Ever since catching glimpses of Ken Loach‘s Poor Cow in flashback sequences in Steven Soderbergh‘s The Limey, which came out nine years ago, I’ve been hoping to see this 1968 Loach film on DVD in this country. But it never happened. There’s a new British DVD coming out next month, which of course can be ordered on Amazon UK and seen on any all-region player. But why not an NTSC version? Or a TCM airing? I’ve never seen it.

John McCain has reportedly made the decision not to attend Friday night’s presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi unless a Congressional Wall Street bailout deal has been reached by sometime earlier in the day. What a transparent sidestepping fool. What a phoney-baloney drama queen.
McCain has been dropping in the polls and knows he’ll be at a rhetorical disadvantage with Obama so he’s playing the role of the dedicated, pure-of-heart public servant in order to give himself a temporary out. Plus he wants to postpone the debate until Thursday, 10.2, which would of course bump the Biden-Palin debate. More prep time for Sarah!
Here’s the story of what happened today as recounted by the HuffPost‘s Howard B. Edsall.
Excerpt: “Later in the day, Obama rejected McCain’s proposal to postpone the first debate. ‘This is exactly the time the American people need to hear from the person who in approximately 40 days will be responsible for dealing with this mess,’ Obama said. ‘What I’ve told the leadership in Congress is that if I can be helpful, then I am prepared to be anywhere, anytime. What I think is important is that we don’t suddenly infuse Capitol Hill with presidential politics.’
McCain also bailed on Daivd Letterman, except that “in the middle of the taping Dave got word that McCain was, in fact just down the street being interviewed by Katie Couric. Dave even cut over to the live video of the interview, and said, ‘Hey Senator, can I give you a ride home?’
“Earlier in the show, Dave kept saying, ‘You don’t suspend your campaign. This doesn’t smell right. This isn’t the way a tested hero behaves.’ And he joked: ‘I think someone’s putting something in his metamucil.’
“‘He can’t run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sarah Palin. Where is she?”
“‘What are you going to do if you’re elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We’ve got a guy like that now!’
Letterman’s comments will air Wednesday evening.

I spoke this morning to dp Gordon Willis, a.k.a. the legendary “Prince of Darkness” whose films include the Godfather trio, Alan Pakula‘s All The President’s Men and The Parallax View and Woody Allen‘s Manhattan, Annie Hall and Interiors. We spoke for 20 or 25 minutes, but I could have easily kept this master of light and shadows occupied for three or four hours.

The phoner happened in part because of my somewhat surprised, very positive response to the restored Coppola/Harris Godfather DVD. Even on a crummy DVD, which delivers about 15% of the visual data contained in the Blu-ray version, this classic film, which I’ve probably seen a good 25 or 30 times, looks significantly better. Warmer, yellower, redder, possibly a bit sharper, much inkier blacks and brighter here and there.
I now can’t wait to watch The Godfather, Part II, which Willis seemed especially enthusiastic about during our chat.
Oh, and I love the supplementary docs — Emulsional Rescue (about the work that went into the restoration), Godfather World (about the general cultural lore that the films have created over the last 30-plus years) and a slew of others. As well as the deleted scenes that were put into in The Godfather Saga, which never went to DVD.
Early this morning I called Robert Harris, who supervised the restoration, to convey my complete satisfaction with the regular DVD version, and he reminded me again that I won’t be seeing the restoration until I watch the Blu-ray version on a 46″ or 50″ LCD or Plasma screen. He then offered to put me in touch with Willis, to which I said thanks much. I wound up phoning the blunt-spoken cinematographer sometime around 11 am.

I told Willis about my very first viewing of The Godfather in a theatre in Boston way back when, and particularly how the theatre showed it in 1.33 to 1 instead of 1.85. I was under the impression that the film was intended to be shown this way in order to reflect the standard Academy ratio of the 1940s and early ’50s. I later realized I was wrong about that. Willis told me that the film had been shot with a protected 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio (i.e., a version that was shown on TV for decades). He said that Coppola wanted it to be shown in this aspect ratio and that he answered, “Where do you think that’s going to happen…Russia?”
One of the distinctive differences in the restored Godfather is that the outdoor wedding-party scenes are bleachy looking — flared whites, over-exposed. The way the sunny outdoors might look to a person who’s been sitting in a dark and shuttered room. That was a deliberate choice, of course, although Willis took some heat for it at the time.
I asked Willis if he’s seen David Fincher‘s Zodiac, which is partially set in the late ’60s-early’70s and seems reminiscent of the shooting and lighting style that Willis used on All The President’s Men. No, he said. I asked if he’s seen Children of Men, which I feel is a bona fide classic due to Emmanuel Lubezski‘s action photography. He hasn’t seen that either. He has, however, seen Burn After Reading, “the Brad Pitt movie,” and didn’t think much of it.
Willis can talk technical photography and projection issues until the cows come home, but his primary interest and deep-down concern, to hear him tell it, is with story skills or rather the lack of. The art of storytelling is falling away, very few present-tense filmmakers know how to tell a story, etc. He’s quite a fellow, and I love his occasionally blunt way of putting things. Serious artists rarely use namby-pamby phraseology. Willis is a sterling example of this.

I’ve been asked to pass along an invitation to local HE readers about a Barack Obama fund-raiser being held on Sunday, October 5th, at Cedering Fox‘s very cool home from 4 pm to 7 pm. They’re looking for $250 a head but they’ll take $175 if you’re strapped. Good food, interesting crowd, a little dough for the right cause, a couple of speakers. I’ll probably attend. It’s actually being called a “Victory Fund Benefit.”

It just hit me that two movies about young mortals in love with young vampires will soon be upon us — Catherine Hardwicke‘s Twilight (Summit, 11.21) with Kristen Stewart having it bad for the blood-sucking Robert Pattinson, and Tomas Alfredson‘s Let The Right One In (Magnolia, 10.24), a tweener vampire romance from Sweden about a 12 year old boy (Kare Hedebrant) who falls for a female vampire (Lina Leandersson) who’s also 12 — and has in fact been 12 for a long, long time, due to her condition.

Let The Right One In‘s Lina Leandersson

I haven’t seen Twilight, but I’m naturally suspicious of any film aimed at marginally hip under-30 women — far and away the emptiest, most clueless demographic on the face of the planet — on top of the usual young-male horror crowd. But I’ve been persuaded by film-wise friends and colleagues that Let The Right One In is much more my speed. I’ll be seeing it tonight or tomorrow so we’ll see.
I’m extremely late to the table on Let The Right One In, which has played almost every significant film festival over the past several months. It just won the Best Horror Feature Award at Austin’s Fantasticfest and won the Tribeca Film Festival Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature last May. It’s also something of a tearjerker, if you can go with that.
Cinematical‘s Scott Weinberg caught it at Tribeca and called it “one of the strangest, stickiest, and (yes) sweetest horror movies I’ve seen in ten years. It’s a pretty unique beast [and] a flick that would never arrive via the Hollywood studio system, seeing as how it deals with hardcore gore, pre-teen sexuality, and some rather nasty kid-on-kid violence.

Let The Right One In‘s Kare Hedebrant

“And yet for a movie that has a lot of dicey components, it sure comes off as a really sweet story. That’s not just good filmmaking; that’s real intelligence behind the camera.”
The irony is that Hollywood — Overture Films and Spitfire Pictures — is in fact cooking up a remake. No script or director yet, but what are the odds that the remake won’t somehow coarsen and/or downgrade the particular alchemy that Alfredson has allegedly put together? American remakes of European film are always more obvious and common and aimed at a dumber crowd. Because, you know, Americans are almost always coming from a dumber, more emotionally primitive and less worldly place.
The only problem is the title. Who in hell is going to remember Let The Right One In or associate it with tweener vampires? Talk about a title that means nothing — nothing at all! — to anyone. Although it does sound cooler and cooler the more you say it.
Let The Right One In will open on 10.24 at West Hollywood’s Sunset 5 and at Manhattan’s Angelika Film Center. It will then open at Seattle’s Varsity on 11.14.

A friend saw Ron Howard‘s Frost/Nixon and “wouldn’t say it’s bad,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s great. Good performance from Frank Langella but otherwise, I was kinda bored.” Stop right there! It’s more or less the stage play, which I saw in New York and wasn’t the least bit bored by. Nobody was.
“As opposed to Gus Van Sant‘s Milk,” the friend continued, “which, according to someone trusted who saw it last week in L.A., is as phenomenal as the trailer.”

Hillary Clinton sidestepped a question this morning from Morning Joe‘s Mika Brzezinski about whether she thinks Sarah Palin could help solve the current financial crisis as vp or, God forbid, president. Did Clinton grim up and say to women voters what needs to be said about Palin once and for all? Of course not.

Clinton ran for cover and slithered away because she doesn’t want to alienate the under-educated Walmart Moms who voted for her during the Democratic primaries, and whose support she’ll need again if and when she runs for president in 2012. This is who and what Hillary Clinton is and always will be.

“I just heard a radio ad for Eagle Eye (Dreamworks, 9.26), the new Shia LaBeouf thriller. I think it’s safe to steer clear of any movie containing the line, ‘Somebody’s hacking into the power grid!'” — email received at 4:35 pm from HE reader Mark Smith.
An elaboration: “He’s an ordinary guy, thrust into chaos. They’re watching him all the time, cat-and-mouse games, he outsmarts them, shit blows up, gets the girl, fast cutting, plot holes, noise, etc.” I couldn’t care less if I were dead.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Steven Zeitchik is reporting that producers Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin are strongly disagreeing about whether to release the Weinstein Co. war-crimes drama The Reader in 2008 or wait until ’09.
“Weinstein is pushing for a December release for the movie, which director Stephen Daldry is working on in post,” Zeitchik writes. “The romance set in postwar Germany and based on Bernhard Schlink‘s novel already has buzz from strong test screenings, though there are post elements left to be completed.”
“Rudin, however, has been lobbying hard for a 2009 release. The producer already has two Oscar candidates — Revolutionary Road, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as a married couple in the 1950s, at Paramount Vantage, and the Broadway transfer Doubt, toplining Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, at Miramax — and a third would mean he is vying heavily against himself.”
To go by the book synopsis, The Reader is a German-guilt movie rooted in World War II. Due respect and no offense, but it sounds like a movie that could have been released in 1979 or 1982 or 1989 or 1996. It costars Ralph Fiennes, Kate Winslet, Alexandra Maria Lara and Bruno Ganz.

Jamie Stuart‘s first in a series of four shorts on the 46th New York Film Festival is mainly about an attempted robbery. Of Stuart. In Stuart’s buuilding. By a thief who’s too good looking, too short and too mild-mannered to be a bad guy. It’s an okay way for Stuart to begin one of his looney-tunes shorts about the NY Film Festival. Except the violent sparring in the hallway doesn’t feel feel right. Too poised, not sloppy enough. And I didn’t believe the stairwell fall. The sound is wrong; you need to feel the pain.

The thief (l.) and Stuart (r.)

Oh, and the people who suggested a couple of days ago that the quickie razor-blade thing was a tribute to Un Chien Andalou? I don’t think so.
The rest of it is the usual impressionistic mind-melt press conference stuff that Stuart has given us in years past The two directors are The Class‘s Laurent Cantet and Wendy and Lucy‘s Kelly Reichardt. Why doesn’t Stuart ever talk to other journalists?