To go by the trailer and a clip, Barry W. Blaustein‘s Peep World (IFC Films, 3.25) might be moderately decent or perhaps even good. A cool, high-pedigree cast (Michael C. Hall, Rainn Wilson, Sarah Silverman, Stephen Tobolowsky, Taraji P. Henson, Judy Greer, Alicia Witt, Lesley Ann Warren, Ron Rifkin), snappy dialogue, dysfunctional family, etc. But the narration style is awful. And the word on the film isn’t so hot.
Michael Rechtshaffen‘s Toronto Film Festival review said it “very much wants to be The Royal Tenenbaums when it grows up.” And also The Celebration, the 1998 Danish Dogme film. “Unfortunately, the ripe setup quickly devolves into sophomoric shtick…[and this] leaves the talented cast high and dry,” he says. “Only Silverman manages to find lasting comic inspiration with Peep World‘s least obnoxious character, relatively speaking.”
I’m firing the Sony S380 Bluray player I bought it last weekend. It’s finished. I’m taking it back to Best Buy on Sawtelle this afternoon, and I’d love to punch it a couple of times and then throw it against the wall for dramatic effect, and then kick it and spit on it. I hate brand-new machines that fuck with you because their designers are assholes.
There’s nothing wrong with the picture quality at all, but the bugger gave me all kinds of trouble with aspect-ratio control. I had to struggle and call around and ask questions just to figure out how to make 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio films (i.e., those released from the mid ’50s and back) look like they should without getting that irritating horizontal taffy-pull effect. Plus the Bluray remote doesn’t have an instant return to the DVD home screen command button. You have to click up and then sideways and find the right control….the hell with that. Plus the remote command action is sluggish; the TV needs a second or two to think before responding.
I got the 1.33 to 1 thing working well for a time (I was quite pleased, in fact, that the S380 delivers almost a perfect box effect by displaying the full height of those old films) but then it reverted to problem status. I’ve been told by a home-video specialist who dropped by to get a wifi-friendly Samsung 8500. I’ve never liked the name Samsung (i.e., too Korean) but I’m done with Sony Bluray players for life. I’d honestly like to put the S380 in the middle of Westbourne Drive and run over it with my car.
HE regulars know that I make many mistakes at many film festivals. And one of my errors at last September’s Toronto gathering was missing James Gunn‘s Super (IFC Films, 4.1). Not because I heard it was stupendous, but because a film that “looks and feels like a weird mixture of a feature length SNL digital short, Kick-Ass and a Troma Film,” as Slashfilm‘s Peter Scirettadescribed it six months ago, is probably better than Kick-Ass. And that would be welcome.
I missed a Manhattan screening of Super earlier this week, and I haven’t quite persuaded the 42West person who’s screening it in Los Angeles to advise about whatever’s coming up.
Everyone knows it’s basically about a loser schlub (Rainn Wilson) deciding to wear the suit and and the attitude of a super hero after losing his wife (Liv Tyler) to a drug dealer (Kevin Bacon), and eventually teaming with an irksome comic-book clerk (Ellen Page) who helps guide him into the superhero realm and later becomes his Chloe Moretz-y sidekick.
“There are moments of brilliance,” Sciretta wrote, “surrounded by moments of bad sketch comedy. Page is the highlight…hilarious as the psychotic sidekick who’s looking to fight crime (even where/when it might not exist). Super also has some good character-based emotional moments [perhaps better suited to] a Jason Reitman film,” and which “feel a bit out of place and unearned in this movie.”
Criterion’s ten-year-old Rififi DVD is one of my all-time black-and-white faves. It was like seeing this 1954 classic for the first and only time…what clarity! I saw it projected at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art a few years ago when Jules Dassin dropped by for a visit, and their print wasn’t nearly as rich and detailed and super-silvery as the DVD.
So I’m thinking of buying the recently released, region-free Gaumont Bluray version when I’m in France for the Cannes Film Festival. yeah, even without English subtitles. Because the same black-and-white high will kick in, only more so. And that’s all I care about.
Amazon says this Bluray version which a 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio. The DVD Beaver screen grabs suggest this as well. If it’s in fact presented this way I can imagine how some who frequent this site might be offended. How dare they not issue it Psycho-style by cropping the tops and bottoms and whacking off a good 25% of the originally intended image? The TVs that we use today have 16 x 9 screens and that’s all that matters, right? Crop those boxy images!
I didn’t even look at this Jimmy Kimmel Show-produced video when it popped up three or four days ago. Bush…blurp. But I finally caught it this morning and realized that it contains the most winning performance Mike Tyson has ever delivered. Easygoing, light-hearted, etc. Like he’s channelling Jamie Foxx or something. James Toback‘s Tyson, a superb doc, revealed the ex-fighter’s sad, soulful side, but this (starring a noticably thinner Tyson) shows mirth and merriment.
For nearly 20 years Matthew McConaughey has under-achieved. The few good films he’s been in have been mostly ensembles (Dazed and Confused, U-571, We Are Marshall, Tropic Thunder) while many of his top-billed or costarring vehicles have been romantic dogshit, especially over the last decade. Now comes The Lincoln Lawyer (Lionsgate, 3.18), the first completely decent, above-average film McConaughey has carried all on his own. By his standards that’s close to a triumph.
Lawyer doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It’s basically a high-intrigue trial drama with an unusual lead character — McConaughey’s Mickey Haller, a bottom-feeding LA criminal attorney who operates out of his gas-guzzler. The story is about Haller being hired by a big-money client and soon after finding himself in a difficult ethical spot. It’s not quite as surprising or jolting as Primal Fear, the 1996 Richard Gere-Edward Norton courtroom thriller that it resembles somewhat. So don’t go expecting a double-A powerhouse thing. But it moves along at a good pace and never bores and satisfies with the usual twists and turns and fake-outs and sharp dialogue.
It almost feels like a two-hour pilot for an HBO series about Haller. Which I would watch, by the way.
The Lincoln Lawyer has been very ably directed by Brad Furman from a script by John Romano, based on Michael Connelly‘s novel of the same name. The costarring roles are well-written, and very persuasively performed by Ryan Phillippe, Marisa Tomei, William H. Macy, Michaela Conlin, Josh Lucas, Laurence Mason, Frances Fisher, John Leguizamo and Michael Pena.
Boiled down, The Adjustment Bureau (Universal, 3.4) is about a team of cosmic fate orchestrators doing all they can to prevent David Norris (Matt Damon), a rising New York politician, from marrying or committing to a longterm relationship with Elise Sallas (Emily Blunt), a gifted dancer. These two have met and fallen for each other in that dippy, lost-in-each-other’s-gaze sort of way, but they can’t partner up because this will somehow hinder or block each other’s progress in life (including a possible occupation of the White House by Damon).
This, at least, is how Thompson (Terrence Stamp), a top-dog orchestrator, explains the situation to Norris in Act Two. The “plan” must be adhered to, he declares, and here-today-gone-tomorrow spiritual connections can’t be allowed to get in the way. Variations on this theme are passed along by two other orchestrators, played by Anthony Mackie and John Slattery (the white-haired Mad Men guy), from time to time. And from time to time I was saying to myself, “Damon and Blunt are good together and it’s cool that this movie is using almost no special effects, but otherwise this is lame, man.”
Partly because it’s hard to take the orchestrator guys seriously, to be honest, because of a regrettable decision by director-writer George Nolti to have them wear small-brimmed businessman hats — the kind you see on Mad Men, or the kind that William F. Burroughs used to wear to poetry readings, or that FBI agents used to wear during the Eisenhower days. All I know is that I felt an urge to bail on this thing the second I saw those hats. Especially when Slattery showed up. They might as well have been wearing black-and-white Reservoir Dogs suits.
The main thing is that The Adjustment Bureau, for all its Mad Men tonalities and being based on a Phillip K. Dick short story (called “The Adjustment Team”), is selling the old swill about how nothing can get in the way of a perfect love match. In other words, it’s saying that even if Stamp and his cronies are correct about Damon and Blunt’s relationship getting in the way of their careers, it doesn’t matter. Live with it. Accept the fact Damon will never be elected U.S. President or that Blunt’s dancing career may not be as inspired as it might have been. Because finding the right lover/partner/mate is the most important thing there is.
That’s true to a large extent. If you can find someone of character who really cares for you and pulls his/her own weight and watches your back, you’re probably going to do a little better in life and be somewhat happier and maybe even live longer. But what Damon and Blunt show us in this film isn’t longterm compatibility or trust or the kind of loyalty you can take to the bank, but mutual interest and chemistry — mere delight with each other’s looks, personality and vibe. And that’s the kind of thing that always settles down sooner or later. Chemical attraction can lead to other things, of course, but it can just as easily fade away. The only kind of fluttery-heartstrings love that lasts is the unrequited kind.
My 13″ MacBook Pro froze this morning for the first time since I bought it about a year ago. There was nothing to do but to shut it down, and in so doing I lost a fairly good review of The Adjustment Bureau that I’d been writing for nearly three hours. (I’d have been okay if Movable Type 4.0 had an auto-save function.) And then HE crashed again, and the stooges at Softlayer/OrbitThePlanet told me I needed to double the site’s memory again, after doubling it from 2 gigs to 4 gigs on Monday (at their suggestion) after Sunday night’s Oscar crash. So now it’s at 8 gigs, and the site is back up. I’m not going to drive down to their offices in Dallas during my visit to South by Southwest in Austin and do something stupid, but boy, I’d really love to. Their incompetence has been infuriating. Remember these guys and don’t ever, ever do business with them.
I’ve been to Irv’s Burgers maybe two or three times in all my years in Los Angeles. The burgers are pretty good — they’ve never been legendary — but I like that Irv’s is there, and I hope it never shuts down.
Over the last four days two director pals have told me the same thing: “I have to make an action film next.” To make some money and keep their cred up with the bottom-liners, they mean. If two guys are saying this you can bet plenty of others have the same strategy. We all have to make a piece-of-shit, Eloi-friendly sequel/action/CG ComicCon popcorn confetti-fart movie. Because if the word gets around that we’re mostly into original and/or “quality” material, we may never work in this town again.
Kelly Reichardt‘s Meek’s Cutoff had an L.A. screening on 2.23, which I missed. There’s a press day with Reichardt on 4.15. Screenings are set for 4.6 and 4.12, but according to a 42West rep there are no screenings scheduled for the entire month of March. I asked, “Do you guys have a screener I can watch?” No, I was told. That’s Oscilloscope Pictures for you — big spenders.
I couldn’t go back to my 36″ Sony analog, so yesterday I sucked it in and paid $575 for a 50″ Vizio plasma. Vizio makes fairly well respected lower-priced plasmas, LCDs and LEDs, but the price seemed a little cheap. The seller, a guy from East LA named Marcus Lopez, said his units cost a bit less because they’ve been judged as discards due to some minor shipping dents. He also said plasmas are cheaper because no wants them — everyone wants LEDs and LCDs.
So I liked the price but I was nervous because I hadn’t really done the homework. Not extensively, I mean, and you can always get flim-flammed. But the hell with it. I rolled the dice and bought the beast (which Marcus delivered, by the way), and i have to say that it’s looking pretty damn wonderful so far. Much better — sharper, pizazzier, more radiant with delicate gradations — than the Panasonic 42″ plasma back at the Brooklyn place. I also bought a Sony Buray (BDP-S380/BX38) with online download capability. Everything looks great — Blurays, DVDs, cable. I have this idea that plasmas delivers a slightly more organic image than LEDs or LCDs. which have always looked more video-gamey. (Or they do in Best Buy stores, at least.)
