Some Came Running

Is there anything Nicolas Winding Refn CAN'T do?

I'm decidedly mixed on Drive, for reasons I articulate in my upcoming review for MSN Movies, and as such I'm a little more impatient than I'd normally be with the utterly breathless and increasingly relentless unwarranted dribbling over the film and its admittedly talented director Nicolas Winding Refn. I hit a bit of a Twitter wall with it earlier today when one Industry Tweeter™ chimed in "Drive Director Refn Talks Scouting Gritty Los Angeles Locations." Ooooh, I thought. Refn went to gritty places to scout. No other director does that. So I tweeted some imaginary Refn headlines. They were: 

Drive Director Refn Heals Lame, Makes Blind See, Raises The Dead

Drive Director Refn Successfully Negotiates Middle East Peace Treaty; Tears It Up & Throws It In Your Face, Just For A Laugh

"Please Have Violent Sex With My Wife/Girlfriend," Dozens Of 30-Something Male Film Critics Beg Of Drive Director Refn

Drive Director Refn Allows Lars von Trier To "Kill" Him, Destroying Final Nazi Horcrux

Can you top these? Do you want to? Am I overreacting?

Have a delightful Labor Day Weekend. 

Random note

So I'm in a Starbucks in the Times Square area trying to write my review of Water For Elephants and I see that they've started putting solid metal faceplates over what were power outlets, so you can't actually PLUG IN a computer while you're using their stellar free Wi-Fi. What I wanna know is, when is Jeff Wells getting back to New York, because when he gets a load of this, the result is gonna be something like Falling Down crossed with Hobo With A Shotgun. 

Jeffrey Wells versus Martin Scorsese, or, the feeding of the internet content maw considered as an act of self-abuse

As Jeffrey Wells, Academy Award winner Robert DeNiro! And, as The Wall, Academy Award winner Martin Scorsese!

I already made this point in a comment over at Wells' place, but I thought it bore repeating with a visual aid. The point of contention? Wells [bolds and underlinings in the original]:

"There can be no legitimate claim of Taxi Driver having been restored without the original natural color (or at least a simulation of same) put back in. The film was shot with more or less natural colors, was intended to be shown this way, and has in fact been shown that way for the last 35 years except for the final shoot-out scene. There's nothing noble or sacred about the look of that final sequence. The fact that it was sepia-toned to get a more acceptable MPAA rating is, I feel, a stain upon the film's legacy."

"I'm presuming that the brown-sepia scheme has been retained in the new restoration. For years Scorsese has said he's against showing the film as originally shot and processed. He's actually defended the brown-sepia tones as being part of the '70s and the climate when the film was released, etc. Taxi Driver's Wiki page says that 'in later interviews Scorsese commented that he was actually pleased by the color changeand he considered it an improvement over the originally filmed scene, which has been lost.'"

"I'm sorry, but the idea of a major director saying that he respects a form of censorship that was imposed upon one of his greatest films has always struck me as surreal, to put it mildly."

Will you join in his crusade?

What are the charges?

David Denby discovers Mumblecore!

And he likes it, kinda.

As I wrote to a friend who was asked to provide DVDs to the good professor last week (and who did, and whose label doesn't even get a stinking mention in Denby's piece for its troubles), "I can't wait to see his thoughts on the promising young New-York-based director Martin Scorsese."

UPDATE: One "topbroker" takes me to task in comments, and, I have to admit, pins me in two tries. Late to the party as it is, and over-valuing Swanberg as it does, Denby's piece is in fact fair-minded and well-considered, and I ought to have taken that into consideration before launching my one-liner, which I still think is a reasonably funny one. Mea culpa, in any case.