightly conquests and his real-life partner Joanne Woodward as a dikey dress-designer turned tender-hearted and vulnerable real woman posing as a prostitute after praying to St. Catherine, then you have a greater ability to suspend disbelief than I do.” — from an IMDB review.