I finally got around to reading Steven Zaillian‘s 12.1.08 draft of Moneyball, or a portion of it. And I can kinda see why a producer-manager friend passed along word about it being “terrific, and why Brad Pitt signed on. But the entire Sony staff, Amy Pascal included, was shocked to read the new script which had been substantially rewritten — a whole different movie.” Again, if anyone can please send along the Pascal freak-out draft, I’ll read both and run a comparison piece.
Could The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 — a superior version of a pretty good, much-loved ’70s film — signify the launch of a new wave of ’70s remakes? Not a bad idea on the surface, but which ’70s films are conceivably ripe for plucking? I’ve looked at a list of the 100 most admired ’70s films and thought it over, but not that deeply or thoroughly.
The key would be to avoid the landmark ’70s films and remake the ones that seem to have a shot at fitting into the 21st Century — i.e., those with a certain fluidity of theme which seem less iconic and invulnerable. This obviously leaves out remakes of the Godfather films, A Clockwork Orange, Chinatown, Barry Lyndon, etc. I’ve come up with 21 that could work again — maybe.
M*A*S*H (’70), d: Robert Altman. Verdict: Conceivably. The ’60s ‘tude and loose-shoe alchemy that went into Altman’s original could never be duplicated or imitated, and what would be the point if someone managed a half-decent job of this? But the premise — hepcat military surgeons saving the lives of soldiers and getting with away all sorts of irreverence and hooliganism during their off-duty hours — is eternally cool. Transplant to Iraq or stay with the Korean War?
The Gypsy Moths (’69), d: John Frankenheimer. Verdict: I’m not sure. Maybe. A troupe of existential wanderers/death-tempters in the form of skydivers interact with residents of a small town prior to and after a local performance. Do skydivers do this any more? (Forget the year of release — Moths is a ’70s film.)
The Outfit (’74), d: John Flynn. Verdict: Yes! As long as they remake it in the same hardball, stripped-down fashion of the original, which costarred Robert Duvall, Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (’75), d: Milos Forman.Verdict: Maybe. It has a kind of timeless appeal. There are probably tens of millions of under-30s who’ve never heard of the ’76 original, much less seen it. Casting suggestions for the new McMurphy and Nurse Ratched?
Mean Streets (’73), d: Martin Scorsese. Rethought and reconfigured, the story of a flawed but at least semi-focused ne’er-do-well doing what he can to protect and guide a throughly irresponsible and self-destructive friend could work again.
Last Tango in Paris (’72), d: Bernardo Bertolucci. Verdict: Throw out the title and the Paris locale and go with the basic erotic tale of a moody, melancholy man in his late ’40s or early ’50s having a nameless, identity-free affair with a girl in her early 20s. Most actors would be scared stiff of the Brando footprint but maybe.
Five Easy Pieces (’70) d: Bob Rafelson. Verdict: Definitely. A musically talented pianist with avoidance issues and irresponsible tendencies going back home to confront his hated father, etc. This could easily be redone.
Other potential 21st Century adaptables: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Scenes from a Marriage, Day for Night, Days of Heaven, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Hospital, Shampoo , The Last Detail, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Klute, Sunday, Bloody Sunday, The Candidate, Save the Tiger, Heaven Can Wait. Comments?
About ten days ago I ran a short comparison piece about The Hangover‘s Zach Galifianakis vs. Humpday‘s Joshua Leonard — similar faces, physiques (okay, Galifianakis is bulkier), attitudes and personalities, and the exact same beard (except for Zach’s being darker than Leonard’s, which is light brownish). Except last week I saw The Hangover and I re-saw Humpday last night, and there’s really no comparison — Leonard is by far the funnier and more charming of the two, and a much more fluid and readable and charismatic actor.
Humpday‘s Josh Leonard, The Hangover‘s Zach Galifianakis.
Galifianakis doesn’t have that much of a role in The Hangover. He’s playing the overweight man-child fingerpaint jerkoff, shuffling around in his underwear with his big pot belly making one-note cracks and acting like he’s 14 or 15, no older. Plus he has a higher-pitched voice that doesn’t have a whole lot of flavor or feeling. Leonard is developmentally arrested as well (stuck in his early to mid 20s) but he has this smooth buttery seductiveness and a lot of mirth and b.s. and oozy charm. He also seems compulsively, naturally honest. His character is that way, I mean, but Leonard himself seems to have a kind of unpretentious natural-dude thing going on. He’s a little like Owen Wilson, only warmer.
In a recently-posted piece called “Grainstorm, My Ass,” Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny says my 6.4 complaint about the extra-vivid grain in the new Dr. Strangelove Bluray is “all wet” and that I “need to recalibrate my monitor,” etc. His basic point is that director Stanley Kubrick was always a grain freak and that Strangelove is supposed to look as if a swarm of monochrome Egyptian mosquitoes are flying around the heads of Peter Sellers, George C. Scott Sterling Hayden, etc.
The problem is that he’s ignored a paragraph that precisely explains what I meant. I said it isn’t that the presence of Strangelove grain that bothers me per se but the way it seems much more pronounced than on any previous home video rendering.
“I understand and respect the fact that Dr. Strangelove (’64) was always intended to look somewhat grainy” I said. “I realize that the inside-the-B-52 scenes used source lighting and that the combat footage outside Burpleson Air Force base was supposed to resemble newsreel footage, and these conditions were meant to result in stark and unprettified images. Which is fine.
“But I’ve been watching this film for decades and the Bluray version is easily the grainiest rendering yet. The grain isn’t just noticable — it’s looks much more explicit.”
This DVD Beaver comparison of the various Strangelove versions make it clear the Bluray rendering is brighter and sharper and thus more grain-vivid. My point is therefore proved — just look at the differences. Glenn Kenny and other detractors have therefore been proved wrong. Case closed.
Tony Scott‘s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Columbia, 6.12) , which I saw last night, is an unquestionably better film — more rousing and flavorful, zippier and craftier — than the 1974 Joseph Sargent original. I haven’t time to do a review and that would be stretching my agreement anyway, but it’s a very satisfying summer-crime fuckall flick. A retread, yes, but with an attitude all its own…pow!
Scott’s Pelham is first-rate crackerjack escapism because (a) it knows itself and is true to that, (b) it’s content to operate in its own realm (i.e., isn’t trying to top the chase sequences, effects and explosions in the last big urban actioner…it’s not playing that game) and (c) it’s just a solid all-around popcorn movie,full of focus and discipline. Scott exhibits the same precision and intelligent pizazz he used for Man on Fire and Crimson Tide. Is Pelham some kind of drop-to-your-knees golden fleece movie? No — just another urban slam-banger but smart, clever and muscle-car sweet.
The New York subway-kidnap hostage thriller has more intricate plotting than the ’74 film, richer characterizations of the top MTA guy (Denzel Washington in the old Walter Matthau role) and top-dog hostage-taking badass (John Travolta in the Robert Shaw role) and a slew of supporting performances across the board that are much more vivid and interesting than those from the class of ’74, and at the same time less broad and farcical.
Plus the Travolta and Washington characters are more psychologically layered; more work has put into their rationales and backstories. In hindsight Matthau’s performance seems humdrum and almost glib in comparison to Washington’s. And Travolta…my God, he’s a friggin’ madman in this thing! Fierce, irate, flying off the handle, lunging — his finest bad guy since the “”ain’t it cool?” guy in Broken Arrow. And James Gandolfini‘s New York Mayor isn’t the buffoon figure from the ’74 film — he’s playing a rationale, practical, somewhat full-of-shit politician, and he does so with an unforced attitude..
The 2009 Pelham was made by a guy who understands and respects the original, and who sincerely wanted to make a better film — and he did! Integrating it very nicely and believably into a 2009 realm. And very grippingly and thrillingly. There’s no boredom to be had, and it never overcranks it. And if I say any more this’ll be a review, which I promised not to write.
The forthcoming 45th anniversary Dr. Strangelove Bluray (Sony Home Video, 6.16) is more than a visual disappointment — it’s a flat-out burn. I paid $35 bills for it yesterday afternoon and I’m seething. It’s hands down the worst grainstorm experience since Criterion’s The Third Man because Sony’s preservation and restoration guy Grover Crisp went the monk-purist route in the remastering and retained every last shard of grain in the original film elements. No John Lowry-styled finessing whatsoever.
Capture from the new Dr. Strangelove Bluray, out on 6.16.
Captured from the 2001 “special edition” DVD.
I understand and respect the fact that Dr. Strangelove (’64) was always intended to look somewhat grainy. I realize that the inside-the-B-52 scenes used source lighting and that the combat footage outside Burpleson Air Force base was supposed to resemble newsreel footage, and these conditions were meant to result in stark and unprettified images. Which is fine. But I’ve been watching this film for decades and the Bluray version is easily the grainiest rendering yet. The grain isn’t just noticable — it’s looks much more explicit.
I’m speaking of an aesthetic concern common to all Bluray discs of older black-and-white films, which is that Bluray masterings and Bluray viewings on any decent-sized plasma or LCD screen (I have a 42-incher) tend to make the untreated natural grain elements in an older monochrome film seem much more vivid and distinct. The result is that this new Bluray version could almost be called a kind of remake. It’s Strangelove reshot in a low-lying Egyptian swamp with Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott, Slim Pickens and Keenan Wynn covered in swarms of micro-sized mosquitoes.
For comparison’s sake I popped in my favorite Dr. Strangelove DVD, which is the 2001 “special edition” with the full 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio intact. My Sony Bluray player and 42-inch plasma screen makes this version look a bit grainier than it did on my old 36-inch Sony analog flatscreen, but at least the grain isn’t amplified and underlined like it is on the Bluray, and the alternating 1.33 to a and 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio means you’ve got a taller and fuller (i.e., more aesthetically correct) image to boot.
Repeating the rant and caveat emptor — the visual textures contained in the new Strangelove Bluray make it a total visual rip. Do not buy this thing. If you have an old set with a seven-year-old DVD player or a newish plasma or LCD with a Bluray player, buy the 2001 “special edition” Strangelove and stay with it. It obviously doesn’t have the image density that the Bluray version has but you’ll be seeing more of what Stanley Kubrick originally shot and it looks reasonably acceptable in terms of sharpness and monochrome tonal correctness, etc.. And it looks somewhat less grainy and is therefore less problematic. Not a perfect rendering but better than the Bluray.
I obviously haven’t addressed the Bluray extras — the documentaries, the intro section and chaptering graphics, the packaging, etc. All of these elements are fine, entertaining, attractive, stimulating, first-rate.
Brad Pitt signing autographs or shaking hands or something in the vein outside the Salle de Presse following this morning Inglourious Basterds press conference.
Inglourious Basterds costar Diane Kruger (l.), director-writer Quentin Tarantino — 5.20, 11:42 am.
French actress Melanie Laurent, who gives one of the film’s two standout perfs as Jewish refugee who inherits a Parisian movie theatre. (The other is given by Christoph Waltz as the brilliantly evil Col. Hans Landa.)
Costars Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Brad Pitt
Here’s the opening of this morning’s Inglorious Basterds press conference, following this morning’s 8:30 am screening. And here’s an mp3 of most of what was said. About 13 or 14 minutes in director-writer Quentin Tarantino delivered a great riff on what the Cannes Film Festival so special. I’ll try and find and isolate and run it as a stand-alone. As for the film…
It’s not great. It’s a fairly engaging Quentin chit-chat personality film in World War II dress-up. It’s arch and very confidently rendered from QT’s end, but it’s basically talk, talk, talk . Tension surfaces in a couple of scenes (especially the first — an interrogation of a French farmer by a German officer looking for hidden Jews) but overall story tension is fairly low. A couple of shootouts occur but there’s no real action in the Michael Mann sense of the term except for the finale. No characters are subjected to tests of characters by having to make hard choices and stand up for what they believe, and nobody pours their heart out. What they do is yap their asses off. Cleverly and enjoyably at times, yes, but brisk repartee does not a solid movie make.
The theme, I suppose is the penetrating and transformative power of film. The secondary theme is a Jewish revenge fantasy against the Nazis. (Costar Eli Roth called it “kosher porn” in this sense.) No emotional currents, no sense of realism and no characters you’re allowed to really and truly enjoy and care about. That said, the two best performances are given by Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa — a great malicious Nazi — and Melanie Laurent as Shoshanna Dreyfus, a French farm girl who escapes Landa’s grasp and winds up running a Parisian cinema.
Inglourious Basterds is probably too talky to lure the knuckle-draggers. The chat really does seem to weigh things down in the middle section. It’s an arch exercise in World War II genre filmmaking, a kind of filmic valentine for people who love film and film culture, and a put-on about World War II movies.
I ran right up to the Orange wifi cafe after escaping from Lars von Trier‘s Antichrist, which had begun at 7:30 pm in the Salle Debussy. I sat down and wrote for a solid hour, so charged by what I’d just seen and what had just happened — easily one of the biggest debacles in Cannes Film Festival history and the complete meltdown of a major film artist in a way that invites comparison to the sinking of the Titanic — that I didn’t pay attention to the fact that my plug adapter wasn’t giving power.
The computer went down and I lost everything. Seven or eight really
good paragraphs.
It’s now 10:42 pm and the Orange cafe is about to close. It’s over and finished and I’m sick of this day. It’s been one thing after another today (heat, sweat, lost power cord) and I know when I’m beaten and drained. I’ll sit down and write more again tomorrow. But my God, what a screening! What a reaction! Critics howling, hooting, shrieking.
There’s no way Antichrist isn’t a major career embarassment for costars
Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and a possible career stopper for Von Trier.
It’s an out-and-out disaster — one of the most absurdly on-the-nose, heavy-handed and unintentionally comedic calamities I’ve ever seen in my life. On top of which it’s dedicated to the late Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, whose rotted and decomposed body is now quite possibly clawing its way out of the grave to stalk the earth, find an axe and slay Von Trier in his bed.
Here’s a portion of Von Trier’s “director’s confession” from the press book:
“Two years ago I suffered from depression. Everything, no matter what, seems unimportant, trivial. I couldn’t work. Six months later, jsut as an exercise, I wrote a script. It was a kind of therapy, but also a search, a test to see if would ever make another film.
“The script was finished and filmed without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half of my physical and intellectual capacity. Scenes were added for no reason. Images were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking. They often came from dreams I was having at the time, or dreams I’d had earlier in my life.
“In any case I offer no excuses for Antichrist. Other than my absolute belief in the film — the most important film of my entire career!”
A man whom I’ve admired and respected for many years has lost his mind for the time being, or at last lost it while he was writing and shooting the film. I just can’t fathom how the director of Breaking The Waves and Dancer in the Dark and Dogville could have made something so amateurishly awful. The decent and compassionate thing would be to forget Antichrist and to forgive Von Trier. To put it aside and move on on all fronts.
I know that if I had been in Dafoe or Gainsbourg’s shoes I would have come to my senses and walked off the film. I would have said “go ahead, sue me — I welcome a lawsuit!” and walked home proudly and at peace.
Marina De Van’s Ne Te Retourne Pas, a Cannes midnight selection that looks/seems roughly similar to David Lynch’s Lost Highway, stars Monica Bellucci and Sophie Marceau as (it would appear) the same character. The Paris Match cover caught my attention as I was walking around last night.
It took me a few seconds to realize who this is. Taken in Cannes either 28 or 30 years ago, I’m guessing. If I say for which films I’ll be giving it away.
Poster art for Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables. Brute commandos vs. Hugo Chavez, or something like that. Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brittany Murphy, Dolph Lundgren .
I’m not sure about my ability to sit down and really watch Watchmen again when it comes out on DVD and Bluray a little more than two months hence. With my full undivided attention, I mean. I suppose I could half-watch it — i.e., write the column while running it in the adjacent living room as a kind of white-noise distraction, eyeballing it from time to time. But I do that all the time anyway.
The Bluray Director’s Cut edition (out 7.21) contains an extra 25 minutes of footage (including “more Rorschach” and “a scene of Hollis Mason‘s death”) for a grand total of 186 minutes. But the big attraction is an expanded capability sidelight called Warner Bros. Maximum Movie Mode along with a live Bluray/Facebook hookup that I don’t want to know about.
The MMM thing, however, includes (a) director walk-ons (i.e., Zack Snyder) with scene analysis, (b) picture-in-picture video from the cast and crew, (c) side-by-side comparisons of the graphic novel and the film; (d) timeline comparisons of our world events to those from Watchmen; plus (e) intersting docs and photo galleries. At least it’s a full-load package. Not bad for $36 and change.
(I would have included art of the Watchmen Bluray, but the wifi in the apartment is so weak and crappy that file transfers don’t work.)
“I don’t really have a plan, because [I] don’t know what the next 18 months will bring and I don’t want to think that much about it. I like not having a safety net. I like the risk of not knowing. But I will be involved in all kinds of great things.”
The preceding was spoken by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and published today in a N.Y. Times piece by Jennifer Steinhauer about this time and influence in Sacramento beginning to wind down. The quote is disingenuous in certain ways. It got me all the same because it reminds me of something I once read in one of Henry Miller‘s books from 1930s Paris, and because I myself tend to think this way from time to time.
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