Jeffrey Wells

If the Criterion Collection wasn’t such an elitist, foo-foo, too-cool-to-schmooze-with-the-little-people outfit, I’d call to ask who’s calling the shots on the design of their Bluray covers. The art on their Rules of the Game Bluray (due 11.15) is one of their best ever. I also think the photo used for their Fanny and Alexander Bluray is the most intriguing piece of ad art I’ve ever seen associated with this landmark Ingmar Bergman film.

Update: I checked the Criterion website and looked at all the copy I could find to see who designed the new Rules of the Game and Fanny and Alexander Bluay jacket covers, and…you know, I spent a good while snooping around and I just couldn’t find anything. I don’t have the booklet for or the Blurays of either. But thanks to David Erlich for informing that the cover artist for Rules is Edward Sorel (I obviously should have looked more closely at the bannister) and that Criterion’s marketing person “calling the shots” is Sarah Habibi.

I honestly found it difficult to pick up this info on my own. I honestly believe that Criterion is an elitist organization. I’ve admired them since Day One, but they’re always rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t like snoots, and I never will.

Three weeks and two days after the opening of Rise of the Planet of The Apes, the N.Y. Times runs a piece by Annie Eisenberg that states once again how 2011 performance-capture technology has made it very, very hard to tell that the apes in Rupert Wyatt‘s film aren’t real? That‘s what they’re bringing to the table as Labor Day approaches? Why didn’t the Times wait until October? Don’t half-ass being late to the table — go all out.

Remember Steven Soderbergh intimating during a ComicCon panel last month that perhaps he might not retire after all? The first journalist to draw this conclusion, or so I recall, was Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale when he posted a riff that was titled “Steven Soderbergh Apparently Not Retiring After All.” But read past the headline and Soderbergh didn’t really say or imply anything like that.

Matt Damon in Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (Warner Bros., 9.9)

Soderbergh said that Matt Damon was indiscreet in passing along “this drunk conversation [I had] with him while shooting Contagion” in which SS said he wanted to get out of directing. He also said that “nobody in this economy wants to hear about someone quitting a good job…[so] that kind of got blown out of proportion, and that’s Matt’s fault.” If anything Soderbergh blurting out his feelings about quitting directing while drunk suggests that he meant what he said, and saying that his remarks about same “got blown out of proportion”…I don’t know what that means.

In any case Soderbergh is retiring, according to Dennis Lim‘s 8.28 N.Y. Times story about Soderbergh’s latest film, Contagion (Warner Bros., 9.9). Or he’s committed, at least, to what may turn out to “a Frank Sinatra retirement,” as I described it a couple of months ago — i.e., two or three years of painting and then back on it.

“Mr. Soderbergh was speaking last month in his office space-cum-painting studio in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, where, having announced his imminent retirement from directing, he will soon be spending a lot more time,” Lim writes. “Mr. Soderbergh, 48, sounded matter-of-fact about the career change. ‘I’m interested in exploring another art form” — painting — “while I have the time and ability to do so,’ he said. ‘I’ll be the first person to say if I can’t be any good at it and run out of money I’ll be back making another Ocean‘s movie.”

With Haywire in the can and opening in January 2012, Soderbergh will direct three more films before hanging up his jodhpurs and megaphone: (a) Magic Mike , inspired by Channing Tatum‘s time as a male stripper; (b) a big-screen version of the 1960s TV hit The Man From U.N.C.L.E.; and (c) that long-gestating Liberace biopic with Michael Douglas. Wait, shouldn’t Soderbergh direct the Liberace pic first?

Last night I finally visited The Old Place — a McCabe and Mrs. Miller-type tavern in the small hamlet of Cornell, a few miles north of Malibu via Malibu Canyon. John Landis used the Old Place for a locale in Shlock, his early ’70s debut film. TV actor Peter Strauss owns a big ranch across the street from the Old Place. Steve McQueen, Ali McGraw and Sam Peckinpah occasionally hung here in the early ’70s. There’s a biker hangout just down the road called the Rock Store.

I’ve known disappointment in my life and I’ve seen what disappointment can do to hardened professionals, but I’ve rarely seen the kind of panicky disappointment that CNN reporters are conveying right now. Suppressed but all the more for that. These people clearly realize that Hurricane Irene is a shortfaller, and is nowhere near the aggressive destructive force that the media has been warning everyone about for the last two days. And they don’t know how to play this.

They’re flopping around like beached flounders, the news anchors are. The “we’re in for some big weather trouble!” current won’t fly any more, and they don’t know whether to panic (“Oh, God…the ratings are going to drop and we might be severely reprimanded if not fired for failing to jack up viewer anxiety levels!”) or breathe a sigh of relief and confess to viewers. “Whew…it’s not gonna be that bad! Wet and windy and loss of power, but nothing too scary.” Update: Hurricane Irene is no longer a hurricane but a candy-assed tropical storm.

All the way from California I can sense that the New York harbor seagulls are generally unimpressed. You can hear them calling out to each other, “It’s okay, guys…caw! caw!…it’s cool! It’s just heavy rain and blustery wind…a storm but nothing to sweat that much.”

A couple of Sundays ago in the L.A. Times seasoned critic Stephen Farber praised The Help in a curious way. Rather than shrugging his shoulders and going easy on the fact that it’s a safe middlebrow film, Farber doubled-down and praised it for that. “Hmm, middlebrow…good!”

Appalled, Mark Olsen went to his LA Times editors and asked to write a retort. In so doing he managed to praise Amigo, Bellflower, The Color Wheel, Dennis Hopper and quote Neil Young. Here‘s what he wrote.

Olsen pull-quote #1: “The retort to Farber’s position is simply and obviously this: Today is not 50 years ago…and the best films should aim to reflect that with a clear-eyed awareness in their context and perspective and a strong reach for more.”

Olsen pull-quote #2: “The problem is not with the middlebrow in itself — and really, a film such as Bridesmaids likely represents the true New Middle more than The Help — the problem lies with opting for the obvious and becoming complicit with the incurious. Aiming for the middle is too often an excuse to aim too low.”

Earlier today a friend mentioned Tony Scott‘s interest in re-making The Wild Bunch. I speculated that just as Straw Dogs director Rod Lurie discovered through research that only about 2% of current moviegoers have heard of Sam Peckinpah‘s Straw Dogs, much less seen it, Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is probably similarly unknown.

To a typical 19 or 23 or 26 year-old a landmark western costarring a group of saggy, middle-aged men that came out in 1969 might just as well have been released when Douglas Fairbanks was an action star, or when the Great Pyramids were built.

To them, a movie released 42 years ago is ancient history. It’s Land of the Pharoahs or the 1932 The Mummy. To them, older movies are ones that came out in the ’80s and early ’90s.

Recycling, re-branding and regurgitation have been Hollywood mantras since at least the mid ’90s if not long before. Nothing gets green-lighted unless it’s pre-sold, pre-recognized — a thoroughly saturated story or concept that’s ripe for re-packaging. Because nothing so terrifies studios and producers of pricey movies and Broadway plays as a semi-original idea, much less a fully original one. Because the vast majority of moviegoers out there (yes, here I go again) are under-educated, low-rent, ADD primitives who would rather take a bullet than open themselves up to something that doesn’t feel shopping-mall familiar and corporatized.

As Norman Mailer once said about Frank Borman, one of the original Apollo astronauts who had dissed Mailer’s “Of A Fire on The Moon“, “It would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a new idea to get into Frank Borman’s head.”

I couldn’t remember at first where I’d seen this style of drawing when I first caught sight of this Coen brothers Bluray box set (out on 8.30). It was inspired, I later remembered, by those turn-of-the-19th-century-era or Victorian-era posters for circuses and carnivals (“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” and all that) and/or those illustrations that accompanied Monty Python shows and films of the ’70s and ’80s.

Me to Drive publicist: “I’ve seen that ‘my hands are dirty’ / ‘So are mine’ clip maybe 10 or 12 times. I’m actually tired of seeing it. Would it kill the powers-that-be to come up with a scene that hasn’t made the rounds quite as much?” Drive publicist: “Hahaha…we have a bunch more coming out. Stay tuned!”

A five-star rave of Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, written by Empire‘s Angle Errigo, hasn’t been posted on the Empire website. But it’s been scanned and posted by Romangirl88. Sum-up verdict: “Utterly absorbing, extremely smart and — considering this is a sad, shabby, drably gray-green world of obsessives, misfits, misdirection, disillusionment, self-delusion and treachery — quite beautifully executed.”

In an 8.26 Deadline story titled “Can Indies Steal Oscars Again?”, Pete Hammond reported that Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will no longer open stateside on 11.18, but on 12.9.