Some Came Running

Gone fishing

Posting's going to be a bit infrequent over the next week or so, as I'm off doing...stuff. Actually, a July Blu-ray Consumer Guide is tantalizingly close to completion (and a good thing, too, because my fucking TV just blew up again), and if I have the wherewithal/time it might go up after the weekend, and that should hold you for the better part of the week...and I'll have some reviews going up that I'll let you know about...but in the meantime I'll be a bit on the less active side. If only the timing had been better, I would have taken up Lawrence Block's offer (proffered on his Twitter feed a little while back) to guest-blog for any one smart enough to take him up on it until he got his own joint going. But he does, now, have his own joint going, which you ought to check out. Have a delightful weekend!

The current cinema, Yves Klein blue edition

The color turns up with practically you-can-set-your-watch-by-it regularity in simulated lens flares throughout J.J. Abrams' Super 8, and this annoyed several of my colleagues at a recent screening, and while I can understand their objection, I wasn't all that bothered by it, in part because I do find it such a strangely soothing hue. In any event, I didn't have the opportunity to comment on it in my review of the film for MSN Movies, so I thought I'd bring it up here. Also this week at MSNM, my review of The Trip, and, not quite a month short of July, a gallery of iconic American movie characters, for which, in the end, there was no room for either Norman Bates or Harry Callahan. Which state of affairs I discuss in a "related video" with "Film Fan" host Sami Jarroush, whilst trying not to actually melt, myself. Enjoy.  

Notes from an abandoned Blu-ray disc Consumer Guide

So. To return to my problems: how fucking busy I am? Pretty fucking busy. This morning I was thinking, "I've gotta do more with the blog, maybe I should go back to my last batch of notes for a Blu-ray disc Consumer Guide, see if I can spruce 'em up a little, run with that, and then really buckle down and put together a FRESH guide." So I got home and looked at my last batch of notes and discovered that A) they really were very sketchy notes, and while I understood exactly what was required to make them into actual "entries," I absolutely did not have the time to expand/refine/distill them into such and B) the discs in question are pretty, well, out of date. 

And, BUT. This is, after all, a blog, not a professional endeavor, which means I can do pretty much whatever the hell I want, and as I'm kind of neurotic (not cripplingly, but kind of) about starting up one particular task without having completed a related prior particular task, I thought, maybe I'll just put up the notes, sketchy as they are, because they might amuse some readers who are interested in my "process" such as it is. So that's what I'm gonna do. These are the notes, exactly as I left them, only with a little formatting and the names of the discs' labels added. An further explanatory note is at bottom. 

Fall Blu-ray CG Notes 

Alien BOX (Fox): Alien, really fabulous…

Space is boring/2001

Good work with the nuances of lighting, blue and purple flashlights and emergency lights… 

Aliens/Excellent too

Antichrist (Criterion) More impressionistic, less “sharp” than I remember it. A very burnished look that’s kind of video looking any way.  B-

Beauty and the Beast (Disney): Not as revelatory as, say, Sleeping Beauty, but damn fine looking in any case.

Black Orpheus (Criterion):Once the sine qua non of color! Looks lovely! Not garish! Very strong. The settings..mountains, beauty, etc. A

Chloe (Sony):Man, Julianne Moore has a lot of freckles. And you can count them. B

Cronos: Very clean and detailed. Beautiful.

Date Night (Sony):Looks good, fakey sets/Kind of painful/dopey

A Fistful of Dollars (Italian) (Ripley's Home Video) Superb! A+

Grindhouse (Vivendi):Great looking scratches! "If he’s so in love with me, why did he fuck Darryl Hannah’s stand-in?"

Humanoids From The Deep (Shout! Factory): Looks EXACTLY like it did at the Plaza! Better, even!  Awesome Alien ripoff ending! A-

Inception (Warner): A

Night of the Hunter (Criterion): Really beautiful, every shot counts and is gorgeous/Cortez’s slowness cost him Chinatown!

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Kino Lorber): A fucking gem! Just beautiful, not overdone.Great production design.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (Universal):Nifty

Seven Samurai (Criterion): Nifty

Sex and Lucia (Palm) Looks like…it was shot on video! Yes! It was! Looks good, but still…looks like it was shot…on video!

The Sound of Music (Fox): Beautiful! Lovely throughout!

Videodrome (Criterion)

Vigilante (Blue Underground):Icky!

"I’ve never been through anything like this before, so you’ll just have to tell me what to do."

Make stuff up in terms of procedure.

Looks nifty though.

"At this point in Joe’s life, he began to…put it this way…drink too much"

Notes on Notes: Yes, I know I used the term "sine qua non" incorrectly. Sorry about that. "The Plaza" was the actual grindhouse theater where I first saw Humanoids From The Deep. It was the first and only time I brought my then-girlfriend to the venue. A curse-filled knife-fight broke out a few rows in front of us, and was interrupted when one of the participants paused and looked at my then-girlfriend and said, "'Scuse the language, miss." I am not making this up. Overall this was a pretty good-looking batch of discs, the notable exception being the too-boosted Date Night, which had other problems as well. Blu-ray mavens ought to be well-pleased with the remainder. Absolute musts, as in no-"taste"-exceptions-allowed, are the Italian Fistful, Night of the Hunter, Seven Samurai, and Videodrome, for which my notes are admittedly VERY sketchy. Musts in the "if you like the genre" category are the Alien box, Beauty/Beast, Cronos, Grindhouse, Humanoids, Inception, Pandora, Scott Pilgrim, Sex, Sound, Vigilante. The rest is elective. 

There. Now I can maybe put together a "proper" Guide before June. Lemme pull out that Criterion Blow Out...

Sorry for the light posting, but...

...as Kim Jong-Il so memorably put it in Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, 2004), "Do you have any idea how fucking bussy I am?"

Lien on me

My pals at MSN Movies had an amusing notion for a Tax Day special feature—a roundup on those whom several critics and zeitgeist observers consider "The Most Taxing People In Movies." I gave myself a particular challenge here, choosing a figure I am instinctively sympathetic to, but have been disappointed by during the past, um, decade. My selection/justification is here. Others surround my entry. Enjoy! Agree or disagree! Get angry! Or not! And so on.

The current cinema, time has come today edition

One of the advantages of being older is you are able to reach back farther for your thematic cultural referents for headlines.

Source Code wasn't bad at all; review here.  Rubber isn't nearly as good or as smart as you may have heard, as I get into here, and as usual, I dare you to spend money to find out which of us is right. Hop is utterly ghastly and if you have young children I feel very bad for you because there's almost no way you'll be able to avoid it, and I commiserate with you, virtually, here. 

An excerpt from "The Auteurist's Guide to the Elizabeth Taylor Filmography," Nomad Wide Screen

Joseph Losey with Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of the notorious Boom!

In this week's issue of Nomad Editions' Wide Screen, a tribute to Elizabeth Taylor, featuring an obituary by the ineffable Self-Styled Siren, a best-of-on-DVD consideration from Tony Dayoub, Vadim Rizov's look at the best and worst of Taylor tributes, a couple of lovely photo portfolios assembled by our crack picture editor Laurie Kratochvil, and a piece by myself on the Taylor filmo perceived through a sort-of auteurist prism. Below is a portion of the article; to read it in its entirety, do consider a free trial subscription to the publication which you may learn about more here.

Mervyn LeRoy

“LeRoy has converted his innate vulgarity into a personal style,” Andrew Sarris noted, before adding, “His Little Caesar is feeble next to Hawks’s Scarface, and his Little Women far littler than Cukor’s, but you can’t have everything.” And indeed, for emotional power (or convincing Hollywood schmaltz), LeRoy’s 1949 version of the Louisa May Alcott classic, starring Taylor as Amy, Meet Me in St. Louis’s adorable moppet Margaret O’Brien as Beth, and June Allyson as Jo (and Peter Lawford as Laurie, yeesh) is no match for the 1933 film featuring Katharine Hepburn as Jo, Joan Bennett as Amy, and Jean Parker as Beth. (Poor forgotten Douglass Montgomery played Laurie.) Still, it is pretty snappy in the manner that the director of such pre-code speed rides as Three on a Match, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and Heat Lightning was something of a past master at. Taylor had been slated to play the lead in LeRoy’s stab at a Biblical epic, Quo Vadis, but production hassles scotched that; she did an uncredited extra bit as an arena slave.

Joseph Losey

The American-born Losey left the United States in the 1950s (HUAC, again) and continued his career in Europe; by the time he teamed up with Taylor and Burton, he was well-regarded not just for his Hollywood and post-Hollywood noirs (The Prowler and Time Without Pity among them) but for two films, Accident and The Servant, made in collaboration with the esteemed playwright Harold Pinter. Still, viable marketplace work seemed to elude him, so he jumped at the chance to work with the then-married international superstars. But again with Tennessee Williams! In this case, 1968’s Boom! a version of one of Williams’s oddest works, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, in which a much married reclusive woman of wealth is visited by a shambling, poetic Angel of Death. Guess who plays whom. As I wrote of this film, and Taylor’s performance, elsewhere, prior to her passing: “problematic for Taylor was the fact that she seemed to forget more and more about acting as the years went on. Look at her in A Place in the Sun, or in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and then look at her here. She shows a narrow range in both of the former films, but at least she’s working that range; she’s paying attention and working with precision. Here she’s all over the place, the result of Losey’s inability, or is it refusal, to direct her.” Boom! is still, in some circles, considered a candidate for Worst Film Ever made… although of course John Waters considers it a classic of its kind. 

Despite the critical drubbing, Losey and Taylor were actually eager to work together again, and they teamed up almost immediately thereafter for Secret Ceremony, a very peculiar film in which Hollywood iconography goes way against the grain of art-film theme and treatment. Again, in another context I wrote this about the film: “The first 20 minutes are kind of remarkable. They’re almost entirely dialogue-free, and depict a little cat-and-mouse game between Taylor’s character Leonora (who we later find out is a prostitute) and the rather gaga girl Cenci (Mia Farrow, unnervingly Paltrow-esque avant le lettre)… [W]hat we’re watching isn’t about plausibility. It’s cinematic theater of the absurd with horror flourishes, and it’s mesmerizing... The problem, finally, is with the figures. Even 40 years after the fact, the strongest thing that registers here is that two Hollywood legends are acting really, really weird. By the time Taylor and Farrow wind up play-fighting over a rubber ducky in an oversize bathtub, all bets are off as far as this piece working in any way that Losey and company might have intended.” Secret Ceremony had sufficient strengths to suggest that a third Taylor-Losey collaboration — perhaps on a less affected piece of contemporary material, — might have borne more artistically satisfying fruit. But it was not to be. Losey did, however, re-team with Burton in 1972 for the underseen and underrated The Assasination of Trotsky.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The great writer and director’s masterpiece All About Eve shows he was thoroughly at home with ambition, betrayal and self-destruction when it was set in the world of reasonably functional (in a day-to-day sense) individuals. He was on much less certain footing in dealing with the deranged modern baroque realms concocted by Tennessee Williams. Hence, 1959’s Suddenly, Last Summer, adapted by Gore Vidal from a Williams play, is oft-regarded as a piece of high camp, despite its scrupulously serious treatment, and notwithstanding the, thespic efforts of Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and a particularly damaged-seeming Montgomery Clift. Its near-hysteria is for some ameliorated by the sight of Taylor at her most ravishing in a white one-piece swimsuit.

Mankiewicz and Taylor got on sufficiently well during the making of the picture, and that factored into Mankiewicz’s ill-fated assignment to replace Rouben Mamoulian on the set of the lavish Cleopatra, the troubled production that birthed the Taylor-Burton romance. Again, it seems that a historical epic set in the ancient world is a less-than-congenial setting for Mankiewicz’s particular talents, but he proved very dedicated to the film, or the idea of the film, and concocted a six-hour version that he wanted to have released in two parts. An attempt to reconstruct that version is underway; in the meantime, the extant four-hour cut is, while certainly on the stiff side, hardly the disaster it was proclaimed to be at the time of the picture’s box-office flop, which some have cited as the beginning of the end for the entity that once was 20^th Century Fox.

Vincente Minnelli

Oddly enough, while many cinephiles might tend to rank the three collaborations between Taylor and the great cinematic stylist Vincente Minnelli as minor Minnelli works, seen from a particular angle — the Taylor one — this teaming might be viewed as unusually fruitful, producing two of the most enjoyable and congenial films of her career, and one of the more unusual and overtly thoughtful as well. In 1950’s Father of the Bride, Taylor was still an ingénue (all of 18), co-starring as the daughter of Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, about to marry amiable boy-next-door type Don Taylor (no relation). A fascinating look at the alcohol-fueled American middle class of the post-war era, it’s a snappy, knowing comedy to which Minnelli brings more than a soupçon of his decorative taste. His sure hand with the Comedy of Anxiety, in this particular case economic anxiety, is also felt. But it’s felt even more strongly in the film’s 1951 sequel, Father’s Little Dividend, admittedly in a scene in which Taylor doesn’t participate, and which is not as comedic as all that; it’s a sequence late in the picture in which Tracy’s character “loses” his new grandchild. Almost as nightmarish and angst-ridden as the Halloween scene in Meet Me in St. Louis, it’s a mini-masterpiece of Minnelli edginess. Similarly, Minnelli’s 1965 The Sandpiper , starring Taylor as a free spirit and single mom and Burton as the minister and educator who falls for her — and framed by the majestic vistas of Big Sur country — is best considered not as a Taylor-Burton vehicle but in the continuum of Minnelli dramas about the anxiousness of nonconformity such as Tea and Sympathy, Home from the Hill, The Cobweb, and so on. In this light, the picture works beautifully and stands out as one of Minnelli’s stronger ’60s efforts.

Looking acceptable on television

My first guest appearance on the MSN video-cast-thingie, FilmFan, hosted by the affable and delightful Sami Jarroush, features my discourse on the best and worst films of 2011 so far. I don't think I mug enough, is the thing. See for yourself, here. 

We are grateful to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Good morning. This evening's Oscar activities will include me abandoning my ExtAngel persona on Twitter —but not, necessarily, his honey-badgeresque undeniably poor attitude—and "live-tweeting" the Oscars from the more professional-seeming Twitter feed of Nomad WIde Screen. Do by all means follow me if you like (it's @nomadwidescreen, but you could probably figure that out), and see how I can churn out high-quality wisecracks better and faster than all the other morons out there tweeting. And if you're into following "live blogs," by all means follow my delightful and wise colleague Kim Morgan's ruminations, from the red carpet to stuff that happens after the red carpet, over at MSN Movies, where I'll be writing a wrapup best of/worst of essay to be posted in the ruinous, rueful aftermath of the shamefully self-congratulatory event. In terms of Oscar picks: you know me, I'm terrible at them, and so, or so he claims, is Alicublog's Roy Edroso, although I credit his logic, good sense, and superior wisecracking abilities. His impersonation of a Magic 8 Ball is here. 

Update: Commenter Mike Grost asks if the above frame is from Two Weeks in Another Town. Well, what else? Actually, there are two films one could name right off the bat that contain similar thank-yous: Minnelli's prior The Bad and the Beautiful and Tashlin's Susan Slept Here. It's been a while since I saw the delightfully godawful The Oscar; I wonder if the Academy saw fit to sully itself with such sensationalist trash. I wonder, too, about the Pia Zadora great The Lonely Lady, which climaxes with...oh, never mind. Here's Eddie G. cradling a memento of glories past in the delirious Two Weeks. 

Boys. Boys. Boys. Boys do not keep swinging.

Hall Pass, a film that compelled Mr. Jeffrey Wells to proclaim, apropos its male lead characters, "I'm cooler and smarter than those assholes any day of the week" (no, he really did write that, check it out, right here) opens tomorrow; it is not, alas, very good. At all. I review it for MSN Movies here. 

Rather better is Of Gods and Men, which I saw and wrote about when it played the New York Film Festival last fall; it goes into release tomorrow, and I revisited it for an MSN Movies review.