In a 7.25 Boston Phoenix piece about Somerville projectionist David Kornfeld (“David Kornfeld’s High Noon”), Chris Marstall passes along a couple of laments from the widely respected Chapin Cutler, co-founder of Boston Light & Sound.
Lament #1 is that Cutler “Cutler doesn’t go to movies in [Boston] any more because of widespread projection problems. The last time he went, he took his son to see True Grit. The picture was wildly out of focus, and hot-spotted in the middle. He talked to the manager about the problems, but they didn’t get fixed and he felt blown off.
Lament #2 is that “in terms of presentation quality, dimness is the big issue. Dimness can be caused by several factors, Cutler said. Bulbs pushed past their rated lifetime, bulbs that are underpowered for their room, bulb focus, dirty port glass, dirty lenses, dirty screens, damaged reflectors — all factors that apply to both film and digital projectors.
“The message I heard over and over again in speaking to projectionists and theater managers,” Marstall summarizes, “was [that] to avoid a steady degradation in quality, you have to invest in a program of monitoring and maintenance.”
Cutler is the resident projection guru at the Telluride Film Festival. Here’s a brief interview I did with him at the end of last year’s festival:
The DVD Beaver screen captures and comparisons of Olive Films’ Bluray of High Noon (out 7.17) are thrilling. For the 189th time, here’s my 7.27.07 piece arguing that Fred Zinneman‘s 1952 classic is a far better film than Rio Bravo. Topped off (or resting upon, really) a Dimitri Tiomkin score that just kills, there’s really no argument.
This is a day or two old, but it’s revealing, I think, when Bill Clinton tells Harvey Weinstein (who was guest-hosting for Piers Morgan) that he’s never given any thought about who might play him in a film. Not Brad Pitt (“too good looking”), he said. George Clooney “is at least more my size. He’s good-looking but, you know, you could put bulbous things on his nose and you could do makeup with him.”
The best Clinton so far has been John Travolta‘s in Primary Colors — he had that laid-back folksy charm. Dennis Quaid‘s Clinton was better than decent, I thought, in HBO’s The Special Relationship.
Clinton singled out High Noon as his all-time favorite film, having seen it “25 or 30 times.” Dwight D. Eisenhower was also a seious fan; I read somewhere that George Bush also swears by it. Clinton talks a bit more about High Noon on the two-disc special edition DVD that came out in ’08.
About five years ago I wrote that High Noon “is not about the Old West, obviously — it’s a metaphor movie about the Hollywood climate in the early ’50s — but it walks and talks like a western, and is angry, blunt, honed and unequivocal to that end. It’s about the very worst in people, and the best in a single, anxious, far-from-perfect man. I’m speaking of screenwriter-producer Carl Foreman, who was being eyeballed by the Hollywood right for alleged Communist ties when he wrote it, and receiving a very tough lesson in human nature in the process.
“Foreman wound up writing a crap-free movie that talks tough, cuts no slack and speaks with a single voice.
“You know from the get-go that High Noon is going to say something hard and fundamental about who and what we are. It’s not going to poke along some dusty trail and go yippie-ki-yay and twirl a six-gun. It’s going to look you in the eye and say what’s what, and not just about the political and moral climate in some small western town that Gary Cooper’s Willl Kane is the sheriff of.
“High Noon may seem a bit stodgy or conventional to some and perhaps not as excitingly cinematic to the elites, but it’s a far greater film than Rio Bravo.
“Both are about a lawman (Cooper in High Noon, John Wayne in Rio Bravo) facing up to bad guys who will kill him if he doesn’t arrest or kill them first. The similarities pretty much end there.
“High Noon is about facing very tough odds alone, and how you can’t finally trust anyone but yourself because most of your ‘friends’ and neighbors will equivocate or desert you when the going gets tough. Rio Bravo is about standing up to evil with your flawed but loyal pallies and nourishing their souls in the bargain — about doing what you can to help them become better men. This basically translates into everyone pitching in to help an alcoholic (Dean Martin) get straight and reclaim his self-respect. High Noon doesn’t need help. It’s about solitude, values…four o’clock in the morning courage.
“We’d all like to have loyal supportive friends by our side, but honestly, which represents the more realistic view of human nature? The more admirable?”
Olive Films’ forthcoming Bluray of the 315-minute cut of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (called Novacento in Europe) is an absolute essential. It’s a sprawling big-canvas movie in spades, a Marxist-erotic epic with several colorful performances from a big international cast (Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Donald Sutherland, Burt Lancaster, Sterling Hayden), and abundant with painterly passion and political feeling. It’s a helluva grand-scale history pageant.
1900 is too pedantic and lecture-y at the end (or so I’ve always felt), but Vittorio Storaro‘s cinematography includes several complex extended tracking shots delivering special heavenly highs, and it has a couple of very upfront sex scenes and an unforgettable presentation of Italy’s old-world class division scheme and the horrors of 1920s and ’30 Italian fascism (vividly represented by Sutherland’s Attila character, a demonic perv for the ages). Ennio Morricone‘s score is a rapture in itself.
The five-hour version is a bear, but those great scenes are necessary to have and hold.
I’ve never forgotten a scene depicting a high-class party in Rome, set in the 1920s or ’30s, in which a white horse named Cocaine — a birthday gift, as I recall — is led right into the middle of the main room. That’s Bertolucci’s sensualism for you, as well as the drug culture of the mid ’70s.
I remember interviewing Hayden in 1978 at the Plaza hotel, and his telling me about his death scene in 1900 and how he wrote his final line — “I’ve always loved the wind.” But I knew it from memory and repeated it before Hayden had a chance to, and I remember his delight and his patting my knee in appreciation.
Novacento streets on 5.15, or a little more than two weeks hence.
Jeffrey Kaufman‘s 4.28 Bluray.com review is a good read, but I was immediately brought down by the announcement that Olive, a respectable boutique outfit, is presenting 1900/Novacento with a 1.78 to 1 aspect ratio. Not only are there many sources and indications that the film was shot and presented at 1.66 to 1, but I saw 1900 at the N.Y. Film Festival in September 1976 and can all but conclusively state that it was projected at 1.66. So bad on Olive for bending to the fascists on this point.
In a July 2007 HE piece that explained how and why High Noon is a far greater film that Rio Bravo (one of the best essays I’ve ever posted on this site), I included a Jean-Luc Godard quote that argued against my viewpoint, but which I’ve always enjoyed on its own terms:
“The great filmmakers always tie themselves down by complying with the rules of the game,” Godard said. “Take, for example, the films of Howard Hawks, and in particular Rio Bravo. That is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all others. Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all he holds most dear into a well-worn subject.”
In 100 words or less, please name any 21st century filmmaker who has made such a film over the last decade or so — a film that works as unpretentious genre entertainment on one level but also offers a meaningful metaphoric journey of whatever kind if you want to dig deeper and look behind the curtain. A film in other words that doesn’t announce or insist upon its deeper, weightier content but which definitely has the “horses” if you do a little probing.
If you ask me Michael Clayton is such a film. Readers are advised that they’re not allowed to mention anything by Peter Jackson in this thread.
I finally saw Chris Kentis and Laura Lau‘s Silent House (Open Road, 3.9) last night, having missed it at Sundance 2011. I also managed to miss Gustavo Hernandez‘s Uruguyan original, which the Kentis-Lau version is a remake of, at the Director’s Fortnight section of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.
My son Dylan didn’t care for the final third and I, too, had issues with this portion, which wanders into Johnny Favorite territory. But the single-take “real time” aspect — it gives the impression of being one continual 88-minute hand-held shot — won me over as an exercise alone. On top of which Kentis-Lau are trying to revive the creepy-scary Repulsion vibe — showing very little, relying mainly on sounds, forcing the imagination to do the work. This alone puts Silent House heads and shoulders above most horror pics. So at the very least I applaud the effort even if I found some of the action and payoff material bothersome and misleading.
Elizabeth Olsen totally carries the film as Sara, the terrorized lead. Her costars (Adam Trese, Eric Sheffer Stevens, Julia Taylor Ross, Haley Murphy) aren’t given a chance to do anything that might stick in your mind, at least from a performance standpoint.
The most noteworthy “real time” films in my book are Rope (’48), The Set-Up (’49), High Noon (’52), 12 Angry Men (’57), Nick of Time (’95), Run Lola Run (’98), Phone Booth (’03), Before Sunset (’04), The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (’05) and United 93 (’06). Wait, didn’t United 93 go in for a little compression here and there?
I’ve been susceptible to the perceptions of UCLA film professor Howard Suber since the mid ’90s, which is when I first listened to his incisive commentary on the Criterion Collection laser discs of The Graduate, High Noon and Some Like It Hot. Three months ago I asked Suber for specially burned DVDs of these. When I returned from Santa Barbara this morning I found discs of Suber’s Graduate and High Noon commentaries laid on top of the films. Here’s a small portion of the Graduate disc:
I chose this portion because Suber points out the highly significant contributions of The Graduate‘s production designer Richard Sylbert with the black and white wardrobes and interior design, etc. There’s a lot more to this 1967 classic than just story, dialogue and performances. It’s really quite an integrated audio-visual tour de force.
The Graduate images in the clip are a third-generation dupe of an old laser disc so naturally it doesn’t hold a candle to more recent DVD and Bluray versions. I don’t know what the reason is for the skips and the speed-ups.
By prior arrangement a cat sitter is living in my apartment until next Sunday so I won’t be able to watch these five Blurays (not to mention Amazon-purchased Blurays of The Apartment and Cleopatra) for a while. So from my room at the Hotel Santa Barbara I’ve been looking to experience these Blurays by proxy, and John Nolte‘s Big Hollywood piece on The Apartment Bluray is the best I’ve come across so far.
This is the only time in my life that I’ve felt any sense of values-based kinship with Nolte, whose conservative political views have often appalled me. But it’s never difficult to find common ground on movies with problematic people. Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was an admirer of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Foreign Correspondent, so by that standard I could probably have a nice chat with him if we could somehow meet. John McCain likes Shane, George Bush loves High Noon, etc. I’ll bet Pol Pot liked some of my all-time favorites.
What I don’t get is how an unhinged rightwing loon like Jon Voight could point to his work in Coming Home, Deliverance, Midnight Cowboy and Runaway Train and say, “That was good, I’m proud of those films, they’ll always be part of me” and still think like he does.
Longtime Village Voice film critic Jim Hoberman has been cut loose. Hoberman had been a Voice critic since 19831978, a staffer since ’83 and the paper’s senior critic since ’88. The news was initially posted at 5:37 pm eastern, and then New York/”Daily Intel”‘s Joe Coscarelliposted it at 6:08 pm. This makes Karina Longworth the only noteworthy V.V./L.A. Weekly film critic left on the payroll.
“To celebrate his 30th anniversary as a film critic at The Village Voice, on 1.5.08 the Museum of the Moving Image presented a conversation with Hoberman moderated by New York Times film critic A. O. Scott.”
“I’ve seen a lot of people lose their jobs there in the last five years,” Hoberman told Coscarelli. “I would be disingenuous to say I hadn’t considered the possibility that this would happen to me eventually. I was shocked, but not surprised.”
The correct spelling of the Hogan’s Heroes thing: “Hoohhhhberman!”
And here are nine memorable Hoberman quotes from Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny. Can I be honest in a Lee Marvin sort of way? The only Hoberman riff on this list that I fully agree with (and enjoy) is the one about Blue Velvet. The florid praise by way of ecstatic description of the wilder portions of Inglorious Basterds seems excessively geeky and cul-de-sacky. I know what Inglorious Basterds is. I sat through that fucker twice, and I don’t think I could stand it a third time. You can’t fool me or push me around. Those days are over.
High Noon forever! And Rio Bravo…well, it’s pretty good here and there. Especially the silent part with grubby Dean Martin and the coin and the spittoon and that look of total disgust on the Duke’s face. But why the hell does Martin knock him cold with a piece of wood?
John Williams‘ score for War Horse is relentless. It doesn’t just tell you what to feel at every turn — it browbeats you into each new emotional moment like a schoolyard bully. “Feel this…and now that…feel it!” And yet Dimitri Tiomkin‘s High Noon score does exactly the same thing, and I have no problem with that. It’s one of my all-time fave scores, and Williams’ War Horse score is one of my all-time peeves.
Tiomkin’s score is so consistent with that melody (“Do Not Forsake Me,” etc.) and persistent and all over you that it almost turns High Noon into a kind of musical. Emphatic out-front movie scores are so great when they work, and so awful when they don’t. Two samples: High Noon #1, High Noon #2.
For those who read too quickly: I didn’t write this to slam War Horse for the 319th time. I was pointing out an irony. I don’t like Williams’ score for mauling viewers and telling them what to feel every step of the way, but I love Tiomkin’s score for doing the exact same thing.
Here’s to Harry Morgan, who died this morning at age 96. His long-running TV roles on M.A.S.H. and Dragnet never mattered much to me. But his three best performances did. They were (a) Henry Fonda‘s trail homie in William Wellman‘s The Ox-Bow Incident, (b) one of the many small-town cowards who abandon Gary Cooper in his hour of need in High Noon, and (c) and an officer who goes off his gourd after getting lost in a maze of underground tunnels in Blake Edwards‘ What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (’66).
A German Bluray (Region 2) of William Wellman‘s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) has been out since late August. A bit on the nose at times, but one of Wellman’s finest. Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Harry Morgan and Anthony Quinn gave career-best performances. Criterion would have done better to issue a Bluray of this (especially in view of Arthur C. Miller‘s moody, Gregg Toland-like cinematography) than that atrocious grainstorm Stageocach.
So when’s the Region 1 Bluray of this 20th Century Fox classic coming out, Schawn Belston or James Finn? What other black and white westerns should be on Bluray? Red River, High Noon, The Gunfighter and what else?