I have to run down to the 2012 SIGGRAPH gathering at the Los Angeles Convention Center to try and get myself a temporary media badge so I can attend a 10:45 am panel discussion on high-frame-rate production and projection. Warner Bros.’s modified retreat from its commitment to 48 frames-per-second presentations of The Hobbit in December is sure to be a particular focus.
Industry friend: A colleague was at the Academy’s Goldwyn theatre yesterday and put up a reel of 2001:A Space Odyssey and found no problems. I have no idea what you saw [at the Academy on Monday night], as I spoke with someone else last night, a director, who was also there, and he thought it looked fine.
Me: I know exactly what I saw, and those guys are either lazy or clueless or full of it…or are looking for simplicity and calm in their lives and “don’t want to know.” The 2001 images I saw Monday night were dark, inky, shadowy and underwhelming. An array of visual values captured by Stanley Kubrick 45 years ago were almost completely unmanifested and unrealized. You couldn’t savor any of the hairs on the ape coats. No exceptional specificity to speak of.
I went home and watched my 2001 Bluray….finally, the way it’s supposed to look!
Your two pallies are just being polite or bland or whatever. I wouldn’t take their word for anything henceforth. I know what I saw. I hate people who work in this industry and are therefore presumed to know a thing or two, and then you show them something and they go “huh? really? I didn’t notice that.”
Industry friend: I need to ask the obvious question, only because [my colleague] said what he saw after a timing session. Did you take off your sunglasses?
Me: Yes, my sunglasses were off and stuffed in my breast pocket.
Indoor personal hygiene options were at a relatively early stage when Abraham Lincoln lived in the White House. While sources contend that Millard Fillmore was the first U.S. President to enjoy indoor plumbing while residing in the White House from 1850 to 1853, a 1989 article about White House plumbing in Plumbing and Mechanical magazine reports that Lincoln may have been “the first President of the United States to splash his way to cleanliness in a White House bathtub, the first tub having been installed during his presidency.”
This is precisely the kind of thing that I like to see and learn about when I see a historical film of any kind. What did everything smell like back then? How well did contraptions work? What kind of soaps, perfumes, bath towels and scented fragrances did they use? Did bathrooms have absorbent floor mats or did water just collect in pools on the marble or hard-tiled floors? Did the toilets function fairly well for the most part or were there issues? Did general stores sell rounded rolls of toilet paper like they do today, etc.?
This is what I want, partly, from Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln. Not just toilet and bathtub information but various hints of the quality and texture of life in the 1860s. Imagine how amazing it would be if Spielberg had decided to present the film in Smellovision or Aroma-rama, then we’d have an idea of what the White House might have actually smelled like from time to time. Think of the transportation!
Will we get this kind of thing from Lincoln? Of course not. Will there be even a fragmentary amount of quality-of-life information? Doubtful. You know Spielberg. Half the time he was shooting Lincoln he was probably preparing for Robopocalypse.
This clip of Steven Soderbergh discussing conservative-minded resistance to digital filmmaking is a Side by Side outtake, but it’s an indication of the film’s spiritual and intellectual energy. Chris Kenneally and Keanu Reeves‘ doc, easily one of the best of the year and certainly the most historic, peeks out in Los Angeles on 8.17, on VOD 8.22, and then on 8.31 at Manhattan’s Quad Cinema.
Warner Bros.’s 48 frame-per-second Hobbit rollback was first announced at ComicCon on 7.12…”scared rabbits,” etc. Eight days ago I predicted that WB and Hobbit director Peter Jackson “are probably going to limit 48 fps venues when The Hobbit opens in December and characterize 48 fps as some kind of eccentric experiment.”
Today Variety‘s David Cohen reported that Warner Bros.will be “keeping the first high-frame-rate release of The Hobbit fairly small [in] select locations, perhaps not even into all major cities…hoping to test the marketplace and expand the HFR release for the second and third installments…provided auds are enthusiastic.”
In other words, WB has next to no confidence in 48 f.p.s. Adverse reactions from old-fart exhibitors and big-mouth bloggers at last April’s Cinemacon scared them silly and they still haven’t recovered. So they’re going to peek out with the 48 fps Hobbit and test the waters and determine if Joe and Jane Popcorn are going to approve or not…and if they don’t, 48 f.p.s. goes under the bus. Or something like that.
As I said yesterday, I took no texting or bathroom breaks during Tony Gilroy‘s The Bourne Legacy (Universal, 8.10), and that is a form of tribute and respect. (This isn’t to imply that I routinely step out for text messaging, but I sometimes do when a film blows.) And I’ve always admired and respected director-writer Tony Gilroy, who spent two years on Legacy, he said, in the manner of a captain going on a whaling voyage. And yeah, he brought home the oil and the blubber.
Bourne Legacy director-cowriter Tony Gilroy.
Gilroy and I spoke last week for a half hour or so. Here’s the mp3.
“Every time I re-watch my Bluray of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, which seems a bit more masterful each time, I feel a little bit worse about not being more enthusiastic when it first came out 40 months ago. I didn’t put enough feeling into my riffs about it. Calling it “never boring,” “a tense adult thriller about some unsettled and anxious people” and “as seasoned and authentic as this kind of thing can be” didn’t get it. I held back and over-qualified. And I’m sorry.” — posted on 1.31.11.
Please, please, please don’t let Gabriele Muccino‘s latest film be as emotionally cloying as the trailer indicates. I say this as a fan of L’Ultimo Bacio and one who was at least okay with The Pursuit of Happyness. Presumably they changed the last word in the title from “field” to “keeps” because the former alludes to the adventures of a hound and the latter to the promise of a real man.
I just watched the Fox Home Video Bluray of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and it’s absolutely beautiful, scrumptious, dazzling. A breathtaking Technicolor high. Watching it is like eating an ice cream sundae with whipped cream and a cherry. On top of which it’s been mastered at a 1.37 aspect ratio…heavens!
Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
In going with 1.37 Fox Home Video’s Schawn Belston has delivered a gentle reminder to the Bluray community that 20th Century Fox wasn’t part of the 1.85 aspect ratio mandate that swept across Hollywood in the spring of ’53. 1.85 fascist theology says that all films released after April 1953 were projected at 1.85…nope!
This may sound anecdotal to some, but to me the 1.37 presentation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which originally opened in July 1953, is a slight crack in the dike.
Projectionist #1 at New York’s Roxy (on or about July 12, 1953): Here are the prints for that new picture, Gentleman Prefer Blondes. We can run it after the show tonight.
Projectionist #2: With what aperture plate?
Projectionist #1: You ask? 1.85, of course. That’s the new rule, what the boss wants.
Projectionist #2: Wrong. We’re showing it at 1.37.
Projectionist #1: Whaddaya mean? Everything is supposed to be shown at 1.85. The rule came down three or four months ago. S’matter with you?
Projectionist #2: It’s wrong, I tell ya. I’ve heard this one has to be shown at 1.37. Fox films are a different deal than ones from Columbia and Warner Bros. and Paramount.
Projectionist #1: Except Paramount wants 1.66.
Projectionist #2: And that’s not all. When From Here To Eternity opens next month we’re not showing that in 1.85 either. That’ll also be shown at 1.37.
Projectionist #1: But that’s Columbia!
Projectionsist #2: Whatever. We’re showing it at 1.37.
Projectionist #1: How’s anyone supposed to keep this shit straight?
“I’ve never found any evidence in [Fox’s] studio files of a ‘1:85 starts at midnight’ dictum,” Belston told me this morning. “There is plenty of documentation, as you probably know, about Fox from 1954 on making every movie possible in CinemaScope. Ditto the development of stereo and CinemaScope55 later.
“I can tell you from looking at the non-Scope Fox films of 1953 (Call Me Madam, Niagara, Inferno and Pickup on South Street come to mind particularly) that they look more correctly framed in 1.37 than in 1.85, in my opinion. Additionally, whenever these films have screened within the last decade, projectionists/archives/museums have always shown them as you might expect in a 1.33/1.37 aspect ratio.
“Neither of these points is proof of how they should be shown, but for whatever it is worth to you, I’m fairly certain most if not all academics would agree with the 1.37 approach.”
If something in the refrigerator is looking stale or moldy or icky, I don’t throw it out. That takes too much effort — putting it in the garbage, pulling out the plastic garbage bag and tying it up, and then taking it outside and downstairs to the dumpster. It’s much simpler and easier to just put the moldy-stale thing in the freezer. That way it’s out of sight and won’t smell the place up, and when I’m ready (and I mean good and ready), I can take all the frozen discards out to the dumpster in one trip.
I’ve never seen any photos of Abraham Lincoln in which he looked quite this gray. His hair is flecked with gray around the temples in those portraits he sat for in early 1865, but Daniel Day Lewis almost looks like a silver fox here. Plus his hair is too neatly combed. The photo below shows you the real Abe wasn’t into clean parts.
Is this the very first piece of criticism levelled at Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln? Possibly.
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