“…comes bob-bob-bobbin’ along…along!”
Whenever I’ve thought of Cindy Williams, I’ve thought of The Conversation. Her character, Ann, and Frederic Forrest‘s Mark, her lover or husband or whatever, strolling around San Francisco’s Union Square, bugged and haunted and up to something pretty bad. I’ll always think of her in this context…her finest moment.
Honest confession: I’ve never seen a single episode of Laverne and Shirley.
Speaking as a onetime friend and promotional colleague of Robert Englund, the livewire, ready-for-anything actor who played Freddie Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, I’ve always slightly regretted how Englund wasn’t more fully appreciated for his witty, snap-crackle, quasi-Rennaissance Man personality.
Just as the Frankenstein monster image always seemed to diminish or at least darken the classy gentleman aspect of Boris Karloff, there’s always been a lot more to Englund than that red-and-green sweater and those long razor fingers.
Which isn’t to say that Hollywood Dreams and Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story, a forthcoming doc about Englund, won’t be worth a watch. Pic will have a brief theatrical run in late spring before the streaming launch on June 6th.
“Brief Shining Moment of Freddiemania,” posted on 1.17.15:
“I’m recalling my efforts as a freelance public relations guy for New Line Cinema in ’85 and ’86, and particularly my promotion of Jack Sholder‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and even more particularly the semi-phenomenon know as ‘Freddiemania,’ which originated with spottings of movie fans dressed as Freddy Krueger a la Rocky Horror for midnight showings of Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84).
“There weren’t that many Freddy freaks to be found, to be perfectly honest, but it was an interesting and amusing enough story to persuade Entertainment Tonight and the N.Y. Times and other big outlets to run pieces on it and to speak with Sholder (who later directed The Hidden, one of the finest New Line films ever made) as well as Freddy himself, Robert Englund, with whom I became friendly and hung out with a bit. (Producer Mike DeLuca was a 20 year-old New Line assistant at the time.) One of my big Freddy promotional stunts was persuading Englund to march in New York’s Village Halloween Parade on 10.31.85 from Houston Street up to 14th or 23rd or something like that.
The below image was captured yesterday morning (dawn) during a balloon ride over the Serengeti National Park in northern Tanzania. You can disagree and that’s fine, but it immediately struck me as being in the same aesthetic realm as Freddie Young‘s work on Lawrence of Arabia (’62).
We all understand that first-class Blurays of 1950s big-studio features that were captured on large-format celluloid (VistaVision, Cameras 65, Technirama, Super Panavision, etc.) are glorious eye candy.
Last night I was in heaven as I savored the just-right compositions in Joshua Logan‘s Sayonara (’57), which was shot by Ellsworth Fredricks in Technirama (35mm film run horizontally at 8-perf, or the same as VistaVision). 1080p resolution is great but 4K UHD is better, etc. My God, the fine threads in those Air Force uniforms, Marlon Brando‘s gistening brown hair, the naturally luminous Kyoto exteriors, etc.
But where are those other 4K large-format titles? Why are we still waiting for a 4K UHD Bluray of John Ford‘s The Searchers, which was one of the first Blurays on the market (released on 10.31.06) but which desperately needs to be remastered and 4K’ed and generally brought uo to to speed. Ditto Ben-Hur, shot in Camera 65 and expensively and immaculately transferred to Bluray 11 years ago, but no 4K upgrade on the horizon. Ditto North by Northwest, also shot in VistaVision but not even a promise of a 4K version.
Nobody’s in a hurry, dragging our feet, we’ll get there when we get there, etc.
You can therefore understand my initial excitement when I discovered a claim on Home Theatre Forum, posted on 9.25.22 by a Danish film buff named Kevin Oppegaard (aka “titch” on HTF), that he’d seen “a beautiful, absolutely flawless 4K DCP…if Warner Bros. ever decides to release this on 4K UHD, there will be much rejoicing.”
And yet Oppegard, I’ve been told, is apparently full of shit. A guy who’s reliably in the know informs that Warner Home Entertainment’s DCP of The Searchers is only 2K, and represents the work done 16 years ago.
Somewhere in the Copenhagen area, Kevin Oppegard has just put on a pair of dark sunglassas and a lumpy fishing hat, and is shuffling off into the crowd.
Also not to be trusted is a website claim by Seattle’s Grand Illusion theatre, stating that a “new 4K restoration” was screened a year ago (2.3.22). The same insider informs that WHE’s DCP of North by Northwest is 4K, but if the Grand Illusion presentation really was a true 4K finish (as the web page implies), it would not be of sufficient quality for a 4K UHD release.
The Searchers and North by Northwest are candidates, of course, for eventual 4K UHD release, but there’s nothing to spill at the present time.
I’m not saying that the argument put forward by the “get Andrea Riseborough and her supporters” crowd (Variety‘s Clayton Davis, Puck’s Matthew Belloni, Till director Chinonye Chukwu) ever had any real traction, but for a day or so the anti-Riseborough contingent made some noise and seemed to generate an “uh-oh” atmosphere.
But I think it’s fair to say now that their side in this debate (i.e., the wokester position) is weakening as we speak and they’re basically adopting a rope-a-dope stance. Reasonable, fair-minded human beings are standing against them and their vague allusions to some kind of conniving, elitist, white-person, anti-equity cabal…that’s all going away, I’m afraid. I can feel it.
Director Rod Lurie put it nicely earlier today on Facebook:
If a world–famous movie theatre is being discussed and some mild-mannered fellow asks where it’s located, you don’t play games like Facebook’s WT Solley did the other day. You man up and say it, plain and straight. You certainly don’t pussyfoot around by not mentioning the name of the city or the reason it became a famous venue to begin with.
Set in present-day Los Angeles, Jonah Hill and Kenya Barris‘s You People is a fuck-all racial culture-clash comedy (Jews vs. blacks) that isn’t half bad. In fact it’s darkly, brilliantly funny during the first 25% (I was actually laughing out loud and I never do that), and…okay, slightly less funny but still clever and diverting during the middle section, or roughly 60% of the running time.
The only part that massively sucks is a truly astonishing copout happy ending that occupies the last 12 to 15 minutes, give or take. If you can ignore this huge miscalculation You People doesn’t deserve the mostly shitty reviews — it really doesn’t. 85% to 90% of this well-produced film is not a burn
It’s been described as a 2023 riff on Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, but it’s a lot nervier and crazy-good than anything Stanley Kramer ever had in mind.
Hill is note perfect as a bearded, chunky, vaguely depressed 35 year-old fellow of the Hebrew persuasion; ditto Laurene London as the Muslim-raised cappuccino girl he falls in love with and wants to marry. (And vice versa.) Hill’s trying-way-too-hard-to-be-hip parents are broadly played by David Duchovny and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Eddie Murphy (best of show after Hill) and Nia Long play London’s Baldwin Hills parents. All the major supporting performers are spot-on, especially Sam Jay, Travis Bennett, Deon Cole and Mike Epps.
David Poland‘s “Riseborough: The Drama” appeared around 12 noon eastern. HE agrees (and that’s the difference between Poland and myself– if I like or admire something, I’ll say so regardless of the contentious personality of the author — Poland is too mule-headed to adopt such an attitude).
The two best performances among the five Best Supporting Actress nominees — obviously, hands down, no question — have come from The Banshees of Inisherin‘s Kerry Condon and The Whale‘s Hong Chau. If either one were to win, I’d know in my mind and my heart that the right thing was done.
But neither are fated to win, apparently. Angela Bassett‘s Wakanda Forever turn as Queen Ramonda has it in the bag, we’re told…not because she delivered a richer, fuller, finer performance, but because the word has gone out that it’s time for Bassett to receive a career tribute, partly because she’s in her mid 60s.
I can only tell you that I found her performance tedious, wearying and even painful at times, as I did the film itself. She barks her lines and glares daggers at everyone so they’ll understand her grief over the death of her son, T’Challa (the late Chadwick Boseman). I know for a fact that many others felt similarly challenged when they sat through (or tried to sit through) Wakanda Forever. And it doesn’t matter.
Because the five cops (all black) wouldn’t control their savagery. They acted like wolves mauling a lamb.
But this tragedy, I’m presuming, also had something to do, probably, with Nichols not deferring to their authority. Cops (doesn’t matter what ethnicity) want you to lower your voice, bow your head and mildly submit to their power, and if you don’t do that you’re asking for it.
How many victims (whites included) have died because they refused to use their brains and play it smart?
Nichols ran from the scene, protested his innocence, accused them of needless brutality — and in the last two instances was obviously in the right. Didn’t matter.
Journalists-columnists, I realize, are not allowed to say this. I should know, having said this two or three times before and every time having been accused of gross insensitivity and even racism. Because only an insensitive ayehole would say to a would-be victim of police brutality, “Are you completely lacking in comprehension? Don’t give these animals a reason.”
I’d honestly forgotten that legendary movie composer, conductor and multi-Oscar-winner Alfred Newman composed the 20th Century Fox fanfare theme, and then expanded it by a few bars when CinemaScope came along in ’53. You’d think I’d know this cold, but whatever.
Newman’s scores won nine Oscars, but there are relatively few (Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Wuthering Heights, Foreign Correspondent, The Snake Pit, Twelve O’Clock High, Anastasia, the musical ornamentation of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel) that have really reached inside and moved me.
As for Newman’s overture sequence for How To Marry A Milionaire (a reboot of his 1946 “Street Scene” music), it’s fair to observe that he borrowed heavily from George Gershwin. The overture sequence seems strange by today’s standards, especially for a prelude to a middle-range comedy about gold-diggers. But he was quite the composer-maestro, and served as 20th Century Fox’s music honcho for 20 years.
Alfred Newman was the godfather of the Newman musical family — brother of Lionel and Emil, uncle of pop troubador-poet Randy, father of composers David and Thomas Newman.
