There are dozens of links to articles stating that real-life Imitation Game hero Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the just-opened film) had a fascination with Walt Disney‘s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and particularly the poisoned apple given to Snow White by the wicked witch. There are also plenty of links pointing to articles about Turing having apparently committed suicide on 6.7.54 by biting into an apple laced with cyanide.
(l.) Alan Turing in his teens or early 20s; (r.) Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing in The Imitation Game.
Talk about a ripe cinematic image proferred on a silver plate! And yet there’s no poison-apple suicide depicted in The Imitation Game. In his 12.1.14 review of Morten Tyldum‘s film, New Yorker critic Anthony Lane asks “how could a movie director, of all people, not make something of that? Tyldum builds up to it, with scenes of Turing messing about with cyanide and handing out apples at work, but the payoff is missing.”
Do you want to read a Bluray review that hems and haws and tap-dances on the fence rail and goes badda-bop and badda-beep? Then read Martin Leibman‘s Bluray.com review of the brand-new William Friedkin and Owen Roizman-approved French Connection Bluray, which I creamed over a couple of days ago.
Clearly the new Bluray represents the film as originally shot and seen — 16mm-ish, rugged, gritty –with some reds and oranges popping through extra vividly. There’s no question this is the version to have and hold instead of that godawful blotchy, muddy, desaturated Bluray that Friedkin mastered and had released by Fox Home Video in 2009.
But Leibman, striving for a tone of balance and fairness and detachment, can’t bring himself to just say that. Largely because (we eventually learn) he doesn’t agree, but also because the changes haven’t been passionately explained.
“In a case like this, then, with an argument existing for one side” — i.e., the way the film looks on the new Bluray — “and none, really, for the other, it comes down to personal preference. The majority seems to prefer, or at least has demanded in the past, a transfer more in line with what this release offers.”
“Seems” to prefer? Hey, Martin…don’t go out on a limb!
Here’s my favorite line in his review: “At the end of the day, it makes for a fun little comparison but serious viewers have certainly been put in something of a pickle with this one.”
Believe me, Martin — nobody but nobody feels like they’re in a pickle with this thing. The bad version has been discredited, pure and simple, and the Munchkins are marching around the town square singing “ding-dong, the witch is dead.”
To my knowledge there’s only one person who might be saying that it’s a 50/50 thing, and that some might prefer the ’09 version and some the new one blah blah and what a pickle, and that’s MCN’s David Poland. Poland actually wrote the following when Friedkin’s bleachy version was released in early ’09: “The French Connection on Blu-ray is one of the great additions to the highest shelf of my Blu-ray library, up there with The Godfather, the Kubrick films, and Pixar.”
Leibman finally comes down on the side of the 2009 version near the end of the piece, not because of what he sees and feels or thinks but because the new version lacks the passionate defense or explanation from Friedkin to explain why the natural hues have been reverted back to.
“Considering Friedkin’s rather passionate and convincing argument on the old release, however, it’s difficult to argue against it, especially considering that there’s no such explanation here save for a blurb on the box proclaiming the approval of both the director and the cinematographer for the new transfer,” he writes.
Have you ever read such a load of gooey gelato bullshit in your life?
What Leibman is saying, in effect, is this: “Seeing is not believing because the visuals alone are not enough. A persuasive argument and/or explanation for the natural look and tone of this new transfer must be included on an extras supplement or on a printed statement of some kind, or the Bluray itself must necessarily suffer in the minds of critics like myself. It’s not enough, in short, for this new Bluray to look better. It has to be accompanied by a persuasive theory.”
If the “lacks a persuasive theory” remark rings a bell, it’s from Tom Wolfe‘s The Painted Word.
Here’s the mp3 of my 9.21 Sony headquarters chat with Moneyball director Bennett Miller. It’s odd but as we were speaking a voice was telling me that Bennett was going too slow and taking too long to articulate this or that response, but listening to it today he sounds fine. He explains it all quite clearly.
Bennett Miller at Sony headquarters at 550 Madison — Wednesday, 9.21, 4:40 pm.
It starts out a little raggedy (audio of my taking his picture, etc.) but I like it that way.
Excerpt #1: “Nobody wants to see a baseball movie, I thought to myself. Outside of this country [the genre is] challenging and even inside….historically they don’t [perform] as well as people might imagine. So I didn’t want to do ‘a baseball movie’, but baseball is an interesting medium by which to tell another story. It’s about Billy [Beane] coming to believe that there was a life that he was supposed to be living, that he wasn’t living. So like a Wizard of Oz or King Arthur story…it’s about somebody who’s displaced or dislocated with the life they have, and they’re a little bit lost, and they’re presented with some kind of impossible challenge, [the deal being] that if you do this thing, be it getting the witch’s broomstick or capturing the Holy Grail, your life will be restored.”
Excerpt #2: “I got a phone call from my agent, Bryan Lourd. I hadn’t really been a baseball fan since I was a kid, not that much, yes and no. And Bryan said, you wanna take a look at this thing? ‘Cause if you’re interested Brad would like to talk to you. So I read everything…the scripts, the book, thought about it…came up with an approach that I thought would be worth the labor of a few years. This is how I see it, I said to Brad. How do you see it?> And we were really compatible. I asked him questions. Why do you want to play this thing? I see it in such a way. If you don’t feel the seme way, no harm, no foul. If we’re all making the same movie, that’s fantastic. But if we’re not, no one’s going to be happy, ever.”
Excerpt #3: “I urge you…I urge you to speak to Mychael Danna, the composer. I think this was the hardest job of his life…one of the most difficult things to get right. He’s very proud of it and I’m in love with it…but it was hard to get to. It’s not literal. It’s not representative in the way that ‘cue’ music often is. The score attempts to conjure a kind of concsiousnes that allow us to observe the story instead of our telling it. The style of this movie is observaitonal. To conjure up a kind of conscousness…movies in which you feel you;re right inside the brain of the filmmaker. There are no fingerprints, but you feel as if you;ve got someone else’s brain in your head. It’s meant to release your own chemicals.”
The death of Polly Platt from Lou Gehrig’s Disease (a truly horrible way to go) was announced today. I knew and liked Platt, and I’m truly sorry that’s she gone. She was a whip-sharp, very perceptive producer and production designer who flourished in the late ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. In her prime she was a master at working this town. She knew everyone and everything. Her mind was incandescent. One of the sharpest, shrewdest and most nakedly honest X-factor creatives I’ve ever known.
I had a pretty good relationship with her in the ’90s when I wrote for Entertainment Weekly, People and the L.A. Times. She helped me with various “this is what really happened” stories from time to time, especially when she worked for James L. Brooks and produced I’ll Do Anything and Bottle Rocket.
She offered friendship, political support and wise counsel to Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson during the making of Bottle Rocket. The odd thing is that Platt told me she didn’t think that their movie, now regarded as a seminal ’90s film, had turned out all that well. She thought it should or could have been something else, I guess.
Platt started in the late ’60s as a production designer, and then segued into producing (and exec producing) in the mid ’80s with Broadcast News, Say Anything, The War of the Roses, the afore-mentioned I’ll Do Anything and Bottle Rocket, and The Evening Star. She did the production design on The Witches of Eastwick, Terms of Endearment, The Man with Two Brains, Young Doctors in Love, A Star Is Born (’76), The Bad News Bears, The Thief Who Came to Dinner, and four early movies with ex-husband Peter Bogdanovich — Targets, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc and Paper Moon. She was Bogdanovich’s greatest creative counselor and political ally, Cybill Shepherd notwithstanding.
Honestly? I got a little pissed at Polly in ’94 when I FAXed her a letter about how she and Brooks and Columbia should consider releasing both cuts of I’ll Do Anything — the allegedly disastrous musical version that nobody ever saw plus the non-musical version that went into theatres. Platt showed that letter to Pat Kingsley, the tough, combative publicist who was repping Brooks (or the film) at the time. I was told that Kingsley took that letter to an Entertainment Weekly bigwig and said, “Look how Jeffrey Wells, who’s reporting on our film, is crossing lines by suggesting changes in our film…he’s not respecting journalistic boundaries.”
That was easily the most sickening move I’d ever suffered at the hands of an adversarial publicist. I wrote that letter out of passion for the musical form and respect for what Brooks had tried to do. And Kingsley tried to beat me with it, and Platt gave her the stick. I didn’t speak to Polly for about a year after that.
I sucked it in and made up with Polly a year later, and she helped a lot — a whole lot — with an L.A. Times Syndicate story that I wrote about Bottle Rocket in ’96.
If anyone knows where and when Platt’s memorial service might be happening, please forward. She was a great lady to know and shoot the shit with. I’m sorry it ended for her after a mere 72 years.
Season of the Witch is down to an historic 1% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and it’ll still make $11 or $12 million by Sunday night. Which is more than Fair Game has made since opening in early November. Blue Valentine is 20 times better than Season of the Witch and most of the Snookis and Guidos out there would rather die than pay to see it. All because they want to hang with their friends. And to them, Nic Cage, Ron Perlman, murky medieval landscapes and CG demons fall under that category.
Joel and Ethan Coen‘s True Grit beat Little Fockers, earning $4.5 million in 3124 situations to Fockers‘ $4.2 million on 3675 screens. Again, how and why are people still going to see Fockers? It’s awful, it’s hateful, it’s not funny and it’s made roughly $115 million so far. Why? Because Fockers is a kind of comfort blanket, and because Ben Stiller, Robert DeNiro, Teri Polo, Owen Wilson, Blythe Danner, Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Alba are pallies who make audiences feel good on some level, no matter how rancid the film is. It’s diseased but that’s what most people seem to want. I need to breathe into a paper bag.
I allowed in this morning’s Season of the Witch review that the Rotten Tomatoes rating “might go up a tad when the kneejerk fanboys start weighing in.” But they didn’t. With no support from anyone, Dominic Sena‘s medieval calamity currently has one of the lowest Rotten Tomatoes ratings ever.
Two days ago my opinion of Dominic Sena was basically favorable for having directed one of my favorite guilty-pleasure flicks of all time, Gone in Sixty Seconds. Though released in 2000, I think of that Jerry Bruckheimer fast-car movie as a ’90s thing because it closed out the glory period when Bruckheimer was cranking out high-octane, smartly-written Chateaubriand guy movies hand over fist. I would have that time again.
I also half-respect the effort that Sena put into Kalifornia, a 1993 Brad Pitt serial killer flick that resulted in Sena doing a six-year stretch in movie jail, and Swordfish, the semi-decent Joel Silver-produced action-thriller which featured a superb (some would say close to legendary) bullet-time explosion sequence.
And then the night before last I saw Sena’s Season of the Witch, and my mouth fell open. We’re talking (a) medieval adventure crap, (b) a completely predictable poor man’s Peter Jackson film, (c) nothing to give a friggin’ damn about except for one character, (d) men on horseback amidst mud and grunge and disgusting corpses, (e) nonsensical CG applications in pursuit of cheap highs, and (f) ridiculously disparate dialogue (Bruce Willis-style macho wisecracks mixed with the same mock-formal English used in all Hollywood-goes-medieval movies), etc. It’s not even worth going into, trust me. Okay, I could get into it but this is basically what we all have to sit through in January and February. Sit there and submit and go “aarrrghhhh, mommy!”
My son Dylan summed it up as we left the theatre: “Why did they even make this movie?”
At first it seems as if Season of the Witch is going to sell aggressive misogyny in a medieval guise by advancing the notion that many 13th Century women were in fact witches and that, you know, they needed to be hanged and drowned and burned. But then Sena drops this and starts concentrating on just one presumed witch (played by Claire Foy), who may or may not be wicked or possessed by a demon or whatever.
Like I said yesterday, Foy’s is only performance with a semblance of intrigue in the whole thing. The problem is that she spends 85% to 90% of the film all greasy and grungy and inside a wooden cage on wheels. Sena uses her in one partially-concealed nudity shot near the finish, presumably because he could.
The screenwriter is a guy named Bragi F. Schut. That’s made up, right? Either way the name is now mud in more ways than one.
Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir, who was sitting three or four seats to my right, was rolling his eyes when he wrote his review, but he at least found the energy and the motivation to stick to the subject without meandering around.
Right now Season of the Witch has an 18% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It might go up a tad when the kneejerk fanboys (i.e., guys who will put up with any film that dabbles in the cinefantastique realm by throwing in a few CG werewolves and flying demons at the end) start weighing in. It cost close to $40 million, and will probably take in $13 or $14 million this weekend. I presuming that Relativity made it with the idea that the impressionable overseas market would line up no matter what.
Last night I attended the Manhattan premiere of Dominic Sena‘s Season of the Witch (Relativity, 1.17). No time to tap out a reaction but the most intriguing performance by far is given by 26 year-old Claire Foy (Little Dorritt), who plays a suspected witch. I wasn’t feeling chatty, but I did manage to snap this.
Not every subway movie poster gets trashed but some do, and I’ve come to suspect that it means something when a certain poster gets the treatment. All it means, I guessing, is that antisocial budding-criminal-class Manhattan teenagers aren’t that high on The Dilemma, but I repeat: only certain posters get defaced, and there’s always a reason.
Movie-wise, the first three months of any year are always rough-going. The second and third month, actually, because January, bad as it is commercially, is always covered by the Sundance Film Festival. And yet last February and March each offered a film that ended up on some 2010 ten-best lists: Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer on 2.19 and Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg nearly 30 days later.
Not this year apparently, to go by appearances and guesstimates. Which January, February or March openings will at least get me through the bad patch? A few seem intriguing, but ingredient- or expectation-wise I’m not seeing anything that’s remotely Ghost Writer or Greenberg-level. If somebody knows something I don’t, please advise.
The best January release (1.21) I’ve seen so far — certainly the one with the strongest performance — is Martin Pieter Zandvliet‘s Applause (1.21). It’s a straight character-driven drama that feeds off the magnetic Danish actress Paprika Steen, who plays a divorced stage actress with anger, alcohol and general-incompatibility-with-the-world issues. It opens during Sundance but Steen has been gathering admirers since Applause began screening two months ago.
There’s also Sang-soo Im‘s The Housemaid (1.21), which I saw and half-liked eight months ago in Cannes. “A sexual hothouse melodrama made in the spirit of Claude Chabrol and Brian DePalma,” I wrote. “Dark perversity within a well-to-do family…I wasn’t entirely floored but was done with it for the most part.”
Peter Weir‘s The Way Back opens the same day, but you can take your time. “I knew going in that anyone making a journey of 4000 or 5000 kilometers on foot will face terrible strain and hunger and hardship,” I wrote on 11.24. “What, then, did The Way Back tell me? It told me that making a journey of 4000 or 5000 kilometers on foot involves terrible strain and hunger and hardship.
Nor was I taken with John Wells‘ Company Men, which opens the same day. A drama of layoffs and despondency affecting three Boston-area white-collar guys (Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper), it “plays like an intelligent funeral in a nicely furnished minimum-security prison,” I wrote during Sundance ’10.
There’s also Richard J. Lewis‘s Barney’ s Version (1.14), which I panned on 12.6. “[It’s] so steeped in the lives and culture of Montreal Jewry that I was having trouble breathing,” I wrote. “Barney’s Version isn’t just about boomer-aged Canadian Jews who grew up and lived in Montreal, but will probably only play with boomer-aged Canadian Jews who grew up and lived in Montreal.”
There’s a chance that Gregg Araki‘s Kaboom and Hans Petter Moland‘s A Somewhat Gentle Man (which I’m watching on disc tonight) could pan out so let’s not say anything.
I haven’t seen Ron Howard‘s The Dilemma, Ivan Reitman‘s No Strings Attached (rumored to be a possible Norbit-in-the-ointment film that could diminish Natalie Portman‘s Oscar chances), Season of the Witch (i.e., the latest Nicolas Cage IRS-debt film) or The Green Hornet (forget it).
It’s too early to discuss February or March with any authority. But the only February release that looks even half engaging right now is Miguel Arteta‘s Cedar Rapids (Fox Searchlight, 2.11 — a Sundance ’11 premiere). And only three March releases stand out for me — Jonathan Liebesman‘s Battle: Los Angeles (Sony, 3.11), Jonathan Hensleigh‘s Kill The Irishman (Anchor Bay, 3.11) and Carey Fukunaga‘s Jane Eyre (Focus Features, 3.11).
I’d like to buy Nicolas Cage in a historical context, but I can’t. He can only portray present-day wackazoids. I realize that Cage has been making films hand over fist in order to pull himself out of a financial abyss, but there needs to be limits. The second I saw Ron Perlman , I went, “Okay, I know what this thing is.”
Season of the Witch is obviously CG porn. The more they pile on the visual effects, the worse films like this seem. The landscapes in this trailer are somewhat less convincing than those in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Some look worse than those swirling sand-cyclone effects in The Mummy.
So why hasn’t Tilda Swinton‘s heartily-praised performance in Luca Guadagnino‘s I Am Love popped through in this year’s Best Actress conversations? For one thing I Am Love is not universally admired. It’s all lavish and cranked up in a orchestrated Visconti-ish sense. That’s what’s sublime about it, of course, but at the same time it feels like an art-film exercise in “quotes.”
And yet the reviews Swinton got were something. “Tour de force” and all that. Consider this paragraph from New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, written as part of his I Am Love review last June:
“This is the film toward which Tilda Swinton has been tending. Put together the chill of her majesty in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; the brunt of her motherly love in The Deep End; the leonine wildness that ate her up, in Erick Zonca‘s Julia; and the awful sense, in Michael Clayton, of a woman waiting to buckle beneath the formal demands of a working life — package all that, and you get Emma Recchi, winding the ribbon from a newly unwrapped gift around the spool of her worried fingers.”
But by Oscar season rules, it’s probably naive to think that a performance might rank as a contender for one of the Best Actress slots on mere “quality of performance” alone. And it’s pretty clear to everyone, I think, that Swinton’s Love performance just isn’t punching through. She’s not percolating. She has no heat. The last thing Tilda did that got people’s attention was that Laurel & Hardy flashmob dance number at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
On the strength of her performance alone (and I Am Love itself, which is like Visconti back from the dead) Swinton is quite mesmerizing. Quite the passionate woman, and slightly mad by way of erotic abandon. But I don’t have to tell anyone that the game, certainly at this stage, is about much more than that.
In a few weeks, I’m told, Swinton will be in LA for a big round of screenings and then on to New York. Magnolia will be sending screeners to the entire Academy, SAG Nominating committee and HFPA for starters.
In an email, columnist Scott Feinberg says that Swinton “has a very real shot at a Best Actress nod. Obviously the field is very crowded, and it may be tougher to get some voters to watch a two-hour foreign-language flick that came out months ago, but I suspect that those who do will not only vote to nominate her but place her very high on their ballots.
“Keep in mind that she’s very popular among her fellow actors, who I imagine admire her fiercely independent streak on-screen and off. While her supporting performance in Michael Clayton — which was good, but far from her best — lost the SAG Award, it won the Oscar, and it’s worth considering who she beat if you want to appreciate just how well-liked/respected she is.”
Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone says “you never know with Tilda” and that “nothing is set in stone right now.”
Cinemablend‘s Katey Rich says this reminds her of “last year’s situation with Julia, another tiny movie with a terrific Tilda Swinton performance that couldn’t get any traction. During the NYFCO vote for Best Actress there was a strong cadre of support for Swinton, but Meryl Streep wound up winning anyway. This year it feels like even fewer people have seen I Am Love, and plus the performance is a lot less baity — more restrained, more technically impressive but less gritty, desperate, that kind of flashy stuff that really gets you noticed.
“So she probably doesn’t have a chance. And with plenty of other female performances out there that need a champion — Jennifer Lawrence, Nicole Kidman, maybe even Lesley Manville — there just might not be room for Tilda.”
Swinton’s p.r. rep claims that “there are many champions for this film out there. Like Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson, Richard Jenkins in The Visitor and Melissa Leo in Frozen River, this is a performance and film that was the talk of the fest circuit at Toronto and Sundance last year, and the film did very well for a foreign film at box office. Buzz may not be crackling at the moment but it’s out there. Actors have seen the film although several key awards-season bloggers calling the race haven’t yet.”
In Contention‘s Kris Tapley says, “I still need to watch it. It’s sitting on my DVD player. I imagine it’ll be the same for Academy members all season long unless they feel a great need to give it a look.”
Coming Soon‘s Edward Douglas says he “barely got through 45 minutes of the movie.”
The Oregonian‘s Shawn Levy says he “can’t see” a Swinton headwind kicking in “but then I was an outlier on this: I believe I gave I Am Love its lowest score on Metacritic. I found it unbearable. But bully for Ms. Swinton if they can do it, I guess.”
Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson says “the only way for Tilda Swinton — who is admired by critics and art house audiences alike — to make the best actress Oscar grade this year for I Am Love is for critics to make a fuss over her in their year-end wraps and ten-best lists, and for critics groups and the Golden Globes to reward her and thus turn the screener into a must-see for SAG and Academy actors. Swinton has been nominated once (and won, for Michael Clayton).
“Metascore critics (32) gave it a 79, which is a strong score — they love Swinton’s performance. Who will the critics groups single out for best actress? Will Tilda Swinton beat out Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, Annette Bening, Jennifer Lawrence, Lesley Manville and Diane Lane? The problem is that someone has to mount a viable campaign for her. Magnolia has not beaten the bushes for Oscars in the past. But the movie reached an almost $5 million gross which is good in today’s market.
“It’s not impossible.”
Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet says, “I’m probably not the best one to ask when it comes to this film, as I didn’t like it in the slightest. I can understand where people are coming from when they found it sensuous and passionate, like biting into that perfectly ripe piece of fruit, but it didn’t move me in that way. In fact it moved me in the opposite direction.”
But there are plenty of admirers out there, enough so that one can say that Swinton ought to at least be in the running along with the others. Do I think she has an actual prayer as things stand? Nope. I mean, not the slightest tendril of a slender reed of hope. But maybe I’m wrong, and I wouldn’t mind at all if I was.
Having seen about a half hour’s worth of New Line’s The Golden Compass, Fox 411’s Roger Friedmansaid today “it will be the big holiday smash hit for which Hollywood is so desperate, without a doubt. It’s full of fantastic animals, all busy shape-shifting, talking and clawing their way to the front of the screen. From what I’ve seen, not only kids but adults too will want to go back and see The Golden Compassa second time for the menagerie alone.”
Is Friedman saying that even special-effects-hating, CG-animal-despising movie columnists who felt tortured by the Lord of the Rings series will want to go back and see it a second time, etc.? Having liked The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, I’m hoping this atheist-minded CG children’s epic will be as good, but let’s take a couple of steps backward and remind ourselves that no one can tell anything about a movie from watching a half hour’s worth….nothing.
Anyone hip to marketing tricks knows that 30-minute product reels can be the equivalent of fool’s gold for early-word-spreading journalists. Product reels for Gangs of New York and World Trade Center hoodwinked several Cannes journalists into thinking the full-length films would be better than what they eventually turned out to be. I was once shown a 30-minute portion of Charles Shyer‘s The Affair of the Necklace and came out thinking, “Wow…could be Barry Lyndon-level!”