I hit my local WeHo Pavilions last night for provisions, and in less than five minutes I had donated my iPhone 4S (which I’d just bought a new battery for at the cost of $60-something bills) to some aisle-wandering sociopath. I do stuff like this. I’ll place an item of value on a shelf or a tabletop while distracted by some fleeting, absent-minded-professor thought, and then I’ll walk away and it gets stolen or it doesn’t. Most of the time the item will get turned in and everything’s cool, but not last night.
I ran anxiously and somewhat angrily from aisle to aisle in search of the damn thing, of course…pant, pant. Within three or four minutes I had asked the Pavilions manager to call my number in hopes that I might hear the distinctive ring (20th Century Fox fanfare) but no dice.
I went out to my car to see if I’d left it on the seat, and on my way back in I noticed a swarthy. greasy-looking homeless type on his way out without groceries. Who goes into a Pavilions and leaves from the entrance door without bags of food? No-accounts looking to gnosh on whatever they can find in the deli department, right? An instinct told me to stop this guy or ask him to empty his pockets (or even tackle him and search his pockets) but that would have made me look bad with the cops being called so I let it go, but I’m guessing there’s at least a 50% or 60% chance that he was the guy.
The phone was probably in reach and reclaimable, in short, but my inner Lee Marvin wimped out. In a sense this is the story of my life.
I did the tracking thing with that iPad3 “find your lost iPhone” software, but the phone has to be using wifi to be located and so far it hasn’t shown up. At least the thief (possibly that icky-looking greaseball) is smart enough to know you have to turn off a stolen phone so it can’t be tracked. I could go on Craig’s List today and respond to every new ad for a used iPhone 4S with a Westside phone number, I suppose, but the odds are not in my favor.
Now I’ll have to buy a new one so I guess I’ll get the effing iPhone 5, which I hate the idea of because I’ll have to buy three charging connectors besides. I have to have three so I don’t have to switch off between my three computers. I feel angry like Elvis Costello in the late ’70s.
I popped the disc in and almost immediately my screen was flooded with alien digital data — ugly noise composed of red, blue and white worms — and an awful buzzing sound. I took the disc out but noticed right away that it had temporarily ruined my Oppo’s ability to deliver clean images on other discs. I had to call tech support and switch out the HDMI cables and go to default and lose all my digital download settings. Everything was fixed after about a 45 minute process, but what a mess.
The Oppo doesn’t play 3D, but the Creature disc offers a 2D option. I had just popped in another 3D Bluray, Warner Home Video’s Dial M for Murder, and the menu offered this option. I naturally presumed this would repeat with the Creature 3D Bluray. Nope. I was told by Universal that nobody else has experienced this problem — fine. But why, then, did the Dial M disc play without issue while the Creature disc didn’t?
A highly intelligent and very well written assessment of the differences between 70mm and digital 4K presentations of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master was provided this morning by Twitchfilm’s Jason Gorber. He basically says 4K is just as good as 70mm, and in some ways better. I agree. I saw The Master in 4K last weekend and I could hear the dialogue more clearly than during my initial 70mm exposure in Toronto.
Gorber also notices something that I pointed out on 9.19 when I wrote that that “delicate bits of dirt have been added to the 4K version of The Master — to the digital intermediate, I mean — in order to give the digital versions the look of film.” As Gorber puts it, “you can still see dirt on the 4K ‘print’…occasionally black specks creep into the image, little bits of grunge that keep the image from appearing pristine.
“This was very confusing,” Gorber writes, until he realized that the black specks and grungy gunks are there “because PTA wanted them there.
“It’s gunk he either added, or at least allowed to stay, built into the digital master as artifacts of the process. This is the cinema equivalent of leaving in easily removable tape hiss, or worse, adding in the sound of vinyl pops or cracks in order to come across as ‘retro.’ In certain scenes (the ‘blinking’ test is one), in both presentations, you can hear the wheeze of the camera chugging away.
“This is a filmmaker not afraid to show the seams of his process, and while reluctantly creating a digital ‘print,’ he nonetheless left in a number of these quirks of analogue filmmaking to make it appear a bit less … perfect.
“Going further, PTA could easily have added the cue marks as well to the 4K, added bob and weave into the digital source so that it to exhibited all the ‘flaws’ inherent in film projection. He went part way but not all the way there, still crafting a near pristine digital master that does a more than satisfactory job of presenting the film in its best possible light.”
Who cares if End of Watch and House at the End of the Street tied for first place at $13 million each and Clint Eastwood‘s Trouble With the Curve tallied $12.7 million? It could have Clint tied for first with End of Watch and End of the Street in second place or vice versa with a little three-card-monte switcharound. It doesn’t matter. It’s a minus-ten topic of discussion.
It was clear from the Trouble With The Curve trailers that with a few variations Clint is playing the same snarly old guy that he played in Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino. Trouble didn’t get the reviews it wanted, okay, but if pays off at the end. So why didn’t the Gran Torino crowd show up in greater numbers? Or will they show up in two or three weeks’ time? Did Clint’s “empty chair” routine at the Republican National Convention have anything to do with anything?
Something made me twitch a bit during my second viewing of Josh Radnor‘s Liberal Arts (IFC Films, 9.14), which I wrote admiring things about in early July and before that at Sundance last January. I’m speaking of a slight aversion to what I regard as an excessive amount of dewy-eyed sensitivity in Radnor — not only in the character he’s playing (a 35 year-old college admissions guy) but in his own temperament, as he’s the director-writer and is presumably drawing from the well.
The story is about Radnor visiting his college and falling into an infatuation with a 19 year-old sophomore (Elizabeth Olsen) and getting all glum and guilt-trippy about it. A voice inside was saying “will you ease with the sensitive shit and just tap it already?” I mentioned last month that I have a certain perspective as I felt a bit funny about having a relationship with a 19 year-old when I was 28. It does feel weird. Then again life is short and we all know Olsen will probably experience much more caring and compassion from Radnor than she would from some 19 or 20-year-old horndog.
And so I started to feel a bit impatient with Radnor’s girlyman hesitancy. He needs a little Vince Vaughn, some unregenerate guy-ness to round things out. You get the idea he doesn’t have a lot of primal energy inside him. Radnor is Woody Allen-esque but not as funny — he’s just not as good with the zingers and the comebacks. He’s all about being mental and morose and oh-so-attuned.
Radnor and Olsen are 16 years apart, and perhaps the best scene in the whole film is when Radnor figures out some equations. When I was 19 she was 3…bad. When I’m 41 or 42 Olsen will be 25 or 26…a little sketchy. But when I’m 50 she’ll be 34…a tiny bit better. When I’m 60 she’ll be 44…excellent! When I’m 70 she’ll be 54…perfect! When I’m 80 she’ll be 64…let’s get married right now! It can’t last? Maybe not, but what in life is guaranteed to be a long-term thing?
My thing with the 19 year-old when I was 28 was pretty wonderful, by the way. I did have a concern when she wound up dumping me after 18 months or so. I was devastated, in fact, but that’s life. All’s fair, rough and tumble, no assurances.
I don’t know anything about longterm relationships, much less keeping the fires going in the midst of one. My marriage lasted four years. My other relationships (including the affair with the married journalist) have all lasted two or three years so what do I know? But I’m asking myself about the premise of Hope Springs, which I was mostly okay with, and wondering how common it is for couples in their 50s or 60s or older to re-ignite and get things going again.
The film suggests at one point, humorously, that very few over-40 types are having sex with any regularity. When I was married I knew couples in their late 30s and 40s who, I learned or was told, were maybe once-a-weekers. At best. I’m presuming (though I don’t know) that once-a-weekers in their 50s or 60s are less common. Once-a-monthers?
Relationships are hard. You have to reach deeper and deeper within and give it up Delbert McLinton-style, and if you hold back and retreat into yourself for some selfish reason you’ll gradually lose her. Because you have to give it up even when you don’t feel like it. And sometimes that’s difficult. “Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a man who’s tired of fucking her,” etc. How do you work it, I’m wondering, when you switch out the beautiful woman with a woman you love, respect and care deeply for, but whom you’re no longer panting heavily for, at least not in an Elvis Presley “Burning Love” way?
So I wonder how much I really believed Hope Springs . But I liked the idea of it, at least, and the feeling of going with it as far as that went, and I quite enjoyed the performances by Meryl Streep and the always solid Tommy Lee Jones.
But I was asking myself, “Why is the movie telling me that Jones and Jones alone is the one causing all the trouble? Why can’t Streep’s character be contributing in some way, however passively or unintentionally, to their sexual enervation or dysfunction or laziness?”
Yesterday’s Twitter war between Simon Pegg and self-described “immoral, vulgar, gay-loving feminist” Courtney Stoker was an odd back-and-forth. Pegg posted a photo of several ComicCon “cosplay” (i.e., costume play) women dressed in Princess Leia‘s Return of the Jedi harem costume, and wrote “makes noise like Homer Simpson thinking of donuts.” Stoker replied that Pegg is a “gross unenlightened jerk” and that he was “objectifying geek women & discouraging more from identifying as geek.”
In other words, in Stoker’s view, Pegg wasn’t getting with the spirit of ComicCon cosplay and degrading the environment by conspicuously smacking his lips and sounding like LexG/Ballsworth. I get what Stoker is saying but c’mon…a couple of dozen women in harem costumes and Pegg is a sleazebag for noting that harem-girl attire has a certain effect upon his libido? Pegg replied to Stoker by saying “it was not my intention to offend and I am against the objectification of women when the intention is malicious…chums?” And Stoker responded “if you’re actually against it, apologize.”
A guy is always asking for trouble, of course, if he says anything in a public forum that objectifies women or alludes to their sexual allure in any lewd way. It’s unwise to go there. But the point of a harem costume, of course, is to sexually titillate or arouse. The reason George Lucas told Carrie Fisher to wear a harem costume in that Jedi sequence is because it would be sexually titillating or arousing to the Star Wars fan base. The reason women wear Princess Leia harem costumes to ComicCon is because they know that sexually titillating costumes always get attention, and that a certain portion of this attention (if not the bulk of it) will be prurient in nature. They know that going in so Pegg’s reaction, however obviously he expressed it, was more or less precisely what they were expecting if not looking for.
HE reader “Film Buff” (a.k.a. “CH”) has passed along two complaints about alleged substandard 3D presentation of The Amazing Spider-Man at the Arclight Dome — his own and one from a guy named “Spleen” who posted on Yelp.
“Maybe I’m crying over spilt milk, but the experience I had at the Arclight Dome yesterday [on Wednesday. 7.4] was awful,” Film Buff writes, “and I kind of had a hunch that I wasn’t the only one. That’s why I searched Cinema Treasures and Yelp reviews to see if anyone had similar issues the week at the Arclight and what do you know — Spleen’s review on Yelp from a day before confirmed it.
“The Spider-Man 3-D I saw at the 11:00 am showing at the Arclight Dome on 7.4 looked flat and awful, barely any 3rd dimension whatsoever. I know a few people walked out to complain, and that when the film was over I asked people around me what they thought of the 3D and they were in agreement that something was off about it, that it looked terrible.
“It took me forever to track down a manager at the Arclight after the show. When I complained about the sub par 3D, she gave me every ridiculous excuse in the book — (a) “Our 3D looks different then other theatres 3D because we use a different system”, (b) “No, you are wong because studio reps drop by and check our system all the time,” and (c) “It was the filmmaking that made it look that way, not us — they filmed it like that.” That last line was classic — blame Marc Web for our subpar 3D! I had to argue with this lady for a good five minute because I’ve seen plenty of 3D films in my time over the last several years and my eyes can spot a piss poor 3D presentation a mile away.
“The Arclight charging 19.50 ($16 for seeing the film on a “holiday”, or weekend plus the 3.50 3D surcharge) for subpar godawful 3D is appalling. Their standards have clearly gone down in the last year or so.”
Here’s Spleen’s rant with edits: “I caught Spider-Man at the Dome in 3D yesterday morning. It had just opened midnight the night before, so they should’ve been on their A game. Nope. They brought in Team Not My Problem for this event, taking their ‘I don’t give a damn’ pills. The 3D was jacked. I went out in the lobby twice to tell them, and so did other people. I overheard one of the Arclight employees come in, watch a little bit of it and exclaim with a ‘why me’ sigh, ‘It looks fine to me.’ Go make some popcorn, doll. You’re obviously part of the problem.
“Eventually (around 20 minutes into the film) the manager stopped the movie and apologized. The crowd kind of became insensitive jerks about it and gave him a hard time. Come on, people, sometimes things don’t work out. Your reaction should be more, ‘Aw, shucks this is a bummer.’ Not a chance to put this man’s qualifications up for review. But, then after about five minutes of waiting they got everything reset and back on.
“Some of the issues with the 3D were fixed, but then I immediately noticed something new: the 3D was flipped with the background elements in the foreground and vice versa. That was it for me.
“Anyway, I mentioned that the 3D was switched to at least three different Arclight employees hoping they’d alert someone asap and fix it for the poor hapless saps still watching the movie in the Dome, but nary a one had a single fuck to give. One lady even said to me, ‘Well, someone alert the media.’ That one took me by surprise, because I didn’t realize it until later that not only was she conveying her absolute disinterest for their moviegoing experience in general, but also that I was Captain Overreaction for mentioning it.
“That’s mainly why they’re getting the 4 stars and not the 5. But on a positive note, the second screening of Amazing Spider-Man in 3D in Cinema 7 looked great!”
I’ve been technically ready to shift HE over to WordPress since early May, but reluctant all the same. Laziness, shock of the new, chickenshit…something. Even though I’ve been told that the blurry Safari image problem on iPhones and iPads might be eliminated when the switch happens. But there’s a solution right now — the new Google browser. I installed it on my iPhone a half-hour ago and the blurry thing vanished. Adios, Safari!
“I disliked Prometheus intensely,” writes “Subashini” in a 6.23 post on the Blog of Disquiet. “I do think that having acrimonious feelings towards the film is the actual point — the film seems to be a stand-in for a certain segment of humanity and its imperialist, ruinous ambitions, though like most films coming out of Hollywood this seems to coexist with its appreciation of capital, technology, and involuntary/reproductive labour.
“That in itself doesn’t make it inherently unlikeable, not at all. But as Susan Sontag wrote in ‘The Imagination of Disaster,’ ‘Science fiction films invite a dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction and violence — a technological view,” and perhaps it’s the nihilist technological determinism of Prometheus that is inherently unsettling. Perhaps it’s this utter lack of meaning in the movie that is its meaning, and consequently the source of my loathing. Maybe a part of me just wants machines and people to get along? I’m not sure.”
I know this for sure: I will never, ever watch this movie again. They can send me a free Bluray and I’ll give it to someone who might appreciate it.
As I wrote on 6.1.12: “Prometheus is impressively composed and colder than a witch’s boob in Siberia — a forbidding gray film about howling winds and chilly people. It’s visually striking, spiritually frigid, emotionally unengaging, at times intriguing but never fascinating. It’s technically impressive, of course — what else would you expect from an expensive Scott sci-fier? And the scary stuff takes hold in the final third. But it delivers an unsatisfying story that leaves you…uhm, cold.”
Also: “What kind of space-voyage movie has on-board officers walking around in flip-flops and sandals? All space travellers in all the space-travel movies going back to George Melies‘ A Trip to the Moon have worn boots or lace-ups or anti-gravitational grip shoes or whatever. Sandals! My heart sank when Michael Fassbender made his entrance with his milky Irish man-toes…don’t get me started.”
The very-good-when-she-was-good Nora Ephron died yesterday at age 71 — hugs and condolences to friends, family, fans. A blood disorder rooted to lukemia, and a shock (nobody outside Ephron’s immediate circle seemed to know it was coming) and very sad — she left way, way too early. But she lived a very full life and experienced the kind of excitement and fulfillment and creative satisfaction that many of us only dream about.
I always think of Bob Dylan‘s line about “death’s honesty” when someone goes. That’s what it is, all right — honest. But keep your distance, pal.
Ephron was an expert, witty, self-deflating writer of a neo-feminist slant. Her best years in this vein began in the late ’60s as a journalist-essayist. Her ’70s articles in particular (largely about food, sex, life in Manhattan) were really, really good — amusing, cutting, confessional, clever. Her screenwriter mother Phoebe once told her that “everything is copy”, and she certainly seemed to have followed that rule. Yes, some of Nora’s ruffs and bon mots were mean at times, but if you’re worried about pissing people off you’ve no business being a writer. Ephron had her voice, and no one can ever take that away.
While married to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein Ephron and he did a re-write of William Goldman‘s All The President’s Men script, and if I’m not mistaken at least one of their scenes made it into that 1976 film — the one in which Dustin Hoffman (as Bernstein) fakes out the chilly, brittle secretary of Dade County investigator Martin Dardis (Ned Beatty) by calling and pretending to be some guy in the County Clerk’s office who needs some records picked up that Dardis wants, etc.
That was a really good scene, and on the strength of it and the screenplay Ephron got a screenwriting gig for a TV movie, and eventually a ticket into the movie bigtime. The ’80s were great for her.
Ephron’s first highly acclaimed screenplay was for Silkwood (’82), which Mike Nichols directed with Meryl Streep as the brave but doomed Karen Silkwood — a strong, commendable, well-acted drama.
And then came her screenplay of Heartburn (’86), which was based on her book of the same name about her marriage to Bernstein and the infidelity that led to their breakup. The Mike Nichols-directed film was quite satisfying during the first half, and less so during the second. The ending was flat.
For me Heartburn was the first movie that told me that Ephron, good as she was, was unwilling to step outside of her well-tended box. She couldn’t seem to admit to any kind of marital failing on the part of her stand-in character, Rachel Samstat (played by Streep), and that was trouble.
As I wrote a few weeks ago after re-watching the film, “The problem is that Jack Nicholson‘s affair with the unseen giraffe lady with the big splayed feet (inspired by Bernstein’s affair with Margaret Jay) happens entirely off-screen and reveals nothing at all about Nicholson’s psychology. All you can sense is that he feels vaguely threatened by fatherhood and responsibility. It just feels bizarre that the affair just happens without the audience being told anything. Nicholson’s Mark is just a selfish shit (which may well have been the case except it takes two to bring a marriage down), and I felt bothered and irritated that I wasn’t getting the whole story.”
And then then came her much-beloved screenplay for When Harry Met Sally (’89), which included that famous Meg Ryan orgasm scene in the diner. That and the film’s nicely-woven emotionality solidified Ephron’s rep as the seasoned go-to lady for romantic comedies, and she was more or less set for life…as far as anyone who lives by their wits and the task of catching and condensing ephemeral pollen can have anything “set.”
Ephron’s first directing effort, This is My Life, a dramedy about a mom (Julie Kavner) who works nights as a stand-up comic, was a critical and box-office dud. But her next film, Sleepless in Seattle (’93), was a huge hit, and was reasonably well handled for the most part. But — sorry but I think it’s true — after that it was all downhill as far as Ephron’s mise en scene-ing was concerned. For she had stepped into another box — that of the highly-paid hyphenate who could presumably deliver sharp, well-sculpted romantic comedies that connected with women and men alike — and the demands of that business or that genre plus her inability to really dig in and go for the challenge and somehow deliver soulful relationship meals in an ’80s and ’90s James L. Brooks-like vein….I don’t know what happened exactly, but it was all diminishing returns, or so it seemed to me.
Mixed Nuts (’94), Michael (’96), You’ve Got Mail (’98), Lucky Numbers (’00), Bewitched (’05) and Julie & Julia (’09) — none of them really worked. And yet I was mostly okay with the screenplay she co-wrote with her sister Delia for Hanging Up (’00), a Diane Keaton-directed film about three sisters (Keaton, Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow) coping with the death of their cantankerous dad (Walter Matthau).
The last time I heard Ephron speak was during a 4.18.09 tribute to Mike Nichols panel at the Museum of Modern Art. She and three of Nichols’ legendary collaborators — Streep, Elaine May and Buck Henry — delivered a “moderately dazzling, often funny, at times chaotic group discussion,” I wrote, “like a spirited dinner-table thing between Uncle Mike and the in-laws…a nice, raggedy, catch-as-catch-can vibe.” Here’s the mp3. Really good stuff.
Here’s a portion of an introduction that Ephron wrote for the Kindle version of her last book, “I Remember Nothing””
“When you’re young, you make jokes about how things slip your mind. You think it’s amusing that you’ve wandered into the kitchen and can’t remember why. Or that you carefully made a shopping list and left it home on the counter. Or that you managed to forget the plot of a movie you saw only last week.
“And then you get older.
“Anyway, at some point, I thought it might be fun to write a book about what I remember, and what I’ve forgotten. I still feel bad about my neck, but I feel even worse about the fact that huge bits of my life have gone slip-sliding away, and I thought I’d better write them down while I still had a sense of humor about it all.”
411’s Roger Friedman has posted another portion in which Ephron lists the things she’ll miss when she’s gone:
“My kids, Nick [Pileggi, her husband), Spring, Fall, waffles, the concept of waffles, bacon, a walk in the park, the idea of a walk in the park, the park, Shakespeare in the Park, the bed, reading in bed, fireworks, laughs, the view out the window, twinkle lights, butter, dinner at home just the two of us, dinner with friends, dinner with friends in cities where none of us lives, Paris, next year in Istanbul, Pride and Prejudice, the Christmas tree, Thanksgiving dinner, one for the table, the dogwood, taking a bath, coming over the bridge to Manhattan, pie.”