Last night Gullermo del Toro delivered a master class lecture inside Toronto’s Bell Lightbox about Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. The classic 1946 espionage thriller was also screened. Peter Howell called GDT’s remarks “masterful.” I wrote GDT and a couple of others about whether digital footage will be made available anytime soon.
The reason I saw only the last half of Meet Monica Velour yesterday was because I was watching Dana Adam Shapiro‘s Monogamy in a tiny screening room right next to Velour‘s. (Both showings began at 4 pm). After about 45 or 50 minutes of Monogamy I was feeling so dispirited that I decided to jump ship. It’s not that Monogamy is awful — it has two or three interesting elements — but I just couldn’t stand the dysentery-like color scheme.
The color in this trailer is much more robust than the color projected during yesterday’s screening. All I know is that after a half-hour or so it began to make me feel ill. At first it made everyone and everything in the film look drab and drained. That was bad enough. But then it started to irritate me personally, and then it took over my mood, and then my soul.
Using bleachy color has become an accepted way of conveying artiness or heavy-osity. I get that. But brownish bleachy color makes a film look like it’s been lying in a cesspool, or has been processed in coffee grounds. Filmmakers would be well advised to avoid it from here on. Whatever you think you’re getting from this visual scheme in terms of edgy hipster cred will be more than counter-balanced by the feelings of nausea in the seats.
I haven’t felt such an acute visceral response to a color scheme since David Fincher‘s Fight Club, which I also dislike for its drab color, which I thought was kind of a cross between muted greenish guacamole and two-day-old coffee grounds lying at the bottom of a plastic garbage bag.
This BBC story about the re-opening of the Pennan Inn in Pennan, Aberdeenshire took me back to Bill Fosyth’s Local Hero (’83). The inn is the one visited by Peter Reigert and run by Denis Lawson in this beloved film, which…good God, I can’t believe it’s been 26 years since I first saw it at the Warner Bros. screening room on 50th Street. Is there anyone who’s seen this poignant and bittersweet love story/fairy tale who hasn’t felt some kind of meltdown effect?
You can’t quite hear the ringing telephone inside the red booth on this YouTube clip (i.e., the very last shot in the film), but my eyes moisten every time I watch it, even without having seen the entire film beforehand. (Although I’ve seen the film at least seven or eight times.) It plucks a chord that feels sad, serene and melancholy all at once.
The caller is Reigert’s MacIntyre, a Houston oil executive who arrives in Pennan (called Ferness in the film) near the beginning to negotiate an oil refinery land buy. But he becomes disengaged from the mission and starts to just feel the mystical Northern Scotland vibe for what it is, and what he is, being of pretended Scottish descent. (His Hungarian grandparents chose the last name arbitrarily.) He slowly falls in love with the place and the people, and is all but heartbroken when he’s forced to return to Houston.
We’re all on the other end of that ringing phone, looking to know and touch something more primal and lasting in our lives.
Warner Home Video needs to upgrade the DVD they issued ten years ago, and put out a Blu-ray as well.
Fantasy Moguls‘ Steve Mason is reporting a higher weekend figure for Martin Scorsese‘s Shine a Light — $2.15 million — than what I’ve been told it’s likely to be, which is something in the vicinity of $1.4 million. Even if Mason turns out to be right, it’s still lower than it should be. You can use terms like “limited success” or “IMAX hit,” but the bottom line is that it fizzled. And nobody under 40 cared what the boomer-aged critics had to say.
If Fox Searchlight’s Young @ Heart, which is also about performing rock standards, is the year’s most heartwarming film, Shine a Light is easily ’08’s most purely enjoyable — rousing, beautifully shot and cut, clap your hands and say yeah. And yet it didn’t do very well outside the IMAX theatres. The reason, of course, is that the Stones don’t mean much to younger GenXers and GenYers. It’s an older person’s rock concert film. The excitement, the charged energy levels and the Stones’ sublime aura of authority are transcendent — it’s one of the best films of this type ever made — and younger moviegoers didn’t want to know.
Jett saw it with a date in Syracuse last night (i..e, the flat version — no IMAX in Syracuse) and says he was mainly taken with the great photography and the editing. He said he didn’t like Mick Jagger showing his stomach (I argued with him about this) but said he was gratified that his forearms were more muscular than they seemed to be during th Stones’ half-time Superbowl performance in Detroit two years ago.
No two ways about it — Martin Scorsese‘s Shine a Light needs to be seen in the IMAX format. It’ll be agreeable in regular 35mm — fun, engaging — but the wow factor will be missing. The Rolling Stones concert film was shot in a semi-intimate setting — Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre — and the intense close-ups and gigantic size of the bodies and faces of Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Ron Wood and Charlie Watts make it seem even more so. This movie is all over you.
An approximation of the IMAX aspect ratio (1.43 to 1) of Shine a Light
Robert Richardson‘s camerawork (with celebrated dps like John Toll and Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki working as camera operators) swings, soars and glides with pulsing rhythm. At times the camera dives and swoops like a hawk. At times it makes you feel as if you’re literally dancing alongside Jagger, but with the kind of exacting discipline that Gene Kelly brought to his big dance numbers in those ’50s MGM musicals. (With maybe a little Twyla Tharp thrown in.) The cutting is clean and smooth and exhilarating at times. The film has a phenomenal visual energy.
Scorsese starts things off with a 10- or 12-minute short in a relatively small and boxy (1.33 to 1) black-and-white format. Scorsese is the lead character at this point — the director asking questions, sorting things through, being told he can’t do this or that, etc. This is the footage of the show’s planning, preparation, logistics. And it’s very engaging. But the split-second that the show begins….wham! We’re IMAX-ed up — in color with the images suddenly twice as tall and four or five times louder, and we’re off to the races.
It’s thrilling in nearly the exact same way that audiences were wowed when This is Cinerama! (’53) went from boxy black-and-white newsreel footage of Lowell Thomas to a sudden cut to the full-color, three-camera Cinerama shot of a mountain range as the music soared and the curtains parted to make room for a much taller, super-wide image.
Approximation of the 35mm aspect ratio (1.85 to 1) of the same shot
I can’t imagine how this effect can be delivered on a conventional 35mm screen, and I’m not precisely sure how the IMAX image I saw last night at L.A.’s Bridge Cinema will be presented in a “flat” format. The IMAX aspect ratio is on the boxy side with an aspect ratio of 1.43 to 1. Movies in regular theatres are projected at 1.85 to 1 or, if filmed and projected in Scope, 2.39 to 1. The Shine a Light bottom line is that either (a) the 35mm non-IMAX version will present more visual information on the sides in order to fill out a wider 1.85 to 1 image, or (b) the IMAX will be cropped to create a 1.85 to 1 aspect ratio on 35 mm. Am I being confusing?
I’ll try to figure this out tomorrow morning. I tried to get a clear understanding of whether the 35mm image will be wider than the IMAX image but smaller in scale, or whether it will be a less tall version of the IMAX image. I asked and asked and asked, and nobody really knew.
The power of those IMAX speakers…my God! And the re-animated groove that the Stones get into with 80% of the songs is sublime. Before last night I thought I’d heard “Tumblin’ Dice” once too often, but the version in the film is so hypnotically cool and soul-freeing that I’d now like to find a soundtrack recording, or at least an iTunes track of this particular rendition. The only rote performances are of the big headline songs (“Start Me Up,” “Brown Sugar,” etc.) The less well-known ones are mostly transcendent. The relatively quiet and contained performance of “As Tears Go By” is a classic.
The IMAX closeups of all those jowls, turkey necks and crows feet on the Stones’ faces are something really new and different in the annals of rock-concert films. This sounds like I’m being a smart-ass, but I found them genuinely cool and fascinating. Keith looks like a Peter Jackson CG creation, a Lord of the Rings troll.
Did director Gore Verbinski put make-up on Richards for his Pirates of the Caribbean cameo? I walked out before Richards’ scene (the film was despicable), but I saw an online photo of Richards and Johnny Depp and it looked to me like Keith’s face was all gunked up. If he looked this way in the film Verbinksi needlessly embroidered one of the world’s great natural weirdnesses.
Shine a Light ends with a knockout Scorsese tracking shot — a half-real, half digital thing in which a single hand-held camera seems to follow Jagger and the others as they make their way through the backstage throng and out the stage door. Scorsese himself, absent since the early black-and-white footage, makes two appearances in this sequence. And then the camera alights and soars over Manhattan and…I don’t want to over-describe, but it’s beautiful.
The full slate for L.A.’s AFI Fest (Thursday, 11.1. to Sunday, 11.11) was announced today, and as usual the films with genuine intrigue are few and far between. Two of the three big galas — Robert Redford‘s Lions for Lambs and Mike Newell‘s Love in the Time of Cholera — are thought to be half-and-halfers, leaving Jason Reitman‘s Juno as the only solid. The biggest eyecatcher is Gregg Araki‘s Smiley Face, enjoying another festival viewing on its way to the home video bin (which some feel is an unjust fate, especially those who saw at Sundance ’07).
The World Cinema section will show Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Eran Kolirin‘s The Band’s Visit — two likely Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. Two docs are said to be worth a looksee — Doug Pray‘s Big Rig and Kent Jones‘ The Man In The Shadows: Val Lewton. And a Latino Showcase feature called Manuela y Manuel, directed by Raul Marchand, is said to be a standout.
Brad Bird‘s Ratatouille (Disney/Pixar, 6.29) is, in all ways but one, a sublime experience. Call it a gifted-underdog-fights- the-odds fable (it’s about a French rat named Remy who manages to become the most admired chef in Paris) and a very entertaining souffle by way of inspired writing, delightful wit, great voice-acting and eyeball-popping digital animation. It’s not a great film, but it satisfies and then some.
The visuals are so good and dazzling that Ratatouille delivers a perpetual throb sensation within your moviegoing heart. See it for any reason that comes to mind — the reviews alone have been highly persuasive — but absolutely don’t miss the drop-dead sumptuousness of each and every shot, cut, backdrop and camera move. Hats off to Pixar supervising animator Mark Walsh, character designer Luis Grane, character developer Andrew Gordon and all the grunt-level animators who did what they were told.
A story about fate, struggle, luck and love, Ratatouille is another brisk and bouncy animated heart comedy with another egalitarian theme — “anybody can cook.” What makes it special for an animated wing-ding is that it has the world-view of a 55 year-old gourmand with a seasoning of old-soul wisdom. The wise and brilliant writing is by Bird, Jim Capobianco, Emily Cook, Kathy Greenberg and Jan Pinkava.
Ratatouiille is such a scrumptious foodie ride that I was thinking halfway through that it’s going to make things a little bit tougher for Scott Hicks‘ No Reservations (a remake of the beloved Mostly Martha) which costars Catherine Zeta Jones and Aaron Eckhart and comes out on 7.27.
Like most commercial-minded animated features, Ratatouille has the frisky, frizzy energy of a gifted 12 year-old and one of those “ohh, man, we are looking to entertain the shit of you!” attitudes. And we all know you can’t get away from that kind of presentation if you’re looking to deliver mass-market orgasms and stay rich while doing so.
I went in expecting a thermonuclear blowout and I came out…uhm, definitely pleased. Not floating on helium, but happy. I’m not sure if it’s the best Brad Bird flick ever made (I’m extremely partial to The Incredibles) but it is not, as a certain bigmouth has proclaimed, “the best American film of 2007 to date.” So far it’s a three-way tie for that title — Zodiac, No Country for Old Men and that early-fall drama I saw four days ago that I still can’t blab about. Ratatouille is a close fourth behind these three. It is obviously a contender for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, but then you knew that.
My reservation is this: I wish Bird and John Lasseter and the Pixar guys had summoned the balls to throw out the expected commercial family-flick shtick and made a deeper, more complex and more “adult” film — something less anxious to please, a little braver and riskier by being a touch more complex.
I realize that laser-sharp digital animation and whirylbird camerawork from guys determined to live flush lifestyles means that the story has to follows certain formulaic guidelines, but somebody has to break the mold some day, and that will mean not automatically siphoning the material through the rubber hose of an “animated kids movie.”
I saw Jason Reitman‘s Thank You for Smoking at the Toronto Film Festival, and then again at Sundance ’06. And all that time I never wrote anything. This means something, obviously, although I’ve had fun with it each time. For a movie about lighting up, Smoking is in no way, shape or form a burn. And yet…let me try again. A very smart, fast-on-its-feet satire, Smoking appeals much more to my dry sense of humor than anything Jason’s dad, Ivan Reitman (i.e., “the king of tasteless comedy“), has directed or produced. And Aaron Eckhardt’s tobacco lobbyist guy is his best role (and best performance) since In The Company of Men, and everyone else in the large cast runs with the material in just the right way. (The exception is Katie Holmes, whose performance as a Washington, D.C., investigative reporter is impossible to roll with.) Smoking has exactly the right pitch and tone for delivering funny-cryptic social commentary. It has a calm deadpan center and lets Reitman’s screenplay (which is based on Christopher Buckley’s book) do the walking and talking. So why haven’t I posted? Because it’s a little too mild-mannered. Reitman never tries pushing his comedy into any kind of frenzied Preston Sturges mode, and that’s the charm of it, ironically…but it’s so smartly agreeable (as opposed to rousing, disturbing or challenging) that I somehow felt it didn’t need my two cents. It seems I can only get it up with films that I seriously love or hate (or with Oscar campaigns I love or hate, a la Munich). The irony is that I tend not to go with satiric comedies that shoot for the moon Sturges-style, because this sort of thing is very hard to do well and almost all directors who try for this wind up flubbing it. Reitman, wisely, hasn’t tried — he’s kept things within his own ballpark — which is why Thank You for Smoking “works.” I’m not saying wait for the DVD, but at the same time I can’t quite say you have to stop everything and run down to the plex to see it…and this isn’t some smart-ass attitude trip exercise. The subject is close to millions, obviously. I first started smoking when I was 14 or 15. My first serious quit happened when I was 25, but every now and then I’d relapse. I used to think of cigarettes as “little friends” (I loved that term) but no more and never again.
When I first saw the photo of former New York cop Lou Eppolito and his partner after their arrest for alleged involvement in mob hits, I knew I’d seen him before. It hit me this morning…it was that five-second quickie cameo in which Eppolito played “Fat Andy” in Goodfellas. Remember that long elaborate steadicam shot in which the camera, assuming Ray Liotta’s travelling POV, goes from one wiseguy to the next inside that bamboo-decorated mob hangout? Eppolito is one of the patrons who waves slightly at Liotta and says, in a relaxed and unforced way, “What’s up, guy?” Eppolito has played nine small roles in films over the past fifteen years or so.
Saw The Aristocrats (ThinkFilm, 7.29) for the second time last night (the first viewing was at Sundance), and it was no less fascinating, subversive or howlingly funny. Take your mother to see this film! Here’s a link to my five month old “Wallow In It” Sundance review (scroll down a ways) and here’s the trailer. My favorite highlights, in this order, are (a) Kevin Pollak doing Chris Walken telling the Aristocrats joke (“It’s…crazy!”); (b) Gilbert Gottfried doing the joke just after 9.11 at a Manhattan Friar’s Club roast (also a bit in which Gottfried explains why a certain sexual act involving people of a certain age would most likely result in a certain anatomical reaction); (c) Martin Mull telling the old anthropologist/kiki joke but using the Aristocrats as a substitute; d) Andy Dick explaining what the rusty trombone is; (e) Pat Cooper’s rendition involving a woman giving birth to a Shetland pony; and (g) the joke told by the little South Park guys (this is Jett’s favorite).
After The Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas had a chance to enter the pantheon of great human storytellers. Go ahead, laugh…but his Star Wars movies brought him to the edge of greatness. After his first two and even after the disappointment of Return of the Jedi, all Lucas had to do was a great prequel trilogy. Had he blown us away with Episodes I – III, he would have joined…brace yourselves… Shakespeare, Kurosawa, the Brothers Grimm and the others in the Hall of Stories. His influence on movies and marketing is not in dispute. I’m saying the stories themselves were good, and had potential to be great. His characters, their universe, the backstory…they bored into our minds until they became archetype. Jedi-ism is even a recognized religion in some places. He was right there and he blew it. Like the Wachowski brothers, he had a chance to make something great…bigger than him, bigger than all of us. Something to last into the future. Had he made a cohesive six-story epic that excited and held our fascination, he’d be in, and they’d still be talking about The Force and Darth Vader a thousand years from now. But like the makers of The Matrix, Lucas is going down in flames. Of all the storms creative people weather in their lives, why must the hardest be success?
Country singer and songwriter Blaze Foley was much admired within his realm, but he was also a big ornery sucker who drank too much. When his significant other Sybil Rosen introduced Blaze to her parents, her mother took one look and reportedly wept. I myself wept when I read about Foley’s habit of wearing duct tape wrapped around his boots (total low-rent asshole move), and how he once made a suit out of duct tape (worse), and how his casket was wrapped in the stuff. (Foley was shot to death at age 39 in 1989.)
From “Song Of a Poet Who Died in the Gutter“: “It almost goes without saying that films about musicians will focus on boozy, self-destructive behavior — Walk The Line, Bird, I Saw The Light, Payday, Michael Apted‘s Stardust, etc. But Blaze feels home-grown and self-owned in a subdued sort of way. It has a downmarket, lived-in vibe. I wasn’t exactly ‘entertained’, but every line, scene and performance felt honest and unforced.
Gifted but temperamental, Foley (Ben Dickey) never really got rolling as a recording artist, but he was a well-respected outlaw artist with a certain following in the ’70s and ’80s. Dickey’s purry singing style, similar to Foley’s, reminds me of a sadder Tony Joe White (“Polk Salad Annie”).
Hawke focuses on the guy’s soft, meditative side and particularly his relationship with real-life ex Sybil Rosen (Alia Shawkat). He gets a truly exceptional performance out of Dickey, a hulking, elephant-sized musician who’s never acted prior to this. Dickey’s Foley is such a good fit — centered, settled, unhurried — that I nearly forgot about the bulk factor.
Blaze offers noteworthy supporting perfs from Kris Kristofferson (as Foley’s dad), Sam Rockwell, Richard Linklater, Steve Zahn (as a trio of record company partners) and Josh Hamilton, among others.
The script was co-written by Hawke and Rosen, author of a relationship memoir titled titled “Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley“. You can just sense that Hawke knows musician behavior like his own. Hell, I was one myself (i.e., a mediocre drummer) for a while, and know the turf to some extent, and it all feels right.
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