George Butler’s Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (ThinkFilm, opening soon) “brings to the surface a Kerry I didn’t know existed: charismatic, idealistic, eloquent. {So] who turned this brave leader in to a Stepford candidate?” writes critic B. Ruby Rich. “Activist groups like MoveOn.org could do worse than buy airtime to show Kerry’s historic testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a passionate attack on failed foreign policies and warmongering. Yeah, just the kind of speech he ought to deliver now in 2004.”
If only the second two-thirds of Shaun of the Dead (opening 9.24) were as good as the first third…
The geeks calling this thing a way cool horror-comedy are deluding themselves. The threat element is shit and the story tension goes south around the 35-minute mark. You can’t just say “it’s a spoof” and leave it at that because spoofs have rules. They’ve got to show the same levels of propulsion and credibility that the films they’re spoofing have, or the game falls apart.
I got into this briefly in a WIRED item, but the Shaun script (by director Edgar Wright and costar Simon Pegg) is about two London slacker-somethings in their late 20s having to contend with a sudden invasion of flesh-eating ghouls in their local neighborhood (and which is manifesting all over England, a la 28 Days Later.)
Shaun (Pegg) has fed-up-girlfriend issues and is resisting the growing-up process, and to call his fat layabout friend Ed (Nick Frost) emotionally retarded would be a form of understatement.
The funniest scene happens just as the ghoul plague has begun. Simon walks through the neighborhood on his usual run to the grocery store and doesn’t even notice what’s going on. Then he goes home, turns on the tube and surfs right past the horrific reports on the news channels.
The problem is that the zombies aren’t threatening enough. They walk and react way too slowly, so agile humans aren’t in any kind of serious peril and so the story tension suffers. The Shaun zombies are like the mummy in Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (’55). They rarely do anything that even a seven year-old would consider half-threatening.
The Shaun zombies catch and eat people on occasion, but they’re much slower and less ferocious than George Romero’s zombies in Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead.
And all you have to do is give them a hard blow to the head and they’re dead. What happened to having to penetrate the skull? The Shaun survivors use a repeat-action Winchester rifle to defend themselves at one point, but it seems silly to have only 32 shells at their disposal with 100 or more ghouls trying to get at them.
Shakedown
I’ve already mentioned how rich, flavorful and well-ordered Sideways is. It’s Alexander Payne’s best film since Election ; his most emotionally ripe and mature. It’s a candidate for Best Picture, Best Director…blah blah, I’ve said all this.
I’m getting the idea that Sideways‘ s Oscar chances are pretty fair, actually. Not just the film itself but Giamatti for Best Actor, Haden-Church for Best Supporting Actor and costar Virginia Madsen for Best Supporting Actress, et. al.
I obviously don’t know anything about films I haven’t seen, but I’m getting these queer premonitions about Oliver Stone’s Alexander and Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. (Dan Fellman’s recent comment about Alexander (see WIRED) is the kind of thing I’m talking about. And I don’t trust Martin Scorsese with big budgets — he’s better when there’s less to paint with).
These films might be spectacular, pretty good’s or just so-so’s. It goes without saying there should be no assumptions about anything.
Taylor Hackford’s Ray is good but too long, I’ve read. Closer has been playing “a little cold,” I’ve heard, and we all know what that means when it comes to a certain brand of Academy voter. Others don’t seem to love and worship Collateral as much as me, but maybe I’m reading it wrong. And more and more people are telling me they were disappointed by The Motorcycle Diaries.
The Best Picture race may come down to Spanglish, The Motorcycle Diaries (an increasingly big maybe), Hotel Rwanda, Sideways and, depending how the election goes, Fahrenheit 9/11.
I was told last weekend that Sideways will probably take in $30 million, at best. But if word gets around in the right way, it’ll do better.
A good portion of Sideway‘s story is driven by adolescent behavior. This is catnip for under-25 crowds. My kids loved that scene in Election when Matthew Broderick throws the plastic container of Pepsi at the limousine (i.e., the one with Tracy Flick in it) and then runs when the limo driver hits the brakes. Payne gets adolescent guy-rage. He’s obviously tethered on some level.
There are three such scenes in Sideways, two of them gut-bustingly funny. They’re going to be word-of-mouth selling points when it opens. No descriptions. Just see it on 10.20.
Sipping Sideways
Fox Searchlight invited several press people up to Santa Barbara last weekend for a Sideways film junket. I accepted at the drop of a hat. I reside in a nice minimum-security prison with privileges (cable TV, music, food, evening screenings), and any time away from my work space is prime.
The deal included a suite at the Bacara hotel and spa in Goleta (about 12 minutes west of Santa Barbara, just past Isla Vista), a complimentary T1 line in the hotel room, too much food, a wine-tasting party, moonlight walks on the beach, all kinds of beautiful women everywhere, more food, and chats with Sideways writer-director Alexander Payne and costars Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen.
I drove up late Saturday afternoon. About 90 minutes, give or take. I checked into the Bacara around 6 pm. Swanky, expensive, built four years ago. Spanish mission style. A series of two-story buildings sloping downhill and all of it landscaped to death. The cheapest rooms go for $400 a night. The vibe felt a bit too rich for my blood.
The drive back to Santa Barbara for the wine party felt longish. (If the Bacara were farther away it couldn’t be in Santa Barbara. It’s out there.) Publicists at the door told me I’d missed a 5 pm screening of Sideways, which nobody told me about. I’d like to catch it again soon.
Alexander Payne was there without his wife, Sideways costar Sandra Oh. I asked him why his usually longish hair was cut short. “You have to cut back the rose bush every fall,” he replied. I spoke briefly to Madsen. Paul Giamatti wasn’t there due to a family situation. I saw Church but didn’t approach.
Top to bottom: At the Bacara Hotel round tables : Sideways producer Michael London (l.) and director Alexander Payne; Thomas Haden Church (in blue shirt); Virginia Madsen; Payne again (below Church); my hotel room at the Bacara; view from the terrace
There wasn’t enough food but plenty of wine. Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling was there and friendly, as always. Marina Zenovich, who’s making a doc about Roman Polanski, was sitting at a table with producer Jasmine Kosovic (The Adventures of Sebastian Cole).
I would say a great majority of business cards you hand to people at these parties end up in the garbage can. I would say that a great majority of things people say to each other at these parties are insincere or flat-out false. But I like going to them anyway.
I wandered around the Bacara bar area when I got back. The hotel is nicely designed, but it gives off a strange feeling of segregation. I’ll bet the same vibe existed in the ruling-class-only Palatine section of Rome during the reign of Tiberius.
I’m going to run the interviews I recorded with Payne, Sideways producer Michael London, Church and Madsen in the VERBATIM section starting next week.
I’m a particular fan of Church’s performance as Jack, an actor friend of Paul Giamatti’s Miles who’s due to be married in a few days but is determined to get laid during their wine-country safari any which way he can. It’s one of those last-gasp, go-for-the-gusto-before-surrendering things. Jack is a small child, but Church gives him a kind of dignity because he takes hound-dogging very seriously.
You should have heard the journos at the table imparting their p.c. sentiments about what a despicable misogynist Jack is. Bullshit — he’s like 80% of all the engaged guys I’ve ever known or heard about. (And for what it’s worth, I’ve been lucky twice with women who were about to get married. I know that the main reason they waved me in was because they knew this was their last shot before reciting marriage vows.)
The Sideways shoot had been described by Payne as extremely pleasant. I asked Payne and London if there’s anything analogous between on-set alpha vibes and first-rate final cuts. I’m not saying everyone has to miserable during shooting in order for a film to turn out well, but creative endeavors of consequence are rarely a slap-happy thing. Distillation — compressing, honing — is not a day-at-the-beach activity.
There’s no fixed rule. Bad films have been made on happy sets and superb ones have come from sets in which everyone hated each other. I just know my guard always goes up when I hear how much fun it was to make this or that film. Nobody seemed to get what I was saying. They all said, “You don’t have to be miserable to make a good movie.” I didn’t say you had to be miserable. I said…forget it.
There was a journalist from About.com who brought up the issue of Virginia Madsen’s performance being a comeback, but he did so in a chickenshit way by remarking she’d never really been away. Madsen said thanks, smiled and corrected him. Her last big hit, she said, was 1992’s Candyman.
Madsen said her career has been up and down, but has basically been okay. She said she’s proud of her performance opposite the late James Coburn in the unreleased American Gun. And of course she’s heartened that people are talking about her Sideways performance as being award-worthy, etc.
“But I’ve already won,” she said. “Just getting a role as good as this in a film as good as this one…this will never happen again.”
Separated at Birth?
Does anyone see a vague similarity between the Fox Searchlight’s Sideways one-sheet and the cover of Kenji Hodgson and James Nevison’s wine-appreciation book, “Half a Glass: A Modern Guide to Wine” (Whitecap)?
Nevison pointed this out to me at the Sideways junket last Sunday. I don’t see how Fox’s ad department can sidestep charges that their poster is…what’s the polite term?…an homage of some kind.
The Howling Man
As with all DVD box sets, there’s an understory to the just-out, superbly-remastered Star Wars trilogy. Or an undersaga, rather.
Star Wars is an efficently made space-myth movie that still plays pretty well and which I have no problem with. (Except for Lucas’s tinkering with Greedo shooting first. Is is true that the latest version has Greedo and Han shooting simultaneously?).
The Empire Strikes Back is, as we all know, the very best Star Wars film ever made. It’s the only big-budget fantasy flick in which the characters lose at every turn and end up worse off than when they started. Every step of the way Luke, Han Solo, and Princess Leia are ducking and running for cover and trying not to get killed. That’s all they do — they never get the upper hand. Plus it’s the best-looking (i.e., most lovingly lighted) Star Wars film ever.
Return of the Jedi was a travesty, a dud….a signaling of the corruption and the banality that was evolving in Lucas’s creative soul.
Lucas, of course, was Luke Skywalker at first — a lonely-kid dreamer who marshalled his resources and went up against the empire, succeeded hugely, and wound up creating his own kingdom. But once this power was firmly in hand, Luke started to devolve into a benign, flannel-shit-wearing Darth Vader figure — a technically-obsessed enemy of anything resembling organic creativity, a toymaker rather than a filmmaker, a digital remixer and reviser ad infinitum.
It’s the story of how a good guy grew into a kind of ogre….a demonic figure, really. A demonic figure with a mild-mannered personality, hundreds of employees who think he’s terrific, and two kids he loves and raises like any deeply devoted dad.
Remember how Albert Brooks’ character said in Broadcast News that William Hurt’s character was the devil? Meaning he was a guy who was helping to bring about degradations of standards in the TV news business and in the culture at large?
Lucas was a once-interesting filmmaker who almost singlehandedly (along with Steven Spielberg) managed to infantilize the film industry (in terms of the movies the bottom-line guys were willing to finance after the success of Jaws and Star Wars), and who also helped bring about, again with Spielberg, the first-weekend blockbuster mentality.
Lucas didn’t deliberately set out to undermine the art and wonder of film, of course, but the blockbuster mentality (a) killed the idea of gradual roll-outs, (b) brought about the idiotic high-concept movie formulas of the ’80s and ’90s, (c) maligned the idea that the making of quality movies had value in the Hollywood marketplace, and (d) helped launch the idea that to succeed big you had to dumb movies down.
Is there any one person out there who’s more responsible (on a symbolic as well as literal level) for these things than Lucas? I’d like to hear arguments.
Russ Meyer, R.I.P.
“I had dinner with Russ Meyer in Glendale back in the 1980s when I was living in Los Angeles. A friend of mine from Philly knew him, and Russ wanted to meet me since he wanted to meet everyone who’d ever mentioned him in print, and I’d mentioned him in a Siskel-Ebert Calendar story I did for the L.A. Times.
“Russ lived in a sort of Swiss chalet-like A frame somewhere in, I guess, Burbank, or in the vicinity of the Hollywood sign. Inside the house was filled from top to bottom with memorabilia, including framed stories about him, nudie pix of his wives and girlfriends, and special plaques featuring photos of certain lovers with the phrase “to the precious exchange of bodily fluids” etched into them.
“Russ was a guy’s guy. We went to eat in one of those darkly lit man’s type restaurants that featured leather banquettes and steaks, and discussed — what else? — photography and women.
“But what I really loved about him was, first, he was a real WWII man, a combat
photographer who’d seen it all. And secondly, he may have been the only truly indie filmmaker in the business (William Goldman said this about him), considering that he had total creative and marketing control over his work. He was also a stylist of some note, and had a great sense of humor.
“My friend Irv thinks Meyer’s life would make a great movie: the war, the titty movies, the studio productions, the obscenity fight, the many lovers. I really hope someone out there in Hollywood sees the dramatic possibilities here.
“RIP, Russ — you were a true original.” — Lewis Beale
A couple of 40ish guys drive up from L.A. to go on a wine-tasting tour of vineyards north of Santa Barbara for a few days. They get lucky with a couple of local women. The lying they use to get going with these women, not to mention certain character flaws (immaturity, impulsiveness), comes back to bite them, but the truth is faced and modest growth steps are taken.
That, in a nutshell, is Alexander Payne’s Sideways (Fox Searchlight, 10.20). It may not sound like much on the surface, but there’s a whole lot going on beneath it, believe me. The sum effect is that Sideways is one of the best films of the year. I don’t care what comes out between now and 12.31 — it stays on the top-ten list.
A day after seeing Sideways on Tuesday night, I put it into the Oscar Balloon as a Best Picture contender, as well as one for Best Director (Payne), Best Screenplay (Payne and Jim Taylor), Best Actor (Paul Giamatti), and Best Supporting Actress (Virginia Madsen). I don’t think I’m over-reacting. I know I’m not.
This is Payne’s most mature and fully realized film ever, and that’s saying something when you’re talking about the guy who made Election, About Schmidt and Citizen Ruth.
But can we agree to cool it with the wine-tasting allusions in the rave reviews to come? No sloshing the movie around in your mouth and mentioning the tannic undertaste, no coming to appreciate this or that character’s vaguely nutty flavor or subtle fruitiness…none of that.
This will be hard, I realize. If there’s ever been a movie awash in the culture of wine-loving, it’s Sideways. It says people are grapes or bottles of wine (or both), and vice versa. It observes how the potency of a life, like a bottle of good wine, can peak at a certain point and then start to inexorably lose it. (Whoa…downer, man.) It plays with the idea of a certain character having the behavioral tendencies of a Pinot grape and another character being more like a Cabernet, etc.
I wrote these words for the WIRED column on Thursday morning: “Sideways is fantastic in lots of small little ways that add up to one big score. It’s not a rock-your-world, drop-your-socks, home-run type of thing, but at the same time it’s damn near perfect and gets better and better the more you mull it over.”
This is what matters in spreading the word, I feel, and not the wine-lover metaphors, which will put off Joe Sixpack types for obvious reasons.
The worst thing a film can do (apart from being awful or boring you to tears) is to deliver this or that cheap high when you’re watching it but then fall apart on the way home. Sideways does the precise opposite. It’s okay at first, and then better, and then deeper and then really funny, and finally very touching. Then it seems to get even better the next morning, and better still a couple of days later.
Sideways walks and talks at times like a buddy movie, but it’s so much more emotionally mature than any buddy movie I’ve ever seen that it doesn’t feel right to call it that.
It’s mainly about Paul Giamatti’s character, a divorced wine connoisseur and would-be novelist named Miles. Calling him a guy with a downer attitude isn’t the half of it. To quote again from WIRED, Giamatti is “a master at conveying morose, cynical, self-loathing funkitude,” and he nails Miles with moves that are always sad and honest, and sometimes hilarious.
Co-stars Thomas Haden-Church and Virginia Madsen are nearly as well drawn, and the fourth character, played by Sandra Oh, is believably inhabited in every imaginable way. Haden-Church doesn’t start out as the funny half of the duo, but he sure as shit ends up that way, and without trying once to be overtly “funny.”
Although Haden-Church plays it real and earnest each step of the way, the reality is that his character, a marginally employed actor named Jack, is close to being a total goon. I’ve known plenty of guys like Jack; they see themselves as reasonably mature and aware, and they’re mostly about nine years old.
Virginia Madsen, who just turned 41, plays Giamatti’s love interest, which struck me as a bit surprising, frankly, if you follow the rule that birds of a feather go out together. She also plays the character with the most soul. She doesn’t have one of those big shouting or crying scenes that great performances are supposed to include, but every time she appears she’s grounded and heartfelt and never once seems to be “acting,” if that’s not too vaguely put.
(It’s funny but I was standing behind Madsen in the check-out line at Pavilions a few weeks ago and trying to remember what she’d last been in. If I’d seen or known about Sideways at the time, I still wouldn’t have said anything…but I wouldn’t have had all those life-is-hard thoughts. Actresses have a very tough time once they pass 35 or so.)
This is a film about some very fundamental things. It’s not an up movie, per se, but only because it’s dealing with recognizable mid-life issues — hurt, fear (of age, failure, loneliness), falling for someone special, stupidity, middle-aged adolescence — in mostly non-Hollywood ways.
And it’s got the funniest scene I’ve seen in any film since the accidental death-of-Wheezy-Joe bit in Intolerable Cruelty. And it involves terrible, turn-your-eyes-away nudity. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t stop, which got in the way of my paying attention to the follow-up scene.
So don’t take a big sip of Sideways or stick your nose in the glass. Don’t swirl it around in your mouth, and don’t wait for the flavor to grow or any of that other wine-snob crap. Just see it and write me and tell me I’m wrong about this film. It won’t happen.
World of Disappointment
[Like I said on Wednesday, I didn’t care enough about getting into a screening of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, so I asked Alex Stanford, a Team Elsewhere member based in Ottawa, Canada, to weigh in.]
I collected comic books as a kid, I used to work in a video store and my current job is in the high-tech field. All of these things should have made me the perfect reviewer for this film. Who if not someone like me should be able to fully appreciate the pulp-level thrills, the homage to a classic film genre and the technical achievements that Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow has to offer?
I didn’t.
The movie starts off with intrepid reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) searching for a group of missing scientists in a stylized 1940’s New York (called Gotham City …clever!) The audience is treated to the backstory through newspaper headlines and radio-news voiceovers, and for the most part the intro works. The problems begin when it’s time to greet our hero.
Sky Captain (Jude Law) is a mercenary for hire, but for what, exactly, we’re never told. He has a fantastic array of gadgets and a super-secret airbase, but again, for no reason I could fathom. Maybe they were just waiting for giant robots to attack. Luckily for them, that’s exactly what happens.
The military calls in Sky Captain, who manages to stop a few of these invaders before they complete their mysterious task and leave a job well done. The only real thing that Cap does in this sequence is rescue his ex-girlfriend. Yeah, you guessed it — Polly.
The most interesting part of this film is the brief moments they lend to the investigation of why these scientists have gone missing and where the robots are coming from. This lasts only about 10 minutes, unfortunately. The rest of the film consists of set pieces and spectacles aimed at wowing an audience right until the end. And they do everything they can to keep your interest, but it always seemed forced.
From references to Indiana Jones, James Bond, THX1138, The Empire Strikes Back and Jurassic Park, you might get the idea that this film is a fun-filled action adventure. But it’s essentially a collection of scenes that hasn’t been strung together in any kind of way that lets you just “enjoy” it for the fun stuff.
There’s a serviceable enough plot in this film, but unfortunately they don’t give you enough time to appreciate it. I’m reminded of the scene in Spaceballs where the evil plan is revealed in intricate detail, and Rick Moranis looks at the screen and says, “Everybody got that? Good.”
Before you know it, we’re brought to another locale or given another whimsical exchange between Polly and Cap. It felt after a while that we were just moments away from having the “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” silhouettes show up.
The characters all seem to be stereotypes: The Hero, The Dame, The Other Woman, The Sidekick , The Villain. I suppose that, given a green screen and little script to work from, each of the actors involved were expected to bring as much as they could to the roles.
Jude Law plays the square-jawed-Joe as well as could be expected. He’s dashing and heroic, but never more than a plot outline. Gwyneth Paltrow does a good job in trying to weave herself into every facet of her character, but unfortunately she’s more whiny than intrepid. Give me Jennifer Jason Leigh from The Hudsucker Proxy any day.
Angelina Jolie has ceased to be an actress, and now resides in the pre-Matchstick Men, Jerry Bruckheimer era of Nic Cage-styled acting. If someone told me that she was totally created in CGI, I wouldn’t blink an eye.
I can’t say much about the villain as it might infringe on the surprise element, but I’m still waiting for the payoff. And the bad guy’s Darth Maul-esque sidekick (played by Bai Ling, another character that could have been all CGI) was, again, less a character than a plot device.
The only character I actually liked was Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), Sky Captain’s sidekick, who played kinda like Q from the Bond films. He was surprisingly subtle, and looked like he actually gave some thought into his role. They must have filmed his scenes separately.
I loved the concept-y art of this thing. The tall buildings, shapes and textures sraddle the line between fantasy and history, and are fairly fantastic. Unfortunately, it still felt like they were in front of a green screen for any of the large set pieces. The only time it works is when they’re in close-quarters like a lab or a storeroom, and there are a few more tangible items around to give the feeling of depth.
Gwyneth runs away from robots for a few minutes at the start of this film, and she may as well have been running on stage with the film projected behind her.
Using soft lighting to cover up the line between real and animated was a good choice. The animators obviously knew their weakness here and tried to turn it into a strength by making it part of the look of the film. Unfortunately, most of the scenes come off looking like the characters are sitting around a campfire with a flashlight pointing up at their faces.
The creators also knew that that the human form is hard to animate realistically, and so they did everything but that. There are a few times (in the movie theatre scene, the air platform, etc…) where they are forced to fill a room or a walkway with people, and they look positively flat. But they nail the robots, the vehicles, the mountains and the dinosaurs.
Yup, dinosaurs. Don’t ask.
There are a few exchanges between Polly and Cap that do work, the film is fun in several sequences, but aside from that, forget it. This is purely a film in service of visual graphics, instead of the other way around.
And it’s too bad, because it is quite obvious that writer/director Kerry Conran has some real talent. I think that computer graphics have come a long way in the last decade, but still aren’t up to carrying a film. The audience is so used to seeing them employed for “the big payoff” that they look for it. I prefer the approach taken by some directors (e.g., David Fincher) to blend computer graphics with actual scenes to achieve shots he just couldn’t get with a regular camera setup.
And I don’t care how many modificiations Dex comes up with, there’s no way a plane can fly underwater. I think they were just trying to piss me off, as they do it twice . Oh, and another thing: this film definitely wins the award for “worst inclusion of ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’ since Face/Off. I’m just saying.
At best, Sky Captain is an interesting failure. The younger crowd might enjoy it, but any sophisticated moviegoer is going to have a hard time.
Familiar
In his Wednesday column filed from the Toronto Film Festival, MCN’s Len Klady writes:
“When I hit the circuit Wednesday the atmosphere had changed. The wattage level had dropped conspicuously and the press/industry participation seemed to have diminished to almost nothing. The change was so dramatic and abrupt that I began to doubt the obvious and found myself asking others whether they were experiencing it too.
“‘It’s over,’ said one Los Angeles-based sales rep. ‘I’m outta here tomorrow.’ A lot of other people came for the weekend and departed on Tuesday and as the festival nears its conclusion, there’s precious little on the horizon set to debut that was among the must-see titles.”
One year earlier, I wrote the following dispatch from Toronto:
“The Toronto Film Festival began to suddenly downshift on Wednesday [9.10.03], revealing a fact that is not widely known: this is a five-day festival that happens to run for ten days. Trust me, the juice was all-but-gone as of midnight on Tuesday, 9.9. Nearly all of the hot-ticket attractions were press-screened the first five days, primarily to accomodate the film-buying community which prefers to get in and get out, fast.”
Eight months earlier, I wrote the following from Park City, Utah on 1.23.03:
“The ’04 Sundance Film Festival ran out of steam about two days ago. Sometime late Wednesday afternoon, I’d say. You could feel it everywhere. Familiar faces were missing. Main Street wasn’t as crowded. Journalists and ticket-holders were still going to films yesterday (i.e., Thursday), but the spark was gone.
“There’s a reason that festival programmers always front-load this festival. People quit after five or six days. Seven days max. Even if you’re 22 years old and in perfect health, your body rebels at a certain point.”
To Arms?
“I appreciate your spreading the word about Universal Home Video’s forthcoming DVD release of Charley Varrick. But did you read the info in Uni’s link? It says that the title will be released in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. Full frame. Modified to fit your screen.
“Didn’t you recently run a screed against Sony for doing same with their release of Castle Keep? Given your position of influence, reporting the release of a ‘modified’ DVD only feeds the fire of ignorance, and indeed, sends the wrong message to the studios, and…well,you know it, man.
“We DVD fans sometime unreasonably demand the moon, but in the case of Charley Varrick, all we want is the OAR (original aspect ratio). And a trailer. I expect you, as a passionate film fan, to insist on nothing less. How about amending your item and taking, and taking Universal to task?” — Dave S..
Wells to Dave S.: Original aspect ratios indeed! This doesn’t sound good. I tried asking Universal Home Video’s publicity people about this on Friday morning, but they were in a meeting.
Before you get your knickers in a twist, you should consider that there may be an upside to this situation…maybe.
First of all, Charley Varrick is not a Castle Keep because it wasn’t shot in 2.35 to 1 Scope. It was shot in the standard Academy aspect ratio of 1.33 to 1, and then either hard-matted in 1.85 on the prints, which is uncommon, or simply projected at 1.85 in theatres.
Most of the time, a 1.33 to 1 aspect tratio on a DVD means they’ve chopped off visual information, but when it came to Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket DVD (which was a very unusual DVD mastering, granted) it meant that more information than was commonly seen in theatres was being provided. So it’s conceivable, if unlikely, that UHV’s Charley Varrick DVD will be the same kind of deal.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the forthcoming Varrick DVD will provide an image with the sides lopped off. You’re usually on safe ground if you assume laziness of the part of DVD distributors, especially when it comes to mastering older titles that aren’t regarded as Oscar-level classics, which is the case here.
Like you, I would prefer to see a Charley Varrick with as much visual information as possible. I’m just saying it doesn’t necessarily follow that a 1.85 to 1 crop will provide that. Technically, a film shot in a standard Academy ratio loses information off the top and bottom of the image it’s shown or matted at 1.85 to 1.
Aaahhh!
“I noticed in your Sideways review you talked about a funny scene that featured ‘turn-your-eyes-away nudity.’ I have yet to see the film, so i don’t know for sure, but there was a clip from Sideways that came online this spring that sounds like it could be that scene you’re talking about…only this clip wasn’t a finished scene, merely an outtake.
Well, anyway, I thought you might enjoy seeing the outtake…whether it’s that scene or not. It’s at joblo.com: http://www.joblo.com/movs/show-sideways.mov.
Who can think about movies at a time like this?
The bad guys are probably going to be running things for another four years and I’m supposed to shrug this off and bang out some kind of riff on this weekend’s openers — Wimbledon or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow or Head in the Clouds?
Okay, let’s briefly do that. Except I don’t have much to say.
Paramount Pictures publicists let me come to their screenings but they don’t go out of their way to invite me either, so I haven’t seen Sky Captain because I haven’t made the effort, but I don’t think anyone needs my help in sussing this out. I’ll go this weekend, I suppose.
Head in the Clouds (Sony Pictures Classics), a 1930s and ’40s European wartime romance thing with Charlize Theron, Stuart Townsend and Penelope Cruz, is, in a certain sense, nicely written and directed (by John Duigan), but there’s no tension in the story, and so the movie tends to more or less lie there.
And there didn’t seem to be much reason to see Wimbledon, and I didn’t give a damn about seeing Mr. 3000 either so that just about covers it, I think.
Back to the “blues” feeling the blues…
I’m sure Moveon.org will disagree, but it’s obvious what’s happened over the last week or so. There’s a strong likelihood that election is over and Dubya — the worst President in the country’s history…the dumbest, the cockiest, the most deeply indebted to the most venal and loathsome people in the country, plus the most arrogant and dangerous…it’s very likely that Bush has it sewn up.
I can’t believe I just wrote that. I’m very angry about this. But look at this rundown — http://www.electoral-vote.com — and tell me I’m wrong.
As far as I’m concerned John Kerry is a major bad guy for letting this happen. He’s done a masterful job of out-Dukakis-sing Michael Dukakais with his idiotic inability not to see that the counsel of Bob Shrum, the Democratic candidate killer, was leading his crusade into quicksand, and this along with his regular-guy personality, awesome steadiness and clear-cut focus on his Iraqi War policy positions…he just won the swing voters over.
To the Bushie side, I mean.
Even if he turns it all around and wins, he’ll still be a jerk and a girly-man. I’m thinking I might vote for Nader out of disgust, and I never thought I’d say that. All right, I’m still a Kerry supporter but what a muddle-headed wimp he turned out to be.
A Connecticut guy named Jim Hammell saw my WIRED posting on this catastrophe yesterday afternoon and wrote back the following:
“You’re right on the money. Four months ago I was betting on a Kerry victory. Now I’m all but certain Bush is going to be re-elected.
“In my opinion, one of the big reasons for Kerry’s downfall (besides his less-than-stellar personality) is negativity. For the past six months, the Democrats, Michael Moore, Al Franken, etc. have attacked Bush relentlessly. Yes, it’s deserved. Yes, Bush has failed on virtually every level of being a President. Yes, he needs to go. But I got the message the first 10,000 times.
“From talking to swing voters (yes, there are a few in Connecticut) I’ve found that many are considering voting for Bush not because of his record, but out of spite. The constant attack by the Democrats, Hollywood, etc., have made them think of Bush as, believe it or not, an “underdog.” A ridiculous concept…but that’s the perception. They feel sorry for him. It’s maddening.
“With two months until the election, I have enough reasons not to vote for Bush. Now I need reasons to vote for Kerry. I need a reason to get behind him. The Democrats have to go positive at this point…despite the fact that it’s easier to go negative.
“Kerry has my vote regardless, but I really think we’re looking at a blown opportunity.”
No Masterpiece
Roger Ebert has called Undertow (United Artists. 10.29) a masterpiece. Director David Gordon Green definitely has his brief together and he may very well one day turn out a truly grade-A film, but forget the “m” word as far as this Terrence Malick-y, southern-fried, kids-on-the-run movie is concerned.
Call it an “s.i.,” as in somewhat intriguing.
Green’s thing so far (in George Washington and All the Real Girls ) has been to plumb the inner lives of rootless disenchanted kids in the South. This time he throws in action, violence, murder and a deranged low-rent villain, played by (was there a choice?) Josh Lucas. Green is obviously trying to go mainstream, and I like the gently spun character and atmosphere flavorings that he uses to make things feel real and lived-in, but the story is a so-whatter.
You’ve got two brothers (Jamie Bell, Devon Allan) being raised by their hee-haw dad (Dermot Mulroney) in a ramshackle, Tobacco Road-type farmhouse. Then along comes Muloney’s lower-end-of-the-gene-pool brother (Lucas), who’s just gotten out of the slammer and wants to move in. He’s trash, of course, and soon enough wants some gold coins left by his and Mulroney’s father for himself.
Then a very bad thing happens, Bell and Allan are soon running away from Lucas and he’s hot on their trail, and yaddah-yaddah.
And that’s it. I’m not saying there aren’t dabs of beauty in this film — there are — but it’s more in the dialogue, acting and pictorial mood stuff. I’m basically saying it’s a little bit boring, but in a quality-type way.
Poor Josh
Part of my impatience with Undertow had to do with sitting through the umpteenth Josh Lucas performance as a fiendish psycho nutbag. He definitely seems to be Hollywood’s go-to guy for playing reprehensible assholes, but aren’t we all tiring of this?
Lucas played a relatively decent sort in A Beautiful Mind, a fairly likable dad in Jordan Roberts’ Around the Bend (Warner Independent, 10.15), and a somewhat tolerable guy(a dead one, possibly) in Lasse Hallstrom’s An Unfinished Life (Miramax, 12.24). And I believed in his character’s bottom-line decency in Around the Bend.
As Lucas is a pretty good actor, it seems a shame that he’s been typecast this way. I’m sure he’s played other non-offensive types…only they’re hard to remember. All I know is that he’s played nutters so often that all he has to do is walk onscreen and audiences go, “Yo…bad guy!”
He played Laura Linney’s dickwad ex-husband in You Can Count on Me. He played a malevolent type in American Psycho. He was a predatory gay guy hitting on a teenage boy in The Deep End. He played Eric Bana’s evil antagonist (a truly disgusting character) in The Hulk. His Wonderland character was so rancid you almost had to laugh.
I’ll bet Lucas has played more bad guys in the seven or eight other films he’s made; I just haven’t seen all of them.
I thought when he romantically hooked up with Salma Hayek earlier this year that he might get some power out of this alliance and possibly shake things loose. Maybe that process is underway. He needs something.
Finger Lickin’
Sally Potter’s Yes, which showed at the Toronto Film Festival a few nights ago (but hasn’t yet landed a distributor), is a kind of lust story.
Set mostly in London, it’s about an affair between a married Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen) and a Lebanese doctor (Simon Akbarian) working as a chef in a London restaurant. Sam Neill plays Allen’s husband. Shirley Henderson has a curious little part as the couple’s maid who has a perceptive take on their personal undercurrents.
The finest things in Yes are Alexei Rodionov’s cinematography and Daniel Goddard’s editing. You could watch it without sound and…actually, if you did that you’d miss the iambic pentameter dialogue, and that’s supposed to be important, I think.
Anyway, Allen and Abkarian’s fuckathon eventually runs into difficulty when he starts to get enraged about a feeling that he’s being treated like, or regarded as, her Lebanese boy-toy. The whole post-9/11, Anglos-looking-askance-at-Arabs thing is harshly reviewed.
Yes is certainly not your usual older-white-woman-falls-for-somewhat-younger-Arab-guy movie. I especially liked the scene in which Abkarian has manual finger-sex with Allen in a restaurant with people and waiters nearby, and then licks his digits for dessert. Good bit.
But I have to say something: Abkarian doesn’t have the dignity, discipline and inner thoughtfulness of Chiwetel Ejiofor, the man of color who played the London immigrant and African doctor in Stephen Frear’s Dirty Pretty Things, had. Mr. Ejiofor had class; Abkarian has a lot less. He’s less considered, less carefully composed. I didn’t much like him because of this.
And his nose is too big. I kept staring at it. Cyrano! Durante! I’m sorry but he seemed common to me, like a chuckling rug merchant you might meet in the Marrakech medina. I hated a scene in which Abkarian dances for Allen on a table top. And I despised him for getting into an argument with a couple of guys in the kitchen, and he’s stupid enough to hold a knife like a weapon, knowing that he’s more likely to be found at fault if the authorities come, which of course they do.
Can I say this? I’m going to say it anyway. Abkarian isn’t good enough to copulate with Joan Allen, and she lowers herself appreciably in our eyes by spreading her legs for him. I’m sorry to voice this in crude stereotype terms, but he’s not my kind of Arab. (Did you ever hear the line that Woody Allen once said about Harvey Weinstein? “He’s not my kind of Jew,” he said. I got this straight from a guy who worked for Allen.)
I read over Sally Potter’s nicely written press notes about the film, and in some ways they frankly told me more about the film than the film itself did. That should tell you something right there.
Uncle Charley
Again, a movie I included in my Most Wanted DVD column of two or three weeks ago is now scheduled to be released on DVD. Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick (1973) is due from Universal Home Video on 12.28.04.
Here’s the link: http://homevideo.universalstudios.com/title.php?titleId=317
Here’s what I wrote about this 1973 semi-classic last month:
Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick, with Walter Matthau, Joe Don Baker, John Vernon, Andrew Robinson, Sheree North, Woodrow Parfrey and Norman Fell, is one of the best second-tier, no-big-deal crime flicks ever made.
Admired for its low-key tone and character-driven action, for the crackling tension from Siegel’s shooting and cutting of the opening bank-robbery sequence, and for Matthau’s easy-going turn as a wise, cagey, seen-it-all indie felon. But it’s Baker and Vernon who give the tastiest performances — the former as a suave, southern-fried, pipe-smoking assassin in a cowboy hat and cream-colored suit, and the latter as a Reno exec fronting for organized crime.
The dialogue in Vernon’s heart-to-heart scene with Parfrey, playing a wimpy Las Cruces bank manager to perfection, is so good that Quentin Tarantino ripped it off. “You know what kind of men they are,” Vernon informs Parfrey, whom he suspects may have colluded with guys who made off with $300,000 in mob loot. “They’ll strip you, tie you down and go to work on you with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers.”
It’s also worth noting that Universal Home Video has finally gotten around to putting out Costa-Gavras’ excellent 1982 film Missing, set for 11.23
Participles
Pittsburgh-based reader George Bolanis has written the following:
“Let’s look at the mini-trend of participle-based movie titles. (Of which the latest lifeless, imagination-less example I have seen in this group is Being Julia.)
“I will start with the contention that Being John Malkovich kick-started the trend as everyone who passed on that project salivated with envy and pounded their head with regret. From there on, people just saw a title-packaging strategy.
“I’ve tried to remember as many titles as I could recall along these lines. I decided to plot the titles on a bell curve showing the Originators (known in marketing parlance as early adopters) on the left against the Bandwagon-Jumping Laggards on the right. (See attached.)
“Should a producer-distributor even bother trying to buck a popular trend that might contribute to a more substantive fare falling flat because its title falls within an overused device even if it suits the art in the long run? Are a few bad apples ruining it for everyone else?
“I myself tend to get sick of any product (movie, snack food, whatever) that might even seem to be jumping on the bandwagon.” — George Bolanis, Pittsburgh, PA.
Hold The Line!
“I’m sympathetic to all the feelings you expressed about Kerry sinking and the fight already lost, because I’ve felt them myself over the past few weeks. But it’s time to for each one of us to cowboy up and fight, because this one’s going to be close and we need everybody we can get. Worry is healthy, but despair is toxic. Kerry is a good guy who thinks about what he does and then does what he thinks is right. He will make a much better president than the one we have. That’s what matters.” — Rob Thomas, Madison, WI.
“While I love your movie column, I have to say you’ve jumped over a cliff on this Kerry-has-already-lost thing.
“I’ve been following electoral-vote.com for the last month or so, and can honestly say that on any particular day it doesn’t tell you much of anything about which way the vote is going to go. Two days he had Kerry winning this thing. What changed? Two polls in Pennsylvania and Florida changed a few points. That accounts for a flip of almost 50 electoral votes. And yet both are very close to being in the margin of error of the poll.
“It could be a skewed poll (like some of the recent national polls that call more registered Republicans). It could be all the emergency aid money Bush is pumping into Florida. It could be people talking up Nader who may never get a chance to vote for him. So calm down on that one.
“As for Kerry losing it….well, just wait. His bump in the polls after the Demo convention was expected. As was the reverse after the Republican convention. And
don’t forget the polls from Iowa that said he wasn’t even going to compete in the caucus, and look how he made everyone look like fools on that one.
“As for him going soft, of course he has. Independent voters are more more likely to go toward candidates that offer hope rather than accusations and fear. That’s why Bush declared himself as a compassionate conservative four years ago, even though he’s been proved well wrong on the first part.
“And for your letter writer who said that people he’s spoken to in Connecticut are tired of the left the picking on poor Bush…what!?! Yes, the Swift Boat ads were against him. Yes, Cheney said if he’s elected terrorists will strike. Not to emntion the flip-flopper, unpatriotic liberal, didn’t deserve his medals, etc.
“This is a messy campaign with the attacks coming from both sides. Please don’t give in to it by pretending one side is getting it worse than the other.” — Mike Shea, Washington, D.C.
Wells to Shea: I hope it turns around, of course, but I’m enraged that Kerry isn’t scrappier and faster-on-the-draw with all this stuff flying at him. I don’t how to explain this even to myself, but I’m starting to really dislike him now because of his general hesitations and ineffectualness. If Bush is re-elected for another four it’ll be Kerry’s fault and no one else’s, and for this he will deserve a lifetime of condemnation.
“Your attitude is exactly what the Republicans are hoping would happen after their
bizarro-world convention. Check any of the latest polls and you’ll see not only has Bush lost any bump he got out of his convention, but he’s rapidly losing ground to Kerry once again.
“If you honestly believe this is an important election and if you think Bush deserves to be defeated after four years of unmitigated disasters, then you need to stop whining about it and do something. Call, write or email anyone you know in a swing state. Get them on board. Get off your ass.
“Nader’s not a solution — he’s part of the problem. The problem is George W. Bush.
“You write like you’re quitting. Now is the most important time of the election. Who gives a damn if you thought Kerry had it sewn up two months ago or if you think Bush has it in the bag now? The election is on November 2, dumbass. That’s the only time any of this matters, so do something now.
“Come on, Wells, I like you and respect your work, but this attitude you’ve got right now is bullshit.” — K. R. Olson.
Wells to Olson: I’m not quitting. I’m just angry at Mr. Candy-Ass and his dithering mind-changing manner. I’m sick of his equivocations. He’d better turn it around and get on the stick (and you’re right — so should I) and win this damn thing or else, or he should be exiled to the Solomon Islands and kept there under armed guard.
“Your Kerry depression is completely justified. I read with interest the rah-rah Kerry types you are scolding you, but those guys are living in dreamland.
“I have worked in public opinion polling for a decade and these recent polls (especially state polls) demonstrate a real certainty that Bush will not only be re-elected, but that he will probably have 2 to 5 more GOP senators to work with, and maybe 5 to 10 more GOP representatives.
“Kerry has stopped all media buys in Missouri — he’s written off the prototype middle-American state, and no president has taken the White House without winning Missouri in, like, 75 years. This is simply incredible for a candidate to do.
“Florida is lost to Kerry — the polls there are very bad now. A friend of mine who works on a Senate campaign there says the internal polls he has seen show Bush leading well outside the margin of error. Unemployment is lower in Florida than anywhere in America.
“The meta-problem revealed by these polls is that Bush has led consistently since the convention by margins far more pronounced than Kerry ever did. Kerry did not bounce like this after the Democratic convention. As the election gets near, the polls show people becoming more and more solidified in their choice, and polls have shown this for decades.
“Since the national and state polls appear to show Bush leading, one should expect that this lead will hold, as more and more people have made up their mind (I think in excess of 85% for both parties).
“Kerry’s focus on gun control the last week is a big indicator that even he knows he’s finished, he’s merely trying to rally the base now and hope to win a few close congressional races.
“While I am not fond of Bush, the Democratic party really insulted the intelligence of independent voters like me with Kerry. He’s an empty suit, passionless, with a far-left-wing voting record in the Senate….way too far left to win a national election. (Bill Clinton was the prototype they should have looked for.) Bush is no prize, but believe me, a lot of swing-staters out here who would have been happy to vote for a decent Democrat will be drinking Bush Kool-aid on election day.
“‘Anybody but Bush’ isn’t a road map to success if the anybody is a candidate and man as weak as Kerry.” — Kansas City Chris.
A Tuesday New York Post story says Harvey and Bob Weinstein are looking to stay with Disney now that Michael Eisner’s agreed to step down (and you can bet he’ll be gone well before ’06). The brothers are no longer considering splitting up, the Post story reported, and are looking for a way to stay within the fold. Miramax spokesman Matthew Hiltzik told the newspaper that the Weinsteins “remain dedicated to achieving an amicable resolution that will allow Miramax to perpetuate Eisner’s legacy, and their own.”
An early I Heart Huckabee’s review from Toronto sounds encouraging. “Five years after Three Kings, writer-director David O Russell returns with an absurdist existential comedy that is more idiosyncratic and daring than anything he has made before,” writes Screen Daily‘s Alan Hunter. “Huckabees combines the lickety-split verbal gymnastics of a Preston Sturges with the philosophical musings of a Stephen Hawking and then adds a side order of Three Stooges-style anarchy just to make things more interesting. The result is chaotic, charming, often amusing and frequently exasperating. The closest affinity in recent years would be with the Charlie Kaufman scripts for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and the all-star cast could help ensure a similar level of commercial interest, although this is simply too odd for mainstream tastes and will require careful nurturing.”
Digital Choo-Choo
I’m kind of an undistilled-reality type guy, visually speaking, so don’t expect me to cream over the latest animation technique.
I can take or leave Japanese anime (and Japanese anime snobs tick me off). I was never a fool for Disney-style paint-cell animation. I’ve always liked but never quite loved those bursting colors and needle-sharp detail in those PDI/Pixar-generated features (you know …Shrek, Shark Tale, etc.) And while I admired those CG compositions in Final Fantasy, they never made me want to jump up and down.
But I sat up, took notice and felt I’d seen something really different and noteworthy after watching a few demo clips yesterday from the forthcoming Tom Hanks/Robert Zemeckis film The Polar Express (Warner Bros., 11.10).
Hanks, the film’s star-producer, and Zemeckis, the director, walked on stage at the swanky Steve Ross theatre on the Warner Bros. lot around 12:15 pm. They took turns introducing the clips and then took everyone through a tutorial about how The Polar Express found its unique visual signature. Then they answered questions for 30 minutes or so. The presentation took about 65 minutes.
The big visual technology used to compose this super-expensive family flick (Variety says it cost $165 million) is a device called “performance capture,” which is similar to “motion capture” technology except for its focus on facial expressions.
Hanks does a Peter Sellers in The Polar Express — he performs five separate roles, including the lead part of an eight year-old boy. No, he’s not doing another Big. He portrayed the kid during filming in every actorly way imaginable, but then it was all digitally transferred into this computerized digi-kid character.
The story is basically about the kid being woken up the night before Christmas by the Polar Express (a big 1940s-era train) pulling up in front of his house. He gets on and it takes him and a bunch of other kids to the North Pole and Santa’s headquarters.
I don’t know how the rest of it plays, but it’s based on a popular 18-page book by Chris Van Allsburg that came out in ’85.
Anyway, Hanks gets to play the five characters (including his own dad and a moustache- wearing Polar Express train conductor) and act his way through each performance with total particularity through “performance capture” technology.
It’s not animation (or at least, not precisely) and it’s not live action. It’s somewhere right in the middle, with a lot more in the way of convincing above-the-neck emotionality than any digitally composed anything I’ve yet seen.
As I understand it, motion capture (which is what Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis used to create Smeagol-Gollum in the Rings movies, coupled with a technique called “video roto” to create those painfully over-emphasized Smeagol-Gollumn expressions) basically uses digital motion sensors attached to actors wearing blue-screen body suits.
And as I also understand it, performance capture delivers convincing facial expressions (along with the regular body stuff, of course) by pasting 152 digital sensors to an actor’s face and then reading each and every muscular shift and twitch, and then converting these into digital data, blah, blah.
We were shown a rehearsal video of Hanks dressed in one of those blue-screen suits and with those 152 sensors pasted to his face. He looked like he was suffering from a strange form of chicken pox or early-stage leprosy.
What I saw on the screen during the showings of finished clips looked painterly, kind of, but at the same time actuely “real.” It looked better — more complex in the renderings, more interesting to simply look at — than anything in Final Fantasy or the Rings films or any other CG animated thing you could mention.
I’m not saying I’m necessarily going to go hog-wild for The Polar Express when it comes out. Well, maybe I will. Hanks said it wasn’t made to appeal just to kids, that it’s aimed at kids of all ages, and so on. At least I know the visuals will kick ass.
Hanks said the four main kid roles are played by himself, Eddie Deezen (remember him? “Mr. Potatohead” from War Games? The bespectacled dweeby Beatles fan in I Want to Hold Your Hand?) , Nona Gaye and Peter Scolari.
The 80 or so invited journalists were ushered out of the theatre after the presentation ended and then treated to a superb lunch in the lobby and an adjoining outdoor patio. I tried to show restraint but I ate everything, including two servings of salmon.
Career Extensions
Robert Zemeckis offered a startling, almost mind-bending prediction during yesterday’s Polar Express press conference.
He was responding to my question about a graph in a new Peter Biskind article about an aspect of motion capture technology. The piece can be found on page 220 of the current issue of Vanity Fair.
It asks a question of its own. What if you could use advanced digital technology to make actors in their 60s or 70s or older look like they did in their youthful prime? Not through digital foolery, since the older, real-life actors would be properly hired and perform the role. But when the movie is finally done, they would be tweaked in a totally convincing way to look 30 or 40 years younger.
What if you could, in a sense, cast the young and hunky Robert Redford — the guy who starred in The Way We Were or Three Days of the Condor, say — in a brand-new film? What if Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli could hire Sean Connery as he looked in 1962’s Dr. No to star in their next Bond film? Wouldn’t that be a cooler way to go than hiring, say, Eric Bana? (Nobody did 007 better than young Connery — everyone knows this.)
Such a thing is only about two years away, said Zemeckis. His more-or-less exact quote was, “We’re only about two years away from being able to make possible, for example, Redford or Connery or someone [like then] play younger versions of themselves.”
Zemeckis said at one point the realistic detail achieved in the digital compositions in The Polar Express was so exacting and precise that digital artists had to “take it down” and make it all look more painterly and animated.
Zemeckis knows whereof he speaks, and much more about what’s possible with digital trickery than I could hope to know… but I still didn’t believe him about the two years. Technology never develops quite as quickly as we’d prefer, although it gets there. I’d guess three or four years, or maybe five or six, before this Doran Gray effect would be technologically refined enough to use in a feature film.
It’s a diseased idea, of course. A journalist friend said after the press conference, “I don’t want to see a young Robert Redford star in a movie!” But he agreed later that casting a 32 year-old Connery (with hair) in a new 007 film would be nifty.
As freaky, anti-life, non-organic and fundamentally twisted as it sounds, a Dorian Gray casting with a major star would be — admit it — fascinating.
What did everyone and his brother say when Redford starred in Sydney Pollack’s 1990 film Havana? That he looked so worn and weathered-down… right?
The Dorian Gray effect could, at the very least, extend the careers of actresses, almost all of whom start to lose work once they hit their mid 30s
Dish Served Cold
If I had gone to the Toronto Film Festival, I would most likely be running a review today about the opening-night film, which is Istvan Szabo’s Being Julia. I saw it in Los Angeles on Wednesday night, so here we go anyway.
It’s an off-kilter comedy about London theatre folk, set in 1938. I’m sorry but it’s an okay distraction at best. At worst, it’ struck me as a petty, ungracious, small-minded thing.
The screenplay, based on the novel “Theater” by W. Somerset Maugham. is by Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar for the script of The Pianist. It doesn’t add up that such talented men could have written the basis for such an unsatisfying film.
Julia Lambert (Annette Bening) is a legendary theatre star of 45 years, a kind of Margo Channing of the West End. She’s introduced as starring in her latest hit play, married on non-sexual terms to former actor Michael Goselyn (Jeremy Irons), loved or at least admired by friends and fans, and deeply depressed. She’s on the verge of a breakdown.
Hungry for something fresh and new in her life, Julia starts an affair with a cute young American named Tom Fennel (Shaun Evans). But Tom turns out to be a callow little shit, and things eventually turn sour when Julia realizes that Tom, behind her back, is schtupping another actress, Avice Crighton (Lucy Punch).
Avice, we learn, hopes to use the connection with Tom (who’s a connection to Julia) to get an audition in a new play that Julia plans to star in. The film’s last third is basically about Julia arranging an elaborate scheme to turn the tables on Tom and Avice.
A colleague wrote a day or two ago that Being Julia has no point. I disagree. There’s a narration line from A Clockwork Orange when Alex (Malcolm McDowell) comments about a group of old homeless men who are savagely beating him up: “It was old age having a go at youth.”
This is what Being Julia is pretty much about. Wise and witty middle-agers — people who have a cultivated appreciation of the finer things in life — sticking it to a pair of opportunistic youths who haven’t the talent or sensitivity to deserve being treated with respect, and thus getting what they deserve.
The result, oddly, is that you almost wind up feeling sorry for Tom and Avice. Almost.
Being Julia, then, is a kind of revenge film. In its not-quite-British, partly-Hungarian, partly-Canadian way, it’s a cousin of Michael Winner’s Death Wish. If repertory cinema still existed, you could one day show Being Julia and Death Wish on a double-bill, and people would get it, believe me.
The distributors are Sony Pictures Classics in the U.S. and ThinkFilm in Canada, and here’s to better days.
A Satire Forgotten?
One of the best American social satires ever made is newly released on DVD and sitting in video stores right now, and nobody gives a shit. Or so it seems. Michael Ritchie’s Smile, a sophisticated, slightly loony-tunes screwball comedy that every critic admired when it opened in ’75, couldn’t have a much lower profile. I couldn’t even find a copy in my visits earlier this week to Tower Video and West L.A.’s Laser Blazer.
It’s not exactly a wondrous, incandescent, life-changing film, but it’s got a worked-out tone and attitude. Ritchie and screenwriter Jerry Belson knew exactly what they were saying about the middle Americans being lampooned, and yet they managed to show affection for them while goofing on their foibles.
Belson’s script, set in Santa Rosa, California, and nominally about a Young American Miss Pageant, is a city-slicker satire about the self-imposed confinements and general ennui of conservative, Rotary Club, small-town schmuck culture of the mid ’70s. The beauty contest inspires all kinds of anxiety and desperation on the part vof the principal characters, and each is quite funny in their own half-sad way.
Like Big Bob Freelander (Bruce Dern), a “donkey” (Pauline Kael’s term in her first-rate New Yorker review) who sells motor homes and does what he can to promote the yearly pageant, which of course involves promoting himself. The beauty pageant is managed by a deeply neurotic ex-pageant queen (Barbara Feldon) who eventually manages to drive her alcoholic husband Andy (Nicholas Pryor) to the brink of suicide.
And yet no one acts in a deliberately cruel or hurtful manner. Smile is a fairly scathing comedy, and yet the actors, male and female, never seem to broadly play it for laughs, and Ritchie’s affection for these poor clods always seems to come through.
The other cast members include choreographer Michael Kidd (playing a choreographer- for-hire with a wonderfully cynical attitude and deadpan speaking style), Geoffrey Lewis, and, as pageant contestants, Joan Prather, Annette O’Toole, Melanie Griffith, Maria O’Brien and Colleen Camp.
A woman named Beth Whiting of Glendale, Arizona wrote this about Smile in a posting on Amazon. com: “I found a crusty old copy at a video store and decided to take a chance, expecting at best a mediocre comedy. But I was surprised. This movie is really good, one of the best comedies of the 70’s. How it ever faded away into oblivion is a good question. It’s not dated at all. Unlike most old comedies, I found myself laughing throughout this whole movie. The humor is still fresh and revelant.”
The Smile DVD, which I eventually found a copy of after trying a couple of more stores, is okay looking. The late Conrad Hall’s cinematography looks a little softer and bleachier than I remember this film to be, but perhaps my memory’s gone soft. You can never expect too much from the people at MGM/UA Home Video, whose big home-video initiative has been the $15 no-frills cheapie.
Night of Nights
Universal had a small press contingent over to the lot on Thursday night for a screening of Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights (opening 10.8), a true-life football movie set in Odessa, Texas.
Based on a book by H.G. Bissinger, it’s about the efforts of a tight-ass coach named Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) to whip the town’s high school into shape, which led to their winning a Texas State Championship in 1988.
Two friends went to the screening (which was preceded by a small dinner that was attended by Nights‘ executive producer Brian Grazer ), and had some morning-after impressions to share:
Mostly shot in a documentary-type style,” Nights delivers “a lot of good football action,” said one. “Thornton is good as the coach, ditto Derek Luke and particularly Lucas Black as two of the players. The film seems like an ambitious attempt to shine a light on a very particular world, which revolves around small-town devotion to high school football.”
“It’s a different take on the high-school football movie,” said the other. “It goes for a documentary feel with a hand-held camera thing. And there’s a lot to like in the story and performances. Billy Bob is very understated and good.
“In some cases, there seems to be a little ambivalence about trying to resolve the stories of the individual kids, which gives it an unfinished or not-quite-satisfying feeling but the movie has some nuance and is about something(s).
“It has some very exciting football sequences but since it’s not the standard feel-good movie, it’ll require some special handling and may not have broad commercial appeal.”
Berg, also at the dinner, said it took 11 years in development (and several attempts by other filmmakers, including Alan Pakula) to get Bissinger’s 1988 book to the screen. Berg said he’s been faithful to the book which was somewhat controversial dealing with racism and other issues when it came out. And yet it’s a little less intense, he said.
Nights is “a definite step up for Berg whose last film for Universal was The Rundown,” one observer said. “It should get decent reviews when it’s finished. Reaction seemed good as far as I could tell. Universal is hopeful for this but want to just put the film out there and see what kind of critical and/or awards attention there may be for this. They aren’t ‘pushing’ it yet beyond its initial release.”
There’s a vaguely bothersome echo in Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries (Focus Features, 9.24) that nobody in Hollywood journalist circles seems to want to talk about…but it’s there.
It doesn’t trouble me to any great degree, although it’s grown into a slight roadblock in terms of my core feelings about the lead character, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who is wonderfully played by Gael Garcia Bernal.
The echo I’m speaking of certainly has no place in Diaries itself, which is essentially a young man’s film about the growing of a heart. The story is about the socio-political awakening of Guevara over the course of a road trip he took across South America with a friend, Albert Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), in 1952.
Diaries isn’t about politics or dogma, but compassion. The invisible sub-heading is not “How I Became a Communist” but “How I Happened to See Beyond Myself and Realize How Badly People are Hurting.”
But Salles’ film tells only a little bit about who Guevara was in ’52, and nothing at all about what he would soon become.
Guevara’s Diaries adventure happened only two and a half years before he hooked up with Fidel Castro in Mexico, about three years before he sailed to Cuba to join the revolution, and only about seven years before Guevara was organizing hundreds of firing-squad executions in the wake of Castro’s Cuban takeover.
The Motorcycle Diaries is about a young man finding his humanity, but as Guevara got older and tougher his life seemed to be less about caring than anger, vengeance and a Marxist philosophical purity that seems fairly bizarre by today’s standards.
In the movie Guevara flirts with various women, shows kindness to strangers, and cares for lepers in a hospital along the Amazon. He’s an unequivocal sweetheart.
In real life Guevara was a hard-core cadre who apparently came to believe more and more in black and white moral extremes. Oppressors bad, revolutionaries good, etc. Hate, it seems, was as much of a driving force in his life as love, and perhaps a bit more so.
In a 1967 speech, he said the following: “Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”
El Che
A taste of this side of Guevara comes through in a DVD documentary called El Che: Investigating a Legend (White Star Video). Initially released in April 2003, it offers a standard account of Guevara’s life with lots of good newsreel footage, plus a bonus doc about some guy trying to relive Guevara’s 1952 adventure on a trek along the same path.
I’m not saying the primary doc is first-rate, but it’s passable. It’s got lots of footage of Guevara in all his incarnations. It has several friends and comrades talking about him at length. And it offers a reasonably intelligent understanding of what his life amounted to and how it all went down.
You can’t watch El Che without thinking two things.
One is that The Motorcycle Diaries, as sublime as it is on its own terms, deals with Che Guevara’s life and legend in the same way a doc about George Bush’s years as a boola-boola Yale student would probably explain why he decided to hang out with his father’s friends, decimate the surplus handed to him by the Clinton administration, and become a “war president.” Which is to say, a little but not much.
The second is that Steven Soderbergh’s Che, based on a script by Terrence Malick and focusing on Guevara’s revolutionary years, right up to his shooting death at the hands of Bolivian solders, is going to be a much darker piece.
This film will apparently follow Guevara from Mexico in the mid ’50s to Cuba to the Congo, and finally to Bolivia, where Guevara met his fate in late 1967.
I got one other thing from El Che. Revolutions are bloody affairs and a lot of Batista loyalists were put to death upon Guevara’s orders, but for better or worse the man was a serious revolutionary. He believed enough in his ideals to die for them.
Hablo Americano
Everyone spoke Spanish in the Mexican portions of Steve Soderbergh’s Traffic, and that seemed to most of us like the right and natural way to go. But a director friend has told me the plan with Soderbergh’s Che is to shoot it in English, and that sounds a bit strange. In fact, I’m having trouble accepting this.
Can you imagine a Soderbergh film about Che Guevara with everyone talking in Spanish-inflected English, like Jack Palance and Omar Sharif did in Richard Fleisher’s 1969 Che? No, no….can’t be right. Too surreal.
Steven Soderbergh, Benicio Del Toro
But then what U.S.-based producer is going to cough up a portion of $40 million (the alleged budget) for a film that’s almost entirely Spanish-speaking?
Don’t misunderstand — I’d be there in a second. I’m hoping Soderbergh does shoot it in Spanish. I’m just wondering about the Average Joes.
Focus Features is listed as the U.S. distributor. A small group of foreign-based investor-producers, including Brazil’s Morena Filmes and France’s Wild Bunch, are pooled on this thing.
If and when Che happens (it’s supposed to roll in August of ’05), Benicio del Toro will plays Che and Javier Bardem will play Fidel Castro. Benjamin Bratt, Ryan Gosling and Franka Potente will costar.
Looking for Girls
Too many guys read Hollywood Elsewhere…no, wrongly put. I’m saying I don’t have enough women readers. Only about 10%, when you get right down to it. This is partly my fault. Okay, mostly. My taste in movies is too Michael Mann-ish, I suppose, and I don’t have a knack for reaching into women’s souls with my prose.
I don’t want this state of affairs to continue. This would be a more interesting site if more women took part. It really would. So here’s the deal: I’m offering a regular weekly column on this site to any woman film critic or Hollywood columnist who wants to try for the gig. Really.
But (a) you have to be at least moderately on the young side (i.e., no 58 year olds), (b) you have to know how to write as well as Veronica Geng, Stephanie Zacharek or Pauline Kael, or an approximation thereof, (c) you have to know this town fairly well, and (d) you have to promise me you won’t quit after four or five months like Patricia Vidal did with David Poland after she met some guy, etc.
All you have to really be is good. Good enough, I mean, to get hired away from this site after a year or so by some employer whose terms I won’t be able to match.
Recants
Every film critic or regular moviegoer has gone through some kind of reappraisal about this or that film from time to time.
Some aren’t honest enough to admit to an occasional modification. But to change one’s mind (or to admit you weren’t paying enough attention the first time, or that you were having an off day) is totally allowable….as long as you’re generally resolute in your views. After all, there are a lot of Zelig’s out there.
When I first saw Eyes Wide Shut, I called it intriguing, stimulating, first-rate… and that I was particularly looking forward to subsequent viewings, as all Kubrick films get better and better the more times you see them. But it didn’t happen. EWS got a little bit worse every time I re-saw it.
(And yet, oddly, it’s an absorbing film. I’ve always been susceptible to the simple scene-to-scene experience of just “watching” it, even if it doesn’t add up to much.)
I feel nothing but shame for having written a qualified rave of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, which I did in this space. I was wrong, wrong…terribly wrong.
One of the most famous critical turnabouts happened in response to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was fairly heavily trashed by most mainstream critics when it opened in April 1968. But by the end of the summer, after the film had caught on with stoned audiences as a kind of new-wave mystical experience film, a few critics wrote mea culpas.
That same year, Andrew Sarris, the Jefferson of auteurism, put Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner on his ten-best list. He later apologized, saying that “I want only to forget.”
New York Times critic Bosley Crowther tore into Bonnie and Clyde when it first came out in the spring of ’67. He called it “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of [this] sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie.”
Crowther would have done well to take another look with a fresh eye after Bonnie and Cluyde‘s re-release a few months later (pushed through by star-producer Warren Beatty)…but he didn’t. The film went on to become a bona fide classic.
I asked some critic friends about this syndrome on Monday. I understand why only a few of them wrote back. Nobody wants to show their soft white underbelly, especially to their editors.
Roger Ebert says he “recently upgraded Donnie Darko from 2.5 to 3 stars, and The Brown Bunny from worst ever to three stars, but both reviews were based on revised versions of the films.” (Nearly a half hour of dead air was removed from the version of Bunny that was shown at the ’03 Cannes Film Festival.) But these are fresh looks, not turnarounds.
Roger Ebert, Andrew Harris, Luke Thompson
Seattle Weekly and L.A. Weekly critic Tim Appelo admits to some regrets, among them a rave in The Oregonian for Jim Carrey’s Batman Forever performance as ‘the Riddler.’
“[A local exhibitor] told me that every star I awarded a film to represented $5,000 in revenue, because the O is a monopoly paper,” Appelo recalls. “And my $25,000 five-star review of Batman Forever almost got me lynched by maybe 10% of my readers. What can I say? I was new to the Alex-in-A-Clockwork-Orange-like plight of the daily newspaper reviewer, and so dazzled by the eerieness of Carrey’s talent that I saw what I wanted and what was not there.”
“And the fact is, if you don’t sometimes change your mind about a movie, you’re out of your mind. Pauline Kael, who refused to see movies twice and falsely claimed to remember them all entirely, was so confident in her stone-inscribed opinion that she would cut off a friendship for life if anybody dared disagree with her on a single film, even if she helped launch their careers (e.g., Owen Gleiberman).”
Los Angeles-based critic Luke Thompson says that “almost every critic will tell you they’ve since thought better of praising Forrest Gump. This partly has do with the [political] baggage it picked up. I didn’t especially think of Gump as a condemnation of the ’60s counterculture at first, but that became what a lot of people latched onto, and indeed, it’s there, and repellant.
“Kevin Smith is someone I’ve seriously had to rethink,” says Thompson. “His recent output is so feeble that it makes me question what came before. I’m pretty sure I’d still like Mallrats — which I related to because it resembled my own teen years spent in malls — but I have my doubts about Clerks, and I’ve definitely thought better of Chasing Amy.”
Variety critic Robert Koehler feels he was “much too harsh on Jean Luc Godard’s King Lear, in my analysis in the Los Angeles Times at the time of its very brief theatrical release. I misunderstood it as Godard’s analysis of ‘Lear,’ when it was actually a kind of meta-documentary on Godard’s filmmaking practice at that point in his home in Rolle, Switzerland.
“I think now that Godard’s Lear is not only one of the more valuable of his works from the ’80s, but one of the more original re-thinkings of Shakespeare on film –Shakespeare completely absorbed into the modern world, the way Heiner Muller did on the German stage.
“I also remember hating Antonioni’s L’Avventura on my first viewing as a teenager….but, of course, you would hate this film as a teen! Only when I was in college a couple of years later did I get it, and it was a major epiphany. Which is perhaps why it remains my favorite film.”
“A director who was once (and remains) hip to dismiss is Claude Lelouch, and I used to place him in the ‘ignore’ file. But Lelouch’s work is pretty glorious over time — silly, but divinely silly, rapturously silly. Giddy movies at their giddiest.”
All right, that’s it. I draw the line at anyone blowing kisses to Claude Lelouch. I just lost it for a minute there…sorry. Go for it, Bob. Whom else do you like? Mervyn LeRoy?
“It’s important to consider that films work on emotions and are therefore by nature offer different payoffs on multiple viewings,” says DVD Newsletter editor Doug Pratt. “There are times when the New Age optimism in Easy Rider seems laughably naive, and other times when that aspect of the film is less important than how well the film captures the spirit of the [late’60s counter-culture].
“In fact, Jack Nicholson’s ‘they’re afraid of what you represent’ speech gets to the heart of your red state vs. blue state quandary better than any analysis I’ve ever seen.”
The Outfit
“I totally agree about wanting to see a DVD of The Outfit, easily one of the finest B-movies ever made, in my humble opinion at least. The fact that some horrible films are getting the special-edition treatment when fantastic films like this are ignored is criminal. Even a bare-bones release would be something, just so long as I have the film in my collection.
“Ditto for Point Blank, which is John Boorman’s finest work and a brilliantly structured exercise. Surely somebody somewhere is working on a special edition? What does it say about industry priorities when that Mel Gibson atrocity Payback , a remake of Point Blank, is in circulation all over and this vastly superior original only gets an airing on Turner Classic Movies?
“Point Blank and The Outfit are both based on Richard Stark books, and in fact are both about the same character, who in the books is called Parker.” — Martin Stanley
Vistors Wanted
Joseph Kay’s piece in the current VISITORS column is tightly edited, nicely laid out and getting good play. If any of you want to be next week’s guest columnist, you know what to do. Send your submissions to me by Friday morning, please. Thanks.
Should Hollywood Elsewhere inaugurate a special ongoing column called Kong Watch, dedicated to the apparent likelihood that Peter Jackson’s film has the earmarks of something woefully misbegotten? I shouldn’t, you’re all saying? Cool the anti-Jackson rant? Okay, you’ve talked me out of it. But what should I put in place of the soon-to-be-discarded Word column?
I want to put this carefully so as not to be misinterpreted. I’m trying to formulate what I consider to be a modest and temperate industry initiative. The unmalicious goal is the total termination of acting jobs given to Rhys Ifans, the downmarket, stubble-faced tall guy with dirty-blonde 1971 hippy hair who, in his movie roles, is often given to beatific expressions and saying lines in such a way as to produce vague mystifications.
It’s just that Ifans, a 36 year-old, six-foot-two Welshman, has been cast as more or less the same guy in film after film, and the cumulative effect has finally reached repulsion levels. Whatever the character, whatever the story or film title…Human Nature, Danny Deckchair, portions of Vanity Fair, Roger Michell’s Enduring Love…Ifans lumbers up to the plate and goes into his gangly, grungy, S.P.C.A. mode.
Did Ifans’ performances in The Shipping News, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and Hotel deliver the same? Memory isn’t serving; I may have erased the hard drive out of some insuppressable instinct.
In Enduring Love, which I saw Thursday night, Ifans plays what struck me as hands-down the most profoundly icky and repulsive stalker character in the history of film. I didn’t want to see Ifans killed in some quick tidy way; I wanted to see a little torture thrown in first. The story, set in England and based on the Ian McEwan novel, is about the after-effects of a bizarre falling death upon two men (Ifans being one) who happen to witness it. It seemed only natural that Ifans character should be dealt with similarly. A plunge off a nice tall building, say. For symmetry’s sake.
Lamentably, Michell is too original a director to go for such a stock indulgence. This is a strong disciplined film with nothing so mundane as mere audience satisfaction on its agenda. It doesn’t compromise or indulge in half-measures.
I know I soundmuddled, but in its own way Enduring Love is a very commanding
work.
But I really, really don’t want to see Ifans playing a downmarket, stubble-faced tall guy with dirty-blonde 1971 hippy hair given to beatific expressions and saying lines in such a way as to produce vague mystifications ever again. I don’t know anything or presume anything. As ship’s engineer Steve McQueen said to the first mate in The Sand Pebbles (and yes, I’ve referenced this line before), “I’m just tellin’ ya.”
I’m not trying to be cruel or cause pain. If I know this industry, Ifans will continue to work for years to come. (He’s apparently now making, or about to make, a new movie with Human Nature director Michael Gondry.) Casting directors generally have minds of their own and couldn’t give two shits.
Anyway, he’s got money. The IMDB says Ifans has “donated nearly a million pounds” to Welsh university called Ysgol Brynhyfryd, Ruthin, in order to provide a stage and better drama facilities.
Otherwise Engaged
Well, guess what? The new Hollywood Elsewhere site had a few too many loose ends to finesse as of Thursday morning, so after pacing back and forth a bit I made the decision to delay the debut until next Wednesday (9.8). A case of having bitten off more than I could chew, even with the help of a group of good-guy web designers, henceforth to be known as Team Elsewhere.
Everyone I know has left town for the Labor Day weekend or the Telluride Film Festival, so it’ll probably be better to launch it next week when everyone’s back (or at least at the Toronto Film Festival, which starts on Thursday, 9.9).
In fact, all these added concerns are the main reason why the column was late in going up today.
Some of the new columns will post on Wednesday; others may take a tiny bit longer. I’m not especially looking forward to all the extra work, to be honest, but slapping it together has been fun so far. The exhausted, frazzled kind, I mean.
Things are going great with the new columns and columnists. (Two have threatened to quit so far, although they’ve since reconsidered. This is fine. Creative people tend to be temperamental.) A friend has suggested posting an interview column devoted solely to a weekly q & a with industry types….okay. Another friend has advised that I don’t take on too many new burdens at once and take things a bit more slowly. Never! Brazilian critic Pablo Villaca has agreed to write a weekly column, and we’re trying to figure out a title. How does “Burden of Dreams” sound?
It’s been so much fun putting this thing together it’s nearly taken the sting out of my not going to Toronto or Telluride. I’ll be taking a half-assed stab at “covering” Toronto since I’ve been given a look at some of the films in advance L.A. screenings.
Thanks to everyone for sending in Visitor pitches and Best and Worst lists. Don’t stop, please.
Likeness
I wouldn’t want to suggest that U.S. Senator Zell Miller, the conservative Democrat who delivered that hellfire speech a few days ago at the Republican National Convention that tore into John Kerry (and which was followed by an orifice-ripping interview with “Hardball” host Chris Matthews) isn’t a swell, stand-up guy.
And I’m not suggesting his aura is anything close to that of Ian McDiarmid’s Emperor in the Star Wars films. Miller traffics in honest rage. McDiarmid’s malevolence is quiet and serpent-like. But the fury in Miller’s eyes is something
else. He’s more than a scrapper; he’s a born hater. That junkyard dog snarl, those threats of physical initimidation when he spoke to Matthews….whoa. You wouldn’t want to get into any kind of fight with him. He’s probably the kind that
bites.
Hitchcock Supreme
I sometimes get this feeling that I’m dawdling somehow when I write about DVDs. It’s a pretty lame attitude, of course. Today especially. We all share the same new-movie expectations that percolate every Friday, but when the big theatrical debuts are Wicker Park, The Cookout and Paparrazzi…well, pass. Give me the comforts of home, a little air conditioning and the new Alfred Hitchcock Signature Collection (Warner Home Video, out 9.7).
This is easily the coolest, spiffiest, most treasure-stocked Hitchcock collection ever sent to home video. You get this kind of hyperbole from DVD reviewers all the time, but this one’s really exceptional. Hitchcock used to call his films “slices of cake,” and damned if these DVD’s aren’t equivalent to the most delectable dessert you’ve ever tasted.
It’s a collection of nine films, all but one newly remastered (the exception being North by Northwest, which was given a first-class makeover a few years ago), and each newie looking more handsomely detailed and finely tuned than ever before. Six are classics — Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, I Confess , North by Northwest, Suspicion and Foreign Correspondent . Three are intriguing so-so’s — The Wrong Man, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Stage Fright.
The great thing about these films looking so crisp and radiant is that they look almost “new,” in a way. The best theatrical screenings I’ve ever seen of each (at the Academy or MOMA or wherever) simply don’t compare. I’ve used this analogy before, but they look, scene by scene, like straight-from-the-lab “dailies.”
And they’re all knock-outs, extras-wise. They’ve all got appreciation or making-of docs produced by the great Laurent Bouzereau, who’s done a slew of Hitchcock docs for past Universal Home Video releases. The same Hitch authorities are interviewed for each — Peter Bogdanovich, Time critic Richard Shickel, TCM host Robert Osborne, film historian Bill Krohn, Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia — but others turn up here and there.
The most decked-out extras package accompanies Strangers, and is contained on a whole separate disc. The extra “heads” include star Farley Granger, Robert Walker Jr. (son of costar Robert Walker) and Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano.
There’s a serenity thing inside Walker, Jr., whose mom was actress Jennifer Jones. His descriptions of his father’s alcoholism, which he says his dad never imposed on him, and the story of his Walker’s accidental death (the injection of sedative by a psychiatrist when Walker was already stewed to the gills) are surprisingly touching. Walker died in August 1951, or about seven weeks after Strangers opened.
Strangers on a Train seems to get better every time I see it. It’s one delicious bite after another. It’s odd that Stage Fright, one of Hitchcock’s worst films, was made just before Strangers, as the differences couldn’t be more yin-yang. Strangers is assured and masterful; Stage Fright is a trifle and close to an irritation.
Strangers has one of my favorite all-time cuts (a fast fade, not a jump), with Granger’s “I said I could strangle her!” followed by that closeup of Walker’s hands. And has there ever been a more concise portrait of obsessive malice than that shot of Walker staring at the tennis-playing Granger from the stands, sphinx-like, while everyone else’s head is whipping back and forth?
Walker’s Bruno, portrayed with an effeteness that was fairly brazen for its time, is one of the dandiest bon vivant psychopaths in motion picture history.
Composer Dimitri Tiomkin (who also did the music for Dial M for Murder) is known for underlining and bombast. His Strangers score goes there at times, but it’s one of his fullest and most particular. That passage when Granger is seen walking up the stairs of Walker’s mansion in the darkness, with that big Great Dane growling at him from a landing, is, I believe, one of the creepiest pieces ever composed for a film, and at the same time one of the most thrillingly performed.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a soft spot for those brassy Tiomkin fanfares that play over the Warner Bros. logo. The one that heralds the beginning of Dial M for Murder is so emphatic it’s almost humorous, although yet there’s something oddly alluring about music that tries to wallop you into submission with such skill.
The fine detail and luminous tones in Dial M for Murder can’t be praised too highly. It makes it almost as much fun to study as the 3-D version, which I saw at New York’s 8th Street Playhouse around 1980. In that slightly oversaturated mid-1950s way this 1953 film looks wonderfully fake…and yet more precise than it’s ever seemed before. The black in Ray Milland’s tuxedo doesn’t, for the first time, seem to be shaded in a strange dark blue. The DVD is so exacting you can just about see everyone’s pancake makeup. You can see the difference in texture between Ray Milland’s real hair and his toupee.
DVD images give everything away, of course. The fine wires lifting up the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, holding up the spaceships in War of the Worlds, etc. Now they’ve exposed a couple of Foreign Correspondent tricks.
I’ve always enjoyed that scene in which George Sanders, portraying a good-guy British journalist, jumps out of a fourth-story hotel window to escape Nazi villains. He breaks his fall by punching feet-first through a street-level cloth awning. Now you can see it’s a crude dummy (barely human-looking, much less resembling Sanders) crashing through, quickly followed (of course) by a shot of Sanders himself hitting the street.
You can also “step” your way through the plane-crash-at-sea sequence and see the paper screen ripping apart. Back up…some of you haven’t read about this. To make the crash look convincing, Hitchcock projected footage of the sea getting closer and closer on to a thin paper screen, and then sent a vat of water crashing through right at the moment of “impact.”
The Wrong Man, a mistaken-identity police procedural with Henry Fonda in the lead role, is an expertly made thing. It’s also grim and flat-feeling. Hitchcock’s apparent intent was to convince viewers of its true-story origins (and to fortify the general tone of sadness and frustration) by shooting things in a low-key, non-flashy way. Anyway, he overdid this aspect by half.
But it has one near-great scene. Fonda’s troubles are about witnesses having identified him as a hold-up man. The real guilty man,who looks almost exactly like Fonda, is finally arrested near the end and brought to the same 110th Precinct where Fonda was first questioned and booked. Just as the guilty guy is being led in, one of the two detectives (Charles Cooper) on the Fonda case is walking out.
Cooper glances at the perp but doesn’t react. He steps outside and walks down the stoop and onto the sidewalk, the camera tracking with him. He takes twelve brisk steps before it hits him. He takes eight increasingly slower steps until stopping. The camera goes in for a closeup. For the first time Cooper isn’t wearing that steely smug-cop look he’s had all through the film. He looks bothered. Dealing with an unconventional thought seems to almost scare him, but he finally accepts it. He turns and walks back into the precinct, and we know Fonda’s troubles are over.
Suspicion, an intriguing parlor drama about a mousey wallflower type (Joan Fontaine) who marries a dishonest swindler and possible murderer (Cary Grant), is mainly known by connoisseurs as Hitchcock’s cop-out film. The initial plan was to
show Grant disposing of Fontaine with poison, and then unwittingly posting a letter that will convict him. But Hitchcock caved to studio pressure (Grant can’t play a killer, etc.) and filmed a sappy turnabout finale that nobody over the age of
five or six could accept. The DVD makes the film look better than ever, though, and the appreciation doc is first-rate.
I saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith on the tube 15 or 20 years ago, and that was sufficient, I think.
Style Change
As I’m no longer an official Poop Shooter (although the column will stay on the site for another few weeks, courtesy of Kevin Smith), I’m no longer bound by Poop Shoot copy rules. So no more caps when it comes to movie titles, TV shows, books or anything else. Back to italics.
Right Things
The folks at Columbia TriStar Home Video pulled a boner when they released that pan-and-scan version of Castle Keep a couple of months ago, but they got right on the stick and decided to put out the proper widescreen (2.35 to 1) version as quickly as they could. It’ll hit the stands on 11.2.
A disc of George Stevens’ Gunga Din, another selection from my recent list of 20 most-wanted DVDs, will be released by Warner Home Video on 12.7 The special features will include a making-of doc, “On Location with Gunga Din,” with commentary by Rudy Behlmer. (The color footage comes from Stevens’ silent home movies. The Image laser disc version that came out in the mid ’90s had the same color footage, but with Stevens and, as I recall, his son George Jr. narrating.)
I’ve also been told that Paramount Home Video is putting out a High and the Mighty DVD with an appreciation/making-of doc. The 1954 film has been going through a restoral process at a post-production outfit located in Valencia. The DVD will be finished and released sometime in ’05.
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- The Pull of Exceptional History
The Kamala surge is, I believe, mainly about two things — (a) people feeling lit up or joyful about being...
More » - If I Was Costner, I’d Probably Throw In The Towel
Unless Part Two of Kevin Costner‘s Horizon (Warner Bros., 8.16) somehow improves upon the sluggish initial installment and delivers something...
More » - Delicious, Demonic Otto Gross
For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg‘s tastiest and wickedest film — intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...
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