I can’t embed this Channel 4 promotional ad for a series of Stanley Kubrick films they’ll be showing, but it’s ingenious — a carefully choreographed, superbly designed and exquisitely cast tribute to The Shining. The sets, the haircuts, the mood of it…perfect! Except I can’t find the actor playing Kubrick or Jack Nicholson. I guess I need to watch it a few more times. (If it’s embedded somewhere, please send along the code.)

“Channel 4 has painstakingly recreated the set of Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining,” the story reads, “complete with look-a-likes of the crew and cast members including Shelley Duvall, for a TV ad to promote a More 4 season of the director’s films.
“The 65-second promotional spot has been filmed as a one-take tracking shot through the recreation of The Shining.
“Viewers get Kubrick’s point of view as he walks through the set, ending up in his director’s chair as the crew prepare to shoot the famous scene of Danny Torrance, the son of Duvall and Jack Nicholson’s characters, riding round and round the deserted corridors of the Overlook Hotel.
“The promo, filmed as a single tracking shot with a cast of 55 actors, was meticulously researched to ‘remain as faithful as possible to the period in which it was shot and the culture of the British studio in the late 1970s”.

I’m sorry, but Meryl Streep‘s use of the word “miasma” in the previous story reminded me of the character named “Miasmo” in Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (’71), and that led to finding this scene on You Tube. Hands down, it’s the best acted and most convincing dumb hypnotism scene in the history of American cinema.

In an interview with The Guardian‘s Stuart Jeffries, Mamma Mia! star Meryl Streep has more or less said that the reason she’s starring in this new movie musical is because of the roundabout influence of Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. More particularly because of the effect that a matinee performance of Mamma Mia! on the Broadway stage had upon a group of 10 year-olds, including her daughter Louisa, not long after the attacks.

Mama Mia! star Meryl Streep; Osama bin Laden.

I knew there was unusual left-field reason why Streep would star in a movie version of an ABBA stage musical! I knew it and now it makes sense.
It was seven years ago and Streep “was in a bit of a pickle,” Jeffries writes. “She had to dream up an excursion for some friends of Louisa, the youngest of her four children by husband Don Gummer, the sculptor to whom she has been married for the past 30 years. Only one problem: it was October 2001 in Manhattan.
“‘Everybody was really dimmed spiritually after 9/11,’ Streep relates. ‘I thought, ‘What am I going to do with the kids?’ So I took all these 10-year-olds to see a matinee of Mamma Mia!. They walked in and they sat there with their heads in their hands. Dimmed is the word. They were sad all the time, you know?
“‘The first part was really wordy, and then ‘Dancing Queen’ started up. And for the rest of the show they were dancing on their chairs and they were so, so happy. We all went out of the theatre floating on the air. I thought, ‘What a gift to New York right now!’ She sent a thank you letter to the cast.”
And that opened Streep’s emotional receptivity door and down the road she was offered the part. In other words, Streep became a Mamma Mia! fan for the same reason that some journalists fell big-time in love with Amelie at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival — i.e., because it was shown right after the attacks and put them in a much better mood. Another way to put it is that Streep joined the Mamma Mia! team for the same reason that Ron Silver became a Republican. Oh…my….God!
“Isn’t this role beneath you?” Jeffries asks. “I’m not strategizing my career moves at all,” Streep replies. “I haven’t got a career that I’m building. When I swim my 55 laps, I try to remember the movies I’ve been in order, and I can’t…the past is just a miasma. There’s no career path.
“I just want to do things that are valuable to introduce into the culture,. This film [Mamma Mia!] is a valuable thing. I knew it when I saw it.”

God grant me (a) the serenity to accept the bad movies I cannot stop from being made that I will probably wind up seeing anyway because I have to try and stay current because I write a daily column, (b) the courage to refuse to see the really bad films that come along that are truly bad for your soul, like Wanted, and (c) the wisdom to know the difference.

Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny feels that a certain James McAvoy line in Wanted — “Six weeks ago, I was ordinary and pathetic, just like you” — indicates that screenwriters have contempt for their audience. “What is this bullshit?,” Kenny asks. “”Have screenwriters become so defensive /resentful on account of churning out quasi-nihilistic, faux-convoluted, graphic-novel-mytho-Babel tripe like this that they feel compelled to lash out at the audience that laps their nonsense up?” Uh, yeah…kinda.
A gaffe, as Michael Kinsley famously wrote, is when you blurt something out that everyone knows to be true (like Samantha Power calling Hillary Clinton a “monster”) but which you’re not allowed to publicly acknowledge. And in a way, Kenny seems to be saying, that Wanted line is a kind of screenwriter’s gaffe — a confession of loathing for the unwashed masses that kind of “slipped out” and wound up in the Wanted screenplay. (Which is attributed to Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan.)
The Hollywood elite, trust me, think very little of ticket-buyers in general. Once you’ve made it to a certain level in the film industry and have begun to run with the truly cool and connected and earn serious dough, you don’t relate to average stiffs. Big Talent tends to look upon regular moviegoers as prisoners of a sort, living in a comfortable penal colony that allows them to indulge in all kinds of perks but keeps them prisoners all the same. (You know…like the way things are in The Matrix.) I’m sorry if this sounds cruel.
Talk to talent on E.T. or Extra about the fans and they’ll go “we love ’em all!” — but that’s public relations. Remember John Lennon‘s lyric about how “you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see”? That was another “uh-oh…a celebrity just said what he should have kept quiet about.” The real truth about things only comes out when someone is tired or arrogant or involved in primal-scream therapy and the obiter dicta — the words in passing — just tumble out.
I was doing an interview in 1982 with actor Paul Land, who played the “Tommy Dee” character in Taylor Hackford‘s The Idolmaker. Land, whose people skills weren’t that great, was talking about his life before he became a successful actor, and he said at one point, “I was like you back then!” Me, he meant — a low-rent schlub, struggling to survive. I understood what Land was basically saying and I didn’t take offense, but the publicist in the room noticably stiffened and went “aaahh.”

I now have good reason to doubt Glenn Erickson‘s review of the Blu-ray Dirty Harry disc that I linked to and commented about yesterday. Erickson was cool with Fox Home Video’s controversial Patton Blu-ray disc, but has claimed that the Dirty Harry disc shows “heavy tweaking to minimize grain, sharpen contrast and brighten colors” and that “heavy processing has given most night shots an almost unnatural look.”
The reason is that transfer guru and unrequited grain-worshipper Robert Harris doesn’t agree, and neither, according to a well-placed source, does Clint Eastwood himself. Harris says that the Harry disc looks like beautifully restored film and not digital data (unlike, in his opinion, the case with the Patton disc). And an on-the-lot source has told me that Eastwood approved the Blu-ray transfer during a test screening late last year.
Eastwood “came in to watch the first ten minutes, said it was fine, and then got up, went to the back of the room, sat down and watched the whole thing,” the source says. “The only grain reduction was done to even out the grain structure. We also toned down a blood scene so it wouldn’t look so day-glo red.”

The trailer for The Day the Earth Stood Still (20th Century Fox, 12.12) with Keanu Reeves (as Klaatu), Jennifer Connelly, Kathy Bates and John Cleese. Directed by Scott Derrickson, written by David Scarpa. I copied the code from some Russian site called Ru Tube. YouTube had it up for a bit before it was pulled. It probably won’t last very long here also. It’s also watchable on this fan site.

Scarpa’s script may, I’m reading, be based more closely on Harry Bates‘ 1940 short story called “Farewell to the Master” than the classic 1951 Robert Wise film with Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Billy Gray and Sam Jaffe. Don’t read the Wikipedia synopsis of the short story if you don’t want to know.

During a q & a session following a Los Angeles Film Festival showing of Boogieman, the superb Lee Atwater doc, I asked a question about the differences in the political climate of 20 years ago (i.e., during the Bush-Dukakis presidential race) and today, and said that I don’t think that racial attitudes are quite as fearful and retrograde as they seemed to be in ’88. I was obviously referring to the Obama ascendancy, but some in the audience flat-out laughed at me for saying this.

The night before last I happened to watch 48 HRS. (’82), the seminal action buddy movie with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy as a cop and a con kicking around San Francisco and looking to stop some bad guys. I was surprised how…yesteryear it felt.
And I’m telling the snooties who laughed at my political naivete a couple of weeks ago that the racial attitudes and undercurrents in this Walter Hill movie, which came out 26 years ago, have all pretty much disappeared in Blue America. They give you a taste of a racially-biased and separatist culture that no longer exists in this country, or is at least severely diminished, and would never be represented in an action film made today.
Nolte is a flat-out racist brute who calls Murphy “nigger” and “spear-chucker.” They go into a redneck bar that’s supposed to be some kind of haven for good ole boy white separatism (in San Francisco?), and when Murphy walks in the vibe in the room is like, “Holy shit, a black guy!” When Murphy order a drink the bartender goes, “How about a Black Russian?” Can anyone imagine material of this sort turning up in any movie made today? Even one set in Bumblefuck, Idaho?

48 HRS. is about Nolte and Murphy seeing beyond their personal petty crap and coming to like and respect each other for who they are inside, but the fact that Hill and his writers toss in the racial jibes tell you something about the culture back then.
Attitudes were still fairly ugly in some quarters. The hosing of the civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, had happened only 17 years before, or what 1991 is to us today. Ours was a reasonably progressive society in elite media circles (Bryant Gumbel began his Today stint in January 1982, and Bernard Shaw had begun as a CNN anchor two years earlier) but Nelson Mandela wouldn’t be released from Robben Island prison until 1990.
I was around and I don’t remember anything in the early ’80s like the comme ci comme ca homogenous whatever vibe that you feel today. In the blue cities and upscale suburbs, I mean. Maybe my memory is faulty, but I don’t think so. The flannel-shirt dumb-asses are obviously still out there in force (they obviously kept Hillary’s campaign going in the final stretches of the Democratic primary race), but things have definitely evolved and progressed since the early Reagan era.

“For those who are quick to call Hancock ‘a mess’ or the third act ‘a huge left turn’ or Variety‘s hypetastic Last Action Hero-like or whatever euphemism they are using this time, I offer this very serious suggestion — see the movie again. If they still don’t see how well the tapestry is woven, I will leave them to their myopia.” — Opening graph of David Poland‘s spoiler review of Hancock, which went up (I think) the night before last. See it again? I have a different suggestion. Erase this movie from your mind by any means necessary.

“The new Blu-ray of Dirty Harry prompts mention of the heated web debate about whether or not studios are over-enhancing older films for hi-def,” writes film.com’s Glenn Erickson. “Irate bulletin board posters have singled out Patton, as Fox’s Blu-ray has been enhanced to minimize natural grain, presumably because Blu-ray proponents think that the format means ‘no grain.’ Patton was so bright and clear in its 70mm theatrical presentation that ordinary viewers are unlikely to complain. This reviewer wasn’t offended either.

“Dirty Harry on Blu-ray is more complicated. The Blu-ray disc shows heavy tweaking to minimize grain, sharpen contrast and brighten colors. Sunny exteriors haven’t changed much but heavy processing has given most night shots an almost unnatural look — detail and bright color in what were once dimly lit areas, with everything else falling into inky blackness.”
Hold on…Erickson is complaining about a so-so-looking film looking better than it did upon original release? Whatever for? I don’t see the beef as long as it looks like “film” and bears a strong resemblance to the intended color and lighting scheme. Is Erickson saying it looks unnatural? Like data rather than celluloid? Look at that Clint Eastwood still up above, which was taken from the Blu-ray by the DVD Beaver guys. He looks terrific. And what’s wrong with that?
“To this reviewer, Patton looks more or less like its theatrical presentation, while Dirty Harry is substantially altered,” Ericksonj continues. “The 1971 release, after all, was never a visual beauty. The quest for ‘docu realism’ seems to have meant indifferent exposure and an over-reliance on zoom shots. Many dialogue scenes have a very shallow focus, and a number of shots are just plain out of focus. On original release prints, ‘pushed’ nighttime scenes offered milky blacks, golf ball-sized grain and weak hues.”

Too many actresses are treated like race horses. They’re allowed to race for a certain period, and then they “age out” and are put out to pasture. Is this what’s happened to Rene Russo? She was looking good during the Clinton years, gliding along there in the early to late ’90s (In the Line of Fire, Get Shorty, Tin Cup, The Thomas Crown Affair). And then…?

The last beam-ups were costarring roles in two movies released three years ago — Two for the Money with Al Pacino and Yours, Mine and Ours with Dennis Quaid — and then she went poof. And now off the radar for three years and counting. Not fair, not right — women of Russo’s age (born in ’54) are in their prime and very watchable.
Hey, what about Madeleine Stowe? I saw her at the Aero Theatre a few months ago with her husband and child, but she’s been MIA for a good while also. Several years. I heard she wrote a good script a few years ago (a western?) that people liked and wanted to make, but they said no when she said “I have to star in it.” She wouldn’t budge, the interest faded and it went away. That’s the story I was told.

John McCain “was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the [Nicaraguan] guerilla group here at this end of the table and I don’t know what attracted my attention,” Republican Sen. Thad Cochran recounted earlier this year, according to the Sun Herald‘s Michael Newsom. “But I saw some kind of quick movement…and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever.
“I don’t know what he was telling him but I thought, good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission. I don’t know what had happened to provoke John but he obviously got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him.”