The Screengrab : salo

In Other Blogs: Evil “Touch”?

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

You might think everyone would be happy now that the latest DVD release of Touch of Evil contains both the originally released theatrical cut and the version restored to the dictates of the famous Orson Welles memo a decade ago. But no! Apparently there are some aspect ratio issues to contend with. At his eponymous blog, Dave Kehr writes, “the sentiment of the group seems to be that we all want to vent about the Touch of Evil 50th anniversary edition, with its highly controversial 1.85 aspect ratio. There’s clearly no cut and dried answer here, in the absence of any documentary evidence, but my eye tells me that it’s too tight. The shot above shows some obvious trimming at the upper frame line, but for the most part the 1.85 version that Universal has released seems to give preference to head room while cutting out the less conspicuous compositional elements at the bottom of the frame. It all feels a bit tenuous and unstable to me, like a chord that hasn’t quite been allowed to resolve itself.”

At Parallax View, Sean Axmaker isn’t so sure about that. “I respect Kehr’s eye as I do his insight, but watching the revised cut in 1.85 for the first time was a revelation to me. Compositions became more dramatic, framed more tightly around Welles’ groupings. The long-takes in Sanchez’s apartment feel more claustrophobic, without so much of the expanse of the blank ceiling open above their heads.” Adding to the confusion is the fact that the two versions included on the DVD aren’t the only ones out there. “Today, no less than four cuts of the picture exist: the original 93-minute release version, the 108-minute preview version rediscovered in the Universal vaults in 1975 (and which had since supplanted the release version in all theatrical showings), a kind of unholy marriage created for video that cuts footage exclusive to the short version into the preview version, and the 1998 ‘revision’ of the film. This latter project, produced by Rick Schmidlin and edited by Walter Murch with Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum serving as advisor, is being branded as a ‘restored version,’ but that’s a studio marketing move. As the project participants understand, it’s really an unprecedented and still unique attempt to retroactively honor a director by following his directions in repairing an artwork taken out of his hands. For the sake of accuracy, I will be referring the 1998 cut as the ‘revised version’ or the ‘1998 revision.’”

Another lavish new DVD release gets the business at Beyond the Multiplex. “What remains profoundly upsetting and unsettling about Salò after 33 years is that the pornographic and scatological and violent images it depicts — if you want a list of the specific outrages, find it somewhere else — emerge in a context of such rigorous formal beauty. With lavish production design by Dante Ferretti (later a collaborator with Fellini and Scorsese), costumes by Danilo Donati, music by Ennio Morricone, settings in spectacularly decaying Italian villas and the most austere, gorgeous camerawork of Pasolini’s career, Salò captures the Italian film industry at its postwar aesthetic height.”

At Hulu Blog, guest blogger Kevin Smith reminisces about the first time he saw Slacker (which you can now view there for free). “After overpaying for both parking and popcorn, we settled into what seats we could find together in the packed theater of a midnight screening. And once the trailer for Hal Hartley's Trust concluded, the Orion Classics logo lit up the screen and introduced me to my future. For the next 100 minutes or so, I was agog. My jaw literally hung open as this shaggy paean to those who follow the road not taken unspooled, offering me a glimpse into a free-associative world of ideas instead of plot, people instead of characters, and Nowheresville, Texas, instead of the usual California or New York settings most movies elected to feature (that ‘Nowheresville’ was really Austin speaks volumes on how culturally bereft I was at the time). That night, director Richard Linklater and his film not only captured my imagination, he (and it) captured my heart -- not to mention kick-started my ambition.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Spoutblog takes a look at 10 Underrated Bill Murray Roles. For instance, “The Writer” in The Lost City. “Another movie that’s not very good and that not a lot of people have seen is Andy Garcia’s labor of love set in Havana during the Cuban revolution. And like most movies featuring a minor appearance from Murray, The Lost City is at least worth watching just for him. In fact, you could easily just fast-forward to each of his scenes and not miss anything since his role and performance is so out of place anyway.”

Joe Queenan: The Worst Movies Ever Made Aren't What They Used to Be

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Professional cranky bastard Joe Queenan surveys the current contenders for the title of worst movie ever made and finds them lacking. He is appalled that a walking answer to a trivia-quiz lightning round like Paris Hilton can take a few weeks off from doing nothing to doing nothing in front of a camera crew, and that the results can be used to scare people away from theaters for a weekend or two in the late winter season, and this gets called the worst movie ever made, as if enough work had gone into it for it to qualify as a movie, let alone the worst anything. "That is not fair," he grrumbles. "It is not fair to Kevin Costner, it is not fair to Jennifer Lopez, and it is certainly not fair to Madonna. Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful." Queenan saves his lowest accolades for movies that are shown real misguided imagination and daring in their very conception. As examples, he cites Futz!, a 1969 hippie extravaganza based on an Off-Broadway play, written in verse, about a farmer whose very close relationship with his pig meets with the disapproval of his neighbors. Though made by the same people who worked on the theatrical production, the fil adaptation trumped the live version because they were able to use a real pig, causing many reviewers to remark that seeing the movie put the viewer in the unusual position of seeing a blameless pig robbed of its dignity. (I have never seen Futz! myself, and not for lack of trying. I sometimes wonder if there is a single remaining print out there somewhere, and if so, if cast member Sally Kirkland might not be hiding it under her bed.)

Queenan also cites Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film, Salo, "the lighthearted Holocaust-era comedy Life Is Beautiful", and The Way We Were, which differs from those pictures in that it doesn't have any Nazis in it, though I'm not sure I'd argue that it doesn't belong. In the end, though, he takes the practical-minded position that a real contender has to have practical consequences: he's looking for "a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock..." Yes, he's giving the title to old-school favorite Heaven's Gate, the one that took down United Artists. "This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates." I'm pretty sure that the "mounted on roller skates" theme is one that even Futz! let slip through its fingers, but again, I haven't seen it and can only guess. Queenan reports that he knew someone who worked for the public relations company that handled the picture: "He told me that when the 220-minute extravaganza debuted at the Toronto film festival, the reaction was so thermonuclear that the stars and the film-maker had to immediately be flown back to Hollywood, perhaps out of fear for their lives. No one at the studio wanted to go out and greet them upon their return; no one wanted to be seen in that particular hearse. My friend eventually agreed to man the limo that would meet the children of the damned on the airport tarmac and whisk them to safety, but only provided he was given free use of the vehicle for the next three days. After he dropped off the halt and the lame at suitable safe houses and hiding places, he went to Mexico for the weekend." Of course, that was then and this is now, and while it seems unlikely that it'll ever start smoking The Godfather in the AFI polls, Heaven's Gate now has a hardy band of deeply committed, easily riled defenders, every one of whom I know in my heart is a superior person who dresses better than I do. That, too, is part of the charm of a true worst movie--enough vision, talent, and passion should have gone into it that someone will see grounds for its defense in there. I do no forsee a day in which there will be a ravening cult sticking up for The Hottie and the Nottie, but if that does ever happen, I'd keep an eye out for the other three horsemen.

The Rep Report (November 27 - December 4)

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Senegalese writer-director Ousmane Sembene, who died last summer, gets his first major posthumous respective at Film Forum from November 30 to December 12. The series kicks off with Xala, the 1974 satire that climaxes with a memorably ghastly, well, spitting scene, and includes the early works that put Sembene on the map (Black Girl, Emitai) as well as the more recent films (Faat-Kine and his last movie, Moolaade) that showed that he was still in strapping form. This is a rare chance not just to pay tribute to a fallen master but to catch up with the work of a major filmmaker who remains sorely underrepresented on DVD.

Pier Paolo Pasolini has been dead for a good long time now, but doesn't seem to have become much less controversial, an accomplishment that might have put a smile on his face. The Film Society of Lincoln Center's Heretical Epiphanies: The Cinematic Pilgrimages of Pier Paolo Pasolini (November 28 – December 4) covers his career from the neo-realist debut film Accattone to the hyper-scandalous, posthumously released Salo. On December 4, Lincoln Center also presents the U.S. premiere of Accattone in Jazz, a live presentation in which "Pasolini's celebrated screenplay for Accattone is revisited by Italian movie star Valerio Mastandrea, as he weaves a unique interplay of words and music together with Italian jazz legends and longtime collaborators Roberto Gatto and Danilo Rea."

The Brooklyn Academy of Music's twelve-film Max Ophuls retrospective begins on November 28 with a week-long run of a new print of the 1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman, the best work done in Hollywood by an artist who got too few opportunities to work at anything like his full capacities. It ain't The Earrings of Madame de. . . , but boy, will it do. . .

SAN FRANCISCO: From November 27-30, the Castro salutes director Hal Ashby, with three nights of double features, starting with the 1979 Being There, paired with the cult classic Harold and Maude. The real keeper may be on the 30th, when the theater shows the masterful, Robert Towne-scripted Shampoo and Ashby's amazing, unavailable-on-DVD debut film, The Landlord (1970).

— Phil Nugent

The Rep Report (November 2 - 20)

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: From November 2 through the 20th, Film Forum brings back Jean-Jacques Beinex's 1981 romantic comedy-thriller Diva, in a new 35 mm. print. As visually graceful as it is inventive, playfully witty, with actual if improbable characters pushing the plot forward, it remains an especially flavorful example of what used to be called "an exercise in pure style" from back before easy access to computer imagery and MTV syntax resulted in an explosion of would-be prodigies turning out movies that really are exercises in pure style. The new print is reported to also boast some new, improved subtitles. (The first time I saw the movie, on cable TV on my fifteenth birthday — I rode my brontosaurus to the house of my friend who had HBO — a single half-assed glitch in the subtitles served to completely screw up the plot.) If you haven't seen it before, nothing else you have seen can fully prepare you for it; Beinex himself has spent the last quarter century failing to follow it up.

October 30 would have been Louis Malle's seventy-fifth birthday, which makes this a good time to check out what may be his happiest masterpiece, the autobiographical 1971 comedy Murmur of the Heart. (I do not mean to suggest that there might ever be a bad time to check it out.) The Film Society of Lincoln Center will be showing it on November 1 as part of their "Young Friends of Film" program. Andre Gregory, who worked with Malle on two of his finest American films, My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street, will be on hand to introduce the film.

BERKELEY: Romanian cinema, believe it or not, is hot right now and getting hotter, so Pacific Film Archives is offering a handy primer in the form of Revolutions in Romanian Cinema (November 3 - December 9). The country produces fewer feature films than any other European country — half a dozen a year — but as Spencer Tracy used to say, what's there is choice. The schedule includes The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the Cannes festival winner that really got the West paying attention, as well as the sardonic 12:08 East of Bucharest and the powerful recent New York Film Festival entry 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days. Plus five other feature films and a program of shorts.

The Pacific Film Archive also hosts The Passion of Pasolini (November 1 - December 7), dedicated to the work of the still-controversial Italian novelist, poet, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. The series, which includes his adaptations of The Decameron, Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales and The Gospel According to St. Matthew opens with his 1961 debut feature Accattone; it closes with his scandalous last film, the 1975 Salo. Just keep telling yourself: it's only chocolate, it's only chocolate. . .

WASHINGTON, D.C.: The twentieth annual 2007 European Union Film Showcase opens November 1 and runs through November 20th at the AFI Silver Theater, showcasing a wide selection of new and recent films from across the continent. The opening night selection is Christopher Columbus: The Enigma, the latest by the startlingly prolific Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira. The director, who will be in attendance, turns ninety-nine on December 12. I just thought I'd put that out there in case you want to show up and give him his birthday card a little early.

— Phil Nugent