No film reduces me to mush like The Wizard Of Oz. Every damn time. It’s that vulnerable, open-hearted, lay-it-down Judy Garland performance. (She really meant and felt every line.) Bert Lahr and Jack Haley‘s New York accents have been making me chuckle or decades. And those song lyric rhymings. “For nearly forty years this story has given faithful service to the young in heart, and time has been powerless to put its kindly philosophy out of fashion.” I know that seeing it in IMAX 3-D is going to be at least interesting. The 2D version will always be there.
I learned this afternoon that even though Paramount technicians spent a lot of time and money restoring George Stevens‘ Shane (’53) and spiffing it up for Bluray and high-def viewings, they’ve sold it to Warner Bros. as part of that overall catalogue deal that was announced last October. Does that mean Warner Home Video will release a Shane Bluray this year to commemorate the film’s 60th anniversary? I just asked a WHV spokesperson and her answer was to say as little as possible.
So I asked if she could confirm that the restored high-def digital Shane…can she at least confirm that this version is what will be shown next month at the TCM Classic Film Festival? Nope, she said. Can’t confirm or deny.
As I noted yesterday, dealing with home video operations is like dealing with the Soviet Union in the ’70s or North Korea today. They live in their own realm, and always by stealth and secrecy.
She didn’t explain why I shouldn’t necessarily get my hopes up about seeing a 60th anniversary Shane Bluray this year. It might conceivably happen, she implied, and then again it might not. Remember that Warner Home Video ignored Cabaret‘s 40th anniversary by waiting until 2013 to release the Bluray…even though it played at the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival. And Ben-Hur‘s 50th anniversary was celebrated 52 years after its release when the WHV Bluray was released in 2011. The bottom line is that WHV isn’t much for celebrating anniversaries. They do what they want to do when they want to do it.
The 3D remastering of the 1939 The Wizard of Oz is finished, I’m told. It would have made marketing sense to release it concurrent with the opening of the 3D Oz The Great and Powerful a couple of weeks ago but nope. WHV blew that opportunity also. They’ll be releasing the 3D Oz next fall, according to this report.
A blunt view would be that the Warner Home Video guys are either timid of spirit or asleep at the wheel…or maybe both. The Bluray business is slowly losing steam, I realize, but still….
I saw Sam Raimi‘s Oz The Great and Powerful tonight on the Disney lot, but the invite came with my pledge to not review it until Friday, March 8th, or opening day. Anyway Oz screened in the main Disney theatre with grade-A 3D projection, and when it ended around 9:20-something a review by Variety‘s Justin Chang had posted. Plus five reviews are now up on Rotten Tomatoes so all bets are off, it would seem. But I’ll hold for now.
Chang is calling Oz diverting family fare with a few portions that connect, but he’s mainly saying that it’s composed of thin material that’s not very involving — “rings hollow,” “gaudily depersonalized,” “visual Baum-bast.” He adds that it makes you want to rush home and pop in the Bluray of the original 1939 The Wizard of Oz , which is where the real nutrition still resides. But he praises the film’s “exquisite” black-and-white prologue, composed in a 1.33 aspect ratio, set on “a windy strip of Kansas prairie” and showing James Franco‘s wily circus magician-slash-con man performing and sweet-talking a couple of ladies.
I have to at least say that Chang is right-on about this portion. The opening credits (also in black and white 3D) are inventive and beautiful and altogether quite masterful. Handsome naturalistic black-and-white 3D hasn’t been seen since…what?…The Creature From The Black Lagoon? (Tim Burton‘s Frankenweenie was animated.) “This is amazing…delightful,” I was saying to myself. “I haven’t watched anything like this ever on a big screen…the first time in my life!”
This section recalls the opening of Victor Fleming‘s The Wizard of Oz in that it lays out character issues and plants a couple of character seeds that will sorta kinda pay off later on. (Of course, if Raimi really wanted to pay tribute to the original Oz he would have rendered this sequence in monochrome sepia.)
Honestly? The lensing, writing and acting in this portion of Oz the Great and Powerful (which lasts maybe 14 or 15 minutes) are better than in the rest of the film, which runs another 110 minutes and has been shot in widescreen color 3D. So I can at least say for now that Oz the Great and Powerful is worth the price just to catch the black-and-white 3D.
Note: Variety is now running high-contrast, Benday-ish, Wall Street Journal-styled images of critics and other contributors.
Yesterday afternoon I drove out to Universal to watch a new DCP of Vertigo, which is the basis of the forthcoming Bluray. I’m not going to share my reactions until later, but it did leave me wondering if Vertigo really and truly deserves its #1 position in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll. Every time I see it it gets a little creakier, just a little bit harder to get lost in. I used to think this 1958 film was eerily haunting and slightly spooky and totally swimming in emotional obsession like few other films in history, but it’s getting old and the Eisenhower-era seams are showing.
Maybe it’s because I’ve seen Vertigo too many times, but more and more I’m noticing and getting stopped by the exasperating, flat-footed aspects. That expository dialogue in that early scene in Midge’s apartment. James Stewart‘s inability to be even slightly covert as he follows Kim Novak around San Francisco. That nonsensical moment when the landlady of the McKittrick Hotel says that Novak hasn’t been in the hotel, a lame tease on Hitchcock’s part. Novak’s pathetic line to Stewart in her hotel room: “Like me?” Novak’s stupidity in putting on the Carlotta necklace. The absurdity of a heavily shadowed nun scaring Novak enough to fall or leap put of the San Juan Batista bell tower. I’m sorry but all these things were vaguely irritating me and then some.
Hollywood Elsewhere’s 45 or 46 Greatest Films of All Time: The Godfather Part II, Raging Bull, High Noon, Zodiac, Strangers on a Train, Barry Lyndon (except for the dead zone portion in Act Three), L’Avventura, Citizen Kane, The Social Network, North by Northwest, The Godfather, Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, Shane, Sexy Beast, Taxi Driver, Some Like It Hot, Children of Men, On The Waterfront, The Wizard Of Oz, The Limey, the Sopranos epic, The Train, Goodfellas, On The Waterfront, Sunset Boulevard, The American Friend, Psycho, Blow Up, Prince of The City, Full Metal Jacket, L’eclisse, United 93, Vertigo, Deliverance, The Hit, Purple Rose of Cairo, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Only Angels Have Wings, Lolita, Bloody Kids, Amores perros.
Sam Raimi‘s Oz The Great and Powerful will apparently begin as a black-and-white film with a 1.37 to 1 aspect ratio — a nice homage to Victor Fleming‘s The Wizard of Oz (’39), which began that way also. (Technically Fleming’s film began with sepia-toned b & w but let’s not quibble.) The Raimi trailer was shown earlier today at Comic-Con.
Sam Raimi‘s Oz: The Great and Powerful opens on 3.8.13. The date in itself tells me something. Disney believes in it but they’re not sure to what degree (the film was shot in 2011), so they’re hedging just a bit. Raimi’s first film since Drag Me To Hell is an origin story about, in a sense, Frank Morgan‘s character in the original The Wizard of Oz, called Oscar Diggs and played by James Franco. Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams and Zach Braff costar. I distrust family flicks. I go to them with a “show me” attitude.
I drove up to Santa Barbara this morning to attend a screening of Mike Cahill and Brit Marling‘s Another Earth, which opened on 7.22 to mostly positive reviews. I wrote on 7.19 that while “it’s partly a sci-fi fantasy about the approach of a second earth, it’s mainly about loss and recovery and redemption” and as such is one of the year’s most intriguing indies, particularly for its emotional, skillfully under-written quality.
At today’s lawn luncheon following 11 am Santa Barbara screening of Another Earth — (l. to r.) costar William Mapother, star-cowriter-co-producer Brit Marling, Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling, director-cowriter Mike Cahill.
The first thing I did when I slipped into the darkened Riviera Theatre during the 11 am showing was to take a nap. The floor was so hard it almost hurt to lie on my back but I went right out. I woke up for the q & a. Costar William Mapother, star-cowriter-coproducer Brit Marling and director-cowriter Mike Cahill kicked it around with Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling.
Then everyone went over to a nice outdoor garden party at a beautiful classic Spanish home, hosted by owners Marilyn Jorgenson and Errol Jahnke. Lots of nice food and not too many guests, and everyone in a nice mild mood. The back yard had fenced-in chickens and a dog who liked playing tug-of-war with a stick.
The sun was so hot that after an hour or so I began to slowly melt like the Wicked Witch of the West…”destroying my beautiful wickedness!” Plus I was wearing mostly black just like Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz so it all fit together. You don’t ever want to be standing in the hot sun with a slight wine buzz-on. It doesn’t feel right.
I spoke to Marling for a few minutes. I asked how many times she’d done the same dog-and-pony show with Cahill and Mapother since the Sundance debut six months ago. I wasn’t trying to trip her up by asking how bored she was getting from doing interviews, but simply how many times. Her answer — i.e., that she loves doing them and that today’s event was really special — told me she’s very political. Then she let her guard down and admitted there’s only one more to go…fine.
We spoke briefly about Nick Jarecki‘s Arbitrage, a financial chicanery drama in which she plays Richard Gere‘s daughter along with costars Eva Green and Susan Sarandon. It’s now being edited with a possibility of screening at Sundance 2012, Jarecki told me.
It’s very curious that Another Earth and Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia are so similar — both being about approaching planets getting closer and closer, but really about people with significant emotional and spiritual issues. And that these films were first seen at 2011 film festivals only four months apart. Cahill, Marling and Mapother all said they haven’t seen the Von Trier.
(l. to r.) Cahill, Marling and Durling during q & a at Riviera Theatre, which followed 11 am screening.
It seems like a fair tribute to assemble some of the comments posted in this space by the late George Hickenlooper. I knew Hickenlooper well enough to hear some of his more pithy observations (he was a shrewd judge of character). Alas, none of these quotes are especially meditative or philosophical. Like all Hollywood Elsewhere commentary they’re about dispute. If anyone has found any further Hickenlooper quotes that would make this a more well-rounded portrait, please forward.
On the circumstances behind the photo of himself and Barack Obama, which happened in concert with the filming of Hicktown:
“It’s a funny picture. I’d just finished filming with Obama for all of the three minutes he had before speaking to 100,000 folks in Denver on October 26th. After I finished shooting a photographer was standing there and believe it or not Obama said, ‘Let’s get a picture.’ I wasn’t even about to ask. I was so damn starstruck. and believe me I’m never starstruck. After the picture my cousin John Hickenlooper [i.e., the current Democratic candidate for Colorado governor] shared a joke with Obama that was based on an earlier conversation I’d with with John, and then Obama mentioned the joke in his speech that night. It was really impressive. At that moment I realized, this guy isn’t your typical robot politician. He actually listens.”
On Francis Coppola’s Releasing Hearts of Darkness on DVD via Paramount Home Video in 2007 Without Mentioning It to Hickenlooper, Who Co-Directed, Much Less Asking or Allowing Him To Record a Commentary Track:
“This is a real slap in the face to me and to filmmakers in general,” Hickenlooper told the N.Y. Observer. “It’s very disillusioning because I worship Francis. He’s trying to portray himself as this icon of artistic integrity, and yet simultaneously he’s completely burying me and my [former directing] partner.”
On The True Authorship of Hearts of Darkness:
“I think the more appropriate way to look at it is that Hearts of Darkness is Eleanor Coppola’s story. It’s not her film. Hardly. It’s her story. But that’s because I decided to make it her story.
“When I got involved with this project 20 years ago, Showtime was going to make it a one-hour TV special called Apocalypse Now Revisited. It was going to be basically an hour-long special about how they did the war pyrotechnics. It was going to be dull and stupid.
“At the time I told Steve Hewitt and my partner Fax Bahr that “nobody cares about a making of movie, especially one that is 14 years old.” I argued that the film had to have an emotional component. At the time, no one was familiar with Eleanor’s diary ‘Notes.’ My father had purchased it for me on my 16th birthday. I ate it up.
“When I got involved with HoD, I advocated using her diary as the narrative thread. I got incredible resistance from Showtime, and I got initial resistance from Eleanor. Not much, but some.
“Once I was able to convince everyone that the film would best be told through her narrative voice, it was then and only then it became her story.
“Eleanor did shoot the footage in the Philippines back in 1976, but she only stepped twice into our cutting room on the back lot of Universal. Twice. For a total of eight hours. I was there for a year, 15 to 18 hours a day. So it’s not a film by Eleanor, but I guess it’s sexier from a marketing angle to make it look that way.”
On The Influence of Les Blank on Documentarians, and particularly in response to Hip-Hop Homey asking “who cares if Blank’s Burden of Dreams is streaming for free?”
“‘Who cares if it’s streaming for free?’ Who cares if someone breaks into your home and cleans out your refrigerator? Independent filmmakers rely on funds for our work so we can continue to make films. What planet are you on, Hip Hop? Give me a break.
“As far as Burden of Dreams it was the main inspiration for Hearts of Darkness. Without Blank’s film, HoD would have been nothing more than a behind-the-scene look at how Francis blew up Do Long Bridge. Blank is the most powerful and honest documentary filmmaker there is. He avoid navel-gazing at all costs and his work doesn’t have that Pottery Barn sheen which afflicts most filmmakers today.
“We actually licensed some footage from Les for Hearts of Darkness. The entire Napa sequence at Francis’ vineyard was shot by Les during the celebration of Coppola’s 40th birthday party. I’d tell you this and more if Lionsgate were interested in Fax Bahr and I doing a commentary for the new Bluray, but apparently they’re not.”
The Relationship Between Himself, Billy Bob Thornton and the two Sling Blades (i.e., Thornton’s feature plus Hickenlooper’s Some Call It A Sling Blade):
“I enjoyed Billy Bob’s Sling Blade. It was different than the feature Billy Bob and I had discussed making. The film I wanted to make would have been slightly darker in tone. The Karl character that Billy Bob portrayed in the feature was a little softer and more audience-friendly. Our original plan was to use the short as the first act of the feature and then once Karl leaves the sanitarium the film pays homage to The Wizard of Oz and slowly fades to color, only to return to black-and-white at the end.
“There is no question that Billy Bob is a great talent, and yet his abusive temperament made him very difficult to deal with. I ultimately walked away from the film and was not ‘passed over’, as the Harvey Weinstein spin machine tried to suggest. My contribution was primarily to the tone and many of the supporting characters in the short. Billy Bob and I developed the feature to some length. At the time Billy Bob’s idea was to have Karl released and then meet up with a woman who was a third-degree burn victim. I felt this was too heavy handed and suggested that Karl should develop a relationship with a young boy. After seeing the film it appears to me he used my suggestion.
“Billy Bob did a great job with the feature on his own and he deserves the career he has had. At the same time he has left a wake of very distraught folks who have had to deal with him intimately. He has a very sweet, charming side to him, but there clearly is some kind of disorder there that he is very aware of. That’s really all I have to say about it. I think the short is worth another look. Thanks, Jeff, for recognizing it.”
On The Late Simon Monjack:
“Simon Monjack had nothing to do with Factory Girl or the screenplay. He filed a frivolous lawsuit against us weeks before principal photography, making bogus claims that we had stolen his script. He held us literally hostage and we were forced to settle with him as he held our production over a barrel.
“I posted this information on IMDB two years ago in order to warn people because Monjack was using his Factory Girl ‘credit’ to solicit and then steal money from other investors. Then one night at three in the morning Brittany Murphy (who was a good friend and a girl I had come close to casting as Edie Sedgwick) called me in tears, begging me to take this posting down. It was going to ruin her husband. I told Brittany it was the truth and warned her, as many other did, about Monjack who had a criminal record and a long, long list of legal complaints against him. In the end I told Brittany I would do it for her and remove the post because I really cared for her as a friend.
“The last thing I told Brittany is ‘Do you know who this guy is? I mean, do you really know him. Do you know what you’re doing by marrying him?’ At this point Brittany became angry and told me she knew Monjack better than anyone and then hung up on me. A few months later I tried to call her to see if she was alright and Monjack would not let me speak to her. I so so feared something bad would happen. I thought he might take her for all her money. I’m sure the guy is in deep mourning in the wake of her death. But one can surely speculate that his clear lack of character and background couldn’t have led to the most healthy environment. I really feel bad for Brittany. She was a sweet angel and didn’t deserve anything bad to happen to her ever. May she rest in peace. I will miss her. We will all miss her.”
On The Passing of Maury Chaykin:
“I’m very saddened by the death of Maury. He truly was one of the most superb actors I have ever worked with. You could sense his greatness on the set. He has a few scenes in Casino Jack, and the entire cast and crew was in awe of his immense talent. And when I say talent there is only one way to underscore that, and that is by saying it was comparable to Brando’s. He was a Canadian Brando whose performances were so connected to his own inner life that every choice he made, even different, was pitch perfect. It was a great honor to work with him.”
On The Matter of “Instant Soul Reads”:
“Sorry, guys, I have no soul. I’ve tried to acquire one but I keep getting denied. Every time I reach for that the big brass ring, I keep finding myself in dogtown with all these low-lifes. Perhaps my life would be simpler if I were just a person unknown amongst all these folks who have hearts of darkness, but alas there’s no relief for any man from elysian fields or factory girl or mayor of the sunset strip. Perhaps I should try my luck at the casino, jack. And the bounty I took out three years ago ended up costing me only 40 dollars and the fellow’s head was shrunk and is now hanging from my rear view mirror. It’s very charming…thanks, guys. I really shouldn’t spend so much time on the internet.”
The Guardian‘s Shane Danielson took issue today with a sentiment I posted on 8.13 about the extraordinary clarity in the forthcoming Psycho Bluray (which has already been released in England).
I said I “love being able to see stuff that you weren’t intended to see” — like the pancake makeup on Martin Balsam’s face in a certain closeup — “but which Blu-ray has now revealed.” Danielson says he’d prefer it if Bluray transfers looked less exacting and more celluloid-y. Okay, but he gets too many things wrong in the piece.
One, he says my article appeared “last week.” Today is Tuesday, 8.31, so it actually appeared not last week nor the week before but 19 days or two and a half weeks ago.
Two, Danielson gives Balsam a new first name — “Robert.”
Three, he claims that “the Blu-ray edition of Paramount’s 1953 War of the Worlds has given fans much anguish, with the wires holding up the Martian spaceships now clearly visible in almost every shot.” Except there’s no Bluray of George Pal’s 1953 classic. The wires are, however, clearly visible on the 2005 DVD.
Four, Danielson complains that while watching Robert Harris‘s Bluray restoration of The Godfather trilogy two years ago in a Times Square Virgin Megastore that it had “a precision to the images, a sort of hyperreal clarity, that didn’t jibe with my memory of having watched the film, either in the cinema or at home.” In fact Harris worked on the trilogy with dp Gordon Willis and produced one of the most celluloidy-looking Blurays in history. And two, as Harris said this afternoon, “He was probably looking at it on a crappy monitor with the color and contrast pumped to the hilt…don’t watch these films at electronic consumer superstores.”
And five, he asks what the difference is between Warner Home Video technicians digitally erasing the wires holding up the Cowardly Lion’s tail in The Wizard of Oz and George Lucas‘s much-maligned ‘fix-ups’ to the original Star Wars trilogy? The standard, says Harris, is original viewing standards. “if 1939 audiences didn’t see the wires when they saw The Wizard of Oz in theatres, then present-day audiences shouldn’t see them on the Blu-ray.” The line isn’t as clear with Star Wars, but if Greedo didn’t shoot first in the original 1977 version then he shouldn’t shoot first (or simultaneously) in the digitally revised version. Simple.
The following xerox of Todd McCarthy‘s Alice in Wonderland review is for anyone and everyone, of course, but it’s particularly aimed at the HE reader/twerp known as Wrecktem, who earlier today (a) said that my alleged meme about how “‘this movie is going to be a disaster’ is a bust”; and (b) suggested that “the UK “exhibitor Wells supposedly talked to about this film should be banned from this industry for life for lying about the quality of the film.”
Here’s McCarthy’s mostly dismissive assessment:
“‘You’ve lost your muchness,’ Johnny Depp‘s Mad Hatter remarks to his newly shrunken teenage friend, and much the same could be said of Tim Burton in the wake of his encounter with a Victorian-era heroine of imaginative powers even wilder than his own.
“Quite like what one would expect from such a match of filmmaker and material and also something less, this Alice in Wonderland has its moments of delight, humor and bedazzlement. But it also becomes more ordinary as it goes along, building to a generic battle climax similar to any number of others in CGI-heavy movies of the past few years.
“A humongous Disney promo effort and inevitable curiosity about the first post-Avatar 3D extravaganza will pull wondrous early B.O. numbers, although long-term forecast could become clouded by the imminent arrival of further high-profile kid-friendly features.
“It all seemed like such a natural fit — Burton and Lewis Carroll, Depp as the key component in fiction’s most eccentric tea party, and 3D put at the service of a story offering unlimited visual possibilities. Not that it’s gone all wrong; not entirely. But for all its clever design, beguiling creatures and witty actors, the picture feels far more conventional than it should; it’s a Disney film illustrated by Burton, rather than a Burton film that happens to be released by Disney.
“The script by Linda Woolverton (a Disney standard-bearer with a major hand in Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Mulan) crucially skews the material by advancing the leading lady’s age from pre-pubescence to 19. The main upshot of the change is that this trip to Underland, as it’s referred to here, becomes Alice’s second, not first.
“The not-inconsiderable benefit is that enables Alice to be played by Mia Wasikowska, an actress of willowy, Gwyneth Paltrowesque beauty but, more important here, of a pale but powerful resolve that confers upon the picture any gravity it may possess.
“After an over-the-rooftops cinematic entry into London that could as easily have alighted at the residence of Sweeney Todd (or, for that matter, Ebenezer Scrooge), a delirious little Alice awakens from yet another nightmare to ask her father, ‘Do you think I’ve gone ’round the bend?’ To which he offers the encouraging, tone-setting reply, ‘All the best people are.’
“Thirteen years later, in an amusing framing story invented by Woolverton, a pale, sulky Alice is put up for an arranged marriage by her widowed mother (the enchantingly mordant Lindsay Duncan) with the twitty son of an aristocratic family. The lavish would-be engagement party quickly and appealingly establishes Alice as an impudent contrarian with a mind of her own; when, in front of hundreds of elegant guests, she is meant to accept the fatuous lad’s proposal, she cries out, ‘I think I need a moment!’ and promptly follows a white rabbit down a hole.
“Just as, at such a transformative interlude, The Wizard of Oz switched from black-and-white to color, this should have marked the point when ‘Please Put on 3D Glasses!’ flashed onscreen and everything took on an all-consuming, eye-popping look (the 3D in the garden party sequence is actually banal, even poorly judged). In fact, Alice enters a verdant, overgrown world that undeniably resembles Avatar‘s Pandora and encounters at least one creature, a skeptical caterpillar, that is actually blue.
“As things get ‘curiouser and curiouser,’ she also meets the round, argumentative twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum; the vaporous and grinning Cheshire Cat; the manic March Hare; Depp’s Mad Hatter, with saucer eyes, Bozo-like red hair and gap teeth that bring Madonna to mind; and, inevitably, the fearsome Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who spares Alice from her favorite edict — ‘Off with their heads!’ — because she, like all the others, needs to know if this is ‘the’ Alice who visited so many years before.
“Script arguably needed a narrative backbone of a sort not to be found in the episodic books, and Woolverton has obliged. Unfortunately, it’s one that turns Alice into a formulaic piece of work, which Carroll’s creation was anything but. Climactic action setpiece, with an unlikely young warrior taking on a fearsome beast while gobs of CGI soldiers clash, smacks of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Golden Compass, The Chronicles of Narnia and any number of other such recent ventures. Thus does Alice become normalized, a tilt Burton is surprisingly incapable of opposing.
“A jaw-dropping coda pivots on a ‘visionary’ character’s forthcoming voyage to open up trade with China, provoking musings about Disney’s rationale for this sort of corporate encomium to a vast young market, as well as thoughts of a never-to-be-made sequel set among 19th-century Chinese as inscrutable and combative as the population of Underland.
“To be sure, the design, effects, makeup and technical work is of a high order. Other than Alice, the most memorable characters are the wonderful hunting dog Bayard and the elusive Cheshire Cat, superbly voiced by Timothy Spall and Stephen Fry, respectively.
“Among thesps whose faces can be discerned, Bonham Carter authoritatively takes dudgeon to a new high as the Red Queen. Unfortunately, Anne Hathaway is miscast as her sister, the White Queen, as her white hair and black eyebrows look weird and she’s not temperamentally suited to the role’s benign superciliousness. And Depp is Depp, slip-siding among moods, accents, looks, rhythms and keys like a jazz player on his own wavelength, to disarming, if transient, effect.”
MCN’s Michael Wilmington has assembled a somewhat lengthy but well-chosen list of 2009 DVDs that he considers the year’s 21 best — most of which I agree with. Wings of Desire, Z, Do The Right Thing, North by Northwest, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Wizard of Oz…the usual-usuals.
But surely a key value in determining “best” in this context alludes to high-end appearance. Wilmington should be talking about best looking, best mastered, best restored, etc. But he barely mentions this, focusing instead on the lasting long-view film-bum value of the movies themselves. Which you can get from any greatest-flicks-of-all-time book written by anyone.
And why is Wilmington focusing on DVDs in the first place? Isn’t this a little like writing a piece in 1999 about the best VHS tapes of the year? A sophisticated uptown film hound like Wilmington should be on the Blu-ray beat, period. Has the DVD audience not primarily become dishevelled middle-market and downmarket types who wander about Walmart and Target and Giant stores on Sunday afternoons?
“Peter Jackson‘s infatuation with fancy visual effects mortally wounds The Lovely Bones,” writes Daily Variety senior critic Todd McCarthy in what may be the first cut in an onslaught of critical knives. Do howlings winds and heaving seas approach?
Lovely Bones director Peter Jackson
“Alice Sebold‘s cheerily melancholy bestseller, centered upon a 14-year-old girl who narrates the story from heaven after having been brutally murdered, provides almost ready-made bigscreen material. But Jackson undermines solid work from a good cast with show-offy celestial evocations that severely disrupt the emotional connections with the characters.
“The book’s rep, the names of Jackson and exec producer Steven Spielberg, and a mighty year-end push by Paramount/DreamWorks will likely put this over with the public to a substantial extent, but it still rates as a significant artistic disappointment.
“There has been cautious optimism among longtime Jackson followers that this material might inspire him to create a worthy companion piece to his 1994 Heavenly Creatures, which similarly involves teenagers and murder in an otherwise tranquil setting and remains far and away his best film.
“The potential was certainly there in the book, which reminds of Dennis Lehane‘s successfully filmed novels Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone in its devastating emotional trauma, but offers the distinctive perspective of the most entirely plausible omniscient narrator in modern literature.
“Unfortunately, the massive success Jackson has enjoyed in the intervening years with his CGI-heavy The Lord of the Rings saga (the source of which receives fleeting homage in a bookstore scene here) and King Kong has infected the way he approaches this far more intimate tale. Instead of having the late Susie Salmon occupy a little perch in an abstract heavenly gazebo from which she can peer down upon her family and anyone else — all that is really necessary from a narrative point of view — the director has indulged his whims to create constantly shifting backdrops depicting an afterlife evocative of The Sound of Music or The Wizard of Oz one moment, The Little Prince or Teletubbies the next.
“It’s a shame, because the first half-hour or so suggests that Jackson, had he taken a vow to keep it real and use not a single visual effect, still has it in him to relate a human story in a direct, vibrant manner.”
“When it sticks to the everyday neighborhood inhabited by its characters, The Lovely Bones, which was shot on Pennsylvania locations and in New Zealand studios, finds a reasonable equilibrium between drama and production values. When it ventures beyond it, heaven turns into Hades.”
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For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg‘s tastiest and wickedest film — intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...
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