Re-watching this poorly tinted Citizen Kane at 60 fps is (I have to be honest) arresting. My eyes are “telling ” me this. I’m sorry but increasing the frame rate energizes Gregg Toland‘s 24 fps cinematography. It’s too bad that the home-use colorizing software developed by Alexander Kozhevin isn’t more sophisticated. All it does is generate a brownish-sepia overlay. I’ll always prefer to watch black-and-white films in their original form, of course, but 60 fps conversion adds without distorting. You can’t say it doesn’t.

Congrats to Promising Young Woman‘s Carey Mulligan for being chosen as the recipient of the Cinema Vanguard Award at the 36th annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival (3.21 to 4.10). It always a favoring omen when a Best Actress contender is selected for this honor by Roger “Nick the Greek” Durling, longtime honcho of the SB festival. Mulligan will receive the award on Monday, April 5, so to speak. Hollywood Elsewhere has attended and reported on the beloved SBIFF for nearly 20 years, and it totally breaks my heart that this year’s gathering (March 31-April 10) will happen “virtually”.

Last night I filled out my final Critics Choice Awards ballot. All votes have to be in by tomorrow evening at 3 pm Pacific. The 26th annual Critics Choice Awards ceremony will be held on Sunday, 3.7, and will be broadcast live on The CW television network. Here’s how I voted…

BEST PICTURE: The Trial of the Chicago 7
BEST ACTOR: Riz Ahmed, Sound of Metal
BEST ACTRESS: Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Paul Raci, Sound of Metal
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Olivia Colman, The Father
BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS: Helena Zengel, News of the World
BEST ACTING ENSEMBLE: The Trial of the Chicago 7
BEST DIRECTOR: Chloé Zhao, Nomadland (spread it around)
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Aaron Sorkin, The Trial of the Chicago 7
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller, The Father
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Hoyte Van Hoytema, Tenet
BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN: David Crank, Elizabeth Keenan, News of the World
BEST EDITING: Mikkel E. G. Nielsen, Sound of Metal
BEST COSTUME DESIGN: Trish Summerville, Mank
BEST HAIR AND MAKEUP: Mank (although I have to say I didn’t care for Gary Oldman‘s haircut)
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Tenet
BEST COMEDY: The King of Staten Island
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: Minari
BEST SONG: Io sì (Seen) — The Life Ahead
BEST SCORE: Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, Mank

…it never manifested, not even a little bit. Just remember that.

Obviously a fascinating cult film and a phenomenal atmosphere thing, but the perpetual nightscape, constant acid rain, smokestacks belching fireballs into the black muck, too many people, vast disparities between street culture and high-rise corporate sanctums, flying taxis, huge video billboards, Times Square meets corporate Bangkok meets smoggy Seoul meets endless squalor….Blade Runner was basically over-imagined, over-produced and quite delusional.

Three and 1/3 years ago: Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner milieu — nightmarish, gloom-ridden, poisoned — is obviously a trip in itself and great to wallow in, but the sprawl of real-world Los Angeles has exposed that realm as absolute noir-fetish fanboy bullshit.

“Blade Runner 2049 is, of course, a prophecy of ecological run to come, and that’s where we’re definitely heading with criminals like Scott Pruitt running the EPA,” I wrote on 10.7.17, “but BR49‘s idea of what Los Angeles will look like 32 years hence is almost surely just as ludicrous as Scott’s.

The twin Blade Runner realms have sunk their visions into our heads and will probably never be dissipated. But facts are facts. Los Angeles of 2021 doesn’t bear the faintest resemblance to Ridley Scott’s nightmare city. Because 39 years after the release of Scott’s film, today’s Los Angeles isn’t even accidentally reflected by Scott’s toxic metropolis. Air quality and Long Beach oil refineries aside, there isn’t even a coincidental depiction that rings true.

George Orwell’s 1984 wasn’t validated by reality 37 years ago, but it has been semi-validated since, at least as far as everyone having lost their privacy and paying obsessive attention to Big Brother-ish Twitter banshees doing their level best to intimidate, condemn and control.

But the Los Angeles of today isn’t even suggested by Scott’s toxic metropolis. Air quality and Long Beach oil refineries aside, there isn’t even a coincidental depiction that rings true.

Excerpt: “Where did the Blade Runner universe actually come from? From legitimate fears of industrial ruination, of course, but also from the despairing, fatalistic moods and attitudes that once resided inside Philip K. Dick, Ridley Scott, Hampton Fancher, David Peoples, Jordan Cronenweth, and, one could argue today, from the devotional geeks who regard the handed-down Blade Runner vision as absolute gospel, and have now made a film about that devotion.”

Kelly Marie Tran, whose Rose Tico character in The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (’19) struck me as engaged and agreeable, is on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter. The core conveyance of Rebecca Sun’s profile piece is basically “okay, that was tough and people can be cruel, but I’m back and all the stronger for it.”

The title is “The Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving Star Wars Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and Raya and the Last Dragon.”

The basic paraphrased message of the piece is (a) “the fanboys tried to hurt me and actually did for a while, but I bounced back and here I am”, and (b) “I’ve also dropped a noticable amount of weight in order to look good in sequined gowns while at the same time telling the Instagram bullies to go eff themselves.”

Why exactly was Tran subjected to so much racist and sexist online harassment by Star Wars neckbeards? Esquire‘s Dom Nero posted the following on 6.5.18:

“Since the earliest promos for The Force Awakens, members of this testosterone-fueled community have flooded the internet with their regressive criticisms that Star Wars seems to no longer be a white male-led franchise. In spite of virtually every movie in the new Disney iteration of the series being headlined by white actors, many fans feel that there is a ‘social justice warrior’ or ‘liberal’ conspiracy within the new Star Wars films — and it’s no surprise that this level of unrest has come about only when Kathleen Kennedy, a woman, stepped in to be the new president of Lucasfilm.

“These fans were especially, as they would say, triggered by Tran’s character in The Last Jedi, namely because she is (a) an Asian-American of Vietnamese descent, b) a woman, and (c) not the [right kind of] Hollywood female body type.”

More or less delighted by the 1.6.21 sacking of the Capitol building because of his sociopathic obstinacy and totalitarian strong man instincts, ex-President Trump didn’t want to send the the D.C. National Guard over to the Capitol. He conveyed his position to various loyalists and flunkies — particularly acting defense secretary Christopher Miller and Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, the younger brother of rabid Trump dog and acolyte Michael Flynn.

And this, according to a 3.3.21 Washington Post article by Dana Milbank titled “Did the Pentagon wait for Trump’s approval before defending the Capitol?“, is fundamentally why it took three hours and 19 minutes for any help to show up.

I thought this was generally known, at least among those with a basic inclination to consider facts. Yesterday Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, discussed how it all went down from his perspective. He received authorization to assist Capitol police at 5:08 pm.

(More…)

This color test footage for Rowland Lee‘s Son of Frankenstein (released on 1.13.39), was probably shot in the early fall of ’38. This clip has been on YouTube since 2011, but I saw it for the first time today. It’s actually the first color image I’d ever seen of Karloff in Frankenstein monster makeup, period.

The makeup genius was Jack Pierce (1889 — 1968). Yes, that’s Pierce getting strangled starting at the 45-second mark.

Karloff’s tongue improv (35-second mark) is good for a chuckle, but what genuinely surprised me was the mint-green skin. Widely circulated color snaps of Peter Boyle‘s Young Frankenstein monster (’74) also showed green skin, but I always thought that was a one-off. One presumes that the mint-green makeup was chosen by director Mel Brooks and Young Frankenstein dp Gerald Hirschfield because it delivers an extra-deathly pallor in monochrome.

Either way I’d never read or been told that Boris Karloff‘s monster had the same skin shade, at least as far as Son of Frankenstein was concerned. No clues if Karloff and Pierce went green for the previous two he starred in, Frankenstein (’31) and Bride of Frankenstein (’35).

I’d actually come to believe, based on a December 2012 visit to Guillermo del Toro’s “Bleak House,” that Karloff’s monster had mostly grayish skin with perhaps (at most) a faint hint of green. (The below photo, taken on 12.22.12, shows life-sized wax models of Pierce working on Karloff for James Whale‘s 1931 original.) Nobody is a more exacting historian or connoisseur of classic monsters than GDT, so I naturally presumed that the skin tone on Karloff’s wax model was accurate. I stand corrected.

One of many shots snapped at Guillermo del Toro’s “Bleak House” — posted on 12.22.12.

I used to derive serious pleasure from the annual Vanity Fair Hollywood issue, as I did from the generally knowledgable and delicious grade-A writing during the Graydon Carter era.

Carter left VF in 2017, Radhika Jones has been running the shop since, and nobody likes the magazine as much. You know what I mean. VF has “changed with the times.” It looks and feels like a lightweight hand-out — serving those who allow it to keep afloat. That special storied vibe from those Hollywood issues of the ’90s, aughts and early teens — a feeling that you were absorbing some kind of thought-through reconnaissance of where Hollywood culture was at that year and with one or two carefully sourced recollections of its own past — is totally out the window.

The only thing I like about the cover is the inclusion of Judas and the Black Messiah‘s Lakeith Stanfield.

Posted on 7.9.15: It hit me last night that the main-title themes for Henry King‘s The Bravados (’58) and John Ford‘s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (’62) are nearly identical. Listen to the Bravados music (which is credited on the Wiki page to Alfred Newman, Hugo Friedhofer and Lionel Newman) and now Cyril J. Mockridge‘s Liberty Valance theme — pretty close to plagiarism, I’d say.

But the Liberty Valance Wiki page credits the score to both Mockridge and Alfred Newman, and Mockridge’s Wiki page describes him as “a staff composer for 20th Century-Fox for years, frequently working with Alfred Newman and Alfred’s brother Lionel.” I’m assuming that Mockridge asked Alfred if he could rip off his Bravados main-title theme as a favor, and the esteemed composer said sure, what the hell.

…and then opens the rear door and slips inside in order to threaten some middle-aged suit — “Give me a name!” I don’t think so.

Michael B. Jordan as John Kelly, Tom Clancy‘s second most famous character after Jack Ryan…whatever. Plus Jamie Bell, Jodie Turner–Smith, Guy Pearce, Brett Gelman and Colman Domingo (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom).

I’ll probably tune in because I respect director Stefano Sollima, the pilot of Sicario: Day of the Soldado and ZeroZeroZero, and because Taylor Sheridan is one of the screenwriters. But it’s probably bullshit.

It was during a discussion this morning about David Caruso that it hit me. For a minute or two in ’93, when the carrot-haired Caruso was riding high with NYPD Blue and after his bravura performance as Mike the Chicago detective in Mad Dog and Glory…for a while there it looked like Caruso might pole-vault onto the next level and become a superstar. Maybe. It seemed possible.

But of course it wasn’t. Because freckly, ginger-haired guys can’t be superstars. They can be admired or even worshipped for their acting chops (i.e., Phillip Seymour Hoffman) or respected or “popular” as far as it goes, but they can’t be “the alpha guy“…that charismatic, rock-solid, center-of-the-universe force field whom other guys want to be and women want to go out with…to be a real movie star you need to exude a certain extra-cosmic, triple-dimensional quality.

And the fact is that only two copper-haired actors in the entire history of Hollywood have become serious superstars — James Cagney and Robert Redford.

Except Cagney doesn’t really count because he ascended and enjoyed his big-star heyday in the mostly monochrome ’30s and ’40s, and so no one was obliged to contemplate his hair color or freckly complexion.

And Redford doesn’t really count because, as we all know, he became a blonde sometime in the early to mid ’60s and stayed that way until his downshift period began sometime in the late ’80s or early ’90s.

And why do you think he became a blonde? Ask yourself that. Okay, I’ll tell you why. He became a blonde because he wanted to be big, and he knew (or his agent or some good friend persuaded him) that it wouldn’t happen unless he did something about his hair. I recall talking to an old friend of Redford’s on the phone once, a guy he used to hang out with in Van Nuys, and this guy told me that Redford’s high-school nickname at the time was “Red.” But eventually he let the blonde thing go. I know that he walked around as a natural copperhead when he was hosting the Sundance Film Festival in the ’90s.

Ginger or copper-haired actresses have never had the slightest problem in Hollywood, of course. And a select few (as with anything else) have become major stars — Cate Blanchett, Amy Adams, Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Bryce Dallas Howard, Isla Fisher, Lindsay Lohan, Christina Hendricks plus yesteryear’s Katharine Hepburn, Deborah Kerr, Myrna Loy, Tina Louise, Greer Garson, Rita Hayworth, Lucille Ball, Maureen O’Hara, Carol Burnett, Susan Hayward.

But ginger-haired guys have almost never made it to the penthouse level. Because there’s something about them that Americans just can’t quite settle in with or bow down to…not really. Michael Fassbender, Lucas Hedges, Paul Bettany, Jesse Plemons, Caruso, Ed Sheeran, Damian Lewis, Rupert Grint, Alan Tudyk, Brendan Gleeson, Danny Bonaduce, Eric Stoltz, Carrot Top Thompson, David Lewis, Domhnall Gleeson, Rupert Grint, Simon Pegg, Toby Stephens, the great Philip Seymour Hoffman, Chuck Norris, Jason Flemyng, Seth Green, David Wenham…none of them ever made it into the elite winner’s circle, not really. Because people glommed onto that red hair and went “okay, fine, good actor but nope.”

Yes, Leslie Howard was a fairly serious star in his 1930s heyday, but he wasn’t way up there. He wasn’t Clark Gable big.