Here’s to the just-passed Horton Foote, whom I’ll always admire and feel really close to because of his screenplay of Tender Mercies, perhaps my all-time favorite rural relationship film played on a subdued and generally calmed-down key. (Whadja think about that one, Watchmen fans? Was it visually fierce enough for ya? The only problem was that Duvall’s Mac Sledge never put a superhero costume on.) His To Kill A Mockingbird screenplay was perhaps the first adult-level thing to get to me as a kid.
“Look at Watchmen from the back to the front,” David Poland finally wrote today at 5 pm Pacific, after seeing Zack Snyder‘s forthcoming weekend winner last night. “Do you care about what has happened to any of these characters, except Rorschach, by the time you leave the theater?
“Not ‘did you think the glass thing on Mars was really cool?’ Or ‘is the prison sequence easily the best thing that Zack Snyder has ever done?’ Or ‘did you like seeing Malin’s ta-tas? Or ‘Is ‘Archie’ cool as hell?’ Or ‘how cool is it watching people explode and then seeing the guts drip off the furniture?’
“And I am not even picking on the terrible wigs, the uninspired fight choreography in all but a couple of sequences, the slow-mo/speed-up thing that is years past being a cliche, the hideously cliched music choices, and other just softball stuff in the film that should have been done better.
“I am looking at the core. Do you care? Do you have an emotional stake in the characters or the world they are trying to save?
“No. And no. For me.
“And yet I don’t hate the film or anything. I just wish it was about something more than recreating the book faithfully on screen. Because you know what? You’re better off reading the book if you want to have that experience. Then you will get all the sidebars and you will have time to consider them. And you will fill in the blanks [even] though, amazingly enough, Snyder, in all his serious effort to be faithful, does what the book does not, which is to fill in those blanks. Perhaps it is not intentional. But again, it is the nature of film. It simplifies, even if you don’t want it to.
“I wish I could say ‘go for the spectacle’ but frankly, you are better off watching The Dark Knight again in Blu-ray. Much better off.”
N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith filed a Watchmen rave last night. Sounds like too much of a rave to me. (“Thrillingly sophisticated”?) But I was expecting Smith to be favorably disposed because he’s a comic-book generation guy, or close enough to it.
I said it a couple of weeks ago but it bears repeating: Take with a grain of salt the views of any Watchmen reviewer who grew up reading superhero comics, which is pretty much anyone under 40, give or take. They have their life savings invested in this bank, so to speak, so I know what I’m talking about when I say they can’t be trusted. In fact, trust no one on this thing. Don’t even trust Barack Obama if he winds up seeing it (which he probably will sooner rather than later).
Except for guys like myself, I mean. Only the stand-up boys who have zero investment in comic book lore can be trusted to tell it straight. We are the blazing truth-tellers — the ones who watch the Watchmen geeks.
Perhaps the funniest Black List script from last year is Kyle Killen‘s The Beaver, about a chronic depressive whose life is taken over by his beaver hand puppet. It’s said by two sources to be in Steve Carell‘s corner. That is, if the term “attached to” means anything. “But he’s also attached to a great many things,” one guy cautions. “I’ve heard they’re readying the next Get Smart for his next hiatus. Carell also has a teaming with Tina Fey in the works, but it’s pricey. He wants to spend time with family, so I’ve heard they’re planning to shoot whatever his next feature is in Massachusetts to accommodate that.”
The next Get Smart?
David Mickey Evans‘ Ace Ventura Jr. Pet Detective hit the video shelves yesterday. I see in the jowly face of that kid, Josh Flitter, the essence of the American cancer that the Taliban is dead set against. And you know what? They’re right. (Thanks to Jack Morrissey for the tip-off.)
As of one hour ago (i.e., 9 am Pacific) 90% of the advance-purchase Fandango action was being slurped up by Watchmen….surprise! 3% of the early-buy money was going to the Jonas Brothers 3-D Concert Movie, 1% was being hammered by Slumdog Millionaire, and so on down the line. We’ll be looking at a cultural avalanche this weekend. See how much effect all those neg-head reviews and pissed-off fanboy postings have had, Warner Bros. publicity?
An mp3 recording of a clip from Armando Ianucci‘s In The Loop, which I creamed over last January and which IFC will be releasing sometime this year: “Don’t apologize for me, apologize for yourself….not a fuckin’ little Jane Austen novel!…walk the fuckin’ line!…not a good time, I’m busy, fuck off!….lubricated horsecock…well within my purview…those kids make you sound like Angela Lansbury.”
“It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with,” Salman Rushdie wrote for a piece in last Saturday’s Guardian. “Or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect.
“Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is authentic; but it’s still tourism. If the earlier films were raj tourism, maharajah-tourism, then we, today, have slum tourism instead.
“In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion.
“But for a first-world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away.”
Jeffrey Wells to William Friedkin: The French Connection was obviously your film when you were developing, shooting and cutting it, and certainly your film when you were promoting it in ’71. And you were most responsible for winning the Best Picture Oscar, clearly. But those days are over, pal, and while you may feel some form of residual parental ownership rights today, you’re out of line. At least as far as revisionist futzing rights are concerned.
Frame capture from David Lean’s revised version of Lawrence of Arabia.
Whatever your attorney has told you or the contracts may say, you do not own The French Connection, Mr. Freidkin — the moviegoing public does. The fans who’ve been watching and worshipping this film for the last 38 years do. Your ownership rights went out the window, sir, once that legendary New York crime film became a huge hit, and they sure as shit were null and void after it won the Best Picture Oscar of 1971. And you can’t just stroll into a post-production house on Highland or Seward and re-visualize it and put out a snow-bleachy version on Blu-ray and say, “This is it — the best version of this film ever made!”
Well, you can because you have. But you have no legitimacy in doing so.
I’m referring to what cinematographer Owen Roizman strongly stated last week, which is that you’ve desecrated The French Connection with a new high-contrasty, snow-grained, color-bleeding, verging-on-monochrome digital transfer that is now watchable on Blu-ray.
The word on the street is that you intend to do the same thing to The Exorcist down the road. I got the idea from listening to you speak the night before last that if you had a chance you’d probably do the same to upcoming remasters of Sorcerer and To Live and Die in L.A..
I’m writing to tell you, sir, that this has to stop because in the eyes of the Movie Gods you haven’t the right to do this, despite what your pallies at Fox Home Video and others in the film-cultivating community may have told you.
You can’t mangle what belongs to the public and to history, Mr. Freidkin. Art belongs to the artist until he or she creates it, and then it belongs to the world. Period. That means forever. That means no retroactive whimsical messing-around rights can kick in. And that means no Greedo-shoots-first revisionism of any kind unless the intention is to try and bring genuine (i.e., nonrevisionist) improvement to the original vision. Richer, fuller, crisper, cleaner…fine. But no “atrocious” and “horrifying” revisions.
That means if Pablo Picasso comes back from the grave he can’t go to Spain and decide that “Guernica” works better in color because he had a recent vision in heaven that painting it in black and white in 1937 was the wrong way to go. That means that the ghost of David Lean can’t come back to earth and decide to reimagine and remaster Lawrence of Arabia as a black-and-white period movie in the vein of John Ford‘s The Lost Patrol (1934).
The same thing goes for The Exorcist, Sorcerer and To Live and Die in LA.. You don’t have the right because they’re not your films, buster. You made them, obviously, but they have a life and a culture and a spirit of their own now. And I am telling you, speaking for myself and I suspect for many others, to back off and leave those movies alone. I mean it. Stand aside, sheath your sword, holster your pistol and find some other way to be creative.
You can do what you can to improve the appearance of these films on DVD, Blu-ray and hi-def digital downloads feeds. You can help to make sure they look precisely as they did when they were shown as brand-new prints in first-run theatres, or help make them look even sharper and cleaner and more vivid than they did back then if you so choose, but that’s all.
Otherwise you’re a brilliant and accomplished filmmaker, and an excellent fellow to discuss the ins and outs of the movie business with. And Bug deserved more attention and acclaim than it got. And all hail Michael Shannon!
Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art is showing William Friedkin’s degraded revision of The French Connection for six days starting today. This morning I sent a letter this morning to Rajendra Roy, MOMA’s chief curator of film. 11:55 am Update: Roy and I just spoke. A summary of his comments is pasted below.
(l. ro.) Owen Roizman, frame capture from French Connection Blu-ray, William Friedkin.
“As you may have heard or read, French Connection cinematographer Owen Roizman, speaking last week in an online radio interview, has called William Friedkin‘s digital restoration of The French Connection (as presented on the recently-released Blu-ray) “atrocious,” “horrifying” and “emasculated” He also said he was “appalled by it,” and emphasized that “it’s not the film I shot.”
“As part of a six-day series beginning today and ending next Monday, MOMA is showing Friedkin’s new version of the film. The MOMA copy says that “Friedkin has called this new digital restoration the definitive version of his masterwork.” MOMA is apparently showing this version without warning, meaning there will be people who haven’t read up on this and who will be attending unaware of what Freidkin has done.
“As a fierce critic of Freidkin’s new version who sides with Roizman 100%, I have two questions I’d like you to please answer for a piece I’m running this morning, if that’s cool.
“Did you, as the programmer, feel any obligation to at least inform viewers that what you’ll be showing isn’t the film that Roizman shot, isn’t the film that played in theatres in 1971, isn’t the film that has been issued on VHS and laser disc and DVD in years past? And that it is a version that Roizman has said he’s appalled by?
“And did you, as the programmer, feel any obligation for contrast’s sake to offer MOMA patrons a chance to see the film as it looked before Friedkin futzed around with it? In other words, did you perhaps consider showing both versions at alternating screenings — i.e., three days showing the traditional version and three days showing Friedkin’s grainy, bleachy, flirting-with-monochrome version?
“There’s nothing wrong with showing Friedkin’s desecrated version if that’s what you want to do, but I think you and our film department colleagues should have made it clear exactly what you’ll be showing to viewers, and given them a chance to compare Friedkin’s digitally-projected version to the traditional 35mm version that’s been around for nearly 40 years.”
Comments by MOMA film curator Rajendra Roy: “We are informing people who come in and buy tickets that this is a digital restoration being shown at Freidkin’s request. Billy came in to my office, said he’s worked on a new resotoration and that it looks like he’d always wished it had looked, the studio never let him get it to the place he wanted to get it and that he wanted to show it. The fact that he said that this digital version looks like he always wanted it to look…I’m highly suspect of [this]. He said he’d never wanted it to look like a dark movie, which to some, I recognize, is flabbergasting.
“But MOMA has to be receptive to being a forum for living artists to reexamine their work, and here we have a living artist getting up and showing this new version and discussing it. And we’ve made it clear this is a digitally-projected version of the film. We have screened the traditional 35mm verson within the last ten months, and this is a chance to see this new version. I would prefer that MOMA patrons have access to this. If I ignore that, MOMA will be in mothballs [one day]. I embrace the debate. I’m doing this because I believe Billy has created something interesting and new. [On the other hand] I mostly agree with what you’re saying about art belonging to the public.”
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