Deadline‘s Nikke Finke is calling J. Edgar‘s opening-day, five-city gross of $59,000 “strong” and “good enough.” Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino doesn’t disagree, but feels “the negative reviews are really going to hurt. J. Edgar is aimed at moviegoers looking for an Oscar juggernaut — and they’ll find plenty of reasons to believe that it’s not. It also looks like a downer. There’s no emotional uplift to this historical biopic, and, let’s face it, you need that to make the big bucks. That’s why Moneyball hit $70 million and not $100 million. We’re going with a $12.5 million opening weekend — good by Clint’s standards, weak for Leo.”
“I saw Moneyball,” a friend said, “and it’s rather amazing, especially on a thematic and/or screenwriting level. But the last thing it is is a power Oscar play. I expect Brad Pitt could find some flow this season, and maybe it’ll figure in the adapted screenplay category (given the names), though it’s not the kind of script that resonates in the season. (I don’t make the rules.) But that’s it. I don’t see 300 people putting this in their #1 spot for Best Picture.”
No, I responded. No, no, no, no…wrong. It is a kind of Oscar play…a quiet, forceful one that’s something to be proud of. “Smart layered movies have to be given their due,” I replied. “The Academy can’t be allowed to dumb down the Best Picture race again…not after last year’s King’s Speech win. That embarassment has to be forgotten, erased, paved over. Please don’t wink at or tacitly approve the default preferences of the dumb-downers…don’t play along with them by predicting their dumb-down votes. Don’t go all War Horse on me, please.
“Moneyball is a kind of heaven. Don’t hang back with the brutes.”
Cameron Crowe was in New York in April when The Union, his Elton John-Leon Russell doc, played at the Tribeca Film Festival. But has he submitted to any kind of public q & a in Los Angeles, which will happen at the Aero theatre 12 days hence, since the double debacle of Elizabethtown (’05) and the never-filmed Deep Tiki (late ’08)?
The ostensible topic of his 6.12 discussion with Peter Bart at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre will be Harold and Maude, but c’mon…this is a coming-out event, no? Crowe has directed and written We Bought A Zoo, a possible Oscar contender, that’s coming out later this year, and has, in any event, many questions to address.
Question #1: How is We Bought A Zoo coming along? How would he describe it? Is it some kind of light family-enterprise film? Is it The Sundowners with zoo animals? Could Disney could have made this film in the early ’60s with Dean Jones and Hayley Mills? Or are there thematic/emotional elements that make it something else?
Question #2: Does Crowe agree that his own story of the last six years — a hard-knocks tale of a gifted filmmaker who’s riding high and then runs into a career ditch and has to struggle for years to make it back to the top, and loses his marriage along the way — is somewhat similiar to Jerry Maguire?
Question #3: If he could go back in time and do it all over again, would Crowe refine or rewrite or recast Elizabethtown? Could anything have been done to avert the disastrous critical reception that greeted it in late ’05?
Question #4: What happened exactly with Deep Tiki?
Question #5: What about Crowe’s Marvin Gaye biopic, which he’s reportedly been working on for years?
Question #6: When will The Union be screened in Los Angeles?
Here’s a 1.7.11 article I wrote about Crowe’s situation.
The following appears near the end of the piece: “Crowe is clearly due for a little light shining down, a clearing in the woods. As a guy who once heard the roar of the crowd and held mountains in the palm of his hand, he needs to stand on a plateau and feel the kind of serenity and satisfaction that can only come from making a film that people admire and pay to see in great numbers.”
The legend is that the prolonged stress of shooting John Huston‘s The Misfits (’61), and particularly the delays caused by the relentlessly insecure and drug-dependent Marilyn Monroe, basically killed Clark Gable. The 60-year old Gable suffered a heart attack two days after filming ended and died ten days later. But he also smoked like a crazy man and reportedly drank a lot.
The Misfits was also the last completed film for Monroe. She was dead of a barbituate overdose 18 months after it opened in February ’61. The Wiki page says just about everyone involved disliked The Misfits — Monroe and costar Montgomery Clift, certainly. And it didn’t make very much money. No wonder — it’s more than a bit of a downer. The Bluray will soon street.
Indiewire‘s Peter Knegt has reported that Jodie Foster’s The Beaver “opened in 22 theaters across North America Friday night to dismal box office returns. A kind of half-dramedy, half downer-with-a-touchy-feely-undercurrent piece (i.e., Mel Gibson as a clinically depressed toy company CEO who finds solace through a beaver hand puppet), the film grossed an estimated $30,000 on its first night of release, averaging just $1,364. That should amount to roughly $100,000 over the weekend for distributor Summit Entertainment, with an average of $4,500.”
Yesterday I posted a fairly glum assessment of the fate of classic films on Bluray, but you can’t get too down-hearted about this stuff. So here’s a list of 30 films made (and for the most part released) in the 1950s — most of them large-format, nearly all in color — that need to be properly spiffed up and Bluray-ed. They certainly need looking after element-wise, particularly those released in the mid to late ’50s up until ’60 due to fading among those shot on “safety” stock.
Danny Kaye in The Court Jester
It doesn’t matter if decent-looking DVDs of these films exist — they could all look much better and need to be re-done to satisfy the Movie Godz. If these films were properly restored and remastered for Bluray release we’d all be living fuller, happier lives.
One guy who helped me put this list together is Bruce Kimmel, former director (The First Nudie Musical), a motion-picture soundtrack record producer and a rabid film aficionado.
I need to mention the VistaVision problem before starting. Paramount shot and released over 100 VistaVision films in the ’50s, and so far we’ve only seen two of them properly transferred to Bluray — The Ten Commandments and White Christmas. It would be ecstasy if the original VistaVision version of Marlon Brando‘s One-Eyed Jacks (’60), a beautifully-shot western that’s has been mired in public-domain hell for several years, could be released on Bluray.
With three or four exceptions I’ve included large-format films that should play by today’s standards, and have avoided those that probably certainly wouldn’t work on Bluray due to being mediocre or awful by any measure.
1. William Wyler‘s The Big Country (’58…shot on SuperTechnirama, a horizontal 8-perf VistaVision-like format that renders a horizontally-squeezed image that came out un-squeezed at a 2.35-to-1 Scope ratio when projected anamorphically). The DVD of this Gregory Peck-starring western is so-so, nothing special, close to mediocre — a properly-rendered Bluray would be stunning.
2. Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Man Who Knew Too Much (’56…shot in VistaVivision). “The original negative has faded, and the two Universal Home Video DVDs so far have been blah-level. “It could and should be gorgeous…perfect,” says an east-coast source.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
3. Melvin Frank and Norman Panama‘s The Court Jester (56…shot in Vista Vision.). I’ve never even seen this film, mainly because I have an aversion to Danny Kaye. (Horrific images of Kaye coupling with Laurence Oliver flood my brain, etc.) A medieval spoof, gorgeously photographed. “The one Danny Kaye film that never dates,” says Kimmel.
4. Michael Todd‘s Around the World in 80 Days (’56…one of two films shot in 30-frame Todd-AO). A close-to-ghastly film that needs work, research, restoration. A film shot in 65mm 30 fps has to be saved, no matter how bad! Compared to what it should look like, given the exceptional elements, the DVD looks awful, bordering on out-of-focus. And yet the fact that it won the 1956 Best Picture Oscar (i.e., handed out in ’57) is perhaps the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ greatest embarassment.
5. John Wayne‘s The Alamo (’60…shot in 70 mm Todd-AO).
6. John Huston‘s Moulin Rouge (’52). Shot by dp Oswald Morris in reddish rosey tones as a kind of visual experiment meant to complement the color in the paintings of Toulouse Lautrec. Allegedly never rendered on DVD befitting Morris and Huston’s precise intentions.
7. John Huston‘s Moby Dick (’56). Shot and processed by Morris in washed-out color and rendered in release prints that were printed with a “gray” negative which gave the color a certain black-and-white tonality meant to resemble Currier & Ives etchings. This special color experiment has been simulated on the Moby Dick DVD, but it’s not the real thing, of course. I happened to see a single reel of a ’56 black-and-white release print at the Academy back in the ’80s — riveting.
8. William Wyler‘s Roman Holiday (’53). Lowry Digital’s John Lowry delivered a grain-free DVD in 2002. “It was a low resolution DVD made from the wrong elements,” a source remarks. “It was the same thing with Sunset Boulevard…they couldn’t find the original negatives or the original fine-grain on either one…it didn’t look filmish…it looked like a ‘kinny'” — i.e, a kinescope.
Moulin Rouge
9. Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard (’50). See Roman Holiday.
10. Billy Wilder‘s Stalag 17 (’53).
11. Vincent Minnelli‘s Gigi (’58). “They did everything they could [when they mastered the Bluray] but they were dealing with a faded original negative and bad color.”
12. John Ford‘s The Searchers (’56). “Needs to be re-done,” says Kimmel. “The Bluray is sharp but the color is wrong…they put too much yellow into it. Everything is wrong….Monument Valley sand is wrong….the sky is faintly greenish when it should blue….the clarity is fantastic but the adobe bricks in the opening credits are supposed to be gray but they’re blondish gold.”
13. George Stevens‘ Shane (’53). “It could be done like they did The African Queen and The Red Shoes, a beautiful Bluray done by Bob Gitt. They have a three-strip Technicolor negative…they just don’t have a clean HD master so how are they going to bring it out on Bluay?…it’s not a huge undertaking…but they just need to buckle down and go in that direction.”
14. Fred Zinneman‘s Oklahoma! (’55, shot in 65mm Todd AO 30 frame and also in 35mm 24-frame — two different versions). Kimmel, like me, saw Oklahoma! projected in 30-frame Todd-AO at the old DGA theatre back in the mid ’80s. “It was beautiful…you felt as if you could walk right into that picture,” he says. A laser disc that delivered the Todd AO version was sharp and handsome but for whatever reason the same version looks atrocious on the DVD. Kimmel says that Fox Home Video restoration maestro Schawn Belston believes that “the image compression screwed it up” and that the Todd AO version is salvagable.
15. Otto Preminger‘s Exodus (’60). A mediocre film shot in 70 mm that looked awesome when it was projected in first-run engagements some 51 years ago. “The DVD is the worst thing ever made and it’s a 4 x 3 transfer,” Kimmel remarks. “That’s one I’d love to see done right.” (Even if the film itself is quite difficult to sit through, he could have added.)
Moby Dick
16. The three James Dean movies — Elia Kazan‘s East of Eden (’55, 35mm CinemaScope), Nicholas Ray‘s Rebel Without a Cause (’55, 35mm CinemaScope) and George Stevens‘ Giant (’56). “Giant is the worst of the three…the wrong process for the wrong film…they took the original Eastman negative and created a dye transfer print, which exacerbated all the problems….so they could say it was in Technicolor.”
17. Alfred Hitchcock‘s To Catch a Thief (’55, VistaVision). Paramount’s Centennial edition DVD, released in 2009, is the best-looking version of all, but just imagine how this exceptionally colorful thriller would look in Bluray.
18. Vincent Minnelli‘s Lust for Life (’56). Shot on Ansco, purportedly to get rid of the stock at hand.
19. Henry King‘s Carousel (’56), shot in CinemaScope 55mm, an eight-perforation process involving a slight horizontal blowup, the same process used on The King and I.
20. Edward Dmytryk‘s Raintree County (’57, shot in Camera 65mm, the process also used for Ben-Hur).
21. Joshua Logan‘s Sayonara (’57).
22. Stanley Donen‘s Funny Face (’57).
23. Morton DaCosta‘s Auntie Mame (’58, shot in Technirama — 35 mm anamorphic).
24. Richard Brooks‘ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (’58, 35 mm).
25. Fred Zinneman‘s The Nun’s Story (’59, 35 mm).
26. Otto Preminger‘s Porgy and Bess (’58, Todd AO 65mm, 24 frame).
27. Fred Zinneman‘s The Sundowners (’60, 35mm).
28. Richard Brooks‘ Elmer Gantry (’60).
All my life I’ve managed to avoid reading Charlotte Bronte‘s “Jane Eyre“, but I’m going to dash through it this weekend to see if the book, published in 1847, is as morose and chilly and constipated as all the various film adaptations have been. I’m 98% sure that it is, but I want to be able to say that I’ve absorbed it first-hand.
I saw Cary Fukunaga‘s Jane Eyre (Focus Features, 3.11) last night, and it’s full of authentic, high-toned period highs. All the performances (including those from costars Jamie Bell, Judi Dench and Sally Hawkins) seem perfectly aged and restrained in just the right way. And hail to all the other 19th Century downer elements. Everything is exquisitely in place, whipsmart and oh-so-carefully rendered.
But the fretfulness…my God! Jane Eyre is like an Oxford Film Festival mood pocket times ten. It’s like a tattered flag rippling in an early March wind on an English moor. Come to us, all ye educated women of a certain age seeking a Bronte fix! We will envelope you in bonnets and lace and corsets and repression and misery, and make you feel like you’re really and truly stuck in olde country-manor England, full of feeling but afraid to speak of it, much less act. We will saturate you with emotions so damp and muffled that you’ll plotz.
Jane Eyre is so convincing and persuasive in this regard that it made me depressed about my own life, and I’m feeling fine these days.
I wanted to leave about 45 minutes in, but I held fast. One reason was that I didn’t want Wall Street Journal critic Joe “JoMo” Morgenstern, who was sitting in the last row, to see me leaving lest he regard me as lacking in patience and literary couth. But I thought about it being over and being released and the coming joys of getting into the car and driving east to Amoeba Records. In fact, I’ve never been so in love with the Amoeba experience as I was last night at the Clarity screening room.
The best thing about Jane Eyre is Michael Fassbender‘s performance as Edward Rochester. The truth is that he’s been disappointing me in ways modest and small since Hunger, but here he shows his earnest, slightly mad Laurence Olivier chops. Every line he speaks is sharp and grave with a river churning beneath it, and I was especially pleased by that I understood each and every word. Why did this provide particular comfort? Because most of the time I couldn’t understand what Fassbender’s costar, Mia Wasikowska, who plays Jane Eyre, was saying at all.
(l.) Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre; (r.) Charlotte Bronte.
I’m serious. Wasikowska’s eyes are haunted and piercing, and her Jane Eyre face has that silently-suffering quality that the story requires, but her British accent is so….it’s hard to describe but so precociously affected and her delivery is so breathy and trembling and tremulous that I got the gist of what she was saying only occasionally. Most of the time I couldn’t figure what her phrases and/or sentences were conveying at all. Okay, now and then, but it got to the point that I stopped trying to understand her thoughts and started grasping at words.
There’s something opaque and bland about Wasikowska’s face when she’s not turning on the current. I’ve never understood why so many filmmakers are so taken with her because of this. She looks glum and bothered all the time, and in this context her face (which has a sort of Eastern European quality, as suggested by her last name) doesn’t have a genetically English appearance. Jane Eyre is supposed to be plain-looking so that fits, but consider the above drawing of Charlotte Bronte — now that’s a face! That discerning half-scowl…magnificent! And she actually looks like a Brit.
I’ve always been afraid of what the Bronte sisters (Charlotte’s sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights) might do to my mood if I sat down and actually “let them in,” to so speak.
I’d like to know who designed this poster for Kelly Reichardt‘s Meek’s Cutoff (Oscilloscope, 4.8) because it works. It has a certain authenticity, a yesteryear quality. It suggests the look of a poster for…I don’t know, some Lillian Gish or Gloria Swanson film from the 1920s, Queen Kelly or Orphans of the Storm or something in that vein.
I managed to miss this film at last year’s Toronto and New York film festivals, and also at Sundance 2011. The truth? I didn’t want to see it because of the bonnets. Here’s how I explained it on 9.29.10:
“Here comes another immensely shallow but entirely honest statement from yours truly,” I wrote. “The instant I clapped eyes on those mid-1800s women’s bonnets in those stills from Meek’s Cutoff, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to figure some way of avoiding this film for as long as I can.’
“I suspected it would be a quality-level thing because Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy proved she’s a talented, dead-serious director. Attracted to downer-type women-facing-tough-odds stories, okay, and not exactly into narrative propulsion, but Reichardt’s films require respect and attention.
“And I didn’t care. I was going to avoid Meek’s Cutoff any way I could for as long as I could because I don’t like the gloomy symbolism of floppy bonnets on pioneer women’s heads. To me bonnets spell sexual repression and constipation and tight facial muscles. They suggest the existence of a strict social code (i.e., the film takes place in 1845) that I don’t want to sample or get close to because I know it’s all about men with awful face-whiskers and the wearing of starched collars and keeping everything buried and smothered and buttoned-up among the wimmin folk.”
Meek’s Cutoff is basically a western in which “a braggart, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), meets his match in a courageous woman (Michelle Williams) after he is hired by three families to lead them through Oregon’s Cascade Mountains so that they may start new lives on the other side. As their water dwindles and they disagree over the treatment of a captured Native American, the group questions Meek’s dependability and cracks under pressure.”
For what it’s worth I’ve moved past my initial feelings and am now ready to experience Meek’s Cutoff, in large part because of this poster.
Now that I’ve seen Denis Villeneuve‘s Incendies (NY/LA, 4.22), I know that the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race is probably down to a choice between Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful and Susanne Bier‘s A Better World. Because as compelling and anchored and finely chiselled as Incendies is, it’s such an ugly and searing portrait of tribal rage, ignorance, cruelty and sadism that it’s finally one of those widely admired films that you’ll never want to see a second time, or even think about once it’s over.
Most critics have called Biutiful a tough thing to sit through, and it is that in some ways. But Incendies is such a grim march and so committed to the probing of an oppressive and penetrating vision of downer-hood that it would easily whip Inarritu’s ass in a one-on-one gloom match.
The story (based on Wajdi Mouawad‘s play of the same title) is clearly a reflection of the Lebanon horrors (Israeli army plus Christian militia vs. Lebanese PLO and non-combatants) of the ’70s and early ’80s. Aaah, to be immersed in primitive Arab-Lebanese-Christian rage on all sides — idiotic tribal traditions, threats of honor killings, sniper shootings, rural women shunning wronged women, torture, prison rape, machine-gun slaughter, burnt bodies, more torture, prolonged imprisonment…good stuff!
You’re sitting there going “boy, this sure is a good film…I wonder how much longer until it’s over?” I went out to the lobby around the 90-minute mark and asked the guy. He called the projectionist and got off the phone and gave me a look and told me to grim up and hang in there — I had another 35 to 40 minutes to go. Eff me. I really hate it when films thrust me into backward patriarchal societies and then block off all escape routes. What a completely nowhere fundamentalist culture we’re stuck with in this film, a world defined by rock and scrub brush and dust and hills and chained to such ongoing hate.
And to be doubly stuck in a lonnnng quest-for-the-ancestral-truth movie in which clue after clue is sought and uncovered, blah blah. Clue, hint, clue, hint…are we getting closer to finding out what really happened? No? It has to get there eventually, right?
Incendies is about a youngish Canadian brother and a sister whose Lebanese mother has recently died, and who are more less forcibly engaged in a search for their missing father and missing brother. And for all of it to end with a Chinatown-ish resolution that gives new meaning to the term “all in the family”? Which doesn’t really illuminate anything in a real-world sort of way? I don’t know, bro. A very “good” film but if I never see Incendies again it’ll be too soon. And I’ve seen Biutiful three times.
This is nearly a week old and covered with dust, but the universe isn’t big enough for two icky-sticky downer movies about poor Linda Lovelace. I wasn’t overjoyed about Matthew Wilder‘s Inferno (the former Lindsay Lohan project, now starring Malin Akerman) but I was willing to deal with it on some level. But a second competing version starring Kate Hudson as Linda and James Franco as Chuck Traynor is just impossible. There’s just not enough psychic space for both. One of them has to go. In fact, kill them both. Wait a minute…
Brainstorm: Combine both casts for a single film about Linda Lovelace (Hudson) dealing with (a) the fiendish Traynor and porn-industry exploitation and (b) at the same time coping with a Twilight Zone-ish realization that there’s another Linda Lovelace living in a parallel universe — a regular housewife and Walmart employee — who’s plotting to take over her life and career as a famous porn star. The weird thing is that the “other” Linda Lovelace (Akerman) doesn’t even look like the original. At first they fight each other in a kind of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill style, barefoot kickboxing with samurai swords, and then they team up as a two-for-one porn pair. They eventually become lesbian lovers, and then they adopt two kids — a girl and a boy. Plus they rewrite history by starting their own production company, kicking Traynor out of their lives, and eventually becoming leading voices in the feminist movement. And then in the late ’80s one of them becomes HIV-positive, gets cancer and dies.
Last night Julia Roberts hosted a screening of Biutiful at CAA’s Century City offices (and not at her home, as a Huffington Post rewrite person has written) on behalf of Best Actor contender Javier Bardem. During the after-event she spoke to Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger, who’s one of the columnists (along with myself and TheWrap‘s Steve Pond) carrying the Bardem torch.
Biutiful star Javier Bardem posing with Julia Roberts during an Eat Pray Love event last summer.
Karger: “What is it about Javier’s performance in Biutiful that you’re so passionate about?”
Roberts: “He’s so raw and completely open to sharing every emotion this character has. I was telling him at dinner tonight, when I watched it I had to keep stopping and saying, ‘Okay, this is not actually happening to Javier.’ Because it’s his face and his big eyes. I think it’s unexpected for a man to expose himself so deeply. And it’s incredibly agonizing in its subtleties. I just have a great appreciation for what he went through to show us all this. I know it had to hurt.
Karger: “So why hasn’t he gotten more recognition? There was no SAG nomination, no Globe nomination, not even a critics award.
Roberts: “I think the movie hasn’t gotten the exposure. You don’t know where it is. It’s like this hidden little jewel. Especially in this particular season, people don’t hunt for things. They just take what you throw in their face.”
Wells interjection: Roadside Attractions doesn’t have marketing money to burn, but I think a lot of people know where Biutiful is. They just don’t want to watch it because they’re sensing “downer,” and some people are so downer-averse it borders on a form of neuroticism. Roberts will tell you Biutiful isn’t as easy sit — everyone knows this — but there’s so much more going on in this film other than “sad,” and almost all of it found in Bardem’s performance.
Back to Karger/Roberts…
Karger: “I know of at least one Academy member who put the Biutiful DVD in the player and took it out after the first half hour because it was just too bleak.”
Roberts: “I don’t know how you couldn’t want to know what happens. I hope that person is haunted until the end of time wanting to know what happened.
Karger: “So is there any hope for Javier? Can he score enough No. 1 votes to get a Best Actor nomination?”
Roberts: “If there’s not hope for talent, then we’re fucked.”
It was reported yesterday (but detected only a few hours ago by yours truly) that director George Hickenlooper accidentally offed himself “due to…mixing alcohol and painkillers,” according to an 11.22 story on Denver’s KDVR.com. An email received early this morning attributed his passing to “an overdose of ethanol and oxymorphone” killed him; a subsequent message claimed he died “of an overdose of alcohol mixed with a pain killer called Opana, which is a variation of Oxycontin.”
A 3.12.09 N.Y. Press story described Opana as “a powerful painkiller that went on the market less than two years ago [and] is twice as strong as OxyContin, with a potential for addiction that rivals the prescription drug that has ravaged the lives of thousands of abusers.”
I’m sorry but my reaction is one of disappointment. Mixing alcohol with any prescription downer is known the world over to be highly dangerous. If it turns out that Opana was in fact the substance George had in his system, how can the word “reckless” not apply to his mixing that and alcohol?
Hickenlooper was reportedly found dead in an apartment in or near downtown Denver on October 29. The world learned of his passing on Saturday, 10.30. (I had just returned from the mild-mannered Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert rally in Washington, D.C.) In a statement Colorado governor-elect John Hickenlooper, George’s cousin, said he died of “apparent natural causes.”
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