Given David Poland‘s tendency to sound a little queeny and sometimes super-malleable when it comes to musicals, his 7.9 pan of Mamma Mia! is a significant thing. It’s also one of the funniest and best-written slams he’s ever posted on MCN.
Other opinions will obviously add to the stew, but henceforth those who are determined to see this film with their friends and have a great time (i.e., the Sex and the City crowd) with a truly un-self-conscious girly-girl attitude are going to have to figure ways to keep themselves d & d between now and when they see it. So as not to permit discordant voices to, you know, muddle the experience.
“Hiring the stage director who doesn’t have the slightest idea how to shoot a movie and has no real understanding of why a movie is not simply the stage show on film,” Poland begins. “And this is, simply, why Mamma Mia! is a pretty terrible movie.
“Worse than Rent. Worse than Annie (a movie with three numbers that really work and an overall tone that does not). But it is one step better than the conversion of The Producers, as it is a jukebox musical and actually requires very little sophistication… just more than Phyllida Lloyd could deliver from behind a movie camera.
“I had a hard time getting a handle on what exactly they were going for with this melange of beautiful settings, terrible green screen (or whatever technique they used to leave massive lines around the actors’ heads when they were looking out onto the sea from the hotel), overt breaking out in song, 60-is-the-new-45 casting, big energy, little consistency, a stunning amount of obvious ADR-ed/dubbed dialogue scenes like we haven’t seen/heard in an American movie in a long, long time, and the bravest performance of Pierce Brosnan‘s career since anyone who sings like that choosing to expose himself to the public is daring indeed.
“After about 30 minutes, it hit me. They were making an AIP beach movie…Gidget Goes Grecian…How To Stuff A Wild Souvlaki…Marital Beach Party. It’s meant to be rollicking, cheesy, brain-dead good fun.
“I’m not kidding. There is a distinct filmmaking style that suggests that they looked at these films as a template. (Exec Producer Tom Hanks has also shown his interest in that period, including with his own directorial debut, That Thing You Do.) The problem is that the filmmaking doesn’t deliver on that either. Ms. Lloyd just doesn’t know what she is doing with the camera. She leaves some very talented people hanging in the breeze as she fails to understand the language of film and how to support the ideas of her actors’ performances with how she shoots the images.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if right now the Hollywood Reporter‘s Ray Bennett is out buying a fishing hat and dark shades and thinking about gassing his car in preparation for a trip to Mexico. He’s probably at least asking himself, “Is it nobler to stay in the States as my reputation as the guy who gave an enormous wet kiss to this film grows, or is it smarter to duck out now and wait until it all blows over?”
Full disclosure: Why haven’t I run my own review? Well, I showed up at last Monday’s screening at the Landmark (which I’d RSVP’ed to a couple of weeks prior) only to be told that Universal publicists didn’t want me to see it. So I guess I’ll just wait until July 18th to (a) confirm my suspicions or (b) fall surprisingly in love, or (c) arrive at some in-between place.
When it comes to slicing and dicing, restaurant critics seem to be better at their particular field — writing with more emotion, using more elegant phrasings — than many film critics are at panning movies. More fun to read, at least. One reason is that restaurant critics are a lot more Anthony Lane-ish than, say, Kenny Turanny or Mick LaSalle-like. The better ones put forth a mixture of effete snobbery and saying it plain and straight (like Alan Ladd‘s Shane dialogue), describing their run-ins like a good sports writer or war correspondent but with slight sprinklings of haute.
Lower Manhattan’s Ago
I was thinking this over yesterday as I read three withering reviews of the downtown Manhattan branch of Ago, which opened early last month. I read them because the West Hollywood Ago, which has been around for a good ten years or so, is only three blocks from where I live, and because I’ve eaten there two or three times and had….well, a pretty good time.
This is the place, remember, where Quentin Tarantino and Don Murphy had their celebrated lunchtime fisticuffs, or rather where Tarantino went all Mike Tyson on Murphy and Murphy (if I recall the news accounts) did a Muhammad Ali rope-a-dope.
In any event, N.Y. Times critic Frank Bruni despises the Manhattan Ago for not being “in the hospitality business [as much as] the attitude business, projecting an aloofness that permeated all of my meals there, nights of wine and poses for swingers on the make, cougars on the prowl and anyone else who values a sort of facile fabulousness over competent service or a breaded veal Milanese with any discernible meat.”
He begins by describing himself and a friend waiting at the bar from an 8:30 p.m. reservation that wasn’t ready by 8:51, “when the great wave of white wine crashed over [the bar].
“I’m talking about the Poseidon Adventure of wine spills. Shelley Winters could have done the backstroke in it. I’m not sure how the bartender set it in motion, and neither was he. He kept marveling at its fury and aftermath: my friend’s wine-splashed chin, her wine-soaked skirt, her wine-sopped entirety.”
ditto
GQ’s Alan Richman wrote last month of a meal for four at Ago, which didn’t begin until 10 pm due to the crowds. “At 11:45 p.m., having spent exactly $100 per person, tip not included, on food and a single bottle of wine, my friends sat stunned. They are both restaurateurs from the South, and they couldn’t believe dining in New York had come to this.”
Then the waiters started in on standard search-and-destroy procedures — i.e., grabbing everything they can off a table in order to scoot the customer out so they can close up. Boom! — a water glass snatched. Wham! — a candle taken away. “We took the hint and got up to leave,” Richman writes. “At that point service improved markedly. The maitre d’ ran outside to flag down a cab, anxious to see us on our way.”
In a 7.7. piece, The New Yorker‘s Lauren Collins called Ago “the most cynical Californian export since Euro Disney.” She saw it as lacking in class. She complained about its “lurid cocktails” (a blue Martini that “isn’t fit for a Smurf”) and exhibitionist patrons (i.e., “a couple [making] out with an athleticism, and a sense of privacy, more often associated with sandy beaches on desert islands”).
I can relate to this. I was once kicked out of a bar for making out with a girlfriend, so don’t tell me. Nothing destroys the allure of a presumably hot and happening restaurant more than common or crude behavior from the customers.
This lesson was impressed upon me very strongly about 25 years ago at an Italian restaurant on upper Columbus Avenue, not too far from the Museum of Natural History. It had just opened and been written about in a couple of publications, so I popped in one night for a quick one and to look at the menu. I eventually spoke to a waiter about this and that, and he pointed out that the owner was celebrating the opening of the place with a large group of friends and family. I looked over and there they were — 15 or so at a big table, raising glasses and being way too loud. They looked like New Jersey Italians.
I went downstairs to the bathroom, and as I was washing my hands one of the owner’s friends or family members — a big tall guy with a moustache — came in and went straight for the urinal and loudly belched, loudly farted and took a leak at precisely the same instant. Boom-boom-bam! And then he went “aaahhhh!” like a grizzly bear having an orgasm. And then he snorted.
Now, I’m as human as the next guy and so I try not to look down my nose at people, but this guy, I decided then and there, was a total animal. And I said to myself, if the owner has beasts in his family or among his friends, then he too must be a belching and farting peon on some level, and this will come out in different ways in the running of his business, and sooner or later the restaurant will close. Probably sooner. I decided all this less than 30 seconds after the show in the bathroom.
Four to six months later, the place had indeed closed. I’m not making this up.
Minor but necessary recap: On 6.28 I wrote about former CBS news Baghdad correspondent and current Washington, D.C.-based chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan, and particularly the hotpants situation she’d reportedly become involved in (an affair with a married-but-separated US State Department contractor named Joe Burkett following a thing with CNN international correspondent Michael Ware), and how the tabs and the N.Y. Post were covering it.
My two main thoughts were (a) this was nobody’s business so why don’t they leave her alone?, and (b) passion is as passion does and is no big deal, especially if you’re reporting from a war zone.
Yesterday the Washington Post‘s Howard Kutz ran a piece about Logan and her brief tabloid flare-up. The thrust or intent of the piece was essentially to say to everyone in the government and the media, “This lady is cool and professional and emotionally centered….there but for the grace of God go you or I.”
The piece also revealed that Logan is pregnant by Burkett and that the two “intend to get married eventually.”
One passage read that “while some may accuse her of tawdry conduct, what happened to Logan is an all-too-familiar tale of someone consumed by a career and needing a partner who understands the peculiar pressures involved.”
Those pressures being reporting from an intense war zone where violence, bodies and bomb blasts are part of the daily drill. As I put it last month, “There’s always something strangely erotic in the air when there’s a lot of random death and danger floating about…the more ghastly or threatening the surroundings, the more likely it is that like-minded professionals of a certain age are going to get down in the heat of the moment.” I compared this to the “terror fucking
On 6.29, HE reader Ogami Itto wrote that this observation was “spoken like somebody who’s never been anywhere near a combat zone.” True, but I knew — know — a little something abut this, having been around and heard some good stories from this and that journalist. Unlike Ogami Itto, it would seem.
Cheers also to HE reader CinemaPhreek, who wondered the same day if”it’s possible to get mental whip-lash from bloggers who talk about high-brow art vs. trash one post and then jump right down into the muck the next?” The muck that Kurtz is now chest-deep in, he means?
Hey, how come David Jones‘ Betrayal, a screen version of the renowned Harold Pinter play which came out 22 years ago and was then issued on VHS but never saw subsequent life on laser disc or as a DVD, is still sitting on the Fox Home Video shelf?
One indication of the completely buried status of Betrayal is that you can’t find any decent online stills from it. This awful shot looks like a screen capture from somebody’s TV screen as the grotesque VHS version was being played.
Ben Kingsley and Jeremy Irons‘ performances (as a cuckolded publisher husband and his best friend, a literary agent) ) are easily among their career best. The luncheon scene alone (“I mean, you love modern prose…probably gives you both a thrill!”) is worth the price alone. And the only way to see it, still, is to buy a cruddy VHS version on E-Bay.
I remember to this day going to the 20th Century Fox lot in ’83 to catch a screening of this. I had just arrived here from Manhattan and was still finding my feet. The screening was two or three weeks away from release and was quite the thing to see. I remember taking a friend, Kathryn Galan, and discussing it with her in the parking lot.
I’ve been badgering Fox Home Video about this title for a good eight to ten years, and all they’ve shown so far is a Ceaucescu-like silence and resistance to the idea.
I’ve never seen On A Tuesday, a short film about a thirtysomething couple getting married at San Francisco City Hall on a work day. I’m only aware of it because a good friend, Svetlana Cvetko, shot it and a friend of hers (and an acquaintance of mine) named David Scott Smith directed and co-wrote it. But interest has been aroused by an American Cinematographer article (July issue, page 16) about Cvetko’s unusual lensing of it.
On A Tuesday dp Svetlana Cvetko
The gist is that Svetlana decided to shoot this intimate little piece in the widest aspect ratio I’ve ever heard of — 3.18 to 1. The widest moving image I’ve ever seen is the 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio of Camera 65 or Ultra Panavision 70, which you can see on the Ben-Hur or Mutiny on the Bounty DVDs. I suppose I just love the perversity of an ultra-widescreen composition being used for a “small” film, or a format not necessarily mandated by the subject matter. Svetlana’s reasons were her own, of course, but that’s what makes a ballgame.
It’s a shame On A Tuesday isn’t viewable online. I’d love to see it for this aspect alone. Here’s a site with some nice frame captures.
Of course, I don’t know how a film this wide could projected on a screen in the right fashion. The screen would have to be fairly large and, I would think, slightly curved to deliver the right composition.
I just love the idea of making a quiet, soft-spoken subject seem exceptional by using some kind of vivid technique. I would have loved it, for example, if David Jones‘ Betrayal (’83), a 100% pure-dialogue movie based on a highly admired Harold Pinter play, had been shot in the 60 -frame-per-second Showscan format. Unnecessary, of course, but it would’ve been amazing.
Here’s Iain Stasukevich‘s American Cinematographer article on a page-by-page basis — page 1, page 2and page 3 .
The boat sailed on this Michael Bay/rejected Dark Knight script parody four or five days ago. It may as well have been posted last May. The world has moved on. But it’s funny so here it is anyway. Posted by Jared on www.spill.com.
Why is this “shock the rubes” gay makeout stunt, staged for a sequence in Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Bruno movie, only being reported now (7.8) by The Smoking Gun when it happened a full month ago? No reporters in Arkansas picked up on this? Asleep at the wheel.
“Lured by $1 beer and the prospect of ‘hot chicks’ and ‘hardcore fights,’ thousands of Arkansans were duped last month into appearing as extras in comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest staged mayhem,” the story says. “Cohen and his confederates organized cage fighting programs on consecutive days in Texarkana and Fort Smith.
“Both cards ended with two male grapplers (one was identified as ‘Straight Dave‘ and wore camouflage) tearing each other’s clothes off and, while in underwear, kissing down their opponent’s chest. This man-on-man action triggered Fort Smith fans to throw chairs and beer at the ring, according to one cop present at the city’s convention center.”
It’ll only cost $3 to attend Thursday night’s screening of Nicholas Ray‘s King of Kings at the American Cinematheque. Much of this 1961 Samuel Bronston epic is either pompous or tedious — some of it is painful — but I’d attend anyway if they would present a 70mm print of it, which of course they’re not. Burn me once with a slightly frayed 35mm print of Ben-Hur, shame on them. Burn me twice, shame on me.
The casting of the 37 year-old Siobhan McKenna (37 going on 52) as Mary, mother of Jesus, is ludicrous — a solemn earthy Irish woman straight out of Sean O’Casey and James Joyce with her clearly lined face, alabaster Irish complexion and faintly suppressed Dublin accent.
There are nonetheless five worthwhile things about this film: (a) Miklos Rosza‘s score, particularly the overture; (b) Ron Randell‘s performance as Lucius, the thoughtful, morally conflicted Centurion; (b) Jeffrey Hunter‘s lead performance during the last third; (d) the shots that show perfect focus in both the foreground and background (which was pretty amazing during a time in which films would commonly rack focus to catch the foreground or background, but never both); and (e) the eloquent narration by Ray Bradbury.
Bradbury is going to show up before the show and talk about his work on the film.
Berlin’s liberal, openly gay mayor Klaus Wowereit favors the idea of Barack Obama giving a speech at the Brandenburg Gate when he travels to Berlin later this month, although the conservative-minded German chancellor Angela Merkel, famed on this side of the Atlantic for getting a creepy back rub from George Bush in 2006, is against it.
Wowereit, Obama, Merkel
The Brandenburg Gate is the “most famous and history-rich location in Germany,” a Chancellery source told Der Spiegel‘s Carsten Volkery in a piece posted today. “In the past, it has only been used on very special occasions for addresses by politicians, and when, then only by elected American presidents. More clearly stated: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama would be better off looking for another location in the German capital to hold a speech.”
Wowereit, however, “appeared unimpressed by the warning from Merkel’s office and said during a press conference on Tuesday that he would be pleased if Obama were to address the public at the Brandenburg Gate.
A spokesperson for the local government told Der Spiegel that “the decision over where Obama should make his appearance was in the hands of the city council of Berlin and not the chancellor’s office or the federal government.
“Some suspect Mayor Wowereit’s remarks may be self-serving,” the article says. No!
Jurgen Trittin, deputy floor leader of The Green Party in the German parliament, has predicted that Obama would end up getting his JFK moment at the Brandenburg Gate. “Do you think that Wowereit would miss the chance to appear alongside Barack Obama?,” he reportedly asked an interviewer on the German news channel N24. “I believe Wowereit is thinking [Obama] should appear [and] I will come into the picture and everything will be great.”
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