When I was launching this site five and a half years ago I was told that the dash between “Hollywood” and “Elsewhere” would be bad for traffic. It probably was in the early days, so in ’05 I asked the guy who ran www.hollywoodelsewhere.com, a deadbeat site if I ever saw one, if he wanted to sell. He said “okay, $10 grand.” I didn’t even reply. Early this month he got in touch again, saying he wants to give me the opportunity to purchase the domain “before we list it on sedo and other domain-selling sites.” I could be wrong, but I’m not convinced it’s even worth having.

There are three reasons why Little Fockers didn’t get an absolute zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and MSN critic (not to mention Hollywood Elsewhere’s own) Glenn Kenny is one of them. His curiously amiable non-condemning review plus two other passes resulted in this plastic poison IV comedy getting an 8%, which is fitting but not the historic blank-out I was hoping for.

“It must be said I did not find Little Fockers to be particularly excruciating,” Kenny wrote. “Indeed, I laughed pretty hard several times. My father-in-law, whom I brought to the screening as a kind of experiment, can testify to this. It eventually settles into an amiably funny groove that holds steady” for the most part. In fact, Kenny says, “It’s kind of cute.”

There’s no accounting for taste in humor. You can’t stop people from laughing at a film that reeks of creative lupus at every turn. You can’t instruct or berate someone into not liking a terrible movie. But if there was some sort of secret elite tribunal that considered and occasionally meted out punishment to critics for not just circulating deeply offensive reviews but for being dead fucking wrong, Kenny’s indictment would be a fait accompli.

“In some ways, much like Charles Laughton‘s Night of the Hunter, which the Coens quote both musically and visually, True Grit is a parable about good and evil,” writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. “Only here, the lines between the two are so blurred as to be indistinguishable, making this a true picture of how the West was won, or — depending on your view — lost.”

Blurred indeed. As in “what’s going on here, if anything?” As I said in my original review, True Grit is “indisputably solid and grade-A as far as those attributes go, but it’s essentially a cold and mannered art western that matters not.”

Marshall Fine‘s interview with Biutiful director-cowriter Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, which he did, I suspect, at the same time I did my Inarritu chat in early November, has some truly sublime quotes:

(a) “I joke that 60 years ago, [Luis] Bunuel went to Mexico to shoot Los Olvidados and, 60 years later, this is my version, shot in Barcelona…I wanted to shoot in my own language[ and] it’s the first film I did in Europe, and the food is fantastic.”

(b) Biutiful‘s story “came from sitting in a doctor’s office [and] seeing another patient emerging after hearing obviously bad news. I thought about what it would be like going out knowing things were changed forever. So I asked the question: What if I knew I had 90 days to be on planet Earth? And that’s where everything departs from.

(c) “When someone says the film is bleak, I hate it. To me, bleakness is 20 or 30 lives being lost in a movie with lots of guns and explosions – and yet there’s not one life you care about. To me, that is bleakness. But this film is a celebration of how important one life is. I knew the consequences of making it. It was not accomplished easily to appeal to the taste of the Starbucks audience. I feel lighter, in a good way.”

(d) “Biutiful is about life, observed from an ending. If you put the camera at the end of the road and observe, it’s more profound. It’s not about death; it’s an homage to a life being lived.

(e) “I started shooting this the month of the financial collapse. This film is like wine that’s been aged for years. This is not a frappuccino, milk and honey and sugary for the audience. [But] just the release of Biutiful is a reason to celebrate…I would say that it is an act of resistance against the intoxicating culture we live under [and] the dictatorship of corporate thinking…at least it’s an attempt to survive.”

(f) “I would love, in a way, to find something that’s not mine, that would take me out of the burden of the personal journey, just to be a director for hire. I’d like to be a craftsman who’s putting together a table he didn’t design. But an apple tree produces apples. My process is very long and exhausting. I can’t escape from that.”

Gone in Sixty Seconds + Grindhouse aesthetic + Nic Cage’s tax debt goading him to do almost anything + 3D whoopee cushion = popcorn flatulence.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and Deadline‘s Pete Hammond answer two key questions: (1) Why has Hammond ditched The King’s Speech?, and (2) Can The Fighter pull off an upset? (Take note, incidentally, that Hammond has The Fighter in second place above The King’s Speech in his rankings.)

I’ve always loved Renata Adler‘s 4.4.68 review of 2001: A Space Odyssey. She didn’t really get it and in fact puts it down, but she’d gotten parts of it, or several fragments, and she knew (or sensed) there was probably more where that came from. She was only 30 when she wrote her piece, and probably had more than a few space-cadet friends who were getting high and listening to Dylan and the Beatles, etc. And a voice was telling her, “You’d be smart not to pan this outright despite your gut feelings…go a little easy.”

I’d like to think that if I’d seen one of the most unusual and challenging films of the ’60s cold and had to write a review right away, I’d have been as observant as she. I’d like to think I would have been a little more perceptive, but that’s easy to say.

“Even the M-G-M lion is stylized and abstracted in Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film in which infinite care, intelligence, patience, imagination and Cinerama have been devoted to what looks like the apotheosis of the fantasy of a precocious, early nineteen-fifties city boy.

“The movie, on which Kubrick collaborated with the British science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, is nominally about the finding, in the year 2001, of a camera-shy sentient slab on the moon and an expedition to the planet Jupiter to find whatever sentient being the slab is beaming its communications at.

“There is evidence in the film of Clarke’s belief that men’s minds will ultimately develop to the point where they dissolve in a kind of world mind. There is a subplot in the old science-fiction nightmare of man at terminal odds with his computer. There is one ultimate science-fiction voyage of a man (Keir Dullea) through outer and inner space, through the phases of his own life in time thrown out of phase by some higher intelligence, to his death and rebirth in what looked like an intergalactic embryo.

“But all this is the weakest side of a very complicated, languid movie — in which almost a half-hour passes before the first man appears and the first word is spoken, and an entire hour goes by before the plot even begins to declare itself. Its real energy seem to derive from that bespectacled prodigy reading comic books around the block.

“The whole sensibility is intellectual fifties child: chess games, bodybuilding exercises, beds on the spacecraft that look like camp bunks, other beds that look like Egyptian mummies, Richard Strauss music, time games, Strauss waltzes, Howard Johnson’s, birthday phone calls. In their space uniforms, the voyagers look like Jiminy Crickets. When they want to be let out of the craft they say, ‘Pod bay doors open,’ as one might say ‘Bomb bay doors open’ in every movie out of World War II.

“When the voyagers go off to plot against HAL, the computer, it might be HAL, the camper, they are ganging up on. When HAL is expiring, he sings ‘Daisy.’ Even the problem posed when identical twin computers, previously infallible, disagree is the kind of sentence-that-says-of-itself-I-lie paradox, which — along with the song and the nightmare of ganging up — belong to another age. When the final slab, a combination Prime Mover slab and coffin lid, closes in, it begins to resemble a fifties candy bar.

“The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science-fiction detail, that it is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring. (With intermission, it is three hours long.) Kubrick seems as occupied with the best use of the outer edge of the screen as any painter, and he is particularly fond of simultaneous rotations, revolving, and straight forward motions — the visual equivalent of rubbing the stomach and patting the head.

“All kinds of minor touches are perfectly done: there are carnivorous apes that look real; when they throw their first bone weapon into the air, Kubrick cuts to a spacecraft; the amiable HAL begins most of his sentences with ‘Well,’ and his answer to ‘How’s everything?’ is, naturally, ‘Everything’s under control.’

“There is also a kind of fanaticism about other kinds of authenticity: space travelers look as sickly and exhausted as travelers usually do; they are exposed in space stations to depressing canned music; the viewer is often made to feel that the screen is the window of a spacecraft, and as Kubrick introduces one piece of unfamiliar apparatus after another — a craft that looks, from one angle, like a plumber’s helper with a fist on the end of it, a pod that resembles a limbed washing machine — the viewer is always made aware of exactly how it is used and where he is in it.

“The special effects in the movie — particularly a voyage, either through Dullea’s eye or through the slab and over the surface of Jupiter-Earth and into a period bedroom — are the best I have ever seen; and the number of ways in which the movie conveys visual information (there is very little dialogue) drives it to an outer limit of the visual.

“And yet the uncompromising slowness of the movie makes it hard to sit through without talking — and people on all sides when I saw it were talking almost throughout the film. Very annoying. With all its attention to detail — a kind of reveling in its own I.Q. — the movie acknowledged no obligation to validate its conclusion for those, me for example, who are not science-fiction buffs.

“By the end, three unreconciled plot lines — the slabs, Dullea’s aging, the period bedroom — are simply left there like a Rorschach, with murky implications of theology. This is a long step outside the convention, some extra scripts seem required, and the all-purpose answer, ‘relativity,’ does not really serve unless it can be verbalized.

“The movie opened yesterday at the Capitol.”

The One By The Famously Exacting Director With The Great Script By The Famously Jerky Screenwriter: The Social Network.

The One Where You’re Going Insane Waiting Around For The Crazy Thing To Happen, Then It Happens: 127 Hours.

The Super-Loony One, Holy Shit, Was That Fucking Nutballs Or What?: Black Swan or Inception.

The Sweet-Hearted-But-Poignant Animated One We’re Supposed To Take More Seriously: How To Train Your Dragon. (Many have obviously taken Toy Story 3 quite seriously.)

The One Where The Whole Thing Might Have Been A Dream: Black Swan or Inception?

The One Where The Whole Thing Might Have Been A Hoax: The Town.

The Shattering Little One That Everyone’s Already Forgotten About, Which I’ll Probably Replace With True Grit When I Finally See It: Greenberg, The Ghost Writer.

The One With A Bunch Of Authentic-Feeling Regional Stereotypes: The Fighter

The Other One With A Bunch Of Authentic-Feeling Regional Stereotypes: Blue Valentine.

The One That Kind Of Bombed But I’m Including Anyway Because It Was So Much Fun: Exit Through The Git Shop, Let Me In.

The Foreign One You Didn’t See Yet Because You Never Send Back Your Netflix DVDs: Can’t be Carlos or Biutiful because neither are on Netflix..I give up.

(Descriptions by Mark Lisanti of Lisanti Quaterly.)

“What the hell am I gonna tell ya ’bout what they got against you? Christ, they’re women, aren’t they? You ever listen to women talk, man? Do ya? ‘Cause I do till it’s running outta my ears! I mean I’m on my feet all day long listening to women talk and they only talk about one thing — how some guy fucked ’em over. That’s all that’s on their minds. That’s all I ever hear about! Don’t you know that? Face it, we’re always trying to nail ’em and they don’t like it. They like it and they don’t like it. It’s got nothing to do with you, Lester. It just happened.”

All large-format films of the ’50s and early ’60s (70 mm, VistaVision, Technirama, etc.) need to be remastered for Bluray, so I have no argument against Warner Home Video scheduling a Bluray of Nicholas Ray‘s (’61) King of Kings on 3.29.11. It was shot in Technirama by Manuel Berenguer, Milton R. Krasner and Franz Planer, and “presented in 70mm Super Technirama at selected first-run engagements,” according to the film’s Wiki page. So the detail should be quite nice.

But why? Or rather, why not first put out a much better large-format Biblical-era film that would be more appreciated — i.e., William Wyler ‘s Ben-Hur (59)? King of Kings is a visually handsome thing with certain attributes, but as I wrote in ’08, “so much of this 1961 Samuel Bronston epic is either pompous or tedious, and some of it is painful.”

Example: “The casting of the 37 year-old Siobhan McKenna (37 going on 52) as Mary, mother of Jesus, is ludicrous — a solemn earthy Irish woman straight out of Sean O’Casey and James Joyce with her lined face, alabaster Irish complexion and faintly suppressed Dublin accent.

“There are nonetheless five worthwhile things about this film: (a) Miklos Rosza ‘s score, particularly the overture; (b) Ron Randell‘s fine performance as Lucius, the thoughtful, morally conflicted Centurion; (b) Jeffrey Hunter‘s lead performance during the last third; (d) the shots that show perfect focus in both the foreground and background (which was pretty amazing during a time in which films would commonly rack focus to catch the foreground or background, but never both); and (e) Ray Bradbury‘s eloquently-written narration.

“Rosza sometimes let his costume-epic scores become slightly over-heated, but when orgiastic, big-screen, reach-for-the-heavens emotion was called for, no one did it better. He may have been first and foremost a craftsman, but Rosza really had soul.

“Listen to the overture and main title music of King of Kings, and all kinds of haunting associations and recollections about the life of Yeshua and his New Testament teachings (or at the least, grandiose Hollywood movies about same) start swirling around in your head. And then watch that Nicholas Ray’s stiff, strangely constipated film (which Rosza described in his autobiography as ‘nonsensical Biblical ghoulash’) and it’s obvious that Rosza came closer to capturing the spiritual essence of Christ’s story better than anyone else on the team (Ray, screenwriter Phillip Yordan, producer Samuel Bronston).”

Here’s another piece I did about Ray’s apparent interest in having his male leads wear red garments with white T-shirts.

I also found a Bible Film geek site that quotes from Bernard Eisenschitz‘s Ray biography, to wit:

“A clash between the Ray, Bronston and Yordan seems to have left the film in a mess. At the last minute Ray was told to include the Jewish rebellion action scene three-quarters of the way through the film, and an extra character called David (played by Richard Johnston), was brought in to play a similar role to the finished film’s Judas.

“By then the film was 3 1/2 hours long, and although Ray thought that was necessary, Margaret Booth (head of the editing department) decided to cut out ‘David’ altogether. This resulted in one scene between Barabbas and ‘David’ having to be re-filmed with Judas instead. As a result of these major, last minute changes, any sense of continuity was destroyed, as was the long standing friendship between Ray and Yordan.

“To make things worse, once Ray had left the project, his final scene of Jesus leaving the disciples on a mountain was replaced by the now infamous ‘giant-Jesus making a cross on the beach‘ shot. Worse still, Jeffrey Hunter’s dialogue was re-dubbed in its entirety so that he would have a lower, more serious, voice.

“Given all this internal wrangling, it is hardly surprising that the film falls short of it’s potential. It never really seems to know what kind of film it is. Is it a Roman action epic, or an introspective look at a rebel with a cause?”