Because Brad Silberling (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Casper) is directing, the odds are that Land of the Lost (Universal, 7.17.09), an animated adventure and his latest big-time venture, will turn out decently. But the Lost swag that arrived today was a bust. If you’re going to send out swag, send the kind that impresses and not the kind that makes guys like me write little diss pieces like this.

Leaning against my front door was a decent-sized cardboard box containing another cardboard foldout display deal covered in movie art, and inside the box was….a brown T-shirt. With the word “Sleestak” on the chest and a picture of a monkey with saucer-sized Invaders from Mars mutant eyes. Plus a Land of the Lost theme song playing on a dinky little music player that wouldn’t work until you popped in the double A batteries.

I was skeptical when I first heard of it, but Lionsgate’s two-disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition DVD of High Noon, which came out yesterday, is drop-dead beautiful. The monochrome images from this 1952 Fred Zinneman are so rich and lustrous and pulsing with biological exactitude that this DVD has instantly joined my all-time pantheon. And they haven’t even come out with a Blu-Ray version yet. It’s so immaculate with such an intriguing variance of tones that it’s almost like color.

Grace Kelly as she appears in a scene in the new Lionsgate Special Collector’s edition DVD of High Noon

I was going to say this new Noon is right up there with the Columbia-TriStar Home Video DVD of Anatomy of a Murder (rendered by the great Grover Crisp), but the DVD it reminded me of the most is Paramount Home Video’s “grain-rape” version of Sunset Boulevard. That suggests that the new High Noon has been grain-raped also, but it hasn’t been — and yet it looks as if it has. That’s the odd thing here.
Dustin Dean, Lionsgate’s director of DVD production, says the reason for the new Noon‘s radiant, super-sharp appearance is that “we maxed out the bitrate…[and] the compression is different than when it was mastered the last time.” The company hired to do the actual “authoring” worked from a high-def source that, according to an Amazon report, came from “a new transfer of the film, restored by Paramount.” Dean says that digital transfer technology has improving every year and so “the compression has become better….better compression, higher bit rate, a better encoder.”
Some of the purists out there condemned the Sunset Boulevard DVD because the transfer (a beautiful job by John Lowry of Lowry Digital) removed the celluloid grain effect from the image, and serious film restorers believe that the only honest way to master a black-and-white film is to retain the grain, which they say is integral to the image and in fact is essential to its constitution.

Being an Okee from Muskogee with a piece of hay between my teeth, I’ve never really bought this argument because Lowry’s Sunset Boulevard was so smooth and silvery and detailed beyond belief. It was heaven to me because the image seemed fresh as today, in part because that silver Iraqi sandstorm effect had been obliterated. The surprise in Lionsgate’s Noon DVD is that it appears to have been Lowry-ized — there isn’t a speck of grain in the whole thing.
Here’s’ the DVD Beaver comparison of the old Noon DVDs (Artisan, Republic…whatever) and the newbie.

Sometime in the late ’90s Guillermo del Toro shared an opinion about laser discs that I’ve never forgotten. “Laser discs are to DVD,” he said, “as vinyl records are to CDs.” Meaning, in effect, that laser discs were truer to the look of film — more celluloidy — than the digital bit reconstitutions that are DVDs.
GDT knows whereof he speaks, so yeah, okay, maybe. I was pretty happy with the format in the early to mid ’90s, but then I began to notice laser rot affecting the occasional disc, and then DVDs started to come in around ’97 and I eventually threw my Pioneer laser disc player into the dumpster. LDs were fine as far as it went — revolutionary at the time — but life and technology have moved on, thank god.
All to say that Mark Altman‘s recollection piece about the good old laser disc days, appearing on The Digital Bits, is well written and worth reading, etc. But I’ll never forget that put-put sound my old rinky-dink Pioneer player used to make toward the end, and how four times out of five it would grunt and whine and sputter when I hit play. May it rot in hell!

Comes the announcement that Palm Pictures will open Steven Sebring‘s Patti Smith: Dream of Life in theatres sometime in September. Great — I’ve been waiting for someone to step up. The film will be preceded by Sebring’s hardcover book version which will hit stores in late August, as well as a live-performance Smith CD called The Coral Sea in early July.

Sebring’s film “is an authentic spiritual adventure film,” I wrote after a Sundance viewing five months ago. “A mostly black-and-white exploration of Smith’s life, loves, history, poetry, music, alliances and relationships, it feels at times like a companion piece to D.A. Pennebaker‘s Don’t Look Back (the monochrome classic about Bob Dylan touring England in the mid ’60s); at other times like a patchwork meditation, a home movie, a concert film, a fashion show.
“It’s about music, heroes, rants, chants, parents, deaths, declarations and determinations.
“For me, the authenticity is in the way Sebring has captured (or emulated) the grit and textures of Smith’s prose, and the fierce spiritual tension that her band music has always injected in one form or another. ‘Life is an adventure of our own design…a series of lucky and unlucky accidents,’ yes…but having a locomotive inside you helps.
“There is no boredom or lethargy in this lady’s life…not a lick of this. The movie is a pleasure, a journey, an attic sift-through, a huge charge. I could see it again today if I wasn’t so buried.”

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil has run a speculation piece about Harrison Ford‘s starring in one substantial-looking drama — Wayne Kramer‘s Crossing Over (Weinstein Co.) — and agreeing to star in another called Crowley, in which Ford would play a renegade scientist that a couple turns to in order to rescue their children from the effects of a rare genetic disorder. One of these could lead down the road to…forget it. Way too sketchy.

Has O’Neil (a) read the Crowley script or (b) seen Crossing Over? Apparently not. The latter, opening on August 22nd, has been test-screening since last fall. Last October an IMDB poster who claimed to have seen Kramer’s film called it “Crash 2: Immigration Boogaloo.” Plus the Weinstein Co’s decision to open it in late August (as opposed to, say, sometime in the early to mid fall seems to indicate a cautious tip-toe attitude.
That said, Kramer (Running Scared, The Cooler) is no slouch. If his film has the goods, now’s the time to start long-lead and word-of-mouth screenings.

There’s no way to talk about M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Happening without spoiling the basics, so stop reading right now if you want to stay cherry. The bottom line is that except for two speed bump moments, this is an entirely respectable, deeply unsettling ecological horror film. It’s not mythic or profound — Shyamalan recently told Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet that it’s a “high-end B movie” — but the direction, as always with this guy, is highly skilled and assured, and the effect is one of deep-down penetration and an absolute absence of comfort.

Which is good if you’re making a horror film, which this absolutely is. A horror film for liberals with an appreciation for expert craft and “saying the right thing,” and a willingness to forgive the two missteps. (Which I’m not going to bring up until tomorrow, or maybe, come to think of it, until Friday.)
The difference is that instead of Jason or Freddy or aliens or a homicidal Harrison Ford trying to kill Michelle Pfeiffer, the boogey man this time is…Mother Earth. The basic idea is what if nature, slowly dying from the greenhouse gases and all the other abuses and pollutants catalogued by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, decided to get rid of us? Or at least sound a warning by getting rid of a few thousand random souls?
In this sense The Happening is a cousin of The Birds but a direct descendant of The Day The Earth Stood Still. It’s saying the exact same thing as that 1951 Robert Wise film, which no big-city film critic will tell you is labored or heavy-handed. And yet some of these same critics, I fear, will come gunning for Shyamalan’s film. It has an issue or two, granted, but it doesn’t deserve a major thrashing. It’s too refined, too expertly fused.

It doesn’t have the chops or the heft of the Wise film, granted, but it’s clearly following in its path by saying to its audience and the world beyond, “You’re on the wrong course and you’d better damn well do something about it.”
Does this mean that Shyamalan’s save-the-earth message is endlessly fascinating? Perhaps not. Or that the whole thing doesn’t feel a little too simplistic by the end? Maybe. But to me the film was basically a surprise. It’s a much, much better thing than the advance buzz had indicated.
It gives you the creeps and the willies all through, and it never really eases up — not even at the end. It scares, un-nerves and guilt-trips you simultaneously, and I can imagine some people — young looking-for-entertainment types, I’m guessing — not caring for this combination. A couple of twentysomethings who attended my screening were muttering about it on the way out, and I could feel what they were thinking without hearing a word.
But if they don’t like The Happening, it’s their problem and not Night’s. For this is unquestionably his third-best film — better than The Lady in the Water, Unbreakable and The Village, but not as good as Signs or The Sixth Sense. But that’s still a pretty fair compliment.

I’ll get into the rest of the ins and outs tomorrow morning, but I wanted to at least post a bare-bones reaction before the day went any further. I saw The Happening today at 2 pm, but I missed tonight’s The Incredible Hulk screening. (Went to the wrong theatre.) So after my Hulk screw-up I drove right home and tapped this out. And now — horrors! — two or three hours of relaxation.

A pass-along from L.A. Times/”Dishrag” columnist Elizabeth Snead that Paul Newman is on the ropes with lung cancer, and thoughts about the sadness to come from Oregonian critic Shawn Levy, who’s been working hard on a Newman biography for a long while.

“I have known for a while that Newman was very ill, probably with cancer, and today the internet is flooded with the news that it’s lung cancer and that it’s not good. There aren’t very good sources on any of these stories, and nobody has any shocking exclusives, but given what I know I find every word of them credible. He’s 83, and his next birthday is in January, and we can only hope he’ll make it. I suspect I’ll be writing an obituary before I hold a copy of my book in my hand.”

An increasingly desperate Warner Bros. is offering a seven-minute Get Smart preview on the iTunes store as a free download.

Indiewire is reporting that Zeitgeist has picked up Trouble the Water, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal‘s doc about the Katrina disaster. It’s a sad and honest film, but the viewing experience is all when it comes to shaky-cam docs. I called it “the King Kong of hand-held nausea jiggle movies” after seeing it at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. The Zeitgeist people are dreaming if they think people are going to rush out to see this.

(l. to r.) Trouble the Water executive producer Joslyn Barnes, co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, exec producer Danny Glover.

As I wrote last January, “Half of it was shot by Lessin and Deal in the usual fashion and is no big challenge, but the other half is shakycam footage of Katrina’s devastation shot by one of the film’s main subjects, Kimberly Rivers. (The other is her husband Scott.) The footage is so scattered and whip-panny that I was starting to think about bolting less than ten minutes in.”
I’ll feel better about this whole matter if Rivers agrees to take an ad in Variety pledging that she’ll never shoot any more video footage of anything ever again, will never go to film school to try and learn how to shoot, will stay away from the visual art world for the rest of her days, etc. If she does this, it’ll start to undo some of the damage.
All I know is that as I watched Trouble the Water at the Park City Library, I was saying to myself, “Whatever it is that good amateur video photographers have, this woman has absolutely none of….the gene that tells you how to hold the camera and how to shoot in a way that’s pleasing or at least non-jarring to the eye has bypassed her entirely. Lemme outta here!”