“In later years, Tony Scott‘s editing became downright experimental in films like Domino, Deja Vu and The Taking of Pelham 123. It didn’t always work, but you got the sense — and here’s where he proved himself the very opposite of a hack, something he was often accused of being — that Scott was constantly trying something new.” — from Bilge Ebiri‘s “They Live By Night” blog, posted this morning.

In his howling, most darkly self-doubting, four-in-the-morning convulsions of the soul, Steven Spielberg wishes he could be the kind of uptown “hack” that Tony Scott was. He dreams and then weeps, knowing that train left the station decades ago.

“What we like to think of today as the Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer aesthetic was, in fact, originally the Tony Scott aesthetic (often deployed in films made for Bruckheimer and his late partner Don Simpson),” Ebiri goes on. “Only back then there was a lot more art to it. Scott famously cross-bred an amped up, high-stakes kineticism with a certain romantic quality: He liked to intercut frenzied scenes of violence with elegiac moments, often with dreamy music playing in the background. This guy made guy movies, or at least what boys liked to think of as guy movies: He shot gunfights and sports stadiums and cars and planes and machines the way other directors might shoot pastoral scenes.

“In so doing he also helped lay down the foundations of the boys-with-big-toys blockbuster style that we’re still contending with today. Along the way, sometimes his people stopped being people and became myths: His long lenses flattened and almost abstracted the characters, and his use of slow-motion and heroic silhouettes caught small, fleeting moments and stretched them until they felt monumental. Indeed, Tony Scott movies often hovered on the edge of abstraction.”

It’s been claimed that ABC News was wrong in reporting that director Tony Scott, who killed himself yesterday with a leap off the Vincent Thomas bridge in Long Beach, had inoperable brain cancer. Even though there was some vague backup from L.A. Times reporter Rebecca Keegan. Deadline and TMZ are reporting that Scott’s widow Donna has told police that the famed filmmaker/TV producer did not have brain cancer“.

I was just speaking to a journalist-novelist friend, and I was saying I don’t think I’d have the nerve to jump off a high bridge. It’s just too scary and freaky, and then there’s the bone-shattering impact to look forward to. Give me a nice hotel room in the late fall with a fire in the hearth and some pills to go to sleep with. That or a sudden heart attack in Paris, on a side street in Montmartre on my way home from a beautiful dinner.

“I can confirm that Tony Scott has passed away,” says Scott’s publicist Simon Halls, “and that the family asks that their privacy [be] respected at this time.”

Boy and Bicycle was the first film made by Ridley Scott, and it’s significant today because the kid on the bike was Tony Scott, then about 18 years old. The 27-minute, 16mm monochrome short was lensed in 1962 while Scott was a photography student at the Royal College of Art in London. Shortened version with Badlands/True Romance music posted this morning by John C. Tassy.

Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas joined Sasha Stone and I for a long but lively Oscar Poker — discussions of weekend box-office,Compliance and Side by Side, and a brief rundown of Toronto/Telluride. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

I’ll bet that of all the critics, bloggers and columnists banging out Tony Scott tributes this morning, none of them ever stood up and urged that one of his films be handed a Best Picture nomination. Well, I did that nearly three years ago. The film was The Taking of Pelham 123. I didn’t care who agreed with me then and I surely don’t care now.

Within its own realm and by the demanding measuring stick of other classic New York-based action thrillers, Scott’s Pelham was damn near perfect.

Posted on 10.16.09: My London trip allowed me to see Tony Scott‘s The Taking of Pelham 123 twice — on the way over and the way back. And don’t laugh but I think it deserves to be one of the ten Best Picture nominees. The idea in nominating ten is to promote and celebrate a movie or two that guys like Scott Foundas and Dennis Lim don’t approve of, right? That Average Joes paid to see and actually enjoyed?

This is precisely the kind of shrewd, sharp-angled, deftly layered urban thriller that high-end Hollywood filmmakers like Scott are better at making than anyone else in the world. And I’m convinced after watching The Taking of Pelham 123 that it’s a damn near perfect film for what it is. The sucker never lags or falls into clicheville, it has a crafty plot with well-massaged characterization, it’s always psychologically complex or at least diverting, it delivers first-rate performances and just rocks out up and down.

And so somewhere over the Atlantic I began asking myself why a film as well-made and fully engaging as this one can’t be nominated for Best Picture? Because it’s a summer movie and summer movies don’t win awards? Of course they don’t, and of course this one can’t. The suggestion is to pop Pelham into the ranks of Best Picture contenders in order to round out the pack and toss a bone to the lowbrows and guilty-pleasure fixaters like myself.

What are the most likely ten Best Picture nominees at this stage? The Hurt Locker, An Education, Nine, Up In The Air, Invictus and A Serious Man. These are the six locks, in my view. Then you have Bright Star (maybe), Up (maybe but what’s the reason to lift it out of the Best Animated Feature category?), Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (probably but it’s so grim and dark, and isn’t it more of a performance film than a rock-solid cinematic achievement?), and possibly A Single Man.

I don’t think these last four are locks at all, and you can argue, I suppose, that A Serious Man might not be a given either. But any way you slice it there’s not a popcorn-muncher among these, and shouldn’t there be? At least one, I mean?

Early last June I wrote that The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is “an unquestionably better film — more rousing and flavorful, zippier and craftier — than the 1974 Joseph Sargent original. It’s a very satisfying summer-crime fuckall flick. A retread, yes, but with an attitude all its own…pow!

“Scott’s Pelham is first-rate crackerjack escapism because (a) it knows itself and is true to that, (b) it’s content to operate in its own realm (i.e., isn’t trying to top the chase sequences, effects and explosions in the last big urban actioner…it’s not playing that game) and (c) it’s just a solid all-around popcorn movie, full of focus and discipline.

“Scott exhibits the same precision and intelligent pizazz he used for Man on Fire and Crimson Tide. Is Pelham some kind of drop-to-your-knees golden fleece movie? No — just another urban slam-banger but smart, clever and muscle-car sweet.

“The New York subway-kidnap hostage thriller has more intricate plotting than the ’74 film, richer characterizations of the top MTA guy (Denzel Washington in the old Walter Matthau role) and top-dog hostage-taking badass (John Travolta in the Robert Shaw role) and a slew of supporting performances across the board that are much more vivid and interesting than those from the class of ’74, and at the same time less broad and farcical.

“Plus the Travolta and Washington characters are more psychologically layered; more work has put into their rationales and backstories. In hindsight Matthau’s performance seems humdrum and almost glib in comparison to Washington’s. And Travolta…my God, he’s a friggin’ madman in this thing! Fierce, irate, flying off the handle, lunging — his finest bad guy since the ‘ain’t it cool?’ guy in Broken Arrow.

“And James Gandolfini‘s New York Mayor isn’t the buffoon figure from the ’74 film — he’s playing a rationale, practical, somewhat full-of-shit politician, and he does so with an unforced attitude..

“The 2009 Pelham was made by a guy who understands and respects the original, and who sincerely wanted to make a better film — and he did! Integrating it very nicely and believably into a 2009 realm. And very grippingly and thrillingly. There’s no boredom to be had, and it never overcranks it. “

I’m thinking now of an Act Two barroom scene in Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton. The titular character (George Clooney) and his boss, Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack), are talking about the apparent suicide of Arthur Edens ( Tom Wilkinson), and Clayton says it just doesn’t figure that Arthur, a manic, high-energy eccentric, would kill himself…”why?” And Bach snaps right back: “Why? Because people are fucking incomprehensible, that’s why. ‘Why’!”

Tony Scott — 1944 – 2012

The apparent suicide death of Tony Scott, 68, is completely incomprehensible, but what do I know? I know that I’m hugely sorry, that I didn’t know Scott well but that I’d met him at three or four LA press junkets, the first being the one for Crimson Tide in ’94 in Marina del Rey, and that he was fun to shoot the shit with…bright, direct, quick, good-humored. Which means absolutely nothing tonight.

How could someone as connected and thriving and plugged-in as Tony Scott figure that the nothingness of death would be better than what life held in store? Good effing God. My sincere condolences to his wife, children, older brother Ridley, everyone who knew and loved him…a whole lotta people.

I know that perhaps my all-time favorite escapist director of the ’90s and the aughts — a guy who made better straight-ahead commercial action-thrillers than just about anyone else in the business, who was always high-styling and side-riffing and slam-banging with supercool scattershot pizazz and never (and I mean never) delivering profound undercurrents or deep spiritual themes or anything that stuck to your ribs, and yet a guy who always portrayed the adult world out there with absolute needlepoint accuracy and complexity…okay, in melodramatic terms with super-flash cutting and authentic performances and cool, handsome cinematography…a guy who had no aesthetic other than to be Tony Scott and produce like Tony Scott, and nobody was as good as he in that regard…this guy is suddenly gone for no reason that makes any sense. At all.

It doesn’t figure, it doesn’t figure, it doesn’t figure, it doesn’t figure. Scott reportedly left a suicide note. Either his family and co-workers will decide to share it or they won’t. But even if they do it won’t make any sense.

For me, Scott’s four best films were Crimson Tide, Man on Fire, Revenge and — yes, I’m perfectly serious — The Taking of Pelham 123. And then True Romance, even with the cop-out happy ending. And then Enemy of the State. And then Unstoppable, Spy Game and The Hunger. That was it for me — nine films that really worked. Okay, the top four with honorable mention for the bottom five.

I’m sorry but I wasn’t a fan of Deja Vu, Domino, The Fan, The Last Boy Scout, Days of Thunder, Beverly Hills Cop II or Top Gun. But when True Romance came along, I lit up. That’s when I started falling for Scott. And then came Crimson Tide…God, I love that film! I watch it once or twice a year.

Gene Hackman to Denzel Washington, final scene: “You were right and I was wrong. (Beat, beat, beat, beat) About the horses, the Lipizzaners. They are from Spain and not Portugal.”

“Several people called 911 around 12:35 p.m. to report that someone had jumped from the Vincent Thomas Bridge spanning San Pedro and Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor, according to Los Angeles police Lt. Tim Nordquist”…and the news only began to get around two or three hours ago? That’s because his body wasn’t recovered until 4:30 pm or thereabouts.

A story I heard once about Scott suggested he had a glint of madness in him. I was told by a friend that he wiped out on a motorcycle really badly a few years ago, that he was tear-assing along like a bat out of hell on some Hollywood or West Hollywood boulevard. I never investigated or read a police report, but that’s what I heard. He was going really, really fast.

I did an interview with Scott during the Man on Fire junket. I was admiring his very cool-looking hiking boots, which had a nice medium-brown deerskin color with brightly colored violet laces (or so I recall), so I asked him “Where’d you get the great-looking boots?” At one of the department stores, he said, but it was a pair of women’s hiking boot…hah! Scott’s feet were small enough, and we all know that women’s footwear are often made with a keener sense of style and attractiveness than men’s. Scott knew this, I knew this, we chuckled…a moment.

Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder will have its world premiere screening at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday, September 2nd, at 7:30 pm. The Toronto Star‘s Pete Howell has kindly forwarded the synopses and notes from the Venice Film Festival as well as the Toronto Film Festival, where Malick’s film will also screen. It seems evident that the basic plot bones of To The Wonder are at least partly based on Malick’s own personal history, which is ironic given his mania for privacy.

Neil (Ben Affleck) and Jane (Rachel McAdams) appear to be at least superficially based on Terrence Malick and his wife, Alexandra “Ecky” Wallace.

“After visiting Mont Saint-Michel — once known in France as the Wonder — at the height of their love, Marina (Olga Kurylenko) and Neil (Ben Affleck) come to Oklahoma, where problems soon arise,” the Venice synopsis reads. “Marina makes the acquaintance of a priest and fellow exile (Javier Bardem), who is struggling with his vocation, while Neil renews his ties with a childhood friend, Jane (Rachel McAdams). An exploration of love in its many forms.”

I’ve heard or read bits and pieces over the years, but a 5.21.11 “The Search” document by Brett McCracken called “39 Facts About Terrence Malick” reports that in the early 80s, Malick, raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, fell for Michele Morette, “a Parisienne who lived in his building in Paris and who had a daughter, Alex. After a few years the three of them moved to Austin, Texas. Malick married Michele in 1985, but they divorced in 1998.” That same year, McCracken writes, “Malick married Alexandra ‘Ecky’ Wallace, an alleged high school sweetheart from his days at St. Stephen’s school in Austin, Texas. They are still married and currently reside in Austin, Texas. Ecky Wallace is the mother of actor Will Wallace, who appears in The Thin Red Line, The New World and The Tree of Life.”

Are you going to stand there and tell me that Neil (Affleck) isn’t Malick, Marina (Kurylenko) isn’t Michele and Jane (McAdams) isn’t Ecky?

As for the Toronto Film Festival, Howell informs that info “is actually taken from the excellent TOfilmfest.ca site, not affiliated with TIFF, which combines all available info about films and is actually more complete than TIFF’s own site”:

To The Wonder / Director: Terrence Malick / Cast: Ben Affleck, Javier Bardem, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Peet, Barry Pepper, Michael Sheen, Rachel Weisz

“New film from Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), about a man who reconnects with a woman from his hometown after his marriage to a European woman falls apart. Venice Film Festival director Alberto Barbera has revealed some new details regarding the film’s themes. ‘The main recurring theme is the crisis — the economic crisis, which is having devastating social effects, but also the crisis of values, the political crisis.”

What? You’d have to be an idiot not to recognize that To The Wonder is at least a partly autobiographical tale, and yet Barbera’s assessment is that the film is thematically concerned with the socio-economic criss that began in 2008?

What’s with Malick’s decision to offer only that one lonely photo of Affleck and McAdams, which was first circulated on 2.23.11?

It was reported on 5.15.12 that Malick’s film, previously called The Burial, had been given an R rating for “some sexuality/nudity.”

The Venice notes say that “actors Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem (TBC) and Romina Mondello will be in Venice to present the film.” Will Malick pull a sneak visit with shades and a hat on, watching silently from the sidelines?

I don’t believe the bike action in this Premium Rush (Sony, 8.24) trailer. I read that N.Y. Times piece and I don’t care — it still looks CG’ed and tricked up and dishonestly rendered. I could buy something like this if it was shot straight and plain with digital minicams, but fakery (or the suggestion of same) kills.

This is what Hollywood has created with its relentless reliance on CG bullshit when it comes to action scenes. Nobody trusts their eyes any more. Everything action-y is presumed to have been pizazzed up to some degree.

This David Koepp film was shot two years ago. The release delay presumably has something to do with the concept of a “bike messenger chase action movie” not being taken seriously. By anyone.

In honor of Monday night’s Aero screening of Herbert Ross‘s The Last of Sheila (’73), here’s a nicely phrased appreciation from Trailers From Hell commentator Larry Karaszewksi.

I spoke a couple of times to Ross when I was a Cannon press-kit writer. It was in the fall of 1987 when his Mikhail Baryshnikov film, Dancers, was being prepared for release. During our second chat I was asking him about something I wanted to put into the Dancers press kit, and somehow I miscommunicated my intention and Ross got the idea I was trying to debate him. “Look, this isn’t that kind of conversation!,” he said sternly, almost shouting. I immediately backpedaled and grovelled. “No, no, Mr. Ross…I apologize, that’s not what I meant,” etc. I cooled him down but after I hung up, I said to myself, “Jesus God, that is one fierce hombre! He was ready to take my head off!”

Of course, any director who’s elbowed his or her way into mainstream Hollywood and maintained power in that realm over any period of time has to be tough as nails. That’s what I said when I wrote that July 2011 piece comparing Wes Anderson to John Ford and Nunnally Johnson. Here’s the opening graph:

“‘All strong directors are sons of bitches,’ John Ford allegedly said to screenwriter Nunnally Johnson sometime in the late ’40s or early ’50s. His point was that Johnson, in Ford’s view, was too much of a nice, thoughtful, fair-minded guy to cut it as a director. Directors basically can’t be too mellow or gentle or accommodating. They need to be tough, pugnacious and manipulative mo’fos in order to get what they want. And if they’re too deferential, they won’t last.”

Why is it that no one who attended the Chicago screening of The Master has made any attempt to really explore the Scientology parallels, or lack thereof? It’s as if the people who’ve posted reactions have never even heard of Scientology or even toyed with the idea that The Master might be at least an oblique commentary about it. Weird.

I’m aware, of course, that Phillip Seymour Hoffman and others have contended that the film is “not about Scientology”, but I’ve yet to read a piece that explains clearly and precisely how ‘the Cause’ differs from Scientology or goes further and asks “where did anyone get the idea that this might be about Scientology? Because it’s so not that!” Or something along those lines. Have I missed something?

Put another way, did an early decision by director-writer Paul Thomas Anderson to avoid specific allusions to Scientology result in the austere spareness of the film?

“Explanations are pared away; background for ‘The Cause’ that Master (Hoffman) represents is implied, hardly ever explained. Motivations of secondary characters are elided. There’s hardly a force onscreen beyond Master and Freddy (Joaquin Pheonix). Amy Adams, as Master’s wife, has three scenes that show her to be yet another sort of master in the emotional equations.” — MCN columnist Ray Pride, posting on 8.17.12 following Chicago Music Box screening.

My God, does this film sound dense and spare and mesmerizing and all but impenetrable!

“Though it’s not me, it’s cinema that’s all fixated on pants and hair and the Citreon DS.” — Ignatiy Vishnevetsky.

A person who saw The Master last night at the Museum of Moving Image in Queens responds: “Oh, I wouldn’t call it ‘impenetrable.’ While you’re watching it, it’s extremely direct and emotional. The alcoholism of the characters is portrayed very bracingly. It’s when the thing’s over and you’re piecing the various stuff together that it actually gets more mysterious. While you’re in it, it’s incredibly direct and uncomfortable and all the narrative eliding that Pride talks about doesn’t register so much. I’ll be interested in how you like it. if you’re open to it, I suspect it’ll affect you an awful lot.”

“God, that Vishnevetsky guy seems like a smirky little prick!

“As for the Scientology angle or lack thereof, well, yes, of course, the stuff that Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd is doing bears quite a resemblance to L. Ron Hubbard‘s scheme, in both the particulars of the beliefs and the building of the ‘church.’ But not always in the way you expect, and it’s certainly not the movie’s mission to make a commentary on Scientology. The belief system kind of stands in for all belief systems, in a way. You’ll get it when you see it. The movie’s theme is far more primal and elemental than that of a mere sociological/cultural phenomenon.”

I remember deciding a long time ago to instantly dismiss people who use the word “uhhm” while gathering their thoughts. I’m not saying I’ll refuse to deal with them — there are tens of thousands of “uhhm”-ers out there and you can’t live on an island. But the instant I hear that word I tend to pull back and regard the speaker askance. You’ll notice that for the most part “uhhm” is used by younger people and under-educated girly-girls.

I can roll, on the other hand, with people who say “uhhh” or “ahhh.” (I’ll occasionally resort to these.) It’s really the use of the letter “m” that tears it. When you’re pausing between phrases, just don’t say anything that rhymes with the word “bum” — simple.

Part of my problem with this year’s New York Film Festival slate, I suppose, is that I was spoiled by the NYFF’s first-anywhere debut of The Social Network in 2010 — that was a major score that put the NYFF, which had acquired a bit of a sleepy, sedentary rep under Richard Pena, back on the map and was a feather in the caps of the newly ascended Scott Foundas and NYFF selection committee member Todd McCarthy.

Note: I’ve been informed that a certain former Lincoln Center fellow with the initials “K.J.” played a crucial role in landing The Social Network, and that I shouldn’t go overboard in assuming that Foundas-McCarthy were the principal architects of that “get.”

To be sure, landing Flight as the closing-night attraction is a commendable score, but the only thing that could have fully lived up to The Social Network this year would have been Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln (Disney, 11.9). Life of Pi for the opener, Flight for the Centerpiece and Lincoln for the closing-nighter…perfect!

Alas, Spielberg films almost never play major festivals (the big exception was ’08’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), and Disney marketing’s decision not to debut their film as a closing-night NYFF attraction may, I fear, indicate their level of confidence in it, at least as far as how Lincoln will fare with the NY critical community…but let’s not assume too much. Ease up, take it slow.

Still, the fact that Lincoln will open on November 9th, only three and a half weeks after the NYFF closes, makes you wonder if there’s any big-city, media-centric event that they’d be comfortable partnering with for a Lincoln debut. What are they going to do, show it around the country in a series of rube screenings like they did with War Horse?

The answer, of course, is “no” — that screen-it-for-the-rural-popcorn-crowd strategy convinced everyone except for EW’s Dave Karger that War Horse was a problem, and that’s exactly what it turned out to be. It doesn’t matter how much money it made ($79 million domestic, $97 million foreign) because (a) many if not most ticket buyers are not afflicted with that cultural burden or affliction called “taste,” and (b) the fact that War Horse was grotesquely sentimental and wildly manipulative destroyed its Best Picture chances, and cemented the notion that Spielberg’s worst tendencies are out of control these days.

Which is why people are concerned about Lincoln as we speak, and saying to each other that “whatever Spielberg does with this material, you really can’t trust him to do the right thing any more, not after War Horse and also considering the tedious experience of Amistad.” They’re also saying that “the only thing we’ll be able to really count on, most likely, will be Daniel Day Lewis‘s performance, and hopefully Tony Kushner‘s screenplay and perhaps the supporting performances…who knows?” But nobody trusts Spielberg.