View image The site says "NC-17" but the box art says "R." Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution" won the Venice Film Festival last year. But that's not the version Blockbuster carries. Would you have known you weren't seeing the version released in the US -- especially if you rented it based on the contradictory online info you see here?
IFC Entertainment has made a two-year agreement with Blockbuster® Video, giving the moribund sales and rental mega-chain "an exclusive 60-day rental window, including both the physical and digital rental distribution channels, for each title as it becomes available. During this period no title will be available on a retail basis in any format."
According to a joint press release, "After the 60-day period, the IFC titles will be available on a non-exclusive basis both for retail and digital distribution. However, Blockbuster will retain the exclusive physical rental distribution rights for IFC titles for three years after each street date." (You read that right: It's a two-year agreement with a three-year exclusive.)
Currently, some IFC Films, released on their First Take label ("Paranoid Park," "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 days," "Hannah Takes the Stairs," "The Wind That Shakes the Barley"), have been available via Comcast's On Demand service the same day they arrive in theaters. Will that still be the case?
The Weinstein Company made an "exclusive" four-year deal with Blockbuster that went into effect in 2007, although that hasn't prevented NetFlix or other competitors from renting or selling Weinstein movies under the "first sale doctrine." As the Dallas Morning Newsreported at the time of the Weinstein-Blockbuster agreement: "Under federal statute, companies such as Blockbuster and Netflix are able to rent out the movies they purchase without getting permission from anyone."
View image "I put together the DVD cover and the poster originally. And then they took it and f--king bastardized it."
Academy Award-winning Irish songwriter Glen Hansard (the Academy urges us to identify Oscar-nabbers that way for the rest of their lives) speaks out about the lousy/cutesy DVD image manipulation on the cover of the US edition of "Once." (Previous Scanners discussion here.) He's waiting for the Criterion edition. From an interview at Pitchfork:
GH: Oh, man. They f--kin' killed it. You're right. They have us holding hands, which we never do in the film! Those legs aren't mine. Those legs are like three times longer than my legs. It's a completely new body. They literally just used my face. I'm wearing a hat in the original picture, so they Photoshopped my head. If you look at my head, my head looks totally weird, because whoever did the Photoshop job was sh-t. My head looks really weird, they took my hat off, and they gave me an entirely new body. It's completely bizarre.
View image This is not a "chick flick." The DVD cover (right) misrepresents the movie.
I resisted seeing John Carney's "Once" at first. Sounded to me a little too much like what, in the 1970s, somebody might have called a "folk opera" -- an Irish acoustic-balladeer musical. You know: moosh. Guy (Glen Hansard) meets Girl (Markéta Irglová) -- yes, that's as much as the movie tells us about the main characters' names -- and, before you know it, they're bursting into song. Which they do, but it's not like "West Side Story" on the streets of Dublin. He sings because he's a busker, but he's also a non-musical vacuum repair guy. The important thing is that "Once" is by no means a conventional romantic musical. It's just that the performances, and the dialog, and the story, are primarily expressed through the songs composed and sung (for plausible reasons) by the Guy and the Girl. The music is what passes between the two of them, particularly in a marvelous scene in which he teaches her one of his songs, and she accompanies him on piano, in the back of a music store.
View image The original movie still. OK, maybe the stocking cap had to go for the poster...
"Once" is the kind of movie everybody calls "charming," but I think that does it a disservice. Not that it isn't charming, just not in quite the ways you'd necessarily expect. For instance, I don't think I've ever pulled so strongly for the two lead characters to not "get together" as I did in this movie. If, even for a moment, it had tipped over into a conventional romance it would have failed.
Which is why the DVD cover for "Once" bugs me. Look at the original poster, above left. The Guy and the Girl are walking side by side, having a conversation. They're looking at each other, but no PDA. Now look at the DVD image: Same photo (with colors brightened), same cobblestone-street-as-guitar... but are they holding hands? That is wrong, wrong, wrong! She's received a colorized accessory makeover, while he's been de-scruffed and dressed in a more svelte and stylish jacket and sweater, with a newly color-coordinated scarf, and what looks like tighter-fitting jeans. And a gym membership. Is somebody is trying to sell this movie as a "chick flick"? I hate that term, but I think it accurately reflects what's going on here... The movie got terrific reviews and became a sleeper hit with audiences -- a $150,000 movie that grossed about $9.5 million in the US (approximately 65 percent of its worldwide take). Was this really necessary?
(Tip: Dave McCoy, who has "Once" as the #2 movie on his ten best list.)
In celebration of the 30th anniversary three-disc DVD release of three -- count 'em, three -- versions of Steven Spielberg's masterpiece, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," I offer yet another quotation from Richard T. Jameson's "Style vs. 'Style'" (Film Comment, March/April, 1980):
"Energy" has become the new cliché of film criticism, which is a damn shame since the cinema is a medium of energy... "Energy" as a cop-out for mindless noise and jitter is reprehensible. But energy, sans quotes, can be lucid, multivalenced, aesthetically informed, and beautiful in ways unique to cinema.
Steven Spielberg misapplies it in "1941," but illuminates the world and his medium with it in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." "Close Encounters" is, like any other good movie, about mise en scène, the transliteration of energy. "The sun sang to me last night," an old derelict beams. The dissonant but regular chant on a mountain in India is echoed on the toy flute of an Indiana boy, while his mother finds herself painting an odd rock formation into all her pictures and a newly-ex power-company employee (he's chasing a new power) looks for it in rumpled pillows and bowls of mashed potatoes. Form finally compels its own content. Music becomes light, gesture, mathematical formula, the patterns described in space by a celestial craft in motion. The metamorphosis of reality, the rediscovery of possibility, the translation of an idea into visual action: what movies do: why movies exist. The foremost pleader of the UFO cause is played by one François Truffaut, movie director.
This is energy as style, style as energy. It's radiant because it's been defined by a cinematic sensibility: What Spielberg's seeing and the way he sees it are one.
I get chills reading that, because it puts me back in touch with the sense of awe I get from a movie that sings... like the sun.
View image Both images above from the opening credits of John Huston's "Under the Volcano" (1984), newly released on Criterion DVD.
Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado.Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trabajo y ningún juego hacen Jim un muchacho embotado. Todo el trab y n nge ju pl g ma de l del y
"The Bridge," Eric Steel's chilling masterpiece exploring the yawning chasm between life and death, between the steel suspension of the Golden Gate Bridge and the cold hard surface of the water below in San Francisco Bay, is now available on DVD. It's a film that goes deeper into that void of despair and self-obliteration than any film I've ever seen. I wrote about it several times in 2006:
A movie that takes suicide seriously, and considers the pain of the person who wishes to die as well as the anguish and guilt of the survivors, is a rarity. Over and over, survivors say they don't understand why someone they knew and loved wanted to cease to exist; but a surprising number admit the agony that would drive someone to suicide is beyond their imagination. They have to accept, and respect, that it was real.
A father says: "“Some people say the body is a temple. He thought his body was a cage, a prison. In his mind, he knew he was loved, that he had everything and could do anything. And yet he felt trapped, and that was the only way he could get free.�? "The Bridge" makes the unthinkable, taboo subject of suicide real in honest and realistic ways that maybe even those who have never considered it can understand. The mother of a jumper recalls it took someone else to finally get her to realize: "It's not about you. It has nothing to do with you." That may be as hard for some to get their heads around as the suicide itself. Suicide is the ultimate solipsistic act; it's not about anyone else.
The few, mostly superficial discussions of suicide we have in our culture (30,000+ in the U.S. in an average year; only about 25 or so off the Golden Gate, which is nevertheless the world's leading suicide destination), tend to objectify the suicidal person and concentrate on prevention and grief and downplaying the reality out of fear that others may be encouraged to try it. Copycat incidents are real, but peer pressure is not one of the leading causes of suicide -- particularly off the Golden Gate Bridge. It takes a certain kind of personality to choose such a dramatic, public exit, and the bridge is already famous as a suicide spot.
It's an awesome sight from up there, the wind and dizzying height halting your breath as you gaze across the strait. The sun makes silver ripples on the churning blue-green water and the horizon glows blindingly bright at the time of day when the sky and the sea converge. The cliffs, crinkled with shadows, form a paradisiacal gateway. And then, in the periphery, there's a tiny momentary rupture in the mythical postcard landscape. A small white splash flickers in the water. And in the great bright cacophony of the scene, Icarus disappears beneath the surface.
That's a description of Peter Breughel's painting, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," and William Carlos Williams' poem by the same name, intermingling with images from Eric Steel's "The Bridge," a film about 24 deaths and one survivor in a year in the life of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. "The Bridge" consciously invokes Brueghel, and after I'd watched the movie and looked up the painting again, hundreds of images of the Golden Gate from "The Bridge" (and my memory) came rushing back to me, as though projected at high speed over Breughel's canvas. Each small white splash, of course, marks the end of a life. [...]
Witnessing the last few moments of these people's existence, I thought of Michael Apted's "Up" documentaries, which have followed the contours of a handful of lives for 49 years now, revisiting them at seven-year intervals. "The Bridge" views human life from the other end of the spectrum -- showing the end, and then working back from there.
And because these jumpers chose such an open and public way to end their lives, I have no ethical problem with what the cameras observe; amateur photographers often catch the same sights inadvertently. One survivor tells of being interrupted by a German tourist who asked him to take her picture, just as he was preparing to jump.
Looking this closely and intently into suicide, you almost fear too much empathy, the way you dread the vertigo that accompanies acrophobia: What you're afraid of is not so much that you might fall, but that impulse within you that wants to eliminate the yawning tension between you and the surface below....
"The Bridge" is brave and unflinching, unshakably haunting and deeply mysterious. I doubt I'll forget it until the day I die.
Steven Boone over at The House Next Door has seen the latest -- er, "Final" -- cut of what may now, 25 years after its debut, be "Ridley Scott's" "Blade Runner," in the new version premiering at the New York Film Festival. Above all, Boone was wowed by the digital presentation:
"The Final Cut" is remastered from original 35mm elements and transferred to High Definition digital video at 4K (4096 horizontal pixel) resolution. Projected in HD at 24 frames a second for this year's New York Film Festival, this "Blade Runner" has no visible grain, dirt or scratches, stuttering frames, reel-change "cigarette burns" or soft-focus moments when the film gets loose in the projector gate. Funny how I thought I'd miss all those things, their "organic" qualities, but this restoration gives us a pristine image without sacrificing warmth. The picture even fooled our editor, who at first thought he was looking at a 35mm projection. This "Blade Runner" removes every barrier to getting lost in Scott's fire-and-rain Los Angeles short of presenting it as interactive theater.
I saw the original version first-run in 70 mm at Seattle's Cinerama Theater in 1982, and grain was evident, probably for a couple reasons: 1) many of the visual effects involved multiple, non-digital exposures; and 2) the film wasn't actually shot in 70 mm, but was blown up from 35 mm.
According to an extensive, multi-sourced Wikipedia article on the film, the 1990 version advertised as a "Director's Cut" and shown at the Nuart in LA and the Castro in San Francisco was actually a 70 mm workprint. (In the days before digital, effects were often done in 70 mm, even for 35 mm releases, for better optical quality.) Scott approved the 1992 Director's Cut, but wasn't entirely satisfied with it. Wikipedia offers comparisons of the various versions, citing the primary changes as:
* The removal of Deckard's explanatory voice-over
* The re-insertion of a dream sequence of a unicorn running through a forest
* The removal of the studio-imposed "happy ending," including some associated visuals which had originally run under the film's end-credits.
It was apparent from the beginning that the voiceover was a big problem -- and Harrison Ford (who didn't get on with Scott, much less the studio execs who were calling him in to read narration) has said he did it badly and begrudgingly, hoping they wouldn't even be able to use it. (It's that cringe-worthy at times.) Scott, however, says he wasn't taken off the picture, and that he completed the original release version after it tested badly with audiences.
But the movie was a theatrical flop anyway, producing rentals of only $14.8 million at roughly the same time "E.T." was on its way to zooming past $300 million. According to a definitive piece by Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times Magazine (September 13, 1992), the film may have died then and there. But the new home video market extended its commercial termination date:
"Blade Runner's" availability on video kept it alive in the eyes of the always loyal science-fiction crowd, and gradually, over time, the film's visual qualities and the uncanniness with which it had seemed to see the future began to outweigh its narrative flaws. Scott says he saw the interest rise, "And I thought, 'My God, we must have misfired somewhere; a lot of people like this movie.' " And not just in this country. In Japan, where the film had always been successful, "I was treated like a king," art director [Snyder reports. "The fans would be too in awe to even look at you." The film's look began to show up in art direction and design: Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and the stage design for the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels tour were influenced by "Blade Runner." And when laser discs appeared on the market, "Blade Runner" was one of the films that everyone just had to get. It became Voyager's top-selling disc immediately upon its release in 1989, never losing the No. 1 spot.
(Are spoiler alerts now becoming unfashionable because we should just assume everybody's seen the movie or knows the ending? I don't care. This is one.)
In Sunday's New York Times ("A Cult Classic Restored, Again"), Scott says of Ford's character, Deckard: “Yes, he’s a replicant. He was always a replicant.”
View image 1. The title of the film and the name of the writer and director. Michael Nyman's chugging strings and pounding piano build tension and suspense on the soundtrack.
View image 2. Opening shot: The mystery begins. Two children pull a dalmatian (black-and-white spotted dog) toward the ZOO. A guard mans his station, to keep people out or to keep animals in or to direct traffic or for some other reason or reasons. The dog strongly resists being pulled toward the ZOO.
Consider this a kind of expanded "Opening Shots" entry -- from the titles sequence of Peter Greenaway's "A Zed and Two Noughts" (1985), one of the director's taxonomy films -- in a category with "The Falls" (92 mini-bios of people whose names begin with F-A-L-L), "The Draughtsman's Contract" (twelve architectural drawings), "The Belly of an Architect" (nine months), "Drowning by Numbers" (1-100) -- about the ordering and classification of things, including images.
View image 3. A tiger, a striped cat, in a cage with bars, stripes. The feline paces back and forth. On the floor is the head of another black-and-white animal, a zebra, that perhaps provides food for the tiger.
There's a story: Twin brothers Oswald and Oliver Deuce (played by identical twins Brian and Eric Deacon) are shattered when both their wives are killed in a collision with a pregnant swan outside the London Zoo. They become obsessed with death and decay, making time-lapse photographic studies of decomposition, beginning with an apple and continuing through the alphabet to a zebra... and then beyond. They both become sexually involved with Alba Bewick (Andréa Ferréol), the only survivor of the accident, who has lost one leg because of it. The other is later removed for the sake of symmetry.
View image 5. A hand with a counter. Someone appears to be sitting outside the tiger's cage, counting the number of times it paces from one side of the cell to the other.
View image 6. Wider view of the man with the counter. He is taking notes. There are black-and-white circles of light and shadow within the squares of the cell and the bars.
There also a character named Venus de Milo (Frances Barber, with two arms) and a mysterious, black-clad character called Van Hoyten (Joss Acklund). The film is narrated by the great voice of BBC nature documentaries, David Attenborough.
View image 7. Repetition/continuation of shot #4. Followed by repetition/continuation of #5, close-up of hand with counter, clicking to a symmetrical 676.
View image 8. Repetition/continuation of shot #6. The sounds of a crash and a scream are heard. The man, hearing the sounds, looks up. Glances at the camera?
That's the skeletal outline. "ZOO" is about ways of processing grief and facing the reality of death, and about photography as a means of recording and preserving the processes of change and decay. It's also extremely funny (emphasis on "extreme," in every way), full of visual and verbal puns and puzzles. And it's a study in mortification (again, in all senses of that word). It is also ravishingly beautiful, in a striking and painterly fashion (photographed by Greenaway's frequent collaborator, Sacha Vierney, 1919 - 2001). Greenaway's most recent film, "Nightwatching" (which I unfortunately missed in Toronto), is a deconstruction of Rembrandt's famous painting, "The Night Watch," and the murder mystery behind it.
View image 9. The accident. Stripes. Tiger. Woman's head. White Mercury. Pair of wings. Pair of headlight circles. "Z" for ZOO in background. License plate: 26 (letters in alphabet), B/W (black and white)... Patters upon patterns upon patterns...
At right: The opening of "A Zed & Two Noughts," by the numbers Some shots are separated by blackouts with film credits on them. A shot or two is left out of the sequence, for the sake of asymmetry...
When I reviewed Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain" last year, after having first seen it at TIFF 2006, I wrote:
"The Fountain" is a science-fiction historical adventure-fantasy about a man's (or Man's) struggle to face the incontrovertible fact of death.
It begins with Tomas (Hugh Jackman, a boy a long way from Oz) as a 16th century Spanish conquistador exploring the land of the Mayans in search of the biblical Tree of Life at the behest of Queen Isabella (Rachel Weisz). The movie slips into the 21st century, where Tommy (Jackman) is a surgeon and research scientist desperate to discover a cure for the tumor in the brain of his wife, Izzi (Weisz), who is writing a fairy-tale book called The Fountain that includes the 16th century story.
Surging forward another few millennia into the 26th century, the film finds Tom (Jackman) as a kind of zen astronaut hurtling through space in a big bubble with a dying tree and the ghost of 21st century Iz (Weisz) on their way into a mysterious nebula. The three stories flow into and out of one another.
I got that bit about the "26th century" from the press kit, not from the movie itself, but I was attempting to be careful in how I described the relationship between the three intertwined "stories" in the film. Yes, they are set in three different time periods, but are they really meant to be chronological stories of the same (or different) characters? Not only do I, as a viewer of the film, not know -- I don't care. Nor should I.
Roger reviewed "The Fountain" last week (he gave it half a star less than I did), and observed -- here be spoilers:
Did I have it figured out? It didn’t take me long, and here was my thinking: Since there is not a single element in the film claiming that the same man is alive in all three time periods, he obviously is not. There is a critical belief that you should not bring story elements to fiction that cannot be found there. The fictional identity of the first man is explained by Izzy’s novel, in which she would obviously visualize her own lover as the hero. The fictional nature of the third man is explained because, hey, people don’t go floating through the cosmos inside a bubble while levitating and eating bark, even in “the future.” There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, but not that. Stephen Hawking will back me up. The film’s central section is unalloyed realism, and generates the fantasy of the first and third. Since Izzy dies in it, magic isn’t allowed. Fiction sets its rules.
RogerEbert.com reader Matt Withers to write in with his own theory about "The Fountain," which we printed as a guest commentary here:
... I was struck by what an amazing tale it told. A quick Google search later led me to believe that so far no one has given it credit as a story that makes much sense; I found simply a mass of possible interpretations. I actually believe there is a very clear and linear story being told (albeit in a "Pulp Fiction"-y kind of timeline). Since I have not come across any explanation similar to my own, I thought I would share it -- film fan to film fan.
To begin our exploration of just what the hell is going on in "The Fountain," our first task is to determine which, if any, of the three story lines presented is real.
You'll have to read the piece for Withers' interpretation of what's "real" (and not) in the movie -- but Marc Caddell isn't buying it. He writes in with his own interpretation (which you can read at the above link).
Me, I think either of these readings are fine (whatever floats your bubble), but I think they are utterly beside the point. In a movie of this sort, the movie is the experience, and it's reductive to try to say one story is more "real" than another. I wrote an article about this subject on RogerEbert.com a few years ago (about "Fight Club" and "Taxi Driver" and "The Wizard of Oz" and "American Psycho" and "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Citizen Kane" and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie"...) called "Head Trips: Movies Inside the Skull":
It’s silly how many moviegoers and critics insist upon making an artificial distinction between what is “real” and what is “unreal” in a movie – often at the expense of what the film itself is actually about. It’s as if, to them, the predominant idea behind any given picture boils down to nothing more than: Did It Really Happen Or Was It All In His/Her Head? Well, look at it this way: If it’s on the screen, it’s there for a reason – to convey something about character, story, theme. And that is all that matters.
A movie consists of nothing more or less than the images in front of you, and what you go through while you watch them. Consider: Does it honestly matter if Dorothy really goes to the Merry Old Land of Oz, or if it was “all a dream” – or, for that matter, if her “trip” was the result of a concussion, or magic Munchkin mushrooms? Of course not. As any child can (and will) tell you, the important thing about Dorothy’s journey to Oz and back is what she experiences along the way, and what she gets out of it, not whether she physically travels anywhere....
Of course, in "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), the distinction between “reality” and “fantasy” is made pretty explicit because, as we all know, Kansas is a monochromatic state (of mind) and Oz is a horse of a different Technicolor. (I’m not so sure I picked up on that, though, the first time I saw the movie as a small child – watching it on black-and-white broadcast TV.)
It's always the theme, and the imagery, that matters to me in a movie, not so much the Point A to Point B trajectory of the plot. I guess if I were to describe "The Fountain" in story terms, I'd use not just the image of the tree, but maybe the one of the bubble: The movie is the bubble. Whatever you experience is inside the bubble, and that's all that matters. Whatever's outside the bubble is, as Roger writes, only speculative because it's not actually in the film.
Want to dip your toe in this argument? Or float your own theory about the structure of "The Fountain"? Dive in....
At the Great Northern, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
What's better than a cup of good, hot, black coffee? Well, nothing. But almost as good is the announcement of the "Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition" DVD box set (due Oct. 30, 2007), which will include both seasons of the show and -- for the first time ever on DVD -- the two-hour pilot episode! Not only that, but two versions of it: the one that originally aired on ABC, and the "European" version (with its own bizarre coda/ending) that was released in theaters overseas.
You'll also get Log Lady introductions for each episode, never-before-seen deleted scenes, production documents, the 4-part "Secrets from Another Place: Creating Twin Peaks" documentary (includes "Northwest Passage: Creating the Pilot," "Freshly Squeezed: Creating Season 1," "Where We’re From: Creating the Music" and "Into the Night: Creating Season 2"), the "A Slice of Lynch" retrospective roundtable discussion video, the "Return to Twin Peaks" featurette, 13 TV spots, 3 image galleries (The Richard Beymer Gallery, Unit Photography and Twin Peaks Trading Cards), 3 Georgia Coffee commercials, Julee Cruise's "Falling" music video, 8 interactive maps and Kyle MacLachlan's monologue and "Twin Peaks" sketch from "Saturday Night Live." The episodes have all been remastered from the original negatives (a process personally supervised by Lynch) and will be presented in the original full frame aspect ratio with audio in both newly-mixed Dolby Digital 5.1 and the original 2.0.
Consider the new, two-disc DVD edition of Lynch's most recent feature "Inland Empire" a warm-up for this.
I believe talking is OK separate from a thing, but a commentary track that goes along through a film, I think, is maybe the worst possible thing a person could do. From then on, the film is seen in terms of the memory of that commentary and it changes things forever. [...]
There are things in "More Things That Happened" [a selection of additional scenes on the 211-minute second disc] that give a feeling that could be like a brother or sister to the film. It's like if you know a family, but you haven't met the sister yet. You go over to Ohio and meet the sister, and it adds more to the feeling of the whole family.
Obviously, I disagree with Lynch on the "commentaries" -- which provide one of the best ways of studying a film. But I see his point: When it's the filmmaker, rather than a third party (like a critic or a scholar) who is doing the talking, it makes the comments seem limiting, more like a statement than than an interpretation of the film. And Lynch does not like to put strictures on interpretations of his work. (I've seen him, in audience Q&A sessions, tell people when they're just flat-out, off-the-charts wrong about second-guessing his intentions, though.)
(Thanks to Jeff Shannon for passing along this news.)
You have, of course, never done a commentary track, but the "Stories" section of the "Inland Empire" disc could almost be a stand-alone commentary because you talk about so many things around the film.
I believe talking is OK separate from a thing, but a commentary track that goes along through a film, I think, is maybe the worst possible thing a person could do. From then on, the film is seen in terms of the memory of that commentary and it changes things forever.
You have about 70 minutes of deleted footage in the "More Things That Happened" section and you've edited them so they play like their own dreamlike film.
Right. There are things in "More Things That Happened" that give a feeling that could be like a brother or sister to the film. It's like if you know a family, but you haven't met the sister yet. You go over to Ohio and meet the sister, and it adds more to the feeling of the whole family.
In the "Stories" section of the "Inland Empire" supplements, you go on a rant about people watching movies on their phones. So how do you feel about the huge explosion of home theater?
I feel great about the home theater. It's so hopeful. It's a counterpart to the telephone experience, or the computer screen, but a lot of people are going to see their films on computers and phones and they will think they saw the films, but they will not have seen the film. And that's a sadness, as I say in "Stories," that's a real sadness. It's very hard to sink into a world when the picture is so small. I hope that the home-theater big screens at home will be something they embrace so they can feel and think in the world -- not have all this distraction around it.
I'm waiting for my DVD of "Inland Empire" to arrive. (I almost always watch them at night, with the lights off, on a 55" Sony LCD projection HDTV with surround sound.)
Even if you haven't seen Lynch's latest magnum opus ("Twin Peaks" was similarly big and deep), you can still check out my review, which was written as a sort of "Viewers' Guide to 'Inland Empire,'" suggesting various ways of looking at it. A synopsis would be impossible, anyway...
And after reading Fujiwara, I agree with him about Murch's intercutting Susie's first encounter with the Grandi's with a scene between Vargas and Quinlan: "One wonders whether if Welles had been allowed to recut the sequence as he wanted, he might not have struggled with it only to conclude that the Susie scene played better uninterrupted." - Another reason not to like the Murch cut!
The specific changes that were made [from Welles' memo] are detailed by Laurence French -- though oddly no mention is made of the recropping -- which I consider to be the Murch cut's most unforgiveable flaw.
I've read that "Touch of Evil" was shot "open aperture" (as many films are) at the standard "Academy ratio" (of 1.33:1 -- or 1.37:1 for sound films, from about 1932 through 1953) even though the "intended" ratio when projected may have been 1.66:1 (mostly a European standard) or 1.85:1. The latter format was used for the 1998 "Touch of Evil" DVD which, Kutner argues, chops the top and bottom off Welles' carefully composed full-ratio 35mm images. Normally, if a 1.85:1 film is improperly projected at the standard ratio, filling the screen from top to bottom, one usually sees boom microphones protruding into the upper part of the frame and other indications that one is seeing things that weren't intended to be seen. That's how you know it's the projectionist's fault, not the filmmakers'. But this was never the case with "Touch of Evil." (Stanley Kubrick ["Eyes Wide Shut"] and James Cameron ["The Abyss"] are among the directors who, it is claimed, have composed at least some of their video-era films in wide screen and "full screen" ratios simultaneously, so the image would fill pre-16:9, non-HDTV television screens without losing anything.)
Indeed, in a May 24, 1958, letter to the editor of the New Statesman of London (reprinted at the bottom of French's second page), Welles writes:
There was no attempt to approximate reality; the film's entire 'world' being the director's invention. Finally, while the style of TOUCH OF EVIL may be somewhat overly baroque, there are positively no camera tricks. Nowadays the eye is tamed, I think, by the new wide screens. These 'systems' with their rigid technical limitations are in such monopoly that any vigorous use of the old black-and-white, normal aperture camera runs the risk of seeming tricky by comparison. The old camera permits use of a range of visual conventions as removed from 'realism' as grand opera. This is a language not a bag of tricks. If it is now a dead language, as a candid partisan of the old eloquence, I must face the likelihood that I shall not again be able to put it to the service of any theme of my own choosing.
As I read this, Welles states his clear preference for the "old black-and-white normal aperature" over the "new wide screens" that were introduced in the 1950s (along with new widescreen processes such as VistaVision, CinemaScope and the like) -- and with regard to "Touch of Evil" in particular. The question (as one correspondent has posed it) was whether Welles really thought he could get away with making a 1:33:1 picture in the late 1950s. But even if he didn't, he knew the prints would retain that ratio. And the 16mm prints shown by universities and film societies were full-frame. So, he must have known that the film was being seen that way before he died in 1985. I wonder if either of the early versions of "Touch of Evil" was on VHS or laserdisc by then...
UPDATE: Christian Liemke offers some 1:33:1/1.85:1 "Touch of Evil" frame comparisons here.
Mr. Lazarescu pukes blood strings on his living room rug. He is not at all well.
Critics, filmmakers and pundits have been writing quite a bit over the last few years about what "digital" means for the future of cinema, and about the sorry state of the audience for foreign language films (not just distribution and exhibition, but demand) in the United States in the age of the DVD. Much of this speculative writing has been hopelessly vague and rather dismal -- and, in some cases, I don't think the writers really understand what they're talking about. But for every dozen "digital doomsday" observations, there's a concrete insight that's worth considering.
I'd like to take excerpts from three recent pieces and follow a thread that I think connects them:
In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it. Of course, no one will ever be forced to look at movies on a pipsqueak display—at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen, or they’ll transfer them to a big flat-screen TV. Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces, and they certainly will function that way for kids. According to home-entertainment specialists I spoke to in Hollywood, many kids are “platform agnostic”—that is, they will look at movies on any screen at all, large or small.
The [National Society of Film Critics] vote stands out a bit amid all this welter because its top three choices for best picture of the year were all movies in languages other than English. The third-place finisher was Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which is in Japanese; the runner-up was “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” a Romanian film directed by Cristi Puiu; and the winner, by a narrow margin, was “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo del Toro’s tale of magic and malevolence in 1940s Spain. [NOTE: Subsequently, the mostly-foreign-language films "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Babel" were nominated for Best Picture Oscars, while "Pan's Labyrinth" received six nominations, including Best Foreign Language Film.]
The honors bestowed on those three movies, not only by the National Society of Film Critics, might be taken as evidence that foreign films are flourishing.... The movies are out there, more numerous and various than ever before, but the audience — and therefore the box-office returns, and the willingness of distributors to risk even relatively small sums on North American distribution rights — seems to be dwindling and scattering. For every movie that manages to solicit a brief flicker of attention, there are dozens that will be seen only at film festivals or on region-free DVD players.
I'm through with film as a medium. For me, film is dead. If you look at what people all over the world are taking still pictures with now, you begin to see what's going to happen. I'm shooting in digital video now and I love it. [...]
How we see films is changing.... A tiny little picture, instead of a giant big picture, is going to be how people see films. And the good news: At least people will have their headphones. Sound will become, I think, even more important.... The whole thing is, when those curtains open up, and the lights go down, we must be able to go into that world. And it many ways, it's getting very difficult to go into a world. People talk so much in theaters. And there's a tiny, crummy little picture. How do you get the experience?
I think it's going to be a bit of a bumpy road. But the possibility is there for very clean pictures -- no scratches, no dirt, no water marks, no tearing -- and an image that can be controlled in an infinite number of ways. If you take care of how you show a film, it can be a beautiful experience that lets you go into a world. We're still working out ways for that to happen. But digital is here; the video iPod is here; we've just got to get real and go with the flow.
I think Lynch, Scott and Denby are all correct in what they say above. Although elsewhere in his piece, Denby oversells an idealized view of "the theatrical experience" (which "theatrical experience"?) as if all 16mm, 35mm and/or 70mm (or VistaVision or Todd A-O or IMAX) presentations were the same: The Best Of All Possible Ways To See A Movie. The most important thing, as I think all of us would agree, is that the audience feel able to submit to the film. We may fight it, we may be unwilling to go where the film wants to take us, but we should, as Lynch says, be allowed to "go into that world."
Imagine a country where, even at the highest levels of power, ignorance is flaunted and incompetence rewarded. OK, maybe that's too easy. Imagine a studio dumping a movie because it just doesn't know how to sell it. Well, that doesn't take any imagination at all, does it? "Idiocracy," the new film by Mike Judge ("Office Space," "King of the Hill," "Beavis and Butthead"), opened in a handful of theaters in the United States while I was in Canada for the Toronto Film Festival. When I got back I learned that none of those theaters was in Seattle, so -- guess what? -- I haven't been able to see it.
The groundwork for "Idiocracy" is laid in a hilarious parody of authoritarian educational films that exposes the roots of humanity’s slippery slide toward pea-brain-osity in the frigidity of intellectuals (or at least their yuppie subset) and the unchecked rutting of the uneducated poor. Smart folks are too selfish to procreate, while Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae can’t keep their genitalia to themselves.
Sounds simple enough, right? But by the time the movie really gets going Judge has laid culpability for the crumbling mental capacity of society at the feet of lawmakers, corporations and opportunistic politicians too. And let’s not forget the military—insofar as they represent by definition the aggressive arm of any government, Judge certainly hasn’t. A low-level army base slacker (Luke Wilson) and a randomly selected hooker (Maya Rudolph) are selected to participate in a military experiment, headed by an officer with more than just a little taste for the pimpin’ lifestyle—that’s how the hooker gets roped in. The experiment is designed to monitor physical changes in cryogenically frozen subjects over a period of a year. But when the officer’s illegal activities end up getting him imprisoned and the base bulldozed, Wilson and Rudolph are left on ice not for a year but for 500. The pair, barely three digits in the IQ department between them to start with, awaken to a world so battered and worn down by an abased pop culture, relentless corporate corruption and political ineffectuality that they are, by acidly ironic default, the smartest people on the planet.
I recommend checking out Dennis's essay about the film -- and what happened to it -- here. (BTW, as I write this, "Idiocracy" has a 71% rating on RottenTomatoes.com, compared to 43% for last week's box-office topper, "Gridiron Gang"; 31% for Brian De Palma's "The Black Dahlia"; and 17% for "All the King's Men," opening Friday.)
As you may know, "The Descent" (which opened in US theaters this weekend) was released last year in Great Britain, where it is now available on Region 2 PAL DVD. The British release has one final scene that was snipped for American audiences, though I really don't know why. I think it adds another note of ambiguity and mystery that... Oh. All right, I think I understand now.
After the jump: Frame grabs and a YouTube clip from the limey version.
View image: Above: That gritty Hollywood literalism and/or naturalism: "Off-putting to the contemporary sensibility."
I was wrong. Last night, just before going to bed, I read Stephen Metcalf's "Dilettante" column, "The Worst Best Movie: Why on earth did 'The Searchers' get canonized?". This did not make it easy for me to get to sleep, so I dashed off a preliminary response in which I harshly characterized Metcalf's piece as an "inexcusably stupid essay... about a classic John Ford Western." But now, re-reading the column in the light of day, I realize that Metcalf was hardly writing about "The Searchers" at all. And nearly every observation he does make about the film itself is cribbed from something Pauline Kael wrote (see more below). He'll just flings out an irresponsible, non sequitur comment like, "Even its adherents regard 'The Searchers' as something of an excruciating necessity," and let it lie there, flat on the screen, unexplained and unsupported. So, while I stand by my claim that what Metcalf has written is stupid and inexcusable (for the reasons I will delineate below), I don't think it has much to do with "The Searchers."
Instead, Metcalf is reacting to his own perception of the film's reputation (and in part to A.O. Scott's recent New York Times piece admiring "The Searchers"), using the movie to snidely deride people Mecalf labels "film geeks," "nerd cultists" and:
... critics whose careers emerged out of the rise of "film studies" as a discrete and self-respecting academic discipline, and the first generation of filmmakers—Scorsese and Schrader, but also Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, and George Lucas—whose careers began in film school.
(The latter are later characterized as "well-credentialed nerds.") The fault, then, in Metcalf's mind, is not so much in the film as in those who brazenly take film seriously as an art form. Using "The Searchers" as an anecdotal, ideological bludgeon, Metcalf attempts to attack the impudent and insidious notion that movies are worthy of serious study and artistic interpretation. Holy flashback to Clive James!
Enlarge image: Messrs. Meyer and Ebert at the time of their collaboration.
Yes, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" is available on DVD at last. Dennis Cozzalio has a fine assessment of Russ Meyer's busterpiece over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule -- and an appreciation of the commentary track by "BVD" screenwriter Roger Ebert, as well:
And now it seems that time, and film critics and film audiences, may finally have caught up with Ebert and Meyer. Last week's DVD release of "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (in tandem with the straightforward Mark Robson-directed 1967 adaptation of "Valley of the Dolls") provides a chance to see the candy-colored Panavision psychedelia, the free-associative montage, and the unbridled energy that powers Meyer and Ebert's play(boy/Pent)house sensibility to greater advantage than it has probably ever been seen.
Someone over at MindValley Ecommerce Labs found a pirate DVD of "Good Night, and Good Luck." in (San Francisco's?) Chinatown that promises a different take, as it were, on the 1950s television showdown between Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy. If you look closely, you'll see this isn't a porn rip-off (that would be "Good Night, and Good F***") -- it's the Oscar-nominated George Clooney movie with, um, embellished packaging. (Patricia Clarkson's role has been enhanced, too.)
I wonder: Do you suppose that somebody enticed to buy this movie with that artwork might, perhaps, be disappointed in the black-and-white historical film inside? Might this person, then, be a bit wary of buying pirated DVDs in the future? Or does the sexed-up cover make for a delightful coffee-table conversation piece?
My favorite thing is the juxtaposition of the hot wet babe with the tag line: "We will not walk in fear of one another." I am convinced that she does not walk in fear -- of McCarthy or anybody. Rather, she walks in high humidity.
My friend the film critic Richard T. Jameson made a clever and brilliant observation about Jonathan Glazer's "Birth," my favorite movie of 2004, before I'd even seen it. RTJ said he thought it was as if the Surrealist masterpiece "Un Chien Andalou" had been adapted into a narrative feature film. And so it is. I'd almost forgotten about this by the time I saw the movie, but there was something about that "Ten Years Later" title at the beginning that tweaked my movie-memory... (Titles like that always make me think of "Un Chien Andalou.") But by the time Danny Huston was pushing a piano across the room I was jumping out of my seat.
Robert C. Cumbow (former contributor to RTJ's Movietone News, a publication of the Seattle Film Society) and Dennis Cozzalio have both written eloquently and appreciatively about "Birth," and its Kubrickian connections in particular (and I'm working on something else in connection with the film for Scanners and RogerEbert.com -- stay browsed!). But I wanted to contribute a few observations (specifically visual ones) from the Andalusian Dog perspective, because echoes of Buñuel (particularly "Un Chien Andalou" and "Belle de Jour") reverberate throughout "Birth."... [SPOILERS AHEAD]
Terry Zwigoff ("Crumb," "Bad Santa," "Art School Confidential") said that as soon as he saw this musical number, "Jaan Pehechaan Ho," from the 1965 Bollywood production "Gumnaam," he knew he had to have it for the opening of his film "Ghost World." You can see why. It's mesmerizing -- one of the wildest, craziest musical numbers I've ever seen. The (Lynchian) energy is so frenetic the thing practically pops off the screen. And the way it's directed and choreographed for film is fantastic. The camera is always in the right place, and the shots of the necessary duration. You never feel like the director and editor are just cutting between different angles at random (as in the last few centuries of music videos, or Oliver Stone movies), chopping up and defusing the kinetic energy of the dancers and the dance. Every shot (mostly full shots, with a few mediums and only a few well-chosen close-ups for punctuation) seems to have been planned with the camera in mind, so that the whole dance only exists as assembled on film. That's the way a movie musical number is supposed to be. And there's something going on in just about every part of the frame -- and in the foreground, middle ground and background, too! (I think the opening of the first "Austen Powers" movie was the last time somebody did it right like this.)
