The most persistent argument against my Beware of Brownfellas piece is that (a) the 2007 Bluray version of Goodfellas was artificially brightened and (b) the new Goodfellas Bluray is a truer, more film-like rendering of what the original answer print looked like — i.e., nice and dark and murky. My response is simple. The 2007 Bluray version, which I’m completely happy with, contains a good amount of shade, shadows and darkness where appropriate. I saw Goodfellas three times in theatres in 1990, and I’m telling you that the ’07 Bluray is by no means an artificially brightened thing. It looks gritty, unaffected, like reality. How in the name of God can it improve the experience of watching Goodfellas by darkening and brown-tinting the image? How is it better for the viewer to remove details that were visible on the 2007 Bluray and bury them in shadows?

This morning I asked restoration guru Robert Harris about the why and wherefores, and his response was that the 2007 Bluray is “totally irrelevant.” What matters is the Scorsese-approved answer print that was supplied for the 2015 Bluray transfer. The 2007 Bluray, he says, “didn’t have stable reds, didn’t have proper black levels, didn’t have proper shadow detail.” The guys who mastered it, he says, “were using a more primitive technology.” And yet 2007 was ironically the first year “in which we had the ability to recreate film on Bluray.” It just wasn’t part of the ’07 Goodfellas. So, boiled down, the new Bluray is a welcome thing because it’s giving us a version that really looks like film, or so Harris and his brethren are saying.

Read more

Nancy Wells, my dear mom, passed Sunday night. She gave me everything — life, love, love of the arts (she turned me on to Peter Tchaikovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, John Updike, Frank Sinatra, George Gershwin…the list is infinite) and particularly love of theatre. She was the beating heart and balm of our family — 90% of the joy and spunk and laughter came from her, and she basically saved me and my brother and sister from my father’s alcoholic moodiness when we were young. (Not to diminish my dad’s influence too much — he gave me the writerly urge along with the barbed attitude, such as it is. But I would have been dead without my mom’s emotional radiance and buoyancy.) My mom loved show business, plays, films, music. She worked for NBC and BBC in the old days, acted in several plays in New Jersey (including Somserset Vaughn‘s The Constant Wife) and directed two or three plays at the Wilton Playshop. She was partnered in her own real-estate business in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

She had been gradually slipping away for a couple of years (during my last visit in early May she didn’t even open her eyes), and now, at last, her peace is absolute.

The corporates at the Watermark called and left a message about “an update on your mother’s situation” around midnight on Sunday. I called back and left a message…nothing. They called again this morning to say she’d “expired” at 8:55 pm Sunday night. Isn’t that what driver’s licenses and AAA memberships do — expire? I’m presuming that the Watermark, a perfunctorily compassionate if corporate-minded concern, learned from focus testing that the word “died” or “passed” is upsetting for immediate family members. 

I’m flying back to New York this weekend for a gathering of some kind.

I wasn’t much of a visitor but every so often I’d fall by Jan’s, an unpretentious, down-at-the-heels diner on Beverly Blvd. It closed last March. This morning I noticed that it’s been half-destroyed. Something else is being built there. I shed a little tear. I wasn’t that attached and it didn’t have a lot of architectural flavor, but I liked that Jan’s was there. They served very generous fruit bowls. Thank God that Norm’s of La Cienega, which is about two blocks west and two blocks north of where Jan’s used to be, has been saved. On 5.20.15 the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to designate Norms La Cienega as an Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM). Councilmember Paul Koretz has called Norm’s “a home away from home for many people” and the kind of place that “isn’t just culturally significant, but culturally uniting.”

That’ll be enough in the way of tantalizing come-ons for season #2 of HBO’s True Detective (debuts on 6.21). I’m expecting a DVD screener in the mail before long and then we’ll see what’s what. The only concern is that Fast and Furious franchise helmer Justin Lin, who literally sold his soul to the devil years ago, has directed the first two episodes. Lin has always impressed me as one of the most brazenly shallow, corporate-kowtowing filmmakers working today, but maybe he managed to suppress that side of himself while shooting. Here’s hoping.

The first trailer for John Eric Dowdle‘s No Escape (Weinstein Co., 9.2.15) popped early last March, and it’s not opening for another four months. I can’t believe I’m going to be watching trailers for this exploitation flick over the entire summer. Here’s what I said on 3.6.15: “I always feel suspicion and hostility toward films in which an Average-Joe father is desperately trying to protect his family from (a) intruders, (b) kidnappers or (c) anti-American revolutionaries and terrorists. The Taken films have really poisoned this particular well. Nor do I like films about average American families having to deal with bad people in a foreign country. The underlying message is “you don’t want to venture outside the safety of your American shopping-mall lifestyle…you’re just asking for trouble if you go overseas and particularly to unstable Asian or third-world countries…stay home, go to the mall, enjoy a backyard barbecue or watch an old movie on Netflix or Vudu from the safety of your basement den.”

Jerry Seinfeld‘s comments during an ESPN interview about how politically correct agendas are stifling stand-up comedy (particularly on college campuses) feeds right into A.O. Scott‘s 6.5 N.Y. Times piece, titled “Adjusting To A World That Won’t laugh With You.” “We’re…in the midst of a humor crisis,” Scott writes. “The world is full of jokes and also of people who can’t take them. It can seem, if you dip into social media or peruse the weekly harvest of Internet think pieces, that comedy swings on a fast-moving pendulum between amusement and outrage. We love jokes that find the far edge of the permissible, but we also love to turn against the joker who violates our own closely held taboos. In the blink of an eye, social media lights up not with twinkles of collective liking but with flames of righteous mob fury. We demand fresh material, and then we demand apologies.”

Out of boredom or restlessness I’ve asked some of the Oscar whisperers to share what they’re sensing or smelling about the likeliest Best Picture contenders. But they couldn’t be roused from their early June, waiting-to-see-Jurassic World, pre-Los Angeles Film Festival slumbers. Of course it’s too early but it’s not crazy early. The programs for the Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York Film Festivals are currently starting to take shape as we speak and will be all but firmed less than two months hence. And the publicists repping the likeliest contenders definitely know what they have or don’t have (hence the recently announced London Film Festival premiere of Suffragette and the N.Y. Film Festival debut of Robert Zemeckis‘s The Walk) so don’t tell me.

The game is on right now whether the Oscar blogaroonies want to acknowledge it or not. So here, right now, are nine films that seem to have the best credentials and tastiest aromas, and in this order. Spitballing these is nothing brilliant or even audacious– it’s just something to do on a warm June day:

* Danny Boyle‘s Steve Jobs (Universal, 10.9), which I’ve read and believe to be quite brilliant, not in spite of the dialogue-driven, stage-play feeling but oddly because of it. I won’t elaborate any further but it’s another “drilling into a prick genius” piece, revealed layer by layer via the old Aaron Sorkin rat-a-tat-tat.

* Tom Hooper‘s The Danish Girl (Focus Features, 11.27) — Flagrantly baity. Director Tom Hooper and Oscar party-circuit charmer Eddie Redmayne ride again. Everybody on the Danish Girl team will be riding the wave of the current p.c. transgender sensitivity vogue du jour (i.e., if you don’t celebrate it you’ll be hammered on Twitter as a transgender bigot), etc.

* Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant (20th Century Fox, 12.25) — Inarritu and dp Emmanuel Lubezski are on a roll. Blast-off reactions to Chivo’s natural light cinematography at Cinemacon. It seems unlikely that Fox would open both The Revenant and Joy on Christmas day. Probable adjustments forthcoming.

* Todd Haynes‘ Carol (Weinstein Co., 12.18) — the toast of Cannes, an all-but-certain Best Picture contender, Rooney Mara or Cate Blanchett for Best Actress?, Best Director, Best Cinematography (Ed Lachman), Best Adapted Screenplay (Phyllis Nagy).

* John Crowley‘s Brooklyn (Fox Searchlight, no date yet) — Across-the-board Sundance raves made this seem like the year’s first Best Picture contender. “Despite its familiar structure it’s a thing of beauty, a delicate, tender period piece about nice people trying to do their best.” — N.Y. Post‘s Kyle Smith.

Read more

I said a long time ago that I want to see tourists eaten in this thing. The more tourists with their heads and limbs and torsos bitten off, the better. Bonus points for fat tourists. But if the movie cops out and doesn’t show anyone screaming for mercy just before being chomped to death and turned into blood-and-bone mulch, I’ll have no choice but to render an unfavorable judgment. And if this happens, in the words of Vito Corleone, “I’m going to blame some of the people in this room” — director Colin Trevorrow, producer Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley, exec producer Steven Spielberg, etc.

“The Academy [theatre] was fucking packed to the gills on a beautiful Saturday afternoon — PACKED. Not one seat available. And I only saw two or three people leave before the question and answer. They all stood for Brian Wilson when he came on stage. Very emotional.

“It’s so unlike every other musical biopic ever made. There’s hardly a trope in it. Which may hurt it at the box-office in the end. No big set pieces, no moment where we discover ‘the singer can sing’, no final musical triumph. It’s so much deeper than that. I’m a member of SAG, the DGA, the WGA and the Academy, and I imagine it will get my support in every organization.

“Paul Dano‘s performance is glorious, almost soul bending — it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. John Cusack is not getting nearly enough love. Banks shows us moves that we’ve never seen before. I’m not quite sure why she loves or, rather, falls in love with Brian- but I just sort of flowed into it with her.”

I paid to see Spy at the Arclight last night. I’m not a laugh-out-loud type, especially during a film as light and inconsequential as this one, but the audience gave it up repeatedly…”Hee-hee-hee…tee-hee-hoo!…eeyuh-huh-hah!” I turned around a couple of times and gave them one of my stink-eye looks. “You rubes…you easy lays…laughing like those chain-gang prisoners at the finale of Sullivan’s Travels. So you’ve got your popcorn and drink and a nothing little travelogue spy spoof with some sassy dialogue, and I’ll bet half of you didn’t even consider seeing Love & Mercy.”

Spy is moderately amusing at times. I sat, watched, half-grinned occasionally. I wasn’t enthralled but I was only faintly bored. I didn’t have what you would call an “enjoyable” time but I wasn’t in pain. I didn’t hate it but I settled for it. And for the first time since Bridesmaids I actually enjoyed Melissa McCarthy‘s performance. Or her character rather. Because unlike her low-rent, emotionally primitive rage-aholics in Identity Thief, The Heat and Tammy, Spy‘s Susan Cooper has a semi-tolerable personality that didn’t drive me up the wall. She’s sharp, witty, emotionally mature, resourceful, motor-mouthed — she even speaks a little French.

Read more

Last night I watched the 25th anniversary Bluray of Goodfellas…the fuck? If clear, sharp, realistically colored images mean anything to you this new disc should be called Brownfellas. It’s absolutely darker, browner, less robust, splotchier and somewhat desaturated. It looks like somebody dipped the 2007 Bluray in gravy and then baked it in the afternoon sun. Don’t listen to snake-oil salesmen like Bluray.com’s Michael Reuben, whose 4.27 review is my idea of a flat-out lie. The 2015 disc’s “clarity, sharpness and densities are superb,” he said — bullshit. This is a splotchy, less robust Goodfellas with unnecessary shadows and a dupey, grainy look. Reuben said that the 2007 Bluray seems to be “covered with a layer of haze, largely because the contrast is too high and the image is overbrightened.” No, it doesn’t seem covered with a layer of anything — the 2007 Bluray looks clear, sharp and life-like. Don’t buy the 2015 Bluray — don’t be suckered by “reviewers” whose role in life is to give blowjobs to Blurays regardless of quality so the distributors will keep giving them freebies. The 2015 Bluray is Martin Scorsese-approved, apparently because Scorsese likes the darker, muddyish, film-like textures. How in the name of Michael Ballhaus could Scorsese want today’s generation to regard Brownfellas as the ultimate standard? Brownfellas is the worst desecration of a major American classic since that blotchy, desaturated French Connection Bluray came out in early ’09. Avoid it, avoid it, avoid it like the plague. As Henny Youngman would say, “Buy the 2007 version…please!”

Henry Hill’s blood-stained handgun as seen in the 2007 Bluray

Same shot, 2015 version.