Some Came Running

Why aspect ratios matter...

...and by the way, don't you hate the word "matter?" Or "matters," for that matter? Not "matter" the noun, which is a perfectly good noun, but "matter" the intransitive verb, which over the years seems to have hypertrophied way beyond its modest meaning to become a word that both mediocre artists and faux-middlebrow publications like to trot out when they're feeling a bit pompous? As in, you know, "I want to make a film that matters," or some such? I'm actually friends with the fellow who concocted that slogan for the Clash—"The only band that matters"—and that was all right, back in the day, but sometimes I think I've got to upbraid him for wellspringing*...

All right, that's it for my impersonation of a mediocre blog comedian. Plus which, if you're reading this particular blog, you already know why aspect ratios matter. So sue me for coming up with an uninspired tease for my exploration of a rather interesting ratio conundrum, involving two editions of the underseen Alain Resnais classic Muriel, in today's Foreign Region DVD Report, over at The Auteurs'.

*(The gentleman in question is Gary Lucas, who did a stint in corporate at Columbia Records before reinventing himself as the guitar god he is today.)

UPDATE: In comments, Steve Santos notes that the IMDB lists the film's aspect ratio as 1.66. Well, that's true, and perhaps my characterization of the current 1.78 image as "proper" is a little inaccurate. A comparison of the Koch version, from a screen grab with the black bars on the side of the screen to render a 1.66 image, with the MOC disc screen cap below, will prove instructive. 

Look at the cropping at the top of the above frame, and then the cropping of the bottom frame. Look, over at the Auteurs' post, at the cropping of the top of the frame in the shot of the casino. 

The truth is, Muriel is a 1.66 film, but the transfer for the MOC version was approved in 1.78 by Resnais...as opposed to a telecine that had the top and bottom of the frame cropped, and then was squeezed to fit a 1.66 aspect ratio, resulting in an image that, once revealed for the horror it is, can't be looked at without inducing something like cinephilic carsickness. Hence, I deemed it as good a video version of the film "as we will have for some time," said time necessitating access to the original materials. 

Maurice Jarre, 1924-2009

Can one actually hoist a wine glass? Probably not. And yet, I feel that a wine glass, filled with a nice Margaux or some such thing, would be the best vessel with which to drink a toast to the late Maurice Jarre, who died, like Jean Renoir, in Los Angeles. He was 82. 

And as we hoist that wine glass, we ought to sing a chorus from the lyric-less theme: "LAWWWW-rence! Lawrence of Arabia!" And so on. Few heroic themes have been so stirring. 

I have been too busy to blog today, and too busy even to collect my thoughts on the passing of one of moviedom's greatest and most prolific composers. Lucky for me that my good friend Joseph Failla has been on the case: 

"Normally at a time like this, I'd probably cite a few of the artist's lesser known works that moved me, and shouldn't be overlooked. But in this case, I cannot in good conscience let his scores for Lean's LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and DOCTOR ZHIVAGO go, without saying how essential they were to our movie-going culture. On their own, these were pretty powerful pieces of music; when experienced with the films they were scored for, they're simply unforgettable.

 

From the first sight of Lawrence making his way across the dunes, framed against an endless sky, his theme music announces a classic movie composition for the eye and ear, is in the works. favorite moment from ZHIVAGO is the coming of spring sequence. After the long train ride to Siberia during a frigid winter, you can literally feel the warmth when the flowers begin to bloom. As beautiful as it is to witness, it's the accompanying music ("Lara's Theme") that really makes this moment work.

This is just as relevant during the whole of RYAN'S DAUGHTER, which I've previously discussed as a completely sensory experience. Pictures and music wed together in such a significant way that words could never convey their meaning. Jarre scores for the Frankenheimer films THE TRAIN and GRAND PRIX also meld seemlessly with the images. The sheer excitement of the chase in the former, and the beauty of precision driving in the later.

 

Perhaps his best action film score is THE PROFESSIONALS; this '66 Richard Brooks western adventure, literally never slows down for a rest. But it also never tires you out even on repeat viewings, mainly because the music once again accompanies the visuals in such a way that makes you wonder which was conceived first.

 

With each passing year I'm more and more convinced that A PASSAGE TO INDIA reprepresents a farewell of sorts to classic, epic filmmaking. Jarre's score goes a long way to making my point. Same goes for THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, a great, great movie which seems to be plucked from another era.

 

I'm sure you'll take note of his early, effective scores for EYES WITHOUT A FACE and JUDEX. But also much more recently, his consistently fine work for several films for Peter Weir, including YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, WITNESS, DEAD POETS SOCIETY and FEARLESS."

Thanks, Joe, as always. I couldn't do better. And now, as for you...?

 

Bali Hai. It may call you.

I remember quite a few years back, when 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment was putting a bunch of its Todd-AO shot musical on laser disc. One of the first ones I popped in was of Zinneman's Oklahoma, and I was staggered. Not only was the corn really as high as an elephant's eye, its greens and yellows were palpable; the picture overall had an almost hallucinatory 3-D effect to it. SImilar rendering sof other such musicals followed, including South Pacific. While almost none of these films were of great value to the largely cinephilic, they were remarkable tech showpieces, real home-system-demo stuff. 

I just got the Blu-ray disc of Joshua Logan's aforementioned 1958 South Pacific, and the image quality here hits with the same force of revelation as the lasers of such stuff did back in the day. Yet another Todd-AO picture, it was shot by the brilliant Leon Shamroy, the Technicolor maestro who also shot Leave Her To Heaven and The Robe. As innovative a stage director as Logan was, he was by and large an absolutely terrible film director, and the rule of thumb is that any Logan picture is only as watchable as its given lenser makes it. Thus, his best film is Picnic, shot by James Wong Howe. South Pacific might be his second best. The Jack-Cardiff-shot Fanny is third. Worst is debatable; I pick Camelot, which was only the third feature shot by cinematographer Richard H. Kline, who went on to do much better work after being compelled to execute Logan's awful ideas about how to shoot close-ups in Cinemascope. (UPDATE: It should be noted that on South Pacific, Shamroy was himself frequently hobbled by Logan's cretinous insistence on using color filters in particular sequences, for fear that untrammeled Technicolor would produce too overwhelming an effect. What a tool.)

This DVD is coming out around the same time as the American Blu-ray of Minnelli's An American In Paris, the Japanese version of which I wrote up for The Auteurs'; I'll be reviewing the domestic for the print edition of Sound + Vision shortly. In their own ways, these discs are giant steps for the Blu-ray format. They're "classic" films, and such fare thus fare hasn't been the real breadwinner for the format. But I can't imagine any home theater maven, no matter how studiously ahistoric or contemporary his or her taste, not being utterly blown away by these discs. Yes, I have something of a sentimental attachment to South Pacific, having played a sailor in a high-school production of the musical (it was before my voice broke, so I got to sing the line about "silhouette of a dame"). Still. Look at this:

And this: 

These aren't even proper screen captures, just careful snapshots I took off my monitor. I'm quite excited to watch the whole thing. Yowsa.

The right week to give up Welsh Rarebit

Last night, I had a dream that involved, among other things, Richard Brody (whom I've never met, but have exchanged cordial e-mails and comments with) hosting an episode of "Saturday Night Live." Weird. 

"The sow is mine!" "No, she's mine!"

In the continuing soap opera Hurricane Billy Howls Again, a new development. Despite William Friedkin's insistence that, as was the case with his controversial Blu-ray re-imagining of The French Connection, he would not consult with cinematographer Owen Roizman for an upcoming Hi-Def rethink of The Exorcist, the honchos at Warner Home Video would appear to have had different ideas. On a live chat online chat at the Home Theater Forum (full transcript available here), the Warner folks state "[The] Exorcist is currently being remastered for BD by director [William] Friedkin AND the cinematographer Owen Roizman. No date set...but it'll make your head spin!"

Ar ar ar.

This is excellent news for those who found Friedkin's color-sapped, oft-grainy Blu-ray of Connection batshit-crazy, unwatchable, or worse. What I wanna know is, given the verbal fireworks launched by both Friedkin and Roizman at each other—many of them captured by my buddy Aaron Aradillas, on his blog radio program Back By Midnight—what was the meeting where they both agreed to work together again like?

Mr. Aradillas is on the case, and will hopefully have something soon.

The rest of the HTF chat is well worth reading, as it will cause the dedicated cinephile to do something rather unusual: salivate at the prospect of bankrupting oneself. The new and utterly exciting Warner Archives store is already boggling my mind; as soon as I get some selected titles myself (no promo freebies in this scheme, it happens), I'll have a more detailed report. 

"Carry me, Bach." "Too old, Virginie."

The punch line to one of the worst punning jokes in the history of Western Civ frequently comes to mind when I'm compelled to contemplate the work of former gamine Virginie Ledoyen. Now almost 33, she is, as you see above, one of those beauties of whom it can be said that age cannot wither, nor custom stale, her infinite OH HAI appeal. The lucky fellow with his hand on her breast is Emmanuel Mouret, writer, director, and star of Shall We Kiss, a largely nifty French sex comedy that's one of three pictures I consider in my last column as IFC's guest critic for March. The other two are a couple of rather more earnest American pictures, one a triumph, the other a disaster. I invite you to learn more here. 

Hello, nurse

Antonia Ellis (later to play Alma Mahler Cosima Wagner—really!) is a stripper and a health-care professional, or something, in Percy, a rather misbegotten 1971 British sex farce which is, for reasons which will be explained over at The Auteurs', the subject of this week's Foreign Region DVD Report. 

Death in these Gardens

Early yesterday afternoon I and my fellow Carroll Gardeners were indulging in a bit of wishful thinking, letting the warmth of the direct sunlight delude us into believing that Spring was well and fully here. I sat at a table outside my local, Abilene, with a libation and a pretty stiff book (Terry Eagleton's Trouble With Strangers; sample sentence: "Rather as the sole end of the accumulation of capital is to accumulate afresh, so, in a catastrophic collapse of teleology, the Will comes to appear independent of all specific objects of its attention."); but I knew, given the number of people passing by, that I wouldn't get too far too fast. 

Get thee to a nuttery

I know, I know, I'm supposed to lay off this kind of thing, but I can't help it. I've been chortling like a hyena in an old Looney Tunes short over the phrase "secular movie mob" since encountering it in Armond White's review of Hunger in Wednesday's New York Press. I know that a major component of White's schtick is portraying his professional peers as aesthetically-blinkered, morally degenerate—wait for it—hipsters. But when he throws in the fillip that they're also not churchly enough, well, that just makes the hilarity more...hilarious. He's been bringing this hobbyhorse out for a walk ever since the release of The Passion of the Christ (duh), but I really wish he'd go full on and take it to the races some time soon. 

So, what are all you guys doing Sunday morning?

The much-missed genius of Néstor Almendros

I've been looking at the Criterion Collection's magnificent Blu-ray disc of Francois Truffaut's The Last Metro recently, and it's been a little difficult for me to follow the film itself, because I just keep wanting to take off the subtitles and luxuriate in the beautiful burnished images Truffaut created with his stalwart cinematographer Néstor Almendros, the Spanish-born master who had long-standing collaborations with Truffaut, Robert Benton, and of course Eric Rohmer. 

Almendros is, of course, best known for co-lensing Terrence Malick's epochal and unfailingly beautiful 1978 Days of Heaven. Some might believe his work for Truffaut, Rohmer and Benton to be, shall we say, plainer by comparison. I don't. His exquisite sensitivity to natural light, his ability to use it to not just create a mood but evoke a mode of living—these qualities are evident in every film he applied his talents to. After creating a busy, chic, sometimes cold and threatening New York City in Benton's Kramer Vs. Kramer (a great film, I will always insist), he went back to France and invented the always fraught but strangely cosy-seeming occupied Paris for Metro. Look at the shot above, featuring the film's gorgeous leading lady Catherine Deneuve; the contrast of the warm light coming from the bathroom lamp and the harsher sun in the oval window. This is Dutch master stuff, for certain. (Incidentally, the screen caps here are from the Standard Definition disc of the film; the Blu-ray is more brilliant still.)

It reminds me of this shot from Rohmer's 1967 La Collectionneuse (also a Criterion disc), just an establishing shot really, but a lovely mix of two light sources...just in the wake of what some call "the magic hour:"

The below shot from Metro, with Heinz Bennent, is an excellent example of how he blended "studio" lighting with an on-screen light source:

These days, digital technology is making such considerations moot for quite a few filmmakers. I wonder what Almendros, whose love of 35mm also seems a hallmark of his work, and who died in 1992, would think of such developments.