Yesterday Joseph McBride, author of the forthcoming "Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge" (Columbia University, 10.26), announced on Facebook that he'd just recorded a commentary track for a forthcoming Kino Bluray of Wilder's Some Like It Hot ('59).
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Initially written during Monday’s 858–mile marathon, re–edited and tweaked in West Hollywood on Tuesday morning: On Sunday night (9.5) I finally caught Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, and there’s no question that it’s brilliant and (I mean this respectfully) oddly hateful in a chilly sort of way.
It’s a visual knockout on a shot-by-shot basis. but except for a scene or two featuring Jeffrey Wright it refuses to provide any sort of narrative tissue or emotional connection with the characters. It’s all arch attitude, snide-ironic voice-overs and deadpan expressions, and after a while it makes you intensely angry. That or your spirit wilts or you become weak in the knees.
The French Dispatch is a bullwhip immersion in hardcore, doubled-down Wes. It’s not that there’s no way “in” as much as there isn’t the slightest interest in offering any kind of common humanity element.
So much so that I began to wonder if Wes might be going through a phase vaguely similar to Jean-Luc Godard’s Marxist-Maoist revolutionary period (‘68 to ‘79). I ask because it’s a pure head-trip objet d’art — there’s no sense whatsoever that Dispatch is looking to engage on any kind of semi-accessible level, even to the extent of reaching people like me.
It’s so mannered and wry and rapid-fire ironic that it sucks the oxygen right out of your lungs.
That said, I loved the boxy (1.37:1) cinematography. I was also kind of wondering why Wes didn’t use 1.66:1 more often. (I’m actually not sure he used it at all.). It seemed to be about 85% boxy and 15% widescreen scope (2.4:1).
For me the most humanly relatable moment doesn’t involve Wright’s character. It happens, rather, during the 1968 sequence that costars Frances McDormand as a Dispatch staffer writing about the fevered climate of French student revolt. Asked if writing is a lonely, isolating profession, McDormand answers “sometimes.”
There’s no chance that anyone this fall will even flirt with the concept of Dispatch being worthy of above-the-line Oscar noms — at best it could land some for production design, costumes, makeup, editing.
Again, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond:
An excellent job of selling a half-century-old film — the forthcoming, undoubtedly spiffy 4K Bluray of Stanley Kubrick‘s A Clockwork Orange (9.21.21).
From yesterday’s [8.5] pay-walled assessment: “It’s still a crisp, clean, mesmerizing film, and I’ll never stop worshipping that final shot of those well-dressed 19th Century couples clapping approval as Alex and a scampy blond cavort in the snow. But this is nonetheless one really cold film. And yet at the same time (and this is what makes Orange such an odd duck) it’s genuinely amusing here and there. Every line and gesture delivered by Michael Bates‘ chief prison guard is a hoot, and I chuckle every time I see that fat, middle-aged fuckface making kissy-face gestures at Malcolm McDowell‘s Alex in the prison chapel.
“At the same time I can’t honestly say that I like A Clockwork Orange much any more. I was always more impressed with the scene-by-scene verve than what it all amounted to in the end. I still respect the visual energy and exquisite 1.66:1 framings (John Alcott was the dp) and the Wendy Carlos meets Gene Kelly meets lovely lovely Ludwig Van musical score, and I still “admire” the tone of ironic ruthlessness and even fiendishness, but I’m not even sure if I like McDowell’s performance any more. (I feel a much greater rapport these days with his Mick Travis character in Lindsay Anderson‘s If…) I respect Orange historically, of course, and I still love the stand-out moments from the flawless first act, but it hasn’t delighted me overall for years.
“A Clockwork Orange was the first Kubrick film that felt wholly misanthropic** — a high-style show-off movie that sold audiences on the idea that Kubrick-stamped cruelty and brutality were palatable — that irony and arch acting styles somehow changed the game. But it was always more amoral than moral, and pretty much devoid of human compassion. Orange has 23 significant characters with noteworthy dialogue, and only one could be honestly described as decent or humane — Godfrey Quiqley‘s prison chaplain.”
Nevada-based friendo to HE: “Have you seen Denis-Carl Robidoux’s YouTube channel? He 3D-printed a film scanner and is uploading old 35mm trailers in 4K, some of them flat or open matte. This Marie Antoinette trailer in particular looks incredible.”
I know it’s heresy in dweeb-film-monk circles but I would definitely pay a fair price to stream classic films of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s that have been given the Robidoux treatment. Not to mention the potential thrill of re-experiencing 1.85 or 1.66 aspect ratio films in 1.37.
Viewers considering the merits of Chamber of Horrors (’66) were probably given pause by the fact that the director’s first name was “Hy” — short for Hyman. “Hy” is not the name of a director of a horror film — it’s (a) the host of a benefit variety show, (b) a guy you might play golf with, (c) a guy who owns a Palm Springs restaurant-bar or (d) runs a San Francisco comedy club.
Hy’s full name was Hyman Jack Averback. He was a fairly successful radio, TV and film actor who directed a lot of TV shows, and who co-produced F Troop.
Chamber of Horrors was originally shot as a feature-length pilot for a proposed series called House of Wax. It was considered too intense for the tube, so Warner Bros. marketers dreamt up the “fear flasher” and “horror horn” gimmicks. Shot at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank (Tony Curtis performed an uncredited cameo), it opened on 10.21.66.
The narrator of the trailer is William Conrad.
A reposting of a 7.30.18 recollection of HE’s “Great Woody Allen Comes To The Rescue of Shane” episode, which happened in early to mid April of 2013:
Five and one-third years ago Woody Allen saved George Stevens‘ Shane from an aspect-ratio slicing that would have rocked the classic cinema universe and resulted in a great hue and cry from the Movie Godz. When all is said and done and the Chalamets of the world have all been put to bed, this is one of the events that will burnish and solidify Allen’s legacy.
On 3.16.13 I revealed that George Stevens, Jr. and Warner Home Entertaiment restoration guy Ned Price were intending to release a Bluray of the classic 1953 western using a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, which would have cleavered the tops and bottoms of the original 1.37 photography by dp Loyal Griggs. I howled and screamed in my usual way, but nothing seemed to change until Allen, the only top-dog, world-class director to step into this fray, shared his opinion on 4.4.13.
On 3.29 I appealed for help from Martin Scorsese in an open letter. On 4.4 I posted the Allen letter. 13 days later Joseph McBride’s letter to Stevens, Jr., deploring WHE’s intention to present the film within a 1.66 a.r., was posted.
Later that day Price threw in the towel and announced that WHE’s Shane Bluray would be released in the original 1.37 aspect ratio. I’ve long believed that Allen’s opinion was the crucial factor in rectifying this situation.
My first New York Film Festival was the ’77 edition. I was planning to move into a cockroach-infested Soho apartment on Sullivan Street, but in late September I was still sharing a home rental in Westport, CT. I forget how many films I saw but I definitely caught Wim Wenders‘ The American Friend (the big public screening was on 9.24.77), Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (10.1.77) and Francois Truffaut‘s The Man Who Loved Women (ditto). All three were shown at 1.66:1.
If I recall correctly New York Film Festival director Richard Roud conducted a brief post-screening interview with Truffaut following the screening.
I was in awe of Roud, whose investment in nouvelle vague French cinema was storied by that point. I loved his deep voice and moustache, the smooth and off-handed way he spoke French, his continental cool-cat fashion sense and the constant smoking of what I assumed were unfiltered Galouises.
A Cahiers du Cinema contributor in the ’50s, Roud began running the Löndon Film Festival in ’60. He co-founded the NYFF in ’63 with Amos Vogel. Roud was a huge Jean Luc Godard enthusiast from way back, and I recall Andrew Sarris telling me that at one point that in his capacity as a NYFF board member he had to tell Roud and his co-enthusiasts that he couldn’t make it with Godard when his films took on an ultra-didactic political character in the early to mid ’70s.
Roud passed in 1989 at age 59.
This interview between Roud and Truffaut was taped right around the festival’s showing of The Man Who Loved Women. A longer version of the interview is on the Criterion Bluray of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim.
YouTube comment by “spb78”: “I’ll have to watch this full interview again on the Jules et Jim set, but if I’m correct in assuming there was no follow-up by the interviewer then what a wasted opportunity. Because the obvious question to Truffaut would’ve been ‘You articulated the auteur theory when you were a critic. Since becoming a filmmaker, do you still maintain this theory?’ Instead of telling Truffaut the theory is proven by his films, he should have asked Truffaut if making films validated his theory.”
Truffaut was 45 when the interview happened. He died of a brain tumor on 10.21.84 at age 52. My ex-wife Maggie and I visited his Cimitiere du Montmartre grave in January ’87.
Text from Santa Barbara friendo: “Hey, cranky Jeff – ghost from Christmas Future here. All is going to be okay. You are loved. You’ve got Tatiana by your side. Count your blessings instead of sheep. To paraphrase good ole Mary Tyler Moore, ‘You’re gonna make it after all.’ Love and Merry Christmas.”
“It’s a moderately diverting sequel. That means it’s also a distinct drop down from the 2017 origin story” — Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips. 59% Metacritic, 70% Rotten Tomatoes
I tried to find a cat-sized Santa hat for Anya, but failed. Tatiana found one online, but it won’t arrive until Monday. Yes, I know — I look like Captain Idiot.
Help! has been out on Bluray for six or seven years, but for some dumb reason you aren’t allowed to stream it as a rental. It’s a moderately bad film — just not worth owning. Someone needs to explain why director Richard Lester insisted on a 1.75 aspect ratio for the Criterion Hard Day’s Night Bluray, but waved nonchalantly at Help! being presented at 1.66:1.
“I realize, looking back, how advanced it was. It was a precursor to the Batman ‘Pow! Bam! Wow!’ on TV…that kind of stuff. But [Richard Lester] never explained it to us. Partly, maybe, because we hadn’t spent a lot of time together between A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, and partly because we were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period. Nobody could communicate with us, it was all glazed eyes and giggling all the time. In our own world. It’s like doing nothing most of the time, but still having to rise at 7 am, so we became bored.” — John Lennon. “If you look at pictures of us you can see a lot of red-eyed shots; they were red from the dope we were smoking. And these were those clean-cut boys! Dick Lester knew that very little would get done after lunch. In the afternoon we very seldom got past the first line of the script. We had such hysterics that no one could do anything. It was just that we had a lot of fun…a lot of fun in those days.” — Ringo Starr.
The elegant “Slim” Keith (1917-1990) was in fact quite slim in her 1930s and ’40x heyday; somewhat less so from the mid ’50s onward. Slim was the inspiration for the classic Hawksian woman — sly, bluntly spoken, takes no guff. This shot was apparently snapped in the early ’40s, a year or two into her eight-year marriage to Howard Hawks (’41 to ’49). Slim and Hawks split over infidelity — i.e., his.
Taken outside Lennon’s home in Tittenhurst Park in Ascot, during the recording of “Imagine.”
The appropriate headline is “Wretched Slimy Bedbugs.”
My first viewing of Wim Wenders‘ The American Friend was at the 1977 New York Film Festival, or sometime in late September of that year. Simultaneously bleak and haunting, a moody European noir, wry and cool and even sexy at times, it connects you with every existential dark-night-of-the-soul phase you’ve ever tasted first-hand in your actual life.
The late, great Bruno Ganz (with whom I felt an instant rapport during an ’04 Downfall junket interview) and Dennis Hopper gave the most iconic performance of their careers, and Robby Muller‘s chilling but wonderfully eerie cinematography…forget about it. And composed, of course, in HE’s all-time favorite aspect ratio of 1.66:1.
Several hours ago I discovered that a certain someone in our home (possibly myself) had accidentally turned on the Sony 4K’s Motion Flow viewing option, which we all understand is a huge aesthetic no-no. I realized this as I began watching The American Friend last night, not off my cherished Criterion Bluray but via HBOMax streaming.
Now the tough part: The motion-flowing of Muller’s cinematography (i.e., frame interpolation or black frame insertion) made it look extra-delicious. Sharper, cleaner, more luscious and immediate with those vaguely video-like (but mostly film-like) textures — I couldn’t get over how my love for this ace-level classic seemed to have been completely renewed.
I’m a bad person, I’m a bad person, I’m a bad person, etc.
HE to self: “This isn’t what Muller and Wenders prepared and approved. It’s a gussied-up distortion so how could you even think that it looks good on some level, whatever that level might be? Ask David Fear or Eric Kohn or any scholastically correct film critic in the country, and they’ll condemn motion smoothing to a man.”
Let me be clear that conceptually HE condemns motion-smoothing without the slightest equivocation. It’s not how films should be seen.
Except, that is, for the awkward fact that I half-loved watching the smoothed-out Friend. Not in a historical, politically attuned, get-with the program sense, but on a deep down, kid-in-a-candy-store level. God forgive me, God help me, beat me with sticks, etc.
The ever-fickle Tatiana had never seen Roman Polanski‘s Repulsion, so we watched it the night before last. It was like seeing it for the first time in a way as she was hooked from the start, despite the increasingly unsettled jagged-edge quality.
For like all great films, Repulsion isn’t so much about the destination as the ride…about a brilliant, increasingly disturbing blend of sharp observational details of mid ’60s Londön + Catherine Deneuve‘s blond hair and vacant eyes + an acute dread of sexuality + a gathering psychosis leading to a psychological meltdown (ticking clock, rape nightmares, cracks in a wall, a punctured cuticle, a rotting rabbit, arms pushing through walls, two male victims).
Shot in Löndon’s South Kensington district and at Twickenham Studios in the summer or early fall of ’64, Repulsion premiered at Cannes ’65 and opened stateside in late ’65 and early ’66.
Polanski has always been a highly exacting and demanding director, but because of Repulsion‘s extra-scrimpy budget (65,000 British pounds or roughly 1.5 million pounds today) he regards it as his “shoddiest” film, and the special effects as “sloppy.” And yet everyone regards Repulsion as a pantheon effort. It still holds me every time.
For whatever reason I’d never watched the making-of doc, David Gregory‘s A British Horror Film (’03), but I finally did on Saturday. A candid, penetrating, wholly fascinating look at a landmark slasher flick, the doc was featured on the Criterion Bluray, which popped on 7.28.09.
Small quibble: The world has confirmed over and over that Repulsion was projected in 1.66, and yet the Criterion web page says the aspect ratio is 1.85.
Polanski quote at the very beginning: “You can [interpret the film] as you want — it’s a free country. But don’t ask me to explain any of my pictures.”
Hollywood Elsewhere to Sony’s Grover Crisp, Roundabout Entertainment’s David Bernstein, restoration guru Robert Harris & everyone else who pitched in:
Last night I watched Part One of Sony’s all-new Lawrence of Arabia 4K UHD Bluray, and I’m trying to think of a more sophisticated way of saying “wow!” What if I use boldfacing and capitalizing and say “WOW!“?
When it comes to assessing 4K Blurays HE is all about “the bump,” and holy moley, does this puppy deliver in that respect! The bump effect is almost startling — a dramatic, unmissable upgrade from not just the 2012 1080p Bluray but even the 4K streaming version that I purchased in December 2016. Due to the sharpness, radiance, steadiness and consistency, and augmented by HDR-10 or Dolby Vision.
A thousand conveyances to you and yours for delivering the most exciting and orgasmic home video experience of my life — a mind-blowing eye bath.
This gives me hope that I might notice a similar bump effect from the forthcoming 4K Bluray of Spartacus, which of course is also drawn from (a 6K scan of) large format elements.
I was especially impressed with the rendering of LOA‘s nighttime scenes. David Lean and dp Freddie Young didn’t shoot them after dusk, of course, but they really look as if they might have been. I’ll be watching Part Two sometime later today or tonight, and I can’t wait for the Jose Ferrer “beating in Derra” sequence and the “no prisoners!” moment on the way to Damascus.
One small problem: I didn’t want to listen for the 179th time to Maurice Jarre’s overture so I flipped forward a chapter, naturally presuming it would take me to the Columbia logo and the main titles. No! It took me to Peter O’Toole painting a watercolor map in his “nasty dark little room” in Cairo. I adore the main title, fatal motorcycle ride and St. Paul’s funeral sequences. But the way to see them on the 4K is to either submit to the overture or fast-forwarding. (I don’t like fast forwarding as as rule — I only use chapter stops.)
By the way, even the 4K UHD Dr. Strangelove looks slightly different. The faces look less white or glare-y. They have a grayish graded quality. And, for some reason, the bars on the side that render the image in 1.66 are no longer black — they’re now very dark gray.
I don’t have a huge amount of interest in watching the other four in the package (Gandhi, A League of Their Owen, Jerry Maguire, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) but I’ll get around to them.
It’s been quite a few years since anyone saw a “boxy” (1.37:1) version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which opened almost exactly 60 years ago. Yes, it was shot with an assumption that first-run theatres would project it at 1.85:1, but it was protected for boxy viewings as well as 1.66 aspect ratios, and the prints weren’t hard-matted at 1.85 either. I know because I inspected one in a booth once. (I was a licensed projectionist in Connecticut starting in ‘81.). And TV stations used to broadcast it boxy. Ditto VHS cassettes.
All to say I would kill to be able to buy a Bluray of a boxy Psycho. And what about Universal offering a domestic Bluray of that German TV version with the slightly risqué added footage?
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