I’ve been walking around Washington, D.C. for the last three and 1/2 hours, mostly near the Dupont Circle area and along K Street and N Street and that general thing, and I’m just not feeling that old pin-striped, power-elite, uptown-and-connected vibration that I recall from my visit here in ’94. There are too many tourist-schlub types, and most of them are poorly-dressed with ordinary faces and (I’ll bet) not all that much to say. It doesn’t feel right. Being here has made me want to fly to Vienna or Paris.
Friday, 10.29, 8:25 pm.
Friday, 10.29, 7:10 pm.
There used to be a kind of hush all over Washington — a vibe that told you “like it or not, this is where the power is, and where the best minds and the great statesmen and the slickest hustlers and wheeler-dealers live and operate.” Now the vibe says, “Haw! Yo, dude, three Blue Moons and two Jack Daniels neat!”
This is Washington D.C. — a place that used to stand for something. Now it looks like a town that Senator John Blutarsky took over and remade in his own image. America has largely become a nation of mallbilly pudge-bottoms and commoners with meager educations, and dressed in ugly-ass T-shirts and man-shorts and bad pigtails and grotesque Foot Locker cross-training shoes.
A barrel-chested guy got out of a taxi on Pennsvlvania Avenue and he looked like Akim Tamiroff with a Van Dyke beard, and the woman with him looked like a Las Vegas slut with too much make-up. Even the storied Tabard Inn felt just a tiny bit downmarketed. Pudgy middle-aged people were hanging out in the bar and going “blah, blah, blah, blah” — they looked and sounded like real-estate agents from Trenton.
If you’re not “in” with the connected government crowd (like me), Washington, D.C. is basically a hick town with large boulevards and big government buildings and tens of thousands of beefy-bodied, T-shirt-wearing, under-dressed dorks walking around and slurping beers. It’s not cool. It’s turned into Fairfax, Virginia or…whatever, Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Where’s the Washington of lore and legend? If the ghost of Jack Kennedy was to return here for one day in the manner of Billy Bigelow, he would say, “This is what America has come to? Get me out of here. I want to be dead again.”
Why do I feel vaguely bummed out by Variety‘s totally-confirmed report that James Cameron has committed to making two Avatar sequels, to hit theatres in December 2014 and December 2015? I can roll with it, but my first reaction was “oh, gee….that’s not the greatest idea.”
It’s a downer because it’s basically a corporate cash-grab move. (Rothman and Gianopulos: “They’ll pay to see this again…twice! Revenues! Hah-hah-hah!”) Because it’s a creatively lazy enterprise for Cameron as it’ll be no great feat to come up with a prequel and a sequel. Because Avatar was a great four-course meal, and I’m not feeling a need to go there again. Because the ending of Avatar was perfect (i.e., the opening of the transformed Jake Sully’s eyes), and I’m thinking “leave it there.”
And because a guy like Cameron committing to a two-movie, four-year rehash project that is primarily about making money (i.e., certainly on 20th Century Fox’s end) is a kind of capitulation to the golden-calf mentality.
Cameron is an adventurer — I get that. And I realize that he’s doing this because the task will be technically challenging and thrilling and draining and fulfilling in a whoo-hoo! sort of way, but what Avatar fan believes that the Avatar world needs to be re-visited two more times? C’mon, be honest.
There are two kinds of money that we enjoy in life — fresh and vibrant money from hard work and inspired enterprise, and rote somnambulent money that comes from some idea or conquering that somebody thought up or accomplished years or decades ago. All real adventurers understand that there’s something vaguely soul-killing about the second kind of money, however plentiful and comforting it may be. Every day God tells all living things that they must find fresh fruit, climb new mountains, and dig into fresh earth. This is the only way to live.
With so many stories happening in the world that he could explore as a director, and with so many tens or hundreds of millions in his bank account, why would Cameron, savoring the last four or five years of his sixth decade and in the creative prime of his life, want to do this?
What would have been the reaction to the idea of a Titanic prequel and sequel? The separate but fated-to-be-interwined adventures of Jack Dawson (kicking around in Paris) and Rose DeWitt Bukater (quietly miserable in English schools), and then a sequel in which Jack’s ghost gives counsel and support to Rose as she makes her way through her 20s and 30s? I’ll tell you what the reaction would have been. People would have jumped off bridges.
If I was Cameron and Fox had told me they’re making a couple of Avatar sequels with or without my participation, I would have agreed to produce — no more than that. This would give me the time and freedom to create the next fresh movie. But no. Cameron has decided to be the Super-Sequel Guy.
Until I saw various comparison shots on DVD Beaver, I didn’t fully understand or accept, I suppose, that the Apocalypse Now Bluray would really and truly render the 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio that Vittorio Storaro originally captured. I thought the wider Bluray version might come from top-and-bottom cropping the 2 to 1 aspect ratio version that Storaro insisted upon in the various DVD versions over the years. But no. It really is wider. And is quite captivating for that.
I’ve only begin to dip into Lionsgate’s Apocalypse Now Bluray, but so far it’s glorious. The only problem (and this is entirely the fault of my system) is that the bassy explosion sounds are overwhelming the speakers on my 42″ plasma. (Dynamic range and all that.) I’ll never forget my first exposure to the magnificent sub-woofer vibration — like some great rumbling earthquake — that came out of the Ziegfeld speakers when I first saw AN in 1979.
This is my favorite still from the film. The instant I saw it projected onto the Ziegfeld screen I said to myself, “Vittorio Storaro is a serious rock star.” I knew he’d done beautiful work on Bernardo Bertolucci‘s The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, but the Apocalypse Now photography was thrilling, gleaming, “extra.”
It feels very strange to sympathize with Paris Hilton, but paparazzi are a pestilence. Watch this video and tell me what happened here (fat female paparazzo with plaid shorts has her foot run over when Hilton’s boyfriend inches his car forward) as a hit-and-run incident is delusional. Stuff happens, just desserts.
Deadline‘s Tim Adler is reporting that three out of the four principal roles in Roman Polanski‘s God of Carnage have been cast, and that the chosen are Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz.
Having seen the original B’way version, I’m guessing that Foster has the Hope Davis vomiting role, Waltz has the Jeff Daniels role (lawyer, compulsive cell-phone calls, Davis’s wife), Winslet the Marcia Gay Harden role (book on Darfur) and James Gandolfini‘s role (hardware store owner, Harden’s husband) is the one yet to be cast.
Filming of Yasmina Reza‘s Tony-winning play will begin in Paris next February, Adler’s story says, and wil last for 12 weeks.
Two days ago (i.e., Friday, 9.17) Vanity Fair‘s “Little Gold Men” columnist John Lopez posted a glowing review of Guillame Canet‘s Little White Lies, which he saw at the Toronto Film Festival. I saw it there also — my last TIFF screening — and couldn’t have felt more differently.
Little White Lies begins with a 30something party animal (Jean Dujardin) leaving a night club at dawn and getting slammed by a truck as he’s heading home on his scooter. Hands down, this is the most absorbing sequence in the film; no subsequent portion put the hook in like it.
But before long Canet’s ensemble cast leaves Paris for a vacation home in southwestern coastal France (the shooting location was Lege-Cap-Ferret, near Bourdeaux), and the film devolves into a kind of French Big Chill. But not really because there isn’t any generational looking-back and summing-up thing going on. It’s mainly a piece about middle-class drift and nothingness among 30- and 40-something Paris urbans. It meanders and meanders and then meanders a bit more. It lasts for 160 minutes, give or take — way too long.
This is a stock beef, but there’s so much smoking going on in Little White Lies that I began to feel a vague aching sensation in my lungs. It began to seriously anger me. I began asking myself if anyone in this film outside of the small children was capable of getting through a scene without lighting up. Yes, one or two characters didn’t smoke but otherwise it was a cancer marathon.
I was a bit confused by the allegiances of Marion Cotillard‘s character, who is apparently commitment-phobic. She appears at first to be the significant other of the banged-up scooter-crash guy, but then she announces at the end that she’s pregnant, but not necessarily, I gathered, by Dujardin. Could the father be the other 30-something, not-very-tall member of the group, a guy with a 14-day beard growth (Gilles Lellouche) with whom Cotillard is shown hanging with in a bedroom during the vacation portion? I lost the thread. Maybe because I dozed off for a bit.
I know that the cloying fellow (Laurent Lafitte) who wouldn’t stop discussing an ex-girlfriend named Juliette possibly being interested in getting back together was hugely annoying. I wanted him to drown in a boating accident. And I certainly found it tedious that an older-guy character played by Francois Cluzet (the Dustin Hoffman-resembling actor who starred in Canet’s Tell No One) was constantly angered about minor stuff all the time. Resolve it or lose it.
Lopez, on the other hand, callsLittle White Lies “a Gallic gem, and not just because you get to watch the immaculate Marion pout with a full glass of burgundy. [The film] could make for a boringly bourgeois exercise in self-congratulation if the opening scenes didn’t set the tone for just exactly what type of people these ‘friends’ are. It’s a complexly textured mix of farce and drama that generates from the care and delight Canet takes in measuring his characters’ massive imperfections.
“There are laughs, there is wine — believe us, there is wine — and there is an endless French summer of sexual confusion, narcissistic tomfoolery, and the sentimental celebration of friendships which flicker between noble motives and base needs, like an old light bulb in a dusty laundry room that somehow lasts for decades.
“Granted, the film can linger a little too long on certain scenes and beats, but when the summer is as lazy as it is in France, that is to be expected. The emotions and laughs are there, and at the end you feel as if you’ve escaped to a desert island with real friends–annoying, entertaining, self-absorbed, and sweet-when-they-can-swing-it friends. And isn’t that why we usually go to the movies?”
Apparently freaked or at least alarmed by recent negative reactions to I’m Still Here, his Joaquin Phoenix meltdown documentary, Casey Affleck has dropped the pose and confessed to N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply that “almost every bit of” I’m Still Here is pretend, put-on theatre.
To this I say bullshit. I believe that some or much of the doc may have been staged and performed, okay, but I’m convinced that it was inspired by genuine career despair on Phoenix’s part, and that a sizable portion of it came straight from his real heart, head and gut.
What happened, I strongly suspect, is that after I’m Still Here was shown at the Toronto Film Festival Affleck and Phoenix both realized they’d over-played their hand by persuading the media that Phoenix is an even bigger egoistic fool than anyone had suspected or realized, and that the only way to save Phoenix from a life of depression and skid-row dereliction is to claim it was entirely made up. Think about it — how could Cieply claim or prove otherwise? Once you start down the rabbit hole there are no guideposts, no rules…nothing but free-form improv.
I believe Affleck is doing what he can to save his brother-in-law from ruination. Because Phoenix has no future without a complete renunciation of the whole “act.” Everyone on the planet has been convinced there is no bigger asshole around. Right now Phoenix would have trouble getting hired as an assistant at Kinko’s.
“It’s a terrific performance, it’s the performance of his career,” Affleck tells Cieply in a story that went up this afternoon.
Affleck “was speaking of Mr. Phoenix’s two-year portrayal of himself — on screen and off — as a bearded, drug-addled aspiring rap star, who, as Affleck tells it, put his professional life on the line to star in a bit of ‘gonzo filmmaking’ modeled on the reality-bending journalism of Hunter S. Thompson.
“The reviews were so angry,” said Mr. Affleck, who attributed much of the hostility to his own long silence about a film that left more than a few viewers wondering what was real — The drugs? The hookers? The childhood home-movie sequences in the beginning? — and what was not.
“Virtually none of it was real,” Cieply writes. “Not even the opening shots, supposedly of Mr. Phoenix and his siblings swimming in a water hole in Panama. That, Mr. Affleck said, was actually shot in Hawaii with actors, then run back and forth on top of an old videocassette recording of Paris, Texas to degrade the images.
“I never intended to trick anybody,” said Mr. Affleck, an intense 35-year-old who spoke over a meat-free, cheese-free vegetable sandwich on Thursday. “The idea of a quote, hoax, unquote, never entered my mind.”
Wait….”a meat-free, cheese-free vegetable sandwich“? What has that got to do with anything? To me, this sentence suggests that Cieply’s story itself is a put-on. You know what? I’m getting sick of this. I say trust no human being entirely. You know who I trust? My cats. Otherwise believe none of what you read or hear and only half of what you see.
Phoenix turned himself into a bloated, pot-bellied pig wasn’t theatre — he clearly did that.
And I was so appalled and amazed by the scene in which Phoenix’s assistant poops on his boss’s face that I’m going to deliberately defy N.Y. Times-sanctioned “reality” and continue to believe it really “happened.”
An HE reader from Portland who saw a rough cut of Matt Reeves‘ Let Me In last June says that the murder-and-chase sequence (which I posted here yesterday) goes on a bit longer without cuts, and actually warrants comparison to the extended sequence in Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men that begins with the van ambush and the shooting of Julianne Moore‘s character.
Reeves’ camera “is in the locked-down position, and it remains there for another minute or so as the car gets hit and then rolls off the road to the bottom of a ditch,” he reports. “We see the destruction of the vehicle internally before cutting away to [turmoil involving Richard Jenkins’ character].”
In the clip “there are shots from inside the convenience store, while in the background of the shot we can observe the violence occurring. There are a few other scenes like this — a scene unfolds in the foreground with two characters conversing, and at the same time there is some very important visual information occurring in the background of the frame. It’s not blurry, but slightly visible while not being so flashy.”
Let Me In “is a fine remake in maintaining the tone and visual look of Tomas Alfredson‘s original, and that specific era of the early to mid 80s, but moving the setting to another geographical location.”
“The visual and tonal approach of the film, which is much different than Alfredson’s. It felt more subdued in places and in the way the action unfolds. At times the camera will maintain a lower visual perspective, trying to convey that of the main character, but not so obvious in a brow beating fashion that makes you think, ‘oh, it’s from his perspective.'”
Anton Corbijn‘s The American (Focus Features, 9.1) is a moderately soothing art piece and an excellent Machete antidote. After you’ve had your blood sausage and micro-waved tacos, The American will feel like a drink of cool mountain water. It’s certainly a tasteful walk (wank?) in the woods. You’ll feel unsullied when it’s over, and gratified that Corbijn and Focus Features respect you, and are not treating you the way Robert Rodriguez treats his fans. This is the other side of the mountain.
Georeg Clooney, Violante Placido in Anton Corbijn’s The American.
And yet there’s something about The American — a lot actually — that feels tastefully repressed and mummified. It’s vaguely Antonioni-ish but at the same time not really because it isn’t “about” any social zeitgiest thing. But it’s certainly aromatic and scenic. Martin Ruhe‘s photography is exquisite here and there.
The American is stirring, in short, for what it doesn’t do and for the meditative tone and cappucino atmosphere. But if the idea was to make some kind of thriller then forget it, folks. It’s a quietly unsettling thing from time to time, but it’s about eerie “uh-oh” feelings rather than pulse-quickenings. Which I was mildly okay with except for the ending, which is on another level entirely.
It’s about an assassin (George Clooney) hiding out in an Italian village and doing relatively little except making a rifle and rolling around with a local prostitute. But if female nudity does anything for you, and if you can let the thriller idea go and just roll with the easy glide of it all, it isn’t half bad and the finale — the last 20 minutes or so — is more than worth the price.
The American is mainly a piece about paranoia. About a man unable to live because he’s forced to use all his wits in order to not get killed. Living in a cave, a prison. Cautious, stealthy. And always haunted by the same thought — who and where are the predators? They’re definitely out there.
Jack (Clooney) is a professional killer who’s being hunted by certain parties, some of them clearly Swedish. His boss (Johan Leysen) suggests a job in an Italian hill town that involves constructing a special high-powered rifle for a female client (Thekla Reuten). While doing the work he strikes up a passing acquaintance with a local priest (Paolo Bonacelli) and an exceptionally good-looking prostitute (Violante Placido).
Speaking of which The American provides some gratuitous nudity that I would call wonderful, excellent, and good for the soul. I am calling it that, in fact. And it has a very nice red-lighted sex scene. Good for George and Anton during filming, and good for guys everywhere.
Corbijn is a celebrated photographer, and is known primarily for Ruhe’s exquisite lensing on Control, his debut film. But I have to say I wasn’t floored by some of the American compositions. Corbijn and Ruhe depend on a great number of close-ups and medium close-ups. There’s an early meeting in Rome between Clooney and Leysen that is all closeups and medium closeups, and I was frankly feeling bored fairly quickly. I regret saying that The American is not Control in color. I was hoping for some kind of Paul Cameron or Dion Beebe-level thing, but nope.
I wanted Bonacelli’s priest, whom I disliked immediately from the very first instant, to be killed. Every time he lumbered along with that hoarse voice and that wavy white hair and those facial jowls I went, “Oh, God…him again.” He’s way too fat and friendly and nosy. And he speaks perfect English, which seemed ridiculous for a priest from the Italian hill country. He’s the kind of Italian who sometimes turns up in American-shot movies set in Italy. A friendly guide, interpreter, counselor.
MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW:
There’s a moment at the very end when Clooney’s grim, somber-to-a-fault performance — monotonous and guarded to the point of nothingness, shut and bolted down — suddenly opens up. It’s when he asks the local prostitute to leave with him. For the first time in the film, he smiles. He relaxes and basks in the glow of feeling.
There’s a little patch of woods by a river that Clooney visits three times. Once to test his rifle, once for a picnic and a swim in the river, and then in the final scene. One too many, perhaps. But his final drive to this spot is almost — almost, I say — on the level of Jean Servais‘ final drive back into Paris in Rififi. For the second and final time in the film Clooney shows something other than steel and grimness.
The American is worth seeing for this scene alone, and for the final shot when a butterfly flutters off and the camera pans up.
The American director Anton Corbijn (l.) , George Clooney (r.)
There’s gunplay in The American, but it’s so abbreviated it’s almost on a “what?” level at times. Corbijn knows how to capture beautiful images but he doesn’t know much about shooting action, and apparently couldn’t care less.
There’s a scene in which a predator has the drop on Clooney and is right behind him, gun drawn and (as I recall) about to be pointed, and Clooney “senses” his presence and turns around and drills him. It’s that easy? There’s also a shootout in the snow — in a remote forest in Sweden — in the beginning. There’s a rifleman wearing snow gear on the ledge above, and Clooney is down below with his handgun…and suddenly he just shoots and drops the guy. Just like that?
Later on there’s another action sequence in which another Swede tries to kill him in the Italian village. Clooney is the victor again (if he wasn’t the movie would stop dead so I don’t consider this a spoiler) but he leaves the guy sitting there in a car with broken glass splattered on the road. Carabinieri and detectives would be swarming all over the next morning, and in less than an hour they’d be knocking on Clooney’s door, and they would find the hand-made rifle and the game would be over.
END OF MILD SPOILERS:
How curious, I’m thinking, that yesterday I posted a quote from former N.Y. Times critic Richard Eder that applies in a certain way to The American.
If Eder were reviewing this film today, as every critic in the country is now doing, he might say the following: “The American is handsome, meditative, elegiac and languid. It’s so coolly artful it is barely alive. First-rate ingredients and a finesse in assembling them do not quite make either a movie or a cake. At some point it is necessary to light the oven.”
By the way: I’ve never seen Richard Fleischer‘s The Last Run (1971), another movie about an elegant American criminal type (played by George C. Scott) hiding out in Europe and showing a certain facility with repairing and building things and doing the old laconic moody thing. I wonder if there are any other similarities. Anyone?
Manohla Dargis has been absent from her N.Y. Times film critic duties since…what, mid-June? I had assumed she’d taken time off for the writing of a book, or maybe some simple chill time in Paris, a favorite city of hers. Contemplation, battery-recharging, whatever. But nobody would say anything when I asked around this morning. Dargis didn’t reply. Nothing from mutual journalist pallies or Times colleagues. Silencio.
So I wrote her N.Y. Times editor, Lorne Manly, and said I didn’t recall any announcement in the Times about her taking time off. “We don’t tend to do announcements about leaves around here,” he replied, “but everything is fine and she’ll be back in action after Labor Day when her leave comes to an end. You’ll see her in Toronto, and you can catch up with her then.”
“So this wasn’t a book-writing sabbatical?,” I wrote back. “Just a plain and simple leave for the purpose of smelling the grass and the flowers and the coffee and…like that?” Manly’s response: “I’m sure Manohla will be happy to fill you in when you see her.”
So I asked some other folks if they’d heard anything. A Manhattan publicist said she was told Dargis “has been doing some graduate school work and perhaps writing a thesis,” but this is “very, very unconfirmed.”
I need to once more register outrage at the rape of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho on the just-out British Bluray (and the forthcoming U.S. version). Because no one, it seems, is mentioning or agreeing with what I said two months ago, which was that two aspect-ratio versions should have been included in the Bluray package.
It should offer the top-and-bottom-cropped 1.78:1 version and the 1.37:1 version that everyone, his sister and his brother-in-law saw in many theatres in 1960, and then on broadcast TV, VHS and laser disc for decades hence. Because the latter is the true-blue version that everyone should see. I feel like I’m going nuts as the only one on the planet taking pains to point this out.
No one is faulting the Universal Home Video guys for cropping the original version to conform to the 1.78:1 aspect ratio of plasma/LCD screens, but their failure to offer a concurrent 1.37:1 version is a case of visual vandalism, pure and simple. Alfred Hitchcock protected his 1960 classic so it could be shown in theatres and on TV with a 1.37 to 1 aspect ratio. Some theatres back then were using 1.37:1 or 1.66:1 aperture plates, but the Psycho norm was never intended to be 1.78 to 1. It was screened at this aspect ratio here and there and, okay, yes, it’s a tolerable a.r. if you want to watch Psycho this way, but it’s not the desired one. Anyone who claims otherwise either can’t “see” this or refuses to.
I recognize that 1.85 aperture plates had begun to be used by projectionists in the mid to late ’50s, but for the most part Hitchcock expected his film to be shown within ratios of 1.37:1 (next door to a perfect box) or 1.66 to 1 (moderate rectangle) because he knew that (a) 1.37 or 1.66:1 aperture plates were also in use and (b) he knew or certainly suspected that down the road most people would see Psycho on TV.
It is a stone fact that Psycho was shot to look best with a 1.37:1 aspect ratio — it’s obvious when you compare the versions.
And people who claim otherwise are either delusional or dishonest. They know the truth of it (and can see the obvious proofs in the 1.37 vs. 1.78 aspect ratio comparisons I posted on 6.11) but will nonetheless take a sip of coffee, put on their best earnest expression and say, “No, that’s not the case — Psycho was meant to be seen in a 1.78 aspect ratio.”
If I was U.S. emperor these people would be hunted down and prosecuted. I’m serious — I would literally press charges and seek fines and jail terms. What they’ve done — I’m not exaggerating — is precisely the same thing as taking a razor blade and slicing off the tops and bottoms of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” in the Louvre.
Think of it! Future generations may never see Psycho in the aspect ratio that it was shot in and meant to be seen in and clearly looks best in (1.37 to 1 framing offers breathing-space grace notes throughout the film). History is being made as well as censored, and all because of the high-def aspect ratio mandate of the times and the laissez-faire greed of Universal Home Video executives. (And I don’t mean Universal archivist/preservationist Bob O’Neil — he just handles the elements, doesn’t oversee home video.) Shame on these scoundrels.