There’s a five-minute visual essay on Criterion’s new On The Waterfront Bluray called “On The Aspect Ratio.” It explains why Criterion went with three aspect ratios — 1.66 (the preferred default version), 1.33 and 1.85. Here’s the narration. I’m warning the 1.85 fascists right now that they won’t like it. This is the end of the influence of this rogue cabal. Henceforth the 1.66-ers and the “boxy is beautiful” gang will have the upper hand.
Update: Some of the commenters are shrugging and saying, “Uhh, so these Columbia films were framed for 1.85 but protected for 1.33…so what?” The “so what” is that the Criterion guys, the ultimate, high-end purist dweebs of the digital home-video realm, explain in this essay why they chose 1.66 as their default a.r., and how severely and pointlessly cropped 1.85 is and how open and accepting and all-encompassing 1.33 is. The essay basically says “if you have any taste at all or have any regard for aesthetic elegance and balance, it’s obvious that 1.66 or 1.33 is the way to go. You’d have to be a troglodyte to prefer 1.85.”
Imagine if a couple of oily operators bought the old Paris Opera house and announced plans to turn it into a megaplex and install stadium seating. Do you think Parisians would shrug their shoulders and go “okay, whatever”? But that’s been the reaction so far from Los Angelenos to Samaha and Kishner’s stadium-seating intentions, which will be funded with a $5 million investment from TCL, the Chinese TV maker that has re-branded the classic theatre. It all falls under the general term known as “re-monetizing assets.”
A source tells me that come April, or just after the 2013 Turner Classic Movie Festival, the former Graumans will be closed for five to six months for remodelling. A 1.11 L.A. Times article said that “planned improvements include a new extra-wide screen, stadium seating, superior sound and projection systems, and a new box-office marquee on Hollywood Boulevard.”
Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and I kicked around the post-DGA situation this morning. Here’s the mp3. It’s okay, nothing special. The only thing that came out of it, really, is an agreement that with Ben Affleck out of the running for the Best Director Oscar, Academy voters will probably give it to Steven Spielberg as a kind of sympathy vote because Lincoln is now sunk as a Best Picture contender.
This is a nice, generic, hit-the-basic-points interview with Silver Linings Playbook costar Robert De Niro. A piece for someone who’s just arrived from the Planet Neptune and has never heard of DeNiro before. But honestly? I can’t stand the narration and the questions posed by interviewer Lee Cowan, and particularly his unctuous manner. His smile, his voice…I hate everything about this guy, including the fact that he’s the size of Richard Kiel.
If Cowan was interviewing me and he asked “are you a happy man?,” I’d tell him “Yeah, I am…or at least I was until I sat down with you.”
Actual Cowan question to DeNiro: “When people come up to you and describe you as a legend, how does that sit with you?” Actual DeNiro reply: “I don’t know what to say to that. I mean, I’m flattered but it’s…I don’t know. Imagined HE response if I was DeNiro: “People don’t come up to me and describe me as a legend. Or at least people who aren’t mental cases don’t. For the most part only corporate media toadies like you ask me stuff like that. Guys like you, junket whores…they love questions like this.
“‘Legend’ is a word that only big-media assholes use. Another word they use a lot is ‘genius.’ They also like ‘magic.’ That night be their most favorite word of all. A perfect sentence for a corporate asshole to say is ‘I just met a real genius….and what can I say? The man is a legend. Every time he gets up on the stage or steps in front of a camera, it’s magic.'”
In short I admire DeNiro’s restraint, his subtlety, his ability to suck it in and just play it nice and polite. Because I know what he’s really thinking.
This morning I attended a Grauman’s Chinese handprint ceremony for Silver Linings Playbook costar and Best Supporting Actor nominee Robert De Niro. Bobby D is doing all he can to out-promote his main competitor, Lincoln‘s Tommy Lee Jones. (TLJ snagged SAG’s Best Supporting Actor award so watch out.) De Niro’s Analyze This costar Billy Crystal and SLP director-writer David O. Russell offered gracious compliments, and Fandango’s Dave Karger was the emcee.
“Heeyyyy! Wet gunk on my hands! Fuck am I doing here?” Robert De Niro at this morning’s TCL Chinese handprint ceremony — Monday, 2.4, 10:10 am.
De Niro is doing a q & a at Santa Monica’s Aero tonight, and I’ll be at that event also.
Fandango’s Dave Karger deliveriing introductory remarks.
(l to r.) Crystal, DeNiro, DeNiro’s wife Grace Hightower, Silver Linings Playbook director-writer David O. Russell.
Between De Niro’s joke about how “Joe Pesci always told me I’d end up with my feet in cement” and the presence of TCL Chinese co-owners Elie Samaha and Don Kushner, who exude the same kind of flashy ne’er-do-well vibe as Mickey Cohen or Bugsy Siegel but without the class, I was thinking of an old Lenny Bruce routine:
New Jersey guy #1: Say, what happened to your partner? New Jersey guy #2: He drowned. New Jersey guy #1: What, in February? New Jersey guy #2: Yeah. New Jersey guy #1: What, he couldn’t swim? New Jersey guy #2: Nah, he couldn’t get out of the car.
The DGA Best Director award going last night to Argo‘s Ben Affleck makes it a 99% certainty that Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln won’t win the Best Picture Oscar. Now that we know the score, I’d like to openly ask all the Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby prognosticators who stuck with Lincoln all through December and especially January a simple question: why? What tea leaves told you that there was enough serious passion out there to push this well written, ploddingly paced, passionately performed grandfather clock of a movie into the winner’s circle?
We now know that the passion was never there, not really. And yet for weeks Team Lincoln told us over and over again “it’s the likeliest winner, what other film has the stature?, it has to happen, it’s Spielberg’s best in years, it’s too good a film, it’s about a legendary U.S. President, it’s made well over $100 million” and so on. Even after those Argo wins at the BFCA, Golden Globes and the PGA and especially after Bill Clinton‘s Lincoln plug at the Golden Globes suggested to some of us that the hand had been overplayed, a lot of people still held fast. Why? What vibrations from what insect antennae told you to stick? I’m honestly curious.
Yes, I had Lincoln down as my own Best Picture prediction for a while but I did so with resignation and depression. From the beginning I saw Lincoln as a lazy default choice. It was just sitting there like a lump of mashed potatoes. I couldn’t wait to dump it after sensing a change in the wind.
My pet theory: The downfall of Zero Dark Thirty sealed Lincoln‘s fate. If ZD30 hadn’t been torpedoed by the Stalinists and had held on the strength it had in early December with all the critics awards, it would have taken a lot of support away from Argo, which after all is a more congenial and entertaining version of the same basic story (i.e., a brilliant CIA maverick bucks the bureaucratic tide in order to push through a secret, risky-seeming CIA operation in the Middle East that involves hoodwinking Islamic militants and which ends in delicious success). The Argo and ZD30 votes might have split the faction that is now voting entirely for Argo, and Lincoln might have inched ahead and become the favorite…maybe.
Dr. Svet Atanasov‘s review of the triple-format On The Waterfront Bluray (Criterion, 2.19) went up yesterday on Bluray.com. The praise is abundant — “simply fantastic…flawless contrast …overwhelmingly beautiful blacks and whites…absolutely no traces of problematic lab tinkering.” But he doesn’t summarize the content of “On the Aspect Ratio,” a six-minute essay that explains why Criterion went with three aspect ratios. One of their reasons, I’m fairly certain, was to placate people like me.
Bluray.com screen capture of white-glove scene.
1.66, or 1.67 if you believe Atanasov.
1.85
If you’re not like me (i.e., not invested in “boxy is beautiful” headroom), take a look at the above screen captures and explain to me how it’s better to chop Marlon Brando‘s knees off and to kill the smoggy sky above the peak roofs and chimneys in the background. There really, really has to be something wrong with you to say “yes, that’s good, cut off those knees and fuck the sky.”
Dr. Svet reports that Criterion’s 1.66 version is actually 1.67…what? Why not 1.65, guys? Why not 1.58? Why not 1.50? Create your own personal aspect ratio! Is Atanasov wrong or is Criterion getting perverse? The middle-ground a.r. should be 1.66, period.
The final big smackeroo of the 2013 Santa Barbara Film Festival was Roger Durling‘s on-stage encounter with guaranteed Best Actress Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence. Durling is an open-hearted admirer of the 22 year-old actress and offered much effusive praise, but this tends to make Lawrence glaze over a bit. (What can you say when someone says you’re the greatest? “Yeah, I guess I am”?) But he was knowledgable and polite and gentle with her, and it was all to the good.
Silver Linings Playbook star Jennifer Lawrence, Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling during last night’s tribute — Saturday, 2.2, 8:55 pm.
Lawrence spoke about how she likes to keep her acting fresh and instinctual. She doesn’t like to prepare too much and waits until the day of a scene to memorize her lines.
Her performance as Tiffany in Silver Linings Playbook shows she has great hot-flash instincts and loads of intense primal energy. But — let’ s be honest — this didn’t come through in a vivid and unmissable way until she hooked up with the mesmerizing David O. Russell.
Last night’s message, in short, is that Lawrence is a very fine actress, but only in the right film and under the right director is she wowser. Durling called her the bee’s knees. What he meant was “under Russell she was.”
She was tough and planted — a paragon of backwoods backbone — in Debra Granik‘s Winter’s Bone, and blazingly alive and vulnerable and sometimes gobsmack in SLP, but her other performances (The Beaver, Burning Plain, Like Crazy, X-Men) are just okay — agreeable, sufficient — by contrast.
The clips of Hunger Games that were shown last night reminded me what a lousy film it is, and what a painfully tedious director Gary Ross can be with average or sub-average material, especially when you compare Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen with Tiffany and what Russell got from her.
For me, the best part of the tribute was a collection of clips (which Durling personally assembled) that showed how Lawrence is cut from the same cloth as Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve and I forget who else. Everyone got it. Lawrence’s Tiffany belongs to a long tradition of spunk.
Watch this clip for Russell’s imitation of Robert De Niro‘s reaction to Lawrence after they performed their first scene together:
You can call them “homeless” if you want, but to me they’re bums. Bums and rummies. And they’re all over downtown Santa Barbara and squatting on State Street in particular, and a lot of them have dogs. Those poor sad dogs. What a life. Listen to me — I’m almost ready to go out and give a buck or two to the next vagrant-with-a-dog that I see. I don’t give a hoot about bums but I feel genuine sympathy for the dogs…and the bums know that, of course.
Santa Barbara is one of the big bum meccas of Southern California. There are bum hang-outs in the downtown area, bum flophouses. This is what a tolerant, politically correct culture has to accept and put up with. I don’t flinch at bums in Manhattan where you expect to see a little squalor, but bums lying around in groups of two, three and four on State Street with all that affluence and Spanish architecture in the background — somehow that feels like a different deal. There are no bums in Tokyo or Hanoi, or none that I noticed. But boy, do they have them here.
