Mondo Cine

AI Critics Say the Darndest Things

2024-09-11T17:07:00.000-07:00

Mr. Coppola's latest film has been long in gestation, presumably since 1977 around the end of the effortless production of Apocalypse Now. On top of the world, Coppola's vision was growing ever expansive and figured now that he'd rewritten the history of Vietnam he could actually remake the entire world in a new image to his liking. Do that Shakespeare in WWII thing. A Central American revolution with helicopters. How about the Roman Empire in New York City?

The movie gods would turn against him in the next decade, and in quick lockstep so would the critics. He got distracted and he made other plans while life happened. Over 45 years later and one less winery in his portfolio, Megalopolis is ready for its close-up.

We'll all see the film in late September and we've been primed by the tantalizingly polarized reactions to its Cannes premiere, which seem to review the production rather than a film that doesn't seem to fit into any neat critical box. It has at least the benefit of people not having walked out muttering "It was... all right?"

I used to work in movie theatres. When they said "It was... all right?" coming out I knew the film would be gone in 2 weeks.

Megalopolis sounds delicious and a little mad. I've gone to more than one film that I was told was either "the best thing he's done" and "the worst thing I ever saw", usually less than an hour apart. That means it's doing something interesting, something a bit confounding, and probably something right.

And the best way to get people talking about such an uncategorizable return to budgets over $3 million is to take over the narrative and upend what people expect based on what those pesky critics have been saying. Surprise them with an unexpected history lesson.

Lionsgate picked up the distribution rights for the U.S. and hired marketing consultant Eddie Egan, who's been in show business almost as long as Megalopolis has been in development, to make the film a must-see event of the Fall.

Do we still care about Coppola films? When's the last time we cared? In September the first full trailer started with a nice line-up of quotes showing how Coppola's films have often been misunderstood and initially weren't received properly by critics. This gambit obviously primes the pump (or proactively plays defense) to challenge what they already knew was going to be a troubled critical landscape.

Sure they hated Apocalypse Now but now it's a classic! (You choose which version is the classic.) Rex Reed: "an epic piece of trash." Andrew Sarris on The Godfather: "a sloppy self-indulgent movie." Owen Gleiberman wrote of Bram Stoker's Dracula "Absurdity." (Um, he's not wrong.)

I think these reviews will actually likely fit for Megalopolis. Pauline Kael didn't think The Godfather was "diminished by its artiness." I'm not in the habit of reading movie reviews from the 1970s (anymore) but I knew this was a gambit to position Megalopolis as a challenging film that the professionals won't initially "appreciate" but you can still trust Coppola. Try the wine. Who didn't get this?

It's a good bit, and cleanses the palate for something that may not want you to take as seriously as it could easily be accused of doing itself. Which apparently was the intent of the campaign according to insiders.

But the industry cried foul. It was quickly pointed out the quotes were fake. *duh* Lionsgate, back-footed, didn't lean into the bit but instead way way back. Sorry, it was an accident. They pulled the trailer within a day. "We screwed up," they said.

By the way the trailer isn't entirely gone:

Some intrepid reporter on the Hollywood beat thought, I wonder if they used ChatGPT to create these quotes instead of doing the actual work of finding them in the wild? A rudimentary test apparently created similar quotes. So the assumption, not verified as of this date, is someone in Lionsgate's marketing department looked up bad reviews for Coppola films and forgot to uncheck the "AI chat" button and when these came up they got dropped straight into the trailer.

And no one checked to make sure they were real before going live.

They dropped them in the trailer? And how many people vet a trailer in a marketing department? For a $120 million picture self-financed by Coppola himself? Certainly more than one or two executives or interns (according to an unnamed producer quoted in THR)? Probably Coppola himself - who's paying for the whole thing?

I find it hard to imagine when these fake quotes were internally tested NO ONE was so worried they said are we sure these are real?

No one cared. It was a bit!

But Lionsgate didn't admit it was a joke. Lionsgate isn't exactly Paramount or some other white-shoe lot worried about EBITA and has shareholders more concerned about next summer's blockbuster than revenues from a huge library and can play fast and...

...hold on this just in. Lionsgate spun off Starz streaming earlier this year to increase stock value as a studio and made a couple acquisitions to strengthen its "core value." There may be a play to make themselves more attractive to a potential merger or buy-out although that's a difficult road. Maybe they're more like Paramount than we thought. When they pissed off the industry, they could have gone all Blair Witch with "It's only real if you believe it's real."(1) but instead they kneeled and took it like good gimps.

And because shit flows downhill they fired that Egan guy. I don't think it's likely Egan was the guy who personally googled "bad quotes from previous Coppola movies," typed them in and presented it on his personal laptop. If they asked him if those quotes were real he probably said "This is a film about a Roman emperor who stops time in a future apocalypse and is based on The Fountainhead. None of this is real."

Now maybe I'm giving too much credit to the studios. To marketing departments. To the guys with 6-figure paychecks and polo club memberships and two mistresses. Maybe after the covid years and a couple strikes a company that's been around since the '60s got sloppy. If it's just that they made one of those AI mistakes well I guess they won't be making that particular one again. There's plenty of others to make.

In any event the quotes are now gone. We're sorry we offended the film critics of a previous generation - when writing about film critically mattered a little bit more. Please acquire us.

And enjoy our fucked-up epic movie.

(1) Another real quote.

Let It Back

2022-01-28T09:50:00.018-08:00

So I’ve seen the original Let It Be (1970) as much as the next Beatle fan, maybe once more than I probably wished, because in that case more is less. I never reached the desire to parse and decode the hints displaying the inevitable and even then overly documented Beatle breakup. It’s chronologically and intriguingly unravelling between The White Album and Abbey Road but dumped like leftovers after Paul’s interview/announcement around the McCartney album he wouldn’t be missing the boys so much.

It's the main attraction of the thing. It’s a grainy car crash that ambles, introducing the deceptively objective Frederick Wiseman “just point and shoot” aesthetic to a wider audience who wasn't ready for it. No talking heads, no Orson Welles. Or so we would be led to believe.

Only later do we all realize how much documentaries lie – the placement of a camera a preemptive editorial intrusion, and every edit an inadvertent act of violence.

It’s a product of its time and the resources at Mr. Lindsay-Hogg's disposal, like the original Star Wars now locked away in aluminum and plastic (or carbonite) on OOP laserdiscs. The lousy feelings are part of the birthing, the myth's been broadcast and once it’s in the can you can change your mind but you can't change the original. Everything would be different if done at another time, by other people, in another circumstance.

New versions don’t erase the originals or really supersede them. They do offer new things to buy. For the completists out there that's the best you can expect.

But 51 years later we have a re-write of the Beatles break-up movie. Like any new version of an old favorite it tried to blunt our skepticism by pretending to be closer to perfect. It’s certainly more attune to our own age. Fifty years on not only has the original audience changed, there’s been 10 million more words written to inform a completely new one. The target hasn’t stopped moving, the rumors have been telephoned so often we don’t recognize where it once belonged and an 8-hour version of Let It Be still won’t be enough. It is however an awfully nice new thing to buy.

Peter Jackson’s edit doesn’t change history after all, no worries you rock’n’rollers, so much as give us more of it. Much more of it. Positioned originally as getting to all the nuance, the ”we laughed a lot” version, it now appears - I haven’t memorized the 1970 film - Jackson’s not only added hours, he’s replaced many events from the original with different coverage as much as possible. He’s writing in fine ink what was only faint pencil shadings before. He knows the general outlines, a mere 81 minutes worth, and proceeds to add 380 minutes of detail work and color correction.

He nods to us with the very first shot, the drum front carried by Mal but adds the slate to authenticate his access from the get. So much coverage they tell us, but with what seems like at least 2 cameras running most times and 10 during the rooftop concert, there’s likely not 57 hours of unique footage as reported but closer 15 to 20 hours total. In other words it’s possible the 8-hour cut could be half of what’s extant. The rest, alternate angles, backs of heads, out of focus?

(The audio’s another story, reportedly over 150 hours worth without corresponding image. And we’ll get to that.)

And it's all been cleaned up and smoothed. More coherently in order even down to a helpful calendar count. As someone who’s read the books, who knows Sulpy and Purple Chick and all three Glyn Johns, the surprise of the thing to me wasn’t so much what’s shockingly new but instead how much old is still in it.

It’s not the white-wash. It’s the very definition of a “hang movie.” The flow is the same from Twickenham to Saville Row to the roof. George still walks out (during “Two of Us” but a different one), John’s still pretty sluggish in the early going, and Yoko, ever Yoko, in the corners of the frame knitting. Ringo stares and smokes, but still barely manages to get past 50 words (just), mostly through dint of one conversation near the middle. Paul's the walrus.

It’s still clear they don’t know what they’re doing but at least they talk about that they don’t know what they’re doing. No grain or wrinkles and the audio’s better but boy does one still gets tired of the Twickenham lighting.

Being the most documented music session in history hardcore fans of the period will already expect the flowerpot conversation, Paul calling Linda “Yoko,” the drugs, divorce and a slipping image, songs repeated on the roof, and Dick James about to sell off the catalog. But we don’t use the word “expected” around here. The original’s 5x shorter and surrounded by bad vibes, bad timing, and lawsuits, and the implosions after India. This new version had explicit sign-offs from all surviving members or estates, and still to a surprising extent simply extends what Lindsay-Hogg managed 50 years ago.

The point is the revelations are, to the initiated, restored outtakes rather than sudden reversals of fortune. Looks between them clarify thoughts only hinted at in the tapes. Proof that the tip of the iceberg is sometimes the whole iceberg. These sessions, partly because the project was so fraught, mostly because it was so heavily documented, has only so much it could really rewrite.

There’s ballsy integrity in going for a patience-challenging 8 hours with this minimum of narrative hand-holding. It’s still more Frederick Wiseman than Michael Moore. Jackson knows the value of simply letting the camera keep rolling when you got something unique. He's certainly got that. And there's the initial tightrope walk in letting all these strangers into your playpen to watch you come up with a new record LESS THAN TWO MONTHS AFTER RELEASING A BEST-SELLING DOUBLE ALBUM. Vacations weren't a thing?

What may have more interesting (and fodder for an even longer edit I can’t believe I said that) is what’s still missing.

George ended up pulling his songs from consideration but the decision remains off-screen, not even a subtitle. He becomes Nicky Hopkins for the rest of it, a session hire (and mocking the whole thing by the end trying to out-peacock Ringo, who’s been there the whole time). We get the entire "Daily Sketch" article read aloud (another bold move on Jackson's part) but still can’t know exactly what happened in the kitchen right before George decided to walk. John and Yoko are suffering from the after-effects of a miscarriage (which would help explain the other members’ willingness to suffer her presence) and a heroin addiction (hiding in plain sight). It circles around the problem of Yoko “sitting on an amp” but softens the conflict by insisting she had company up there with Linda and Maureen. We never hear her ominous request for another mike for herself.

Jackson may have us think it’s not his place to do that autopsy. But we hardly see any of Yoko's many vocal interjections and unsolicited advice, beyond a bit of the famous “after George” freak-out. No grain. Everything smooth.

We do get “Taking a Trip to Carolina” on film, complete takes of “No Pakistanis” and “All Things Must Pass.” Jackson’s elegant cheats laying audio over the backs of people’s heads has received much less criticism than Ron Howard’s continuity and sound manipulations in Eight Days a Week. And it turns out Billy Preston was on the roof after all! The most accomplished archival stunt here is how he’s managed to fill out the many footnotes with more scraps and ends, and nods and winks, paying homage to Lindsay-Hogg’s initial aesthetic instead of making it some talking-head mini-series.

And the power dynamics reveal themselves with more time. Paul was never in charge, and he knows it and that's why he's always working so hard at it. George actually has more control than the ostensive leaders. When he puts his foot down everything stops. No one's going to Egypt, of that he makes sure. Ringo's film date is in cement and no one thinks that can be changed either. Glyn Johns seems always this close to being dismissed. And when John speaks, even if it's in monosyllables everyone stops to listen. He's still the leader even when he doesn't want to be there and has no songs.

Sometimes the real story really is in the footnotes. This is like a 900-page novel with 600 pages of filler. The original feels like the Cliff Notes. If you're in the tent this is a bottomless giftcard. Fifty years later the remaining Beatles have given us a longer version of the same thing. An extended alternative take.

The stake-holders dissed on this period for years after it happened and no one was happy, suggesting their winter of discontent had already cool-set even as Glyn Johns tried to embrace the intended vibe (getting back to basics) three times with three different mixes before Spector came in with a new color Apple. Paul was still trying to rewrite the original record himself in 2003 with his own.

It's all too much. Let It Be should have been a double album as well.

They Lose Their Noses

2020-06-17T12:21:00.006-07:00

I've written about Chinatown before. It's seminal to my appreciation of what movies could do. I caught it years after it came out in a rep house on a double bill with, no kidding, Byrum's Inserts. The savvy of that double bill only now occurs to me.

I expected a Chandler/Cain riff starring Jack Nicholson in full leading-man glamour mode. Yeah, I got that too. And a dozen layers of everything else from design to tone to performance in apparent perfect harmony, in exact concert to its time and also timelessly ageless.

Chinatown now looms large in the the myth of New Hollywood, a view maybe more revisionist than prescient. It's both post-modern and retro; the easy "best screenplay ever written" answer (regardless of reality); the event horizon when all of 1973's MVPs were in the same rooms and working on the same project. It didn't do so well when it came out, regardless of subsequent opinion. And it's the perfect example of worst title ever is the best title only after you've seen it.

And to think for most of the early drafts they weren't even going to end it with a scene in Chinatown.

Sam Wasson's 2020 book-length examination of Chinatown, The Big Goodbye has the subtitle "Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood." He's a young(ish) turk who's written about Blake Edwards and Bob Fosse to good effect in the past, other touchstone creators whose main work I presume was before his time. I get it. The nostalgia for the '60s is only shared by those who weren't here, the famous saw goes. No one over 50 likes Boogie Nights.

Chinatown isn't perfect -- no film is -- but Polanski has gotten as close to anyone in avoiding obvious mistakes (at least when a camera's around). I personally consider his Knife in the Water the most perfect film I've maybe seen, even with some rough dubbing. Every edit just frame-perfect. Wasson knows Chinatown is important. It symbolizes the end of an era, the last great roar of the bohemian elite in the toy palace built out of the rubble of the Easy Rider republic. As recounted in other works of the period by Richard LeGravenese and Ted Demme and Peter Biskind, the "New Hollywood" barely lasted under the weight of its own excesses for six years.

Wasson's going to make a point by going behind the scenes of the bastard child of old and New Hollywood, a script which started as an annoyance Robert Towne had over a nearby development project (so it says here) and was rendered into dark cinema by Polanski still in the traumatic throes of the Manson murders (it says here as well).

How did this wondrous piece of art get made and mean so much?

And... here is where my troubles began. You know the genre of film books that seem determined to unearth all the unsavory gossip of famous or infamous celebrities. These guys aren't so smart, they have worse relationship problems than you ever could. No one reads. Oh, and the drugs. How the mighty have fallen. You're better than this lot. Wasson has quite a group here: the hypochondriac and insecure writer; a failed-actor-now-studio-chief trying to turn the Titanic of Paramount Pictures around under the cold eyes of Gulf & Western; the lead actor who struggled to make it and is taking this lead role as seriously as he can muster; and director Polanski, notorious for more things than there are stars in the heavens.

And Wasson reminds us. Over and over. He opens with a recounting of the Cielo Drive murders and Polanski's inability to get over it. His obsessive staging of every violent scene in subsequent films. Towne so asthmatic he can't work, hits his girlfriend, can't finish, takes credit from somebody else. Evans endlessly bed-ridden with his sciatica, falling into a cocaine snowdrift. Nicholson doesn't know who his real father is and can't stay faithful to Anjelica Huston.

The overarching effect is there's no way this dysfunctional group will make anything note-worthy, mired as they are in their own self-absorbed problems. Wasson is almost dismissive of the work, with a couple interesting exceptions. Nothing but professional praise for Richard Sylbert's production design and Anthea Sylbert's costumes. And a haliographic revelation of Towne's long-secret collaborator Edward Taylor, with whom Towne tested every script, note and idea throughout his career.

Evans can't decide if he's a producer or an executive. The music sucks. John Huston's drunk. We don't have an ending.

There's a precedent to this. Casablanca the other famous classic cobbled together, nearly on accident in the last minute, way more than the sum of its parts, not solely attributable to any one but instead the perfect melange of efficient direction, unfussy writing of an overly complicated story, and damn lucky casting. How did it work? It just does.

Wasson doesn't let anyone off the hook in the last pages, either. Polanski drugs and sleeps with a 15-year-old model and goes into exile. Evans quits/gets fired from Paramount. Towne ends up in a fog of cocaine and can't finish Greystoke either. 15 years later Nicholson fucks up directing the sequel, The Two Jakes.

As the book goes you realize Wasson is more a collector of stories than a storyteller. Unlike the film, the book is less than the sum of its parts. Wasson's point in the subtitle is barely addressed. There's no "end of Hollywood." Instead, Billy Jack has proven you can saturate book a film and make huge grosses "no matter how bad it is" and then, Jaws came out. Chinatown is the "end" of Hollywood simply by nature of its date of release. The modernity of it, hidden so completely you can safely ignore it, evades Wasson's gaze. Why can't they make a picture like this anymore?

The most obvious new primary research here is Wasson's description of Edward Taylor helping Towne through his career, often sitting with him for days and weeks at a time writing scenes, beats, and dialogue, as well as insights into Towne's personal life from ex-wife Julie Payne, whom he lived with during the '70s. While Payne's personal life may have inspired some of Chinatown's twists, it's hard not to finally come away with the sense Wasson includes this material because it makes Towne look just a little bit worse.

Wasson's blindness to a certain bias towards tabloid dismissal appears in cold print on page 314. On the disappointing subsequent careers of his protagonists, he says of Nicholson's post-1974 work: "...[Nicholson's] productivity had declined and the films he chose were largely those that offered him opportunities for flamboyant self-parody (The Shining) and amenable fluff (The Witches of Eastwick)."

Think what you will of Nicholson's wired performance in The Shining, the reason to star in Kubrick's reconstruction of horror being an opportunity for "flamboyant self-parody" was probably not near the top of the list. You could question Kubrick's choice of takes and we know there were hundreds of them. (George C. Scott also knows a performance is often not yours to finesse. But he was warned he'd get his hair mussed.)

And to suggest George Miller's 1987 Witches with its industrial, feminist, Updike-ian undercurrents as mere "fluff," well-produced and half-assed as it is, seems a serious mis-reading.

Wasson wants to place Chinatown in the crux between an old Hollywood (already dead or dying as of 1968, per Mark Harris) and something new, also dying, and towards a more cynical era. But probably being a product of that more cynical age, he never trusted the process. He diminishes the achievement of Chinatown by not taking its creators very seriously and pushes the cynical period earlier than he realizes.

The book comes across not as a celebration, and the only insight to be gleaned is people who make art are, well, complicated. But maybe that's what made the art more interesting in the first place.

Hollywood's Rainbow

2019-08-12T22:18:00.015-07:00

So as a "movie" person it seemed de rigueur to see the new Tarantino joint, Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood.

Funny title. It's a reference to Leone, of course. But also that fey ellipsis suggests a fairy tale or a Disney princess movie from the '90s.

Spoiler alert! (Every article about Once...Hollywood requires a spoiler alert.) It's a Disney princess movie after all.

Not in the text, to be clear. There's a kingdom, and an oppressive hierarchy that prevents our hero from finding true love and happiness. The historical longevity of this kingdom is suspect but subliminal (the functional industrial mechanics are depicted in quotidian details. Fancy camera moves, an actor's dilemma.). The film is chaste; no one's looking to get laid. (The wife, apparently accidentally acquired and barely able to speak English, serves as a distraction and is put back to sleep when her plot use is over. There aren't even any topless women in the Playboy mansion sequence.) Nothing really hedonistic or Fatty Arbuckle about this version of Hollywood.

Our dreamy lead just wants to be with the person he loves the most. You know those movies where the hero asks the girl if she wants to go get a soda and when she says yes it's like the most important triumph of his life? Here he wants his buddy to watch his TV show with him, and when he's already bought the beer and has a plan to order pizza, there's an emotional sense of unspoken camaraderie that's strangely touching at that moment.

And it even has a happily ever after. Our lovers are separated physically, but only until tomorrow, and they're as close as a hand on a piece of glass. This isn't First Man hand on a piece of glass. This is Pickpocket hand on a piece of glass. "Visit me in the hospital," he says. You know he will.

But to be clear, it's also a Leone western. Gunslingers fighting in the landscape of long ago, when things were simpler, fighting forces larger than one man. Dispensing personal hand-to-hand justice when the system, whether it be corrupt oil barons or cynical Hollywood hangers-on, oppress those around them.

Plus, there's sure an inordinate amount of TV western footage in this. Does that make it a western or just a film with westerns in it? Hold that thought.

And like all Leone's westerns (even Once Upon A Time... in America), it's about the death of the frontier. The coming of the railroad. In its way, civilization (whether in the form of Claudia Cardinale or the Teamsters) means the good times are coming to an end.

And what does Tarantino do with this meta/ post-modern conceit? Hollywood fairy tale as western? He makes it a love letter, but he needs an ending. Instead of the railroad coming to town or Ms. Cardinale marking fenceposts on the homestead, he turns to the one event in numerous biographies that mark the death of the Hollywood scene. That day in 1969 when Tate & co. were visited on Cielo Drive by Manson's girls. And Tex.

Tex. Yee-haw. Yes, it's a western all right.

We've heard it many times and not just from (but maybe originating from?) Joan Didion. The hippy vibe turned dark that month. You couldn't keep your door unlocked or pick up hitchhikers anymore. Both featured prominently in this film (Spoiler alert!). The rich turned inward. And three months later it's Altamont. What was next, the Beatles breaking up? Like I said. He ends up making it a fairy tale. If only real life could be like this.

Tarantino makes the ultimate hang-out movie, spending 2+ hours recreating the end of the '60s, channeling Route 66 and Jacques Demy's Model Shop, and withholds until he can't anymore, a final scene of the Wild Bunch ultra-violence, that's cathartic, problematic, beautiful. Stops time.

But because of that, it's hopelessly inconclusive. That car did drive away with the woman who still has a knife, after all. We know what happens next... or do we?

And Sharon Tate lives to make more movies, though probably no more with Roman Polanski. Even though in this film, she's already dead. A dream of lost potential, frozen in the moment where fame is nothing more than a 50-year-old doorman in a theatre who lets her in for free. The same theatre where Julian Kaye confronts Stratton's henchman in American Gigolo.

There are two Hollywoods. The one we wish were true and the boring reality behind the scenes. There are two Rick Daltons, one who cries when he blows a line and one who killed his wife. (Or at least, doubled by one who did.) There are two Sharon Tates, the one up on the screen who walks in a kind of blessed bliss, and the one who never rose above true-crime footnote. There's the end of the '60s, and the false historical pause that allows them to continue on in our dreams, at least past the credits, at least for a little while.

And boy howdy, Tarantino is going to give his version the deepest rabbit-hole Thomas Pynchon treatment he can. Reference after reference, neon signs and real-time TV Guide covers, fake movies and deep-cut album tracks. Kurt Russell as a stuntman and actors who didn't wear helmets on their motorcycles in real life. What is fake and what does the stuff in the background really mean?

Every movie title you see is one of those old stuffy Otto Preminger movies (or might as well be). Not a reference to Midnight Cowboy (1969), Medium Cool (1969), or Easy Rider (1969) (besides a dismissive aside) in sight. Even the set design is in denial about the brick wall that's about to be hit.

Every corner is filled with something. A piece of an Italian locandina, Steve McQueen who famously claimed he was invited to the bungalow that night but ended up going with another girl (because he wasn't Sharon's type anyway), none of which is explained in this movie but it's all right there for those who are not blind.

It's almost too much. Your eyes and your ears can't see it all, can't see enough, are taking in too many things. Subtext, inferences, nods and indulgent pauses. Artifice and the makings of it. We get fan service, Pitt takes off his shirt, we get fetishistic close-ups of needles literally dropping on records and almost too many shots of feet, bare and shod. Beautiful close-ups of headlights.

And yet not a single shot of someone tuning or turning on a car radio. It seems whenever you start a car the music simply starts. You don't get to see a stereo dial in close-up until you've smoked a little LSD. Which is perfect.

My ultimate opinion of the film is mixed at the moment. Which is how I judge most recent Tarantino films. I see them two times or even three, and the good parts get better and the bad parts become worse. Can't ever write them off, though. They're still the best movies to talk about in the lobby when you're a bored usher (as in my earlier formative years).

This thing's a dream, veers close to being a nightmare just to pull the celluloid curtain away (or over) at the last moment. ...Hollywood is incredibly well-made and Tarantino's confidence has built to the point where he can spend what seems like 20 minutes recreating a melodramatic late '60s horse-opera scene shot on a sound stage (with over 10 minutes of lead-up) that's pure minor back-story, a scene any other director in any other era, pre- or post "golden age," would have cut down to 2 minutes. Or completely.

It's indulgent, delicious in how it recreates the fantasy of the industrial complex, too long and yet never boring. Even as it disingenuously foregrounds what happens in front of the camera as more important than what happens behind, or in preproduction or in post.

Tarantino knows damn well how important good, compelling performances are to the success of films -- we refer you to Travolta in Pulp Fiction which I maintain is the primary reason that film didn't tank under its own weight. But who wants to see where the real work happens, in the research department, in razor cutting, designing crane shots, when we all know we're happier watching Brad Pitt drive around in a DeVille listening to the Mamas and the Papas.

So what to make of this technicolor object, told with careful and indulgent care, a shiny object floating in the sea of sequels hiding an iceberg of work and references, and soaking with cultural artifacts made important purely by the attention being bestowed on them even as they remain out of the direct spotlight?

DeCaprio's Roman adventure ("Roman") is either a brilliant nod to the industrial function of international funding practices in the '60s or just a visual rhyme/pun. Rick Dalton uneasily moves towards domestication at the end. Is his new wife his Claudia Cardinale, his civilizing influence, or an excuse to get a girl in her underwear on screen a moment for the big finish?

Tarantino doesn't seem to need to answer this. Probably more interesting that he doesn't. She's unimportant except as a punchline, an indicator that shirtless Brad Pitt will indeed be in the sequel. Because we know how those things go; you don't break up the team. You also leave a bad guy to come back because next time it'll be more personal.

I know that won't really happen. Spoiler alert.

On the first viewing my enjoyment of this film is in direct relation to how much I know the back story. I drove those streets in LA and Burbank. I've seen those movies and played with those toys. The movie seems to be going for something more, but I'm not sure it gets there or even exactly where that is. I imagine a younger generation who didn't grow up watching episodic westerns on TV or who don't know what Spahn ranch is or what Charlie's girls did and would do, who might find this film incomprehensible.

That's part of its charm. It's a focused valentine to one person, speaking a secret language. Quentin, it's taken me so long to come to you.

* screengrab from the blog http://movie-tourist.blogspot.com/2013/05/american-gigolo-1980.html

hEllO mOthEr!

2018-10-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, is two times the charm?

Darren Aronofsky's mother! (so capitalized) seems nice. A amiable and unassuming domestic family drama.

Were it so. This Molotov cocktail, designed intentionally to incite, was insufferable to me the first time I watched it, and also as fascinating, broken, and audacious as anything else I used to obsess over when I wasn't quite sure what the actual rhetorical, industrial, or genre rules were in filmic story-telling.

We would watch The Man Who Fell To Earth, Blue Velvet, Plan 9 From Outer Space, or even Larry Cohen's Special Effects not because they were particularly insightful or moving. Because they seemed to come from another planet. People who stuttered and couldn't get their consonants out. Films circling around some metaphoric truth but unable to speak the right language.

They're all genre films. But they don't follow the rhetorical rules. They lurch and fail to explain. They spend too long motivating what's already understood. They hide their intentions poorly, say the quiet part loud, and obscure the loud parts in hyperbole, or hysteria, or drowned out in even louder blunderbuss.

It's often blamed on the unintentional failure of the proper emphasis. How boring would Blue Velvet have been if Sidney Lumet directed? Or if Pulp Fiction had been told chronologically? I'm all for movies that go off the rails, or maybe have no rails to begin with. Aronofsky seems to have embraced the "hysterical" part.

I don't think there's anything unintentional about mother! It pretty clearly screams early its uber-trappings as idyllic domestic drama as ripe for decoding. Visions of beating hearts and bloody floor openings presumably aren't to be taken literally, and a rogue's gallery of arbitrary visitors into the kingdom of the needy creator (Bardem) lead to the destruction of his talismanic crystal egg in his study, which he thereafter shutters closed, ensuring no one else will enter. Should our lead character (Lawrence) take this sudden denial seriously or personally? A disorienting, hyper-subjective mise-en-scene centered on our heroine frustrates and compels us to watch. Wondering when the rabbit scene is, waiting for him to pull out an axe, or even just the mother part.

The real screams come shortly thereafter.

It helps to know your film history. It also makes you impatient with ground already trod. Mr. Aronofsky clearly had big metaphors in mind, and relishes the cognitive challenges of making plot into thesis, philosophy into conflict. He's made dreams carnal, reality into hallucination. From Pi to Noah, he reduces (elevates?) plot mechanics using literal metaphor into character study. He strips his symbols of literal meaning by making them so literal they dissolve.

In mother!, I feel he's stripped his metaphor of outside meaning and all he has left are the symbols. It's a POV fallacy, which leaves us looking in the wrong direction, but the plot's hiding in plain sight. As an afterthought, detritus of the grand experiment, scratches in the bark that mean nothing to those who don't know what they're looking at. Have some more water.

No wonder people hated it. Both too confrontational and weirdly obvious, mother! boldly breaks what we would consider proper balance between text and subtext. The first and best hint is in the title font itself, a lowercase one-word title misdirecting you to a pretentious yet quiet drama of domesticity and yet insisting on its self-importance by that exclamation point.

I swear, it made me miss the restraint of Larry Cohen.

Damned

2018-04-13T21:39:00.001-07:00

Here's a still from Losey's The Damned, a rather rare cold-war SF-y film to see, at least up to now, from 1962.

I remember where I first saw this shot, published I think in John Baxter's 1970 Science Fiction in the Cinema. People nowadays don't remember such things, but before home video, let alone IMDB, most of the information you could get about films was from survey books like Baxter's, Carlos Clarens' Illustrated History of of the Horror Film, the various volumes of the Barnes' International Film Guide Series, and any number of those Walden Books' pictorial histories.

Make no mistake these were basically picture books, and in the pre-internet days, a good picture would capture your imagination like no collection of words possibly could. And for the most part that was all these authors had. That and old trade reviews, barely remembered viewings when they were younger or other second-hand sources. They couldn't exactly rent the things at the local Blockbuster either.

These stills served as visual relics in thin volumes of holy palimpsests. It was only later, when you discovered the late night listings in the TV Guide, your ability to program the VCR, or the rep house 15 miles out of your way, that you pulled those books down again to review where, exactly, you might have first learned about the Quartermas Xperiment.

Or Curse (Night) of the Demon. Or Myra Breckinridge.

You slowly managed most of the films in the supposed "canon," as deemed by these writers and these publishers. There's an entire generation who learned about classic horror films from Clarens, for good or ill, with wonky plot summaries, the mistakes and the omissions practically hard-coded into all of our (non-)memories of these films. I poured over the Tantivy Marx Brothers: Their World Of Comedy (1968) by Allen Eyles (the 6x6 square British edition) before I ever had access to the rest of the Marx films, trying to make sense of my first accidental viewing of A Night at the Opera one night on TV. Imagine reading that mad and short book about their career before having seen any of their other films (and trying to imagine Duck Soup only through a print description).

Stills from Seconds and The Manchurian Candidate made you hunger for any Frankenheimer you could find. (Birdman of Alcatraz was your solid base hit.) Atkins went on about Metropolis, with pictures and everything in his book. And would we ever see the uncut The Wicker Man? And who the hell was Carl Dreyer?

Being a film aficionado, let alone a completist, was a long difficult journey, often involving drives to theatres in nearby towns, evenings in scary triple-bill houses on skid-row (how I saw Count Yorga after reading about it in Cinefantastique), and decades.

Danny Peary's Cult Movie books were more specific and unlike many of the others from the '60s, clearly written by someone who had actually seen the films rather than only read about them in other, older books.

When at last you caught up with a film that you had lodged in your head for years, since that first compelling, impossible black-and-white still while browsing the used bookstore shelf, it almost didn't matter whether it lived up to expectations. You began to write your own book in your head, with your own plots, your own omissions, your own canon.

The Damned is due to come out from Indicator/ Powerhouse sometime this year on blu-ray. Finally. It turns out it was already released on a Hammer "Icons of Suspense" DVD collection since 2010.

I could have satisfied my curiosity 8 years ago. Damn. I'm not sure I want to see it anyway. Its power as a still, with the man in a rubber suit, the child looking at a flower on the edge of a cliff. What power this unseen post-bomb Hammer film from the early '60s has by remaining undefined, unseen. Lost.

Damned to obscurity and a cultural mis-remembrance. Embalmed in a book, out of print, and etched by a still in a generation of older film goers who couldn't see it for 40 years.

Wonder Women

2017-09-13T22:22:00.000-07:00

I finally caught up with Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman (2017) and found it much better than what I think most superhero movies tend to be. Full disclosure, I really don’t see superhero movies. The 3 Iron Man films, for various reason, were my fill up to now.

What’s most interesting about WW, and less discussed lately than a couple months ago, is how political a woman-centric superhero movie was. Not because it was particularly transgressive, except it automatically is by dint of its mere depiction of gender roles, let alone treatment of them. And even from my limited POV of a white male, there remains a strong sense of empowerment to have Gal Godot take up the (slightly adolescent) ass-kicking mantle peppered with an oh-so-serious alternate history, proto-Spongebob Nietzschean philosophy, fake retro fashion, geek trainspotting, and plenty of beefcake cameos.

This is the superhero film the women have been asking for. Or is it? Is it enough to switch the cast sheet, or as Carol Clover argues, maybe it doesn't even matter your sex if we all want is the protagonist to fight the evil they're facing, and get out at the end to star in the sequel.

There was a similar inkling during The Force Awakens (2015), when Princess Rey wields that light saber. I saw at least one post how ecstatic it was for women viewers to finally see a heroine positioned squarely in the center of the current popular culture myth.

This isn’t the place to analyze women in traditionally male roles, or even to discuss why there have to be such things in our entertainment. I wish we were past all this. I’m just noting that in geek culture lately, you got some cross-dressing that gets a lot more political attention and resonates beyond what it might actually deserve.

Don’t get me wrong. But I'm afraid Gal Godot in that short skirt sold as many tickets as the filmmakers' feminist creed.

Men have been getting this wrong for a long time. Angelina Jolie with hand guns and Gina Corano kicking guys in the balls appeal to 12-year-old impulses in male audiences. Not gonna convince your wife to come see those on a Saturday night.

James Cameron sticks a horse-cock in his heroine’s hands and he thinks he’s doing feminism. Even Kathryn Bigelow thinks that makes characterization. She's wrong, too.

A long time ago (in a galaxy far away), Aliens was playing at the movie theatre I worked at. Giant hit, you’ve heard of it, and the dynamic of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) protecting the young Newt (Carrie Henn) from the bad ass mother alien was powerful emotional stuff. The big moment near the end that James Cameron engineers so well, Ripley appears in the mechanical Transformers-style skip-loader and snarls, “Get away from her, you bitch!”

A scream filled the theatre, the ultimate sense of female empowerment and maternal catharsis. And the scream was from the women. There was an emotional connection beyond a simple action-movie beat.

Hell, just look at the poster. I wasn’t sure Cameron knew exactly what he’d inadvertently stumbled onto there. (After True Lies, I was sure he didn't know.)

Now, with the huge positive financial responses to Rey and Diana, Hollywood have decided maybe they're onto something. And -- I now might be seeing more superhero films.

The Buffalo Roam

2017-06-08T19:10:00.001-07:00

We miss Hunter S. Thompson more than ever recently. His journalistic viewpoint aside, his character is as large and as imposing as any on the political landscape, although it's generally considered he deteriorated into a sideshow (back into a sideshow?) after Nixon's fall from grace, which he took partial credit for.

Shout Factory has just released Art Linson's 1980's "Where The Buffalo Roam" on blu-ray, previously MIA in its original form because of some troublesome music rights that couldn't get cleared until now.

It's Hollywood's first foray into codifying Thompson's unique brand of journalistic anarchy, a vein with a rich history in movies I've written about before. Newspaper writers are outsiders, colorful, generally "good guys" and tend to find themselves in the middle of the action. Without having to shoot anybody.

The film is loosely based on his article in Rolling Stone ("The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat" in 1977) about the disappearance of his friend/lawyer/partner in crime Oscar Acosta. You may know Acosta by Benicio Del Toro's depiction in Gilliam's Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. I think this article was about the time in which Hunter became unreadable to me. At this point he'd become Hunter-exclamation-point (trademark pending) and was more concerned with playing the brand cashing the checks than in adding to his written legacy. Nothing wrong with the Examiner columns. I just like his earlier funnier work. As it is, this first version of history is instructive and on its face much more transgressive than Gilliam's strangely conservative take, and is poking down at HST himself as the asshole he really is. Even though he was listed as a consultant.

It's the first directorial effort of Art Linson, who previously produced rock'n'roll stalwarts as Car Wash and American Hot Wax, and starred Bill Murray, still not sure what he wanted to do with his SNL fame (this just before Meatballs and Stripes). Later he'd figure out he wanted to be in Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch movies.

The film rides the supposed anti-establishment charm of HST and a weird Nixon nostalgia, produced forebodingly at the beginning of the Reagan era. It ends up, accidentally, as a paean to a mode of press coverage we didn't know we wouldn't see again.

And it's packaged as a buddy film. Murray gives a coked-up Snagglepuss performance that Johnny Depp would channel in Gilliam's Fear and Loathing, hanging, fighting and increasingly focused on the yin-yang of his relationship with Lazlo (the "Buffalo"). As in any good buddy film, Peter Boyle (as Lazlo) goes one way while Hunter tries to pull him in another. Lazlo veers increasingly out of his lane while Thompson, determined to bring down his man (Nixon), gets closer to the white-tiled corridors of power, with many antic stops along the way.

The Buffalo is the metaphor of chaos HST is either siding with or fighting. Lazlo's more radical than the radicals he's representing, while meanwhile, Thompson screams at phones, breaks statues, drinks with apparent ill effect, shoots guns, gives his press credentials to total strangers, slips drugs to straights. It's all slapstick background to his real goal, which is to get a story, or simply, to be in one more exciting than the one he's assigned to cover.

And Linson in 1980 pulls it all off with straight-faced incorrectness. Gilliam's version, 10 years later and behind the curve, seems too reverential to embrace Thompson's true thuggish nature, too anxious and guilty to let loose, even as it falls head first into the shiny neon of CGI hallucinations. If only Alex Cox had stayed on the project.

Linson is just happy he got Bill Murray. He should be. It's a velvet-smooth performance, a barrel-aged sing-song Venkman, deeply flawed with his insecurities completely under the waterline. He's a crooked top that seems to gain momentum with each careen off the bumpers of authority.

Spoiler alert. Near the end, HST finally comes face to face with Nixon on the campaign trail, at a urinal in a men's room. Apparently based on HST's single true-to-life encounter with Nixon, the most powerful man in the country and the clown reporter make small talk. Thompson, having appropriated the credentials of another reporter ("Harris from the Post") strips down while he talks. People in this world are either "screwheads" or doomed. Is this an existential identity crisis?

The scene both belittles and raises both men, and beat journalism and high-stakes politics, to the level of inscrutable metaphor and myth.

The film is busy and sloppy. Grunge-period Neil Young and Jimi Hendrix pepper the soundtrack. But the film is trying to get at something. The final scene has Thompson's wearing the disguise that got him the farthest, the suit and tie in his Harris persona (hair all slicked back), having gotten closer to the innermost bowels of power he ever has before. And that's in a goddamn men's room.

His triumph is ephemeral. Thompson ends up standing on a lone airstrip, pleading with his gonzo friend Lazlo, trying to talk sense. But the Buffalo is onto another journey, heading for a far-off jungle to fight another vague rebellion. This time he'll disappear for good, having (literally) lost the map, unable to convince Hunter.

Who would? Thompson's original article insisted Acosta was the crazy one. No one could control the buffalo. And he's left alone on a runway, the wind swirling his tie and fire extinguisher foam spattered on his ill-gotten suit.

The movie suggests he goes on fighting the good fight. But reading it differently (and now we know Thompson drank himself into obsolescence, and in an era where journalism is now more embattled than busman's folly), Thompson had been co-opted by that 3-piece suit. It's as if he's realized, "I'm crazy, but not that crazy." He's been tamed, trapped by his appetite to get inside -- and his own inability to break the rules that really matter. The ones that really meant something.

Thompson's childhood pranks are just that: adolescent, sexless and ultimately inconsequential.

The film, loose-limbed and compelling as it is, both holds up Thompson as a figure of anarchic fun and damns him as someone who didn't have the conviction to, maybe, be crazy enough. Don't worry, it's all an act.

The film didn't do well when it was released. No one knew what to make of it, or Murray. And Hunter Thompson was no popular Woodstein hero figure. A cinematic footnote because of some Motown tracks (and possibly Murray's singing a couple bars of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"), now resurfaces 35 years later, a completely different kind of history lesson.

Linson directed one other film, The Wild Life, Cameron Crowe's follow-up to Ridgemont High, and would produce The Untouchables, Dick Tracy and Fight Club among a respectable array of films. Hunter S. Thompson stopped his own presses in 2005. Bill Murray reportedly bad-mouthed the film, even though it may be his best sustained performance.

As a comedy, it's a bit of a failure. It's one of those films that only get really funny the third time you see it like Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's really a drama, with funny people in it. Now it has the unexpected subtext of showing the downside of being a counter-cultural icon, before anyone involved quite knew what kind of prison that could end up being.

No wonder Thompson didn't like it. He saw his own future, and it wasn't playing himself.

Fellini In Order

2017-05-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

I haven't been able to find anything worth watching on Netflix lately. All old shows and flashy fake sitcoms.

Amazon Prime's selection, beyond the darts at a more meaningful new internet TV, is a disaster. They even took off Take This Job And Shove It last year.

So for the last month or so I've been watching old stuff again, like I've been promising myself for years. My own personal film festival.

I always told myself I should really revisit was Fellini's oeuvre; I'd seen maybe half of them over the years, out of order of course and mostly the classic middle period. Some of the early neo-realist ones eluded me and most of the tired later films never made it to my attention.

He directed a couple dozen films along with a handful of shorts; not insurmountable to get through the entire list. Most all are easily available at the local video store -- if you have one. The local video store without a Fellini section isn't in business anymore anyway. And if you have to, there are streaming options.

To follow an artist with such a signature personality and outlook as Federico is to newly understand his development as if it were preordained. His work breaks down into 3 distinct phases. The neo-realist/rural vs. urban cautionary tales, going from Variety Lights (1951) to La Dolce Vita (1960), is the first, where his characters are invariably diminished in social stature while aiming at something much larger and likely impossible to attain, whether it be fame, understanding of a spouse, to simple grace. La Strada (1954) is the closest to a parable outlining his concept, highlighting what people do what they do, even if they don't know they're doing it.

This is the meat and the heart of Fellini's stature, the awards and the international recognition. The second phase begins under what must have been the growing fame and an existential crisis first hinted at in La Dolce Vita. In his first entry post that glorious signature bummer, "The Temptation of Dr. Antonio" in the portmanteau film Boccaccio '70 (1962) he's magically developed (perhaps helped by access to more money) the baroque camera moves and surreal design sense that not only defies narrative but, somehow, will soon become it. Nothing can be taken literally anymore.

The fragmented and fanciful episodes of 8 1/2 (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965), incomplete searches for identity and meaning, are better served embodied in his larger historical epics. The hippie Fellini Satyricon (1969) and Fellini's Casanova (1976) (both using the possessive in the title, not an accident) are parables and have little to do with history as much as Fellini's own personal artistic crises. The title "Fellini Satyricon" places the creator on equal footing as the source work, while "Fellini's Casanova" reasserts the fact that both these sources, actually age-old classics, were more known by their authors ("Have your read your Petronius today?") until being appropriated and re-authored by a new maestro.

A film near the end of this cycle, Fellini's Roma (1972) (that possessive again), highlights the friction he's exploring with narrative from the other side of history. He's taking on the documentary form full-face, and, starting with the film-maker as character in 8 1/2 through A Director's Notebook (1969), a behind-the-scenes film for television, Fellini has moved off graceless savages and is increasingly interested in how film itself constructs the story. Even a story presumably "autobiographical" and true.

Since La Dolce Vita with a journalist at its heart, to 8 1/2 which treats film-making as existential burden, to his short in 1968's Spirits of the Dead, about a decadent actor who sells his soul to get out of the business (and of life), Fellini investigates how film tells lies about itself. "I'm a born liar." Roma is Satyricon's good twin, not really about Rome, and not really a documentary. It's self-consciously staged, and includes a character called Federico Fellini who's the director of the film you're watching, played by Fellini himself.

How meta can you get? The process doesn't seem to matter anymore. Casanova is arguably the most lush, decadent, personally depressed treatment to assert that the "artiste" is no longer happy when he does it too long. Whatever you may define "it" to be.

This middle period is soaked with self-disdain, a surprising lack of fun (in spite of the color of Juliet and 8 1/2's circle-of-life finish, which seems forced and half-hearted, I'm now reminded, ending on a minor key with that out-of-tune rag-tag band as light fades).

Was it the money? The girls? The drink? Film-making used to be so much more fun when people (and the producers) weren't paying so much attention.

The last period goes from Orchestra Rehearsal (1978) to the final The Voice of the Moon (1990). The budgets are shrinking, the triumph of Amarcord (1973) had been waterlogged by the failure of Casanova, and his themes seem less relevant, playing in minor keys with limited aspirations. Had Fellini taken the criticism of extravagance and arrogance to heart? Amarcord certainly seems a mature and measured melting of what we liked before, the perfect marriage of La Dolce Vita and Roma without the crazy bits, his nostalgic Limelight.

But -- Chaplin didn't stop making movies after that either. City of Women (1980) reads as a weak-wristed swipe at feminism by a provincial misogynist who's not sure he wants to change his ways, and his takes on television, both Orchestra and Ginger and Fred (1986), are grumpy and begrudging, considering it was TV money that got them funded in the first place.

The familiar playfulness with the documentary format reaches its naked apogee with Intervista (1987) which adds Fellini's nostalgia about being "Fellini" with poster-topping cameos of Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, awkwardly wishing they were younger, in a film that makes you wish they were, too.

I found it astounding how many of Fellini's themes persist through his 40-year career, many present from the start. The mode of attack and resources at his disposal changed dramatically after La Dolce Vita's success, and then again 10 years later with Casanova's failure. Yet you can watch a film from the mid '50s and see its echo in the '80s. He continually shows a curiosity about people, a gentle hand against questionable behavior, a willingness to explore how art can reveal the heart of the most ugly character.

In all of them, Fellini "hates the sin but loves the sinner." And not one of these felt a chore to sit through. Okay, maybe The Clowns (1970). That one was tough. I don't get the clown thing he's trying for.

And, it's a misconception Fellini was obsessed with clowns. This isn't something we see through his entire career. Sure, there's a thin layer of grotesquerie, really a showman's distraction, and side characters with too much make-up and funny hair inserted for effect, and certainly all with an underlying threat of artistic anarchy.

Maybe that was his point. Maybe I took it too literally. Maybe I should watch again.

Incorporated

2016-11-29T21:44:00.000-08:00

N.B.: This one is a little inside.

* * *

I like podcasts -- they make my commute go by quicker and more productive. You should really try it (I know you won't listen).

One of my favorite used to be a horror-film one called Killer POV, from Geeknation, which ran for 2 years from April of 2015 to this year, running 145 episodes.

The show was comprised of 3 horror writers/"experts," Rob Galluzzo, Rebekah McKendry, and Elric Kane, some of those names possibly familiar to you from Fangoria's pages, Icons of Fright and other various online sources, talking about current and classic horror films. This motley but well-matched collection of film nerds (and I mean that in the best possible sense) mixed a flavor of populism (Galluzzo), academia (McKendry), and elite snobbery (Kane), and the talks were loose, hip, usually centering on a theme for each episode, from horror comedies to DIY to Christmas to anthologies, to interviewing horror filmmakers and icons in depth like never heard before, from Dean Cundey to Darren Bousman, from Savage Steve Holland to the team of Kevin Kolsh and Dennis Widmyer.

Their knowledge of Ti West to Richard Stanley was informative and entertaining. Their most valuable and informative episodes to me were the extended interviews with two heads of marketing for the DVD label Scream Factory, Jeff Nelson and Cliff McMillan, and with the head of the Twilight Time label, Nick Redman, outlining the practical and financial realities of putting out cult legacy and cult films on blu-ray nowadays.

Don't quote me -- I place the age of these hosts at mid- to late 30s, and obviously having grown of age during the VHS era they know their stuff, certainly from the '80s on. Kane's expertise seems to go backwards in a very art-centric vein while McKendry, the professed academic of the group who mentions her "thesis" more than she should, perversely seems to favor nunsploitation and the Satanic Panic films of the '80s. Galluzzo tends to always keep what could easily turn a dinner party gone wrong on track.

(When they're drinking straight shots during the podcast (admitted to us more than once), he also seems to be the one who can best hold his liquor.)

Continually dropping names of famous people they'd met at conventions, terminally underemployed, and always bragging about which DVDs they'd gotten ahead of release date to review for free, their conversations were woolly and rapid-fire, dropping references we'd be thankful they'd occasionally circle back around to explain when they remembered to. Like the best horror films, we weren't sure what we were getting and the banter could easily get lost before it righted itself again.

I loved it. I like horror because it doesn't politely follows the rules. The worst horror is too polite, takes relatively few chances with narrative; feels too conservative. Horror is supposed to take chances. We love it when a film goes, as I've heard them say many times, off the reservation and a little batshit.

Early this year Galluzzo and McKendry found jobs at Blumhouse Productions (the house that Paranormal Activity and Insidious built) writing and editing for their website. A portal to discuss and report on all things horror, a quite fractured and disorganized space on the net. Seemed like the jobs they were made for.

Determined to remain independent and announcing often early on they would treat Blumhouse films as fairly as any others, a tension began to enter the podcast. Not only having to justify every mention of a Blumhouse film (of which there are many) ("No no, if I didn't like it I would have certainly said so."), it now seemed Kane was suddenly the odd man out, having missed the Blumhouse gravy train (but hey, he's got a job as a teacher) and also having recently lost his hobby coffee house/ screening room business the Jumpcut Café (where many of the current crop of indie filmmakers hung out).

Vague attempts at gaining a sponsor for the POV podcast and the hosts trying to read ad copy in a voice that didn't seep fake sincerity failed miserably and quickly.

Last April the trio rather abruptly announced they were stopping the POV podcast, mouthing excuses of being "too busy" during their last episode which happened to be about sequels that have lived out their welcomes yet kept coming back one more time. (This one after the previous, perhaps also not so coincidentally about horror franchises' "final chapters.") The announcement was sudden, cursory, and uncharacteristically unsentimental, papered over with promises of being back "sooner than you might think."

I sensed underlying intrigue not yet revealed.

A week later it was learned the podcast had magically been resurrected as Shock Waves, under the auspices of -- wait for it -- the Blumhouse podcast network.

Blumhouse Productions, and all the success they've had, is a fascinating movie-making model. Akin to Roger Corman, AIP, and other old exploitation entities for which the POV/Shock Waves hosts have a nostalgic affection ("Tell us what was it like working with Roger Corman again?"), Blumhouse have found the sweet spot between low budgets and marketing to create a 21st century aesthetic brand that's both derided and admired. They've been accused of revitalizing the horror genre in the last 10 years, of ruining it, of taking chances no one else would dare, and of playing it all too safe. All of that is true.

My own fascination with them stems from these very conflicts. I like their films, I often wish they were better, I have been surprised by them, as often not so much.

It's fascinating exactly because it is a model.

The new podcast was almost exactly like the old one, with rundowns of current films, hip guests, lots of insider information and new regular appearances of Ryan Turek...who happens to be the director of development at Blumhouse.

Our heroes had, on the face, been co-opted. Left GeekNation in the lurch, while secret plans for a new, more lucrative podcast (with even more free stuff?) was in the works with the corporate entity Blumhouse. They waited a respectful one week before announcing the new arrangement?

And while the perception of impartiality was still thinly addressed, the Shock Waves iteration couldn't really be believed, no matter how often someone said they didn't like Blumhouse's new Purge film. (All three of them loved the new Purge film.) And while the personalities are the same, the structure, the weekly schedule, the show now seems to have listed about 10% to the right.

Not that it's sinking. But something not quite right. Now they're dropping references to Blumhouse parties where they met the new director of _new film to be released by Blumhouse in December goes here_. McKendry and Galluzzo mention "the article I wrote for the site last week." And there seems just 2 pitches more per inning of even more inside baseball talk among the deskmates from Blumhouse including the well-spoken new member Turek. He seems to have all but silenced McKendry by his sheer presence and willingness to be the first to offer an unpopular (but usually correct) opinion. McKendry has devolved to a busy working mom (two kids) who barely has time to keep up with the site, let alone see all the films Galluzzo and Kane watch all night at Tarantino's fabulous New Beverly cinema, promising to "catch up soon."

(We never did hear their take when Tarantino ousted long-time manager Michael Torgan, which first alerted us to the fact even among our hosts, there are politics.)

I have a feeling she pines for the days when they'd talk about old Italian snuff films. And Kane's snobbery and occasional tone-deaf douchery has mellowed, possibly because he now has a vague deal for a film he's written and hopes to direct (and keeping it relatively down low -- he wouldn't want to be the one to jinx it).

The shows still averaged over 2 hours as before, but they recently started to cut them into one-hour segments for our listening pleasure, the rambles being the first half and then an extended conversation the second part. More episodes, you can pick which half you liked better, and no one complains you went on too damn long.

Are they pulling punches? Not necessarily. Have the rough edges been sanded off? Maybe they're just getting better at what they do. Am I constantly reminded Blumhouse Productions is the primary source of 3 of the 4 hosts' gainful employment? Once every 5 minutes.

I'm reading between the lines here. It's easy to hate on something that gets popular. Like Star Wars or Nolan after Batman. I prefer Woody Allen's earlier funnier movies. The show arguably had quite a fanbase and influence before, helping Gardner's The Battery and Begos's Almost Human get wider audiences. I don't know the numbers here, but a higher profile must mean more listeners. I just don't happen to be a faithful one anymore.

I used to listen to every one front to back, regardless of topic.

I don't know if it's just perception on my part there's some hidden agenda. The ghost of a conflict of interest is inescapable. The lady doth protest too much. I could call out that every interview seems tied to an upcoming release -- but who else would spend 2 hours talking to Larry fucking Cohen about a documentary that isn't even in post yet.

I appreciated that, Elric. But my nerdy drunken horror friends aren't entertaining me like they used to. I don't bemoan them a living. But the show has become more polite. It's not surprising me. It's no longer going to go batshit.

How to Win Your Office's Oscar Pool

2016-02-23T21:22:00.000-08:00

It's the end of February and the Super Bowl is history. That means the fantasy football betting at work has been temporarily replaced by the Oscar pools.

Should be easy to win the pot on this, right? A lot fewer variables than the NFL.

The problem is no one's always got a clear line on who's gonna win the Oscars. They aren't really about which pictures are the best, so much as an excuse to have a 3-hour worldwide commercial for Hollywood (and so do they really care if it goes over the scheduled time?).

The raison d'etre of the show has always been showing clips, reminding you to rent last year's winners on VOD (oh yeah, Birdman), the nervous glamour on the red carpet, Kate's (and Cate's) designer dresses, and who's so drunk they mess up their acceptance speech.

But who gets the gold statues is increasingly impossible to predict -- #OscarsSoWhite not withstanding. The Academy tries each year to be more inclusive, nominating films no one's heard of, letting James Franco and Anne Hathaway host (ruin) the 2011, and featuring well-meaning foreign-based issue pictures for lesser awards to class up the joint.

How can you possibly win your Oscar poll this year? The secret to remember is the best films and performances seldom -- never -- get the prizes.

You saw who won the Golden Globes (The Martian as best comedy or musical, it must have been that Abba music on the boombox), and what the Spirit Awards has nominated (Carol, which only appears in the acting and adapted screenplay categories among Oscar's major awards). The most popular films of the year aren't even nominated (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World, and Avengers: Age of Ultron aren't "Oscar material"--they don't need the extra publicity push).

Inside Out, the 4th highest grosser of 2015, is safe, being in the animation ghetto; also, it's a little girl's bike. The front-runner among the best picture nominees, The Revenant at #17, is modest enough to pass the art-over-commerce test.

None of these are predictors for how to mark your ballot. But you can have the inside track, beat that Oscar pool and annoy your co-workers as you agree to take them to lunch next week when you trump the odds.

Here are the things to remember:

1. Don't watch any of the films beforehand.

No. Really. Millions of people try to see all the nominees in the weeks leading up to the broadcast to give the ballot an objective, fair ranking.

Don't.

Measures of quality will only confuse and confound you. What wins has little or nothing to do with actual accomplishment and everything to do with who's sleeping with who, whether or not the grosses were too big (but not too small), how many little people you pushed aside on the way up, or if they forgot to nominate you last year.

This is inside baseball and you're better to read Deadline Hollywood than Manohla Dargis. Does it feel like it should win? What looks good on the front page tomorrow will statistically win more than the best film.

The more culturally acceptable and polite, the better the odds. Ergo, Crash beats Brokeback Mountain (2005), Out of Africa beats The Color Purple (1985), Ordinary People beats Raging Bull (1980), Kramer vs. Kramer beats Apocalypse Now (1979), the list goes on. The losers, all worthy, were made by young turks and maybe those guys hadn't paid their dues yet.

Their time will come (see 3 below). Shakespeare In Love won over Saving Private Ryan (1998), but that upset seemed to be about the size of Spielberg's bank account. Plus, Spielberg. (Nothing against any of the winners, but no one's teaching Gandhi in film school nowadays.)

The winner can't embarrass anyone when it's picked. If you steer clear of quality, you're alright. It's strictly business. Deserve's got nothing to do with it.

The runners-up tend to engage with youth culture, which brings us to:

2. The Academy is old (and white) (and male).

The real truth is the Academy (spoiler alert) picks what it understands, and being made up predominately of old men who used to work in the industry (who are also, yes, mostly white) this year as much as any made it clear the field inadvertently gets biased towards films they feel comfortable with.

The voting ranks are filled with professionals at one point were nominated for or won an Oscar, or were invited by their peers (white, male nominees) to join. It ends up being a self-selecting "minority" of the majority.

And until this year, you didn't leave the Academy until you died. The average age is 74. It is not a democracy. So imagine a screener of Straight Out Of Compton hitting a retired cinematographer's mailbox along with Spotlight. Which one gets popped in first?

Those Academy members might have voted for Compton when they were 22, but they weren't in the Academy when they were 22.

Remember who's casting the votes, and you can't go wrong on your Oscar poll. What would rich grandpa vote for?

(The Academy has recently revised its voting rules so that anyone who hasn't been "active" in the industry loses their voting status. This ensures younger voters will have more of a voice in future nominees, and will, for the good, dramatically change future ballots. Tab Hunter however will still be allowed to participate.)

(The full effect of this change remains to be seen. Next year's meme: #OscarsSoYoung.)

3. Timing is everything.

Oscar history is rife with people who won for "last year's performance," when the Academy failed to honor what they should have and are now playing catch-up.

Did Paul Newman really win in 1986 for The Color of Money, or for Cool Hand Luke, Hud, The Verdict, The Hustler, or Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, all of which he was nominated for but didn't win?

Jeff Bridges's Crazy Heart win (2009) is really acknowledgement for a long career of solid work. It's not because he did anything special in Crazy Heart he hadn't already done better in, for example, The Big Lebowski.

And speaking of the Coen Brothers, they've made better pictures than No Country For Old Men (2007) and there were better pictures that year, too. But there might not be another chance. (Hasn't been so far.) The Academy realizes time is running out. The Departed? MillionDollar Baby? Thanks for the memories, boys.

(This doesn't explain Argo.)

4. The "trash" awards.

All those minor awards -- documentary shorts, make-up, editing that take up the middle hour while you're making more margaritas and surreptitiously changing your ballot when the boss isn't looking? Just flip a coin. Only people in certain guilds are allowed to nominate and vote on these and who knows what the hell they think?

Difference between sound editing and sound mixing? Time for another margarita.

Besides, your poll probably only assigns a single point to each of these, a handful of darts in the dark. Odds are no one will get any more right than you did. (N.B: If it's French, knock it out. If the animated short's about a cat, automatic win.)

5. It ain't fair.

Mad Max: Fury Road consistently impresses in all the categories it's nominated for. I predict it'll win nothing important. It's a Mad Max movie. This is the Oscars. In a fair fight, Spielberg and Boyle would be with the director and Samuel L. Jackson would be representing The Hateful 8 instead of Jennifer Jason Leigh.

But Matt Damon lost all that weight on Mars and Leonardo DiCaprio wrestled a real bear.

Now you have the inside track. Good luck!

So Lonely You Could Die

2016-02-04T20:00:00.000-08:00

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David Bowie's penultimate album, The Next Day (2013, presumably created before he knew he had the liver cancer that would take him away) is soaked with anger, a dread of violence, and a sense of fighting against mortality that doesn't quite fit our idea of a retired 66-year-old rock star. After 10 years, Bowie was still writing -- and rewriting -- his legacy, calling out images reminding us of the old days, from space dancers to corpses hanging from trees.

"Here I am / not quite dying," he announces. And he's still the magpie he always was. He loved to reference other songs, from The Beatles ("Beep beep") to Broadway show tunes ("Get me to the church on time") to old novelty songs ("Look at that caveman go"). Part of the fun is in the trainspotting.

And as always, The Next Day's referencing his past and also your impression of his past. The Tin Machine era aside, he continually referenced his earlier tones ("Ashes to Ashes"), and this one's not entirely brand-new Bowie either, as just adding extra notes (post-it?) on a previous iteration.

The cover fairly insists it's just a re-do of "Heroes" -- of course it's not. But its tonal and musical variety of anger and sometimes punk-inflected or broken drum signatures call back most Scary Monsters. "The next day after Heroes"? Yeah, close enough.

From bodies in trees to the armed shooter of "Valentine's Day" -- the lyrics are a dark update of Scary's schizophrenic urban nightmare. Within this context, the track "You Feel So Lonely You Could Die," on the face a romantic-sounding palate cleanser before the drone of the closer "Heat," emerges as something quite different, when digested with the rest of the meal.

The first clue something sinister is up comes from the title, an easy redo of Hank Williams' 1949 standard "I Feel So Lonesome I Could Cry," but also calls back to Lennon's "Yer Blues" from the White album. A close reading of the lyrics reveals a night encounter with a lonely figure walking through the park, a silent gun, a character reviled for stealing "their trust, their moon, their sun."

He's done something awful, and the moon (and the stars (out tonight)) and the sun can't help remind us of karma (of the instant variety) -- and other elements all across the universe, which doubles the reference back to Bowie again, while further evoking whom he collaborated with on that particular record.

With images of rain-soaked streets and a cold concrete city, I can't help think the song's mourning a New York without John Lennon. We know that when Lennon was shot, Bowie was in NY playing on Broadway in The Elephant Man. He didn't make any new music for two years, and then it was the digestible, non-confrontational non-obsessive Let's Dance. But the event didn't leave our new romantic completely unscathed.

Without naming the subject of the song, there's vitriol hiding behind his Elvis Presley croon. "I can see you as a corpse/ hanging from a tree... Please, please make it soon." Bowie wants him to die lonely, cold -- death his last and only companion.

There's some polite sympathy with "You got the blues, my friend" but Bowie's clipped and tense vocal, purposely limiting his own range past what might just be age (shades of his monotone delivery on Low), suggests he's spitting it out between his teeth. "People don't like you." Karma indeed.

And yet, the track has the romantic wash of a torch song. Bowie's given it the shade of a ballad about love lost (which it also is), disguising the venom behind a theatrical production closer to "Heartbreak Hotel" than to "Working Class Hero." Bowie doesn't ever make it too easy. He can't give everything away.

Ain't that just like him?

Canon

2015-12-02T22:05:00.001-08:00

That’s Lawrence Kasdan, and he’s probably the true creator of the Star Wars phenomena for the last 35 years.

That probably doesn’t sound right. Success has many fathers. Let’s assign the godhead to George, okay, but also, investigate the historical effect when these films, almost from nowhere, appeared.

Star Wars, yes, was a huge unexpected success from out of the gate, and suddenly, that dumb robot kid movie was going to have a sequel. Do you remember sequels in the ‘70s?

Airport 1975 (in 1974, by the way), Airport ’77 (we didn't finish this one early), and The Concorde…Airport ’79 (they seemed to want you to know when and how old back then). Shaft had a Big Score in 1972 and was in Africa in 1973. Each one with decreasing expectations and returns. Godfather II is presumably the first major film to use the actual number in the title and was the exception that proves the '70s sequel rule.

It wasn’t until 1980 that the Empire struck back, and it did three things. First, it absolutely exploded the original, adding content and backstory and far more serious conflicts no one thought a light-weight robot film could support. It turned into a multi-generational family drama approaching Greek tragedy. It opened the series visually and spatially (something you’d think no one would have been worried about in a SF film), with extended set pieces in the snow, puppets talking pidgin English in a swamp, spaceships with infinity shafts, black guys, and mischievously sneaking in the green-armored Boba Fett (who the hell is that guy?!).

It also seemed to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Not only is our supposed hero figuratively castrated, he’s fated by blood to go to the dark side anyway, and the only other male lead is melted into a block of aluminum. What? No space battle to close it out? How do they make a first-person shooter out of this?

I think Kasdan got access to all of Lucas’s notes (and his wild schemes), and suddenly the idea of having nine of these started to make sense. Kasdan is setting up what he thinks is a whole universe, and he’s not going to be held back by goggle-eyed midgets and lizards drinking green liquid in a stupid bar scene.

It was a weird time. It did almost as well as the first and was re-released, alone and then in a pair with the first, a kind of 4-hour-long package advertisement for episodes yet to come. Yet it had no closure. The question gauntlet had been thrown aggressively down and blew our minds, while our most pressing desires had actually not even been remotely answered.

The theories and predictions were elaborate and far-fetched, yet not entirely impossible. And who the hell was Irvin Kershner? I need to see the rest of his movies. George said the only thing he liked worse than writing films was directing and now didn’t have to do either. The screenplay even had Leigh Brackett’s name on it, a famous fantasy writer who’d also worked decades before with the likes of John Huston and Howard Hawks. Who‘s in charge here? More moorre MORE!

For 3 years all popular culture was abuzz with talk of Star Wars, not only the plot twists and proper use of a Muppet as key deliverer of philosophical wisdom, but a deeper, near existential consideration of how a film series could tap into current and ancient myths so completely. People were passing around Joseph Campbell. The films took us all hostage. The conversation reached epic proportions.

And infiltrated the culture in a way that couldn’t be unstuck, not even by the teddy-bear letdown of Return of the Jedi, a by-the-numbers dénouement barely livened by a speeder chase, a half-hearted kiss on the cheek (“He's my brother, silly”), and a sing-along from hell over the campfire.

It’s the echoes of that conversation from 1980 to 1983 that fuels the enthusiasm for the next entry in a couple weeks, that kindles childhood memories of a more innocent (or at least, simpler) time, that inspired the $4 billion price tag on Lucasfilm that Disney paid gladly.

The three Lucas-directed sequels/prequels couldn’t kill it. Dozens of spin-off novels and watered down canon couldn’t kill it. The Matrix brothers tried to get the same lightning in a bottle but their Empire ended up being Reloaded.

Even the supposed touch of J.J. Abrams won’t kill it. In fact, his careful expertise following previously trod paths and love of lens flares is exactly the polish the new one needs, a safe and nostalgic return to something we haven’t actually had since 1980. They are going to fool you by casting Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher (at any cost), and they hired Lawrence Kasdan, whose credits, for those who paid attention a long time ago, includes a couple movies we remember fondly.

Kasdan worked decades ago with the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. How bad could it be?

Fast Food

2015-11-12T08:31:00.001-08:00

Back in the old fogey days I worked in a video store, a step removed from the opening-night show-business excitement of a movie theatre, most of the films at least 6 months old and just more boxes filling up the New Release wall that stretched from one end of the store to another.

It was all so much product, all the same, some more popular than others. What really got our cocks hard though was the burgeoning undertow of old cult classics that would be released to backfill the catalog of the Blockbusters and Hollywood as secondary rentals and alternates when the new hot releases weren't in. Don't have any more copies of "Die Hard 3"? Have you seen Bruce Willis's "Color of Night": we have 6 copies currently in stock. "Heat" all checked out? How about "The Real McCoy" also with Val Kilmer?

We arranged the old titles next to the new ones, putting boxes with like subject matter together to trick the rubes, increase rentals and get another $100 on our bonus that month. It was a film-geek exercise worthy of Tarantino remembering vague co-stars and stretching thematic connections between unknown arch oddities ("Sonny Boy" (1989)) and new hip films ("Miller's Crossing"(1990)). One thing we could always count on renting out were erotic thrillers. In the go-go age of straight-to-video they knew how to design those boxes. Casting Tayna Roberts always helped.

We made our own sub-sections, pulling things off of the Never-Rented lists and spotlighting them on an endcap. We actually has a small section called "Never Watched," which slowly got smaller once someone rented one. Then we placed "Bonnie & Clyde," "Dick Tracy," "Melvin & Howard," "Scrooged," "Tango And Cash," a couple TV things and "Roxanne" in their own section and named it the Michael J. Pollard Section because they all had him in them, a goofball sidekick you saw everywhere during the '70s and '80s who would steal a scene by doing nothing.

Seriously, in "Fast Food" (1989), some kind of precedent to either "Hot Dog the Movie" or "Mortuary Academy" he steals the film from such scene gobblers as Kevin McCarthy, Traci Lords and Jim Varney by just standing there with a goofy goddamn look on his face listening to the exposition.

He'd become one of our favorites since someone taped "Big Fauss and Little Halsy" (1970) off cable and passed around the VHS like a dog-eared and much-loved dirty magazine.

"Scrooged" was the only one that ever rented, usually in December. Completely an inside joke. But imagine the delight when some film student came in and actually asked for "Bonnie & Clyde" and I was able to say, "Oh that would be in our Michael J. Pollard section" and walked him over to it where he saw this Pollard guy had quite a few legit credits, as well as some junk (but hey who doesn't?), and wondered why he hadn't heard of a guy who rated his own endcap.

Film Projectors

2014-12-01T09:05:00.002-08:00

Two years after Paul Thomas Anderson forced the issue by releasing The Master in a limited (very limited) number of theatres in 70mm, Christopher Nolan has pushed the envelope by gently demanding not only 55 70mm runs but another 190 35mm runs for Interstellar.

When Nolan talks, they listen. His films have made over $2 billion dollars worldwide and any scheme he has breathes golddust.

With delicious irony, the film is being released by Paramount who announced last year they would be the first major studio to stop distributing their films on 35mm - convert to digital or get out but if you ask nice we do still have 35mm stock (foreign markets are still mostly analog).

The apparent attraction to exhibitors was the film versions would open 2 days early (November 5th) and enjoy the high first-nighter grosses, be in Mr. Nolan's "preferred format," wouldn't be scratched yet and hey, you know, he shot it in film not that digital phone camera crap.

It's been a mere 2 years since all the 35mm projectors were not only wheeled out of the way but ejected from the major chains' booths. Certainly we can move them back in?

But based on numerous reports from friends, professionals and various websites the sad truth is the skill to install, run and maintain 35mm has already gone the way of hot-type. Sound mixes way off, audio tracks going silent, dirt and scratches running through the middle of Kansas and the void of space, etc. 70mm is a more rarified format with its own challenges you'd assign only to a journeyman projectionist.

Anderson, more an instinctual businessman than filmmaker, ended up with ten 70mm installations (most re-installations) for The Master in 2012, a manageable number and good enough for the publicity of the gesture. Nolan's (it's on him) aggressively retro, certainly well-meaning stubbornness may have inadvertently hastened the audience's disdain for old film formats.

Presumably Tarantino's The Hateful Eight is being released in 70mm as well as a couple others. (But not Star Wars VII - Abrams is using 65/70mm stock, the standard IMAX strategy and hasn't announced an actual 70mm release.)

This is not a trend so much as a fetish. These filmmakers value the texture as much as the text and precious few (Tarantino, Nolan, Spielberg, barely Anderson) have the power in Hollywood to be petted and indulged. Others (Fincher, Abrams, Scorsese) have the mojo to keep movies on film and out of our handhelds but choose to weave different myths.

Most every member of the sold-out crowds who witness a bad presentation due to lost skill and scratched prints will avoid the next film release if they have a choice. To them 70mm is already like the gimmick of 3-D. An acquired taste and of questionable financial and aesthetic value.

* * *

Picture from DoobyBrain.

What You Wish For

2014-09-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

In other news, Quentin Tarantino, film nerd and savior of the New Beverly 7 years ago because he started paying the rent to keep it open, then actually bought the building when it was going to be redeveloped, has taken over the management from the previous manager/ programmer Michael Torgan.

This story has been reported, poorly of course, in various publications the last couple weeks. The New Bev is closed until October, when Mr. Tarantino's schedule and plan (and maybe a new paintjob) are revealed.

The sentiment among the film preservationist community is conflicted. In the absence of actual evidence of whether or not Tarantino was really actually pissed Torgan bought a digital projector and therefore kicked his ass out, or if his announcements at Cannes were just a coincidence of timing, without any apparent ill will actually expressed by either Tarantino ("I want him to be involved as much as possible") or by Torgan ("Quentin couldn't be a better landlord"), various commentators (such as this one) suggest it was "uneasy" or "not pretty," that QT the rich Hollywood plebe is destroying a man's livelihood and the insular and cineaste community that surrounded the New Bev.

As of this writing we still don't know why or other details. Comments spilling under the articles are overwelmingly sentimental for the films watched, the wonderful double bills, the star appearances - as they should be. As I am about the Pacific Center 3 and the Fashion Valley 4 in San Diego, all gone now and where I saw seminal films in the '70s and '80s myself.

There's a palpable sense of betrayal and distrust in Tarantino's motives.

He "wants to make it his own." He's doing this for a hobby, that he's going to show films from his own extensive collection. He's got 1000s of prints and apparently knows there are 1000s more out there so he is only going to show 35mm only, no more digital, a true film fan's dream.

I guess he got what he wished for.

I know a little about the financial realities of trying to keep an aging theatre alive. The New Bev is shabby, in spite of new seats (the old take-seats-from-a-closing- theatre-only-slightly-newer-than-the-ones-you're-replacing trick), in a dodgy area and with audiences often no more than double digits, sometimes less than a dozen by some reports. The additional fakt that most of the films they show are available elsewhere (albeit digitally) or stone unknown, makes the math hard to stack.

QT isn't the bad guy. He allowed the theatre, unlike hundreds of others just like it, to remain open with what amounts to a donation approaching (possibly exceeding) $1 million or so. A labor of love. Preservationists and archives, film fetishists to a man, appreciate his response and want a theatre devoted to 35mm, want one that shows old, odd, inspired double bills. They want the theatre in the shaggy Fairfax district as its show business anchor, to see Clu Gulagar in the front row, to get free popcorn.

They also want Michael Torgan. The guy who works 60 hours a week, drove his own car, projected, this unmarried guy (he can't be married - she'd be behind the snackbar every night). He even changed the marquee himself. A love of labor? I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

I think there's so much hand wringing because they also know - it's a lost cause. The digital projector was a way to mitigate the future but it won't matter. Tarantino doesn't have enough 35mm prints or ultimately, the right prints. Even if he suggested arrogantly in an interview (in the LA Reader) that filmmakers demand the studios make more film prints:

Indie Filmmaker to Studio Head: "You have to strike a 35mm print so we can show it at the New Beverly!" (Laughs heartily).

Maybe if you're Tarantino this gets traction. His last 2 films grossed at least $120 million domestic each so he can call up a studio and ask a print be struck (or a new one of some old forgotten favorite and Paramount's happy to spend the $10k for a print of Hickey & Boggs to make QT happy. Then he gets to keep it for his collection).

Maybe that's why the Bev had the pristine prints they did the last few years. There's more to this story. There's been precious little information about exactly what Tarantino offered, said or threatened or when, and what Torgan wanted, lost or demanded. Everyone's quite civil but I know for at least someone, this came as no surprise. Only to us on the outside.

The prosaic reasons for QT to "make it my own" are probably more complicated and less interesting than the most vocal want it to be. It's not just little guy vs. big guy.

The guy with the money gets to try now. We're not sure this is a great idea or a terrible idea. But we feel sorry for Michael, 'cause he made that lost cause our own private secret.

Triggers

2014-07-14T22:59:00.002-07:00

Film history is revisionist and reactionary. Most people writing about the classics or about "the golden age" weren't even there - they have only the reviews and the evidence of the careers before and subsequent to place any film or trend in context.

I've heard more than one person amazed why no one liked Carpenter's The Thing when it came out. They don't understand what it was like to see that shit back in 1982. (I know that disparaging words against The Thing get some people apoplectic. Consider that a trigger.)

So let this post be a kind of primary source for Kathyrn Bigolow's Strange Days (1995) which was highly anticipated, had a great pedigree at the time and should have blow our minds, we know we wanted it. And it was a film that opened in the large theatre where I worked in the '90s and I was there for the opening nights.

The reaction and the word-of-mouth was quite different than that which has come down to us through the years. A puzzle piece that's lost but may explain the career trajectories of some of those involved.

Strange Days was co-written and produced by James Cameron, who was hot off of True Lies (1994) and Terminator 2 (1991) and the ex-husband to Bigelow, whose last film was the equally testosterone-y (but more fun) Point Break (1991), only beginning to grow the street-Keanu-cred on it that it would enjoy in subsequent decades. Yet Strange Days is practically a lost film. Seemingly prescient, taking place on the cusp of the millennium and posing a hip blue-lit future out of Philip K. Dick or the Wachowski brothers (they were brothers then), it also has that Doors resonance (I taste The Lost Boys in there; people are strange even in your peripheral vision).

The action centers around a device that records your actions, sharing them virtually (this was barely a buzz word then) with headgear and a demonstration near the start of a recording of someone doing something, from inside their head - cool! it turns out to be a recording of the guy trapping then raping a woman.

Our heroes (relatively speaking) get ahold of the tape but can only watch that crime from the recorded POV - you "experience it" but still can't quite grab the evidence you need.

A lost film I have the feeling the filmmakers would rather stay lost. A novel, rather edgy techno- nerdy idea (well, not so new after all, a similar device was used in Brainstorm (1983) and was the fodder of much speculation then - if you could "read someone's thoughts" the first thing that came to mind was.... Rule 34 and all that. A provocative but ultimately flat homogenized Hollywood film (it was directed after all by Douglas Trumbull) its buzz was taken over by the untimely death of Natalie Wood and how the final cut became compromised)).

Starring Ralph Fiennes (Schindler's List!), Angela Bassett (Tina Turner!), Vincent D'Onofrio (The Player!, Orson Welles in Ed Wood!, the donut guy in Full Metal Jacket!). And of course, the huge balls of Cameron and Bigelow each seemingly trying to out cock each other with their arrogance, sci-fi savvy, hubris and ourheartsnotbroken.

Thing was they throw in a rape. Not just a rape, as like - a past event to motivate a character, but instead it's a rape from a 1st-person perspective. One that's subjective, that doesn't signify the bad guy as "bad guy" but as something the viewer experiences as it's happening. As a bit. A thrilling visual.

(Ebert complained about this kind of thing in the Friday the 13th films. If you don't position the killer as "other," cinematically you end up putting the audience in sympathy with the killer. With being the killer. With being the rapist. To what end? You know you want it. Indeed.)

Here's where I learned an important film-making lesson. Rape takes a film hostage. Irreparably and inexorably. When the first rape scene came on, in first person (when they're demonstrating the device), easily a dozen people hit the lobby - angry and in no mood to negotiate. Some of the women are in tears; everyone demanded their money back. They all felt violated - tricked. The sense of outrage palatable and scary. The men were red around the ears, protective or accusing us of thought crimes and irresponsible citizenship.

You see, you don't treat a rape scene as entertainment.

That arrogant cocky Cameron/Bigelow attitude got to them. This adolescent rape sequence, a provocative dare had added insult to invisible injuries, salt in unknown wounds.

The film's word of mouth was vitriolic and moved quickly. Who cares how daring or well done the special effects. The film didn't quite work anyway, as science fiction or as detective story. (Maybe as cautionary tale and it's aged well in some respects.) Trying too hard to be cool but with an elitist view of the poor and desperate, and by having (and this was not the first or last time Cameron fell in this trap) too much resources at his disposal they didn't attempt to be empathetic or smart, just brazen, colorful and daring.

It blew up in their face.

Rape is a trigger. Some people simply won't take it fictionalized or treated without the highest level of respect. (And don't make me tell you the Schindler's List story.) Certain topics are off limits. You don't hurt animals, you don't casually throw child abuse into your story, and you sure as hell don't use rape as a "plot device."

It kills your narrative dead and demanded you stop everything and lower your voice in those politically correct, victims-first times.

This was not a niche indie. This was a major 20th Century Fox production. The film was gone within 3 weeks as I remember and everyone's career experienced a speedbump. Whether because of this film, the decision to be in this film, or the fact they'd all graduated to big-Hollywood cocaine-sized budgets and trailers, Fiennes, Bassett and D'Onofrio's careers seemed to stall or got murked by less high-profile projects. Maybe no one trusted them anymore, maybe audiences had a bad taste in their mouth.

Maybe the paydays were big enough so they all went arty.

Cameron has always earned a begrudging respect, people enjoyed his films in spite of themselves (the racism in True Lies, so weirdly accidental and not even intentional makes it more distasteful. Avatar is already moving past its sell-by date.). Bigelow would continue to have trouble getting projects off the ground until she eventually had two good years 15 years later with The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Two war films heavier on the art side and a little more careful with the moralizing.

I think that big budget films are way too careful and well, I guess they have to be. Strange Days is an abject lesson lost to time but that many Hollywood types probably still remember.

Bad movies don't kill careers. Triggers do.

Blue

2014-07-08T16:08:00.003-07:00

It's rumored, half the time Ridley Scott spent updating and mastering the most recent "last" Final Cut of Blade Runner was spent figuring out if Deckard was a replicant or not ("Do I have any coverage of that?") and half the time he spent taking out the wires and cables that were suddenly visible in the new hi-definition formats.

Film is a different medium than digital, and has grain, 24 images per second, moves through the projector and each image is distinct, different, contrary - the inherent blur tends to soften sharp distinctions between shots. Just ask ILM.

Blu-ray imagery is sharper and doesn't move - it's an algorithm that reveals anything the original film could pick up and holds it still for our eye. In hi-def 4 times as sharp for our edification. And in its crystal clarity lies the rub.

The mechanics of film is forgiving and tricks the eye. When lit properly rear-and front-projection screens look real in their soft-focus background. Matted shots blend more smoothly with the hard surface of the foregrounds. Cables that held the helicars up disappeared in the smoke, but Scott had to have them digitally removed for the blu-ray.

Tom Savini's make-up effects, intended to go by in single-digit frame-flashes in the old Friday The 13th movies convince even less than they did then.

Movie theatres used to be large dark rooms and the light, this big at its source, would be expanded and diffused through the hundreds of feet it travelled to the movie screen, by 1000% or more. Effects were engineered and designed to work as well as they needed to. They didn't need to stand up to intense scrutiny.

You could get away with the flying horse in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. There's a reason why it hasn't been upgraded to blu-ray. It would look too shabby. That film's been denigrated enough.

Blu-rays reveal the flaws of the source. And at a certain point you get diminishing returns. The beginning 15 minutes of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Oddysey appearing to be shot on the veldt of prehistoric Africa was actually shot on a soundstage with large front-projection screens behind the rocks and the men-in-suits. On a large screen it's entirely convincing, as is the small cut-ins of people moving in the windows of the model spaceships on the moon.

Yet, finally, on the beautiful blu-ray I recently acquired (what could go wrong?) there are clear panels marring the prehistoric sky. The resolution of the blu-ray reveals the folds in the fabric that is hanging behind the sets; the clear "sheetiness" of it, hell, I swear, even the remnants of old western landscapes that seem to have been painted over or obscured that would have been, at most, a blurry trace when filmed and projected.

Deep and nuanced and not quite visible, like the past it depicts.

The tolerances built into the old systems have been decalibrated and the nuances are now hammer blows. The film, so much of its time (1968) is built as best it could be then, with paper cut-outs and fake backgrounds.

A blu-ray upgrade has made me strangely sad.

Free Money

2014-05-27T20:30:00.001-07:00

Long-time readers, or those who are curious enough to do their research, will know I produced and directed a film, "Usher," around 2004.

I curried favor and collected everyone I could to pitch in. Actors, cable pullers, drivers and bagel buyers. A true indie production, currently available here.

I went into debt making the film, because who listens to the advice of not using your own money, or believes their idea isn't better than the others that don't get sold, or realizes how expensive post production (especially on film) really is. I did get it in the can, and while the film never made it to DVD (the indie DVD market was falling apart already by then) I got my soundtrack on iTunes and CDBaby and have actually sold a handful of tunes for about a dollar each.

That and some pocket change would buy you a pocket. The yearly checks I got were good for buying a case of beer for the Christmas holiday. All those streams on Spotify and Rdio added up to about $20 over the course of a year, a penny at a time. CDBaby struck a deal with Rumblefish in 2012 in which they would monetize any use of the songs they held on YouTube, identifying it and collecting a bit of money for every view.

About .000635 cents for each view.

This works 2 ways. People who upload something and need a song can use their huge database and pick my song (assuming they find it, or hear it and think it appropriate for their needs). A "Buy it now" button is added to the clip description. More pennies for me (the answer to the question who buys the song they hear on a YouTube video we'll save for another day).

Or, anyone who had already grabbed one of the songs is warned to replace it or share in the wealth.

The bad news was Rumblefish kept trying to block the music on our own upload, then allowed it thereby gaining 50% of the funds for any plays. (Not that there were any funds before it was licensed).

The surprising news was, I just found out my soundtrack guy (Jeff Lunzaga aka Desciple) had used one of my cuts (or one similar enough for software) in another film he scored the same year, "Gangsta's Paradise" and it was recently identified by Rumblefish as belonging to me (I have the contract right here, Jeff).

This film's been watched many more times than "Usher," and in the last 10 days alone has been watched over 103000 times.

That's 3 cases of beer.

I don't know the deal Jeff made with the producers of "Gangsta's" but by virtue of being first to CDBaby and Rumblefish with the music, I inadvertently find myself in the position to start to pay off that debt with this inadvertent revenue trickle.

Just in time for July 4th! Just don't ask which year.

Two Detectives

2014-05-19T10:32:00.001-07:00

When I think of Sleuth, I think of blue.

They hired Kenneth Branagh and Harold Pinter to remake Anthony Shaffer's 1972 original in 2007. Based on a limited-character chamber piece written for the stage, it starred scene-chewing Lawrence Olivier as the older man and a smoldering Michael Caine hot off "Alfie" and "Get Carter." Both actors got Oscar nominations.

35 years later, Caine played the older man, still smoldering while the young and upcoming Jude Law played the role Caine had been in, also (to further the cultural echo) hot off his own "Alfie."

Branagh's take was colder and more self aware to the point of being arch. The joie de vivre and loose playfulness of what is basically an adolescent game of the original had been rendered sterile. Hell, the set design was hypermodern, all glass and concrete and uncomfortable-looking chairs. And everything was blue. Having Pinter adapt the play this time didn't exactly warm things up either.

And the film stock they used for the prints had an additional problem. I worked in a theatre when this came out and the polyester print would slowly shed particles of plastic as it ran through the projector. Perhaps all prints do to a certain degree (Schindler's List had this problem as well, we seemed to think it had to do with the way the color stock had been processed to make it black & white). But Branagh's Sleuth gave off blue. A fine layer of dust got into every crevice of the projector, behind the lens and along the film path. Thank god for us it only lasted 2 weeks.

The next film had a slight twilight glow to it we jokingly ascribed to Branagh's directorial vision (even though his film had left the premises a week before).

DVDs are falling on hard times and they are no longer demanding full price. I was able to pick up (at two different places) both versions of Sleuth this week, each for under $3.00. A shame really as the first is possibly the best mid-'70s puzzle-box play based on character, a post-Christie whodunit/thriller that proves a trick ending need not disappoint or be entirely unexpected.

And the second, as cold-hearted and mannered as it is, in part I suspect to protect against claims of being old-fashioned or obsolete, may serve as the best example of how a different sensibility and cultural circumstances can recast (oops, wrong word) transform for all practical purposes an identical piece.

The stunt casting (which would work anyway even if it weren't such a delicious stunt) only adds to the resonance between the two films. Viewed one after the other you're seeing a new work, yet also have the benefit of seeing the same work again (which is what film schools always tell you to do - see a film to discover what it's doing, see it a second time to discover what it isn't doing, see it a third time to see how it does what it is (and isn't) doing).

It's a match made in heaven. Have your cake then eat it. See two films for the price of one; one film for the price of two.

I can hardly wait for the next remake, due in about 25 years. Doing the math, it's likely the young actor who will play against Jude Law who will take on the role of the older man, hasn't even been born yet.

Frozen

2013-11-20T17:30:00.000-08:00

Disney's new animated feature "Frozen" continues the development of generally hyperrealist CGI films for children and not only embraces the tension between a fantasy world and tools that make them as real as possible, the tension now informs and deepens the film.

There's always been that conflict between the family-friendly accessibility of animated films and the sometimes transparent pleas to adults who are charged with sitting with (and paying for) the children they bring in. It manifests itself either with gentle double-entendres only adults "get," covers of classic rock songs during the credits, or clumsy attempts at more progressive "Princess" gender politics so we're not quite as offended.

But Disney films have been hopelessly stuck in the past, starting with their over-reliance on creaky public-domain fairy tales and mythology but also in their apparent inability to update their story model or embrace the sensibility of a post-Pixar era. They've seemed lost since "Hercules."

"Tangled" (2010) was a hit but felt like 1985, a quick-cutting update of the princess model that "The Princess and the Frog" couldn't sell with its flat 2-D animation: hip, colorful, highly accomplished and retro in all the worse ways. Computer-rendered plastic Barbie skin was the wave of the future.

"Frozen" is just another princess tale; more exactly a sister tale. You know, a dysfunctional pair of orphans looking for love and maybe their true destinies along the way. Actually it's about the sidekicks who nudge the heros(ines) into each other's arms, more or less by the end. "Aladdin" with girls?

What's striking about the art design and animation of "Frozen" is it introduces the backstory of magical powers for the character Elsa that has no basis in reality or prior mythology and really only is possible to render in this age of computer animation. Blessed (cursed?) with the ability to wave her hand and create snow and ice sculptures out of thin air, as beautiful as they are imposing, the weather effects and self-generation of complicated crystalline structures unfolds with the visual shorthand of a Prius commercial. Effort and premeditation have given way to the surreal ecstasy of 100 conceptual artists without physical constraints. Like Pixar's "Finding Nemo" it's simply too beautiful to criticize.

Rather than an aggressive hypermodernism or chancy avant-garde impulse, this only grounds the film, as "cool" as its surface is, in a 30-year-old animation tradition. Witness the snowman Olaf, the best side-kick in 10 years who steals the film, and his loose-limbed (snow-balled?) animation in which his various round pieces float and revolve around each other without connection. A throwback to the gravity-based physics of Pacific Data Images tests for animation festivals back in the mid-'80s.

Repurposing old and obsolete techniques (or characters) into new and knowing ways is the classic "fish out of water" scenario that also drove last year's "Wreck-It Ralph" to gross $200m. "Frozen" seems to know it's a Disney princess story stuck in an old industrial model and tries to reinvent how to tell such a story with tools unappreciated up to now, mostly due to Pixar's success with hyperrealism (talking dogs notwithstanding).

And by new I don't mean so new ("Hercules") that audiences don't recognize it anymore. There's something comforting in seeing old techniques shined up and exploited. Instead of resisted, or ignored.

This agenda is made clear by the old-style Mickey Mouse cartoon that proceeds it, in small-screen black-and-white like the oldest of artifacts before it opens both wide and out in a self-referential post-modern rip in filmic reality, a 3-dimensional struggle between old and new, monochrome vs. color, flat and round, the clean vs. the profane. Between analog and digital.

The cartoon is titled "Get A Horse," a phrase people yelled at Model T drivers when their new-fangled technology would fail them in traffic. The conflict between the frozen past and a dynamic future is foregrounded in the cartoon, and while the answer isn't resolved, it's finally become part of the discussion. As Peg-leg Pete's car-horn proclaims, make way for the future.

A Billion Dollar Business

2013-07-11T20:10:00.001-07:00

A dozen people forwarded the article (from Hollywood Reporter) to me when Spielberg and Lucas gave a talk earlier this month at USC predicting the movie industry was headed for an "implosion." (No need to click on that link: just Bing "Spielberg" and "implosion" later.) I read it. Spielberg could barely get Lincoln funded but perhaps it's hard to be sympathetic - he's still functioning in a post-WWII John Ford model [1] anyway. He even still edits on film - the nerve.

The point was that the digital dilemma [2] has affected even the biggest players in the field, from Spielberg who at one point could have gotten funding to direct a phonebook - to George Lucas who first embraced digital (with those ~~later~~ - earlier Star Wars films) (a link to another article about digital in 1999 when Lucas tried to push it down our throats for the The Phantom Menace release has been removed, 'cause you already know he did that) but still can't write a decent 3rd act [3].

About a week later Lynda Obst wrote in Salon (article, June 15, 2013, no need for a link; I'll just stick the citation in) saying that the industry was completely broken; another high-end Hollywood player saying we're in trouble, no really [4], that the people in charge could no longer do the math. It all no longer added up.

For once someone was talking sense. It all has to do with the DVDs. In a development suspiciously similar (3 links, each word to a different one, that go to different books about how the music industry missed the digital revolution; that's one way to get a bunch of background citations out of the way) to the baroque go-go CD era of the '80s of the (now dead) music business, the new format was the way to print free money. Everyone wanted to own films and with the explosion of home video most films nearly doubled their grosses [5] through DVDs and VHSs. And it was all gravy - they didn't have to make the film again to reap the profits, just sell it on .90c discs in .50c plastic covers.

Hollywood didn't know what to do with all that money. People bought everything rather than wait for it on cable. The sense of ownership was too intoxicating.

But as we all now know DVD sales plummeted for 5 years in a row now. [6] People are finally shaking off the hangover and reconsidering the reasons to have a copy of The Town (this link: a review of The Town; why am I pointing you in a direction you can already find yourself? Because I happen to agree with this one (and it's well written) and now I don't have to use any extra words in my post here discussing The Town for my back story) [7] in the house - they'll never watch it (certainly not through to the end(s) [8]. They don't need any copies of Pitch Perfect [9] or Fast and Furious 2,3 or 6 [10], or even all four (5?) editions of the Lord of the Rings (no footnote here - suffice it to note each word links to a different configuration of the trilogy - no need to click unless you want to get pissed off at how many versions of LotR you have to buy) trilogies, each with a different and essential set of extras.

There's so much content out there through Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, HBOGo, YouTube or bittorrentting people think there's no need (this links to the reason why you should horde content at home [11]) to horde content at home anymore.

The gravy went away. No one could predict how much money a film would make during the critical years of 2008 - 2013, a time when the highs were very high (The Passion of the Christ, or Alice In Wonderland) and the lows were lower (John Carter (is he from Mars or not? (don't click on this link, just reports Andrew Stanton explaining why they dropped the word "Mars" from the title. And note that I "answer" the question I ask in the hot-linked words; nice, huh?), or Battleship). All bets were off and limos were traded in for towncars, espresso bars were replaced by coffee urns and administrative assistants were told to become script girls or get on their knees and start charging for different services.

Now a film made as much money as it was likely to in the theatrical release, increasingly wider and shorter and that was about it. No long tail and studios were trading their analog dollars for digital pennies as Obst warned. This is the direct analog to the music industry where once people got a taste of free on the Internet they didn't care about quality; quantity and choice trumped scarcity.

Profits halved, an amazing number. And if it's a $10 billion dollar industry 3 years ago [12] (and that #'s only the gross at the B.O.: possibly only 20% of that is free-and-clear profit) that means as little as $1 billion is actually still clearing the checking account or the funny accounting. And as Spielberg and Lucas pointed out polite enough not to name any names when a handful of large budget films fall on their faces this year (After Earth, budget $130m+, marketing $100m [13]; The Lone Ranger, budget $250m+, marketing $150m+; Jack the Giant ~~Killer~~ Slayer, budget $190m, marketing $70m+) you just heard that billion in profit simply disappear.

Films come out faster and faster and the hits are merely doubles. Even a Pixar movie costs $200m (this link references someone who estimated the total amount, no official source so it may not have "earned" a footnote (so much for the internet link ecosystem. Dude gets no respect)) and they don't have to construct any sets (only software).

After marketing, it'll have to reach $600m to break even. And it won't be doubling that on home video like in the old days.

There are no home runs. Like the music industry Hollywood is now not so much the road to easy money. People would do anything to be in show business. Now that the stupid crazy money isn't a given, you gotta be into it - just to be in it.

* * *

[1] Rather than giving you another link (which probably would have been to a review of War Horse in NYT) I did this footnote instead. I wanted to make a point about Spielberg's recent retro style but a link would have sent you away faster than it had the time to suggest the underlying idea. So see what I did there? "John Ford" manages to be an short-hand review of Spielberg's latest films (Lincoln literally (almost hid another link there, to Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (and would you have just thought I linked to the wrong film on accident?) and I also got in "Ford model" as a kind of nod to his throwback technological processes, which might have demanded another link (or a footnote (here? within the footnote?)) to Spielberg's penchant for still editing on film.

[2] This link - if it had been put in - would have referenced an article about the loss of old rep screens that can't afford the conversion; on Indiewire, Feb 23, 2012. A footnote proper would have listed the title and complete information, and probably have included the online link.

[3] This clever link goes to the Rotten Tomatoes rating for Red Tails. I'm also including this footnote so you don't have to click to find out where it goes. You probably thought it would be for Return of the Jedi, (and some bloggers make it a point to link to IMDB for every film they mention as if they have to cite and prove the film exists (their existence on IMDB not necessarily conclusive proof (that would have been where I would have linked to a couple fake or non-existent films to prove that point - which is that IMDB is no reliable source)). If any reader needed to look up a film on IMDB I would like to think they could to that without the link to push them in that direction. Sheesh.) which also doesn't have a satisfying third act but you very well might have clicked just to make sure and I would have lost you. Don't click on it, it'll just distract you and you'll start reading movie reviews.

[4] To emphasize "no really" the writer might have included the following link to those words: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120521/01542518984/why-hollywood-is-doomed-it-takes-sensible-advice-like-make-good-movies-turns-it-into-screed-about-piracy.shtml hoping you would have visited after you were done reading here, which talks about how piracy is bad.

[5] This footnote to a link (which is probably now starting to piss you off) notes that the citation linked above backs up the author's contention that DVD grosses increased profits, would in the old days normally would have been handled only as a footnote. Now it's a link within the text and you can't reference it until you click on it (and only if you doubt me) which means you'd leave the main page and probably never be coming back. Proceed accordingly - or just take my word for it.

[6] That claim probably should have had some kind of citation to back it up.

[7] Longtime readers will note how much I avoid using extra words.

[8] This link is tied to a single letter (in this case to a site explaining the extended endings of The Town (no IMDB link needed, right?) which gets the point across (the added ending letter of the word = the added footage/alternate end of the movie. But if you left to see, you never came back again).

[9] Cute story about trying to download Pitch Perfect for his kids, here. (There, now I have a link in the footnotes that have been complaining about the links in the main text.)

[10] Link to the first 5 F&F films in a boxed set. Also, too many numbers.

[11] This is the page of OOP Criterion titles; don't click here. It would just frustrate you that you didn't buy these when you could. You're welcome.

[12] I really need to stop footnoting my links. It's hard enough avoiding linking my footnotes. This link is a discussion of increasing profits of Hollywood which is ironically and perhaps significantly on a website devoted to online piracy.

[13] Here are some actual hard numbers and the citations should actually be supplied. Here in a footnote. Details from NYT: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/will-smith-and-after-earth-have-dismal-opening/ And if I had put the link up there you probably would have ended up reading movie reviews from the New York Times. So, my plan worked.

N.B.: Rather than properly cite my sources I've been seduced by common practice of the Internet to link to the appropriate virtual digressions as needed inline, a new kind of Internet economy of attention - or authenticity - or verification, and one that likely sent you away from here never to come back to finish the original article. So note, at least, that there are references and read through to them only if you really needed the goddam proof of my suppositions.

Hooray For Hollywood

2013-04-28T22:54:00.002-07:00

My favorite genre, presuming there is a specific type of book I would automatically pick up in a used bookstore, is the Hollywood expose. Not the over-heated fictionalized biographies of Frank Sinatra or Barbra Streisand but the melodramas that take place in a palm-lined, dream-world of West LA, collecting types and accomplices inside and outside the gates of the studios, and depicting misguided sexual unions, stirring up dashed dreams and broken promises and lying agents in an always sunny, often depressing, hard-edged and hardboiled beat prose.

The genre bloomed early in the 20th century, fomented by the grousing of those East Coast writers like Ben Hecht coming to the promised land to make their fortune writing for the talkies (and who probably saw themselves in the water reflecting the bright sunshine). It culminated in the ’40s with “What Makes Sammy Run?” (introing Sammy Glick) and “The Day of the Locust,” (pace Homor Simpson) both dark turns that illuminate the unspoken Faustian deal that seems to lurk at the heart of fame. The genre had found a new lease and angle in the early ’60s, with non-classics such as Allison Lurie’s “The Nowhere City” (specifically about outsiders) and Fitzgerald’s “The Pat Hobby Stories” (also pointedly about an outsider (and first collected in 1962, perhaps finally of its time)) leading the way towards a more existential outlook that suggests while no one is innocent no one is particularly guilty either.

Maritta Wolff’s “The Big Nickelodeon” (1963) seem inspired by “Peyton Place” more than any real thing and her reluctance to go full-bore in the milieu she must know existed – she was invited to Hollywood to write screenplays after the success of her “Whistle Stop” – is mitigated by her valiant attempt to introduce a wide and decadent swath of characters – from divorcees trying to break into the movies to rentboys parking cars on Sunset to cops finding bodies on the beach.

That same year “The Surprise Party Complex” by Ramona Stewart follows a trio of young women in various states of denial and undress having moved to Hollywood and trying to negotiate auditions, parents who don’t believe in them and horny next door neighbors. Mentioned earlier, Allison Lurie’s “The Nowhere City” (1965) elevates the corruptible outsider to literature following two small-town rubes who move with big dreams of success (or in the case of the wife, not) and how expectations and morals are confounded by intangible seductive powers more in the air and due to fate rather than to any malicious antagonist or force.

Wolf Mankowitz’s “Cockatrice” (also 1963) focuses on an anonymous assistant to an arrogant big-time producer who will steal talent, ideas, and girlfriends to make a picture and a name for himself. You become what you despise. What makes this one more insightful may be that Mankowitz worked with Broccoli and Saltzman during the beginnings of the Bond franchise. Yet even this insider expose has more winks than tooth. He’s along for the ride as much as any of the girls he beds.

Something happened in the late ‘50s and early ’60s. TV had officially been declared not-a-fad and Universal was bought by MCA, the biggest deal involving talent, land, a back catalog and the potential to rewrite the future of show business before or since. 20th Century Fox, meanwhile sold 3/4s of their lot to developers giving rise to Century City for $43 million. The worst real estate deal in history and making public the voracious appetite of the glass teat, the money at stake, the careers made and broken and only brightened the allure of a career in show business.

Part of this also has to do with the economics of paperback books being widely available and exploiting a cultural unease after the Eisenhower ’50s before the sex-and-nothing-but trade supplanted these innocent tomes. But these cycles of books, a clutch of forgotten potboilers that seemed to peter out around 1970 as Hollywood players felt more comfortable not hiding their confessions behind fictional names and projects (“Play It As It Lays” being the avatar of the milieu of behind-the-scenes disasterpieces), freeze in amber a cultural moment in which Hollywood was incredibly alluring, dangerous, innocent of its faults, and success was still possible. Make no mistake, in none of these books does anyone succeed on sheer talent or without selling out their most closely held morals. At the conclusion of at least one, characters lay dead in a burning mansion.

But the “watch out – don’t let this happen to your daughter” panic of the 1930s and ’40s books (including those hammerhead noirs by West and McCoy) have softened as more and more writers realize that the business of show is as dysfunctional as any paper-printing corporation. No one’s in charge, and no one’s stealing any daughter’s virtue that isn’t already for sale.

And they all use ripe metaphors as their entrypoints – the cockatrice is a fanciful dragon/griffith with a colorful plume and a poisonous bite; one of the characters in “Surprise Party Complex” keeps expecting someone to bust in and yell “surprise!” – the reward for always being ready, always photogenic, on the constant edge of expectation; “nowhere city” and “love-jungle tigress” speak for themselves.

The ’80s would bring the breezy Jackie Collins beach reads that seem strangely unplugged from show business reality we’d learned by that point from TV. And the Leonard and Ellroy meta-noirs “Get Shorty” and “L.A. Confidential” (both 1990) are more affectionate pastiche than scathing attacks.

In spite of the dark heart of most of these books, they seem at the time to be ceding the post-depression anxiety of an earlier age and embrace the Kennedy era and go-go promise of the ’60s. By the end of the decade UHF would increase the # of channels on the dial to over 50. A new world in which the possibilities have become a foregone conclusion and resistance is futile.

These are sexy yet moral, chaste and yet trashy. Deliciously seductive, in spite of good intentions they can’t quite keep their hands to themselves.

Who Wants Nostalgia Anymore?

2013-03-11T09:30:00.000-07:00

Over to the right there, in the margin is a link to one of my favorite film sites. See it? Lower, in the Film Sites section.

To SwanArchives.org, which is devoted to the 1974 film "Phantom of the Paradise," and it is the best site for any film, official or otherwise, EVER.

The guy who runs it (Ari, whom Paul Williams wants the trust of) became a fan of the film after seeing it on a double bill (with "Young Frankenstein" no less and there's no better argument for the great loss we've suffered culturally by not wanting to see 2 films in one night anymore), and he began to collect the various emphemera, stills, international posters and magazine articles related to the film over the next 20 years. In the era before VHS and DVD and their attendant behind-the-scenes features this was the only way to capture the experience of a film vicariously absent having a copy yourself (which he would also purloin, a 16mm print intended for the college rental market). In the process he amassed over 400 items, including previews, radio spots (on reel-to-reel tapes), lobby cards, concept drawings and even outtakes from footage abandoned in a lab.

Yeah. A goddamn archive, more complete than any other, devoted not only to one film but to an entire production and marketing process of a typical cult, mid-level hit from the '70s. That it's a sci-fi musical with elements of horror, rock 'n' roll, and directed by Brian De Palma who would go on to much greater things adds to the delicious fortuitousness of his foresight.

In 2006 he put photos of his collection online and wrote over 20,000 words on the production, themes and complicated subtext of the film. A labor of love and the sign of an obsessive fanboy stuck in the past but us beggers can't be choosers and he's done a fabulous job, bringing the joys of the film to a new international audience - and arguably increasing the long-term value of the film for those who own the rights. There is no better discussion of aesthetics and a critique of the industrial process of building and marketing such a complicated and nuanced piece of popular culture, putting it into context.

Thing is the rightsholders don't seem to care. They held no archival material for the film and when a French company wanted to put out a DVD they had to go to Ari for the trailer to put on as an extra. 20th Century no longer held such obsolete objects.

Ari's efforts, exhaustive and extensive, bring up important questions about how archives and curation will manifest in a new digital age. From an age in which films came and went over the course of a few weeks - often only to be found on late-night cable after their initial theatrical runs - "Phantom" now lives online in a comprehensive deconstruction, including a history of last minute edits to erase the "Swan Song" logo illustrated by outtakes, and a careful chronology of marketing campaigns and film quotes.

The archive is no longer behind closed doors. The curator is now the tourguide, leading you through a primrose path of materials arranged just so. And he's a stone amateur. He makes no money on this and has set up shop in the inner sanctum of archivology without permission. 20th Century Fox and Harbor Productions don't even mention the film on their websites, and although Ari posts image after image of their intellectual property they seem to have ceded all archival responsibility to him.

A thousand other films from before 1980 did not make it to a new generation of fans and didn't enjoy an obsessive teenage nerd with time on his hands to collect every related element or magazine mentioning its makers and stars. They weren't borne during the internet age of dedicated websites. If they never showed on late night TV or made it to VHS they're invisible to us now.

If not for Ari this one would be lost as well.

* * *

Postscript 5/3/13: An extended article I wrote about Ari's website and its archival ramifications was accepted by the esteemed online journal Bright Lights Film Journal, and just appeared in the May 2013 issue here.

Film Is Heavy

2013-02-13T09:01:00.000-08:00

Side By Side, the 2012 documentary that compares digital film-making process with celluloid aesthetics and the cultural repercussions of this, seems to locate the shift to the moment in which Avatar, How To Train Your Dragon, and Alice In Wonderland all did boffo in 2010 and changed the industry's perception, profit potential, and go-big-or-go-away attitude.

Barely real himself Keanu Reeves interviews various movers and shakers in the push to digital, from godfathers George Lucas and James Cameron (arguably sounding more like IT guys than film directors, and can actually get companies to build new cameras for them) to relative unknowns like Bradford Young and Lena Dunham who are using the democratizing effect of ubiquitous digital equipment to capture more than has been able to be captured before.

The film, measured and fair as it goes, sounds practically like the authorized version, and like most authorized versions is at only 6 months old already out of date (film is deeper in the grave than suggested - Kodak would shortly file for bankruptcy and stop making film) and reveals darker undercurrents than the participants quite recognize.

There is painful little (but enough) lip service to how digital materials can possibly manage to survive past a couple years without aggressive curation and constant cloning and migration. (Christopher Nolan is quoted as saying "There are no meaningful archival digital formats" and I believe it was Michael Ballhaus said everything we're working on will be gone in 50 years.) Rich filmmakers who have the infinite support of studios like David Fincher and George Lucas and Stephen Soderbergh and Cameron (or so they think) are sure their works will be kept and preserved, that digital looks much better, and that the cameras are so much smaller and lighter.

Another hidden subtext of Side By Side is how the realm of cinema production turned many of its practitioners by necessity into technical experts, taking some power and aesthetics (earned or not) from cinematographers and directors and the art of patience (per Scorsese) into the hands of IT gurus. When the IT guys are calling the shots (I'll say figuratively) different decisions are made and different money is spent.

The film avoids the pointless argument of which is "better," and Keanu as avuncular (if barely real) host and producer keeps the proceedings engaging and conversational with only a minimum of hand-wringing.

It is not a film about the democratization of art (although that's mentioned). It is not about the aesthetics of hand-held or 3-D (although a lot of cinematographers are talked to). This is an extended discussion with serious filmmakers about their decisions regarding how they will be making films from now on and as such is skewed toward those who have had the resources to take full advantage of the shift. It's heartening to see that Reeves at least sought out Lars Von Trier and David Lynch, although they both don't seem as interested in talking about their technology as their stories.

And even Mr. Fincher admits that much of his commercial work from 20 years ago is orphaned on obsolete tape technologies that can no longer be played back. If that's okay with him I guess it's okay with me. But for the 1000s of other filmmakers who have less resources than him, what are they to do when the studios don't answer their calls?