AMPAS announced today that (a) the 84th Oscar ceremony will air on Sunday, 2.26, (b) the 2011 nominations will be announced on 1.24.12, the nominees luncheon will take place on 2.6.12, and final ballot deadline will be 2.21.12. Been here before, not radical enough but fine…whatever.
Weinstein Co. co-chief Harvey Weinstein was in very good form when he spoke to TheWrap’s Sharon Waxman three days ago (Friday, 4.22) during TheGrill@Tribeca, a media and entertainment conference.
I don’t really need the TCM Classic Film Festival (4.28 to 5.1) to see venerated older films or wallow around in old-movie sentimentality — I can do that at home. But I am interested in seeing classic movies on big screens with presumably optimum (or at least signficantly better-than-average) projection in the company of large enthusiastic crowds — to me that’s special. So I’m feeling moderately cranked about this festival, which is now in its second year, and which I’m fully press-credentialed and ticketed for.
I have to hit the 7 pm Fast Five screening so I’ll finish this later, but dozens of extremely worthy older films are playing for four days. The question is “how good will they look and sound?”
For whatever reason I’ve been sent images of impressionistic paintings inspired by Joe Wright‘s Hanna. The copy implies that Focus Features paid three artists — Jock, Aaron Minier, Alan Brooks — to “capture the spirit of the characters and bring them to life in their own mediums,” etc. But what for? It reenforces the notion that Hanna is an art thriller but everyone understand that now. I don’t really get it but whatever.
I bought two large plants about a month ago, and in so doing condemned them. I’m more or less resigned to the fact that all plants that come to this apartment will die within four or five months. I’ve always made sure they get the right amount of water (i.e., every three weeks) and plenty of indirect sunlight, and every three or four days I mist their leaves. But the leaves inevitably turn yellow and then fall off, and before you know it the plants are stalks.
This is a House of Death and I am Vincent Price.
The guy in the apartment next to mine has been taking a shower for a good ten to twelve minutes so far. Will he go 15? Do we dare talk about 20? Now I know, in any case, who he is and what he’s made of. 9:09 am update: He finally turned the water off after 13 or 14 minutes.
Like fingerprints or snowflakes the best actors of any generation are always unique instruments, playing their particular music no matter what the role. Meanwhile the second-tier actors, lacking this uniqueness or particularity, tend to draw from a generic grab-bag of mannerist ticks and tendencies in favor at a given cultural moment. The tendencies of young male actors in the mid ’50s through the next 15 or 20 years were about trying to channel the sensitive anguish of Brando-Dean-Clift, etc. Every generation has its particular mode and attitude.
I’m saying this because I’m feeling more and more annoyed by second-tier GenY and younger GenX actors. I’ve been noticing behavioral similarities in their performances on cable (particularly in True Blood) and in crappy movies like Scream 4, etc. And I guess…okay, I’ll say it: they need to get off my lawn.
The ultimate acting style or manner, for me, is no acting style or manner. It’s about “being” and receptivity and constant vigilance in a quiet Zen way. Not being a sap but not shutting things out either. It means being Steve McQueen in Bullitt. It means Jean Paul Belmondo or Robert Mitchum in repose, or Meryl Streep in almost anything. It can’t get any better if you simply follow James Cagney‘s rule of “plant your feet, look the other guy in the eye and tell the truth.” Very, very few second-tier under-30 actors, it seems, try to do this. Perhaps they haven’t been told.
The common behavioral thread among young 21st Century actors performing second-rate material is a kind of cool disdain — a mannered chilliness, especially when these guys are acting with each other. Almost everything said to them except “dude, wanna party?” or “let’s go home…I want to make love with you” is an affont of some kind. It’s always about thinly veiled hostility and “oh, God…please.” Hayden Panattiere‘s behavior in Scream 4 is a perfect distillation of this.
The underling message when they speak with each other is always “you want some of my time and attention? I am so effing bored just anticipating what you might have to say! Okay, fine….what? Because before you start you need to understand you won’t be taking advantage of me. Because I will not be fucked by you…get it?” They all exude “pretend” put-on emotion by way of broadly faked feeling or their contempt for another character’s agenda or manner, and letting the other character know how, like, totally difficult it is and what a turn-off it is to even listen to what he/she has to say, much less take him or her seriously.
“Pretend” emotion, hostility, disdain, hidden emotional agendas, cynicism…they never just parcel it out straight and simply lay it on the line like St. Francis of Assisi or Charles Aznavour in Shoot The Piano Player or Oskar Werner in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. There’s always the “cover” of frosty vibes, attitude acting, “mock” feeling. “I really can’t be bothered to talk to you straight so I’m going to let you know in unmistakable terms what a drag it is to even look at or listen to you…Jesus!”
They’re terrified of emotional even-steven, openness, vulnerability, plain straight talk and behaving in an unaffected manner. They are the sworn enemies of the James Cagney way. Spencer Tracy is looking down at these guys and shaking his head and throwing up his hands.
Taxi Driver costars Jodie Foster, Robert DeNiro at the Cannes Film Festival, a bit less than 35 years ago. De Niro looks distinctly uncomfortable; Foster seems glassy-eyed but more or less accepting. Today’s De Niro is a tad mellower (naturally) but is still the same guarded guy, obviously still thriving and punching even though — let’s be honest — he creatively peaked as an actor years ago. Foster — 13 then, 48 now — has grown into my idea of a steady and together hyphenate, and her peak may be yet to come.
Photo found here.
Before Jesse Peretz‘s My Idiot Brother had been retitled Our Idiot Brother (8.26) by the Weinstein Co., it was slammed at Sundance by Hollywood Reporter critic John deFore. The film, he said, “shambles along with all the purposefulness of its title character, a kind of near-beer Lebowski who’s neither reckless enough to cheer for nor misguided enough to disdain.
“Paul Rudd‘s Ned Rochlin, recently released from jail and broke, wanders through his three sisters’ homes, inadvertently revealing that each has as much to answer for as their brother who sold dope to a policeman in uniform. Each episode yields laughs, but the many parallel screw-ups don’t build to the kind of crescendo the film needs; it may be no worse than Rudd’s latest vehicle, How Do You Know, but it’s yet another leading role that fails to live up to Rudd’s talent, and it’s hard to imagine it approaching the commercial success of his more high-concept studio comedies.”
It’s already clear how Meryl Streep‘s Oscar-bait performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (20th Century Fox, late December) is going to be sold. One, as a tribute to a woman “who came from nowhere to smash through barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male-dominated world.” And two, as a respectful salute to a tough, steely conservative who doesn’t seem so bad compared to the Palin-Bachmann tea-bagger wackos.
Jim Broadbent (l.)as Denis Thatcher and Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady.
Yesterday I posted a fairly glum assessment of the fate of classic films on Bluray, but you can’t get too down-hearted about this stuff. So here’s a list of 30 films made (and for the most part released) in the 1950s — most of them large-format, nearly all in color — that need to be properly spiffed up and Bluray-ed. They certainly need looking after element-wise, particularly those released in the mid to late ’50s up until ’60 due to fading among those shot on “safety” stock.
Danny Kaye in The Court Jester
It doesn’t matter if decent-looking DVDs of these films exist — they could all look much better and need to be re-done to satisfy the Movie Godz. If these films were properly restored and remastered for Bluray release we’d all be living fuller, happier lives.
One guy who helped me put this list together is Bruce Kimmel, former director (The First Nudie Musical), a motion-picture soundtrack record producer and a rabid film aficionado.
I need to mention the VistaVision problem before starting. Paramount shot and released over 100 VistaVision films in the ’50s, and so far we’ve only seen two of them properly transferred to Bluray — The Ten Commandments and White Christmas. It would be ecstasy if the original VistaVision version of Marlon Brando‘s One-Eyed Jacks (’60), a beautifully-shot western that’s has been mired in public-domain hell for several years, could be released on Bluray.
With three or four exceptions I’ve included large-format films that should play by today’s standards, and have avoided those that probably certainly wouldn’t work on Bluray due to being mediocre or awful by any measure.
1. William Wyler‘s The Big Country (’58…shot on SuperTechnirama, a horizontal 8-perf VistaVision-like format that renders a horizontally-squeezed image that came out un-squeezed at a 2.35-to-1 Scope ratio when projected anamorphically). The DVD of this Gregory Peck-starring western is so-so, nothing special, close to mediocre — a properly-rendered Bluray would be stunning.
2. Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Man Who Knew Too Much (’56…shot in VistaVivision). “The original negative has faded, and the two Universal Home Video DVDs so far have been blah-level. “It could and should be gorgeous…perfect,” says an east-coast source.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
3. Melvin Frank and Norman Panama‘s The Court Jester (56…shot in Vista Vision.). I’ve never even seen this film, mainly because I have an aversion to Danny Kaye. (Horrific images of Kaye coupling with Laurence Oliver flood my brain, etc.) A medieval spoof, gorgeously photographed. “The one Danny Kaye film that never dates,” says Kimmel.
4. Michael Todd‘s Around the World in 80 Days (’56…one of two films shot in 30-frame Todd-AO). A close-to-ghastly film that needs work, research, restoration. A film shot in 65mm 30 fps has to be saved, no matter how bad! Compared to what it should look like, given the exceptional elements, the DVD looks awful, bordering on out-of-focus. And yet the fact that it won the 1956 Best Picture Oscar (i.e., handed out in ’57) is perhaps the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ greatest embarassment.
5. John Wayne‘s The Alamo (’60…shot in 70 mm Todd-AO).
6. John Huston‘s Moulin Rouge (’52). Shot by dp Oswald Morris in reddish rosey tones as a kind of visual experiment meant to complement the color in the paintings of Toulouse Lautrec. Allegedly never rendered on DVD befitting Morris and Huston’s precise intentions.
7. John Huston‘s Moby Dick (’56). Shot and processed by Morris in washed-out color and rendered in release prints that were printed with a “gray” negative which gave the color a certain black-and-white tonality meant to resemble Currier & Ives etchings. This special color experiment has been simulated on the Moby Dick DVD, but it’s not the real thing, of course. I happened to see a single reel of a ’56 black-and-white release print at the Academy back in the ’80s — riveting.
8. William Wyler‘s Roman Holiday (’53). Lowry Digital’s John Lowry delivered a grain-free DVD in 2002. “It was a low resolution DVD made from the wrong elements,” a source remarks. “It was the same thing with Sunset Boulevard…they couldn’t find the original negatives or the original fine-grain on either one…it didn’t look filmish…it looked like a ‘kinny'” — i.e, a kinescope.
Moulin Rouge
9. Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard (’50). See Roman Holiday.
10. Billy Wilder‘s Stalag 17 (’53).
11. Vincent Minnelli‘s Gigi (’58). “They did everything they could [when they mastered the Bluray] but they were dealing with a faded original negative and bad color.”
12. John Ford‘s The Searchers (’56). “Needs to be re-done,” says Kimmel. “The Bluray is sharp but the color is wrong…they put too much yellow into it. Everything is wrong….Monument Valley sand is wrong….the sky is faintly greenish when it should blue….the clarity is fantastic but the adobe bricks in the opening credits are supposed to be gray but they’re blondish gold.”
13. George Stevens‘ Shane (’53). “It could be done like they did The African Queen and The Red Shoes, a beautiful Bluray done by Bob Gitt. They have a three-strip Technicolor negative…they just don’t have a clean HD master so how are they going to bring it out on Bluay?…it’s not a huge undertaking…but they just need to buckle down and go in that direction.”
14. Fred Zinneman‘s Oklahoma! (’55, shot in 65mm Todd AO 30 frame and also in 35mm 24-frame — two different versions). Kimmel, like me, saw Oklahoma! projected in 30-frame Todd-AO at the old DGA theatre back in the mid ’80s. “It was beautiful…you felt as if you could walk right into that picture,” he says. A laser disc that delivered the Todd AO version was sharp and handsome but for whatever reason the same version looks atrocious on the DVD. Kimmel says that Fox Home Video restoration maestro Schawn Belston believes that “the image compression screwed it up” and that the Todd AO version is salvagable.
15. Otto Preminger‘s Exodus (’60). A mediocre film shot in 70 mm that looked awesome when it was projected in first-run engagements some 51 years ago. “The DVD is the worst thing ever made and it’s a 4 x 3 transfer,” Kimmel remarks. “That’s one I’d love to see done right.” (Even if the film itself is quite difficult to sit through, he could have added.)
Moby Dick
16. The three James Dean movies — Elia Kazan‘s East of Eden (’55, 35mm CinemaScope), Nicholas Ray‘s Rebel Without a Cause (’55, 35mm CinemaScope) and George Stevens‘ Giant (’56). “Giant is the worst of the three…the wrong process for the wrong film…they took the original Eastman negative and created a dye transfer print, which exacerbated all the problems….so they could say it was in Technicolor.”
17. Alfred Hitchcock‘s To Catch a Thief (’55, VistaVision). Paramount’s Centennial edition DVD, released in 2009, is the best-looking version of all, but just imagine how this exceptionally colorful thriller would look in Bluray.
18. Vincent Minnelli‘s Lust for Life (’56). Shot on Ansco, purportedly to get rid of the stock at hand.
19. Henry King‘s Carousel (’56), shot in CinemaScope 55mm, an eight-perforation process involving a slight horizontal blowup, the same process used on The King and I.
20. Edward Dmytryk‘s Raintree County (’57, shot in Camera 65mm, the process also used for Ben-Hur).
21. Joshua Logan‘s Sayonara (’57).
22. Stanley Donen‘s Funny Face (’57).
23. Morton DaCosta‘s Auntie Mame (’58, shot in Technirama — 35 mm anamorphic).
24. Richard Brooks‘ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (’58, 35 mm).
25. Fred Zinneman‘s The Nun’s Story (’59, 35 mm).
26. Otto Preminger‘s Porgy and Bess (’58, Todd AO 65mm, 24 frame).
27. Fred Zinneman‘s The Sundowners (’60, 35mm).
28. Richard Brooks‘ Elmer Gantry (’60).
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