HE reader “Geoffsongs” discovered last night that while while Larry Cohen‘s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover is not available on DVD, anyone with a Netflix subscription can watch it online through the website’s “watch instantly” feature via Starz, with the Starz intro/logo popping up just prior to the start of the movie.
Where’s Jim Hoberman‘s review? Isn’t he a longtime Cohen-head? All I can dig now are the MRQE reviews, which are mostly plans (including one from Dave Kehr).
Off to my 10 a.m. Watchmen IMAX screening at Leows Lincoln Plaza. Some kind of breathless-but-thoughtful reaction by 2 pm or thereabouts. I won’t catch Every Little Step at MOMA at 1:30 pm…it’s that or write. Then Tony Gilroy‘s Duplicity at 7 pm. Catch as catch can. One of those days.
“Brutality is not merely part of [Watchmen director Zack] Snyder‘s repertory of effects,” writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott . “It is more like a cause, a principle, an ideology. And his commitment to violence brings into relief the shallow nihilism that has always lurked beneath the intellectual pretensions of Watchmen.
“The only action that makes sense in this world — the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction — is killing. And the dramatic conflict revealed, at long last, in the film’s climactic arguments is between a wholesale, idealistic approach to mass death and one that is more cynical and individualistic.
“This idea is sickening but also, finally, unpersuasive, because it is rooted in a view of human behavior that is fundamentally immature, self-pitying and sentimental. Perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in regressing into this belligerent, adolescent state of mind. But maybe it’s better to grow up.”
A critic friend predicted last night that Watchmen‘s Rotten Tomatoes rating — now standing at 65% positive among the grunts and 44% positive among the creme de la creme — is “going to collapse” when the regular daily critics starting being heard from tonight. (Partly, he suspects, because Warner Bros. publicists kept big-name critics waiting in sub-freezing temperatures outside of the theatre where the Manhattan all-media occured last Tuesday night.)
But you know something? 44% of the elite reviews being positive (including Roger Ebert‘s) is nothing to sniff at. The movie clearly has merit for some, and this should be respected as far as it goes. 44% is nothing to sniff at. Except…well, c’mon, we all know what a below-50% positive means in the real world out there. Be honest. And we all know what’s likely to happen after the fanboys rush in to see it this weekend.
“I grew up in the comic-book generation and still found plenty of reasons to not love Watchmen,” says Film.com’s Laremy Legel. “I don’t think it’s a generational issue. It’s more a matter of rabid fanboys vs. everyone else in the world.”
Hats off to that exceptional missing-arm effect in Christine Jeffs‘ Sunshine Cleaning, which I saw last night for the very first time, having missed it at Sundance ’08. It’s a teeny bit mystifying as to why the nice-guy character, played by Clifton Collins, Jr., has a missing left arm, but that’s the deal. I’m just trying to pat some folks on the back.
This is my kind of visual effect — i.e., the kind that doesn’t look like one and which nobody has even mentioned so far. (Or at least, in the reviews that I’ve read so far.) To make it happen the visual effects guys, I’m sure, had to carefully cover Collins’ left arm in a bright green sock so as to erase it without a speck. It doesn’t look like anything at all.
Credit is due to Daniel Holt (special effects foreman), Margaret Johnson (special effects coordinator), Randy E. Moore (special effects rigging foreman), and Christopher Stack (imaging supervisor). I don’t know which special effects company was hired to finesse but I’d like to give credit where due.
Why did Jeffs remove Collins’ arm in the first place? Beats me. It doesn’t matter one way or the other story-wise. There’s a character stroke when we learn that Amy Adams, who plays the lead character, finds Collins attractive despite the handicap, but it’s really not an important point to make. Okay, so she can see past the handicap issue…great.
I’m wondering because Sunshine Cleaning (which isn’t too bad, by the way) must have made for a modest price, and the producers must have shelled out a fair amount of money, I’m guessing, to get the arm thing right. Am I wrong about this? Is it relatively inexpensive to take arms off these days? I remember how impressed I was when Gary Sinise turned up with a very convincing missing leg in Forrest Gump. That was 14 years ago.
If anyone has PDFs of the following I’ll be happy to trade: (a) Alex Garland‘s Never Let Me Go, a sci-fish drama that will costar Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan under director Mark Romanek; (b) Floria Sigismondi‘s The Runaways, a mostly true-life story about the Runaways that will costar Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cheri Currie; and (c) Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, written by Capote‘s Dan Futterman with Ryan Gosling starring.
The Playlist is offering six or seven reasons why Watchmen fails in a post-Dark Knight landscape. Reading the article top to bottom makes the points more clearly than the reading of the headlines, but here goes. One, nothing seems to be truly st stake. Two, the tone is goofy. Three, faithful fidelity to the graphic novel was a bad idea. Four, the ’80s are cornball. Five, dark and cartoony doesn’t make it. Six, emotion, truth and grittiness are sold separately. And seven, the music blows.
I agree with the other guys. This could be a problem. It’s the growling and the grimacing, for the most part. I don’t need Wolverine-Jackman to scream and flex and make his blood vessels pop. I just need him to be cool and sardonic and do the thing like it’s no sweat at all. I want him to be a smart-ass. Instead, this trailer has convinced me that the film — whatever it actually will be — is totally generic, and will surprise me not.
Many moons ago (i.e., last summer) a story broke about James Franco‘s deal to play Allen Ginsberg in a Gus Van Sant-produced biopic called Howl. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman were announced as the co-directors and co-writers of the drama, which will mainly be about the obscenity trial that followed the 1957 publication of “Howl,” Ginsberg’s legendary poem. The film will begin shooting just a few days from now.
I happened to reconsider the Howl project after reading Roger Friedman‘s story today about Franco having sold a collection of short stories to the Simon & Schuster guys.
Not be a stickler, but if you’re being cast to play a famous person aren’t you expected to sort of resemble him or her? At least somewhat? And shouldn’t it bother someone besides myself that Franco doesn’t look anything like Ginsberg did in the mid ’50s? As in no fucking resemblance whatsoever?
The only way Franco could look more unlike the young Ginsberg would be if he was Asian-American, African-American, a native of Tonga or an Aborigine. As is, Franco could probably make it into the finals of the annual “I don’t look the least fucking bit like Allen Ginsberg” competition that has reportedly been staged each and every year in Oslo, Sweden, since the early ’60s.
Which famous ’50s guy does Franco resemble? Well, if you dyed his hair black he might pass for Farley Granger. He could star in a biopic about Heath Ledger, I suppose.
Vanity Fair.com’s Frank DiGiacomo and illustrator Frank Harris have imagined a “new breed of Washington, D.C.-based superheroes, battling one another for dominance even as they wage a desperate war against their common enemies: Mortgage Mash, Mr. Credit Freeze, and the un-tame-able Afghakistan. Will they save the world, or kill each other trying?”
Oh, and by the way: I’m not the only guy who thinks N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith went a litle bit overboard in his Watchmen review (i.e., by comparing Zack Snyder‘s fanboy flick to Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001.)
