Jeffrey Wells

“When candidates debate each other, they should debate each other. In a real debate, the participants engage, they grapple, they get into each other’s hair (metaphorically, of course). Without that clash of ideas and personalities, there’s no point in getting the two sides together on one stage.

“But in the presidential debates over the years, the rules have bizarrely permitted the candidates to ‘debate’ without actually addressing each other. Some have spent the entire night studiously avoiding eye contact.

“Their escape mechanism is the moderator, the one person on stage whom both candidates must address, in a weirdly triangulated conversation, as they work through the questions the moderator poses. So it becomes those questions, and not the candidates’ ideas or personalities, driving the discussion.

“It feels hollow. It feels forced. There’s a simple fix for this: Make these candidates talk to each other.”

“Looper felt to me like a maddening near-miss: It posits an impossible but fascinating-to-imagine relationship — a face-to-face encounter between one’s present and future self, in which each self must account for its betrayal of the other — and then throws away nearly all the dramatic potential that relationship offers. If someone remakes Looper as the movie it could have been in, say, 30 years, will someone from the future please FedEx it back to me?” — from Dana Stevens‘ 9.28 Slate review.

“The biggest disappointment, for me, is that the great haunting concept of an older guy (Bruce Willis) being able to give counsel to his younger, stupider, less wise self (Joseph Gordon Levitt) has been almost completely ignored, and that’s really a shame.” — from my 9.6 review, titled “Looper Dooper.”

Notice I didn’t say this potential was completely ignored; I said it was “almost completely” ignored. It was toyed and fiddled with but not really developed.

Two days ago a Creature From The Black Lagoon 3D Bluray disc, included in Universal’s Classic Monsters Collection box set, put out bad information and caused my expensive Oppo Bluray player to suffer a major freakout.

I popped the disc in and almost immediately my screen was flooded with alien digital data — ugly noise composed of red, blue and white worms — and an awful buzzing sound. I took the disc out but noticed right away that it had temporarily ruined my Oppo’s ability to deliver clean images on other discs. I had to call tech support and switch out the HDMI cables and go to default and lose all my digital download settings. Everything was fixed after about a 45 minute process, but what a mess.

The Oppo doesn’t play 3D, but the Creature disc offers a 2D option. I had just popped in another 3D Bluray, Warner Home Video’s Dial M for Murder, and the menu offered this option. I naturally presumed this would repeat with the Creature 3D Bluray. Nope. I was told by Universal that nobody else has experienced this problem — fine. But why, then, did the Dial M disc play without issue while the Creature disc didn’t?

Today Deadline announced a ceasing of 24/7 coverage (somewhere between a slowdown and a partial shutdown?) “for at least the next week.” This is presumably about Nikki Finke and staff starting to manage an interweaving of its operation with Variety‘s, which Jay Penske is reportedly buying for $30 million. What other explanation makes any sense?

“Youre so way off you’re on another planet,” a friend claims. “Honest. No. Truth. Whatsoever. Even remotely.”

About 21 months ago I wrote excitedly about College Republicans, a “very smartly written, character-rich, darkly humorous” Wes Jones script “about an actual 1973 road trip taken by infamous Bush strategist and Fox News scumbag Karl Rove, then 23, and the late Republican attack dog Lee Atwater, then 22, as they campaigned and dirty-tricked their way across the south in order to get Rove elected chairman of the College Republican National Committee.”

I described it as “another Due Date mixed with politics…an origin story about the wily and colorful beginnings of two scoundrels who made their bones as the architects of rightwing attack-and-subvert politics — guys who not only put two Bushes into the White House but injected a vicious and reprehensible strain into American politics that not only thrives today but has metastasized.

It seemed to me like a natural for Todd Phillips to direct. The idea at the time (or so I understood) was for Shia LeBeouf and Paul Dano to play Rove and Atwater. The project had some heat in late 2010, but I’m presuming it died because an idea crept in that College Republicans would be processed as an overly partisan satire that wouldn’t play with the yahoos. If anyone knows what really happened, please inform.

College Republicans is “funny and entertaining,” I wrote, “and the Atwater character is a likable good-old-boy, part snake and part horndog, and Rove is a brilliant but snarly schemer who believes in Machiavelli and getting revenge. And it’s got rowdy episodes and wild shenanigans (sexual seduction, colorful language, sudden fisticuffs, rummaging through garbage cans, being chased by dogs and cops and hopping over fences) and a scrappy and suspenseful third-act climax that works in the same way that hundreds of other films have worked — i.e., everything comes to a head and the characters fulfill their fate.”

Yesterday’s discussion of Life of Pi led to discussions of this or that spiritual orientation, and one or two mentions of “faith.” Faith is for gamblers. It’s standing next to a closed door and proclaiming a belief in something profound being on the other side of it. That’s where most Christians are at. Christianity is a child’s way of processing the Great Altogether. Because it’s all knowable. No mystery about it. Cut yourself loose, sail into the mystic and let it all happen…”a cleansing moment of clarity.”

“I’m imbued, Max. I’m imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It’s a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing, as if suddenly I’d been plugged into some great electromagnetic field. I feel connected to all living things. To flowers, birds, all the animals of the world. And even to some great, unseen, living force. What I think the Hindus call prana. I’ve never felt more orderly in my life. It is a shattering and beautiful sensation. It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and…oh, of such loveliness.”

Yesterday was an “all hail Life of Pi” day (especially for guys like Glenn Kenny), but Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn nailed it when he said Pi “seems destined for the Hugo slot” in the Best Picture race. Which means it’ll end up as a marginal contender and a respectable also-ran. Esteemed director, luscious painterly 3D, kid/family appeal (as indicated by the Bambi-level, non-existent PG suggestions of animal killings and flesh devourings), a certain spiritual current with a nice little ending.

Strip it down to basics and Pi is a highly respectable eye-candy achievement that really isn’t all that great but is certainly attaboy-ish in this or that respect, especially if you want to be obliging or comme ci comme ca in your initial review.

I respected the intent and certainly admired aspects of Life of Pi but I wasn’t floored. Boil it all down and it’s a modest little parable — a doodle, really — that’s not so much painted with CG as smothered with the stuff, like chocolate syrup obliterating the creamy hues in a bowl of vanilla ice cream. MCN’s David Poland doesn’t see any “there” there, In Contention‘s Kris Tapley is respectful but not over the moon about it (he called it “messy“), and Hollywood Reporter awards columnist Scott Feinberg sees it mainly as a tech contender.

So just calm down and consider the joint message of Kohn, Wells, Poland, Tapley and Feinberg. Everyone is just being polite and alpha-smiley right now because it came into the NYFF yesterday with all the attendant hoopla and hosannahs with a nice after-party at the Harvard Club …it’s so beautiful to look at! And let’s not forget the visuals!

I was listening to Anne Thompson talk yesterday about how she choked up during the moment when the Bengal Tiger (a.k.a. “Richard Parker”) put his head on Pi’s lap…what? That moment was a wank — a bizarre negation of the natural order and nature of things for no discernible purpose except to emotionally “get” viewers like Anne. For me it was checkout time. Big tigers (even starved and exhausted ones) will always want to eat you, eternally and forever, and the only way they’ll ever abandon this instinct is when fanciful writers and filmmakers decide they want to add a certain “awww” factor.

Once the cosmic beatific smiles and alpha-politeness vibes and back-patting instincts calm down and the next movie comes along and then the next one and the next one and it all gets tossed around in a big salad bowl and the Glenn Kenny and Sasha Stone and Ed Douglas types have shot their rhetorical wads and run out of breath, people will see Life of Pi for what it is — respectfully but without great amounts of love — and rank it accordingly.

Yes, Life of Pi is more substantial film than Hugo — the spiritual current will be seen as at least semi-alluring or even semi-profound by almost everyone — but it’s basically the same kind of tree with the same kind of trimmings.

If you’ve seen the extremely sad Amour it’s nice to think that costars Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva were once beaming with youth. Riva, born in 1927, was 31 when she played a French actress disengaging from an affair with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) in Alain Resnais‘s Hiroshima Mon Amour (’59). Three years earlier Trintignant, born in 1930, had popped through opposite Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim‘s And God Created Woman (’56).

All day long I’ve been hearing about the Arizona suicide guy, and what a terrible thing it was for Fox viewers to have witnessed a real suicide on live TV, and how a mortified Shepard Smith profusely apologized for exposing viewers to such horror. But viewers only saw a long-lens helicopter shot of a guy apparently shooting himself in the noggin and then pitching forward, but with no evident gore or cranial blowout of any kind.

For all the camera was able to see it could have been a kid shooting himself with a plastic toy gun. It was nothing.

The bottom line is that TV news stations love entertaining viewers with live car chases, and viewers are always drawn to this crap as long as it’s shown in PG form. Obviously the guy who shot himself injected an ugly human reality into a form of entertainment that most people regard on the same level as Daytona stock-car racing or the Keeping Up With The Kardashians. In movie rating terms he took things into a PG-13 realm, at most. If we had seen blood or brain matter or fluids of any kind, it would have been R rated…but we saw nothing except a guy performing a suicide pantomine.

So what was the big deal? TV stations and viewers love these stupid, low-rent animal spectacles as long as the helicopter camera is four or five hundred feet in the air and those little stick figures and thimble-sized sedans and SUVs and cop cars are seen as video-game abstractions and no real-life pain or shock or anguish is shown. This rule was broken when the guy shot himself…whoops! We just like the fun action stuff but not the sad or horrid or appalling facts behind these chases! Could you guys please cut to a commercial?

News flash: There are no car chases involving cops that don’t contain some kind of sad or horrid or appalling aspect as the ones being chased are almost always unstable, low-rent, substance-abusing, law-defying types. But cameras never take in these aspects when they’re several hundred feet above and not capturing any sound.

It’s so lazy for the Film Society of Lincoln Center camera guy to just hold on a single master shot and refuse to slowly zoom in on faces from time time. If they wanted to do it right they would have a second camera down near the stage to do another set of closeups.

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson play shuffleboard during their new Oscar Talk chat, which was recorded only an hour or two ago.

Tapley isn’t as much of a fan of Life of Pi as Thompson is, and Thompson is a much bigger fan of Silver Linings Playbook than Tapley. But they’re too polite with each other. They won’t let fly. We’re looking for a little “incredulous parking garage rage” action.

Wells to Tapley: Looper does not “kick ass,” as you say at the end of your podcast. As I said on 9.6, “It’s a highly imaginative sci-fi action thriller in the Phillip K. Dick mode that’s a little too enamored of its originality and imagination, I feel — certainly more than it is enamored of being propulsive or thrilling.

“The biggest disappointment, for me, is that the great haunting concept of an older guy (Bruce Willis) being able to give counsel to his younger, stupider, less wise self (Joseph Gordon Levitt) has been almost completely ignored, and that’s really a shame.

“And Levitt’s made-up, CG-fortified Willis face is weirdly unformed and gets in the way of any potential investment. We all know what Willis looked like when he was costarring in Moonlighting and their faces, his and Levitt’s, just don’t match or seem even vaguely from the same family or country, even. The effect doesn’t work. Johnson should have cast Willis in both roles and CG’ed and de-aged him for his younger-self scenes.

“Boil Looper down and it’s just another violent whammy-chart actioner, albeit with a novel time-travel premise. The whammy chart thing is oppressive. It really feels as if someone shoots something or someone every seven or eight minutes, and that this is happening because the software insists.”