Everyone knew Rob Cohen’s Stealth would crap out on opening weekend, and now it’s more or less done that with a $5 million take on Friday. Wedding Crashers topped the $100 million mark while finally beating out Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, $6 million to $5.2 million. And exhibitors saw John Singleton’s Four Brothers (Paramount, 8.12) a few days ago and are said to be high on it because “it’s commercial.” That’s a code term for “it’s not going to win any Oscars but it’ll probably sell tickets.”
My beloved news ticker has been up and running for a few days now, but it needs to be rewritten in a Flash format. Flash, I’ve been told, isn’t as laborious or cumbersome to load and read on an average slightly-older computer. I don’t know jack about any of this, but if anybody out there is a Flash-head and could lend some insight…
And So It Begins
Once August is here the summer is basically over. Any marketer will tell you August isn’t the summer — it’s “August.” And that means contending with the likes of Must Love Dogs, Red Eye, The Dukes of Hazzard, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Four Brothers, Pretty Persuasion and The 40 Year-Old Virgin already.
And this means that out of lethargy or some kind of psychological avoidance pattern people like myself are shifting into a September frame of mind (Toronto Film Festival!), which will quickly feed into October and the dawning of Oscar season. And none too soon.
Matthew Macfadyen, Keira Knightley in Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice
I’ve seen 23 films so far this year that I’d call somewhere between very good and exceptional, and out of these I’d say six or seven (The Constant Gardener, Crash, Hustle & Flow, Mad Hot Ballroom, Grizzly Man, Match Point, A History of Violence) may penetrate in terms of screenwriting, acting or best feature doc nominations.
There are about another 30 or so films opening between now and December 31st that may qualify also, so figure 35 or so films and their creators competing for everyone’s consideration, and out of these maybe 10 or 12 will wind up in the final lap.
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There’s very little I know right now but I’ve “heard” stuff, read some scripts, poked around and come up with some powerful hunches (Peter Jackson’s King Kong will only be up for only tech awards…heard that one?).
Let’s just jump into this and challenge some of those long-throw early-bird assumptions we’ve all been hearing from Dave Karger and David Poland and the like…prognosticators who, one gathers, are voicing some kind of assimilated community view. Let’s see about that.
Slap-Downs
Shakiest Presumed Best Picture Contender of All: Steven Spielberg’s Munich (Universal, 12.23) — I’m saying this because Spielberg isn’t a hardballer. He’s mushy at heart, and sentiment can swing either way at the drop of a hat, and is often a close relation of equivocation and accommodation. I’m seriously wondering if Spielberg has the cojones to handle this story about Mossad’s revenge upon the Palestinians behind the 1972 Munich killing of Israeli athletes without giving in to emotion or kowtowing to pro-Israeli sentiments by depicting the Palestinians as evil and subhuman.
Famous shot of Palestinian kidnapper during 1972 Munich Olympic Games standoff, almost certain to be used or recreated in some fashion in Steven Spielberg’s currently-rolling Munich (Universal, 12.23)
Munich costar Daniel Craig expressed the theme of this film as having something to do with the futility of revenge, but the hairs on the back of my neck are telling me Spielberg will finally go with a theme that says “revenge leaves a bitter aftertaste but when you’re eliminating some really wretched people who killed innocent Israeli athletes, it’s also kind of righteous.” If he doesn’t go this way and makes a film that, say, Costa-Gavras might have made in his late ’60s heyday, a lot of us will be delighted and amazed.
Jarhead isn’t Platoon — It’s More Like Full Metal Jacket . This was my guarded opinion after reading William Broyles, Jr.’s script last year. It may be something else entirely, its own thing, whatever…but I felt more of a dispassionate life-of-a-soldier thing than an emotional ride of any kind. I guess I’m just not feeling it quite yet, except for the reassuring notions of Sam Mendes (Road to Perdition, American Beauty) directing and Peter Sarsgaard costarring. (Universal, 11.11)
Second Shakiest Best Picture Contender: The Producers: The Movie Musical (Universal, 12.23). I say this because Susan Stroman, an obsequious Mel Brooks associate, is the director. If she follows Mel’s handbook to the letter the film will most likely wind up playing a little too something or other…broad, shameless, etc. (Mel Brooks was never Luis Bunuel.) Okay, there’s the Broadway and Tony Award momentum and yes, everyone loved the stage show and big brassy uppers sometimes do well with the Academy but c’mon….Susan Stroman?
Ziyi Zhang in Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha
Heading For a Fall?: Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.9) — This is one big-budget prestige movie that’s just waiting to get picked off because of the advance fatigue factor that I can sense all the way back here in Brooklyn. Ziyi Zhang as a woman from a Japanese fishing village who moves from one patron to the next and gradually becomes one of Japan’s most celebrated geishas…? See what I mean? Your eyelids are drooping as you read this.
There’s a premonition going around (I’m not the only one saying this) that it’s not going to play all that strongly with the public. And Rob Marshall having directed it is another grenade waiting to go off. The memory of Marshall’s Chicago having won the Best Picture Oscar over The Pianist two years ago still makes some of us twitch, and — honestly? — there would probably be a twinge of satisfaction in this corner if Memoirs of a Geisha were to fail, as a kind of payback-for-Chicago thing. An irrational, back-biting attitude? Sure, but unless Memoirs of a Geisha is some kind of masterwork such symmetrical notions may come into play.
Upticks
Has Cameron Crowe’s Time Arrived? — Neither Walter Parkes nor any Walter Parkes-minded uber-executive will have anything to say about the final shape of Elizabethtown (Paramount, 10.14) so maybe things will turn out this time for director-writer Cameron Crowe…better than they did with Almost Famous, I mean, which wasn’t fully appreciated until it came out on DVD as Untitled.
I read Elizabethtown way back when and I’m telling you it’s a peach, but I guess I shouldn’t be trusted, being a Crowe loyalist and all. This sad-funny story of a suicidal shoe designer (Orlando Bloom) getting in touch with his down-home Kentucky side during his father’s funeral and falling in love with Jean Arthur-like airline stewardess (Kirsten Dunst) definitely has the stuff. Crowe’s films dance to their own clock and work for their own reasons and they always pay off (except for Vanilla Sky), so I’m wondering why it even matters if the Academy gets on the bandwagon or not.
Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst during filming of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (Paramount, 10.14)
Word is Just Starting on Pride & Prejudice, and While It May Not Be The Second Coming…: “I think when it comes to your Oscar forecasting you can’t ignore this one,” a New York journo told me this morning. “Focus has pushed it back to November so it will get more attention, and it deserves a look. It’s quite good with has a top-notch cast. I think Matthew Macfadyen is gonna get lots of attention as Mr. Darcy, and Brenda Blethyn looks like Supporting Actress material as Mrs. Bennet. Falco is handling.” Hey, Falco…can I see it? (Focus Features, 11.18)
Conceivables
* Terrence Malick’s The New World (New Line, 11.9) The script has heart and says all the right things. The trailer promises wonderful photography with that great pastoral particularity Malick is known for. Colin Farrell as Cpt. John Smith and what looks like a strong supporting turn by Christopher Plummer — these and other indicators are quite heartening.
* James Mangold’s Walk The Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18) Great performances, okay, but will Academy types feel a little funny about the notion of handing nominations to another period music bio one year after Ray? Is it fair to even bring this up? If a film works, it works.
Joaquin Pheonix as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18)
* All The King’s Men (Columbia, 12.16) Don’t know a damn thing about this except it’s apparently a modern take on the Robert Penn Warren novel about the rise and all of a Huey Long-like southern politician. Sean Penn has to be fantastic in the lead role, but why after every acting job does he always say he’s taking two years off because he’s burned out? (I’m burned out myself, but I can’t afford to take even a week off. Guess that’s the difference between being a big-time actor and a journalist, huh?)
Buckshot
I could spend another several hours on this thing, but it’s almost 2 pm in New York and I can’t…
* Ask The Dust (Paramount Classics, December) — Labor of love and devotion for many years for director-writer Robert Towne. Can’t wait to see Colin Farrell play a quiet, internal character; ditto those South African visions of 1930s Los Angeles.
* The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, late August) — I’ll say it again: this is the best feature-length adaptation of a John Le Carre novel since The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Well written, superbly photographed, and basically sublime all the way around the track. Perhaps a bit too subtle in some respects for some, but definitely not me. If only director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) hadn’t cast Danny Huston as the heavy…
Viggo Mortensen in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (New Line, 9.30)
* A History Of Violence (New Line, 9.30) — Cronenberg’s best film in a long time, but even the best Cronenbergs don’t tend to register as award-level films. Except for the acting, I mean. Viggo Mortensen, Bill Hurt, Maria Bello….each performance burns deep.
* Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9) — Ang Lee’s gay cowboy drama… bend over, grab that hitching post and get ready to feel the heartbreak. Jake Gyllenhaal (who popped up on Defamer this morning re Ted Casablanca) and Heath Ledger…I don’t know. I’m an old cowhand from the Rio Grande.
* Syriana (Warner Bros., 12.9) — Feels kinda particular, political, subdued, male-ish. What do I actually know? What have I heard? Nothing.
* The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada (still no distributor, presumably opening later this year) — A likely Best Actor nomination for director Tommy Lee Jones, if nothing else. And lots of critical support if and when it opens later this year.
Heath Ledger, Stephen Gyllenhaal in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9)
* Crash (Lions Gate) — This punchy thoughtful little indie that made it big with the paying public deserves all the accolades it can get, especially for the script (Paul Haggis, Bobby Moresco) and for Don Cheadle’s performance.
* North Country (Warner Bros., 10.7) — The new film from Whale Rider‘s Niki Caro, about an actual sexual harassment case from the mid ’80s that involved a female miner. Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sissy Spacek.
* Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (Paramount, 11.11) — Something hit when I realized this biopic about 50 Cent’s life in the criminal lane would be out in November after wrapping in early July. And you can feel the energy from the trailer. Doesn’t 50 Cent have a video game coming out in November, and didn’t I hear him say something about wanting to have the #1 song, the #1 movie and the #1 video game out at the same time?
I can’t do any more. I’ll have to jump into Part Two next Wednesday, which will include potential acting, directing and screenwriting nominees.
Rent Defense
“So let me get this straight: because there’s an effective treatment for HIV, the movie musical of Rent is out of date?
“Why can’t it be appreciated for its music and for highlighting a period in American history when people were dying from a virus that had no effective treatment? (And by the way, most of the world still doesn’t have access to these drug cocktails that treat it.)
“I’m sorry but David Karger and David Poland’s reasoning for dissing the coming of Rent are totally absurd.
“I’m not sure how Chris Columbus, the director of the film version, has handled the ending but it was an odd ending to begin with by having Mimi come back from what appears to be septic coma. If you have a medical background you would know eventually within a year that a person like Mimi would have been dead due to her continued weakened immune system and no effective treatment to fight off the virus that killed off her CD4 count.
“On top of which Rent is not just about AIDS but about the plight of anyone looking at their mortality faced with a terminal illness. Get a clue.” — Nick Good
Wells to Good: I would add, Nick, that the story of anyone facing any life-threatening situation works as a metaphor for terms we all face, which is that life is short and very dear, and continued health is not something any of us can entirely count on. In other words, treasure life as much as you can while you’re here…right?
Grabs
Broken Flowers director Jim Jarmusch, costar Jessica Lange at Maritime Hotel party following premiere at Chelsea Cinemas — Wednesday, 7.7, 10:48 pm.
Stella’s Pizza, 110 Ninth Avenue between 17th and 18th Streets…excellent!
All those turn-the-other-cheek Christians who wrote in to complain about my disdain of this and that aspect of their trip should check out Bill McKibben’s thoughtful and very sincere look at their skewed spiritual attitudes in a piece called “The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong,” found on page 31 in the August issue of Harper’s. There’s another terrific piece in the same issue by Mark Crispin Miller called “None Dare Call It Stolen: Ohio, The Election and America’s Servile Press.”
Harry Winston-level jeweler David Yurman, Broken Flowers star Bill Murray in lobby of Clearview Cinema’s Chelsea West just prior to premiere showing of Jim Jarmusch film — Wednesday, 7.27, 7:05 pm.
There are more slow-walking tourist pudgeballs shuffling around in groups of four and five near this intersection than in any other part of town. Shot taken Wednesday, 7.27, 6:35 pm.
Saturday, 7.25, 12:25 am.
For what it’s worth, the most succinct, persuasive and elegantly written subway ad I’ve seen all summer.
Way over on 33rd Street, a block or two from the home of the New York Daily News. I don’t know why I’m even running shots like this. Movie art on a big building….so what?
Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello have been cast in Oliver Stone’s 9/11 flick as the wives of the two Port Authority guys, Sgt. John McLoughlin and Officer William J. Jimeno, who were the last to be pulled from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena (last in Million Dollar Baby) are playing McLouglin and Jimeno, respectively. I know this sounds cold, but I still don’t get what the big human-interest angle is in this thing. Being the last guy to be pulled out of the rubble on that horrible day is more dramatic or emotionally meaningful than, say, being the second-to-last or third-to-last or the first? I still say Pasquale Buzzelli’s story is far more intriguing. I explained it all in a column that ran last March.
Chris Columbus’s Rent (Columbia, 11.11) is already being dismissed as damaged goods. In a recent Oscar prediction chart David Poland asks, “How can something less than a decade old feel so passe already?” (Uhhm, because it deals with one or two characters dying from AIDS and because medical breakthroughs since the mid ’90s have made AIDS a survivable affliction?) Plus in a recent Entertainment Weekly Oscar forecast piece, Dave Karger warned than Rent might not get awards traction if it winds up feeling like a “dated” stage show. Now, maybe Rent works and maybe it doesn’t, but the early dissing isn’t just about AIDS cocktails. It’s partly due to many journalists despising Chris Columbus, Rent‘s director, because he always sentimentalizes and sugar-coats his films. (In weighing a possible Best Director nomination for Columbus, Poland wrote there are “525,600 reasons it ain’t happenin.'”) It’s also about Rent‘s Broadway stage show having been chided by Matt Stone and Trey Parker in ’04’s Team America: World Police, when they included a scene of a Broadway show with several young marionette performers in a chorus line style singing, “Everybody has AIDS! Everybody has AIDS!” So Rent is dead, is that it? No, that’s not it, but you could easily get that impression.
So the reason the ’06 Oscar schedule is a week later than last year’s — the Oscar show is happening on 3.5.06 rather than late February — is because the Academy didn’t want to compete with the closing ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics, which is set for 2.26? Does anyone apart from the families of the Olympic athletes really care that much about a closing ceremony? I really don’t get this.
I listed my Aristocrats favorites in Wednesday’s lead piece — Gilbert Gottfried, Kevin Pollak-as-Walken, Martin Mull-kiki, and the South Park telling. But I just realized I totally forgot to mention the bit when Andy Dick explains the meaning of “rusty trombone.” I never knew what it meant before — now I can’t think about it without smirking. This film is truly diseased.
Some people have been writing and tell me that the news ticker, which just went up last Friday, has been gumming up and/or freezing their computers. This is because the original program driving the ticker was slow and clunky and from Romania. We’ve just installed a new all-American version that may be easier and smoother to contend with….I hope. We’re also looking around for ways to rewrite this news-ticker program with Flash, which may be even easier for everyone to process. Anyone out there know about writing Flash programs who’d be willing to help out?
Listen to these sound clips from The Aristocrats (ThinkFilm, 7.29 limited)…a nice taste. No, that’s putting it wrong. The word “taste” is distasteful given the repeated mentions of…forget it, I won’t go there. But listen to the Gilbert Gottfried and Kevin Pollak clips.
Gilbert Stood Tall
There are two things you need to know about Penn Gillette and Paul Provenza’s The Aristocrats (ThinkFilm, 7.29 limited). One, it’s quite funny but not in the usual way — it makes you laugh and also say at the same time, “Am I really laughing at this?” And two, you need to see it not just for the humor, but for the journey it takes you on.
There’s a quote made famous by the late Michael O’Donoghue that says “making people laugh is the lowest form of humor.” This is one of the few films I’ve seen that actually seems to get what O’Donoghue was on about.
Gilbert Gottfried, not just one of the stars of The Aristocrats but the star…at Caroline’s following New York premiere — Tuesday, 7.26, 11:15 pm.
This is a movie that basically gets laughs out of the different ways that gifted comics get laughs out of the same joke. And it’s really something to find yourself laughing at the tenth or the eighteenth or the twenty-fifth version of this rancid concoction…something because “the joke” isn’t all that funny, despite its reputation as a landmark gag that every major comic has passed along and had fun with.
The joke is basically about a man making a pitch to a talent agent with a claim that he and his family has a great act, and the agent agreeing to sit down and watch them perform it. The act is foul… in defiance of every tenet of civilized, moralistic behavior. And then the agent asks what the act is called and the man says, “The Aristocrats.”
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I happen to agree with Drew Carey that the joke works better if you do the arm thing (as Jillette and Provenza are doing in the photo below) when you say “the Aristocrats.” But this doesn’t really change what Pat Cooper says early on in the film, which is that “the joke sucks!”
And that’s not the point.
You start laughing at this stupid-ass gag after the third or fourth telling, and the more you laugh the less you care about laughing, and the more you’re enjoying the talent and inventions and personalities of the joke-tellers and sampling the dozens of ways this relatively mediocre gag can be made to work.
It’s odd, but sharing in the enjoyment of telling a lame joke really well gradually makes the experience of laughing at a genuinely funny joke pale in comparison.
This is one of those movies you have to see because you have most likely never heard of, much less considered, the acts described in the various renditions of the joke. And to mull it all over in the company of strangers feels like some kind of therapy.
(l. to r.) The Aristocrats maestros Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette
It’s an oddly liberating thing to be sitting with a group of people and acknowledging (by the evidence of constant laughter) our gross animal commonality.
The experience is made extra-palatable by watching all these cool-cat big-name comics — George Carlin, Paul Reiser, Martin Mull, the great Gilbert Gottfried, Robin Williams, Bob Saget, Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Alexander, Eddie Izzard, Drew Carey, Eric Idle, et. al. — serving as goaders and ringleaders.
I said last January that the funniest bit of all is a tape of Gilbert Gottfried telling the joke at a Friars Roast of Hugh Hefner that took place in Manhattan only a couple of weeks after 9/11. He’s like Zeus up there on the mike…like Alexander the Great.
Nobody wanted to push any envelopes at this Friars Club thing, for obvious reasons. Everyone wanted to go easy — some comics wondered if it was even appropriate to try and be funny at such a time. What does Gottfried do? He gets up there and tells a joke about catching a connecting flight out of the Empire State building.** Somebody in the audience shouts out, “Too soon!”
It was at this point, more or less, when Gottfried began telling the Aristocrats joke and brought down the house.
It’s not just that he tells it with typical Gottfried-ian gusto, or that other comics in the room (like Rob Schneider) are literally on the floor. It’s the metaphor of what he’s doing.
(l. to r.) Gottfried at the Hugh Hefner roast almost four years ago in New York City, a couple of weeks after 9/11.
People of moderation and mediocrity are always telling creative people not to stick their necks out and tow the conventional moral line. Gottfried ignored this and rolled the dice and tapped into the emotional undercurrent and made it into something else. Laughter has always been about expunging hurt, and this time there was a lot to go around.
Gottfried’s routine also showed that truly creative people never second-guess themselves. They never sand down their material to fit what they’ve been told people supposedly want or don’t want. They go for it and let the chips fall.
I also love that when you bring this up to Gottfried he shrugs and goes, “Okay…that sounds good.” What he means is that he didn’t do anything deliberately, he didn’t think about it — it just happened.
The second funniest bit in The Aristocrats is Kevin Pollak telling the joke in the voice of Christopher Walken, or in the voice of Walken’s Sicilian goombah in True Romance.
The third funniest bit is Martin Mull telling the “kiki” joke (the one with the two anthropologists captured by loin-clothed natives and being told they can either die or suffer “kiki” and…you know how it goes), but with an Aristocrats substitution.
The fourth funniest joke is that clip of one of the little South Park guys telling it.
** The exact joke went, “I have a flight to California. I can’t get a direct flight. They said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first.”
Malleable Sheep
Adam Curtis’ The Century Of The Self is a nearly four-hour, BBC-produced documentary that’ll begin showing at Manhattan’s Cinema Village on August 12. Trust me, it’s worth the four hours and then some. It’s quite simply the most intriguing, audacious and insightful study of publicity, mass psychology and Orwellian mind control ever assembled.
The Century Of The Self is the pretty much untold and appalling story of the creation of psychological selling points in commercial and political marketing, and how this led to the culture of “me” and the expansion of mass-consumer societies in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and his nephew Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations and the concept of “spin,” are the genteel ogres at the heart of Curtis’s social history.
The Century Of The Self is the story of Bernays’ amazing influence, beginning in the 1920s, upon the techniques of selling and mass persuasion…techniques based upon the insights into the human psyche that his illustrious uncle made famous.
Curtis’s film says in essence that Freud’s uncovering of the drives within the human mind — and particularly the influence of our subconscious urges — has changed the world by way of Bernay’s seminal revolution in public relations techniques, the results of which are everywhere today, especially in big-time politics.
Before Bernays came along advertising and political promotion was essentially about laying facts before the public and leaving them to decide to buy or not buy based on rational evaluation. Bernays’ big idea was getting industry to start pitching products and services to people’s unconscious — to pull them in based on what they emotionally wanted, but didn’t necessarily need.
An explanation on a BBC website puts it well: “By introducing a technique to probe the unconscious mind, Freud provided useful tools for understanding the secret desires of the masses.
“Unwittingly, however, his work served as the precursor to a world full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society’s belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man’s ultimate goal.”
Telluride Film Festival director Tom Luddy was the one who turned me on to The Century of the Self during the 2003 San Francisco Film Festival.
Luddy told me soon after that journalist/author Christopher Hitchens is a big fan of this film; ditto Orville Schell, Dean of Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Schell, said Luddy, had thought one way for The Century Of The Self to be seen in this country would be for PBS’s Frontline series to air it. A call or two suggested otherwise. Brilliant and on-target as many believe Curtis’s documentary to be, it may, by the standards of American TV journalism, not be “balanced” enough.
Self says in essence that we live in a country run by leaders who have never trusted the voters and have always sought (successfully, in most ways) to “control” our thinking and appetites and political allegiances. Such a declaration would almost certainly ignite controversy.
A show like Frontline, says Luddy, would “have to have two sides…they’d have to have this quote-unquote ‘objectivity’…and this film is a polemic…it suggests that our democracy is manipulated by people who believe the voting public is fundamentally irrational.”
Schell, who describes Luddy as a kind of Johnny Appleseed of new, see-worthy films, agrees that The Century Of The Self “is a natural to be aired someplace because it’s a very good film.
“But I don’t know that it’s a natural for ‘Frontline.’ I don’t think that show lends itself well enough to this kind of mission statement. But I think it’s an amazing project, and precisely the kind of thing American TV should be providing.√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù
However, says Schell, “If a film such as this were to appear on a network, I think I’d have a heart attack. The tragedy is that it’s so unimaginable that a film such as this could be shown, much less made, by any of the apparatus that has come to be known as American TV.”
I called Curtis in London in June ’03 and asked about what has been perceived by some as a lack of balance in this film. He said the mode of presenting differing points of view about a controversial subject is obviously a venerated approach, but it’s now old hat.
“Those days of journalism are over,” he said. “That was the sort of journalism that was formed during the Cold War. Our job is to actually tell a story, but it’s not a polemic — it’s a particular story told from a particular viewpoint.
“In the old days everyone knew what was happening on the world political stage…there was a big struggle, that was it. Now there isn’t an agreed-upon story, an agreed-upon position to be adopted. Christopher Hitchens has said that the job of modern journalism is to make sense of all these fragments that you can argue for or against.”
The Century of the Self is composed of four one-hour chapters titled “Happiness Machines,” “The Engineering of Consent,” “There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed” and “Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering.”
There’s a whole rundown — photos, chapter breakdowns, links– about the series on a BBC site that will fill in some of the gaps.
This doc really deserves to get out there and be seen as widely as possible by New York media types, so it’ll get some decent exposure when the DVD comes out.
Ancient Pelican
Don’t ever expect movies that you liked as a kid to stand up when you see them again as an adult. It’s almost better to leave them in your head than confront the reality of what they really are and were.
I haven’t seen William Wellman’s The High and the Mighty since I was 11 or 12, when I caught it on the tube in a pan-and-scan version. I’ve never seen this 1954 film in widescreen (it was shot in the somewhat wider CinemaScope used in the early to mid ’50s, which had an aspect ratio of about 2.55 to 1). And I have these hazy notions of it being an emotionally affecting thing (I’ve always been a sucker for Dimitri Tiomkin’s emphatic scores) and John Wayne exuding a certain authority in the role of the middle-aged co-pilot.
I guess this means I’m going to at least rent the two-disc special edition DVD when it comes out August 2nd, especially with all the extras….but I’ve got my fingers crossed.
Jacket cover for Paramount Home Video’s DVD of The High and the Mighty (due August 2nd) and one-sheet issued during film’s 1954 theatrical release.
The High and the Mighty is about a commercial flight from Honolulu running into trouble during a flight across the Pacific to San Francisco, and a lot of people — the crew among them — becoming more and more persuaded that the plane and its passengers are headed for the drink.
It was Hollywood’s first multi-character soap-opera disaster movie, and was thought to be a little sappy and sentimental even for its day, and we all know how cornball characteristics tend to worsen over time.
A pen-pal journalist who’s seen the DVD says The High and the Mighty “is worse than anyone remembers…hopelessly stodgy and dumb, and very boring unless you’re into laughing at it.”
He trashed the cockpit POV shot when the injured plane finally lands at San Francisco airport and the landing lights form a crucifix and Wayne says, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Okay, overbaked…but I flew across the country one time in a Beechcraft Bonanza four-seater and when you land at night the runway lights do look like a cross. (I wonder what the lights look like if the pilot of a damaged plane is a Muslim or a Buddhist.)
It’s all speculation until I see it, but here’s one thing I know for sure: the jacket art on the DVD makes it look like something from one of those cheapo companies who put out public-domain films.
Quality level DVDs either use some representation of the original ad art or come up with a modern variation or substitution that’s even better looking. Paramount’s High and the Mighty jacket art does neither. That close-up shot of Wayne in his airplane pilot’s uniform along with that drawing of an airplane looks like it’s aimed at the K-Mart crowd.
Grabs
ThinkFilm honcho Mark Urman (l.) at Tuesday night’s after-party at Caroline’s following the premiere of The Aristocrats. I don’t know the guy on the right.
Actress Leigh Spofford (Kinsey, The Human Stain) with L.M. Kit Carson (l.) at the 7.26 Aristocrats party. Spofford is the star of Cat’s Paw, a thriller that’ll soon be shooting in and around Oxford, England, and will costar John Shea. Carson is exec producing. Alun Harris is directing the film, which Carson describes as “Pulp Fiction meets Chariots of Fire.” Spofford played Liam Neeson’s daughter in Kinsey. (Apologies for having gotten the title wrong earlier — Carson and Spofford made a short together last year, and this was the source of the confusion.)
Captives in underground blast furnace-sweat box — Sunday, 7.25, 6:40 pm.
Would a caption make a difference? First Avenue just north of 3rd Street — Sunday, 7.24, 11;20 pm.
First Avenue around 3rd or 4th Street — Sunday, 7.24, 10:50 pm.
Park Avenue looking south from 61st Street — Monday, 7.25, 10:50 am.
Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove, Dick Cavett at Tuesday’s Aristocrats party.
Why do the women reading paperback books in subways and airport lounges always seem to be reading mass-market fiction? Why don’t I ever see one, just one, reading a book by, say, William Faulkner or Gore Vidal?
Cover of last Sunday’s New York Daily News, lying on top of garbage in waste basket on corner of 9th Avenue and 39th Street.
One-sheet for Jim Sheridan’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ which only just wrapped two or three weeks ago but is coming out in November. That may not be a super-fast turnaround by Otto Preminger standards (he finished shooting Anatomy of a Murder in May of ’59 and had it on the screen two months later), but it’s pretty quick by today’s.
There’s a movie — a Showtime or an HBO movie, I’m thinking — in the story of Silvia Johnson, an indiscreet Colorado woman of 40 who just pled guilty to various charges for having schtupped a bunch of local teenage boys. A news story says she threw a series of weekly parties between October ’03 and October ’04 in which she gave drugs and alcohol to eight of the boys and had sex with five of them. Enabling young guys to get high is stupid and irresponsible for any adult, but what’s wrong with a little sexual healing? If only I’d known someone like Johnson when I was 14 or 15, I would have been a much happier lad. Courtney Love would be great in the role, but Meg Ryan would be better.
It’s 97 blazing degrees on the streets of Manhattan today. We might as well be in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It’s so hot you can break an egg and spill it on the sidewalk and it would sizzle, I swear. The air on some of the subway platforms feels like something out of a blast furnace. At least it’s better than last week’s climate, which was muggy like a rain forest’s. There was a soppy thickness to the air…you needed a machete to cut through it.
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