Jeff Wells …but I honestly would’t want to spend a weekend in a glass house topped by an ostentatious, big-ass glass dome, much less hang with the guy who owns or has designed it.
Most of us understand that avoiding gauche, declasse people and their environments is a basic requirement in life. If I’m going to fraternize with super-wealthy or super-opportunistic folks I want to stay someplace cool and approvable in an architectural sense. In a home, for openers, that doesn’t say “boy, I sure am wealthy!”
…to come out of The Banshees of Inisherin will be Kerry Condon‘s Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Otherwise it’s an Irish death march — a well-composed, essentially nihilistic film about a self-destructive island of lost souls.
Steven Williams and Stefani Robinson‘s Chevalier (Searchlight, 4.7.23) is a rare historical drama that doesn’t, for a change, smack of presentism. It’s the real-deal saga of a gifted young mulatto fellow from Guadalupe (Kelvin Harrison‘s Joseph Bologne, aka Chevalier de Saint-Georges) vs. evil snooty racist whiteys of Paris and Versailles.
Bologne was a superb violinist-composer, a skilled sword-fencer and a lover second only to Warren Beatty‘s George Roundy in Shampoo. I have a vague idea of how this story will play out, but I’ll tell you this much — any movie in which Marton Csokas plays a venal bad guy is itself problematic.
Ty Burr: “Chevalier [is a lesson about] how to take a grand subject – the life and times of 18th-century Creole violinist-conductor-composer Joseph Bologne — and dumb it down into a strident, shallow melodrama pitched at the rear balcony.”
Friendo: “Evil white people again — do they think this is going to make money?” HE answer: “:In ’20 and ’21 there was a strong belief among Hollywood wokesters that evil-white-people movies would strike a chord. Not necessarily with palefaces but among BIPOCs. I suspect that they realize now that Chevalier is a flop waiting to happen. Shown in Toronto, they bumped the release into April ’23….what does that tell you?”
Regional friendo: “Saw Banshhes of Inisherin earlier today. Less than a dozen people in the theater.
“I think a lot of people are expecting one McDonagh thing — more In Bruges wackiness – and getting something entirely different. It’s a very downbeat film, not funny at all (okay, there are maybe one or two chuckle moments), and it quickly becomes obvious why it’s set during the Irish Civil War, which pitted brother against brother, friend against friend.
“What’s going on in Inisherin is the war in microcosm…the violence, the despair, the unforgiving nature. It takes place in an economically depressed setting, one that seems way behind the times with no electricity, no cars, no decent roads, where the police and the priesthood seem to rule over everything.
“Brendan Gleeson‘s character relies on his music to keep him from despair, but it doesn’t really help. Colin Farrell relies on his friendship with Gleeson to help pass the endlessly boring days. And Kerry Condon, truly the heart and soul of this film, knows she has to get off the Island or else turn into a bitter old hag, like the other women in the film.
“Can’t say I enjoyed the fecking movie, and I had some trouble with the fecking accents. But it’s deeper than I expected, and I appreciated where McDonagh was going with it. But boy, is it a downer!”
Steven Spielberg is a big fan of Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus (’60), and in this AFI interview clip (which appears to be 20 or 25 years old) he shares two or three things that he likes in particular.
One is the duel to the death between Kirk Douglas‘s Spartacus and Woody Strode‘s Draba — short sword vs. three-pronged trident and net. Except starting at 1:28, Spielberg’s memory fails him. This isn’t a felony (we all misremember stuff) but I’m amazed that the AFI crew didn’t stop him and suggest a re-take.
Spielberg recalls that Spartacus and John Ireland‘s Crixus had become friendly, which is true, but they don’t fight each other– Spartacus and Draba do. Spielberg nonetheless recalls that in the dark holding pen adjacent to the gladiator arena, Douglas is sitting across from Crixus…wrong. Douglas and Strode share the pen while Ireland and another guy are fighting. Ireland winds up killing his opponent, and then staggers away, exhausted.
The power of the sequence is that Draba, who has stoically kept his feelings to himself, had told Spartacus that “gladiators can’t make friends…I might have to kill you.” But when Draba has gained the upper hand in the arena and is one trident thrust away from killing Douglas, he instead tosses the trident at the Romans who’ve been watching them from above (Laurence Olivier‘s Crassus, John Dall‘s Glabrus, Nina Foch‘s Helena Glabrus, Joanna Barnes‘ Claudia Marius).
This morning I read portions of David Freeman‘s “The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock,” a longish book excerpt which appeared in Esquire 40 years ago. From December ’78 to May ’79 Freeman worked with Hitchcock on a script of The Short Night, an espionage thriller what would have been Hitchcock’s 54th film.
The article is culled from Freeman’s “The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock,” published on 11.30.84.
I was struck in particular by two passages, one about the AFI’s 1979 Life Achievement Award tribute to Hitchcock and Hitch’s reaction in particular to a note from an ailing Frank Capra, and another about Hitchcock’s occasional random interest in young women during his final year or two.
Here’s a link to Freeman’s April 1982 Esquire article.
I watched the AFI tribute on the tube that year, and my impression was that Hitch seemed barely “there” — no apparent energy or intellectual aliveness or curiosity even. He appeared, frankly, to be on the verge of slipping into a coma. I remember in particular that he didn’t seem to recognize Sean Connery when the star of Marnie was at the lecturn. It made me feel quite sad.
Here’s a capture of the Capra anecdote:
Until an hour ago I had never heard of, much less seen, Welcome Danger, a 1929 Harold Lloyd adventure-comedy that was also (I think) his first sound film. Which is “topical,” in a sense, in this is more or less the historical turf of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon (Paramount, 12.23), a film about the Hollywood changeover from silent to sound flicks.
In its 10.3.29 issue, The Film Daily reported that Lloyd would attend the 10.7.29 world premiere of Welcome Danger,” opening at the Rivoli Theater. Pic opened on Friday, 10.12.29.
Welcome Danger opened two weeks before the beginning of the ’29 Stock Market Crash. At the end of Thursday, 10.24.29, the market was at 299.5 — a 21 percent decline from a few days before. On Black Monday, or 10.28.29, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped another 13 percent.
With sensible film buffs dreading the inky arrival of the forthcoming 4K Casablanca Bluray (11.8), it’s worth reminding ourselves that for years Criterion has been the father of the shadows-and-ink aesthetic. The Criterion tech guys never met a mineshaft they didn’t like, a shadow that didn’t brighten their day.
Here’s a 2017 tribute piece to that effect, dated 8.11.17 and titled “Darkness Darkness“:
In the case of at least two relatively recent Criterion Blurays, Only Angels Have Wings and His Girl Friday, the tech guys darkened images that were slightly or distinctly brighter on previous Blurays and DVDs.
Criterion clearly has an occasional fetish for inkinessin the black-and-white realm. Two HE reviews, “Dark Angels, Black Barranca, Noir All Over” and “Inky, Grain-Smothered Friday Doesn’t Deliver Decent Bump”, complained about this.
And now, to judge by a new DVD Beaver review, the Criterion guys have gone all dark and inky on their forthcoming 4K-scanned Rebecca Bluray (due on 9.5.17).
Review quote: “Like their 2001 480p DVD, the image on the new Criterion Bluray of Rebecca is darker than [previous] digital releases. From our experience and comments from transfer specialists, ‘darker’ is usually more accurate to the theatrical presentation. You can see from the screen captures that the Criterion shows less information in the frame [and yet] the Criterion actually shows more on the top.”
Look at George Sanders‘ Jack Favell in these DVD Beaver-captured images. The lighter version is from the 2012 MGM Bluray (which I am totally happy with — thank God there’s a fine-looking Rebecca that hasn’t been inked up) and the darker, of course, is from the Criterion. What kind of sick-fuck cineaste would prefer the darker image? It looks as if heavy thunderstorm clouds are passing over Manderley, and that Favell is about to get soaked.
2017 Criterion Bluray version.
2012 MGM Bluray version.
I haven’t seen the forthcoming 4K Casablanca Bluray (WHE, 11.8) but to go by the DVD Beaver screen captures it just looks darker, which is what 4K versions of classic films often provide…inkier, buried in shadow.
Compare the stills of the 4K version vs. the old 2007 Bluray — details you could see with the 2007 Bluray (which is still my favorite) you can’t see as clearly on the 4K. How is that an improvement?
Were the techs who created this inky Casablanca inspired by Criterion’s 2016 Bluray of Only Angels Have Wings? — one of the most bizarre and totally needless experiments in pointless shadow baths?
Home Theatre Forum‘s Robert Harris, posted on 11.4.22: “Casablanca looks fine in 4k. Blacks may be a bit richer than the previous Bluray, but beyond that I’m not seeing a great deal of difference. I’m seeing some constantly shifting grain patterns, which I can understand as much of the film is taken from dupes.
“Extremely fine in some facial close-ups and medium shots, far more normal in exterior long shots and other bits of the film. The management is obvious, but not a problem.
“If one owns [an earlier 1080p] Bluray version, is there enough of a 4k bump to purchase the film again? I’m not seeing it.”
My favorite is still the good old DNR’d 2007 Bluray. Perfect — I love it like family. I hated the 2012 70th anniversary Bluray, which covered Casablanca in billions upon billions of grain mosquitoes…infinite swarms swirling around the heads and inhaled into the lungs of poor Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Dooley Wilson, etc. Ghastly.
As to the 4K, why would anybody want to watch a Casablanca that’s been shadowed and darkened all to hell? Where is the upside in that? 4K treatments almost always smother with unneccessary inky darkness that often obscures detail.
The 2007 Casablanca Bluray is good enough for me. It’s my little baby, my teddy bear, my blue blanky.
Question: Why does the 4K Bluray jacket use a shot of younger Bogart (taken in the mid to late 30s) wearing a black tuxedo, which his somewhat older character, Richard Blaine, doesn’t wear in Casablanca? Why? What kind of perverse or diseased mind says “yeah, that’s fine — Bogart looks a few years younger but so what? And who cares about the black tux?”.
In an 11.2 interview with the L.A. Times Glenn Whipp, Quentin Tarantino stated that he and other filmmakers “can’t wait for the day” when the superhero genre finally runs out of gas.
When might this happen? Or more to the point, will it happen?
Excerpt: “[Tarantino] muses that, just as ’60s anti-establishment auteurs rejoiced when studio musical adaptations fell out of favor, today’s filmmakers ‘can’t wait for the day they can say that about superhero movies. The analogy works because it’s a similar [economic] chokehold.’”
When will that hallej]lujah moment arrive? “The writing’s not quite on the wall yet,” Tarantino says, “[or certainly] the way it was in 1969 when it was, ‘Oh, my God, we just put a bunch of money into things that nobody gives a damn about anymore.’”
QT kicker: “You have to be a hired hand to do [superhero films]. I’m not a hired hand. I’m not looking for a job.”
