Lindsay Lohan apparently made a decision to act sober and contrite for her Oprah sit-down, which will air next Sunday. She’ll probably do a decent job at playing this role, but it’s still acting. As Lyndon Johnson once said to George Wallace, “George, don’t you shit me.” If anything she would be more interesting if she continues with her alcoholic shenanigans than if she cleans up. Any way you slice it she’s…I was going to say she’s Tallulah Bankhead but at least Tallulah had that great performance in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Lifeboat to point to. What has Lohan done on that level?
Stop Making Sense
With the Ishtar Bluray finally out, it’s permissible to re-post a 33-month-old riff on the oppressively dull jacket art:
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment design guy: “So what about the Ishtar Bluray jacket art? I’ve roughed out some ideas.”
SPHE marketing director: “No ideas. Boilerplate. Use the art from the VHS. Tweak it or re-do the titles, but we’re not spending nickel one on re-design.”
Design guy: “The VHS art…? But we’ve got all this material.”
Marketing director: “We don’t care. It’s a loss leader. Just re-do the lettering. Fuck it.”
Fog Bank
32 year-old Woody Allen was ten years away from Annie Hall when this was shot. The San Francisco TV news guy interviewing Allen is a clod. [Thanks to Joe McBride for passing this along.]
Death Wish
On 8.4 Scott Brown‘s Vulture interview with screenwriter Damon Lindelof appeared. The gist was obvious — robot-zombie Hollywood is bingeing on destruction porn, and in so doing is eating its own tail. I read Brown’s article and went “yeah….so?” I’ve been saying this for years. Strafe the ComicCon faithful in an F4 Phantom jet. The more CG apes and comic-book geeks you can eliminate, the better. The 80-minute finale of Man of Steel was, I suspect, the straw that broke the camel’s back for many of us. It’s gone too far. It’s moderately interesting to hear Lindelof, one of the leading whore-architects of this trend, admit that self-destruction is inevitable but…aahh, I wasn’t excited enough to link to it. But I came back to it today and decided that Lindelof’s quotes are so well-phrased that they deserve a re-reading.
Bulletproof
I could have read Terence Winter‘s script for Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (11.15, Paramount) a year ago, but I was too lazy, cocky, indifferent. It can wait, I kept telling myself. I finally read it last night and this morning, and it’s Goodfellas on Wall Street. Or Casino…whatever. The finale of Scorsese’s American hustler/den of thieves trilogy. Venal and criminal, but wildly intoxicating. Time-shuffling, narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Jordan Belfort (as Ray Liotta and Robert DeNiro narrated Goodfellas and Casino), manna from heaven, adrenalin-plus, woo-woo…and then the crash. If you fell for the first two how can you not like this installment? Same basic story, same engine, same unhappy wives, same juice, same cutting style. Winters’ script is awwwwwl right now, in fact it’s a gas. Best Picture nominee slamdunkaroonie.
“This Man Wants To Buy A Copy”
Presumably people used to actually tell Woody Allen that while they enjoy his films, they really like “the earlier funny ones.” I once ran into Allen on 57th Street, right near Carnegie Hall, and the instant we exchanged glances he had a look of total horror in his eyes. The first time I saw Bananas I had recently swallowed a chocolate shake spiked with an ounce of pot. I was so ripped I was missing half the jokes or paying so much attention to the thematic undercurrent that I wasn’t laughing. But this is an example, I suspect, of what most people considered the earlier funny material.
Lake Bell Thinks Like I Do
In a recent interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, In A World‘s Lake Bell (star, director, screenwriter) lamented what she called the “sexy baby voice virus”, which she says has been adopted by young women everywhere. Okay, right. Except I bitched about the same thing three years ago in a piece called “Chirpy Minnie Mouse,” and again on 7.31.11 in a piece called “They Had Voices Then.”
Took A While To Get It
Name a film that you didn’t care for at all (or felt seriously underwhelmed by) when you first saw it, and then you warmed to it the second time, and then the third time it was like “wow, what was I thinking the first time?” For me it’s Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton. I don’t know what was wrong when I first saw it, but my initial reaction was “yeah, okay…pretty good.” Then I caught it a second time at the Toronto Film Festival and said to myself, “This is better than I first realized.” I think I really started creaming big-time when I saw it the fourth time, when I first watched the Bluray. I’ve seen it maybe 9 or 10 times since. It just keeps getting better and better. George Clooney to poker player (quietly, casually): “You bought some hair too.” Poker player: “With your money!” And Sydney Pollack‘s performance? Forget about it.
“Who’s The U-Boat Commander?”
Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business opened 30 years and 5 days ago. It captured and in some ways defined the early ’80s zeitgeist (Reagan-era morality, go for the greenbacks, the receding of progressive ’70s culture). And it brought about an ungodly torrent of tits-and-zits comedies, so numerous and pernicious that they became a genre that forever tarnished the meaning of “mainstream Hollywood comedy.” But Risky Business was a perfect brew. The Tom Cruise-Rebecca DeMornay sex scenes were legendary, the vibe of upper-middle-class entitlement was delivered with natural authority, Joe Pantoliano‘s Guido is arguably a more memorable character than his Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos, and the opening dream sequence is just as funny and on-target in its depiction of encroaching doom as Woody Allen‘s Bergmanesque train-car sequence at the beginning of Stardust Memories.
Vudu Guy
I’m queer for Blurays of classic black-and-white films. Until recently I’ve never believed that I could get Bluray quality out of digital high-def streaming, but I’m now convinced that Vudu is a reasonably good delivery system for that. And they claim to have significantly more high-def movies in their library than anyone else. And that their new films are available day-and-date with DVD releases. And I feel that the quality is pretty good. Not perfect but commendable for the most part.
There’s no Bluray for John Frankehheimer‘s Seven Days in May (’64) and until yesterday I’d never seen it in high-def on a video monitor, but Vudu delivers a very satisfying high-def version — rich, sharp and silvery. I also watched a high-def version of Stanley Kramer‘s Judgment at Nuremberg (’61), and found it mostly satisfying. And yet a Vudu high-def version of From Here To Eternity (which is coming out on Bluray in a few weeks) didn’t look as robust and gleaming as a high-def rendering on TCM that I caught last spring. And a high-def Vudu viewing of Stanley Kramer‘s On The Beach looks good texture-wise but is presented — horrors! — in 1.78 rather than 1.66 (which is how it’s presented on the old DVD). So that’a demerit.