VCI Entertainment’s Bluray of Bryan Desmond Hurst’s A Christmas Carol (’51) came out thirteen and a half months ago. I bought it, of course, but I missed the big reveal with the little guy in the mirror (i.e., to the left of Alistair Sim). Now that I’ve seen it I’ll never not notice it. It’s like the kid extra in North by Northwest who plugs his ears before Eva Marie Saint shoots Cary Grant in that Mt. Rushmore cafeteria.
In tribute to the about-to-commence Christmas holiday, which I dread with every fibre of my being because of the silence and calories and carol-singing and football games and endless TV-watching it brings, I’d like to dispute the notion that people don’t go online during the holidays because they’re otherwise engaged with family and partying and watching football games.
Not in my experience. People are always online with their handhelds, iPads and laptops…always. Okay, traffic does drop somewhat during Xmas week, although I can’t imagine why. No under-50 person focuses on a single diversion or distraction these days — it’s always two or three at the same time (i.e., conversation plus TV show plus texts plus surfing). On top of which most people are dying for little time-outs from their families and relatives after 36 to 48 hours of alcoholic yaw-haw.
I’ve just about had it with listening to “The Little Drummer Boy” under any circumstance, and especially while sitting in Starbucks. “Bah-rumpa-pum-pum,” my ass. Wouldn’t the racket of a drum upset a just-born child? Maybe if the drummer boy had brushes, but of course they hadn’t been invented 2010 years ago. I’m down with Christmas Carols as far they go, but this is one of the all-time dumbest. It bothered me even when I was an eight year-old.
Last night was one of those nights when you have four or five topics stacked up like planes circling an airport, and you can’t post a damn thing. That happens. This week’s a wash anyway — two work days — so HE’s Thanksgiving “vacation” starts today. There will never be a vacation, of course — the column never sleeps. Sitting in Charlotte, North Carolina, right now, and about to leave for San Francisco.
Park Avenue and 53rd — Monday, 11.22, 1:10 pm.
I just want to be a perfect web columnist, so on a certain level I can relate to Natalie Portman‘s Black Swan character. But if I’d designed the Nina website, I’d include a reference to her Aunt Carole, who did two decades of medical confinement in England after killing two men with a straight razor.
Clint Eastwood‘s Hereafter isn’t just a critical bust. I think it’s his least satisfying film since Firefox (’82). Perhaps the biggest letdown aspect is that it doesn’t impart a sense of tranquility or acceptance about what’s to come, which is what most of us go to films about death to receive, and what the best of these always seem to convey in some way.
Terrence Stamp, John Hurt and Tim Roth in Stephen Frears’ The Hit.
They usually do this by selling the idea of structure and continuity. They persuade that despite the universe being run on cold chance and mathematical indifference, each life has a particular task or fulfillment that needs to happen, and that by satisfying this requirement some connection to a grand scheme is revealed.
You can call this a delusional wish-fulfillment scenario (and I won’t argue about that), but certain films have sold this idea in a way that simultaneously gives you the chills but also settles you down and makes you feel okay.
Here’s a list containing some top achievers in this realm. I’m not going to explain why they’re successful in conveying the above except to underline that it’s not just me talking here — these movies definitely impart a sense of benevolent order and a belief that the end of a life on the planet earth is but a passage into something else. I’ve listed them in order of preference, or by the standard of emotional persuasion.
1. Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ. 2. Stephen Frears‘ The Hit. 3. Brian Desmond Hurst‘s A Christmas Carol. 4. Warren Beatty and Buck Henry‘s Heaven Can Wait. 5. Henry King‘s Carousel (based on Ferenc Molnar‘s Lilliom). 6. Tim Burton‘s Beetlejuice. 6. Michael Powell‘s A Matter Of Life And Death, a.k.a. Stairway To Heaven. 7. Albert Brooks‘ Defending Your Life.
I’m also giving a pat on the back to that old Twilight Zone episode called “Nothing in the Dark,” in which Robert Redford played a kind of angel of death in the guise of a wounded policeman.
For me the four worst films about death — the shallowest and most phony-manipulative and least reassuring — are Ghost, Flatliners, What Dreams May Come and Death Becomes Her. These are movies that pull down their pants and play cheap little games for the enjoyment of those in the audience who are scared shitless of death and need to fantasize or joke about it in order to allay their fears.
And the single most terrifying film about death as envisioned by fundamentalist Christian wackos is Michael Tolkin‘s The Rapture. One look at that film and you’ll be able to at least consider the idea that hardcore Christians have taken something naturally serene and peaceful and created a terrifying new-age mythology that would give Satan pause.
Update: I don’t know why I forgot to mention Wim Wenders ‘ Wings of Desire. Because it’s doesn’t fit the mold, I suppose. It’s not about passage from life to death as much as passage from death to life, being about an angel (Bruno Ganz) who falls in love with a circus girl (Solveig Dommartin) and wants to be mortal so he can experience love and pain and all the rest of it.
It’s been nearly 50 years since Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her bedroom in August 1962. I’ve personally visited that home on Brentwood’s Fifth Helena Drive seven or eight times (I took my mother there once), but there’s something bizarre about her brand continuing to generate books and movies and magazine articles (like Sam Kashner‘s in the current Vanity Fair), and making money for people still hungry for a piece. Memorials a decade or 20 years later, okay, but to be turning heads almost half a century later?
The sad metaphor of Monroe’s life — that of a “poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes,” as Arthur Miller once described her — has never stopped resonating among people of suppressed hurt who feel ignored, under-valued or marginalized. I get that. We all do.
Elton John and Bernie Taupin‘s “Candle in the Wind” was written twelve years after her death, and then the following year — 1975 — came Norman Mailer‘s ‘Marilyn‘, and even then the feeling was “okay, we’ve stirred her ghost and put her on the stage again and again…now let her be.” And yet the band is still parading around some 35 years later.
Maureen Dowd‘s current N.Y. Times column compares the attitude of Marilyn’s day, when intellectual uplift and spiritual growth was something everyone wanted and in fact needed in order to feel whole, to the tea-bagger Palin notion that people of intellect deserve our suspicion and mistrust and that political leaders need that good old Walmart touch.
But it also anecdotally reminds that there’s “a hit novel in Britain narrated by the Maltese terrier Frank Sinatra gave Monroe, which she named ‘Maf‘, for Mafia, and three movies in the works about her. Three? Naomi Watts is reportedly planning to star in a biopic based on the novel, ‘Blonde,’ by Joyce Carol Oates; Michelle Williams is shooting My Week With Marilyn, and another movie being planned is based on an account by Lionel Grandison, a former deputy Los Angeles coroner who claims he was forced to change the star’s death certificate to read suicide instead of murder.”
I’m not at all persuaded that both the Watts and Williams movies, which are being made in order to cash in the 50th anniversary of Monroe’s death, are destined to attract huge interest.
A 21-gun salute to CNN’s Anderson Cooper for telling North Carolina Republican congressional candidate Renee Ellmers, an ignorance-baiting opportunist, that one of her remarks about the Ground Zero mosque situation “is the lowest response I have ever heard from a candidate, I have got to tell you.” Ellmers has run a TV ad that deliberately blurs the line between Muslims and terrorists. Is there any way I can avoid calling this woman other bad names?
I know a Beverly Hills woman (now living in Malibu) who has the same drawl and the same inclinations toward intellectual laziness, the same tendency to ignore facts and default to preconceptions that suit her rightist agenda. Her voice has almost the exact same pitch and timbre — it’s eerie.
There apparently can be no universal standard of happiness (or contentment even) regarding Blurays of Carol Reed‘s The Third Man. First there was the infamous Criterion grainstorm Bluray edition that gave me (and perhaps others) so much anguish and frustration, and now there’s another source of agony — the Studio Canal Third Man Bluray (out 9.21). And yet it must be said that Nate Boss‘s High-Def Digest review is hilarious.
Boss is a colorful impassioned writer. I like him because he hates like I do.
“Let me just say I wouldn’t have minded a brown tint, caused by a layer of barbeque sauce smeared across the picture, compared to the sometimes blurry, borderline sterile and inhuman veneer found here,” he notes halfway into the review. “Early reports and screenshots showed this release having a significant amount of grain removed from the picture, and as much as I hate to give any credit to screenshots, they were right.
“Jackets and their intricate stitching appear smeared, while the stitching on Major Calloway’s shoulders is illegible, even in a closeup of his arm. The sewers never looked cleaner, and that’s just dirty. There is no disputing how different this release looks from the Criterion edition, but these changes, they’re not for the better. Another blow to the StudioCanal Collection name. A big, big blow. If there weren’t a previous release, this wouldn’t have been as big a deal, but since we know the potential, it’s downright unforgivable.
“There’s quite a smattering of dirt, debris, and lines all over this release, significantly more than the previous version, with some amazingly large or heinous onslaughts leaving one to wonder how much it would have cost to license the Criterion supervised restoration. Brightness levels can still shift, as they did before, but shadow details take a humongous drop. Where black on black in the darkest shadows used to be quite easy to discern, now it’s just one big mess. The picture retains some nice depth, but detail levels take a hit. Edges appear pretty clean, free from halos of any kind. Aliasing pops up from time to time in the jackets of the actors, in varying degrees (the tighter the pattern, the more problematic it can be).”
I think even I, one of the most grain-averse people on the planet, might prefer the Criterion Bluray edition to the Studio Canal version. Honestly? I watched it again last month and even though the grain in some of the scenes makes me sick, it at least doesn;t have the kinds of problems that afflict the Studio Canal version, according to Boss.
I didn’t want to buy Criterion’s recently released Bluray of John Ford‘s Stagecoach (1939). I suspected the worst — something un-finessed and scratched and speckled and lousy with grain — and knew it would probably rub me the wrong way. But I went down to Kim’s last night and bought a copy anyway — over $30 bills! — and took it home and popped it in. And holey moley, it looks even worse than anticipated.
It may sound extreme to call this an awful Bluray with others giving it a thumbs-up, but I’ll go one better: this is the worst-looking, worst-sounding Bluray of a classic black-and-white film in history. That means, obviously, that it looks worse than Criterion’s notorious Bluray of Carol Reed‘s The Third Man, and that’s saying something, fella.
The reason is simple. The Criterion monks used a 1942 nitrate duplicate negative that had squawky sound and titanic grain levels plus all kinds of smudges and wounds and scratches, and then went by their usual creed, which is that “whenever the damage [is] not fixable without leaving traces of our restoration work, we elect to leave the original damage.” Which has resulted in one of the biggest burns in Bluray history. And then these fuckers turn around and charge retail-schmuck purchasers like myself (i.e., guys who are too lazy or impulsive to use cheaper online options) over $30 bucks. Well, gee…thanks, Criterion!
I’m recognizing that Criterion “removed the worst of the damage” by committing “hundreds of hours of restoration work,” but for their brochure-writing spokesperson to say that “certain defects remain” in the finished Stagecoach Bluray is like a BP spokesperson claiming that there’s a little bit of mucky-muck in the Gulf of Mexico right now.
I was watching it last night and going, “This is ridiculous.” I mean, I was really seething — furious that they hadn’t tried to refine the detritus and the scratches and the Iraqi sandstorm effects at least a little bit. Don’t listen to the purists who say that any kind of digital refinement or clean-up will turn an old movie into a scrubbed- down video game. The people who say this are agenda-spinners, plain and simple. You know what I mean by this. I’m basically saying they’re dishonest.
I’ve said over and over that there are acceptable halfway measures that can remove the offensive stuff without making the actors look as if they’ve got plastic mannequin faces.
I wrote a few weeks ago that the Criterion Co. is “the ultimate blue-chip outfit — far and away the most trustworthy providers of true quality in home video. They do what they do with considerable expertise and devotion. It’s just this Abbey-of-St.-Martin monk strain in their thinking. They do great work in general, yes, but they’d rather have films look like what they looked like when they came out rather than have them look so good today that their directors would hear about them in Heaven and have angel erections.”
Well, the latter part of that paragraph was wrong — the Stagecoach Bluray makes the film look worse than it must have appeared when it had just opened and was playing in first-run theatres in New York and Los Angeles. It looks like Stagecoach probably looked in a dinky little theatre in Barstow, California, after it had been playing for six or seven weeks through a dusty gate. I’m speaking as a formerly licensed projectionist so I don’t want to hear any shit about this from anyone.
I feel used and abused by Criterion. Snookered, ass-fucked, film-flammed, hoodwinked, boondoggled…a tin can tied to my tail.
Deadline‘s tube reporter Nellie Andreva has posted an official “yup, it’s really happening” story about Diane Keaton and Ellen Page being set to star in HBO’s Tilda, a forthcoming half-hour series about a female Hollywood blogger modelled on Nikki Finke. I reported the Keaton-Page castings as a straight fact on 4.29.
Last month an HBO spokesperson told Hollywood Reporter columnist Matthew Belloni that ‘”the Tilda script is a fictional composite and not based on any one person,” I mentioned in the same piece. “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,” came the response. “The Tilda Watski character is Finke, Finke, Finke all the way.”
Page’s Carolyn character, who wasn’t all that filled out in the first-episode script I read last month, is described by Andreva as “a morally conflicted creative assistant caught between following the corporate culture of the studio she works for and following Tilda, who has taken a keen interest in her.” She could, in other words, turn to the dark side and wind up slightly scheming against Tilda in a kind of Anne Baxter-in- All About Eve sort of way. Maybe.
For whatever reason I never paid attention to this Magnum Gold ice cream commercial that Bryan Singer directed and Benicio Del Toro & Caroline De Souza Correa starred in. It began showing a couple of months ago in France. It just played on a flatscreen here at the Orange wifi cafe. Benny!
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