What’s so wonderful about My Damn Channel? It’s okay, it’s fine…but I’m not getting the accelerated pulse-rate thing. This background piece by Time‘s Rebecca Winters Keegan doesn’t quite explain the mystique of it either.

According to Blowup costar Ronan O’Casey, who explained the full, partially-unfilmed plot of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s 1996 classic to Roger Ebert seven years ago, the inattention paid to the murder plot — on Antonioni’s part as well as that of David Hemming‘s photographer character — was a kind of accident. Antonioni was forced to go all mysterious and inconclusive, he says, because producer Carlo Ponti shut the film down before all the scenes were shot.

Ronan O’Casey’s only Blowup closeup

“The intended story was as follows: the young lover, armed with a pistol, was to precede Vanessa [Redgrave] and me to Maryon Park in London, conceal himself in the bushes and await our arrival,” O’Casey explains. “I pick up Vanessa in a nice new dark green Jaguar and we drive through London — giving Antonioni a chance to film that swinging, trendy, sixties city of the Beatles, Mary Quant, the Rolling Stones, and Carnaby Street. We stop and I buy Vanessa a man’s watch, which she wears throughout the rest of the film.
“We then saunter into the park, stopping now and then to kiss (lucky me). In the center of the park, Vanessa gives me a passionate embrace and prolonged kiss, and glances at the spot where her new lover is hiding. He shoots me (unlucky me), and the two leave the park intending to drive away. Their plans goes awry when he notices Hemmings with his camera and fears that Hemmings has photos of her. As it turns out, he has.

“None of this was ever shot. There were other scenes, such as those between Sarah Miles and Jeremy Glover [i.e, Vanessa’s character’s boyfriend who was also the trigger man in Maryon Park] that also went unrealized. Some of the scenes that were shot pertaining to the murder plot ended up in the film, but are completely puzzling to the audience. For example, in the film there is a scene with Vanessa and Hemmings at a cafe.” Wrong! The scene hes’ describing is between Hemmings and his bearded book editor.] A young man approaches, notices that she is with Hemmings, and runs away. That’s Glover. This makes for an odd, mysterious moment because the audience is completely ignorant of his identity.”
Ponti did Antonioni a favor, of course. If the all of this murder-plot, watch-buying stuff had been filmed and integrated into the film, Blowup would have been a much lesser work. That moment when Glover approaches the cafe and then walks away is perfect — absolutely perfect.

Three days ago L.A. Times guy Geoff Boucher wrote about getting sucker-punched by some tattooed, shaved-head, cutoff-wearing hormone monster in San Diego’s Gaslamp district during Comic-Con, and getting knocked to the ground and going home the next day with staples in his head.

And then yesterday Transformers and Shoot ‘Em Up producer Don Murphy posted a comment on Anne Thompson‘s blog saying that he and his wife “suffered a similar attack [last] Thursday night/Friday morning that left us in the emergency room for hours….we were with a group of twelve, six people attacked, two arrested.”
Boucher writes that “the cops at the scene said this sort of incident isn’t that rare” — i.e., is somewhat common — and commenters on the Boucher essay page, some of them San Diego residents, haven’t strenuously disagreed with a with a commenter named “Rob D” calling the Gaslamp district “a magnet for stupidity…on any given night during the summer you’ll see people stumbling into the street, hanging on street lights and yelling incoherent drunken shit..[the area is] literally a haven for the retarded.”
This is an issue that Comic-Con and the city of San Diego need to address. The remedy, obviously, is hiring extra security to patrol the Gaslamp streets, and to keep a particular eye on beefy 20-something apes with shaved heads and tattoos and other sartorial indications of rage and alienation. This is not an issue for geeks — the Comic-Con faithful are generally cool, cerebral, spiritually impassioned types who would never pop anyone — but the simian under-class types that hang out in the neighborhod adjacent to the San Diego Convention Center.
It’s not unheard of for lower-class brutes of any municipality to express loathing for the connected cell-phone class that visits for a film festival or whatever.
Six or seven years ago I was talking to someone on my Motorola while standing on Park City’s Main Street during the Sundance Film Festival, and some townie drove by in a Chevy Silverado and yelled out, “Look — another asshole with a cellphone!” I yelled back, “Look — another asshole in a pickup truck!” The truck immediately pulled over and two guys got out and charged over, obviously looking to get down, but I went into my Matrix Reloaded mode and in less than ten seconds they were both moaning on the pavement, in the fetal position and begging for mercy. I wailed on them again for good measure, and they cried and whimpered like the pathetic bitches they were and always will be.
Okay, everything after the word “truck” is made up. As if I needed to say that.

On one hand, the somewhat-New-Line-partial David Poland has called Michael Davis‘s Shoot ‘Em Up “grindhouse dim sum…unbelievably tasty and surprising and engaging stuff…a joyous plate of entertainment…a watchable enjoyable experience…good junk!” On the other, Variety‘s Peter Debruge is calling it “violent and vile in equal measure” as well as “shamelessly sordid” and “gonzo” in the vein of Running Scared, The Boondock Saints, Domino and Smokin’ Aces, and yet — important passage, this — “too stylistically audacious to dismiss outright.” I’d love to get into this myself, but the defining terms have obviously already been drawn. You either have a taste for low-brow vitality, or you don’t.

Fox Searchlight and Landmark Cinemas hosted an industry/journo shindig (screening, party, performance) last night for Once, which is right now receiving a fresh TV-ad push and personal-appearance promotion by costars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. Here’s a slow-loading but better quality wav file of their performance of “Falling Slowly”, and here’s an mp3 file of “When Your Mind’s Made Up”.

Once costars Marketa Irglova, Glen Hansard performing in the lounge/bar within West L.A.’s Landmark plex — Tuesday, 7.31.07, 9:25 pm

Fox Searchlight marketing president Nancy Utley, Marketa Irglova, Glen Hansard, Fox Searchlight prez Peter Rice at last night’s soiree.

Glen and Marketa are playing this evening at a sold-out show at the El Rey on Wilshire. They visited Jay Leno on Monday night; a visit with Carson Daly airs on Friday, 8.3. Hansard and The Frames are going to be touring with Bob Dylan in New Zealand and Australia throughout most of August. All that’s left to happen now is for the film to show up in more theatres so the live-wires who are still saying “Never heard of it!” will perhaps give this perfect little film a looksee.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil wrote earlier today to ask for a quote about the Best Animated Feature race as it looks now. His piece just went up, but here’s my summation in my own words: Ratatouille is the front-runner but the matter of Beowulf‘s classification is far more interesting.

I’ve seen most of the 3D Beowulf product reel that played at Comic-Con, and the digital work has convinced me that it’s the most out-there and avant-garde-ish animated stuff I’ve seen in ages — far more so than Richard Linklater‘s Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly, and way in front of Robert Zemeckis‘s Polar Express.
Here’s how I wrote it…
“By far the best animated film of the year so far is Ratatouille — forget the Simpsons, forget Shrek the Third, and, given the indications so far, it’s hard to think of Jerry Seinfeld‘s Bee Movie as any kind of serious Ratatouille competitor. Look at the new one-sheet, listen to Seinfeld discussing it in Cannes….draw your own conclusions.
“Ratatouille rules because it says something that is true and generous that everyone recognizes as true (or wishes were true), which is that not anyone can be an artist but that art can come from anywhere. To an Academy person, this could be taken to mean that an electrician or a makeup artist or a bit player can write a screenplay or direct a film that everyone will love or which might even win awards. That is music to the Academy’s Unwashed Masses, and this is why Ratatouille has, at this stage, the clear lead. Apart from the fact that it’s one of the best and brightest animated films ever.

“But the most interesting animated film so far is Beowulf, which I saw a reel of footage from yesterday. Projected in 3D, it looked to me like the trippiest and most absorbing animated footage I’ve seen in ages, although it may not, according to the Academy’s “Rule Seven,” be an animated film. ‘May’, I say.
“Beowulf is a real eye-popper and clearly something other than the realm of animation. Each and every frame is ‘animated’ by any standard of digital recomposition, and yet the Academy seems to be saying that any film that begins with live-action performance and then uses digital animation to enhance or augment that performance (like, say, Linklater’s two above-named films) is not eligible. Again — this is not the final word.
“The animation in Beowulf, which isn’t “animation” at all, is definitely painterly, and at the same time it’s obviously not unvarnished reality. And yet it began at the core as live-action footage of the actors (Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Angelia Jolie, etc.) shot in a room full of sensors that captures their performance in a bare-bones, Samuel Beckett style at Culver Studios in early ’06.
“Rule Seven of the Academy rules regarding Best Animated Feature film say that a contender has to be “a motion picture of at least 70 minutes in running time, in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique. In addition, a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the pictures running time.”

Beowulf screenwriter Roger Avary is calling the 3-D Beowulf “digitally-enhanced live action”. It’s also, in my view and without question, animation. It’s also mind-blowing. I loved it. I can’t wait to see the whole feature.
Beowulf, says Avary, is “enhanced live action” and as such is “closer to Ralph Bakshi‘s painting over cells, the rotoscoping of 2-D imagery, even though Beowulf is about the rotoscoping of 3-D imagery. The 3-D version will be the largest 3-D release of all time. It will be released also in Real-D, a new 3D process, and IMAX 3-D.
“More and more, the differences between animated and real-life action is starting to blur. The form is changing, and rather than limit actors with this technology, Zemeckis is actually trying to figure out a way that can broaden what an actor can do.. He want to make sure it’s about performance…this is the first time that the technology doesn’t get in the way…it’s technology allowing you to fall deeper in the performance.”

Sixteen minutes of Samuel L. Jackson talking about a few things — his role as “Champ,” a charismatic, grimy-ass derelict revealed to be a former champion boxer in Resurrecting The Champ and the real-life story behind it, the intriguing success of 1408 (in which he played a relatively small role), the respective failures of Black Snake Moan and Snakes on a Plane, and his refusal to name a favorite among the Presidential candidates because nobody’s saying anything,” or words to that effect. (Recorded at yesterday’s Resurrecting the Champ junket at the Four Seasons hotel.)

Three factual statements: (a) Hilary Clinton has more black supporters than Barack Obama, (b) the archetypal Barack Obama voter “is a 28 year-old white woman with a Masters degree,” as Tucker Carlson said on MSNBC a few minutes ago and (c) there’s a certain portion of the electorate who will never vote for Obama because he’s black. The last statement especially. We all know this deep down, and that the no-way-in-hell voters are not just old-school Jim Crow types with shotguns racks in their pickup trucks. But no one will ever address it, least of all the Obama campaign.

Ingmar Bergman “stopped making motion pictures in 1982, though he wrote and directed several small films for television,” writes N.Y. Post columnist John Podorhetz. “And the truth is, he quit just in time. His day had passed. After decades of declaring modern life worthless and offering only suicide as a way out of the nightmarish tangle of human existence, Bergman had nothing more to say.”

Podhoretz also says that “the critics who described Bergman as the greatest of film artists were people embarrassed by the movies. They didn’t admire the medium. They were offended by its unseriousness, by its capacity to entertain without offering anything elevating at the same time. They believed the movies were a low and disreputable art form and that its only salvation lay in offering moral and aesthetic instruction to its audiences about the worthlessness of existence.”
In other words the people who understand the true soul and purpose of movies (i.e., guys like Podhoretz) know that movies are best at offering light-hearted foolery and unserious entertaining that don’t get too mucky-mucky about reflecting “real life.”
Do I have to point out that this is what the ill-informed always say about movies and particularly about audience-friendly popcorn movies — comedies, thrillers, adventures, westerns, etc.? They don’t understand that the very best motion picture entertainments are always written with and informed by the same structural discipline and seriousness that go into the best heavy-duty dramas. Ask any comedy writer and they’ll tell you all good comedies are written with the same regard for real-life undercurrents as anything written by Eugene O’Neil or directed by Ingmar Bergman.
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We all know the line between tragedy and comedy is wafer thin. We now also know that guys like Podhoretz don’t know very much about movies. You can’t be a truly devoted movie hound and be an admonisher of the cloistered liberal culture that tends to produce (and always rushes to the defense of) liberal-minded film directors, which are pretty much the only kind that exist with th exception of guys like David Lynch.
Quick — name me a conservative, three-piece-suit-wearing critic who has truly interesting things to say about movies and/or knows what he or she is talking about (except for Michael Medved). By this I mean a critic who really gets what’s going on with this or that new or classic film, and isn’t using film criticism as a podium by which to push some right-wing, family-values, Jesus-loves-you agenda.

“Ingmar Bergman had an audience of one aside from himself. The one he always sang about was you. His was one symphony with slight variations — from childhood to old age. (My favorite is obviously Wild Strawberries, aging, I hope with some slight honor). The two warriors have always been life and death, who had deep respect for one another. There is no death unless there is no throbbing life; otherwise you never die because you have never lived.” — Studs Terkel as quoted on Roger Ebert‘s tribute page to Bergman.

The closest contact I ever had with Ingmar Bergman, so to speak, was a night in 1981 or ’82 when I talked for a long while with Harriet Andersson, who had a relationship with Bergman in the ’50s and starred in various Bergman films of that general period (including Summer With Monika, Sawdust and Tinsel, Through a Glass Darkly) and later costarred in Fanny and Alexander.

There was actually a little more than talking going on. There was enough of an attraction that after 90 minutes or so Andersson suggested that we could perhaps leave the party (some invitational soiree on behalf of Swedish filmmakers that was happening in some cavernous space in Soho or Tribeca) and head uptown and…who knew?

I knew one thing: an attractive middle-aged woman (she was nudging 50 but looked a good ten or twelve years younger) who had once been entwined with the great Ingmar Bergman was now somewhat interested in me. I was certainly flattered. If you believe that lovers pass along certain particles and auras to each other and that these are somehow absorbed and become part of who and what they are for the rest of their lives, I was thinking that on some ethereal level I might absorb a little residual Ingmar.

But instead of grabbing a cab, Andersson arranged for us to ride uptown in a limo with a group of her Swedish film industry friends, including actor Erland Josephson, who had starred in several Bergman films himself including Hour of the Wolf, The Touch, Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage.

There were five or six of us crammed into the back seat, and it was only a matter of ten or twelve seconds before they all realized what was going on and starting making joke after joke. In Swedish, of course, but translations were unnecessary.

The mockery and the giggling and the howling went for two or three minutes, but it felt like a non-stop barrage to me. I tried to smile and be a good sport at first, but after a minute or so my eyes froze over. I distinctly remember Josephson being the worst of them. He was slightly in his cups and looking at me with a certain fiendish glee as he let go with one derisive snort after another. The import, more or less, was “Hah!…you worthless nobody!…you think you are good enough to lie down with Harriet?…think again!”

By the time we were let off at Andersson’s hotel at 59th Street and 7th Avenue, I was on the verge of vomiting. It was all I could do to say “very nice meeting you” to Andersson before turning and walking off. She’d been howling along with the rest of them, after all. Nice.

I’ve been told that a $70 million-plus haul for The Bourne Ultimatum this weekend is out of the question. I’ve been thinking that it might just happen because the word is out that it’s the best action film in many a moon — an instant genre classic — and that it’s not particularly sadistic or even brutal, and that these elements may result in heavier-than- normal patronage from teens, women and family auds. The counter-argument is that Casino Royale opened to $40.8 million and The Bourne Supremacy did $52.5 million “so there’s very little family/four-quadrant element to this, so it virtually can’t jump to those upper numbers,” as one guy put it.