slider

On this, the 59th anniversary of the assassination of JFK in Dallas, World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has posted a recap of a Gangs of New York piece that was titled Gangs vs. Gangs, and which originally appeared in my Movie Poop Shoot column in December 2002.

Here’s my own recap, which I posted on 1.24.18.

I was told earlier today that the Gangs of New York Wikipedia page mentions a noteworthy piece by yours truly, posted in December 2001, that described the differences between a 1.37:1 work print version of Gangs that I saw on VHS vs. the final 2.39:1 release version. Here’s a link to the original article, and here’s a repost of it:

If Miramax Films and Martin Scorsese had decided to release a polished, cleaned-up version of the Gangs of New York work print they had in the can (or, if you want to get technical, that was stored on Marty and editor Thelma Schoonmaker‘s Avid) sometime in October ’01, we’d all be enjoying a better, more rewarding film than the Gangs that will open nationwide four days from now (12.20.02).

I’ve seen both versions and most of you haven’t, so I know something you don’t. The best Gangs of New York will not be hitting screens this weekend, and may never even be seen on DVD, given Scorsese’s apparent disinterest in releasing “director’s cut” versions of his films, or in supplying deleted scenes or outtakes or any of that jazz.

The work-print version is longer by roughly 20 minutes, and more filled out and expressive as a result, but that’s not the thing. The main distinction for me is that it’s plainer and therefore more cinematic, as it doesn’t use the narration track that, in my view, pollutes the official version. It also lacks a musical score, with only some drums and temp music.

This leaves you free, in short, to simply pick and choose from the feast of visual information that Gangs of New York is, and make of it what you will. And if that isn’t the essence of great movie-watching, I don’t know what is.

It also points out what’s wrong with the theatrical release version, which I feel has been fussed over too intensively, compressed, simplified, lathered in big-movie music and, to some extent, thematically obscured.

Miramax and Scorsese had the superior work-print version in their hands 14 months ago. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s not tremendously different from the version being released on Friday. It is only missing Leonardo DiCaprio‘s narration, a musical score and some CG effects, which tells me it could have easily been prepared for a December ’01 release. But Miramax decided otherwise and pushed it back it until now. If you ask me their reasons for doing so were short-sighted and wrong.

Read more

An article in the January 2023 issue of Empire dishes about de-aging tech used for the still-untitled Indy 5 flick, which stars the 80 year-old Harrison Ford in the title role.

The slam-bam prelude opening is set in 1944 — six years after the events in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade took place in 1938, and 13 years before the 1957 adventure that unfolded in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I’ve always understood that Jones was born sometime around 1900, and so Ford (roughly 38 or 39 during the shooting of Raiders of the Lost Ark) will be inhabiting the 44 year-old archeologist in the forthcoming James Mangold film (Disney, 6.30.23).

Are we clear so far? In Indy 5 Jones will start out as a 44 year-old, or roughly six years older than he was in Last Crusade, which took place in 1938 and was released in 1989, when Ford was 47. Even I’m a bit confused.

The Indy 5 prelude is set in an old castle and involves Nazi antagonists. A blend of old footage plus anti-aging tech was used to make Ford look 44, or roughly how he appeared in Witness (’85) and The Mosquito Coast (’86). Ford was born in 1942.

Ford to Empire: “This is the first time I’ve seen [de-aging technology] where I believe it. It’s a little spooky. I don’t think I even want to know how it works, but it works.”

After the opener, Indy 5‘s story will advance 25 years to 1969, when Jones is supposed to be roughly 69. So Ford will be playing ten years younger than his actual age, which shouldn’t be a problem.

Read more

Back in the old days (i.e., seven or eight years ago and earlier) the Spirit Awards were known as the hip Oscars. Now they’re a secular award forum for the Woke Branch Davidians.

The Spirit Award nominations popped today, and what an inexplicable setback for The Whale‘s Brendan Fraser, who was expected to pick up an easy Best Lead Performance nom on his path to the Oscars.

If the Spirits were still adhering to gender categories, Fraser would have certainly been nominated for Best Actor.

But even under current gender-free system he still should have been nominated. Fraser plays a massively overweight gay guy (two woke points in one character) plus he has his emotional comeback narrative. What was the problem exactly?

On top of which the Spirit Davidians backhanded Danielle Deadwyler’s powerful performance as Mamie Till in Chinonye Chukwu’s Till. They brushed aside a major BIPOC performance in a film about the most searing incident in the 1950s and ’60s Civil Rights movement?

They also told James Gray‘s Armageddon Time to take a hike; ditto costar Jeremy Strong in the supporting category.

As things currently stand, the Spirit Davidians have announced ten nominations for Best Lead Performance, and only two honor male performances — Aftersun‘s Paul Mescal (a performance that I hated with a passion) and The Inspection‘s Jeremy Pope (which I still haven’t seen).

Here are the nominees along with HE’s boldfaced preferences in each category:

Best Feature:

“Bones and All” (MGM/United Artists Releasing)
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” (A24)
“Our Father, the Devil” (Resolve Media)
“Tár” (Focus Features)
“Women Talking” (MGM/United Artists Releasing)

Best Director

Todd Field – “Tár”
Kogonada – “After Yang”
Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert — “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Sarah Polley – “Women Talking”
Halina Reijn – “Bodies Bodies Bodies”

Best Lead Performance

Cate Blanchett – “Tár”
Dale Dickey – “A Love Song”
Mia Goth – “Pearl”
Regina Hall – “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.”
Paul Mescal – “Aftersun”
Aubrey Plaza – “Emily the Criminal”
Jeremy Pope – “The Inspection”
Taylor Russell – “Bones and All”
Andrea Riseborough – “To Leslie”
Michelle Yeoh – “Everything Everywhere All at Once”

Read more

The opening scene of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon (Paramount, 12.23) is set in a hilly section of Bel Air circa 1926. Except it doesn’t look right. For 80 or 90 years Bel Air has been a flush and fragrant oasis for the super-wealthy, but in the mid ’20s, according to Babylon, it was fairly dry and barren and desert-like — no trees, no bushes, no grass and definitely no golf course. Almost Lawrence of Bel Air.

I’m no historian but this Palm Desert version of Bel Air struck me as slightly untrustworthy. So I did a little researching last night and found a slightly greener atmosphere. In fact Bel Air of the mid ’20s was starting to come into itself. Photos from that era show the beginnings of paved roads, smallish trees and shrubbery, yucca plants, a few mansions, a reservoir, the east and west gates and a little shade here and there.

[Originally posted on 10.15.04] Three of us — myself, a friend and an acquaintance i didn’t like — came close to dying in a drunken car crash — a wipe-out that almost happened but didn’t thanks to Chevy engineering.

It happened around 1 am in rural Wisconsin, and I’ll never forget that godawful horrifying feeling as I waited for the car we were in — a 1958 Chevrolet Impala convertible — to either flip over or slam into a tree or hit another car like a torpedo, since we were sliding sideways down the road at 70 or 80 mph.

It happened just outside Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Bill Butler was driving, Mike Dwyer was riding shotgun, and I was in the back seat. We were coming from a beer joint called the Brat Hut (or possibly the Beer Hut). We’d jointly consumed several pitchers and were fairly stinko. We were five or six miles out of town and heading south towards Markesan, where we had jobs (plus room and board) at the Del Monte Bean and Pea plant. To either side of us were flat, wide-open fields and country darkness.

Butler, a serious asshole back then, was going faster and faster. I looked at the speedometer and saw he was doing 90, 95, 100. I was about to say something when the road started to curve to the right, and then a lot more. Butler was driving way too fast to handle it and I was sure we were fucked, especially with nobody wearing seat belts and the top down and all.

But thanks to those magnificent Chevrolet engineers, Butler’s Impala didn’t roll over two or three times or slam into a tree or whatever. It just spun out from the rear and slid sideways about 200 feet or so. Sideways! I remember hitting the back seat in panic and looking up at the stars and hearing the sound of screeching tires and saying to myself, “You’re dead.”

The three of us just sat there after the car came to a halt. There was a huge cloud of burnt-rubber smoke hanging above and behind us. I remember somebody finally saying “wow.” (Dwyer, I think.) My heart began beating again after a few seconds.

I realize I’m a little late getting in touch with my emotions, but if Butler is reading this, I want him to know I’m really furious about this. Butler almost took away my becoming a journalist and loving my kids and going to Europe and everything else, and all because he had some idiotic anger issues and tended to dare-devil it after the ninth or tenth beer.

Maybe some 17 year-old kid with issues similar to Butler’s will read this and think twice the next time he’s out with friends and starting to tromp on the gas.

William Deterle‘s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (’39) was one of my father’s favorite films. He took my mother to see it at a Norwalk revival house on their honeymoon. No one’s idea of a romantic gesture, and yet he may have been subliminally reaching out — he may been saying to my mother “will you be my Esmeralda?”

When I was 8 or 9 I would scare the neighborhood kids by pretending to be Charles Laughton‘s Quasimodo, contorting my face and squeezing a pillow under my T-shirt and running around with that lumbering sideways gait.

Dieterle and his dp, Joseph H. August, should have shot this one in color. If future technology allows someone to colorize this classic decently, as opposed to how these clips look, I would happily re-watch it this way.

Alfred Newman‘s score is masterful.

Wiki except: With a budget of $1.8 million, Hunchback was one of the most expensive movies ever made by the studio. It was shot at the RKO Encino Ranch, where a massive replica of medieval Paris and Notre Dame Cathedral was built — one of the largest and most extravagant sets ever constructed.

“The sets were constructed by Van Nest Polglase at the cost of $250,000 (about $4,974,622 in 2021 dollars), while Darrell Silvera worked as set decorator. Walter Plunkett oversaw the costume design.

“Filming was difficult for the cast and crew due to the hot temperatures, particularly for Laughton, who had to act with a lot of makeup.

“In her autobiography, O’Hara recalls one day arriving on the set and finding chimpanzees, baboons and gorillas. Dieterle wanted monks to be on the set but his assistant mistakenly thought he wanted monkeys because of his poor English and thick German accent.”

From Owen Gleiberman’s Variety riff on Daniel Craig’s dancing-around-Paris Belvedere spot: “If the new Belvedere Vodka commercial, starring Daniel Craig and directed by Taika Waititi, were a scene out of Craig’s latest film, it would be the best scene in the movie, or at least the one that everyone’s talking about. Then again, no one would mistake it for a movie scene.

“The commercial has a postmodern strike-a-pose viral aesthetic — it‘s two minutes of bliss frozen in time. As Craig saunters and dances through a swank hotel in Paris, it becomes the rare commercial in which a movie star isn’t being used to sell a product so much as he’s using the commercial to sell a shift in his own image.

“Yes, the extended spot is hawking vodka, and Craig probably got a paycheck that leaves most movie-star paychecks in the dust. Yet that’s all kind of beside the point. The commercial is Craig’s way of announcing who he is, or might be, now that he’s done with the role of James Bond.”

HE to Gleiberman: “Your Daniel Craig riff is very good. The ad is an inspired image makeover.

But it was a SERIOUS MISTAKE, I feel, for director Taika Waititi to send Craig into the interior of a glitzy-ass Kardashian Paris hotel. Because once inside that golden dungeon the endless organic glories and intrigues of Paris disappear. Because glitzy Kardashian hotels are the same boorishly vapid experience the world over…Paris, Milan, Moscow, NYC, Berlin, London, Seoul, Los Angeles, Dubai, Barcelona, Stockholm…exactly the same damn experience and atmosphere.

“And so the Belvedere ad fails in terms of spirit and imagination. And this failure, I regret to say, rubs off on Craig a little bit. It’s good but it could and should have been a lot better if it had been about silky Craig-as-Fat Boy Slim Chris Walken dancing and shuffling around several Paris nabes, it could have been ten or fifteen times better.”

From Mark Salisbury‘s “Burton on Burton“: “Warner Bros. management disliked the title Beetlejuice and wanted to call the film House Ghosts. As a joke, Burton suggested Scared Sheetless and was horrified when the studio actually considered using it.”

Just $1 million of Beetlejuice‘s $15 million budget was spent on visual effects, which included stop motion, replacement animation, prosthetic makeup, puppetry and blue screen. It was always Burton’s intention to make the style similar to the B-grade movies he grew up with. Burton: ‘I wanted to make them look cheap and purposely fake-looking.”

Wiki: “Test screenings geenrated positive responses, and prompted Burton to film an epilogue in which Beetlejuice angers a dead witch doctor.”

This morning Jordan Ruimy sent me a screen capture of a half-interesting movie idea [after the jump]. I’ve re-worded it and used a shot of Back to the Future‘s “Biff” for an illustration, to wit: “A late 1950s or early 1960s high-school bully (like Sam Rechner or Oakes Fegley in The Fabelmans) is somehow transported into a 2022 high school or college — an institution teeming with diversity, Tik-Tokers and trans kids.”

Okay, cool premise…then what? The idea is basically a spin on those Rip Van Hippie scripts that were making the rounds in the ’80s.

Read more

This is a very nickle-and-dime matter but…

In an 11.9 interview with N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, Steven Spielberg recalls his brief meeting with legendary director John Ford — an encounter depicted at the end of his latest film, the largely autobiographical The Fabelmans (Universal, 11.11).

“I was only about 16 when I met him,” Spielberg says, “and I didn’t know anything about his reputation, how surly and ornery he was and how he ate young studio executives for breakfast. That only came later when people began writing more about him. I felt I really escaped that office with my life.”

The slight problem is that Spielberg was born on 12.18.46 and therefore lived his sixteenth year of life between 12.18.62 and 12.18.63. Spielberg’s meeting with Ford, which happened at Radford Studios in Studio City, was arranged by a “second cousin” who was working on the then-upcoming Hogan’s Heroes, which began pre-production in ’64 before debuting on CBS in September ’65.

Let’s presume Spielberg met Ford sometime in the summer of ’64, while he was working as an unpaid assistant at Universal Studios’ editorial department. (He graduated from Saratoga High School in June 1965, at age 18.) He was therefore 17 and 1/2 when Ford instructed him about horizon lines — 17, not “about 16.” Just saying.

“Three Fabelmans Keepers,” posted on 11.9.22.

Read more

Closing remark: “It shouldn’t be this scary to talk about anything. It’s made my job incredibly difficult and to be honest with you, I’m getting sick of talking to a crowd like this. I love you to death and I thank you for your support, and I hope they don’t take anything away from me. Whoever ‘they’ are.”

Read more

…to host the 95th Oscar telecast, I mean? Did the producers even reach out in this regard? Maybe not, but Jimmy Kimmel is fine.

I’ll always associate Kimmel with what many of us feel was The Greatest Oscar Finale in Hollywood History — the ballot screw-up between Moonlight and La La land. I love watching the unedited footage of that snafu, and in my book Kimmel handled the chaos fairly well.

Is Kimmel’s brand of humor too woke? The right thinks so because he’s brutally lambasted Trump for so many years, but I’ve never felt that he was especially guilty on that score.

I also think the Oscar producers tapped Kimmel because they wanted to close the books on the Oscar slap. I also think they wanted to signal that the Oscars don’t necessarily have to be the Anglo Apology BIPOC awards.

Kimmel hosting again is a gesture that says to viewers “okay, we’re pulling back a bit…we’re reaching back to the vibe and attitudes of early ’17, or before the woke virus took over. Quality is quality and may the most gifted or politically popular contenders win, but we’re easing up on the white guilt or white apology factor.”

Read more