“It must also be said that many of those who now call themselves Christians are rich and pious themselves, and are no better, I fear, that the Pharisees. Indeed, they are often greater in their hypocrisy than those who condemned me.
“Now, in these days, many Christians believe that all has been won for them. They believe it was already won before they were born. They believe that this victory belongs to them because of my suffering on the cross. Thereby does my Father still find much purpose for me. It is even by way of my blessing that the Lord sends what love He can muster down to that creature who is man and that other creature who is woman, and I try to remain the source of love that is tender.
“For love is not the sure path that will take us to our good end, but is instead the reward we receive at the end of the hard road that is our life and the days of our life. So I think often of the hope that is hidden in the faces of the poor. Then from the depth of my sorrow wells up an immutable compassion, and I find the will again to live and rejoice.” — excerpted from pages 239, 241 and 242 of Norman Mailer‘s The Gospel According to the Son, which was published eight years ago.

This is a fairly old gripe, but with the release of the new Taxi Driver special edition double-disc DVD on 8.14 it seems allowable to dredge it up again. It’s addresses the core definition of the term” original vision” so it’s a fairly major issue.

When this 1976 film was restored sometime around ’96 or ’97, director Martin Scorsese made the decision to leave the brownish sepia tint over the final shoot- out scene in that lower East Side tenement building, even though it wasn’t part of his original vision to have it look this way. Scorsese was forced into the brown-tint alternative (i.e., which toned down the red-blood shots) by the ratings board, and his explanation for keeping this muted color scheme is that “this is how the film looked when it came out…this is what it was, a product of the time we were living in, the forces we were dealing with.”
The brownish tint obviously had nothing to do visually, thematically or conceptually with the rest of the film — it was a political solution enforced by persons who had nothing to do with Taxi Driver until it was in post — and it obviously separates this sequence from the rest of the film. (It looks just as jarring and strange today as it did 31 years ago.) In this sense Taxi Driver is very much a co-directed film, and obviously not to anyone’s credit. .

And yet Scorsese, a cineaste extraordinaire who’s fought for the restoration of classic films all his life, wants it to stay brownish for a reason that no other artist in any medium has ever used. He’s the only movie director in world history to not only accept but defend the vandalizing of one of his own works….amazing
Imagine Leonardo Da Vinci‘s “Mona Lisa” hanging today in the Louvre with a big grayish smear across the lower right side of the painting because one of Da Vinci’s assistants happened to spill a jar of paste as he was framing it way back when. And Louvre restorationists haven’t cleaned it off because Da Vinci, wanting to respect the conditions under which he created this legendary work, made it clear to his contemporaries that he wanted it left alone. How would this differ from what Scorsese is saying? God’s lonely man indeed.

This photo of a photo doesn’t really capture how bizarrely airbrushed and pancaked Jonah Hill‘s face is on the cover of the current EW (#948, 8.17), and how his expression is mainly distinguished by how completely divorced it is any of the emotions or attitudes he projects in the film…weird.

An Entertainment Weekly round-table discussion of Superbad (Sony, 8.17) went up Friday, moderated by Josh Rottenberg and featuring Seth Rogen, Judd Apatow, Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. My favorite portion is as follows:

Seth Rogen: I’m noticing when you do a lot of interviews, often the reporters go in with something they want you to say and they’ll keep asking questions until you say it. And the two things that people seem to want us to say more than anything is that audience’s tastes have changed and that we are all unconventional guys to be in comedies — both of which I very strongly disagree with.

Judd Apatow: Don’t they remember Jack Klugman?

Rogen: Exactly!

Apatow: I always talk about Jack Klugman. In fact, when I was trying to get ”unconventional” kids on Freaks and Geeks…that’s a code word I use….

Rogen: …for Jewish. [Laughs] ”There are too many goddamn unconventionals at this country club!”

Apatow: ”I’ve got to go to temple with my unconventional friends.” But I always talked about Jack Klugman. Like, if you looked at all the great old television comedy, it was always Jack Klugman and Tony Randall and Phil Silvers.

Rogen: We’re the new Phil Silvers, Jack Klugman, and Tony Randall!

Apatow: I don’t know when it became that people thought funny people were all so handsome. That’s just an idea that I’ve always rejected. But what happens is that when people become popular, then people think they’re sexy also for some reason.

Jonah Hill: Thank God. Well, I think it’s funny because every interview they say, ”You guys are leading men now and you’re so unconventional,” or whatever the hell the word is…

Michael Cera: Untraditional.

Hill: And I go, like, ”Do you guys think Will Ferrell and Jack Black look different from us? Those guys are big movie stars!”

Rogen: If every comedy star is unconventional, doesn’t that then become conventional?
Apatow: Do you guys get insulted by that?

Rogen: No, I honestly just think they’re crazy. It makes me feel like they’ve never heard of Albert Brooks or Woody Allen or W.C. Fields or the Marx Brothers or any other comedian.

Hill: They’re acting like we’re making movies like Bourne Ultimatum. It’s not like we’re in like f—ing Ocean’s 11 or something like that. We’re making comedies!

Rogen: It’s a weird stance to take.

Hill: And it’s everybody’s stance.

The initial assumption was that the Farrelly Brothers‘ version of The Heartbreak Kid (Dreamamount, 10.5), which costars Ben Stiller and Michelle Monaghan, is a remake of Elaine May‘s The Heartbreak Kid, which came out 35 years ago with Charles Grodin and Cybil Shepard in the leads. It is that, of course, but there are indications that it may be a much coarser and more slapsticky thing than May’s film, and with fewer mixed-bag subtleties in terms of the characters.

The self-absorption in Grodin’s character was fairly deranged (he sees women primarily as challenges, and begins to disengage once he’s won them over and/or possessed them), and the New York-area Jewish girl he marries at the beginning (Jeannie Berlin) is grating and inelegant but at least half sympathetic — the scene in which Grodin drops her in a Miami Beach restaurant is somewhere between sad and grotesque. Stiller’s guy, on the other hand, is said to be more likable and less looney tunes, and the woman he marries early on (Malin Aker- man) is portrayed as a batshit caricature of someone you’d definitely want to un-marry as soon as possible.
In this sense the new Kid seems to bear a slight resemblance to Jeff Franklin‘s Love Stinks, a 1999 comedy about a guy who gets caught up with a gold digger from hell. The connection is obviously being telegraphed by the Heartbreak Kid marketing guys with their slogan — “Love Blows.”

I haven’t seen the film and it may be fine on its own terms, but if the what I’m hearing and reading turns out to be true then c’est la guerre — that’s how things are. The ’70s were the ’70s and now is right now. Just because a character comedy directed by one of the smartest and most sophisticated female comedy auteurs (working from a script by Neil Simon) of all time worked on its own terms back then doesn’t mean it’ll work by today’s standards. You have to gorilla things down today…make something that the Seth Rogen crowd will laugh at. The Elaine May-Charles Grodin comic aesthetic is way too fussy and neurotic and smarty-pants. Let it go, move on.

I’m an Ari-Lloyd latecomer, and ashamed to admit this. I didn’t, couldn’t and wouldn’t understand until recently that their relationship is easily the best thing on Entourage, and that without it there’d be next to nothing. The genie is out of the bottle and you can’t reconfigure, but if things had worked out differently a stand-alone Ari-Lloyd movie — the agency, Ari’s marriage and Lloyd’s outside-the-agency life being the core with the four homies strictly backup — could have been something else.

Anne Thompson reported yesterday that Marc Forster‘s The Kite Runner (Paramount Vantage, 11.2), which is performed in Dari, and Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Miramax, 12.17), which is spoken entirely in French, will be ineligible for a Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar because they’re both considered “American productions with foreign elements.”

The totally immobile, left-eye-blinking, lip-drooping Mathieu Amalric in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I don’t know from the Forster (Thompson is hearing it’s “a crowd-pleaser” and a “tearjerker” but not necessarily “a critics’ picture”) but the Schnabel is, I feel, a non-starter because it boils down to being a beautifully rendered immersion into a state of total paralysis. Except the beautiful renderings are for naught because you’re still trapped in the mind and body of a real-life guy named Jean- Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), an Elle editor was left totally paralyzed in the early ’90s after suffering a massive stroke, unable to express himself except by blinking his left eye.
After seeing it in Cannes three months ago I called it “a passable attempt to render a beautiful, inwardly-directed portrait about what is truly essential and replenishing in life. But the film is neither of these things, and is nowhere close in terms of poetic resonance and emotional impact to Schnabel’s Before Night Falls (’00). It’s sensitively realized and skillfully made, but it’s a movie about a state of nearly 100% confinement that itself too often feels confining.
“I’m all for living and fighting until the last, but winking your way through an extremely restricted version of living tests the limits of this positivist philosophy.”

In an 8.10 piece about the toxic effect of fame, the Toronto Star‘s Geoff Pevere writes that “next week in Memphis, hundreds of thousands of people will converge to mark the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, a man whose struggles with his own notoriety have become so deeply engrained in the popular consciousness they’ve taken on the contours of a kind of pop-cult mythology.

“That’s why we all know the story, whether or not the specific subject is Elvis, Marilyn, Jacko, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Brando or Judy Garland. It goes like this: Fame comes early to the conspicuously gifted one, too early for such a sensitive soul to bear. The pressure warps the frail creative vessel, resulting in seclusion, addiction, madness and (often) early death.”
One of the lousier scripts I wrote in the ’80s (i.e., good concept but lacking a decent third act as well as that forward-motion purposefulness and clarity that all good screenplays have) was called Tupelo Honey, and I never understood why someone else didn’t try and do something like this. Maybe someone did and it just sucked.
The basic idea was that aliens cruise down to earth in August 1977 and scoop up Presley just before he dies on the toilet at Graceland, leaving an immaculate genetic imitation to take his place. As one of their endless medical experiments, the aliens take Elvis up to the mothership and clean him out — the drugs and the fat and the poisons sucked out of his system — and then return him to earth all thin and primed and ready to go a few years later. In fact, they’ve de-aged him in the bargain. (Humans are always frozen in time in the company of aliens — remember those soldiers and sailors returned to the earth in Close Encounters? — and so the Elvis abductors have simply gone one better.)
The problem is that Elvis can’t convince anyone that he’s The Man when he tries to get work. Even his former friends and ex-girlfriends don’t believe he’s the real deal. (Too thin, too healthy, too alive.) The best he can do is get hired in Vegas as one of the coolest Elvis imitators in the world, and he hates that. So he quits Vegas and goes back to Tupelo, Mississippi, to try and sort things out and figure what to do with the rest of his life. Elvis is resigned to not singing anymore so he takes a job driving a truck for a soft-drink company. He meets a nice girl, starts to fall for her, makes friends with a couple of good ole boy musicians, and then slowly begins to go through a music reawakening — finding himself again as a performer.
I could never figure out what kind of music he’d get into, or how he’d get past the image problem of being seen as an Elivs Presley imitator…or what the overall solution would be. But if somebody were to come up with a decent third act for this thing and if someone else were to make the movie with the right cast, I’d pay to see it. I really like the idea.

The clips on Nerve’s 50 Best Sex Scenes site are…well, incomplete. Of course. Where’s the breast-washing scene from The Silence? Or the Last Tango in Paris stand-up-quickie-with-the-overcoat scene? But the ones they’ve got aren’t bad.

In the face of next to no encouraging news, the trapped Utah mine workers story has become a kind of dance in which the governing rule is not only a matter of not stepping in the dogshit (i.e., saying what’s really on everyone’s mind), but to push aside the option of using one’s nostrils as well as the powers of deductive reasoning to detect the aroma. We don’t want it to be there because we don’t want to hurt anyone.

Why does Joe Leydon smirk and shrug shoulders and go so easy on Rush Hour 3 in this video-clip thingie? What could his motivation possibly be? Is he some kind of devout believer in amiability for its own sake? It is necessary to be merciless in the face of mediocrity and the resulting oppression, especially in times like these.

A guy who talks to money guys and is familiar with the financial flow-through situation in the independent financing world believes that “there’s so much [production] money out there right now, and there’s so much product coming out that the market is being swamped, and a lot of people are getting killed, and it’s going to get worse.”

I’m sensing this swamp effect from my perspective also It seems like there are so many films out there that I can’t keep up. All these little films are coming out and I want to see them all but I don’t get around to a good percentage. And my failure to keep up is helping to seal the fate of some of these films, and I feel badly about that.
“It’s so crowded [out there] that they’re going to kill each other.” the guy believes. “I talked to a guy on a plane last March, and he said back then — this was five months ago — that there’s an amazing amount of money out there and almost anyone can get funded.” I was told in May 2005 that the floodgates were opening bigtime. Everyone has been aware of this for at least the last couple of years.
“But so many independent films are coming out that they’re going to have trouble getting distribution, getting video deals, getting TV deals…and soon or later it’s going to implode. There’s too much product, and few of [these movies] are doing well enough to be called successes.” In short, a very grim forecast due to a very crowded market.
“What independent movies have done any real business this summer?,” he asked. “La Vie en Rose, Rescue Dawn, Waitress, Once, 1408 and what else? Miramax is doing decent business with Becoming Jane right now and they’ve got No Country for Old Men coming out in November and maybe getting into the Oscar game, but they’ve had a very dry season for a good year, and if this continues Disney is not going to finance them. Lionsgate got slammed with their torture movies cratering, although 1408 — a good classic horror film — did pretty well.”