Obviously this trailer for Michael Polish‘s Big Sur, a Sundance 2013 Premiere, works. Definitely gets your attention, draws you in, makes you swoon. The reasons are M. David Mullen‘s cinematography, and the Flamingos’ 1959 version of “I Only Have Eyes For You” (“kuhluck-kuhluck”). The rants of Jack Kerouac (Jean Marc Barr) are well-written and fiercely performed, but I know all about this. Creation enters when it wants to and leaves when it wants to. The artist is only a conduit.
“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.” — a quote from Roman court-philosopher Seneca, and passed along in a 1.4 N.Y. Times article by 77 year-old Uruguyan president Jose Mujica, who has shunned the trappings of power to live an austere, bare-bones life in a run-down home in the outskirts of Montevideo.
Mujica’s net worth upon taking office in 2010 amounted to about $1,800 — the value of the 1987 Volkswagen Beetle parked in his garage,” writesTimes correspondent Simon Romero. “He never wears a tie and donates about 90 percent of his salary, largely to a program for expanding housing for the poor.
“His current brand of low-key radicalism — a marked shift from his days wielding weapons in an effort to overthrow the government — exemplifies Uruguay’s emergence as arguably Latin America’s most socially liberal country.
“Under Mr. Mujica, who took office in 2010, Uruguay has drawn attention for seeking to legalize marijuana and same-sex marriage, while also enacting one of the region’s most sweeping abortion rights laws and sharply boosting the use of renewable energy sources like wind and biomass.”
The 1926 lost version of The Great Gatsby, directed by Herbert Brenon an starring Warner Baxter as Jay Gatsby, had a running time of 80 minutes. It looks like torture. The 1949 Elliott Nugent verison with Alan Ladd, Betty Field and Shelley Winters ran 91 minutes. The 1974 Jack Clayton version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow ran 144 minutes. Baz Luhrman‘s upcoming 3D version reportedly runs 72 minutes…kidding!
The Wiki page says the 1926 film “was designed as lightweight, popular entertainment, playing up the party scenes at Gatsby’s mansion and emphasizing their scandalous elements.” No telling if Luhrman’s version will emphasize the same, but I can guess. They’re definitely emphasized in the trailer.
After watching Josh Olson‘s “Trailers From Hell” tribute to Ulu Grosbard‘s Straight Time (’78), listen to my mp3 recording of the Straight Time gang — Dustin Hoffman, director Ulu Grosbard, Theresa Russell, Harry Dean Stanton, cinematographer Owen Roizman — chatting with Scott Foundas at L.A.’s Billy Wilder theatre on 6.23.07.
You just know John Ford was thinking to himself, “Huston, okay…I’ve liked a lot of his pictures. A libertine but talented and ballsy. Knows horses. But Hopper made life hell for poor Henry Hathaway, and then came Easy Rider, which I didn’t fully hate because he seems to love the Southwest like me. Or his cinematographer does. But now I’m hearing about The Last Movie. I dunno. Might be a one-trick pony.”
(l. t. r.) Dennis Hopper, John Ford, John Huston in 1971. (Posted by KinoImages.)
Steven Spielberg has made a highly respectable grandfather-clock film that has inspired subdued or muffled reactions from one-third of the industry/journo crowd, so naturally Movieline has him down as the Best Director front-runner. Ang Lee is the winner of the 2013 Attaboy Award for having directed a respected, vaguely spiritual tiger-in-a-lifeboat film that has absolutely no chance of winning the Best Picture Oscar, so it makes perfect sense that he’s ranked above David O. Russell, director-writer of easily the smartest and most skilllful “up” film of the year….yeah!
I don’t want to hear one single comment about my Lincoln-Spielberg views. I realize I’ve made them perfectly clear, but Movieline‘s Donald Liebenson has put up his latest Oscar Index and it says what it says. I can’t sit mum on the sidelines because four or five HE readers might say “enough already.” The season’s the season, and it ain’t over ’til it’s over.
If anyone is stuck for Sundance Film Festival lodgings in Park City between Saturday, 1.19 and Saturday, 1.26, I know of two one-bedroom units at the Park Regency. $1200 each for seven days. Not huge but decent-sized. Good for two people (or three in a pinch). An excellent central location — a four-minute walk to the Park City Marriot and a twelve-minute walk (or a one-stop bus ride) to the Holiday Village Cinemas and the Yarrow Hotel.
“I don’t understand why [Lincoln] didn’t just end when Lincoln is walking down the hall and the butler gives him his hat,” Samuel L. Jacksonrecently toldL.A. Times reporter Steven Zeitchik. “Why did I need to see him dying on the bed? I have no idea what Spielberg was trying to do. I didn’t need the assassination at all. Unless he’s going to show Lincoln getting his brains blown out. And even then, why am I watching it? The movie had a better ending 10 minutes before.”
Vanity Fair‘s Marnie Hanelreported today that an article on Oscar.go, the official website of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, accidentally and prematurely disclosed that Django Unchained costume designer Sharen Davis has nabbed a Best Costume Design nomination. The page in question has since been taken down, and the person responsible is taking Diazepam as we speak.
If only a similar-type mistake had revealed something big, like the Best Picture or Best Director nominees! The Oscars nominations will be revealed six days hence, or at 5:30 am on Thursday, 1.10.
Speaking to N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply about Gangster Squad (Warner Bros., 1.11), director Ruben Fleischer‘s period melodrama (i.e., set in the late ’40s and early ’50s), producer Dan Lin says “if we do this right, it’s a contemporary gangster movie.”
The instant I read those ten words, I went “Jesus Christ, game over.”
Because I’m guessing that doing it “right,” in Lin’s view, means re-tailoring Harry Truman-era L.A. so it feels like a cool walk-through exhibit at Universal Citywalk. You know…synthetic slick, flash in the fucking pan, dumbing things down for the 21st Century primitives. It means re-styling, filling in the grooves and re-attitudinizing 20th Century Los Angeles so under-40s are in no way challenged, and so they can slide right into it.
I wrote last May that Gangster Squad is a kind of “get Mickey Cohen melodrama” in the vein of Brian De Palma‘s The Untouchables. But after that I speculated that Fleischer’s film will be a “make a lot of noise and look cool and sexy and studly while making a lot of noise and looking cool and sexy and studly” movie. Now I’m thinking it’s going to be that only a little dumber and more primitive. (I won’t see it until Tuesday evening, 1.8.)
Cieply says that the film contains “moral ambiguities ,” but Fleischer and company “have also tried for something new. Their Mickey Cohen is not the historical gangster who inflated his celebrity by displaying his pet’s doggy bed in Life magazine and ran a pathetic racket that involved raising money for a planned movie (never shot) about his own life.
“In Gangster Squad Cohen becomes mythic evil, a Batman villain. His victim is Los Angeles, a glamour doll of a metropolis that is being strangled, like Gotham City in The Dark Knight series. And it is saved, but also sullied, by tommy-gun-wielding cops,” blah blah.
How is this “something new”?
In other words, as Robert Downey, Jr.’s version of Sherlock Holmes is to the older, more traditional versions played by Basil Rathbone, Robert Stephens or Nicol Wiliamson, Gangster Squad is to The Untouchables, Public Enemies, L.A. Confidential and Mulholland Falls. A romp through a semblance of old times, but “rebooted with contemporary cool,” as Cieply puts it.
So Tina Fey and Amy Poehler‘s Golden Globes material is still taking shape, but the basic idea, apparently, is to go with a generic 21st Century approach to humor — dry, casual, ironic, referenced — and pretty much stay away from being Ricky Gervais-y or funny. Unless the purpose of this clip is to lower expectations so everyone will be pleasantly surprised when the 1.13 show happens.
It would be nice to catch Steven Soderbergh‘s Side Effects (Open Road, 2.5) before I leave for Park City on Tuesday, 1.15, as I’ll be swamped with Sundance and then the Santa Barbara Film Festival through Saturday, 2.2. Yes, I could see it during the five-day run-up to 2.8, but Soderbergh’s films are always special enough to warrant early viewings. So next week (1.7 through 1.11) would be good. Take back tomorrow, etc.