wired

That “vaguely bothersome echo” in Walter Salles’ beautifully rendered The Motorcycle Diaries — i.e., the dramatizing of young Che Guevara’s growing compassion for the downtrodden without dealing with the severe and murderous fruit of this compassion that manifested after Guevara came to power in Cuba with fellow revolutionary Fidel Castro — has struck an adverse chord with at least a couple of major-league critics. If other journos pick up on this (and I have no knowledge that this view is widely shared), Diaries, which has been the recipient of heartfelt praise since its debut at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, may encounter a critical backlash when it opens limited on 9.24. This may muddy the waters in terms of its ultimate reception (i.e., awards and whatnot), or what I’m hearing may just be an insignificant ripple.

Variety reporter Ben Fritz’s story about a deal between Howard Stern and Movielink, the internet video-on-demand outfit, to sell access to uncensored clips of nude or topless women visiting Stern’s radio show studio, is interesting enough. But the online version of this story has a more interesting headline: “Movieline, Stern offer uncut antics.” This will probably be fixed by the time you read this, but it gave me a bit of a start. Movieline publisher Anne Volokh pacting with Stern to show nudie footage? Especially with Movieline having long ago renamed itself Hollywood Life? Ahh, well…

Just for clarity’s sake, Alejandro Amenabar’s undeniably touching right-to-die drama with the Oscar-calibre Javier Bardem performance is called….wait a minute, I’m not sure. The Spanish title, Mar Adentro, translates as Out to Sea, but that wasn’t used because it had already been taken by a 1997 Jack Lemmon film. So New Line Cinema, the distributor, announced a new title: The Sea Within. Then they changed their minds (or were forced to reconsider) yet again, and now it’s called The Sea Inside. Which, of course, shoudn’t be confused with Lions Gate’s Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea, which will open on 11.24.04.

“I’m off to catch Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban one last time on the big screen before it dons its celluloid invisibility cape and disappears for good.” So declared the extremely bright, super-knowledgable L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas in last week’s issue. Whew….whatever. As intriguing as Alfonso Cuaron’s influences were upon Azkaban, it’s still a friggin’ Harry Potter film, and that means you’re in a kind of jail as you watch it. I felt hopeful when I saw it in Paris last June. I said to myself at one point, “This is is the best Potter ever, and so nicely composed…and best of all, it’ll be over in less than an hour.”

Good to hear that Alexander Payne’s Sideways, which my friends at Fox Searchlight have agreed to let me see early next week, is a winner, or is perhaps even, as David Poland declares, “the first true masterpiece of 2004.” At the very least I look forward to savoring the four main performances by Paul Giamatti, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh and Thomas Haden-Church. But the use of the word “masterpiece” scares me a bit. A wait-and-see attitude seems prudent.

The truth is that Wired is the new Word column, and I can already tell after writing it for a couple of days that I’m going to refresh it a lot more often, while I haven’t added a new item to the Word in a couple of weeks now. So the hell with it. Off with the Word ‘s head, I say…but what to put in its place?

An angry letter written two or three weeks ago by Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorcese to Sony vice-chairman Jeff Blake is apparently the main reason why a widescreen (2.35 to 1) DVD of Sydney Pollack’s Castle Keep is being issued so quickly on the heels of that condemned pan-and-scan version that came out 7.20. Apparently Blake passed along the Lucas-Spielberg-Scorsese letter (which “raised hell” about the Castle Keep DVD, according to an insider who read it) to Sony honcho Michael Lynton, who in turn conveyed his concerns about negative p.r. over this issue to CTHV chief Ben Feingold. The letter also complained about a pair of Three Stooges DVDs released last month that offered colorized versions of four Stooges shorts, along with black-and-white versions. No word on what response, if any, CTHV had on the Stooges.

There’s this item (which may or may not be accurate) that Tom Cruise may earn $100 million or more from a revenue-sharing deal in exchange for starring in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Why does this make me feel less interested in seeing the film, and maybe even a little turned off about it? Because the notion of that much money paid to an actor for his agreeing to run around and hyperventilate and dodge Martian death rays is grotesque. Why are you doing it, Tom? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?

I’ve kvetched about this before, but it can’t be repeated too often: when you see a film at your local theatre, you’re probably seeing an image that is 1/3 less bright that what the filmmakers have intended. SMTP projection standards call for 12 “foot lamberts” (i.e., units for measuring light) to be used in showing films. But a post-production expert tells me that a friend with one of the big chains (okay, AMC) has confided that the projector lamps in all of their theatres are adjusted to project only 8 foot lamberts. The reason is that it purportedly saves money, since projection lamps are thought to last longer when they’re not giving off as much light. This is said to be untrue, as Roger Ebert has allegedly pointed out in a column. (I haven’t found the link.) It’s an industry myth….but try telling the AMC guys that.

A thought passed along by Variety film critic Robert Koehler, quoting Paris cinephile/critic/programmer Nicole Brenez:”The more important a film is, the less it is seen.” Mull that one over…

Fox Searchlight’s Napoleon Dynamite, a low-budgeter aimed at 25-and-unders, was facing a bit of a touch-and-go situation at first, but it caught on and may actually hit the $40 million mark before running out of steam. Sundance know-it-alls were predicting marginal business last January, and it clearly hadn’t enchanted the over-40s I spoke to back then…but kids made it into a quasi-phenomenon. Things weren’t looking all that fantastic at first for Open Water either (not conventionally scary enough, not enough twists, etc.), but now it’s a safe bet to top $30 million. The prime goal for distributor Lions Gate was to hit at least $18 million (what with prints and ads); now they’re looking at something like $15 mil over and above.

A recent watching of the DVD of George Lucas’s THX 1138, out 9.14 following a limited theatrical break on Friday, came as a bit of a surprise. For decades I’ve been calling this Lucas’s finest film as well as an indication of an intriguing path he might have followed if he hadn’t hit it big with Star Wars, and it still is that, I suppose. But it no longer cuts through. Where it once seemed darkly prophetic or at least stylistically striking, THX 1138 now seems a touch passe. Hard to say why this story about a spiritually sedated, shaved-head functionary (Robert Duvall) slowly coming to rebel against a white-on-white techno-oppressive society of the future now exudes a been-there, done-that odor…but that’s how it plays. It was all I could do to watch it to the end.