As a Cannon publicity staffer and press-kit writer, I visited the Culver City set of Masters of the Universe sometime around…oh, probably the late fall of ’86. I seem to recall interviewing director Gary Goddard and screenwriter David Odell, although I may not have. I don’t recall speaking with Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella, Courteney Cox and other cast members, although I may have.
It was a difficult write as I was totally disheartened and certainly not into the Mattel sword and sorcery-themed franchise. The general presumption during filming was that Cannon had bitten off more than it could chew, and that the $22 million budget was probably insufficient. Masters opened on 8.7.87, was creamed by critics and wound up making $17.3 million.
And yet, very curiously, it has a modest cult following today.
With one fell swoop, Disney and Peter Jackson have all but destroyed serious Beatle fan interest in Peter Jackson‘s endlessly delayed The Beatles: Get Back doc…they’ve blown the allure to smithereens by expanding it (i.e., watering it down) into a six-hour thing on Disney +.
The obvious strategy should have been to release the originally planned two-hour feature version in theatres — people would’ve loved to see this communally with popcorn! En masse! — and then follow this up a month or two later with a three-part, six-hour version (three docs lasting two hours each) on Disney +. But nooooo…
The Beatles: Get Back was originally slated to open theatrically on 9.4.20 in the U.S. and Canada, with overseas territories to follow. On 6.12.20 it was pushed back to 8.27.21…they should’ve stuck to that!
It was announced today (6.17.21) that The Beatles: Get Back “will be released as a three-part documentary series on Disney+ on 11.25, 11.26 and 11.27, with each episode being about two hours in length.”
Lebowitz: “[Marty] said to me numerous times: ‘You know what ruins Taxi Driver? The color red. The studio wouldn’t give me enough money to correct the color red, and that’s why it’s horrible.’ To which I say, ‘You know what’s wrong with Taxi Driver, Marty? Nothing.’”
HE to Scorsese, Leibowitz: Wrong — the brownish sepia tint during Taxi Driver‘s East Village shoot-out sequence is fucking terrible. It’s always been terrible, and it always will be terrible. And now, after 46 years of saying the sepia brown color is fine and this is how the film was released and so on, Scorsese is suddenly admitting that it looks awful. Which of course is an accurate statement.
On 3.11.11 I ran a piece called “Taxi Driver‘s Brown Blood“. It was about (a) Grover Crisp and Martin Scorsese‘s Bluray restoration of Taxi Driver (it popped on 4.5.11). and more particularly (b) a technical question asked of Crisp by The Digital Bits‘ Bill Hunt.
Hunt asked about the brownish, sepia-tone tinting of the climactic shoot-out scene, which had been imposed upon Scorsese by the MPAA ratings board. Scorsese had naturally always intended this scene to be presented with a more-or-less natural color scheme, in harmony with the rest of the film.
Hunt to Crisp: “Why didn’t you and Scorsese restore the originally shot, more colorful shoot-out scene?”
“There are a couple of answers to this,” Crisp replied. “One, which we discussed, was the goal of presenting the film as it was released, which is the version everyone basically knows. This comes up every now and then, but the director feels it best to leave the film as it is. That decision is fine with me.”
HE response: “There can be no legitimate claim of Taxi Driver having been restored without the original natural color (or at least a simulation of same) put back in. The film was shot with more or less natural colors, was intended to be shown this way, and — with the exception of the shoot-out scene — has been shown this way since it first opened in ’75.
…and the legacy of a great classic was soiled by the disreputable hand of producer, director, screenwriter and cinematographer Peter Hyams. 2010: The Year We Make Contact (’84) is arguably three things — the worst space-travel film ever made, the worst big-time sequel ever made, and one of the worst films ever made. No, it wasn’t former MGM honcho Jim Aubrey who pushed it through (he resigned from MGM in ’73) but David Begelman. The stink of Aubrey-ism nonetheless prevailed.
…in which a small, scrappy, boozy John Cassevetes midlife crisis film (16 weeks in limited release) briefly out-earns the long-running LoveStory and LittleBigMan (popular films had “legs” then), not to mention the monumentally masterful Tora Tora Tora. Meanwhile, amid the bottom third of the list, are The Conformist, FiveEasyPieces (28th week!), BedandBoard and Get Carter. Altogether a tasty smorgasbord for the avid film buff.
Last night I paid my respects to the late Ned Beatty by watching Friendly Fire, a 1979 TV docudrama about the increasing revulsion shared by the real-life Peg and Gene Mullen (Carol Burnett, Beatty) after the mystifying death of their son Michael (Dennis Erdman) while serving in Vietnam.
Army reps tell the Mullens that Michael’s death was a “friendly fire” accident, but they’re stingy with facts. This fudging of specifics annoys, irritates and then enrages the Mullens. Traditional patriotic Iowans at the start, they gradually evolve into antiwar activists.
There’s no big shocking twist at the end — we simply discover that Michael died from “friendly” shrapnel that exploded near his foxhole due to a miscalculation. So Friendly Fire is not Costa Gavras‘s Missing (’82) — there’s no satisfying “gotcha” moment in which the military “bad guys” are revealed as guilty super-shits, and are then punished or shamed. None of that happens.
The movie isn’t brilliant — it’s lean and direct but it lacks a certain elegance. It feels like a rough cut, or a second cut — certainly not like a polished final cut. But it’s a reasonably good film.
Burnett and Beatty are brilliant in every scene — Burnett in particular.
Friendly Fire wound up winning four Emmy awards. Fay Kanin‘s screenplay was adapted from C. D. B. Bryan‘s 1976 book of the same name, which began as a series of New Yorker magazine articles Bryan had written about the Mullens.
I really hated Erdman’s dialogue as well as his performance. We get to know him a bit during the first 15 minutes or so, and he’s presented as way too modest and dutiful…almost angelic. The movie is telling us that Michael was anall–but–perfectfellow — smart, reasonable, soft-spoken, inspired, modest. He feels like a cypher, and I was saying to myself early on that I was glad he’d be dead soon because I can’t stand characters who are this pure of heart, this pure-as-the-driven-snow.
Less than a month hence Oliver Stone’s JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, an in-depth documentary, will be screened and reviewed in Cannes, and we’ll all be obediently diving back into that Dealey Plaza sinkhole once again, for the umpteenth time.
The basic Stone view is that the JFK kill shot came from the grassy knoll, and that the back of his head was blown out with brain matter spilling onto a Parkland Hospital stretcher 10 or 15 minutes later. I’m not doubting what this or that Parkland doctor claimed he saw in emergency room #1, but Hollywood Elsewhere has never seen one glimmer of visual evidence to suggest that the back of JFK’s head was destroyed…nothing whatsoever.
In the Zapruder film it’s JFK’s right temple that explodes, not the rear of his head, plus a split second after the fatal shot Jackie Kennedy‘s white-gloved hand touches the back of his head — how come that glove wasn’t soaked with blood and brain matter?
Oliver Stone to Bloomberg News, 11.15.13 / 2:48: “The evidence in the case…you have to look at the evidence and apply common sense….in my mind the nub of JFK (’91) is that Kennedy was shot from two sides…he was shot from the back and he was shot from the front. And no matter how you fancy up the evidence and talk about gravitational physics and neuro effects and jet effects, it’s all blah-blah-blah.
“The man you see in the Zapruder film and [what] the autopsy revealed [along with] people who saw him right at that moment, right after the death…they all talk about the big shot, the kill shot was from the front. Shot in the front [actually the right temple] of his head, and it blew out the back of his head. It’s what people kept seeing, and they still see it to this day.
“People who were at the autopsy revealed to the assassination records review board that the autopsy photos that are now in the national archives have no resemblance to the head wound that they saw in Bethesda.”
More and more frank depictions of sex and violence began to manifest in the mid ’60s, but relatively few actors have delivered what I regard as serious authenticity when it came to portraying gangsters, hitmen, ruffians, sociopaths, etc.
Any two-bit actor can wear a hollow, ice-cold expression or radiate animal hostility; the trick is to suggest serious malevolence with as little effort as possible, and particularly with your eyes and manner and body language. Bottom line: If you’re a serious monster, the camera can spot it right away.
In my mind one of the most believable bad guys ever was Michael Caine‘s Jack Carter in Mike Hodge‘s Get Carter (’71).
Please name other movie characters who radiated evil and malevolence without any showy gestures or demonstrations. Like Michael Madsen‘s Reservoir Dogs psycho, for example. Heath Ledger‘s Joker doesn’t count (way too showy); ditto Richard Widmark‘s giggly nutcase in Kiss of Death (too spazzy and cackly).
I’m talking about bad guys who simply are that rancid thing. You look at them, sense their vibe and you know they’re the Real McCoy.
There’s nonetheless a weird obsession that pokes through in two reviews of the film — Eric Kohn’s in Indiewire, Matt Goldberg’s in Collider. Both claim there’s something unseemly about the movie trying to “solve” the mystery of Bourdain’s suicide.
Why is it wrong for Roadrunner to examine Bourdain’s suicide and try to figure what happened? Are we not allowed to ask those questions? Or think about them? Are we invading the ghost of Anthony Bourdain‘s safe space? What the hell else is a documentary supposed to do but ask questions and, if possible or reasonable, look deeper?
You really never know where the next stupid woke umbrage is going to come from. The sensitives and their arbitrary dumbshit “moral” rules. This fucking generation of woke idiots is going to kill us.
Collider‘s Matt Goldberg: “A suicide is not a crime to be solved. It’s a tragic circumstance going to the depths of another person’s psyche. You can’t reason it out because no reason will be satisfying. There’s no conclusion where you will get an audience to think, ‘Oh, well I guess suicide made sense in this regard.’ It cannot comfort, and it cannot illuminate. And yet Neville attempts to reason out why Bourdain would take his own life as if that’s a question that needed to be answered beyond anyone’s morbid curiosity.
“This leads Roadrunner down a deeply dark road where the film basically insinuates that Bourdain’s romance with actor and filmmaker Asia Argento was personally destructive to his well-being. If this is a film about Bourdain and his legacy, then why do we need scenes showing footage of an episode directed by Argento that Bourdain’s coworkers felt were not up to the standards they had set? Why do we need talking heads alluding to tabloids that say Argento was cheating on Bourdain and that drove him to despair and ultimately suicide because his personality operated at extremes?
“Even if you have one talking head say, ‘I don’t want to pin a man’s suicide on the woman in his life,’ the fact that Roadrunner is even broaching that as a possibility is deeply gross and incredibly irresponsible.”
Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn: “Roadrunner enters dicey territory during its final act, as it delves into Bourdain’s relationship with actress Asia Argento, who’s absent from the movie as a participant but appears in ample documentary footage.
“By all indications, Argento brought Bourdain to a new plane of happiness in his final months, when he hired her to direct an episode in Hong Kong shortly before his death. It also gave him a renewed sense of purpose as he became a public voice in the #MeToo scandal with Argento’s revelations about being raped by Harvey Weinstein.
“Roadrunner, however, bursts the sunny image of Bourdain’s new partner with claims from his former collaborators that he cut them off in the midst of the relationship; then the movie goes one step further by hinting at the idea that his suicide was an erratic act of revenge as the romance went south. Despite one subject who makes it clear Argento isn’t truly to blame — Tony killed himself, after all — it’s still a queasy passage that comes dangerously close to exploiting the scenario with a murky explanation assembled from secondhand accounts.”
I may have been overly harsh yesterday in my dismissal of the 40-year-old Clash of the Titans. I’m walking it back a bit because the Harry Hamlin vs. Medusa sequence is half-tolerable. There’s no believing it, of course, but it’s spooky all the same. Otherwise the entire film is a tedious, old-hat, stop-motion joke.
