I was told last night that Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglorious Bastards script is around 165 pages. So at a minute a page it’s not really long enough to be a two-part film, but it’s too long to come in at a comfortable 115 to 120-minute length. So right away it’s a pickle, even with Brad Pitt playing a major role (as Nikki Finke reported last night). I’ll have a copy of this sucker by week’s end and then we’ll see what’s what.
Minor but necessary recap: On 6.28 I wrote about former CBS news Baghdad correspondent and current Washington, D.C.-based chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan, and particularly the hotpants situation she’d reportedly become involved in (an affair with a married-but-separated US State Department contractor named Joe Burkett following a thing with CNN international correspondent Michael Ware), and how the tabs and the N.Y. Post were covering it.
My two main thoughts were (a) this was nobody’s business so why don’t they leave her alone?, and (b) passion is as passion does and is no big deal, especially if you’re reporting from a war zone.
Yesterday the Washington Post‘s Howard Kutz ran a piece about Logan and her brief tabloid flare-up. The thrust or intent of the piece was essentially to say to everyone in the government and the media, “This lady is cool and professional and emotionally centered….there but for the grace of God go you or I.”
The piece also revealed that Logan is pregnant by Burkett and that the two “intend to get married eventually.”
One passage read that “while some may accuse her of tawdry conduct, what happened to Logan is an all-too-familiar tale of someone consumed by a career and needing a partner who understands the peculiar pressures involved.”
Those pressures being reporting from an intense war zone where violence, bodies and bomb blasts are part of the daily drill. As I put it last month, “There’s always something strangely erotic in the air when there’s a lot of random death and danger floating about…the more ghastly or threatening the surroundings, the more likely it is that like-minded professionals of a certain age are going to get down in the heat of the moment.” I compared this to the “terror fucking
On 6.29, HE reader Ogami Itto wrote that this observation was “spoken like somebody who’s never been anywhere near a combat zone.” True, but I knew — know — a little something abut this, having been around and heard some good stories from this and that journalist. Unlike Ogami Itto, it would seem.
Cheers also to HE reader CinemaPhreek, who wondered the same day if”it’s possible to get mental whip-lash from bloggers who talk about high-brow art vs. trash one post and then jump right down into the muck the next?” The muck that Kurtz is now chest-deep in, he means?
Hey, how come David Jones‘ Betrayal, a screen version of the renowned Harold Pinter play which came out 22 years ago and was then issued on VHS but never saw subsequent life on laser disc or as a DVD, is still sitting on the Fox Home Video shelf?
One indication of the completely buried status of Betrayal is that you can’t find any decent online stills from it. This awful shot looks like a screen capture from somebody’s TV screen as the grotesque VHS version was being played.
Ben Kingsley and Jeremy Irons‘ performances (as a cuckolded publisher husband and his best friend, a literary agent) ) are easily among their career best. The luncheon scene alone (“I mean, you love modern prose…probably gives you both a thrill!”) is worth the price alone. And the only way to see it, still, is to buy a cruddy VHS version on E-Bay.
I remember to this day going to the 20th Century Fox lot in ’83 to catch a screening of this. I had just arrived here from Manhattan and was still finding my feet. The screening was two or three weeks away from release and was quite the thing to see. I remember taking a friend, Kathryn Galan, and discussing it with her in the parking lot.
I’ve been badgering Fox Home Video about this title for a good eight to ten years, and all they’ve shown so far is a Ceaucescu-like silence and resistance to the idea.
I’ve never seen On A Tuesday, a short film about a thirtysomething couple getting married at San Francisco City Hall on a work day. I’m only aware of it because a good friend, Svetlana Cvetko, shot it and a friend of hers (and an acquaintance of mine) named David Scott Smith directed and co-wrote it. But interest has been aroused by an American Cinematographer article (July issue, page 16) about Cvetko’s unusual lensing of it.
On A Tuesday dp Svetlana Cvetko
The gist is that Svetlana decided to shoot this intimate little piece in the widest aspect ratio I’ve ever heard of — 3.18 to 1. The widest moving image I’ve ever seen is the 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio of Camera 65 or Ultra Panavision 70, which you can see on the Ben-Hur or Mutiny on the Bounty DVDs. I suppose I just love the perversity of an ultra-widescreen composition being used for a “small” film, or a format not necessarily mandated by the subject matter. Svetlana’s reasons were her own, of course, but that’s what makes a ballgame.
It’s a shame On A Tuesday isn’t viewable online. I’d love to see it for this aspect alone. Here’s a site with some nice frame captures.
Of course, I don’t know how a film this wide could projected on a screen in the right fashion. The screen would have to be fairly large and, I would think, slightly curved to deliver the right composition.
I just love the idea of making a quiet, soft-spoken subject seem exceptional by using some kind of vivid technique. I would have loved it, for example, if David Jones‘ Betrayal (’83), a 100% pure-dialogue movie based on a highly admired Harold Pinter play, had been shot in the 60 -frame-per-second Showscan format. Unnecessary, of course, but it would’ve been amazing.
Here’s Iain Stasukevich‘s American Cinematographer article on a page-by-page basis — page 1, page 2and page 3 .
The boat sailed on this Michael Bay/rejected Dark Knight script parody four or five days ago. It may as well have been posted last May. The world has moved on. But it’s funny so here it is anyway. Posted by Jared on www.spill.com.
Why is this “shock the rubes” gay makeout stunt, staged for a sequence in Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Bruno movie, only being reported now (7.8) by The Smoking Gun when it happened a full month ago? No reporters in Arkansas picked up on this? Asleep at the wheel.
“Lured by $1 beer and the prospect of ‘hot chicks’ and ‘hardcore fights,’ thousands of Arkansans were duped last month into appearing as extras in comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest staged mayhem,” the story says. “Cohen and his confederates organized cage fighting programs on consecutive days in Texarkana and Fort Smith.
“Both cards ended with two male grapplers (one was identified as ‘Straight Dave‘ and wore camouflage) tearing each other’s clothes off and, while in underwear, kissing down their opponent’s chest. This man-on-man action triggered Fort Smith fans to throw chairs and beer at the ring, according to one cop present at the city’s convention center.”
It’ll only cost $3 to attend Thursday night’s screening of Nicholas Ray‘s King of Kings at the American Cinematheque. Much of this 1961 Samuel Bronston epic is either pompous or tedious — some of it is painful — but I’d attend anyway if they would present a 70mm print of it, which of course they’re not. Burn me once with a slightly frayed 35mm print of Ben-Hur, shame on them. Burn me twice, shame on me.
The casting of the 37 year-old Siobhan McKenna (37 going on 52) as Mary, mother of Jesus, is ludicrous — a solemn earthy Irish woman straight out of Sean O’Casey and James Joyce with her clearly lined face, alabaster Irish complexion and faintly suppressed Dublin accent.
There are nonetheless five worthwhile things about this film: (a) Miklos Rosza‘s score, particularly the overture; (b) Ron Randell‘s performance as Lucius, the thoughtful, morally conflicted Centurion; (b) Jeffrey Hunter‘s lead performance during the last third; (d) the shots that show perfect focus in both the foreground and background (which was pretty amazing during a time in which films would commonly rack focus to catch the foreground or background, but never both); and (e) the eloquent narration by Ray Bradbury.
Bradbury is going to show up before the show and talk about his work on the film.
Yesterday’s withdrawal timetable statement from Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki — he claimed he’s negotiating a deal with Washington that will set a timetable for a withdrawal of foreign forces as part of a framework for a U.S. troop presence into next year — couldn’t be better news for Barack Obama and couldn’t be worse news for John McCain, who’s made staying the course in Iraq the centerpiece of his campaign.
Maliki’s statement “was the first time that Baghdad’s Shiite-led government has made a pullout deadline a condition for a promised new agreement with the United States for a troop presence into 2009.” This seems to me like the big defining moment of the ’08 Presidential race, the end of the legitimacy of the Bush-McCain hang touch policy, and a Godsend to the Obama camp — and the news guys are barely paying attention to it. Could I be missing something? If I am, I can’t figure what.
Berlin’s liberal, openly gay mayor Klaus Wowereit favors the idea of Barack Obama giving a speech at the Brandenburg Gate when he travels to Berlin later this month, although the conservative-minded German chancellor Angela Merkel, famed on this side of the Atlantic for getting a creepy back rub from George Bush in 2006, is against it.
Wowereit, Obama, Merkel
The Brandenburg Gate is the “most famous and history-rich location in Germany,” a Chancellery source told Der Spiegel‘s Carsten Volkery in a piece posted today. “In the past, it has only been used on very special occasions for addresses by politicians, and when, then only by elected American presidents. More clearly stated: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama would be better off looking for another location in the German capital to hold a speech.”
Wowereit, however, “appeared unimpressed by the warning from Merkel’s office and said during a press conference on Tuesday that he would be pleased if Obama were to address the public at the Brandenburg Gate.
A spokesperson for the local government told Der Spiegel that “the decision over where Obama should make his appearance was in the hands of the city council of Berlin and not the chancellor’s office or the federal government.
“Some suspect Mayor Wowereit’s remarks may be self-serving,” the article says. No!
Jurgen Trittin, deputy floor leader of The Green Party in the German parliament, has predicted that Obama would end up getting his JFK moment at the Brandenburg Gate. “Do you think that Wowereit would miss the chance to appear alongside Barack Obama?,” he reportedly asked an interviewer on the German news channel N24. “I believe Wowereit is thinking [Obama] should appear [and] I will come into the picture and everything will be great.”
A couple of hours ago Nikki Finke posted an exclusive report concerning Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglorious Bastards project. She wrote that (a) the script went out yesterday (Monday) to Universal, Warner Bros and Paramount, and to Sony today, and (b) that there’s “a possibility” that Harvey Weinstein will be producing (along with Lawrence Bender) but not financing it, which “certainly adds fuel to those rumors that The Weinstein Co is having movie money woes.”
The question I would have asked if one of my agent sources had called me about this is “how many pages”? Is it, like, 180 or 200 pages? I ask because of that reported-about interview between original Inglorious Bastards director Enzo G. Castellari and Tarantino on the forthcoming three-disc DVD (out 7.29) of his 1978 film reveals that Tarantino’s new version will be a two-parter like Kill Bill. In other words, something that may be leisurely paced, elephantine, long.
If I was running production at one of the four studios, I would insist that everyone reading and making a call about Tarantino’s Bastards script should also see Castellari’s original 99-minute film, which came out in ’78. We all know that Tarantino routinely flavors his scripts with his sassy talky-talk, and that Bastards, though set in World War II, will completely ignore the idioms of G.I. speech at that time in favor of the Quentin music. Which is fine. But I would want to know if the “music” or perhaps the extra plotting is really worth the expense of making and releasing two movies. (If, that is, the script indeed runs around 180 or 200 pages. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the movie Tarantino talks about on the Bastards DVD is no more.)
It may also be that Tarantino’s Bastards has a natural “fighting weight” length of 180 minutes or longer, and no ifs, ands or buts. But I also might insist, depending on the length of the script, that the theatrical version of the film be shot and cut to run no more than 115 to 120 minutes, and that a three-hour version (or perhaps a Part I and Part II) be confined to the DVD market. Because I really wouldn’t want to go through any sort of Grindhouse-type experience.
And because I believe that any movie or novel or essay is always a little better if it’s been pruned and tightened to within an inch of its life. The Tarantino I’ve heard about all these years doesn’t know from pruning. He is no longer, by most accounts, the guy he was in ’92 or ’94 or even ’97. He seems to be someone who believes in and stokes the fires of his own legend, and who seems to have a sense of his own genius, invincibility and entitlement. Not a mentality, in short, that’s likely to produce something lean and mean.
A “predictably glossy screen adaptation of the Abba-scored musical” that uses bigscreen names like Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan for the leads and adds lush Greek exteriors” that are made to look “glitzy” and “over-polished,” Mamma Mia! plays out more like an oversized Abba promotional vehicle than a fully dramatic piece,” writes Variety‘s Jordan Mintzer.
His point is basically that the film will make lots of money off its huge female fan base, partly or largely because of the “fun” element that was recently praised by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Ray Bennett. But the direction by Phyllida Lloyd (who directed the stage musical) and the screenplay by Catherine Johnson is not, he strongly implies, up to the level of Baz Luhrman, Lars von Trier or Milos Forman.
“The singing-and-dancing work for the basic excitement and energy of a live performance, but an additional boost of cinematic prowess is needed to sustain a similar rhythm on film,” he notes. “Johnson and theater-opera vet Lloyd” — both in their first screen outing — “can’t seem to find the right tone or style for their globally celebrated material.
“Most of the chorus dance numbers — especially ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!’ and ‘Voulez-vous’ — feel over-shot and over-cut, never allowing for the pleasure of a sustained, well-choreographed performance. Other, more intimate songs — including the beach-set ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’ and the cliff-set ‘The Winner Takes It All’ — feature a twirling Steadicam that does a better job of depicting the gorgeous coastline than the lip-synching cast.
“Thesping is all-around pro, although some stars, especially the bouncy and rejuvenated Meryl Streep, seem better suited for musical comedy than others, including Pierce Brosnan and Stellan Skarsgard.
“Despite the obvious time and energy devoted to smooth transitioning between studio and location scenes (both are shot realistically yet theatrically by d.p. Haris Zambarloukos), tech work often feels more rushed than mastered. Poor dubbing in some of the outdoor sequences tends to take away from the filmmakers’ insistence that we’re actually there.”
Hellboy II: The Golden Army is tracking the strongest among Friday’s openers — 77, 33 and 15. Journey to the Center of the Earth is at 82, 21 and 7 (fair, needs to do better), and Eddie Murphy‘s Meet Dave is running at 65, 17 and 2 (bomb).
The Dark Knight (opening 7.18) is running at 85, 65 and 31 overall. The first choice figure among older and younger men is 41, at 25 among younger women, and 19 among older women. Obviously looking at very big business. Mamma Mia, which is opening against Knight, is running 19 for first choice among 25-plus women, but at 8 first choice overall. Older and younger men aren’t interested. Space Chimps (also opening on 7.18) is running at 48, 12 and 0.
Stepbrothers, opening on 7.25, is at 66, 37 and 2 — people aren’t focusing at this stage, campaign has some work to do. The X-Files: I Want to Believe, opening the same day, is at 59, 23 and 3.
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