Director Lenny Abrahamson clearly has a thing about confinement and creepy obsessions. The titular character in his last film, Frank, played by Michael Fassbender, was a singer in an experimental band who walked around with his head inside a basketball-sized paper mache mask. Abrahamson’s new film, Room, based on the same-titled 2011 best-seller by Emma Donoghue, is about a mother (Brie Larson) and her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) living for years in an underground cell in the backyard of a home owned by Old Nick (Sean Bridgers). I’m guessing that Nick (a) is Jack’s dad and (b) ravages Larson whenever the mood strikes. The trailer doesn’t supply particulars but that’s the basic shot. And then they escape. Donoghue may or may not have admitted that Room was largely inspired by the case of Josef Fritzl, an Austrian monster who kept his daughter confined in a cellar for 24 years (’84 to ’08) and fathered seven children with her, but it almost certainly was. By the way: Until you read the credits there’s no telling that “Jack” isn’t a girl — the teaser makes no effort to suggest he’s a young lad. I’ll see Room but I’m not looking forward to it. Who would?
I haven’t sat down and watched Criterion’s new Dressed To Kill Bluray (due on 8.18), but a recent review by DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze notes how it looks “extremely different” compared to Dressed to Kill Blurays issued by MGM Home Video (and released by Fox Home Video) on 9.6.11 and Arrow Home Video on 7.29.13. On top of which the Criterion version “seems vertically stretched (or the other two are horizontally stretched),” Tooze writes. “This makes the Criterion faces thinner and taller and the Arrow and MGM faces fatter. It is also more faded-looking and has a yellow/green tinge to it.”
I watched Nancy Allen in many films during the ’70s and ’80s, and her face was never as thin as it is in this DVD Beaver screen capture of Criterion’s Dressed to Kill Bluray…NEVER.
HE to Criterion’s Peter Becker (sent this morning): “I just looked at DVD Beaver‘s review and I’d appreciate your input if you could spare a moment or two. Has Criterion ever mastered a film in such a way that everyone comes out looking a few pounds thinner? It doesn’t look quite right to me. I’m guessing that it doesn’t look quite right to a lot of people. I’m not saying the MGM/Fox Home Video and Arrow versions are absolutely correct either (I don’t know anything), but they seem a bit more life-like and more naturally proportioned.
“I’ve long agreed with the age-old maxim that ‘you can never be too rich or too thin,’ but Criterion seems to have really taken that saying to heart, at least as far as Dressed to Kill is concerned. And what’s with the greenish-yellowish tint? And the much brighter exposure with the faded colors? I saw the film a couple of times in ’80 and I know it didn’t have this green-yellow thing.
Six years ago I posted a short riff about “Vacation ’58,” the original John Hughes National Lampoon story (published in ’79) that became the basis of National Lampoon’s Vacation (’83). The HE piece (called “Eisenhower Days“) contained a once-valid link to the Hughes story. I used the same link last May in a riff called “Calling All Schmucks,” which referenced the first trailer for the new Vacation, which I’m reviewing tomorrow. (It’s awful.) Now dark forces have killed the original link to the Hughes story and you have to go to a recently-posted Hollywood Reporter page to read it. I wrote last May that the 1983 film (with a screenplay by a success-hungry Hughes) diluted the fuck out of his original National Lampoon short story, which was much, much darker — it really shook hands with the white-bread American angst of the pre-Kennedy ’50s and the repressed rage of the Depression and World War II-hardened dads who gave so many boomer kids such miserable childhoods.”
The basic thrust of Mark Harris‘s Grantland piece on Tom Cruise (posted as part of the site’s “Tom Cruise Week” tribute) is that his decision to become the dominant 50something energizer bunny of the action-franchise realm is unfortunate because he seems to have concurrently shut down his ambitious acting game. Harris says that Cruise’s peak acting years happened between 1988 and ’99, or the timespan in which Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia were released. That’s because Cruise’s performance in each landed a Best Actor nomination, but that’s not encompassing enough. Cruise also delivered riveting, touch-bottom performances as a selfish, resentful younger brother in Barry Levinson‘s Rain Man (’88) and as Vincent-the-compassionate-assassin in Michael Mann‘s Collateral, and he definitely pushed his limits in A Few Good Men (’92), The Firm (’93), Interview with the Vampire (’94) and Vanilla Sky (’01). And how can Harris write a here-and-now assessment of Cruise and not even mention Alex Gibney‘s Scientology doc and the portrayal of Cruise as an enabler/promoter of an unmistakably venal, predatory and vicious-minded organization? How can Harris ignore that and just say “ah, well, too bad Cruise isn’t interested in the big acting roles any more”?
It’s been well telegraphed that Glenn Kenny, who edited and was on good bromancey terms with the late David Foster Wallace, is less than pleased with the latter’s portrayal in James Ponsoldt‘s The End of the Tour (A24, 1.31). He’s particularly unhappy with Jason Segel‘s hulking behemoth impersonation along with David Margulies‘ script, which is based on David Lipsky‘s “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.” Kenny has now vented his complaints in detail in a 7.29 Guardian piece.
What do they boil down to? Wallace was who he was and the guy presented by Ponsoldt, Segel and Margulies is a lot lumpier and gloomier and kind of suicide-obsessed with his clothing a half-size too small.
Kenny obviously knows what he knows but honestly? I found myself wondering if the ghost of Abraham Lincoln had similar reservations about Henry Fonda‘s performance in John Ford‘s Young Mr. Lincoln. How did the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald feel about Gregory Peck‘s portrayal of him in Beloved Infidel?
Kenny beef #1: “I found The End of the Tour risible. [This] very conventional independent film left me so angry I actually had trouble sleeping the night I saw it. I lay awake obsessing over the best phrase that could sum up Jason Segel’s performance as Wallace. I came up with ‘ghoulish self-aggrandisement‘. For me, it recalls a line from a Captain Beefheart song: ‘I think of those people that ride on my bones.'” (HE insert: I think it’s fair to say that for most people the phrase “riding my bones” refers to some hulking behemoth putting the high hard one to a presumably willing recipient.)
In the wake of my Anomalisa riff, here’s my 5.25.08 Cannes Film Festival review of Charlie Kaufman‘s Synecdoche, New York: There’s no way around saying that Charlie Kaufman, the director-writer of Synecdoche, New York, is a gloom-head. A brilliant and, in his past screenplays, hilarious one (by the standards of dryly perverse humor), but a gloom-head all the same. Who, for now, has put aside his sense of humor. The problem with his film, which I loved in portions, understood the point of and was intrigued and somewhat amused by in the early rounds, is the damn moroseness of it.
And the title is impossible. I would actually say commercially suicidal. I finally learned how to pronounce the damn thing — Syn-ECK-duh-kee — but if the folks who wind up distributing believe that average moviegoers are going to do anything but run in the opposite direction when this puppy opens, they’d best think again. Titles should always convey something that your average dumbass can understand — this one doesn’t. And they sure as shit can’t be tongue-twisters on top of this.
I nonetheless said to myself during the first 50 minutes or so, “This is my kind of deal.” Okay, maybe into the first hour. Smart-guy material, wise and witty, at times almost elevating, at times surreal, performances that strike the chords just so.
But it began to wear me down. I could feel my interest ebbing. This had something (okay, a lot) to do with the archness and obsessiveness of the characters caught up in various fickle head trips and never saying “uncle.” I didn’t hate what was going on — it’s an imaginative Alice in Wonderland-type thing — but I found myself wishing nonetheless that all these dithering neurotics (Caden especially) would get over themselves and…I don’t know, go rob a bank or move to rural China or something. The story tension in Synecdoche, New York is zilch.
