In a 5.12.13 piece called “If Saving Mr. Banks Is As Good As The Script…,” I wrote that Terry Marcel‘s script “is so wise and clean and well-crafted that you can hear Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson say the lines as you read them.” I also wrote that John Lee Hancock, director of the forthcoming Disney film, “is probably the most skilled guy in the business when it comes to giving G or PG-rated or family-friendly material a certain echo-y gravitas.” But this trailer makes the film seem jokier and more comedically cloying than the script I read. Banks, trust me, is not a comedy. But this is what trailers always do — they remove the shadings and subtleties.
Perverse Fascination
I confessed a long time ago to being a Bluray philistine when I said I enjoy “tastefully DNR’ed” classic films, especially those shot in black-and-white. (DNR being an acronym for digital noise reduction or, in Hollywood Elsewhere-ese, tasteful de-graining or digital mosquito removal.) In my mind Universal Home Video’s Psycho Bluray is one of the most beautifully DNR’d films ever released. In any event I’m staying in a new abode with a 60-inch flatscreen on the wall, and I’ve discovered a new Philistine pleasure — watching Blurays of classic black-and-white films on an LCD screen with that video-like, frame-duplication setting that almost makes them look like they were shot at 48-frames-per-second. LCD and LED sets call it Motion Plus or Clear Motion or Auto Motion.
What’s In It For Me?
Tell me why I should be even faintly excited about Sam Mendes having agreed to make Bond #24, i.e., Son of Skyfall? I find it vaguely depressing that guys like Mendes, who should be directing films like Road to Perdition, American Beauty and Revolutionary Road (as well as producing films like Things We Lost In The Fire), are having such a difficult time getting their pet projects funded that they take jobs directing franchise crap because it pays well, etc. This is a sign of the times, and the times aren’t good for guys who want to make real movies. Bond #24 will be written by John Logan. It’ll open on 11.6.15 in the U.S.
I Can At Least Say This
I saw Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine last night, but I can’t say anything. Well, maybe something. I can at least say that Cate Blanchett‘s fierce, ragged-edge performance as the Ruth Madoff-y Jasmine, the pill-popping, vodka-slurping widow of a disreputable high-finance finagler (Alec Baldwin), burns into your head minutes after the film begins and all but forces you to acknowledge that she’s an instant Best Actress contender. It’s clearly “one of those performances,” if you catch my drift. (The fact that it’s only July 10th mitigates this somewhat, but it’s balls-out any way you slice it.) Blanchett’s performance borrows a little from Judy Davis‘s neurotic nutjob in Husbands and Wives and then piles on the rage and (self-) loathing and denial like shovelfuls of dirt in a cemetery. I shared my thoughts about the film an hour ago with a publicist but that’s for later. It’s very much an above-average Woody but I can’t go any farther…later.
All Filth-ed Out
Filth won’t open in Scotland until sometime in late September; perhaps it’ll have its North American debut at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival but who knows? I’ll tell you what I do know. I know that it’s been over-trailered.
Damon, Junod, Bono/McCartney
I’ve selected two exceptional portions from Tom Junod‘s profile of Elysium, Behind The Candelabra and Monuments Men star Matt Damon in the current Esquire — the first being a Junod riff about Damon’s almost-regular-guyness and the second a great Beatles anecdote by way of Bono.
Portion #1: Matt Damon “is not a regular guy. He is to regular guys as he says Germans are to Americans — about 5 percent different. For comparison`s sake, let`s say George Clooney is about 15 percent different. Brad Pitt is about 12.5 percent different, and Leonardo DiCaprio has never been a regular guy, so he offers no basis for calculation. But Damon is so close to being a regular guy that he can pass as a regular guy onscreen and off. He can be the same guy onscreen and off, and so he offers audiences the rarest of combinations — the satisfaction of reliability and surprise.
Debunked, Discredited, Drained
With a single, well-reported article, Slate‘s Sharon Shetty has all but destroyed the credibility of Ken Scott‘s The Delivery Man (Touchstone/Disney, 11.22) and with it the credibility of Starbuck, Scott’s Canadian-made original. Shetty began with my 7.2 “Son of Starbuck” piece, in which I asked how many pints or quarts it would take for a single guy to father 535 children, and came up with some real-world answers that won’t put a smile on the faces of anyone behind this film (i.e., Scott or his star, Vince Vaughn, or the various attached Touchtone and Disney execs).
The bottom line is that it would be awfully damn hard as well as bureaucratically unlikely for one guy to father 535 kids via sperm bank donations as (a) Vaughn’s character would be required to ejaculate over 1,000 times into vials and (b) within the realm and regulations of sperm banks this level of delivery would take about seven years to accomplish.
Geekdogs of London
One could be forgiven for thinking that the journalists in this photo, assembled for the London junket of Edgar Wright‘s The World’s End, were “in the tank” for Wright and the film going in, no matter how good it may have turned out to be. “The World’s End has been getting very good reviews from the UK press,” Faraci writes, “so I’m excited. Of course no matter how good it is, some asshole will show up in the comments and complain that this trip has colored my review of it.” I’m not complaining. I’m just saying “consider the Wright oeuvre and then look at these guys…you’re telling me they’re impartial?”
(l. to. r) Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny, Todd Brown of Twitch, Edgar Wright of A Fistful of Fingers, Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News, Jordan Hoffman of Screencrush, Devin Faraci of Badass Digest, Germain Lussier of Slashfilm, Alex Billington of First Showing, Eric Vespe of Ain’t It Cool News, Silas Lesnick of Coming Soon and Steve “Frosty” Weintraub of Collider.
Noise In The Canyon
“The number one fact of the new low-budget cinema is that it is no longer impossible to get your film financed, but it is impossible to get anybody to see it,” says The Canyons director Paul Schrader in a new, Canyons-kowtowing issue of Film Comment. Both Kent Jones and Larry Gross give it little pats on the back. Oh, yeah? Then why didn’t The Canyons get into Sundance or South by Southwest? Why did Steven Soderbergh offer to recut it for Schrader, and why did Scharder turn him down? What about the likely bedrock truth of the matter?
The problem, says Schrader, is that “there are 10,000 people doing the same thing you’re doing, right now. And which one of those 10,000 films is anybody going to see? 15,000 films get submitted to Sundance, 100 or so get shown, eight get picked up, and two make money. Those are the economics.
Short People
I just don’t relate to short guys, and I don’t mean that negatively. I’ve never agreed with Randy Newman and I completely agree that “it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” But I’ve always felt a certain remove from guys who’ve never grown beyond the size I was when I was ten. When I see a short guy pulling a gun or kissing a girl or beating up some guy in a bar, I don’t say to myself “okay, whatever” — I say to myself “whoa, that short guy isn’t letting his stature determine his attitude or fate!” And I respect their rage. Everyone knows angry short guys can be more ferocious than anyone. Napoleon Bonaparte, Truman Capote, Swifty Lazar, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, etc.
All to say that the first thing I noticed when I watched this Wasteland trailer is that Luke Treadaway is a little guy. (Roughly the size of Charlie Kaufman.) And Iwan Rheon, Gerard Kearns and Matthew Lewis are no giants-of-the-earth either.