David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises was announced as the winner today of the People’s Choice Award at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. In other words, the locals voted for a local. Guy Maddin won the Best Canadian feature for My Winnipeg . The Indiewire guys are running a complete list of winners.
DVD Savant (a.k.a. Glenn Erickson) is saying that the Deliverance deluxe DVD that comes out on Tuesday, 9.18, “replaces a much older release with an improved enhanced transfer that flatters the camerawork of Vilmos Zsigmond.” [9.16 shocker: Erickson’s assessment is now suspect. See fire-alarm update at end of this article.]
“I remember the stunning 70mm six-track audio during the film’s exclusive run at the Cinerama Dome, and the disc’s 5.1 audio recreates the same dynamics.
“John Boorman and all four leading actors add their anecdotes and opinions to Laurent Bouzereau‘s multi-part 35th Anniversary retrospective docu,” Erickson adds, “which covers every aspect of the film including the story behind that amazing dueling banjos scene. Boorman also provides his thoughts on a full commentary.”
Nothing gets me interested in a new DVD version of an older film like the words “improved enhanced transfer,” even knowing that the real way to see much-better looking versions of old films is to watch them via Blu Ray or HD-DVD. But I don’t own a Blu Ray or HD DVD player, much less a high-definition flat-panel TV of any size (an investment that would set me back a good two grand or so…no?), so I’m really kind of a Luddite.
Fire-alarm update: Either Erickson deliberately softballed, or he’s color-blind, or he was blind drunk when he wrote that the new Deliverance DVD represents “an improved enhanced transfer.” The proof can be found on this DVD Beaver page in which Gary Tooze compares frame-capture stills between the new Deliverance DVD and the ’01 version.
Just click on the link and compare. The apparent degradation by way of the less-sharply-focused, coffee-and-muddy-water images on the new DVD aren’t just obvious — they’re glaring. Warner Bros. Home Video technicians have some answering to do
Tooze says he’s “somewhat disappointed by the new Deluxe SD transfer…what looks odd to me are the colors and detail. It can look very green at times but skin tones are less red than in the original.”
The key visual element in the original release prints was a detailed but desaturated (almost flirting with monochrome) color. I would say the new DVD (based on the DVD Beaver captures) looks murkier and browner. The stills seem to also prove that the older version had much sharper detail — the dirt smudges on poor Ned Beatty‘s back in one of the shots were obviously rendered with more detail in the ’01 DVD.
“Mid ’70s punk music was basically about two words — ‘fuck you.’ But sooner or later you knew a band was going to come along and say something different, and that was Joy Division. Punk said ‘fuck you’ — Joy Division said ‘we’re fucked.'” — a comment heard near the halfway point of Grant Gee‘s Joy Division, which the Weinstein Co. acquired for distribution last Thursday.
It seems facile to say, as two HE readers have, that big-name female actresses should think about steering clear of Joel Silver projects following this weekend’s shortfall performance of The Brave One.
Jodie Foster‘s vigilante film, nicely directed by Neil Jordan, is an emotionally developed, decently written effort. This in itself place it heads and shoulders above Silver stinkers like Gothika (in which Halle Berry starred and suffered), The Reaping (Hilary Swank vs. Biblical plagues) and The Invasion (which failure of which underlined Nicole Kidman‘s lack of commercial potency).
Still, if you were an agent repping a major female actress and she was offered the lead in a Silver film, wouldn’t you give it a bit more thought now than you would have six months or a year ago?
Now I’m hearing that The Brave One won’t even make $15 million this weekend, which was a shortfall in itself. A competing studio’s projection says it’s only going to do $13,761,000….way short of that $20 million ballpark indicated by last week’s tracking. What slowed it down? Some of the reviews were fairly rough, but aren’t reviews supposed to be meaningless these days? Perhaps not with slightly older women, the Brave One‘s targeted demo. I’m guessing (not having canvassed or called around) that the young-male action crowd wasn’t that into it.
Here’s an IGN link to a quickie teaser for Francis Coppola‘s Youth Without Youth (Sony Classics, 12.14). Tim Roth, a 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio, a hot lady in black underwear, and Bruno Ganz‘s voice saying “we’re running out of time.” The teaser is preceded by a flashy, aurally abrasive spot for Volkswagen.
Yesterday’s over-before-it-began Sidney Lumet interview at the Hotel Intercontinental, the primary subject being Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. We also discussed the bizarre mis-marketing of Find Me Guilty as well as Lumet’s affinity and respect for William Wyler‘s The Best Years of Our Lives.
Ethan Hawke in Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Peter Lauria‘s New York Post analysis of the Weinstein Co.’s financial situation, which has lately been pummelled by negative rumors, states the following: (a) “The studio’s debt-to-equity ratio is running at an even 1-to-1, according to a source who has seen its finances, which compares to Lionsgate’s debt-to-equity ratio of 0.14-to-1; (b) “A second source who has seen The Weinstein Co.’s finances said the studio has ‘several hundred million dollars of liquidity’ available and that its debt-to-equity ratio is by no means problematic because ‘as losses turn to profits, it will go completely in the opposite direction’; and (c) a statement from Bob Weinstein that ‘debt is good, you use debt to acquire…If I wanted to access a billion dollars more debt from Goldman tomorrow and I had something worth buying or taking over, we’re now in a game where we can do that…we never were able to do that at Disney.”
But the best quote belongs to Harvey: Fuck everybody. We are back to being No. 1 in profitability and gross.”
My guy hasn’t called this morning, but Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is reporting a shortfall for Neil Jordan and Jodie Foster‘s The Brave One, which was expected to reach or slightly surpass (according to tracking) $20 million this weekend. It opened with a relatively weak $4.8 million on Friday, says Mason, which will translate to a projected $15.1 million haul. As the wounded Steve McQueen says at the end of The Sand Pebbles, “What the hell happened?”
And bravo, American audiences, for the smart, sophisticated choices you’re making among the weekend’s three limited openers — the relentlessly vapid Beatles-music flick Across The Universe, the slithery-perverse Russian penis movie Eastern Promises, and the sad and solemn procedural/Iraq War drama In The Valley of Elah.
Naturally, Julie Taymor‘s Beatles film did “blazing” business on 23 screens ($9114 per situation) and David Cronenberg‘s Russian crime flick averaged $10,971 in 15 situations. And of course, Elah did the least amount of business, managing an “unspectacular” debut at 9 locations, having earned about $40,000 on Friday for a $4,492 average. Paul Haggis‘s pic should bring in $130,000 for the weekend.
It’s no secret that American moviegoers almost always favor films that seem the most emotionally obvious as well as the least challenging and/or complex, and they’ve certainly lived up to their reputation this weekend.
I haven’t read Jamie Curtis‘ screenplay of Lost for Words, which has been described as a story about a libidinous movie star who finds himself falling in love with a beautiful Chinese actress and her female translator, but it certainly sounds like a sell-out project for the great Susanne Bier (Things We Lost in the Fire, Brothers, Open Hearts) to direct.
The synopsis alone sounds coy and randy-cute, like something Hugh Grant would have made in the late ’90s. Jamie Curtis’ biggest credits are having produced The Good Sex Guide, a British TV series, in the early ’90s, and then writing “additional dialogue” on ’97’s Spice World — what does that tell you about her vistas? But the dagger-in-the-chest element is the producing presence of Richard Curtis, the Love Actually director-writer, along with Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.
One of the most shallow and sickly-treacly British films ever made, Love Actually is Curtis’ testament and emblem. All you need to know about Curtis’ filmmaking philosophy can be found in the following statement, which is on his IMDB page: “If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it’s called searingly realistic, even though it’s never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you’re accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.”
Bier is talented enough to recover from her association with Curtis (who doesn’t appear to have any family ties with Jamie, although they seem similar in attitude), but why is she even going there in the first place?
My suspension of disbelief falls apart whenever anyone in a movie lights up indoors. This always makes me shift in my seat and say to myself, “Jeez, now the place is going to reek of cigarette smoke…why doesn’t the guy go outside or at least open a window?” And I really can’t stand it when a character lights up inside a car without opening the windows because you can always smell it the next day and the day after, even if it was only one person smoking a single cigarette, and it’s always rancid and repulsive.
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