“Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.” — Napoleon Bonaparte. In other words, better to have ridden high and drunk the electric brew, however briefly, than to have never ridden at all.

This 8.4 Associated Press article is the first significant “soft” piece about Mel Gibson. It has quotes from some Giibson friends, some of them Jewish, giving him a pass. Okay, fine. But a guy I know who worked with Gibson over a decade ago, and he’s has written and told me he “believe[s] all this shit.” He calls Gibson a “bigoted man, now and forever” and “a bigoted son of a bitch.” But life is fluid and moving and people grow. Look at how Bobby Kennedy evolved from ’62 to ’67. And the impulse to stand by a guy you like or respect during his hour of need is a noble one. We all need understanding, forgiveness, a second chance. Let’s just leave it at that.

It took them several years, but Warner Home Video is finally about to release a big swanky DVD of the 1962 Marlon Brando version of Mutiny on the Bounty. The film has been re-mastered from the original 65mm elements and will be presented in the original 2.76 to 1 Ultra-Panavision aspect ratio. This version hasn’t been seen by anyone since Bounty‘s big-city, reserved-seat showings some 44 years ago.

It’ll be part of a spiffy new Marlon Brando Collection box set hitting stores on 11.7.06. The set will also include a purist remastering of John Huston‘s Reflections in a Golden Eye (’67) that will recreate the golden pinkish hues that this disturbing film was presented with during its initial run. It’ll also include a remastered version of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Julius Caesar (’53), which I wrote an item about just a few days ago.

(l. to r.) Trevor Howard, Marlon Brando, Richard Harris and Percy Herbert in Lewis Milestone’s Mutiny on the Bounty

The lesser titles in the set are Teahouse of the August Moon (’56), which features Brando’s strange performance as a cheerful Taiwanese translator named Sakini, and John Avildsen’s The Formula (’80), in which a fat, white-haired Brando plays a no-good oil company mogul.

Say what you will about the ’62 Bounty‘s problems — historical inaccuracies and inventions, Brando’s affected performance as Fletcher Christian, the floundering final act. The fact remains that this viscerally enjoyable, critically-dissed costumer is one of the the most handsome, lavishly-produced and beautifully scored films made during Hollywood’s fabled 70mm era, which lasted from the mid ’50s to the late ’60s.

Roger Donaldson‘s The Bounty (’84) is probably a better Bounty flick (certainly in terms of presenting the historical facts), but the ’62 version has more big-buck, oom-pah swagger. The sets seem flusher and more carefully varnished and arranged, Robert Surtees‘ widescreen photography is more vivid and precisely lit and generally more eye-filling than Arthur Ibbetson‘s for The Bounty, and Bronislau Kaper‘s orchestral score is more deep-down stirring than the quieter ’84 score by Vangelis.

The Brando Bounty is a dated film in some ways (okay, a lot of ways), but it has a flamboyant “look at all the money we’re spending” quality that’s half-overbaked and half-absorbing. It’s pushing a kind of toney, big-studio vulgarity that insists upon your attention.

There’s a way to half-excuse Bounty for doing this. It was made, after all, at a time when self-important bigness was regarded as a kind of aesthetic attribute unto itself, with large casts, extended running times, dynamic musical scores (overtures, entr’actes, exit music) and intermissions all par for the course. And there’s no denying that a lot of skilled craftsmanship and precision went into this manifestation.

The act that ignites the mutiny scene as Brando’s Fletcher Christian tries to give fresh H20 to a thirsty seaman, and Howard’s Cpt. Bligh expresses his opposition.

Bounty definitely has first-rate dialogue and editing, and three or four scenes that absolutely get the pulse going (leaving Portsmouth, rounding Cape Horn, the mutiny, the burning ship). And I happen to like and respect Brando’s performance — it gets darker and sadder as the film goes along — and you can’t say Trevor Howard‘s Captain Bligh doesn’t crack like a bullwhip. (I read a review that said his emoting was made from “wire and scrap iron”, and that Brando’s came from “tinsel and cold cream”.) And Richard Harris and Hugh Griffith are fairly right-on. And everybody likes the topless Tahitian girls.

You could argue that this Bounty is only nominally about what happened in 1789 aboard a British cargo ship in the South Seas. And you could also say that its prime fascination comes from a portrait of colliding egos and mentalities — a couple of big-dick producers (Aaron Rosenberg was one), several screenwriters, at least two directors (Lewis Milestone, Carol Reed) and one full-of-himself movie star (Brando) — trying to serve the Bounty tale in ’60, ’61 and ’62, and throwing all kinds of money and time and conflicting ideas at it, and half-failing and half-succeeding.

Seen in this context, I think it’s a trip.

I frankly expected WHV to go with a 2.55 to 1 aspect ratio. 2.76 to 1 is fairly radical. It means you’ll be looking at thicker-than-normal black bars above and below the image. (If you want an example, check out the most recent DVD of Ben-Hur.) This means you’d better watch it on a fairly large screen.

Here’s are four samples from Kaper’s score — the overture, an unused overture, a romantic idyll piece on Tahiti and a replay of the main theme.

The Bounty DVD is a two-disc affair, but apparently it won’t offer a “making of” documentary. (The doc on the second disc is called “After the Cameras Stopped Rolling: The Journey of the Bounty”, which obviously isn’t about what happened before and during the rolling of the cameras.) That’s a shame because Bounty‘s production history is one of the most tortured in Hollywood history, marked as it was by constant tempest (Reed was let go, Milestone quit), cost overruns and Brando’s brash big-star behavior. It was almost as costly and disastrous as the shooting of Cleopatra, which opened seven months after Bounty.

(Fox Home Video’s two-disc Cleopatra DVD has a doc that covers the making-of story in fascinating detail, and is actually much more engrossing and entertaining than the film.)

The DVD will also include a prologue and epilogue that was attached to the film for showings on TV in the late ’60s and/or ’70s, but never seen theatrically.

John Huston’s visual scheme for Reflections in a Golden Eye was created with cinematographer Oswald Morris, with whom he created the steely monochrome-ish color for Moby Dick and the rose-tinted, Toulouse Lautrec-ish color for Moulin Rouge.

It used a look of desaturated color with an emphasis on gold and pink. It was supposed to make you feel the perversity and the creepiness that permeates this adaptation of Carson McCullers’ novel, which is about a gay, heavily repressed Army Major (Brando) who ignores his hot-to-trot wife (Elizabeth Taylor) but has a thing for a hunky young private (Robert Forster).

The color succeeded in complementing the vaguely icky mood. Too well, I mean. Viewers complained that it made them feel queasy, and so the color reverted to conventional tones later in the run. The “normal” color also turned up on the VHS version that was sold way back when. WHV’s DVD of the gold-and-pink version will be the first time anyone has seen it in nearly 40 years.

The black-and-white Mutiny stills were sent to me by Roy Frumkes, a friend of restoration guru Robert Harris.

Brando posing with Mutiny crew and costars aboard newly constructed Bounty ship during filming

Tarita Teriipia, Brando shooting love scene. Tarita later had two children with Brando, including a troubled daughter, Cheyenne, who committed suicide in 1995.

I’ve seen a million trailers like this one for Joe Carnahan‘s Smokin’ Aces (Universal, 2.16.07). Why, then, does it seem way hipper than the others? Maybe I’m easily impressed, but it does seem funny. Jeremy Piven (Entourage ‘s “Ari Gold”) is a Vegas stand-up comic who’s decided to rat out some organized crime figures, which of course results in a couple of assassins (Ben Affleck, Alicia Keys) being sent to silence him. And of course there’s an FBI agent (Ryan Reynolds) looking to keep Piven alive. “Forget Hollywoodland — this is the movie that will bring acceptance back to Affleck,” a reader enthused about a half-hour ago.

Word around the campfire is that Nicole Kidman‘s performance as celebrated art-gallery photographer Diane Arbus is the best thing about Fur. As for the film itself, some are using the A word, as in “arty.” Or as in, “It turned out a little artier than what some in the loop were expecting.”

In some circles “arty” means index-finger-up-the-butt precious, but shouldn’t an Arbus biopic, of all biopics, have a kind of art-gallery feeling? An aura of artified apartness? If I’d directed this puppy I would have shot it in 35mm black-and-white.
The director is Steven Shainberg (Secrretary), who worked from a script by Erin Cressida Wilson and a book by Patricia Bosworth. Picturehouse is releasing Fur sometime in November, following what I’m told will be a debut at the Toronto Film Festival.
Arbus commited suicide in 1971 at age 48. Why is it that the final acts in the lives of so many gifted 20th Century artists (Arbus, Harry Nilsson, Sylvia Plath, Jean-MIchel Basqiat) end on a black note? Suicide obviously lends a quasi-tragic dimension and also gives the biographer or screenwriter an “ending”, but there are few cliches as groaningly tiresome as that of the self-destructive genius.

I don’t mean to go anal, but there’s this nagging issue with the blue contact lenses that Maria Bello wears for her part as John McLoughlin‘s wife Donna in World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9). Reader Rich Frank observed yesterday that her eyes “are a weird, translucent blue and the pupils never seem to change size. Every time they went for a close-up I couldn’t help but stare at her eyes. Sure enough, in the photos on her IMDB page her peepers are deep brown.”

Maria Bello in World Trade Center) (l.) and A History of Violence (r.)

I noticed this too but I tried to push it away. There’s a weirdness in those artifical blues — almost a Village of the Damed quality — and this seems to get in the way of Bello’s fine performance, at least in the early stages. (I forgot about them during the scond half.) I presume Bello used the contacts because Donna’s eyes are blue and she wanted that extra measure of similarity. That’s understandable, but only Donna and her friends and family know she has blue eyes so it obviously didn’t matter that much. It’s not a huge deal but Oliver Stone probably should have said something.
Maybe Bello is one of those actors, like Laurence Olivier, who needs to alter her physicality in some way to get out of her self and become the character. Peter Ustinov once said that in his own skin and using his own voice Olivier never exactly filled the air with electricity. But give him a fake nose or a wig or something that took him out of his natural being and he was off to the races.
“I wouldn’t have mentioned this except it’s the second time in a month that colored lenses have become an issue,” Frank continued. “The same thing happened with Brandon Routh in Superman Returns. I knew going in that he did not have naturally blue eyes, so it became really distracting every time I saw those Master Po contacts.”

Oliver Stone‘s World Trade Center is being celebrated by the patriot crowd, conservatives and right-leaning pundits as the best hooray-for-the-USA film in a long time. And they’re correct — it does work on this level, although not in any kind of divisive, anti-liberal way. Like I wrote earlier, I’m fine with it. It didn’t offend my political sensibilities, I mean. I can’t imagine it offending anyone’s.

This is why it’s starting to seem likely it’ll be one of the five Best Picture nominees. Because mainstream American moviegoers are always saying Hollywood movies always are a little too caught up in industry lifestyles and liberal attitudes, and here, for a change, is a straight-up emotional film from the heart of the Hollywood beast that any middle-aged Republican farmer from Iowa can go to with his wife and say, “Yeah, my kind of movie.”
This means if it gets Best Picture nominated you know that a lot of the people who profess not to care about the Oscars will probably tune in and root for it. (The last year when the audience jumped as ’99, when Titanic was Best Picture-nominated.) And that means higher ratings and the possibility of higher ad revenues.
It’s good politics to include a “heartland people movie” among the five nominees. That’s why it was a mistake to exclude Walk the Line last year. It deserved to be among the top five anyway, but nominating it for political reasons would have made sense. I realize, obviously, the Academy members don’t weight the political implications of their choices for Best Pictures, but still…
Now that I’m thinking about, I’m wondering why Paramount isn’t sneaking World Trade Center this weekend? Like I wrote yesterday, it’s going to do about $25 million give or take, but it would probably make more than $30 million and the word would go out faster with a nationwide sneak.

If I could clap my hands three times and rid the world of the Mozilla ActiveX plugin, I would clap my hands three times. You need to load the damn thing to watch trailers on the AOL Moviefone site but which it won’t load. The latest trailer I can’t watch because of this problem is one for Barry Levinson‘s Man of the Year (Universal, 10.13.06), an allegedly shrewd and restrained political comedy with Robin Williams, Laura Linney and Christopher Walken.
A friend who saw Man of the Year at a small screening a few months ago swore up and down it’s funny and corrosive and Levinson’s best since Wag the Dog. But I couldn’t accept her word (she’s not the most cultivated cineaste) so I called Barry’s reps and his producers to ask some questions about it, and they all said “who?…what?…too early.”

No director has swerved up and down and back and forth like Barry Levinson. Whenever a new movie of his comes along, everyone always asks, “Will it be a good Barry or a bad Barry?” There are actually two bad Barry’s — the guy who makes expensive commercial crap (Sphere, Indiana Holmes and the Temple of Doom) and modest, lower-profile commercial crap (An Everlasting Piece, Envy, Bandits). The good Barry, of course, makes films like , Avalon, Rain Man, Wag the Dog, Diner, etc.
Man of the Year is about a talk show comedian named Tom Dobbs (Williams) who decides to run for president as a goof, but faces some major problems when he unexpectedly wins. Why would that be a problem, I wonder? Would Jon Stewart be in a pickle if he were to run and win? I don’t see why. Chris Rock handled the job okay. The lesson of George Bush is that anyone can be president these days. You don’t need wisdom, character, brains — you just need to win and the determination to try and apply your power. I for one would vote for Walken for president without even thinking about it. I would…really.

I just thought I’d put up this Descent one-sheet and ask for interpretations. It’s obviously meant to look like a kind of Rorschach ink blot by way of Heironymus Bosch. It seems just as obvious to me that the artist who created this poster had his/her head in Vulvaland. It looks like some kind of mad Dali-esque scene from a Ken Russell movie. The message is either “beware those who would enter this chamber” or that some kind of satori consciousness awaits.

As I Lay Dying

Usually if I go to a comedy and don’t laugh, I’ll wind up writing it’s no good or that I hate it, or both. Well, a different thing happened with Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (Columbia, 8.4). I didn’t laugh much at all — two or three titters, a couple of chuckles — but it’s not a bad film. I respected it. It’s quite smart, very hip and a piece of searing social criticism.
I just didn’t laugh. Well, barely. A critic sitting next next to me was shrieking — you should have heard the sounds he was making — and I sat there like one of those statues on Easter Island.

Wil Ferrell, Sascha Baron Cohen in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

I’ve seen Little Miss Sunshine three times and felt light and tickled each time, but that’s a film about real people. I recognized every character from my own life, and it kept reminding me of how folks actually are and how pathetic and yet hilarious it can all seem. Talladega Nights is all about stereotypes. There’s not a real person in the whole thing. That’s not a bad strategy on Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay’s part — it’s just the way they decided to go.
Except their humor is impersonal. It isn’t about human foibles and quirks and peculiarities. Every last character in Talladega Nights is an archetype or cliche. It never gets “real” or down to earth. (Same deal with their last film, Anchorman.) Nobody exudes any kind of quiet, settled-down ordinary-ness. Again, this isn’t a problem. McKay and Ferrell know what they’re doing. And they decided to do a Southern social-critique thing and write all the characters as eccentric twits or douchebags or styrofoam heads. A lot of people are going to find this quite funny…whatever.
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Joke after joke, scene after scene, Talladega show us what total fools white-trash Southern hee-haws are. It says they’ve got no real values and they care only about conspicuous consumption, and that all they like to do is tear around in muscle cars, buy new stuff, serve their kids junk food and go apeshit at NASCAR races. And it doesn’t let up.
The irony, of course, is that Tallageda is expected to play much stronger with red- staters than anyone else. The people it shits on the heaviest are going to be its biggest fans.
It actually goes a little too hard on the folks down there. Talladega is really mean. Mort Sahl said the cruelest jokes are the funniest, but there’s a limit. I wanted to find a Southerner and gived him/her a hug after seeing it.

I love all kinds of things about the South. Southern life doesn’t have to be about vulgarity or voting for Dubya or hating the environment. But when it comes to driving fast cars I’m more of a Last American Hero type than a Dukes of Hazzard guy. And when it comes to comedies I prefer everyday average realism as a starting ground.
I haven’t really laughed at anything Will Ferrell’s done since he did his George Bush impressons. He makes me smirk at times. Maybe if I went back to smoking dope I’d find him funny, but I’ll never get high again so that’s that
I loved Sacha Baron Cohen as Farrell’s arch-nemesis, a gay French race-car driver named Jean Girard. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I did laugh at Talladega when Cohen was on-screen and cranking. I can’t make myself feel much enthusi- asm about anyone or anything else in the film. While I was intellectually apprecia- ting what Ferrell and McKay were up to, this movie was also making me feel para- lyzed. At times I felt like I was hibernating. I felt like a bear. At times I was making hibernating-bear snoring sounds.
I was roused out of my slumber when Ferrell stabbed his left leg to prove to his friends he’s actually paralyzed, even though it’s psychosomatic. And I chuckled at an insert shot of a French-language cover of “L’Etranger” by Albert Camus. And I half-snorted at a fake Eleanor Roosevelt quote in the beginning.
But I spent a lot of time dreaming about things I’d like to do and places I’d like to see before I sleep. This movie isn’t giving me anything, I was muttering to myself. It’s not bad and I respect Ferrell and McKay, but it’s eating up two hours of my life.

I left about five minutes before it ended (it didn’t matter) and as I was walking up the aisle I saw a woman sitting in the back row, and talk about a morose expres- sion. This woman wasn’t thinking about places she’d like to visit — she was think- ing about whether she felt better about a bottle of Seconals or a sharp razor blade in a warm tub. Every time I think about Talladega Nights that woman’s face is going to come back to me.
I really do love the South in a lot of ways. I love Savannah, Georgia, and those fine old rural plantations with their mossy tall trees. My grandfather came from a Kentucky horse farm, and something about that probably softened my feelings about rural Southern life. I’ve always felt a kind of love for Lyndon Johnson, deluded and self-destructive as he was, in part because he reminds me of my grandfather. I’ll always love young Elvis (the ’54 to ’57 version). I loved Tommy Lee Jones’ char- acter in Coal Miner’s Daughter. And I’ve always love those fatty Southern foods and the way those earth aromas fill up if you stand in some rural area late at night and just breathe them in.
I guess I’m acknowledging in my usual half-assed way that Talladega Nights really is a Southern culture trip, and all the brassy vulgarity it shows made me think about the aspects of Southern life that are getting lost and smothered by corporate forces…the same thing that’s happening everywhere to American small-town life.

Roger Michell‘s Venus (Miramax, 12.15), which has that allegedly delicious Peter O’Toole lead performance, is going to play at the Toronto Film Festival. And Alfonso Cuaron ‘s Children of Men (Universal, 9.29), which everyone wet their pants over at Comic-Con and which Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu says has the visual chops of a Stanley Kubrick film, is not going to Toronto.

If I come back as a dog, I’d wouldn’t want to live in Asia because there’d be a fair chance I’d be killed and chopped up and grilled and served as somebody’s meal. I’d want to be a rich American dog living in Beverly Hills. Point of fact, I’d like to live with Candice Bergen and have the kind of life that this basset hound is living. Except I’d want be be a golden retriever. Seriously, read this story and who’s got it better — this dog or your average citizen in southern Lebanon?