It’s been 39 years since I first saw Brian DePalma‘s Scarface, and two fresh observations have suddenly hit me. Okay, one and a half.
The first concerns the “South Beach motel drug deal gone bad” scene — pure pornoviolence with a yellow chain saw. Tony Montana (Al Pacino) and Angel (Pepe Serna) have been overpowered by Hector (Al Israel), a Columbian cocaine dealer, and two cohorts, and told “give us your buy money or else.”
With Angel handcuffed to a shower-curtain rod, Hector saws Angel’s left arm off. Tony has been watching the carnage at gunpoint, two or three feet away.
But with Angel’s arm gone, he’s no longer constrained by the curtain rod, and has almost certainly collapsed into the bathtub. And yet Hector says to Tony, “Now the leg, eh?” How was that supposed to work exactly? Angel — bleeding profusely, in shock, probably close to death — is no longer hanging or standing but writhing in the tub, and probably howling for dear life. It makes no logistical sense.
The second observation is that after the shooting starts, Tony runs downs the staircase and drills the wounded Hector in the forehead. A natural revenge thing, but with dozens of horrified eyewitnesses looking on, Tony was being reckless. Are you telling me the cops didn’t get an excellent description of Tony from these onlookers? Not to mention the model and approximate year of the getaway car?
I’ll accept that no one happened to have a camera with them (even with Miami’s South Beach region having become a major tourist mecca), but if I were Montana I would have grabbed the yejo and escaped by the motel’s rear entrance and dealt with Hector later on. Way too many witnesses.
Six or seven years ago I began to assemble a list of the greatest lead performances in feature films, and Monica Vitti in L’Avventura was one of them, you bet.
The names that that came to mind off the top of my head were James Gandolfini in TheSopranos, Geza Rohrig in Son of Saul, Marlon Brando in OnTheWaterfront and The Godfather, Amy Schumer in Trainwreck (I’m dead serious), George Clooney in Michael Clayton, Gary Cooper in High Noon, George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose, Lee Marvin in Point Blank, Alan Ladd in Shane, Brad Pitt in Moneyball, Marilyn Monroe in Some like It Hot, Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast and Betrayal, Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings, Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton, Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Capote and, last but not least, Vitti in…aww, hell, her entire Michelangelo Antonioni travelogue.
After 90 years and 2 months on the planet earth, Vitti has left for realms beyond. I’m very sorry but then again she really livedalife, particularly during her ultimate star-power and mesmerizing collaboration years with the great Antonioni — a five-year exploration comprised of L’Avventura (’60), La Notte (’61), L’Eclisse (62) and Red Desert (’64).
Were it not for this five-year chapter, we wouldn’t this day be praising Vitti to the heavens. She “lives” today because of Antonioni, and a significant reason for his own exalted early-to-mid-’60s rep is due to — owned by — Vitti’s allure.
In her Antonioni films Vitti always seemed to be thinking “is this all there is?” Or “my God, there’s so little nutrition…I’m sinking into quicksand, withering away…so little in the way or sparkle and joy…nearly every waking minute I’m consumed by the glammy blues.”
Yes, she laughed and loved in L’Ecclisse, but only briefly and anxiously and in a sense ironically. The African tribal dance sequence was the exception — a spoof, of course, but lively and sexy.
Born in 1931, Vitti was 28 or 29 at the beginning of her Antonioni period and 33 when their collaboration ended — no spring chicken even at the start.
From Adam Bernstein’s Washington Post obit: “Her willowy physique, huskyvoice, full lips and mane of sun–kissedblondhair gave her a raw sensual appeal. But Antonioni cast her against type in a cycle of acclaimed films about emotional detachment and spiritual barrenness. He made her the personification of glamorousmalaise.”
Take L’Avventura, for one example. It’s about wealthy Italians wandering about in a state of gloomy drifting, anxious and vaguely bothered and frowning a good deal of the time.
The movie is about the absence of whole-hearted feeling, and it never diverts from this. If there’s a moment in which Vitti conveys even a hint of serenity in her intimate scenes with Gabriele Ferzetti, it barely registers. I don’t remember a single shot in which Ferzetti smiles with even a hint of contentment.
From “Red Desert Return“: “I saw Red Desert for the first time in 2015. I know the Antonioni milieu, of course, and had read a good deal about it over the years, so I was hardly surprised to discover that it has almost no plot. It has a basic situation, and Antonioni is wonderfully at peace with the idea of just settling into that without regard to story.
“And for that it seemed at least ten times more engrossing than 80% or 90% of conventional narrative films I see these days, and 87 times better than the majority of bullshit superhero films.
“Vitti plays a twitchy and obviously unstable wife and mother who’s been nudged into a kind of madness by the industrial toxicity around her, and Richard Harris is an even-mannered German businessman visiting smelly, stinky Ravenna. The film is about industrial sprawl and poisoned landscapes and a lot of standing around and Vitti’s neurotic gibberish and a certain caught-in-the-mud mood that holds you like a drug, specifically like good opium.
“Each and every shot in Red Desert (the dp is Carlo di Palma, whom Vitti later fell in love with) is quietly breathtaking. It’s one of the most immaculate and mesmerizing ugly-beautiful films I’ve ever seen. The fog, the toxins, the afflictions, the compositions.”
Houston, we have a problem with Criterion’s new Citizen Kane package, which includes a 4K UHD version as well as an alternate Bluray version.
The problem is not with the 4K disc, which reportedly looks quite fine and delightful. The problem is with the Bluray version, which looks fine until the 30-minute mark, at which point the image turns all gray and milky with the black levels and sharpness totally out the window.
This bizarre Criterion screw-up was first reported two or three days ago by DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze. Tooze’s screen captures were pointed out this morning by HE friendo Mark Smith. The problem was subsequently confirmed an hour or two later by a totally trusted technical authority on Bluray and 4K discs.
So this is real — not a rumor. Criterion has totally dropped the pitcher of milk and now it’s all over the floor. The 4K is cool, as noted, but the Bluray is a cock-up of epic proportions — perhaps the worst in Criterion’s history. And so Criterion will have to recall the package and fix the problem and send the corrected version out sometime in December or whenever.
Okay, I’m being presumptuous. It’s theoretically possible that Criterion might not recall the Kane package. They might just say to their customers “you guys don’t really care about the Bluray disc…right? This package is all about the lustrous 4K version so let’s just push the Bluray problem aside and forget about it. You don’t care, we don’t care…right? We fuck up every now and then and you’ve been cool with that. The DePalma thing…remember that one? You let us slide on those ridiculous teal-tinted Blurays of Midnight Cowboy and Bull Durham and Teorema. So why not just turn the other cheek on this thing as well?”
Tooze: “The 1080p looks quite strong, superior to Warner’s 2011 Blu-ray in varying degrees, often darker, showing more grain and richer contrast layering. It’s a dual-layered rendering with a max’ed out bitrate with nothing else sharing that first Blu-ray disc.
“Until we get almost exactly 30 minutes into the film — just prior to the scene in Bernstein’s office (with the contentious visibility of the rain on the windows) — [when] the Criterion Bluray alters and shows a very softer, paler, contrast [and] the brightness is diminished.
“I don’t have any explanation for this [grayish milky transition] on the Bluray…[but it is certainly] different from the first 1/2 hour of the film.”
The problem is made obvious in many of Tooze’s screen captures — here’s a sampling provided by Smith:
Sean Penn's Flag Day (UA Releasing, 8.13) has opened in Cannes to pretty good reviews. These Cote d'Azur tributes led me to a realization that the 40th anniversary of Taps, in which Penn gave his first significant (if supporting) performance, isn't far off. And so...
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In basic plot-strategy terms, Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up (’66) kicks off in a London public park (Maryon Park in Charlton) when a youngish fashion photographer (David Hemmings) happens to take several snaps of an amorous May-December couple (Vanessa Redgrave, Ronan O’Casey).
As he develops the photos in his dark room later that day he realizes that the images show a murder in progress — one of the blow-ups reveals an assassin holding a pistol, and another a fuzzy image of the dead O’Casey lying on the grass.
Blow-Up isn’t a thriller, of course — it’s a meditation about reality vs. perception vs. artistic fancy as well as a brilliant capturing of 1966 avant-garde London, so the focus is about much more than just the ins and outs of a murder. But Hemmings encountering Redgrave-O’Casey is the inciting incident, and I’ve always adored the first glimpse of that swoony couple in a lazy-day mood.
Any other director would have called special attention to Redgrave-O’Casey…capturing them with a steady centered shot, perhaps starting from a distance and then cutting to an MCU, in effect telling the audience “you’ll want to pay attention to these people…something is about to happen.”
Instead Antonioni and dp Carlo Di Palma show Hemmings scampering around the grass while shooting some pigeons, and then the camera pans up and to the left, and as it’s moving north it catches the briefest glimpse — exactly one second’s worth — of the couple. (Go to the :31 mark.) The first-time viewer doesn’t even notice them, much less consider that they might be key players.
This is one of the 40 or 50 things that I dearly love about this film, and why I own the Criterion Bluray version. The first thing that grabbed me way back was the sound of wind rustling the park bushes and tree branches as Hemmings snaps away. So much going on and not a line of dialogue or a note of music…just the breezes.
Respect and regrets for the late Olympia Dukakis, the veteran actress whose career peaked with an Oscar win for her performance in Moonstruck (’87). She’s passed at age 89. Her career rumbled along in mid-gear until Moonstruck came along, when she was 56. Her other big role was in Steel Magnolias, which I can’t speak of directly as I’ve never seen it. But we all love Moonstruck! Hugs and condolences for Olympia’s family, friends, fans.
I never knew Olympia played supporting roles in Brian DePalma‘s Sisters (’73) and Michael Winner‘s Death Wish (’74). Now I do.
Remember the Criterion teal gremlins?…the vandals who radically distorted the color palettes of four significant 20th Century classics — Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Teorema, Brian DePalma‘s Sisters, John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy and Ron Shelton‘s Bull Durham?
(DVD Beaver’s Gary Tooze recently claimed to have noticed “some minor teal infiltration” on Criterion’s Amores perros Bluray, so that would make five.)
Brody: “DiCaprio is the most paradoxical of actors. A star since he was a teenager, he built his career around his charisma and his gift for mimicry; in most of his early performances, he seemed to be impersonating a movie star, and slipped frictionlessly into his roles as if they were costumes, regardless of the physical difficulty they involved. With The Wolf of Wall Street, he finally achieved his cinematic apotheosis. In the role of Jordan Belfort, a super-salesman and super-con-man whose hedonistic will to power is one with his consuming fury, DiCaprio seemed to tap deep into himself, even if in the way of mere fantasy and exuberant disinhibition. He so heatedly embraced the role’s excesses that they stuck to him; he flung himself so hard at its artifices that he shattered them and came through as more himself than he had ever been onscreen; he and his art finally met.”
Jordan Ruimy: “Richard Brody is the Armond White of ultra-progressive cinematic Bernie Bros.”
I saw Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount, 12.25) for the second time last night, and it felt just as wild and manic as it did the first time. (And without an ounce of fat — it’s very tightly constructed.) And yet it’s a highly moral film…mostly. Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and all the rest are never really “in the room” with these depraved Stratton Oakmont brokers. They’re obviously juiced with the spirit of play-acting and pumping the film up and revving their engines, but each and every scene has an invisible subtitle that says “do you see get what kind of sick diseased fucks these guys were?…do you understand that Jordan Belfort‘s exploits redefined the term ‘asshole’ for all time?”
Why, then, did I say that Wolf is “mostly” moral? Because there’s a subcurrent that revels in the bacchanalian exploits of Belfort and his homies. It broadly satirizes Roman-orgy behavior while winking at it. (Or half-winking.) Unlike the Queens-residing goombahs in Goodfellas, whom he obviously feels a mixed affection for, Scorsese clearly doesn’t like or relate to the Stratton Oakmont guys. But the 71 year-old director also knows first-hand how enjoyable drug-abuse can be for cocky Type-A personalities in groups, and he conveys this in spades. Wolf is clearly “personal” for Scorsese. Like everyone else who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, he is believed to have “indulged” to some extent. (Whatever the truth of it, 1977’s New York, New York has long been regarded as a huge cocaine movie.) One presumes that Scorsese is living a sensible and relatively healthy life these days, but boy, does he remember!
Jordan Ruimy is finishing up his Best Films of the ’80s critics poll, which 200 critics have participated in. The #1 pick is no surprise but I’ll get into that when Jordan posts on Monday. He’s given me permission to discuss the film that occupies the #13 slot — Martin Scorsese‘s The King of Comedy (’83). Which Average Joes hated, of course. Critics are the only ones who truly love this deeply uncomfortable, hoi-polloi-loathing film. I adore three or four scenes (“His name is Pumpkin…you know a Pumpkin?” plus “you should get cancer!” are the top two) but mostly it’s a grueling sit. And yet, after a fashion, it’s a powerful look at celebrity wannabe-ism and the aggressive shallowing of American culture.
Scorsese had a tough time in the early to mid ’80s. Post-Raging Bull he thought about getting out of feature films, his health was up and down, The King of Comedy (’83) totally tanked, Paramount abandoned support of a higher-budgeted version of The Last Temptation of Christ (Aidan Quinn as Jesus, Sting as Pontius Pilate, etc.) and he was more or less forced to dive into the low-budget indie realm with the offbeat, comically perverse After Hours (’85).
But once the shooting and editing of After Hours were finished things began to look up. Scorsese took a director-for-hire gig on The Color of Money, which wasn’t all that great but had its moments. He finally assembled Last Temptation funding ($7 million) through Universal and began shooting it in Morocco in October ’87. And of course he’d begun developing and preparing Goodfellas by mid ’86 with Nic Pileggi‘s first-draft screenplay popping out sometime around November of ’86. By any measure Goodfellas was the crowning creative achievement of Scorcese’s ’80s period, even though it wasn’t released until the fall of ’90.
So basically the ’80s wasn’t a downer decade for Scorsese but his greatest if you step back and take it all in — the legendary Raging Bull, the fearlessly frank The King of Comedy and the weirdly burrowing After Hours, the occasionally interesting and commercially tolerable The Color of Money, the spiritually soaring and transcendent The Last Temptation of Christ (best Jesus movie + best death scene ever), and the mesmerizing gangster powerhouse that was Goodfellas. Three stone classics, two admirably offbeat digressions and one straight-down-the-middle star vehicle that isn’t too bad if you step back and ease up.
Cinematically speaking the ’80s was a big comedown decade — a time of relative shallowness, the end of the glorious ’70s, the flourishing of tits-and-zits sex comedies, the unfortunate advent of high-concept movies, a general climate of cheap highs + terrible fashion choices (shoulder pads, big hair), flash without substance plus Andrew Sarris writing that “the bottom has fallen out of badness in movies,” etc.
As we speak World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is polling the usual suspects for their top ’80s picks, but I’m going to take a mad stab and pick some faves off the top of my head.
What makes a great ’80s film? Not just a relatable, well-crafted story but one that delivers (a) irony, (b) tangy or penetrating flavor, (c) the combination of intriguing characters and perfect acting, and (d) a compelling social echo factor…a mode of delivery that only portrays but sees right through to the essence of what was going on during this comparatively shallow, opportunistic, Reagan-ized period in U.S. history.
And so Hollywood Elsewhere’s choice for the Best (i.e., most arresting and perceptive) Film of the ’80s is — I’m perfectly serious — Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business. Because it’s (a) perfectly (and I mean exquisitely) made, and (b) because the ’80s was when everyone in the culture finally decided that the United States of America was a huge fucking sales opportunity and whorehouse, and that it was all about making money any way that could happen and fuck the consequences, and this movie, focused on a naive but entitled young lad fom Chicago’s North Shore and his smug, droll friends, nails that mindset perfectly. And — this is the master-stroke aspect — Brickman presents these kids as cool, laid-back and ironically self aware.
Here are the rest of my top ’80s picks, in no particular order and with the criteria being not just craft and charm but social resonsance: 2. Adrien Lyne‘s Fatal Attraction; 3 and 4. Peter Weir‘s Witness and Dead Poet’s Society; 5, 6 and 7. Woody Allen‘s Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her sisters and The Purple Rose of Cairo; 8. Alan Pakula‘s Sophie’s Choice; 9 and 10. Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City and The Verdict; 11. David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet; 12. Oliver Stone‘s Platoon; 13. Spike Lee‘s Do The Right Thing; 14. Francois Truffaut‘s The Woman Next Door; 15 and 16. Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining and Full Metal Jacket; 17 and 18. Brian DePalma‘s Scarface and The Untouchables; 19. Michael Mann‘s Thief; 20. Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner; 21. Alain Resnais‘ Mon Oncle d’Amérique; 22. Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America; 24. Alex Cox‘s Repo Man; 25. John McTiernan‘s Die Hard; 26. Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ; 27. James Cameron‘s Aliens; 28. George Miller‘s The Road Warrior; 29. Steven Spielberg‘s E.T., the Extra Terrestrial; 30. John Carpenter‘s They Live.
Oh, wait, I forgot Lawrence Kasdan‘s Body Heat and The Big Chill…make it 32.
I’ve also forgotten TheHidden, Drugstore Cowboy, Raging Bull and LocalHero… make it 36.
I’ve been visiting movie sets for 40-odd years. I’ve never worked on a feature or TV series on a day-to-day basis so I’m no authority. But over the years I’ve noticed over and over that sets are generally pleasant environments — caring attitudes, consideration for others, no hostility or temper tantrums to speak of.
On the other hand there’s always tension between directors of exceptional vision and eccentricity, and those who hate innovation and new ideas — who prefer to shoot films and TV shows in the usual way.
I remember reading that Brian DePalma once said that he was suspicious of happy sets because that indicated (to him) that people were goofing off. Back in the early ’80s an actor friend told me that director David Ward regarded the making of Cannery Row as a “constant war” with meddling studio execs and a crew that often resisted various outside-the-box ideas or ways of getting things done.
Today I was struck by a recollection from Booksmart director Olivia Wilde, which she passed along to Promising Young Woman director Emerald Fennell in a Variety video chat.
Wilde: “A very established actor and director in this industry” — two separate people, she apparently means — “gave me really terrible advice that was helpful, because I just knew I had to do the opposite. They said, ‘Listen, the way to get respect on a set, you have to have three arguments a day…three big arguments that reinstate your power, remind everyone who’s in charge, be the predator.’ That is the opposite of my process. And I want none of that.”
Wilde expands: “I think that it is an unfortunate part of the kind of the paradigm, that has been created over the last 100 years…the idea that great art has to come from a place of discomfort and anxiety. That the pressure cooker has to get to a point where it can be something intense and valuable in that way.
“I do think it may be a uniquely female instinct to say, ‘Look, we can be nurturing. And we can multitask.’ It doesn’t mean that anyone needs to be uncomfortable. And it doesn’t mean that I have to constantly remind you of my my position, because I don’t think anyone on a set has ever forgotten who’s in charge. It’s in fact, an incredibly hierarchical system.
“If anything, I think we’d all benefit to sort of remove the hero narrative from that structure, and to acknowledge that a director is a sum of all these parts, that we have the opportunity to delegate to all these incredible people that we’ve asked to come on board.
Fennell: “This idea of having three arguments a day…where do you differentiate between something that really important, and something that isn’t? I think that there are moments necessarily where you do have to be sort of fairly strict or straightforward to get things back on the rails.
“[But] I agree completely with what you say, I think there’s a sort of idea that being a tormented artist is the route to genius. I really do think, as I’ve sort of gotten older, it is just a mask for a lot of fear and anxiety. It’s kind of a sort of synonym for bullying.”
Question to production veterans: Have you ever worked under a three-argument-per-day director, and if so, how was the experience? Have you ever worked for alpha-lion types or persistent arguers who turned out to be really good, or is the general rule of thumb that the gentlest directors tend to be more effective?”
Friendo: “I recently finished Romain Gary‘s award-winning, best-selling ‘The Roots of Heaven,’ an excellent, deeply philosophical novel about a man who sets out to save Africa’s elephants from hunters and ivory poachers. He thinks by saving the elephants he can help mankind reclaim its humanity. John Huston made a film of it in 1958, with Errol Flynn, Trevor Howard, Juliette Greco and Eddie Albert costarring.
“It’s kind of a notorious disaster, which even Huston admitted (a) wasn’t very good, and (b) was all his fault. Although shot on location with a big budget, Roots is generally sluggish and filled with the kind of speeches that work a lot better on the page than in a film.”