I haven’t yet seen the Jaws Bluray (8.14), but I gather it’s been nicely restored. Fine. The film itself is a decent-enough thing. But it has no undercurrents so it hasn’t aged all that well. Which is the mark of all hackwork — popular or unpopular in their day, but always diminished by time. The fact is that the two-hour “making of Jaws” doc, included on the disc, is much, much more entertaining.
I still think of Jaws as one of the two films (Star Wars being the other) that killed the ’70s and ushered in the infantilization of mainstream movies and murdered the idea of the gradual theatrical break, so no matter how much you might “like” this film, it’s nearly impossible to forget what it is, was and always will be in a metaphorical sense.
But God cherish the memory of the great David Zanuck, one of the smartest, most kindly and most perceptive producers you could ever hope to meet.
My favorite moment is still the zoom-in, track-back shot of Roy Scheider (borrowed from Vertigo) when he realizes, sitting on his beach towel, that the shark has eaten a little kid.
Explanation: Some guy has hacked into my staging software and is changing copy. No way did I mistype and call it Jews, twice. It’s always something.
I might see Total Recall sometime this weekend. Maybe. But I could smell the fumes coming off this thing from the trailers, and I know who and what Len Wiseman is…I know where he lives, and that I’ll never go there if I can help it. It opens today with a 31% Rotten Tomatoes rating and a 44% from Metacritic. Colin Farrell‘s life and career turned around post-Alexander when he stopped drinking and became a character actor. I say “ignore this” — I say “give him a pass.”
I had a reservation to stay tonight at Monument Valley’s Firetree Inn, a b & b located in a wifi dead zone about a half-hour’s drive from Goulding’s. The novelty is that visitors sleep in a Navajo Hogan, a kind of dirt igloo that Navajos have been crashing, praying and meditating in over the generations. It’s a sacred thing so the owner-managers want people who “get” the Hogan experience to stay there — they don’t want trashy, fast-food-eating families with loud kids looking to watch American Idol on flatscreens.
I get that. I wanted to do this. I figured I could do without wifi for an eight-hour period. But I’d never seen a real Hogan up close (to me the word “Hogan” means Hogan’s Heroes) and was curious about the Firetree, so early yesterday afternoon a friend and I drove out to pay a visit.
The owner-managers, a couple in their early 40s or late 30s, were — I don’t want to exaggerate — stunned by our visit. Stunned. They pretty much went into apoplectic shock. Their basic response was “whoa, wait a minute…what are you, a person who’s not scheduled to be here until late tomorrow afternoon, doing here now?” They couldn’t wrap their heads around someone just checking the place out, all friendly and no biggie.
The first thing the bald and bleary-eyed guy said was that “we don’t open for guests until 5 pm.” Nice people skills, pal. And then the woman said they’d recently gotten up — it was around 1 pm — and they were having breakfast. Right away I was thinking, “What’s up with these guys? Who treats customers like tax collectors? Who has breakfast at 1 pm?” When I said we’d just driven over from Goulding’s and just wanted to look around, the woman said, “But that’s so far.” No, I said — it’s about a 25-minute drive. (Which it is.)
Then they went into a kind of silent mode. “How do we deal with these people?,” they seemed to be saying. “How do we cope with this?”
The general vibe was “We don’t do this…people don’t just drop by to check our place out and you’re the very first to do this in the history of the Firetree Inn” — the guy actually said this to me in a subsequent e-mail — “and this is a place of tradition and spiritual worship in a sense, but first and foremost the Firetree Inn is about us…about what we want…and we don’t like people just dropping by before 5 pm.”
An hour later I was back at Goulding’s and writing the Firetree guys and asking if they could find it in their hearts to please refund the $200 and change that I’d sent them in advance. “You didn’t like me dropping by,” I wrote, ” and I didn’t like that you didn’t like this. So let’s agree to dislike each other. This happens occasionally. Not everything is a fit. You’re okay, I’m okay, we’re all okay. Peace?” They agreed and sent the refund immediately.
I’ll be staying this evening at the San Juan Inn in Mexican Hat.
“Ruthless, ogre-ish, heavily-armed invaders descend from the sky, take over the reins of government, and before you know it rebel groups are forming into grass-roots militias, fighting back like proud guerillas and asserting their nativist rights — this is our country! Death to the invaders! Does this remind anyone of anything?” — posted five years ago upon the DVD “Collector’s Edition” release of John Milius‘s Red Dawn (’84).
The “Russian commie invaders invading and taking over the U.S.” fantasy peaked in the ’50s. Milius’s 1984 film came so late in the cycle that a cycle didn’t exist, but you could just just barely roll with it…just. North Koreans are thought to be militant and crazy enough, I suppose, but the basic idea seems ludicrous.
I’ve chosen not to make time for the 2012 Olympics, thanks. At best I’ll catch the late-night or BBC or Today show sum-ups. But even I, uploading MV photos in a motel room, saw the Gabby Douglas gymnastics triumph last night, and I couldn’t be dispassionate. You just knew she’d win. Superb form, pretty face, elfin (4′ 11″), killer smile and…did you notice?… exquisite eye makeup. A torrent of monetary favorings await. She needs to keep it classy.
Monument Valley is eternal, of course, but it suddenly got better, deeper and more transporting for yours truly late this afternoon. A Navajo guide named Larry took us out around 4 pm Pacific, and we bumped around dirt roads and basked in the glory of the place and took dozens of photos and shared a Navajo spiritual moment under a massive sandrock shelter as Larry and his cousin and some other guy sang Navajo songs. It was beautiful. I forgot about the annoying stuff. This land was made for you and me.
I’m sorry but Monument Valley isn’t knocking me dead so far. It’s fine, it’s okay…but I don’t feel as emotionally affected as I was by the snow-capped Bernese Alps. I guess I built it up too much in my head. The brownish-red colors against the green scrub and bright blue sky are as beautiful as they’ve always seemed in those John Ford films, and the huge mesas and chimney-shaped peaks, the wind-sanded cliffs and the general enormity and flatness of the valley itself…whew. But there’s something faintly meh about it. And Goulding’s is way too touristy.
As long as the costs stay low and the big revenues continue, Paramount will keep churning these things out. I liked the first one, half-liked the second one but didn’t get around to the third, even though it was do-directed by the Catfish guys, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Paranormal Activity 4 opens on 10.19.
The reported “official synopis” of Lars Von Trier‘s The Nymphomaniac, which will play at Cannes next May with Nicole Kidman in a minor role: “[This] is the light and poetic story of a woman’s erotic journey from birth to the age of 50 as told by the main character, Joe, [a] self-diagnosed nymphomaniac,” it reads. “On a cold winter’s evening Seligman, an old bachelor, finds Joe semi-unconscious and beaten up in an alleyway. After bringing her to his flat he sees to her wounds while trying to understand how things could have gone so wrong for her.
“Seligman listens intently as Joe, over the next eight chapters, recounts the lushly branched-out and multi-faceted story of her life, rich in associations and interjecting incidents.”
The Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauthreports that filming will begin “this summer” — i.e., sometime this month? — “and will arrive in both hardcore and softcore variations, with porn actor doubles being used for the raunchy stuff.”
Von Trier spoke of a planned porn film during 2011’s Melancholia press conference. Some thought he was joking. He has to somehow get past this phase in which anything that pops into his mind or shows up inside his belly-button is material fit for a film.
Even in a liberal, well-educated college town like Flagstaff, you can feel the staunchly conservative Arizona vibe. It’s friendly and gracious with the twangy accents and all, but the motel parking lots in Dump City (i.e., the area where I’m staying outside of town) are jammed with SUVs and pickup trucks with monster-sized tires. And the rightie bumper stickers (“So far the change sucks”) and ads on TV are creepy. I haven’t seen any pickups with gun racks but you can sense the folksy firearm attitudes. “Naahs to meet yew…how ya dewin’?…you all right?…want a coffee?” I’m not looking for trouble but this is foreign territory. O give me the comforts of Prague or Bern or Munich. Can’t wait to get out of here. But first, breakfast at Brandy’s.
I’m posting this from the craphole-ish Knights Inn in Flagstaff. Three hours and 45 minutes from LV’s McCarran Airport. I drove 80 to 85 mph, but I always stay behind another guy going a little faster (i.e., the stalking-horse system) so the Arizona fuzz will pull him over before they come after me. But there were no bulls anywhere. All I know is, this place smells like Lysol disinfectant.
Last night I caught Hope Springs (Sony, 8.10), which is not what the trailers are selling — i.e., a chuckly, easy-going “comedy” about a 60ish straightlaced couple (Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones) rediscovering sex and romance through therapy. I would instead call it a modest, agreeably honest, dialogue-driven two-hander about…well, heart and trust and intimacy and such. And very well acted, especially by Streep.
Intimacy is never easy for guys, particularly conservative boomers, but you can’t live any kind of life without it and we all need to give it up, and so you have to give Hope Springs credit for trying, at least, to nudge us in the right direction. It was said last night that “this movie is going to change lives.” I don’t know about that, but it’s nice that a commercial movie is even poking at this subject.
It’s seasoned with light humor and…okay, one laugh-out-loud gag set in a movie theatre, but it’s mainly an appealing, plain-spoken relationship “talk” piece that fiddles with sadness and old-age melancholy without digging into it too deeply. It’s honest and respectable with making things too uncomfortable. Love sustains and refreshes and makes it all worthwhile, but who wants to get into facing the last third of your life and being past your sexual prime and not working out like you used to and popping Cialis? Gnarly stuff, that. Certainly not the stuff that sells popcorn.
Imagine what the great Mike Leigh or somebody on his level would do with a story about a 63 year-old housewife looking to jazz things up with her husband of 30-odd years. Something a bit bolder and more invasive than Hope Springs would emerge, I’m thinking, but at the same time something less commercial, even with the great Meryl Streep in the lead. So it seems right that Hope Springs doesn’t try and drill too deeply. It feels like it’s aimed at those who wants to believe what it’s selling — i.e., over-40 women and couples.
The feeling I got last night (I saw it with an older crowd at the Aero) is that the audience was content with Hope Springs and definitely respectful of its originality and intentions, but at the same not exactly lifted out of their seats. But they seemed happy with it, agreed with it, liked it.
I have to leave for Monument Valley in an hour or so so all I can do is repeat that this modestly-made film, produced by Todd Black and Guymon Casady and directed by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) after Mike Nichols bailed, is deeper and more touching than what those lying-ass trailers have been selling, and that the script by Vanessa Taylor isn’t exactly dense with plot turns but it does have an arc — when will Jones finally open up and let intimacy take its course? When will he finally treat Streep with a little romantic respect and show a little vigor in the sack?
I’ll have plenty more to say this weekend or next week. I wasn’t going to write anything but I heard last night that the embargo had been lifted so I dove in as much as I had time for.
