This morning Hollywood Reporter award-season analyst and handicapper Scott Feinberg finally jumped into the Nate Parker thing (along with THR colleague Gregg Kilday) with an assessment piece that includes four quotes from Academy members about Parker and his situation. Tab Hunter and documentarian Mitchell Block want to cut Parker a break while producer Marcia Nasatir and actress Rutanya Alda (Mommie Dearest) are quite negative about the guy.

The article mostly reiterates a general feeling around town that Parker and his film are fucked as far as Academy or guild member opinions are concerned. I think it’s too late in the cycle to just repeat this by way of quotes. Feinberg should have filed right after the Deadline/Variety stories broke on Friday, 8.12, and certainly in the immediate wake of Variety‘s 8/16 report, filed by Ramin Setoodeh, about the 2012 suicide of Parker and Jean Celestin‘s unnamed victim.

Nasatir: “This is going to set off a thing in this town the likes of which we’ve never seen. I personally find it really hard to separate the man from the film when he wrote, directed and starred in it. Do I want to see a movie from someone who has committed an assault against a woman and who I do not think recognizes his guilt? Right now, based on what I’ve read, I would not go to the movie.”

Read more

When Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker go to meet the aliens (called Heptapods) in the latest Arrival trailer, we see a smokey circle form against a glass barrier. It seems obvious to me that Villeneuve chose this image because it summons memories of Gore Verbinski‘s The Ring (’02) and more originally Hideo Nakata‘s Ringu (’98). The message is clearly “watch out, possibly something malevolent.” And yet that doesn’t appear to be where Arrival is coming from. Go figure.

Heptapod smoke circle in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.

Creepy circle image from Gore Verbinski’s The Ring

A new 4K DCP restoration of Michael Mann‘s Heat will screen at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater on Wednesday, 9.7. I’ll be in Toronto that evening, rested and ready for the Thursday am start of the Toronto Film Festival. (TIFF had a 20th anniversary 35mm screening of Heat last year.) Christopher Nolan will moderate a post-screening discussion with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and other cast members.

This means, of course, that the 4K restoration will result in a better quality Bluray. (Sometime in the fall?) Why did the homies at Warner Home Video put out such an unexceptional Heat Bluray in the first place? It’s not “bad” looking but it’s far from a knockout. The 4K Heat was restored by Mann and Stefan Sonnenfeld of Company 3. The Bluray will be apparently be released by Fox Home Video.

Read more

The Birth of a Nation is not my idea of a great film, but it’s definitely see-worthy — a strong first effort, a powerful myth, an intensely powerful narrative. A month from now and two weeks after the big Birth of a Nation Toronto gala (which may or may not be tempestuous, especially with Fox Searchlight having decided that Parker will not do a TIFF press conference), the Los Angeles County Museum will screen Nate Parker‘s film for LACMA Film Club, Film Independent and N.Y. Times Film Club members. Nip that AFI shit in the bud. No turning tail and running for cover. Respect the effort, respect the achievement, respect the legend of Nat Turner. Parker made the film, yes, but he was merely the conduit, the means by which a story was told and an end was achieved. The Birth of a Nation is not about Penn State in 1999 — it’s about Southampton County, Virginia in 1831.

Trailers are always a montage of the usual fragments. So putting this out is fine, not a problem. But being a staunch admirer…actually a worshipper of this film, I feel something a little different is in order. There are many, many scenes in Manchester by the Sea that work just right, that tell you just enough but not too much. Make a trailer that’s just about one of these scenes. Just give viewers a small slice of the pie, just one slice, so they’ll know how it really tastes.

Oh, and by the way? All of the pull quotes in this trailer are generic-sounding. They don’t have anything extra going on — no snap, no flight, no spinning of the wheel. Here are four that make you sit up and go “hmmm…interesting”:

(1) “Some movies are applauded and whoo-whooed, and others just sink in and melt you down.”

(2) “[Some movies] get you in such a vulnerable place that your admiration is mixed with a kind of stunned feeling, like you’ve been hit square in the heart.”

Read more

The 1999 Penn State rape controversy that has hounded Nate Parker over the past week and a half has resulted in a cancellation of an American Film Institute screening of The Birth of a Nation on Friday, 8.26. AFI dean Jan Schuette — himself an embattled figure due to a recent AFI staff revolt — announced the yanking late Tuesday.

The AFI screening would have been followed by a discussion with Parker, the director, writer and star of the historical drama about Nat Turner’s 1831 slave revolt.   Oh, what a shitstorm that would’ve been.

The 17 year-old PSU incident, which was discussed by Parker a week and a half ago in interviews with Variety and Deadline, has all but torpedoed whatever hope BOAN had of becoming a strong award-season contender, particularly given the recent revelation that the victim in the case committed suicide four years ago.

“I have been the recipient of many different passionate points of view about the screening, and I believe it is essential that we discuss these issues together — messenger and message, gender, race and more — before we see the film,” Schuette said in a statement. “Next week, we will be scheduling a special moderated discussion so we may explore these issues together as artists and audience.”

Read more

From an 8.23 Variety story, “The Nate Parker Interview: What’s Next for The Birth of a Nation‘ by Ramin Setoodeh: “The Birth of a Nation was supposed to finally end two years of #OscarsSoWhite, but the movie might cause further ripples within the Motion Picture Academy. Some prominent members of black Hollywood are standing with Parker, but they haven’t backed him publicly yet. ‘I don’t like the timing of this,’ says one well-known black director, who asked not to be named. ‘I’m not defending his actions, but something is wrong about the way it went down.’ Another black director who knows Parker, but also requested anonymity, said: ‘It worries me that a film and a guy with so much promise gets cut down a month before his masterpiece gets released. The last two years have proven how much our stories matter to this industry, and this seems like a way to muffle a very important piece of work.’”

Last Friday night (8.19) an extended cut of John Huston‘s Beat The Devil (’53) was screened at a tech symposium called “The Reel Thing,” which is co-sponsored and partly organized (or something like that) by the Association of Moving Image Archivists. The event happened between 8.18 and 8.20 at Hollywood’s Linwood Dunn theatre.

The 2016 “Reel Thing” program page says that this new Beat The Devil, which is currently available in truncated form at 89 minutes, was “restored by Sony Pictures” — i.e., by Sony archive honcho Grover Crisp — “in collaboration with The Film Foundation to the original, uncensored version.”

Crisp reports that the extended version runs 94 minutes.

An IMDB Beat The Devil page titled “alternate versions” states the following: “There are supposedly two edits of the film. One is described as a ‘butchered’ short version; the other as longer but with better storyline and continuity. The longer version is also listed as either elusive or practically impossible to get.”

Read more

Director Martin Scorsese is currently editing Silence, which Paramount may or may not release this year. A recent cut of the film reportedly ran 195 minutes, which I’m sure Scorsese is looking to whittle down. Last weekend a startling intuition of Scorsese’s thoughts about the film flew into my head. I don’t know if he’s shared the following with his Paramount partners, but he might eventually convey something along these lines:

“I’m sitting here in the editing room with Thelma and flipping through a copy of Entertainment Weekly‘s fall movie preview issue, and you know what what I’m noticing? Silence isn’t even mentioned. As far as EW is concerned it doesn’t exist. That tells me something.

“A while back I told Roger Friedman that ‘it’s up to Paramount’ about when Silence will be released, but I’m getting a feeling, just a little inkling of a tingle of the hairs on the back of my neck, that you guys might be quietly thinking about bumping it into February or March of 2017, like you did with Shutter Island in 2010.

“Is that what you guys are thinking? You haven’t ‘dated’ it yet, and I think it’s fair of me to ask what’s going on.

“I’m not the delusional type. I know a lot of people out there are going to regard Silence, sight unseen, as a very tough sit. A three-hour historical persecution-and-torture movie set in 17th Century Japan starring…what did that guy write the other day?…a weepy, whining, constantly suffering Andrew Garfield, and without much screen time for Liam Neeson, who doesn’t even get to go all whoop-ass on the 17th Century Japanese persecutors.

“You guys have three serious Oscar ponies on your fall slate — Arrival, Allied and especially Denzel’s Fences. I’m not stupid. I’m not clueless. I can read the writing on the wall. At best you may be considering a small token qualifying release for Silence, just to get it out there before 12.31…right?

Read more

The recent decision of former Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers to include Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester by the Sea on his list of the ten greatest 21st century films has greatly impressed Sasha Stone. Because this suggests a serious headwind for a Best Picture Oscar, or so she suspects. “Travers, Joe Morgenstern and Kenneth Turan are really your best critics in terms of sussing out what Academy voters might value,’ Stone explains. “With The Birth of a Nation mostly sidelined, can Manchester by the Sea become the first Sundance opener to win Best Picture? We’ve seen Cannes openers deliver winners (The Artist, No Country for Old Men), Toronto (The Hurt Locker) and Telluride (Spotlight, Birdman, 12 Years a Slave, Argo, The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire) but so far, nothing from Sundance. Boyhood looked like it might be that movie. The Birth of a Nation looked like it might be that movie.”

In the wake of the December 1962 opening of Lawrence of Arabia, some lightweight comic called it “four hours of sand.” Last night I watched the new Criterion Bluray of Hiroshi Teshigahara‘s Woman in the Dunes (’64). This, trust me, is the ultimate, ultra-definitive sand movie. Two hours and 27 minutes of the stuff. Lots of bugs, putrid water in wooden buckets, a fascinating clink-clank score by Toru Takemitsu, a certain amount of nudity and sex, luscious black-and-white cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa, and all tied together with a story that has something to do with Sisyphus, frustration, claustrophobia and escaping from whatever your daily grind may be. I had this horrible feeling of little particles of sand all over my bod. Sand and bugs, sand and bugs. Sand in my hair, in my ear canal, under my fingernails, inside my socks…Jesus! I honestly took a shower after watching it. Woman in the Dunes is indisputably an austere arthouse landmark. It has my respect for all the things it does perfectly or at least precisely, but I’ll never watch it again — guaranteed.

Read more

Based on a poll of 177 film critics, BBC.com has posted a roster of the 100 greatest films of the 21st Century. Because the BBC polled only scholastically correct, impressively credentialed dweeb types (and didn’t reach out to any unconventional clear-light samurai jazzmen like myself), their top 10 reflects a certain ivory-tower dweeb aesthetic. Here they are along with my comments:

1. David Lynch‘s Mulholland Drive (HE comment: trippy, striking, noteworthy but calm down); 2. Wong Kar Wai‘s In the Mood for Love (HE comment: The praise is almost entirely about Chris Doyle‘s cinematography); 3. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood (HE comment: Deserved); 4. Hayao Miyazaki‘s Spirited Away (HE comment: Not my cup but if you say so); 5. Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood (HE comment: Respectable, somewhat moving time-passage stunt film — overpraised during Oscar campaign). 6. Michel Gondry‘s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (HE comment: The older it gets, the less it seems to be — you don’t have to be a Gondry loyalist to be in love with this film, but it helps); 7. Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life (HE comment: Lubezki-captured dream-trip aesthetic totally devalued in hindsight by To The Wonder and Knight of Cups — Malick has eaten his own tail); 8. Edward Yang‘s Yi Yi: A One and a Two (HE comment: Never saw it); 9. Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation (HE comment: Brilliant); 10. Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men (HE comment: Ditto).

I posted a similar thing last April — a rundown of the best films of the second decade of the 21st Century along with a summary of the best of the first decade.

Read more