Jeffrey Wells

A newly-mastered, slightly problematic 70mm print of Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus (’60) was screened last night at the Academy theatre. And I’m sorry to say that it looked a bit darker than it needed to be (and no, it wasn’t the fault of the Academy’s projector lamp). To indicate the problem I’ve posted crude simulations of the difference between how Spartacus looks on Universal Home Video’s excessively DNR’ed Bluray vs. what we saw last night.

Simulation of how this Capua gladiatorial school scene looks on the “shiny” Spartacus Bluray.

Simulation of how this same scene looked last night during the Academy’s 70mm presntation.

The bottom line is that many of the details didn’t seem as crisp and needle-sharp as they are on Universal Home Video’s “shiny” Bluray, which is considered by grain monks to be just as bad as Fox Home Video’s overly glossy Patton. The close-ups on the big screen were magnificent but many of the particulars captured by Russell Metty‘s Super-Technirama 70 cinematography were simply obscured in shadows. This, I regret to say, is the way it is almost every time I see a 70mm film projected at the Academy or the Aero or Hollywood’s American Cinematheque. 70mm just doesn’t stand up to Blurays or DCPs. The absolute best large-format presentation I’ve recently seen was the big Lawrence of Arabia screening at the Academy, but that was a DCP.

Are Universal Home Video execs listening? You guys need to allow Robert Harris, who co-directed the original Spartacus restoration in 1990, to do a Bluray that’s really right, and I mean in a way that truly captures the textured wholeness of Mr. Metty’s photography. Your current “shiny” version isn’t right, last night’s 70mm print wasn’t really right — and you can’t let the “shiny” version be the last word.

Producer-star Kirk Douglas, 95, showed up before the film began to speak with Pete Hammond, ands was his usual plucky, good-humored self, old-mannish in some respects but very sharp and on-the-stick in others. He and Hammond recounted how Douglas’s tough-darts decision to give blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo full credit in the opening titles had essentially ended the Hollywood blacklist. This story and others about the making of this 1960 film are recounted in Douglas’s new book, “I Am Spartacus!” (which I haven’t read but intend to get into). Douglas mentioned that his son, Michael, has recorded the audio version.

After introducing Douglas and Hammond and before surrendering the mike and leaving the stage, Academy president Hawk Koch said to Douglas, “Kirk, I just want you to know that I’m Spartacus.” At which point pretty much everyone in the seats (and I’m talking about at least a couple of hundred people) leapt to their feet and began shouting “I’m Spartacus!” and “No, I’m Spartacus!” and so on. It was quite a moment. A minute later I was asking myself, “Did that just happen?” Update: I got there about ten minutes before the chat began and didn’t realize that this audience-response thing was orchestrated by Tom Sherak — i.e., he had asked everyone to do this.

“Shiny” Universal Home Video Bluray version

Simulation of 70mm projected version of same shot.

Last December I passed along a funny Spartacus story told by James Toback, one that happened during the cutting. The story came from editor Robert Lawrence, who later edited Toback’s Fingers and Exposed.

Kubrick and Lawrence were editing the finale when Jean Simmons, escaping from Rome with the help of Peter Ustinov, is saying goodbye to Douglas, who’s dying on a cross. Kubrick told Lawrence he didn’t want to use what he felt was a grotesque close-up of Douglas. Lawrence said the shot wasn’t so bad, and in any case Douglas will surely complain when he notices that his closeup is missing. “I don’t care what he says,” Kubrick said. “I’m the director…take it out.” They later showed the scene to Douglas, and his immediate comment was “Where’s my closeup?” Kubrick shrugged and said, “I don’t know, Kirk.” He then turned to Lawrence and said, “Where’s his close-up?”

Peter Ellenshaw’s matte painting used for Rome establishing shot at the beginning of Act Two

“This is the first time in history…the first time in the history of the world in which more people are dying of obesity than of starvation…what was once a rich man’s disease has now become socially widespread, and it’s historic. And if we don’t do something to turn this around we’re going to be in deep shit.” Except for the term “deep shit,” this is very close to what New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just said to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell in a little chit-chat segment that aired around 10:10 am Pacific.

I didn’t hear the beginning of the conversation but I think Bloomberg was primarily referring to Americans rather than the worldwide industrial-nation citizenry. Even more specifically he was referring to fat-asses who buy 32 ounce Cokes at movie concession stands, and particularly to exhibitors who insist on selling those 32-ounce drinks. When I ask for the smallest drink at a concession stand, they almost always give me something two or three times bigger than I really want. Huge helpings of food and drink are a lower-middle-class thing in the same way that the only non-young people who smoke are low-rent clock-punchers and layabouts.

Cosmopolis director David Cronenberg and star Robert Pattinson rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this morning. There is meta and meta-meta — this is the latter. Cosmopolis is about an utterly rancid, soul-less and sell-loathing Wall Street guy coming to the end of himself. The metaphor is obvious, and so naturally the NYSE gave Croney and RPatz a big hand.

The Cosmopolis guys can do this stuff all day along and it doesn’t change the fact that the film is airless and suffocating.

“The non-stop chatter in Cosmopolis is so compact and persistent and airless your ears will eventually fall off,” I wrote last May. “With the same determination that Eric Packer — played by Pattinson with his usual glum, shark-eyed passivity — takes himself down, Cosmopolis talks itself to death.

“I was dying for a little silence, a little quiet outside the limo…a sunset, an empty, wind-swept boulevard at pre-dawn, an encounter with a friend or two. Oh, that’s right — Packer hasn’t any.

“Cosmopolis is too familiar, too regimented, too claustropobic, too obvious. Yes, you’re constantly aware of Cronenberg’s fierce behind-the-camera talent, his determination to stay with his apparently quite faithful screenplay of Don DeLillo‘s book and to not cop out by making a film about how Pattinson’s Eric Packer used to be human but is now an alien although there might be a way out. That’s not the Cronenberg way. He gives it to you his way, and you just have to sit there and take it.”

They have a wall phone with a coily cord on the floor of the New York Stock Echange? A wall phone with a cord?

Comedically-inclined talk shows are not a place to get down and share your hurt feelings. But if you’re going to appear on one and you know that subject #1 is not going to be the misbegotten Cosmopolis, you may as well man up and convey something of some interest…some indication of the color of your mood, some pithy banter. So what did Rpatz say to Jon Stewart last night when “the subject” came up? He shrugged and half-smiled and said, “I need to hire a publicist.”

Do you see now why he’s not such a good actor?

If I had been Stewart, I would said the following: “You know, you can’t be too demanding in this world. Nobody’s perfect. Everyone gets corrupted. We all make mistakes. I’m not alluding to anything specific, mind, but one way to look at it is this. If you were to get back together with a certain someone and if there’s, say, a 1 in 100 chance that somewhere down the road you might be the one to make a mistake…a brief dalliance that you half-succumb to and half-resist but it happens anyway, the kind of thing that you’ll remember with great fondness when you’re 87 years old but which you’re sorry for in the immediate aftermath…I haven’t been there but you probably have, right?…and if, let’s say, you get back together with a certain someone and that thing ever happens and you get busted for it, you’ve got this ‘get out of jail’ card that you can pull out of your wallet. Y’know? And she won’t be able to say a damn thing.”

The Jaws Bluray arrived today and I popped it in…well, a couple of hours later. And all I can say is that it looks a bit sharper, cleaner and more vivid than it ever did on a big screen. Back in the ’70s, I mean. For all I know the Jaws DCP will look just as clean and robust if projected on a big screen. Jaws director Steven Spielberg says exactly the same thing on the “restoration of Jaws” piece. Looks better, sounds better. But…

It’s still Jaws. It’s still that mid-level, beach-read, good-enough-but-don’t get-carried-away movie that made all kinds of money, blah blah. I haven’t seen it in five or six years…or is it 10 or 12 years? Anyway I watched about 40 minutes’ worth and it’s fine. It’s clever and crafty and obviously engrossing. But it’s just okay. I can’t for the life of me understand why people hop and down about this thing and go “wow, great film!”

At the very beginning the young blonde girl who’s about to get eaten is running along the beach with a drunk guy following, and rather than act like any normal or semi-normal human being on the planet earth, she takes her clothes off the Spielberg way. She yanks her sweatshirt off and drops it on a grassy sand dune to the right. Then she runs a bit more and pulls one of her sneakers off and throws it to the left. And then the other sneaker. And then her jeans. By the time she’s running into the water she’s scattered her clothes over a 100-foot stretch of beach.

Nobody would do that. They just wouldn’t. In the real world even a drunk girl would drop her clothes in a rough pile of some kind, but not in Spielbergland. Spielberg always finds some way of pulling you out of a film with unnatural human behavior.

I wrote the following last February: “The cheesy Ranker.com has a piece called “The Top 7 Manliest Sword-fights on Film.” Before reading it, I made a bet with myself that they wouldn’t include any of the sword fights in Ridley Scott‘s The Duellist (’77). And they haven’t. Either they’ve never seen it, or they don’t think Scott’s duels are adrenalized enough. In my book The Duellists is on par with Barry Lyndon.” Shout! Factory is releasing a Duellists Bluray on 11.20 — major news.

Earlier today U.S. District Court Judge Dale S. Fischer denied bail to the imprisoned Anthony Pellicano, Hollywood’s hotshot wire-tapper of the ’90s. But the highlights of Frank Swertlow‘s Wrap story (filed at 11:43 am) about the decision focus on the sadly diminished figure of Anita Busch, the former L.A. Times entertainment journalist who was famously intimidated by someone allied with Pellicano when a dead fish and a rose were left on her car windshield along with a note that said “stop.”

A “frail, frightened-looking” Busch delivered an “emotional appeal” at the hearing, Swertlow reports. On top of which she “limped” and “had a wheelchair with her, which she did not use to enter the courtroom.” Busch said her life “has been hell” and her career has been “destroyed” because she “lost sources” over her phone being wiretapped, and she has “lost health.” Swertlow writes that Busch “seemed scared of Pellicano and by the thought of his being released,” calling him “a domestic terrorist” who “has terrorized people for years.”

That may well be the case, but every time I read and think about Busch I feel badly for her, and I shake my head a bit. She’s had a very rough time over the past ten or twelve years, and I’m sorry for her hard luck, physical and otherwise. But the two basic rules about dealing with adversity and tough times are (a) if you’re thrown, dust yourself off and get back on the horse and (b) as hard as things can get someimes, always try to strike a match. Cursing the darkness can get old.

“Our rights come from nature and God, and not from government” — spoken by Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan a day or so ago.

The mind reels. Involuntary gag reflex. The Founding Fathers and the Constitution, Ryan seems to be saying, had relatively little to do with our basic freedoms. But what about those from other cultures and past periods who’ve had to struggle under tyranny? If Ryan is truly a man of God then he surely understands that God rules over all things, and therefore all nations. Which means, according to Ryan’s belief, that God has personally seen to the misery of tens of millions over the millenia, as most people over the last three or four thousand years have suffered under despotic, royal, authoritarian, non-Democratic regimes.

Perhaps Ryan is saying that the hunger to live and breathe and speak freely are inherently bestowed or instilled by a cosmic entity, whether or not these rights are successfully fought for, won and enjoyed. So maybe Ryan isn’t saying that the human rights are God-delivered or assured. Maybe he’s saying that the the freedoms enjoyed by citizens of liberal free societies begin as natural eternal longings, and whether or not they’re able to enjoy them is contingent on the luck of the draw and whether or not they’ve got that fighting spirit. By this understanding, the will to be free isn’t that strong among humans or we’d have seen the emergence of democratic governments a thousand or two thousand years ago instead of two hundred thirty-six years ago.

I don’t think most people are going to go this deep. I think most people are going to read the above statement and think, “What a simplistic-minded Sunday-school asshole.”

Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi (20th Century Fox, 11.21) will be the opening night attraction at the New York Film Festival. Now, I think, there’s a reason to seriously consider shelling out $1500 or so I can stay in Manhattan after Toronto and attend the New York Film Festival press screenings.

Not an easy decision, but I suppose it’s worth it. Sorta kinda. So I can be one of the first movie journalists to watch this kid Pi (played by Suraj Sharma) take a magical 3D sea journey with a Bengal Tiger, an orangutan and a zebra.

Except a little voice is whispering in my ear, “Don’t be a sucker…don’t do it…never trust movies about wide-eyed boys and animals and adventure.”

I don’t know what to do with this seething resentment I’m feeling about Manhattan hotel rates and apartment sublet deals. They used to be steep. Now they’re somewhere between ludicrous and brutal. I’ve come to seriously despise the way all New Yorkers — East Side, West Side, top to bottom, Hoboken to Astoria to Howard Beach — are determined to rape, pillage and gouge all visitors. With random exceptions they’re all pretty much on the same ethical level as Blackbeard or Long John Silver or Bob Diamond of Barclays. But if I want to see Life of Pi seven or eight weeks before it opens, I’ll have to agree to some kind of loathsome economic submission. Terrific.

Posted this morning in the “Don’t Buy The Bullshit” thread, and re-posted here to attract more attention: “I don’t think you guys understand. You might think you’re deeper, smarter, wiser or more perceptive than the New Yorkers who saw the full-length Heaven’s Gate at that disastrous afternoon-and-evening screening at Cinema 1 in November of 1980. But I have to tell you (and maybe you need to sit down first) but you’re not. Or not necesarily, at the very least. By and large you’re roughly on the same level of brain power and sensitivity.

“And I was there, man. I was in that audience, and in all my years of watching films I have never felt such a sucking sensation in a room…a feeling of almost total inertia from the oxygen having been all but vacuumed out by a filmmaker with a ridiculous and over-indulged sense of his own vision and grandeur, and by a resultant approach to filmmaking that felt to me like some kind of pretentious waking nightmare.

“I could feel it in one of the earliest scenes, when John Hurt is addressing his graduating Harvard classmates in a cocky, impudent, self-amused fashion and Joseph Cotten (as a character called “Reverend Doctor”) is shown to be irked and offended by the snide and brazen tone of Hurt’s remarks, and right away I was saying to myself, ‘What is this? I can’t understand half of what Hurt is on about and I don’t give a damn why Cotten is bothered. If this is indicative of what this film will be like for the next three hours then Cimino is fucked and so am I because I have to sit here and watch it.’

“What happened? How could Cimino have made such an oppressive and impenetrable film as this? The basis of the ‘misunderstood masterpiece’ revisionism is basically about the fact that (a) it’s very pretty to look at, very pastoral and majesterial, etc., (b) it offers a severely critical view of the vicious tendencies of gangster capitalism (hence the admiration in certain lefty and left-European circles), and (c) it’s very expansive and meditative and serene in a certain 19th Century fashion. I understand how some could glom onto these three talking points and build that into a revisionist mentality.

“But don’t start up with the ‘oh, what did they know back in 1980?’ crap. They knew. I know. I was there.”

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting Christoph Waltz — Waltz! — will star in Terry Gilliam‘s The Zero Theorem. Waltz will play “an eccentric, reclusive and angst-plagued computer genius” named Qohen Leth who’s working “on a mysterious project aimed at discovering the purpose of existence — or the lack thereof — once and for all.”

HE memo to Gilliam and Waltz: I figured this out years ago and have explained it once or twice in this column. The purpose of human existence is the same one shared by trees, grass, insects, trout, elephants, cats, dogs, worms, poisonous snakes and armadillos, which is to manifest and re-produce for the elemental purpose of manifesting and re-producing. To be is to be is to be…that’s it! For sentient beings with the ability to read, write and make movies the additional challenge is to devise a philosophy that permits an enthusiastic and whole-hearted continuance of this process without succumbing to depression (see: any Woody Allen film after Bananas) or self-destruction or mindlessness (see: Fight Club).

So now that we know, why would anyone want to spend two hours in the company of a guy who’s trying to figure this out, especially one with a dipshit name like Qohen Leth?

Variety‘s Jeff Sneider joined Sasha Stone and I for a discussion of this and that in an Oscar Poker-ish, grab-bag, drill-down fashion. We talked about right now…howz that? I refuse to describe it any further. Dang-ah-lang-ah-ding, dang-ah-lang-ah-lang-ah-ding. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link. Note: Link corrected…sorry for earlier error.