Respect and farewell to Kevin Corcoran, the pint-sized actor in various Walt Disney flicks and serials — Toby Tyler, Old Yeller, The Shaggy Dog, Swiss Family Robinson, Pollyanna, Adventures in Dairyland, Savage Sam — who went on to work behind the camera in various capacities. Corcorcan, 66, died two days ago from colorectal cancer in Burbank. Tough break. “Every day above ground is a good day.” — Mel Bernstein (Harris Yulin) in Brian DePalma‘s Scarface.
This is an overworked thread but three or four days ago Cinemaholic‘s Amal Singh posted a list of the worst films by ten top-tier directors. Here’s Singh’s list along with my own choices or disputes, followed by a few career-worsties of my own. My heart isn’t really in this but I thought I’d post it out of boredom.
1. Oliver Stone‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Alexander. HE disputes: Savages, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Heaven and Earth.
2. Tim Burton‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Planet of the Apes. HE disputes: Agree on Planet of the Apes but also Alice in Wonderland.
3. Steven Spielberg‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: 1941. HE dispute: Always, The Terminal.
4. Ridley Scott’s‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Exodus: Gods and Kings. HE dispute: Prometheus, G.I. Jane
5. Coen brothers‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: The Ladykillers. HE agrees.
6. David Fincher‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Alien 3. HE agrees.
7. Clint Eastwood‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Hereafter. HE dispute: Firefox.
8. David Lynch‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Dune. HE agrees.
9. Woody Allen‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Scoop. HE agrees but feels Curse of the Jade Scorpion is just as bad.
10. Francis Coppola‘s worst according to Cinemaholic/Singh: Dracula. HE disputes: Jack.
I haven’t sat down and watched Criterion’s new Dressed To Kill Bluray (due on 8.18), but a recent review by DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze notes how it looks “extremely different” compared to Dressed to Kill Blurays issued by MGM Home Video (and released by Fox Home Video) on 9.6.11 and Arrow Home Video on 7.29.13. On top of which the Criterion version “seems vertically stretched (or the other two are horizontally stretched),” Tooze writes. “This makes the Criterion faces thinner and taller and the Arrow and MGM faces fatter. It is also more faded-looking and has a yellow/green tinge to it.”
I watched Nancy Allen in many films during the ’70s and ’80s, and her face was never as thin as it is in this DVD Beaver screen capture of Criterion’s Dressed to Kill Bluray…NEVER.
HE to Criterion’s Peter Becker (sent this morning): “I just looked at DVD Beaver‘s review and I’d appreciate your input if you could spare a moment or two. Has Criterion ever mastered a film in such a way that everyone comes out looking a few pounds thinner? It doesn’t look quite right to me. I’m guessing that it doesn’t look quite right to a lot of people. I’m not saying the MGM/Fox Home Video and Arrow versions are absolutely correct either (I don’t know anything), but they seem a bit more life-like and more naturally proportioned.
“I’ve long agreed with the age-old maxim that ‘you can never be too rich or too thin,’ but Criterion seems to have really taken that saying to heart, at least as far as Dressed to Kill is concerned. And what’s with the greenish-yellowish tint? And the much brighter exposure with the faded colors? I saw the film a couple of times in ’80 and I know it didn’t have this green-yellow thing.
I’ve been missing screenings of David Robert Mitchell‘s It Follows (Radius/TWC, 3.15) for nearly ten months now. It played at last year’s Cannes, Karlovy Vary and Toronto festivals (among many others) and also at Sundance ’15, and has generated nothing but primo buzz. The 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating speaks for itself. A few days ago Boston Herald critic James Verniere advised me to “check this out if you haven’t yet…early Cronenberg vibe.” I intend to, but the truth is that I’ve been ducking It Follows because of an impression that it’s yet another perils-of-promiscuity flick about a hot girl being stalked by something ghastly — a cliche that stretches back to John Carpenter‘s Halloween (’78).
On top of which is Mitchell’s somewhat tiresome narration of the above N.Y. Times video essay. The opening shot, he explains, starts with “a slow, calm, objective shot of this sort-of middle-class neighborhood”…sort of? The Shadow of a Doubt-like, tree-lined, middle-class atmosphere is a right-down-the-middle cliche that’s also right out of the Halloween and Scream films and dozens of others in this vein.
I spent a good portion of my non-working time last weekend watching the first ten episodes of House of Cards. The adventures of Frank Underwood are in no way boring, but neither do they take you anywhere. You just turn the show on and it flows along like a river and you with it, gliding along like a drugged zombie. And then the next episode starts up. And then the next. And you’re a little older at the end of each one. An acrid, agreeable, handsomely composed thing. Definitely engaging but to what end? Chess, power, occasional sexual favors, pressure, manipulation, setbacks, tough words, grim choices, fourth-wall puncturing, etc. Sometimes amusing, sometimes a bit draggy but not often. But it’s just plot. Not entirely but mostly. Gobs of it. A torrent. And I’ve got three more hours to go.
I’ve read a synopsis of the final three episodes and have therefore discovered there’s at least another whole season of House of Cards yet to go. I don’t know where I got the idea that Season 3 would wrap things up.
On Friday night I watched that BFI Bluray of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Red Desert (’64). It was my first time. I know the Antonioni milieu and had read a good deal about Red Desert over the years, so I was hardly surprised that it has almost no plot. It has a basic situation, and Antonioni is wonderfully at peace with the idea of just settling into that without regard to story. And I’m telling you it seemed at least ten times more engrossing than House of Cards.
Producer and former Paramount Pictures president Frank Yablans, who presided over that studio during its early-to-middle”70s golden period (The Godfather, Serpico, Paper Moon, Chinatown, The Godfather, Part II, Murder on the Orient Express) and then served as vice-chairman and COO of MGM/United Artists under Kirk Kerkorian, died earlier today at age 79.
Unlike his slightly older, still-living brother Irwin, a producer of second-tier “product” who was Billy Carter to Frank’s Jimmy Carter, the younger Yablans believed in class and quality. He produced Silver Streak (good comedy), The Other Side of Midnight (glitzy garbage), The Fury (second-tier DePalma), The Star Chamber (Peter Hyams crap) and Congo (crap).
Yablans also produced and co-penned screenplays for North Dallas Forty (a very good football film) and Mommie Dearest (classic, hilarious, over-the-top kitsch).
I’m not approaching Bong Joon-ho‘s Snowpiercer with an attitude. Seething class warfare on Runaway Train sounds like a great concept. But Joon-Ho’s Mother struck me as a little too Brian DePalma-esque, and I’m a bit afraid of that flourishy, operatic style. “There’s no doubting that Bong Joon Ho is a DePalma devotee in the same way that DePalma was a Hitchcock acolyte in the ’70s and ’80s,” I wrote five years ago. “Mother was by far the most interesting sit because of his immaculate and exacting composition of each and every element — deliberately unnatural, conspicuously acted, very much a director’s film.” Joon-ho himself has proudly declared that DePalma is a major inspiration. In my book that means “caveat emptor.”
This Wolf of Wall Street f-bomb video is a half-decent ADD summary of the film itself. The important comparison, of course, is with the various Scarface compilations. Indiewire/The Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth says there are 522 fucks in Wolf; a commenter below the Scarface video claims there are 218 in that 1983 Brian DePalma film; the Wiki list says 207. Wolf is the new all-time champ, but the first runner-up surprises me — Spike Lee‘s Son of Sam.
I saw Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount, 12.25) for the second time last night, and it felt just as wild and manic as it did the first time. (And without an ounce of fat — it’s very tightly constructed.) And yet it’s a highly moral film…mostly. Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and all the rest are never really “in the room” with these depraved Stratton Oakmont brokers. They’re obviously juiced with the spirit of play-acting and pumping the film up and revving their engines, but each and every scene has an invisible subtitle that says “do you see get what kind of sick diseased fucks these guys were?…do you understand that Jordan Belfort‘s exploits redefined the term ‘asshole’ for all time?”
Why, then, did I say that Wolf is “mostly” moral? Because there’s a subcurrent that revels in the bacchanalian exploits of Belfort and his homies. It broadly satirizes Roman-orgy behavior while winking at it. (Or half-winking.) Unlike the Queens-residing goombahs in Goodfellas, whom he obviously feels a mixed affection for, Scorsese clearly doesn’t like or relate to the Stratton Oakmont guys. But the 71 year-old director also knows first-hand how enjoyable drug-abuse can be for cocky Type-A personalities in groups, and he conveys this in spades. Wolf is clearly “personal” for Scorsese. Like everyone else who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, he is believed to have “indulged” to some extent. (Whatever the truth of it, 1977’s New York, New York has long been regarded as a huge cocaine movie.) One presumes that Scorsese is living a sensible and relatively healthy life these days, but boy, does he remember!
And it hit me last night that The Wolf of Wall Street is going to be enjoyed by audiences as a rollicking memory-lane drug party. Anyone who lived any kind of Caligula-type life in their late teens and 20s is going to get off on it. Because as deplorable and outrageous as the film’s party behavior seems, it’s also oddly infectious.
“When I said ‘realistic ’70s movie’ I meant one that excludes X-factor people. Nobody wants to admit this and I’m sure I’ll be called an elitist for saying so, but only semi-clueless bridge-and-tunnel people from lower-middle-class ‘meathead’ neighborhoods (i.e., those who weren’t connected to dynamic big-city culture) wore terrible hairstyles and laughably grotesque ’70s threads.
Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale in David O. Russell’s American Hustle.
“I was bopping around on the fringes in the mid to late ’70s and I never wore a fucking leisure suit or elephant collars or gaudy sunglasses or had godawful ‘big-hair.’ Okay, I wore flared jeans but I was mainly into T-shirts and Frye boots andBrian DePalma-styled khaki bush-safari jackets and that whole American Gigolo/Giorgi Armani/Milan-influenced thing (i.e., nifty sport jackets, Italian loafers, shirts with small pointed collars).” — from a 4.13.13 post called “Sartorial Nightmare.”
Movie Mezzannine‘s Sam Fragoso has polled several critics and posted several lists pondering the ten best films of the 1980s. What wankery. You can’t pick ten effing films to represent the cream of the crop of an entire decade. It has to be least 30 or 40. Here’s Hollywood Elsewhere’s picks, a blend of the best, the most significant, the most enjoyable and and the most influential. I’ve settled on 47.
Warning: It is the respectful opinion of this columnist that anyone who picks Brian DePalma‘s Blow Out as one of the great ’80s films either (a) has a serious aesthetic perception problem or (b) is being intentionally perverse. I tried watching the Criterion Bluray and I couldn’t get past the first 45 minutes or so.
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