The Trailers From Hell guys are to blame for this post. Yesterday they put up a featured link for a grade-Z 1972 Italian exploitation sleaze-flick called Amuck (nudity, sex scenes, sadism, murder). After watching 20 or 30 seconds I was about to click off when I noticed that poor Farley Granger (Strangers on a Train, They Live By Night, Rope) had a lead role. Granger and his longtime boyfriend Robert Calhoun moved to Rome in the early ’70s for the work and whatnot, but to have once been at the very peak of your profession only to wind up accepting icky exploitation gigs as your drawing power fades…the humiliation! Many actors who’ve fallen on lean times have gone this route. Thank fortune that Granger rebounded on the Broadway stage in the late ’70s and ’80s (The Seagull, The Crucible, The Glass Menagerie, Deathtrap, The King and I, A Month in the Country). In 1986 he won an Obie Award for his performance in the Lanford Wilson play Talley & Son. Granger died on 3.27.11 at age 85.
Daily
The Dead
To judge by early reviews of Paul W.S. Anderson‘s Pompeii (Sony, 2.21), the following HE piece about a 2007 visit to the actual Pompeii is probably a bit more interesting than the film. I’ll never know, of course, as I’d rather jump off the Santa Monica Pier at midnight than see it. The CG zombie-whore vibe is like the stench of carrion. Update: Disdain doesn’t cut it. Sony never invited me to a screening so I’ll be paying to see Pompeii early Friday.
“With spooky, half-shaped visions of Roman Polanski‘s Pompeii flashing in my head, Hollywood Elsewhere visited the Pompeii ruins yesterday,” I wrote on 5.31.07. “I’m very glad I went — this is the best-preserved ancient Roman city anywhere, covered as it was and frozen in time by tons of ash that spewed out of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 AD. The problem is that I was too cheap to buy a map or go with a tour group, and by the end of our visit I’d come across only one lousy plaster-covered body.
Adjustment
I’ve been dealing with the usual fatigue issues since returning last night to Los Angeles. I was in Berlin and Prague for a week and a half, and then Manhattan for a couple of days. I had just gotten adjusted to the European clock (nine hours ahead of L.A.’s) when I turned around and flew back. It’ll take about a week to get back in the groove. In the interim you sleep at odd times and wake up at 2 am…patterns like that. Once you’ve divorced yourself from the idea that sleep is something you do only from, say, 11 pm or 12 midnight or 1 am until 6:30 or 7 the next morning, you’re fine. A half-hour from now I’ll be leaving for my first back-in-L.A. screening. A date with Liam “Paycheck” Neeson…okay.
Leap of Faith
All I know is that the more Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah doesn’t cater to religious rightwingers, the more I’m likely to find a place in my head for it. Will I be satisfied with a biblically themed movie — designed to appeal to conservative Christians — which replaces the Bible’s core message with one created by Hollywood? Yes…please! Will I be satisfied with a film depicting Noah as a “crazy, irrational, religious nut…fixated on modern-day problems like overpopulation and environmental degradation”? Yes, probably. I would like to believe that Aronofsky, a highly intelligent and discerning fellow, hasn’t sold his soul to make Noah, and that he despises fundamentalist Christians as much as I do. If he doesn’t share my prejudice I can at least fantasize that he does. It is, in any event, my solemn belief that any film that angers and alienates Christian yahoos has to be doing something right.
Easy Ballot
Two days ago I announced a Hollywood Elsewhere Oscar Ballot. Now with the gracious help of Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, a simple online ballot has been assembled. Just check your predictions and send it in. The balloting deadline is Saturday, March 1st at midnight.
“How Do You Say It…Like A Stutter?”
Criterion’s Foreign Corespondent Bluray is close to magnificent. For the most part Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 classic looks wonderful — clean, richly rendered, sublime. I’ve never seen the values in Rudolph Mate’s cinematography look so robust and yet delicate. Plus there’s a surprising revelation in Craig Barron‘s visual effects doc [see below]. Minor mood pocket: Every so often a scene is covered in mosquito-grain, but it happens so infrequently that I didn’t find it bothersome. I let it go, and that’s something coming from me.
Payne on Love/Hate, $45 Million Adult Movies, Color Nebraska
In an interview with Nebraska director Alexander Payne, Fade In‘s F.X. Feeney discloses that there’s a color version of Nebraska that was prepared by Payne and dp Phedon Papamichael. “I saw the color version once,” Payne says. “I liked it. It was really pretty. Some shots look even prettier in color. We made it look like a color from about 1970 or ’71, like the colors in Five Easy Pieces, for example. But it’s not right for the film.”
Payne has no plans to release the color version to anyone or anything except for “Arte Laos or Channel 4 Moldova…those TV outlets that specify absolutely only color. As part of my convincing Paramount to fund a film in black-and-white, [as] they harped about the TV output deals, I said, ‘I’ll provide you the color version for those TV output deals, very specific ones, but contractually it must be black-and-white for theatrical, DVD and streaming.'”
I don’t see what the problem would be in releasing the color version down the road, after the Bluray, DVD and streaming revenues for the black-and-white version have been collected. I would love to see it with a ’70s color palette.
Hatred vs. Love: “I was watching this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary shorts, which I cannot recommend highly enough, and I walked away thinking that feature films try to show examples of hatred and documentaries try to show examples of love in the subjects that they pick. You know who said that, too, is Albert Maysles. I heard him speak one time. He said, ‘I go to the movies, and all I see is violence and examples of hatred, but I look around me, and I realize that all I see are examples of love.’ And he [asked], ‘Why aren’t we showing those?’ There’s something easy and facile in how it’s used in today’s cinema. But anyway, my basic answer is, I make comedies.”
$45 Million Summer Dramas & Comedies: “Some studio people asked me out to lunch a couple of months ago, and they said, ‘Look, if we let you run the studio, what changes would you make?’ I said, ‘Well, thanks for asking. I believe in the $25 to $45 million adult comedy and adult drama. Why does everything now adult have to be absolutely shrink-wrapped and be robbed of the production value it could have? Where is Trading Places today? Where is Groundhog Day today? Intelligent summer comedies. Where are the intelligent ones?’ Then the studio guy said, ‘Well $45 million…I think I might disagree with your price point.’ I said, ‘You might, but where is Out of Africa today? Why don’t we have films like that?”
Shia LeBeouffin’ With Buzz Lightyear
The “don’t watch it on an iPhone” bit is lame, but this “Honest” Gravity trailer finds its feet about 40 seconds in.
Again With The Metaphor
A new restoration of Toho’s Godzilla (a.k.a., Gojira), the 1954 monster classic “that has spawned six decades of sequels, imitations and remakes,” will debut on 4.12 at the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, followed by a national release beginning at New York’s Film Forum (4.18 to 4.24). But of course, a 50th anniversary re-release happened ten years ago plus Criterion released a Bluray Gojira in 2012, so why is this happening again? This Rialto trailer uses a fireball effect at the very end that’s not from the ’54 original — it’s re-configured black-and-white CGI.
Ralph Nader Factor
In her “Oscar Voting for Dummies” piece, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone breaks it all down and makes it easy for those Academy members who “have never [and] will never see all of the movies.” Except she advises against voting for the Best Picture of the Year, which of course is Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street.
Stone does so by saying “don’t vote for Ralph Nader…you know what I mean by that…there are three films that have the best shot of winning right now — 12 Years a Slave, Gravity and American Hustle. If none of those three are your favorite, just pick some other movie for the #1 spot then rank these three in order of preference because sooner or later your ballot is likely going to count only for one of those three movies.”
And yet she says that “no film has captured America in 2014 like Scorsese’s masterpiece…it’s about the pinnacle of gluttony and greed, of a people raised to take what they want no matter who they hurt or what debris they leave behind.”
No matter — she’s advising Academy members to get smart and vote for American Hustle, Gravity or 12 Years A Slave because Scorsese’s “masterpiece” is a throw-away Ralph Nader choice.