A reader remarked in response to yesterday’s Hitchcock/Truffaut item that Alfred Hitchcock looked like one of those recumbent tubbos from WALL*E, and I had to respond immediately to that. I’m re-posting here to give it the proper attention because it’s a fairly major point:

“No — he was Alfred Hitchcock, and therefore brought things to the table that were so creatively ripe, rich, eternal, fascinating and delectable that his physical proportions are anecdotal, at best. Same deal with Orson Welles (starting in the mid 1950s), Guillermo del Toro, Diego Rivera, Charles Laughton, etc. Their inside action so completely overwhelms the outside appearance that the matter of corpulence barely comes to mind.
“Now, it may well be that this or that morbidly obese Jabba waddling around the local galleria is a secret Orson Welles or Guillermo del Toro and that their inner light is simply not apparent to the passerby (i.e., I was a secret guy myself for years before coming into my own), but possessing an awareness of this or that lardbucket’s wondrous creativity, imagination and richness of spirit is not my responsibility. I need some sort of readily apparent indications of this.
“Besides, we can all tell things by just looking at someone. We can see past a person’s massive body-fat situation to look at how they’re dressed, what they seem to be income or lifestyle-wise, what they’re up to activity-wise, how fat their kids are and how their eyes look — how sparkling or interested they seem to be in the life around them, or how deadened by junk food and a WALL*E teletubby lifestyle, which creates eyes that are next door to a shark’s.
“On top of which Mr. Hitchcock was a super-Jabba only from the early to mid 1930s to the early ’40s. He embarked on a diet during the making of Lifeboat with the aid of a product called Reduco (you can see the before and after shots of Hitchcock on a newspaper that William Bendix is reading during the film), and henceforth was never that massive — just pleasingly plump or perhaps modestly fat. He suddenly became heavier, yes, towards the end of his life when he wasn’t working and was eating far too many rich desserts or high-calorie gourmet dishes, but….I digress. (I’m kidding about Reduco, of course — that was a made-up product Hitchcock threw in for the sake of visual economy.)”

HE reader Mark Edward Heuck has passed along the art below with the following message: “Alcoholic drifter with superhuman powers and antisocial feelings — check. Saves good-looking stranger who dedicates themselves to superhero’s career rehabilitation — check. Starring Academy-Award nominated actor in the lead – check. Showstopping musical numbers written by Rocky Horror Picture Show creators — uhhh, hold on.” Has anyone ever seen this Alan Arkin film? I don’t even remember it.

Don’t let anyone tell you that the tide is turning on Hancock, and that David Denby‘s rave in the New Yorker was some kind of indication that the initial bad buzz is not to be trusted and that it’s just a matter of the cool people sending out the cool word.

Forget all that. Hancock is a cloddy but decent-enough thing at first but then — wait for it — it shoots itself right in the face with a .44 Magnum. It does this at the two-thirds mark with (a) an astoundingly ridiculous plot turn, (b) a totally absurd abandonment of logical behavior concerning a certain character, (c) an introduction of a tediously loathsome fat-faced villain who does nothing but bring everyone down and spoil the vibe, and (d) a ludicrous (and suddenly introduced) back-story dependency that is ridiculous in its complexity and certainly makes no rudimentary sense.
How does a movie directed by Peter Berg (never a Stanley Kubrick-type guy but a fairly able guy and a shrewd operator) and produced by three very savvy hombres — Akiva Goldsman, James Lassiter and Michael Mann — along with star Will Smith turn out this badly? How could they have gone with such a drop-dead awful third act?
The villain has to be Smith; he must have pushed it through. Goldsman knows what makes a good story — he’s no dummy. And Mann clearly knows his way around a solid three-act structure and what good stories have to do. Did these guys actually produce this film or just sit back and glad-hand Smith and pocket the paycheck? What the hell happened?
Hancock, which I paid to see at the Arclight last night (after catching Hellboy II at the Chinese), is a crudely destructive but tolerably entertaining cartoon for the first act. A runamack alcoholic superhero creating titanic havoc and earning everyone’s enmity — fine. The second act, which is about Hancock’s prison time, quiet meditation, rehab and p.r. restoration, is less engaging but not too bad. But the third act, trust me, sends the Hancock train completely off the rails and crashing into the stockyards. It is not just bad — it is confounding, mind-boggling, nuts.
I could feel the energy hissing out of the audience last night once the third-act meltdown settled in. Some laughed it off; some were scratching their heads as they smiled at their dates; some were walking out with very pissed-off expressions. I have to get dressed and make a private screening of a friend’s movie in less than an hour, but this movie is one of the weirdest big-budgeters I’ve ever seen because it’s acts as it wants to destroy itself. It has no interest in doing that dance of skill and spirit and occasional movie magic that lifts you out of the third-act quagmire and sends you out satisfied.
Hancock dives into a third-act sinkhole and goes, “Whuhhh…we’re diving into a pit of insanity now and we’re not leaving! Get used to the stink pit! You thought this movie had a reasonable attitude and would avoid this kind of thing….surprise, assholes! We were a ‘pit’ movie all along and you just didn’t realize it until the third act, so fake-out and fuck you! Because we’re getting paid anyway.
“You don’t want to know the realm we live in. You’ll never get there anyway. We are the gods and you are the peons. We lose our bearings because we feel like going there because we’re arrogant, which means pulling the rug out in the third act and you, the audience, pay to see it regardless. A pretty good deal from our end!”

As someone noted yesterday, Tony Ortega‘s “Trash Talking with Harvey Weinstein” piece, which was posted yesterday on the Village Voice site, recalls the sifting-through-garbage tactics of famed Dylanologist A.J. Weberman. Ortega happened upon a large bin of Harvey’s trash in some Tribeca back alley that had all kinds of good stuff, and so he made a piece out of it and even got Harvey to get on the phone.

Harvey Weinstein; Nicole Kidman

The most heartening or encouraging thing for me were the various unsigned Nicole Kidman contracts regarding The Reader, which is currently filming without her. As Ortega notes, “She dropped out when she got pregnant for the first time with her new husband, Keith Urban, and was replaced by Kate Winslet. The documents contain details that are probably pretty standard for highly-paid stars like Kidman: the size of her name in advertising, a guarantee of first-class travel, a right not to have her hair ‘permanently’ colored, restrictions against nudity not already spelled out in the screenplay, the right to keep one of each item of her wardrobe,” etc.
The agreeable surprise is that Kidman agreed to make the flm for a lousy $100 grand, plus another $450,000 if the movie breaks even. (Given the lore about Harvey’s bookkeeping practices, the $450 thousand sounds like a dream.) As Ortega points out, “That’s a pittance for a star in her bracket, but not unusual when an actor really wants to take part in an ‘art’ movie.”
Kidman’s price surely has been dropping since the double box-office calamities of The Invasion and The Golden Compass (which followed a commercially lackluster run of films starting with Cold Mountain and the refrain I’ve heard said over and over, to wit: “She doesn’t sell tickets”) but $100,000 seems really low for a star of her magnitude. Cheers nonethless for her willingness to take less for the right role. I don’t know how many others have this attitude, but everyone should embrace the concept of risk in this business, at least occasionally. It would be a far healthier business if they did.

Here‘s a tape of Alfred Hitchcock speaking to Francois Truffaut in the mid ’60s for the book that eventually became “Hitchcock/Truffaut.” The subject, as Hitchcock described, was “a little matter of the physical aspect of the kissing scene in Notorious. The actors, of course, hated doing it. They felt dreadfully uncomfortable in the manner of how they had to cling to each other. And I said, I don’t care how you feel, I only know how it’s going to look like on the screen.

Alfred Hitchcock

“I conceived the scene in terms of a desire on the participants not to break the romantic mood. To normally break apart, it’s possible that the moment would be lost. But there were things to be done, movements to be made with the telephone and the door, where it was still essential for them not to break the embrace. And I felt that the camera, representing the public, should be permitted as a third part, to join in the embrace. I was giving the public the great privilege of embracing Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman together. It was a kind of temporary menage a trois.

Here‘s the best part: “The aspect of not wanting to break the mood…the idea was given to me when I was in a train coming from Bologne to Paris and the train was going through a tup rather slowly,” Hitchcock says. “It was a Sunday afternoon and there was a big factory and there was a large red brick wall, and against the wall was standing a young man with his girl. The girl had her arm linked through his, but he was urinating against the wall. But she never let go of his arm. She was looking down at what he was doing, then she looked around the countryside and then back again, and I thought this was true love really functioning, and that was the actual inspiration for the scene in Notorious.”

Here’s a site with links to several tape portions of the Hitchcock/Truffaut sessons.

It’s not nostalgia, and it’s not a refrain of the “old films are better than the new” crap that the sentimentalists run up the pole from time to time. The fact is that this King Kong vs. T-Rex fight sequence (found about halfway through this clip) is better choreographed, more thrilling and generally more kick-ass than any mano e mano, big monster vs. big monster sequence made since the 1950s — including, I would add, the battle between the Ed Norton and Tim Roth bulkazoids in The Incredible Hulk.

As part of a discussion of John Horn‘s recent L.A. Times piece about a visit to the set of Oliver Stone‘s W, Patrick Goldstein posted a page from Stanley Weiser‘s script. Noting Horn’s observation that the film “is heavily focused on the current president’s relationship with his father,” i.e., ex-President George H.W. Bush, Goldstein chose a scene in which Bush, Jr. tries to comfort Poppy on the night of his electoral loss to Bill Clinton in 1992.

So what the hell — here’s my favorite scene. (I can play this game too…no?) It’s basically George Bush, Jr. vs. his mother, Barbara Bush — Page 92, Page 93 and Page 94.

The gist of Eric Lundegaard‘s 7.1 Slate piece (“”Why We Need Movie Reviewers”) is that critics are more in synch with moviegoer tastes than you might think. The key is to look at how critical favorites have done on a per-screen basis. If you look at things this way, the fog lifts and the blinders come off!

Going by Rotten Tomato ratings, Lundegaard notes that “while there were fewer ‘fresh’ films (i.e., pics that critics liked) that showed on fewer screens and took in less overall box office, they tended to make almost $1,000 more per screen than ‘rotten’ movies (i.e., pics critics didn’t like). So, on a per-screen-basis, more people are following critics into theaters than not.”

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Thomas K. Arnold has rewritten a Paramount Home Video press release about the forthcoming Godfather trilogy Blu-ray four-disc package that’s coming out on 9.23, and again — as noted in my riff on Peter Bart‘s 6.23 Variety blog piece about the package — no mention of the fact that the restoration guru Robert Harris (Vertigo, Spartacus, etc.) supervised the frame-by-frame digital restoration of all three films. The last time I looked the Harris brand meant blue chip, top-of-the-line, etc. The PHV press release mentions Harris and his credits right up front (i.e., in the second paragraph).

In this stammering Tony Kaye video about his regard for the films of Stanley Kubrick, he talks (at the very end) about an encounter with a friendly payroll consultant. As a way of stirring empathy between kindred souls, the guy told Kaye “he played the ape in 2001…the one who picked up the bone and threw it into the air.” As Kaye puts it, “The friendliest person I ever met when I was going bust was the ape in 2001.”

I knew in a flash upon watching this morning that Kaye had spoken to Dan Richter, whom I interviewed 15 years ago for an L.A. Times Calendar piece. Here are three scans of the original — #1, #2 and #3.

My second favorite Kaye line in this video is his repeating what New Line Cinema’s Bob Shaye said in an argument over American History X, to wit: “‘Look..who do you think you are, Stanley Kubrick or something? You don’t have a track record, you haven’t done anything, you can’t tell me what you want.” In response to this, Kaye says, ” I was stood up, very reactive, and stormed out and proceeded on a direct road to hell. ”

Three reactions to Eddie Murphy telling Extra‘s Tanika Ray that he’s considering retirement from film acting with comments like (a) “I have close to fifty movies and it’s like, why am I in the movies?,” (b) “I’ll go back to the stage and do standup” and (c) that he “doesn’t want to be a part of” Brett Ratner‘s Beverly Hills Cop 4 because “the movie [isn’t] ready to be done.”

Eddie Murphy; Frank Sinatra.

One, Murphy may be feeling deflated about the tracking on Meet Dave (7.11), which has been fairly abysmal for the last couple of weeks. The first-choice numbers have recently improved (they’re up to 2 or 3) but the signs are unmistakable that the bloom is off the rose and that people have finally understood that the odds of a Murphy comedy being gross or sloppy or not funny enough are pretty good so why bother in the first place? Murphy has since quashed the retirement talk, but that’s only because he’s moody fuck who feels what he feels when he’s feeling it. The bottom line is that he’s in a lousy place.
Two, he’s talking about a “Frank Sinatra retirement” which really means an extended “fuck all this” adventure that’s about shedding the old skin and finding new sources of vitality or what-have-you. A soul-seeking, soul-recharging exercise that every high-stress creative person goes through once or twice, usually in their 40s or 50s. In short, a bout of the middle-aged-crazies.
Three, it’s obviously a healthy thing or Murphy to be thinking about getting out of the rut and get back to his stand-up roots. I used to love the guy in the old days (late ’70s to ’83). I saw him perform live twice back then — once at a comedy club in Manhattan, once at the Universal amphitheatre. But the hip industry people haven’t been with him for 20 years. His loss of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Dreamgirls confirmed that, and then people really didn’t like his graceless ass when he bolted out of the Kodak theatre 90 seconds after Alan Arkin, the winner, took the stage.
All I know is, the guy used to be really funny, and that he needs to get back to that place again if he wants to matter again. Or feel anything again. Right now he’s a dead man.