N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis doesn’t claim that Oliver Stone‘s W. is outright fiction, but she seems to imply it’s the next thing to it. This doesn’t square with my understanding that 98% of W. is taken straight from verified historical accounts. There ‘s a certain amount of dramatic embroidery all through W., of course, but the only baldly fictional portions are the Cheney/Dreyfuss conference room speech (“There is no exit strategy — we stay”) and the Oval Office dream sequence at the end, or so I’ve understood.
“Mr. Stone’s take on the president, as comic as it is sincere, is bound to rile ax-grinders of every ideological stripe, particularly those who mistake fiction for nonfiction,” she writes. “History informs its narrative arc from Texas to Iraq, but it should go without saying that this is a work of imagination, a directorial riff on real people and places complete with emotion-tweaking music cues, slo-mo visuals and portentous symbolism. It says nothing new or insightful about the president, his triumphs and calamities. (As if anyone goes to an Oliver Stone movie for a reality check.).”
Where’s that scene-by-scene W. fact-resource site?

N.Y. Press critic Armond White is calling W. “the best example of American filmmaking courage since Munich.” Intriguing thought, but the remainder of the graph indicates that White, incredibly, is in the tank for Bush. I’ve heard about White’s pro-Iraq War positions from a colleague, but hadn’t really read one of his political testaments until just now. It takes balls of steel to be a Bush guy at this stage of the game, especially for someone working in a liberal racket like film criticism.
“Our mainstream media’s vindictiveness toward George W. Bush has dismantled even the illusion of fairness,” he says. “For the past eight years, the media elite have fought back against Bush winning the presidency in 2000, corrupting the purpose of journalism and entertainment by being vehemently partisan and ferociously illiberal. By opposing the mob mentality that would hang Bush in effigy, W. imaginatively sympathizes with the most maligned president in modern history. It might be too late to restore respect for the office, but Stone knows that until we learn that Bush is like us, we learn nothing.”

I got about ten to twelve seconds of face-time with Senator Joe Biden at last night’s Pacific Design Center $5000-per-person fundraiser (which I was invited to but didn’t pay for). I asked him if he’d seen Oliver Stone‘s W. and he said nope, not yet, how is it? And I told him it’s more or less a Greek tragedy with a little comedy thrown in, and well worth seeing. Biden is obviously a little busy these days. I knew the drill before asking, of course, but I asked anyway.

Sen. Joe Biden during his Pacific Design Center speech at last night’s fundraiser — Thursday, 10.16.06, 8:05 pm

I loved a line in a speech Biden delivered to a sizable crowd in the open-air plaza area. It’s from Irish poet Seamus Heaney, and expressed a dream that if things go well on Nov. 4th, “hope and history” might “rhyme. The exact line: “History forbids us to hope this side of the grave. But once in a lifetime, the longed-for tide of justice can arise and hope and history rhyme.” Here’s a partial mp3 of Biden’s remarks.

Biden, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (l.) during Biden’s open-air speech — Thursday, 10.16.08, 8:02 pm

Given the word about Joe Wright‘s The Soloist possibly being a bit “schmaltzy” and boilerplate concerns about Ed Zwick‘s Defiance that I presume don’t need explaining, I wasn’t completely surprised to read a 10.17 story by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Carl DiOrio that both pics have had their wide-release dates delayed into ’09.
The Soloist‘s postponement seems particularly dramatic with its 11.21.08 wide opening being pushed back to 3.13.09. Defiance, which had a previous release date of 12.12.08, will now open wide on 1.16.09.
Defiance will be given a late-December Oscar-qualifying run, reports DiOrio, and it’s possible (though not likely) that The Soloist might be given a similar limited unveiling. But from HE’s perspective it’s looking as if both films have been all but yanked from the Oscar race by their respective distributors, DreamWorks/Paramount and Paramount Vantage.
The Shine-like story of Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez‘s relationship with a homeless musician, The Soloist — a DreamWorks/Universal co-production — was looking at the very least like a possible uptick opportunity for costars Robert Downey and Jamie Foxx regarding possible year-end acting honors and distinctions.

I’m afraid there’s something I don’t understand, Alexsei. It’s widely believed (though not absolutely dead confirmed) that there was a test screening of Zack Snyder‘s Watchmen last night at the Regal Lloyd Center 10 theater in Portland, Oregon. And yet there are no reader reviews posted at AICN yet. What’s up with that?
Any notepad-and-shoe-leather reporter might regard this silence as an indication that reports of the alleged test screening were incorrect. If the screening happened, though, this is inexcusable fan-boy behavior. How long does it take to sit down and post a quick-draw response? Man up, grim up, turn on the Powerbook, tap something out (but make it thorough) and send it off.
Update: A Portland guy informs that “people seem to have been pre-invited and needed to show up with some sort of document they’d been asked to print out. Plus the local rep who works for the Seattle office of the WB reps and who routinely checks the press into screenings here was working the door. So none of the usual media guys got anywhere near the place, and the theater showing the film was locked down and guarded well before 7pm.”

Max Payne (20th Century Fox, opening today) “is a nap-inducing special-effects fest, minus even the excitement of watching someone else play a game. Mark Wahlberg, who appears to have been hypnotized before each scene, plays Max, a cop whose family has been murdered by junkies. Or so it appears: In fact, his wife was eliminated for knowing too much about a new drug being manufactured at the corporation where she worked. Max spends his days filing in the cold-case department and his nights tracking her killers. Until he finds them. Yawn. This is as cardboard as action-movie-making gets: slo-mo bullets and breaking glass, big explosions, rows and rows of dead bodies.” — Marshall Fine at Hollywood and Fine.

At last night’s Al Smith Memorial Dinner in Manhattan:

And last night’s crazy McCain rally lady skit on SNL’s Thursday show. And some real-life rocket scientists at a recent political gathering in Ohio, dated. 10.13.08.

Two days ago the legendary, famously cantankerous Armond White, film critic for the New York Press, was (a) re-elected as the 2009 chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, and (b) also elected 2008 vice-chair. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Goldstein reported yesterday that the NYFCC will vote on the year’s best Dec. 10 vote on 12.10, and that the awards ceremony will happen on 1.5.09.
When I think of White, I think of his uniform approvals of (to the best of my recollection) just about every Steven Spielberg film ever made, including “the excellent, excellent” Munich. I’m also reminded of White’s attempt last year to dissuade the NYFCC from giving to give Sidney Lumet a Life Achievement Award, by way of an impassioned speech in front of the group.

The answer to the Touch of Evil aspect-ratio controversy contained in the release of the 50th anniversary DVD is simple, and shame on those who would needlessly complicate it. All 1950s film that were captured with a protected aspect ratio of 1.37 to 1 should always be mastered for DVD at that aspect ratio. Or at least at 1.66 to 1. I can’t over-emphasize how despicable I find 1.85 to 1 croppings of Eisenhower- and Kennedy-era films.

There is no aesthetic benefit at all — zero — to chopping the tops and bottoms off an image that was protected for 1.37 to 1. The reborn Gordon Gekko’s new slogan: Tall and boxy is good. It harms no one to release a taller fuller image. The DVD distributors are simply looking to put out an image that fits within 16 x 9 aspect ratio of high-def plasma and LCD screens. They want everything to be “wide.”

Don’t believe so-called experts who claim that 1.85 was the projection norm in the ’50s — it wasn’t absolutely. It was 1.66 to 1 here and there, and 1.85 here and there; it was even 1.37 here and there. Why have so many ’50s and ’60s films been masked for laser disc and DVD at 1.66 to 1? For the hell of it? Remember the travesty of Shane, shot in 1.33 (or 13.7) to 1, and then projected in theatres at 1.66 to 1 to accomodate the then-new appetite for wider-screen imagery? The same kind of revisionist horseshit has been happening for years in the DVD market.

HE reader Robert Hunt contends that Hollywood historian Richard Maltby, writing in his book “Hollywood Cinema” (which I’ve read but have no copy of right now), argued that “1.85 wasn’t accepted as the standard aspect ratio by the SMPTE until 1960.”

Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny was written about this in a fashion that I find a little too laissez-faire. Here it is:

“The facts are these: Director Orson Welles and cinematographer Russell Metty shot Touch of Evil in the so-called ‘Academy ratio’ of 1.37:1. And…well, actually, as far as the universally accepted facts are concerned, that’s where they end.

“There is plenty of documentation attesting that it was Universal Studios policy, mid-1953 or so, to have all their releases theatrically projected at the wider 1.85:1 ratio, via a ‘hard matte’ (a plate with a rectangular opening placed in front of the projector’s lens), with the Academy ratio reserved for TV airings of films (1.37 fitting almost exactly correctly on old-style television screens).

“Kehr’s commenters include a great number of folks who have seen Touch of Evil screened theatrically at 1.37. Did the projectionist make an error? Is the documentation concerning Universal’s policy wrong? Did Welles and Metty compose for 1.37 without realizing that the film would be projected at 1.85?

“A lot of questions with no, apparently, definitive or cut-and-dried answers. What is sure is that the new Touch of Evil edition offers three versions of the film–the compromised but still absolutely classic theatrical release, a ‘preview’ edition that hews closer to Welles’ vision than the eventual theatrical release, and the ingenious, controversial 1998 ‘restored’ version put together by scholar/preservationists Rick Schmidlin and Jonathan Rosenbaum — all in 1.85. Former Cahiers du Cinema critic Nicolas Saada calls this a ‘disaster’ over at Dave’s site.

“A host of others, who are also discussing the decision over at the Criterion forum, point to the evidence apropos Universal’s policy. The Lafayette Theater’s Pete Appruzzese, a man I defer to in all manners technical, says he’s run Touch of Evil in both 1.37 and 1.85 and that to his eye the 1.85 version is correct. Dave Kehr feels the 1.85 version looks ‘tight.'”

Then again Kenny wrote the following within Kehr’s talkback section: “Let’s start a collection to raise enough money so that Craig and the MOC guys can convince Universal to license them Touch of Evil for a Blu-ray MOC release in 1.33. Put me down (seriously) for $500 in support.”

Here’s a German comparison site, copied from Dave Kehr’s TOE page.

There’s no earthly reason to believe or presume that Welles and Metty would have preferred that Touch of Evil be seen by future generations in a 1.85 to 1 aspect ratio. Any idiot can look at the 1.37 version on tape and the new cropping and come to this conclusion. There is a word for the 1.85 cropping on the just-out three-disc DVD set, and that word is “vandalism.”

My earlier absence today was due to errands, two meetings and aimless running around. I also had to buy a nice shirt-and-tie combo to wear at a $5000-per-person Joe Biden fundraiser I’m attending at the Pacific Design Center starting at 6 pm. But the real action this evening will be on Late Night with David Letterman when John McCain finally shows up and sits there and plays the good sport. Will Letterman take pity or…?

Created by the guys at 23/6.