I’ve said this over and over: depending on the condition of the print, 70mm showings can look great but only if the film was shot in large format (65mm, VistaVision, Todd AO, Super Panavision 70, Ultra Panavision 70, Camera 65, Dimension 150).
35mm upgraded to 70mm (i.e., TheWildBunch) is fine as far as it goes but nothing to necessarily shout and scream about.
The bottom line today is that digital projection tends to look just as good as 70mm, and in some cases better (i.e., no print degradation). 70mm can look great, yes, but it’s mostly a marketing brand that film cognoscenti have bought into — a way to “sell” classic movies.
In and of themselves, 70mm showings are no longer the coin of the realm.
A month from now (August 9th) Rialto Pictures will release into theatres a 50th anniversary restored version of Francis Coppola‘s The Conversation (’74).
A press release say “the original negative was accessed for the first time and scanned in 4K”…fine. And that the restoration has been “fully approved” by Coppola.
I’ve seen The Conversation four or five times over the last half century, and at least twice in HD over the last decade or so. I wasn’t aware it needed a restoration. The intrigue is in the sound design, of course. Visually it’s always looked fine — an assured, pro-level, run-of-the-mill 35mm film. Mostly urban (San Francisco) interiors, nothing exceptional. The highlight (hand in hand with the sound design) is the Union Square long-lens surveillance footage, etc.
I can’t imagine what kind of visual boinnngg! this restoration could possibly achieve. The film world certainly hasn’t been crying out for a visual upgrade. Okay, this new version might look slightly better…maybe. If it manages this, fine. All to the good.
“When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin’ along…along!”
Being a mid-realm teenager (14, 15, 16 and sometimes 17) can feel like a cross between a Eugene O’Neil or Edward Albee stage play and a kind of low-simmering horror film.
It felt that way to me, at least, during my Agony Years.
Most of the time I was dead bored or lost in television shows or a movie I’d recently seen, or I was seething about some suffocating parental restriction or discipline, but during those periods when I actually faced my situation I was engulfed in something that felt like a form of suffocation. As in barely able to breathe.
I can’t speak about the horrors that teenage girls have endured over the last half-century, God help them, but almost all male teenagers go through unpleasant trials and gauntlets and humiliations, sometimes involving sex (or the desperate longing for same or at least a brief taste) and more often involving battling-buck behavior…parking-lot taunting, braggadocio, forced machismo, “I won’t back down but on the other hand it might make sense if I do, even if the other guy gets to preen and strut around,” etc.
Who contributed more significantly to making my teenaged life feel more tortured, more conflicted, more arduous, more upsetting in this or that way? Me, first and foremost. Bob Seger‘s “Against The Wind.” I called the shots and the world pushed back.
But it was also my alleged junior high and high-school chums (i.e., confrontational peers) who gave me shit for being different and odd-angled in my thinking (which I definitely was in a Matt Groening secret-genius sort of way), or my well-meaning but nonetheless bruising parents, which is to say my mostly indifferent, occasionally seething alcoholic dad, who was augmented for the most part by my mom, who was just trying to hold things together.
The answer, of course, is that my parents and high-school frenemies behaved like a kind of team — they worked hand in hand to make my teenaged life feel like a dungeon. It’s commonly understood that teenaged life is always difficult. I don’t want to say “it’s intended to be” — that would be too horrific a diagnosis — but the experience has never been a walk in the park for anyone except for high achievers, brown-nosers, goodie-goodie and Student Council types, and in some instances even these people, these apparent lightweights, are dealing with all kinds of buried convulsions.
True story: There was a straight-arrow guy in my New Jersey junior high school, a bespectacled, conservative-mannered guy who had either run for or been elected Student Council president, and one night he tried to commit suicide. No, not by hanging himself in the bathroom — that would have been too decisive — but by drinking some kind of poison. And he was the kind of guy who sprinkled talcum power in his shiny shoes when he was getting dressed for a prom. (I was there — I saw him sprinkle the stuff.)
I never even fantasized about doing myself in — the thought has never been in me until recently — but I did undergo a kind of long-accumulated rage explosion in my high-school cafeteria once, and it was a doozy.
A “friend” had gotten hold of something I valued — I can’t remember if it was a drawing or a letter to some girl or a movie program from Times Square or a cherished record album — all I remember is that it was something that mattered a lot to me, and this guy (a casual hang buddy whom I regarded from time to time as a half-assed friend of sorts) had thrown it into a garbage receptacle of some kind, and I distinctly recall pulling the article out of the bin, walking over to a cafeteria table where the “friend” and some others were sitting, picking up a wooden chair and throwing it at him and shouting what an asshole he was.
I threw the chair so hard that it bounced off my “friend’s” head or shoulder and grazed a young girl who happened to be walking just behind him. I was disciplined for this, of course. People who can’t hold their tempers will always be called on this by social forces, especially if physical harm (however slight) is part of the lashing-out process, as well they should. The girl who was hit by the chair (most likely a glancing blow) didn’t make anything out of it, thank God.
My “friend” was scowling in the aftermath and telling me what an unhinged jerk I was, etc. My comeback line was something along the lines of “yeah? well, there’s more where that came from, fucker…a lot more.”
It’s been obvious to me that Twisters (Universal, 7.19) is Glen Powell jizz whizz — a cheap, shallow CG action wank. And now a between-the-lines reading of Owen Gleiberman’s Twisters review confirms this.
Excerpt: “There are moments of spectacle that hook you, but [the original] Twister, in its time, was bedazzling because we had never seen anything like it on the big screen before.
“Staring up at the tornadoes in Twisters, I felt like I’d already seen something exactly like them — and that when it comes to footage of actual tornadoes, I’d already seen something more incredible. Twisters, fun as parts of it are, is a movie where [iPhone-captured] reality ultimately takes a lot of the wind out of its gales.”
Posted on 5.8.24: Sometime within the next two or three years Glenn Powell, youngish but no spring chicken, is going to have to star in a movie that isn’t mechanized, prefabricated, power-pumped, big-studio bullshit.
You can’t just spew jizz-whizz all the time. Every now and then it’s really necessary to put some nutrition into the cereal bowl.
Yesterday evening an HE commenter named “Jimmy Porter” brought upJan De Bont‘s Twister, and said I reminded him of “Bill ‘The Extreme” Harding, the Tornado whisperer played by Bill Paxton. I never took that film seriously (who did?) and I never felt that Harding was much of a character. Twister is “fun” in pieces. It’s basically a series of FX sequences strung together by a romantic triangle story (Paxton, new flame Jami Gertz, old-but-enduring flame Helen Hunt).
HE to Porter: “Thanks for the Bill Paxton analogy. (I guess.) The instinct guy, feels the tornado energy in his bones, etc. I can’t even recall Cary Elwes’ antagonist character in Twister. I saw it once 24 years ago at a Westwood all-media screening.
Critically pummeled but the second highest-grossing film of ‘96 with $495 million worldwide, Twister was a career peak for headstrong director Jan De Bont, who would gradually flame out with Speed 2: Cruise Control, The Haunting and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
I naturally recall Paxton and Helen Hunt and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. And Lois Smith’s grandma character who fed them all steak and gravy and mashed potatoes in one downtime scene.”
I’ve been ducking Twister for 24 years, and now — oddly — I’m suddenly thinking of watching it again.
Key George Clooney passage in his 7.10 N.Y. Times guest essay: “The one battle Joe Biden cannot win is the fight against time. Our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate.
“This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and congress member and governor that I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.”
I’ve loathed Trump for quite a few years — he’s the only truly Satanic President this country has ever had. But right now I hate the Bidens (Joe, Jill, Hunter) even more.
It will be a monumental tragedy when Biden-Harris lose on 11.5.24, but a part of me, a deep-down part, will be savoring a certain emotional satisfaction from this.
I’ll be muttering to Biden, “You bought this, you rotting pumpkin…your defiance and arrogance and lack of patriotism ushered in this defeat. Enjoying the moment, fucker? Your name is mud. May your reputation suffer eternally.”
The Bidens and the ugly & deranged HE commentariat chorus share the #1 spot right now…top of my hate list.
(1) Colin Jost‘s cameo as Senator Cook, a conservative none-too-bright, is a little embarassing. He only has a couple of lines, for one thing, and you can barely see him — he’s mostly covered in shadows. Jost is married to Scarlett Johansson, the film’s star and senior producer, and they couldn’t give him, say, six or seven lines?…a well-lighted scene with a little back-and-forth repartee? It’s humiliating, man — grounds for divorce.
(2) Ray Romano plays an upper-level NASA administrator named Henry Smalls…fine. But why is he wearing a ten-day growth of beard? NASA bigwigs were total straight-arrows, for one thing, and nobody in 1969 walked around with the Miami ViceDon Johnson short-beard look. That shit didn’t begin until the mid to late ’80s.
(3) Early on there’s a magnificent nighttime shot of a couple of Cape Canaveral launch towers a mile or so away, glowing with amber light. Congrats to dp Dariusz Wolski.
(4) Despite the protests of some delusional HE commentariat lunatics, Todd Douglas Miller‘s Apollo 11 showed without a shadow of a doubt that obesity was mostly non-existent in 1969. And yet Fly Me To The Moon includes two insert shots of a beefy. bordering-on-fat TV reporter going on about the atmosphere of excitement at Cape Canaveral, etc. There aren’t any galumphy, sea-lion-sized TV reporters now, and there sure as shit weren’t any 55 years ago.
(5) Woody Harrelson‘s Moe Berkus, a governmental “bad” guy, insists that fake moon landing footage should be captured in case the Apollo 11 mission goes wrong. Fine, but why is it important to shoot this footage live, or concurrent with the actual moon landing and exploration? They could have shot it a few days before and nobody would be the wiser. It makes no practical sense.
(6) Channing Tatum‘s Cole Davis is a total drag to be around. He stops the film in its tracks every time he says a line.
(7) And by the way, Tatum is now 44, and a recent promotional interview he did with Johansson shows he’s clearly going bald. He could fix this shit right away by going to Prague — his middle-aged years have only just begun! — but of course he won’t because he’s too cool for school.
If Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi don’t stand up and insist to Joe Biden that he needs to fold his tent and release his delegates, their reputations will be soiled beyond repair. A chance to stop The Beast was put before them and they wimped out? History will not forgive them.
“Mark my words: Joe Biden is going to be out of the 2024 presidential race. Whether he is ready to admit it or not. His pleas on Monday to congressional Democrats for support will not unite the party behind him. Mr. Biden says he’s staying in the race, but it’s only a matter of time before Democratic pressure and public and private polling lead him to exit the race. The jig is up, and the sooner Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders accept this, the better. We need to move forward.
“But it can’t be by anointing Vice President Kamala Harris or anyone else as the presumptive Democratic nominee. We’ve got to do it out in the open — the exact opposite of what Donald Trump wants us to do.
“I want to see the Democratic Party hold four historic town halls between now and the Democratic National Convention in August — one each in the South, the Northeast, the Midwest and the West.
“We can recruit the two most obvious and qualified people in the world to facilitate substantive discussions: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. They may not represent every faction under our party’s big tent. But they care as much about our democracy as our nation’s first president, they understand what it takes to be president, and they know how to win.”
From N.Y Times 7.8 editorial — “The Democratic Party Must Speak the Plain Truth to the President
“For those at the helm of the Democratic Party — including the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer; the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries; and even the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi — the time has arrived to speak forcefully to the president and the public about the need for a new candidate, before time runs out for other candidates to make their case to the party’s convention delegates.
“These Democratic leaders know that the presidency is not a day job, and Mr. Biden needs to hear from them and others that the security of and stakes for America are too high to continue to move forward with Mr. Biden as the nominee.
“If their reticence up to now was partly a show of respect and partly a calculation that Mr. Biden would be more receptive to private counsel than to public criticism, it is increasingly clear that the president is unwilling to accept the reality of his situation. He is engaging in a staring contest with Democratic leaders, and he appears to be winning. The only way to persuade Mr. Biden to accept the need for new leadership is to demonstrate that the party is no longer following him.
“The 2024 presidential election is not a contest between two men, or even between two political parties. It is a battle for who we are as a nation.
“President Biden clearly understands the stakes. But he seems to have lost track of his own role in this national drama. As the situation has become more dire, he has come to regard himself as indispensable. He does not seem to understand that he is now the problem — and that the best hope for Democrats to retain the White House is for him to step aside.”
…I’d be super-down for this…Denzel throws dust into the eyes of a charging rhino!…some other actor (Chris Walken?) saying to 20-years-younger Denzel “you shall be my instrument.” That I could easily go for. That I would delight in.
But I can’t invest in a gladiator flick film starring Paul “weepy dad + milky complexion + greasy whiskers” Mescal. He’s too vulnerable, too meditative, too watery-eyed. Not my kind of alpha male. 24 years ago Russell Crowe had that X-factor, coiled-tension, charging-bull quality, and Mescal is supposed to be his son? Not buying it. Outside of the deranged HE commentariat trolls, relatively few are.
If Ridley had gone with a real man, fine. But the tearful, melancholy, too-quick-to-smile father from Afterburn? Forget it. He’s not good-looking enough. His jaw is too pointy, too Margaret Hamilton.
There’s no trusting a trailer, of course, but I’m sensing that the overall tone of Gladiator II is on the porno-violent side…overly emphasized…more blood, more severed limbs, more howling rage, etc. But at least there’s no more herky-jerky cinematography.
