From a 9.11.14 Toronto Film Festival review by Indiewire‘s Kevin Jagernauth: “With a premise based on the salacious murder trial of Amanda Knox, the most curious aspect of Michael Winterbottom‘s The Face Of An Angel is that it’s not about the case at all. Instead, the filmmaker takes a self-indulgent approach, reorienting the project to tell the story of a director (Daniel Bruhl) researching and writing a movie about the sensational crime and who promptly begins to spiral out of control the more he keeps digging for the truth. A mismatch of genres, coupled with a pretentious attitude regarding the art of moviemaking, this film strains for significance, referencing Dante in the same breath as Knox.

Winterbottom’s film will open later this month in England, and on 6.30 in the States. Almost four months from now? We’re living through a dull, dispiriting season. It should appear concurrent with the British release.

“Shot by Hubert Taczanowski (The Look Of Love, The Opposite Of Sex), the film is visually lifeless, [using] a grimy visual palette that matches Bruhl’s perma-sour demeanor. And the overall tone never coheres, partially due to the shifting nature of the triptych-ish structure. The film’s auntish indictment of tabloid culture is tedious, and as a portrait of an artist grappling with truth and his own personal demons, Thomas just isn’t all that interesting. He’s his own worst enemy, and it’s hard to care about what he’s going through if he doesn’t either.

Read more

Superhero movies had a certain punch or value in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, but they don’t mean nearly as much to the culture today. They’re basically opiates for losers. I’m not saying that only losers are into them, but losers certainly are. Is that putting it too harshly? Okay, I’ll tone it down. The more emotionally invested you are in superhero dreams, the less mature, interesting and formidable you are as a person. I know that if I walk into a home and there are four or five people on the couch who have nothing but contempt for superhero films and four or five in the kitchen who live for them, I’m on the couch.

Alex Gibney doesn’t pull punches. His reputation as our country’s leading documentarian rests upon that notion, so it’s unlikely that Sinatra: All or Nothing at All (HBO, 4.5 and 4.6), a two-part, four-hour doc about Frank Sinatra, will take a softball approach. Meaning, I presume, that Gibney won’t brush aside Frank’s wise-guy connections or the thing with Jack Kennedy (Peter Lawford once reportedly commented that Sinatra “was Jack’s pimp”) or the mob wanting Sinatra to get the Kennedy administration to go easy. Well, the trailer alludes to this stuff but how deeply will Gibney get into it?

The only thing that scares me is a claim on the website that the doc is “told in [Sinatra’s] own words from hours of archived interviews, along with commentary from those closest to him.” So all the quotes except Sinatra’s are from people who had won his favor or friendship and were otherwise invested in the legend?

Read more

In the view of Chris Ashton, “the 20 greatest, or most powerful, uses of slow-motion in film” can be found in Rushmore, Reservoir Dogs, Chariots of Fire, Watchmen, Hurt Locker, Matrix, Zombieland, The Untouchables, Thelma & Louise, The Darjeeling Limited, Ferris Bueller’s Day off, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Raging Bull, Matrix Reloaded, Inception, Spider Man, 300 and a bullshit boxing sequence in Robert Downey‘s Sherlock Holmes. The list excludes two landmark ’60s films that put slow-mo on the map and pretty much revolutionized the aesthetic by turning rifle-fire death into strangely beautiful ballet — Arthur Penn‘s Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch. Ashton presumably omitted these two because he’s youngish (late 20s, early 30s) and considers films made in the ’80s to be ancient history and anything earlier to be prehistoric. Or he’s under-educated. Or he just forgot.

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.” On top of which this kind of thing is way outside Owen Wilson‘s safety zone.

Legendary fly-on-the-wall documentarian Albert Maysles, who with his brother David cranked out classics such as Salesman (’68), Gimme Shelter (’70) and Grey Gardens (’76), has passed at age 88. For years I mispronounced his last name as MayZELLES when the proper pronunication was MAYzuls. My three favorite Maysles brothers docs, to be perfectly honest, weren’t the above three but their ’64 doc about the Beatles’ first visit to the States, Meet Marlon Brando (’65) and With Love From Truman (’66). These guys wrote the manual on grainy, neutral-minded, you-are-there docs in the ’60s and ’70s, but eventually grabby docs that were more cinematic and opinionated (“this is how I see a situation so fuck ‘fair and balanced'”) took over. Maysles-styled docs are still being made, of course, but they don’t seem to be punchy enough.

Read more

An allegedly riveting period crime flick, Cedric Jimenez‘s The Connection (Drafthouse, 5.12) seems to be exactly what the doctor ordered for the March-April doldrums. If it were opening this weekend I’d bolt right out of the house. Naturally Drafthouse has decided to release it in mid May. Of course!

Stretching from ’75 to ’81, the French-produced drama “pits Jean Dujardin and Gilles Lellouche against each other as a real-life Marseille judge and an elusive kingpin, distilling actual events into a procedural epic whose complicated narrative is propelled by visceral action sequences and an unusually thrilling soundtrack,” wrote Hollywood Reporter critic John DeFore.

Read more

Over the last day or so I’ve been scratching my head over more bad information on the Great Innocents Mumps Mystery, but after calling and sifting around for a couple of hours an answer came along that seemed to finally make sense. I’m frankly getting sick of this story so I’m just going to cut to the chase. Problems with Bausch & Lomb CinemaScope lenses during the ’50s were the cause of the syndrome called the CinemaScope mumps, which made images (particularly faces) in the 2.35:1 image look wider or fatter than they naturally were. It turns out there were three kinds of B & L CinemaScope lenses between ’53 and the early ’60s. The very early kind, which delivered serious mump distortion, was used on The Robe, How to Marry a Millionaire and Beyond The Three Mile Reef. Then another lens was developed and used during the mid to late ’50s, one which lessened or modified the mumps without making them disappear. And then came the third kind of Bausch & Lomb CinemaScope lens, which was known as the E-series or blue lens as the housing was colored blue as opposed to grey with the earlier versions. The E-series went a long way to correcting the mumps altogether, and The Innocents dp FreddIe Francis used the E-series lens during most of the shooting, hence the absence of mumps in that film. It’s all explained on a certain page within American Widescreen Museum. And that’s it. I won’t be touching this topic again.

The E series or blue lens used, apparently on a preferential basis, by dp Freddie Francis on filming of The Innocents.

Deadline is reporting that Steven Spielberg‘s next film will be an adaptation of Roald Dahl‘s “The BFG“, a 33 year-old kids novel about a little girl, the Queen of England and a benevolent giant on a mission to “capture the evil, man-eating giants who have been invading the human world.” Walden Media will co-finance and co-produce with DreamWorks Studios. A project like this, frankly, is a lot more on Spielberg’s level than the announced adaptation of Linsey Addario‘s “It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War.” Every so often he’ll shoot a high-toned history drama or a jolting action piece but his default instincts always take him back to movies for folks who want to have a good time — i.e., projects like The BFG or the announced re-boot of the Indiana Jones franchise with Chris Pratt as Indiana Jones. This is who Beardo is and what he does so let’s not have any more discussions about his artfulness. He’s an entertainer. Thank you.

I’m sorry but if you crash-land your private plane on a golf course and then you walk away with “blood all over” your face, as Harrison Ford did about 100 minutes ago, you’ve definitely banged yourself up — no question about that. But it seems alarmist to call Ford’s injuries “critical,” as Variety did a half-hour ago. One of the sentences in Alex Stedman’s story reads as follows: “Ford was transferred to a local hospital in critical condition with head injuries.” To be in critical condition Ford would have to be…what, semi-conscious and carried off the course on a stretcher by paramedics, right? His heartbeat would have to be weak or erratic and he’d have to be hovering between life and death. A real man wouldn’t say all falsetto and flutter-voiced, “Oh my God, I’m in critical condition! Help me!” A real man, as Ford obviously is, walks away from the plane like a tobacco-free Marlboro Man and then turns around as he dabs blood from his forehead and goes, “Well…that happened!” For sure Ford will have bruises and may be feeling a little bit dizzy later on, but this is nothing. Water off a duck’s ass.  Update: Variety is now reporting Ford is in “fair to moderate” condition.

Read more

A day or so ago Welcome to New York director Abel Ferrara pledged to call me around noon today so we could discuss the mild hoo-hah about the unrated vs. R-rated versions of his film, which originally screened at last May’s Cannes Film festival. (IFC Sundance Selects will make the R-rated version available for public consumption starting on March blank.) For whatever cavalier reason Ferrara didn’t call me today (thanks!), but Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn has spoken to both Ferrara as well as Wild Bunch honcho Vincent Maraval, and has combined their quotes in a piece posted a few hours ago.

Excerpt #1: “Maraval said when he approached Ferrara about delivering an R-rated cut of Welcome to New York, “his response was somewhere between ‘fuck them’ and ‘mmmrrrmmr.” After a shorter cut that mainly slimmed down the orgy scene was prepared, Ferrara refused [to sign off]. ‘The R-rated version has existed for eight months,” Maraval says. “[It] has been released all over the world by distributors to whom we gave the choice between two versions, and all unanimously preferred the shorter version not only for commercial reasons but because they found it much better.”

Read more

It was a standard part of the 70mm, reserved-seat, roadshow engagement experience of the ’50s and ’60s to play an overture before the film began. When the film went into wide release on 35mm prints the overture was often (typically?) dropped. But some films used another kind of musical prelude, a kind of mini-overture that was included on all prints, even wide-distribution versions. Here’s one example on Criterion’s Bluray of The Innocents. (Sorry for the imperfect framing.) I remember attending a commercial screening of William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer in ’77 that included a Tangerine Dream mini-overture, but for some reason this wasn’t include in the restored Bluray. Michael Bay used a mini-overture for the very beginning of Pearl Harbor. Hans Zimmer‘s theme played for maybe 8 or 10 seconds on a black screen before the film began. I asked Bay about this during a Honolulu press conference in early May 2001, and he said he was proud of it but had to fight for it.