If You Don’t Love Mistakes…

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Either you’re the kind of movie hound who loves seeing the helicopter shadow during the opening credits of The Shining, or you’re not. If you don’t enjoy this kind of thing, fine, but Hollywood Elsewhere adores it. Ditto the pancake on Martin Balsam‘s face in Psycho, the kid plugging his ears in North by Northwest, etc. Because I watch films in a dimension outside of “suspension of disbelief.” My attitude is “I am suspending disbelief in my suspension of disbelief, and therefore I’m a free man on this train.” What are the other biggies that I’m missing?


Helicopter shadow is viewable only by watching a 1.37:1 version of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. HE to Leon Vitali: Any chance Warner Home Video will stream a 1.37:1 version?

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Major Bradley Cooper Factor in ’18 Best Picture Race

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A week ago Awards Circuit editor Clayton Davis posted a 2018 Best Picture spitball chart.

Reps for director Martin Scorsese have insisted that The Irishman won’t open later this year due to extra time being needed to digitally de-age Robert De Niro and others in the cast. “Scorsese and Netflix may or may not be back in the fray with The Irishman,” Davis allows. “The IMDB has it listed for 2019 but [many] believe that if the quality is there and competition is thinning, Netflix will go for its first Best Picture nomination after missing out with Mudbound last year.”

If — I say “if” — The Irishman decides to jump in at the last minute it immediately becomes the Big Kahuna of Best Picture contenders. The Scorsese stamp, the super-sized budget and the old-guy star power (DeNiro, Pacino, Pesci) will immediately establish dominance.

I said the other day that competing heavy-hitters will include Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk, Adam McKay‘s Backseat, Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman, Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots, Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, Steve McQueen‘s Widows, Bryan Singer and whatsisname‘s Bohemian Rhapsody, David Lowery‘s The Old Man and the Gun, Richard Linklater‘s Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, Mimi Leder‘s On The Basis of Sex, Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife and Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner.

A very strong voice within is saying “no, no, a thousand times no” to Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born (Warner Bros., 10.5), sight unseen for obvious reasons. Yes, the combination of New Academy Kidz and Lady Gaga fans could turn it into a contender and yes, Sean Penn says he loves it, but my God, the prospect of sitting through this film gives me the willies. To Boy Erased I say “really?”, and to Beautiful Boy I say “meth addiction?”

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Don’t Kid Yourself

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The same thing is happening in Hollywood. To me, I mean. As a columnist friend put it a couple of months ago, “The voracious corps — Penske Media, Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, Vulture, N.Y. Times and a few others — is trying to vacuum up every advertising penny in the sector and drive all competitors out.”

From “Introducing HE:(plus),” posted on 2.27.18: “Award-season ad revenue is finite, and over the last two or three years the big gobble guys have muscled their way into the banquet room like the Al Capone mob. They’ve been throwing their weight around and sucking up the oxygen and indirectly eating me (and others I could mention) alive, no lie.

“Plus the new whiz-kid agency buyers are, like their forebears of a decade ago, interested only in numbers and page-views, and not in HE’s sui generis cosmology as well as its longtime award-season selling point — not just numbers but the quality of industry eyeballs — the coolest directors, producers, screenwriters, Academy members, agency guys, ubers, early adopters, grumpy know-it-alls, etc.

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“Never?”

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Nately: What are you talking about? America’s not going to be destroyed.
Old Italian Man: Never?
Nately: Well…
Old Italian Man: Rome was destroyed. Greece was destroyed. Persia was destroyed. Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you think your country will last? Forever?
Nately: Well…forever is a long time, I guess.
Old Italian Man: Very long.

Watching this scene resonates because it’s been 49 years since this scene was shot, and 74 years since the occupation of Italy by U.S. forces. And because the old man (i.e., Marcel Dalio, the croupier in Casablanca) is sounding wiser and wiser these days.

If Art Garfunkel‘s Nately could see into the future, the answer to the old man’s question would have been as follows: “Well, America will start to eat itself in 2016 with the election of a bestial authoritarian demagogue as President, and with subsequent polls showing that between 35% and 40% of registered voters actually support this animal, largely due to his having exploited racial paranoia and resentment over perceptions that America’s European Anglo-Saxon heritage is being flanked and overwhelmed by persons of African and Middle-Eastern ancestry. Along with their agreement with his view that climate change is fiction. And this will be the beginning of a period of crazed American xenophobia, and from this will come eventual destruction.”

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Not So Fast, Team Wakanda!

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With $665,355,740 in domestic earnings thus far, Black Panther is obviously a huge, historic, worldwide phenomenon. But it’s not a Titanic beater, and it probably never will be. And currently it’s not the all-time third highest grosser either. Not by inflationary standards, it’s not.

By the close of ’98 Titanic ended up with $600,788,188. If you add the nearly $58 million haul for Titanic 3D, which was released in 2012, the lifetime domestic gross is $659,353,944. But let’s stick to the ’97 and ’98 earnings.

The 2018 dollar is 52.8% higher than the 1998 dollar. $100 in 1998 is equivalent to $152.76 in 2018, and so Titanic‘s initial haul of $600,788,188 translates into $917,735,286 by current monetary standards.

After saluting Black Panther this morning as “the number 3 movie of all time in the U.S.,” Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman speculated that it might hit $700 million before it’s done. If that milestone is achieved, Black Panther will be $217,735,286 behind Titanic‘s domestic ’98 tally. By inflationary criteria.

Titanic‘s worldwide earnings (including the 2012 3D re-release) are at $2,187,463,944 — i.e., roughly $2.2 billion, and at least 90% of that was earned in ’98. Right now Black Panther‘s worldwide tally is at $1.3 billion, or $1,2999,855,740.

Windmills

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I’m sorry but I like the poster more than the trailer for Terry Gilliam‘s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. The poster kills; the trailer is a “hmmm, yeah.” I’m doubly sorry that Gilliam won’t be able to screen his long-gestating film in Cannes next month, due to a lawsuit with Portugese producer Paulo Branco. Costarring Jonathan Pryce, Adam Driver, Stellan Skarsgård, Olga Kurylenko, Joana Ribeiro. Who remembers Lost in La Mancha? It doesn’t feel like it popped 16 years ago, but it did.

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On The Other Hand…

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Eric Kohn‘s 4.7 Indiewire piece about the Netflix-vs-Cannes brouhaha mentions a significant point, which is that a law overseen by France’s culture minister requires 36 months between a film’s French theatrical release and its streaming debut. So if Netflix were to theoretically commit to theatrical openings this year for its five films slated for the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, the company wouldn’t be able to stream them in France until 2021. That is beyond absurd. A six-month window would be more like it.

Kohn and Anne Thompson‘s latest Screen Talk:

Can’t Wait To Be Bludgeoned

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…into submission by this thing, sitting there in my seat and getting pounded, elbowed, waffle-ironed and slam-banged for 156 minutes. And it’s all about perks, pomp and paychecks…an army of filmmakers hauling it in, and not so much as a taste for Hollywood Elsewhere. This movie will do nothing but sap and impurify my precious bodily fluids.

Menace to Cinematography

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I’ve been wondering all my life why Orville Nix was so far from the Presidential motorcade when he captured his crappy footage on 11.22.63. The motorcade route was widely known, having been published in the local papers. Why was Nix so far away from Elm Street, a half-block to the north? Nix just before the big moment: “I can hear the motorcade coming. It’ll be coming down Elm any second now, but I don’t want to get too close. It’ll make for a better shot if I can capture the whole panorama. True, I won’t get a closeup or even a medium shot of the President and Mrs. Kennedy, but the grass and the asphalt road and the trees and the blue sky are just as important, if not more so.”

And what about that gifted cinematographer Abraham Zapruder? He wasn’t aiming his 8mm camera properly, and so most of what he captured was above the JFK limousine. In fact Zapruder almost managed to miss the grisly Kennedy head shot. 85% to 90% of the image is about Dealey Plaza grass — 10% or 15% of the Zapruder image, at most, shows the limousine and its occupants. Zapruder just barely captured what happened. He nearly missed it entirely.

Zapruder and Nix were typical suburbanites with typical photographing skills. Both clearly believed in the importance of touristy wide shots, and had no apparent use for MCUs or close-ups. If only someone with a knack for decent framings had been on the scene. If young Steven Spielberg, 16 or 17 years old at the time and visiting Dallas with his mother for some reason, had been at the base of the grassy knoll and shooting with an 8mm Kodak wind-up, history would have been in his debt.

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Know What A Mule Is?

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It’s time for another scolding about another mispronunication. Case in point: The last name of special prosecutor Robert Mueller. It’s a German name, of course, and the easiest explanation is to break it into two syllables. The first syllable is pronounced like “mule” and the second is pronounced “lehr.” And yet every cable news and radio announcer pronounces it “muller” — first syllable “mull” (as in mulling something over) followed by “lur.” Film mavens are familiar with the still-living German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl, and that his last name has always been pronounced mule-ler and not muller. And don’t forget Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

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HE to Netflix: Sheath Your Sword, Show Cinema Love

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It was reported yesterday that Netflix is threatening to withdraw five major films, including Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Paul Greengrass‘s Norway and Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind, that were slated to premiere during next month’s Cannes Film Festival. Netflix is angry about a decision last year by festival topper Thierry Fremaux to exclude their films from competition, which was prompted by Netflix’s refusal to book films theatrically in France. Withdrawing these films would be Netflix’s “fuck you” to the festival and French exhibitors combined.

HE to Netflix: You should bend on this one. You really should. Your no-theatrical-release policy has cast a pall over the film industry. I’m not saying that a good film going straight to Netlix is necessarily cause for mourning on the part of its makers and fans, but a lot of people in this industry feel that way. You have to acknowledge that the faith of theatrical is in everyone’s bloodstream, and that you can’t just say “no theatrical, fuck off, we live in a streaming world, get used to it.” That’s harsh. That’s cruel.

Everyone is presuming that you’re not going to open Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman without an initial theatrical opening of some kind, so you’ve already capitulated to some extent. Can’t you loosen up a bit more?

Due respect but from my perspective you’ll be doing a rotten, rotten thing by preventing Cuaron’s film from playing in Cannes, not to mention the Greengrass, the Welles and Morgan Neville‘s Welles documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. Not to mention Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark. Bad karma, bad vibes, too much ego.

Yes, exhibition has all but divested itself from quality-level films and has devolved into a brothel of CG spectacle and almost nothing else, but great cinema has been nurturing and flourishing in theatres for the last century or so, and you can’t just say “okay, no more theatres” just like that. Cinemas are not just places to project images but churches of communal worship — chapels, cathedrals, temples, mosques, synagogues and fundamentalist Elmer Gantry tents. You can’t just raise your hand and tell a worldwide community of movie lovers that they’ll have to do their praying at home now. You can’t just shut all that down. It’s wrong.

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No-Go on “Quiet” Aliens

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Hollywood Elsewhere disapproves of the Quiet Place creature design. A large brown praying mantis with a human-skull head with moving parts that pop in and out. I didn’t believe it. All I saw was yet another competitive CG creation, built by designers who are looking to create a cooler-looking monster than the one they all saw in the last big monster film.

You know what would be cool for a change? Non-CG Tom Savini-styled monsters. All makeup, nothing digital, played by actors in makeup and no deep-register gurgling. The monsters in Cowboys & Aliens made that same damn gurgly sound.

Imagine if the Quiet Place monsters were seven-foot-tall bipeds who were bald and howled like cats and sucked the blood out of humans for nutrition — if, in short, they looked, sounded and acted like James Arness in The Thing. Absurdly primitive, of course, but at least it would be different and even wowser in the midst of today’s creature-design dictatorship.

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