Category: [Films & TV]

Gugusse redivivus

I need a happy story, and the recent rediscovery of an 1897 film by George Melies will do just fine.

The 45-second film, made around 1897, was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot, which had endeared it to generations of science fiction fans, even if they knew it only by reputation. It had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century. The find, made last September but now being announced publicly, is a small but important addition to the legacy of world cinema and one of its founders. […]
The cache of Frisbee’s exhibition films also contained another well-known Méliès film from 1900, “The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match,” as well as fragments of an early Thomas Edison film, “The Burning Stable.” They survived due to McFarland and his family preserving them for a century, if often in haphazard circumstances.
After Frisbee died in 1937, two small trunks of his old projectors and films, along with some of his diaries and papers, went to his daughter (McFarland’s grandmother), who passed them along to her son (McFarland’s dad), who passed them along to him.
McFarland didn’t know what was on the reels – they could no longer be safely run through a projector – and after years of searching for a home for them, a lab technician in Michigan suggested he contact the Library.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, the Library’s nitrate film vault leader.

I love a good film rediscovery story, especially when it involves a film THIS old. Said film is handily linked in the LOC article and proves to be a prime bit of delightful early Melies, though I do think the “robot” description is a bit tenuous. But whatever, it’s pleasing to have Gugusse back…

Speaking of Bresson…

I found this screen grab of cinema’s “patron saint” on Tumblr and have been a bit perplexed by it. It evidently comes from this French TV interview from 1960. As I noted in the previous post, I’ve now seen almost all of Bob’s filmography, and that’s why I find this statement so baffling… because frankly, if there’s one thing I’ve very rarely done with Bresson’s films, it’s feel anything from them. His approach to acting involved kind of leeching all the “performance” out of his performers, of which Roger Ebert wrote in his obit of him:

Bresson was one of a handful of directors whose very frames identified their author. Like Fellini, Hitchcock and Ozu, he had such a distinctive way of seeing that his films resembled no others. What you noticed was the extreme restraint of his actors (he preferred to call them “models”), and the way the action centered on what his characters saw, rather than what they did. “The thing that matters,” he said, “is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.”
His actors had no difficulty conveying that state, because Bresson never discussed characters, plot or motivation with them, only instructing them minutely on how to move and what to say. He shunned displays of emotions in his work, rehearsing and shooting a scene over and over, until the actors seemed to be going through the motions without thought. Oddly, this style created films of great passion: Because the actors didn’t act out the emotions, the audience could internalize them.

But I rarely if ever felt an emotion TO internalise from Bresson’s films. I never felt passion from them, except perhaps for Diary of a Country Priest. The proposition that his methods created some kind of greater realism just doesn’t hold for me, and I think his films tend instead to a kind of gross artifice. Not as grotesquely so as Greenaway’s, but certainly not naturalistic. The “acting” may be drained from Bresson’s films, but so is almost everything else. I know I’m in the minority here, but that’s how it is for me.

Diary is the only one of his films I ever particularly liked, and I haven’t seen it since 1995, at which age this was the sort of film I would have liked at that time and that age, when this kind of art cinema with some sort of heavy spiritual theme seemed particularly Important (with a capital I) to me. Over the years I gradually saw most of the rest of the Bresson filmography, none of which impressed me in the way that film did, and I don’t think I left any of them with more than a somewhat distant sense of mild appreciation and respect for the effort at best. At worst I actively disliked the films. If I ever catch up with those three I haven’t seen, I don’t suppose my overall opinion of Bresson will improve much.

But, as I said, I haven’t rewatched Diary in 30+ years, nor indeed have I rewatched any of them that I can remember, with the somewhat odd exception of Lancelot du Lac, which I remember seeing on SBS and then again some years later on a DVD I got from the library, and per the note I wrote about it on my old film blog back in 2009—the last time I can recall watching him at all—I apparently hated it less than I did first time round, and that by the time I was 50 I might even like Bresson. And, well, I’m past that landmark now, so maybe it’s time I found out. Maybe I just need to rewatch Bresson’s other films with these markedly older eyes and allgedly more mature perspective. Maybe I’ll watch something I’d rather watch first, though.

Some very mixed doubles

One thing I like about Bluesky is that there are accounts which look at what was showing on TV or at the cinema in that week during some other year, like what was on at Times Square or the Scala in London, etc. I don’t know anything about the Times cinema except what this tells me, but I did find on BS this ad for its February/March 1969 programming…

…which I find profoundly baffling on multiple levels. Of all of these, the only one where I’ve actually seen both titles is La kermesse heroique and Viridiana, neither of which… go together. And I’ve seen one film in each of the others and read about their respective partners to know that, well, none of them do either. I really can’t imagine what the logic of these couplings is, and maybe that was the point; having learned that Antony Balch was operating the place at that time certainly explains the discordance of the programming to some extent, if not the precise oddities going on here.

I mean, Hunger is apparently “a masterpiece of social realism“, whereas X is… frankly kind of the opposite of that, I don’t think Roger Corman ever had that in mind. Masque is one of his too, of course, although it’s him in his higher-minded Poe series, but again the other film is, per IMDB, “An avant-garde political satire” so not exactly an obvious pairing again. That film starred Zbigniew Cybulski who was also in The Saragossa Manuscript… I have no idea what Thoughts of Chairman Mao even is (maybe this?), but I’m sure it was also a wildly inappropriate companion to its big shaggy Polish brother, though admittedly I can’t think of many films that would pair well with. But the last one… OY. Mouchette is actually one of the few Bressons I haven’t seen at any point, I think Four Nights of a Dreamer and The Devil Probably are the only other ones I’ve never seen, but that means I have seen all his others, so I know EXACTLY how deranged it is to pair him off with a 1940s Val Lewton horror for RKO. Particularly that one. And did each of these bills actually play each day for a week as the ad suggests? OY again.

But Balch was also running the Jacey cinema at the time which apparently ran more in an exploitation/sex vein (including his own Secrets of Sex in 1970, where it was apparently a big hit and made back its entire cost just from that one cinema) so presumably that offset some of the losses I’m sure the Times must’ve been accruing with this sort of programming. I found the advert via this fellow who offers a lot of old cinema ads like this, but Bluesky is so damnably hard to plow through so I don’t know if he’s got any more of this particular place. I’d love to see more of what Balch was running there cos this batch is so perplexing. Maybe 1969 was just like that, of course…

RIP Boo Radley

Robert Duvall has left us, at the fairly grand age of 95 and after 70 years on stage and screen. Quite a body of work, maybe not so many big roles in his later films (though he did get an Oscar nomination in 2015), but he kept pretty solidly working until just a few years ago… but until I saw this posted on Bluesky, I never knew about one of his more amusing parts:

Not only was Duvall the Corleone family consigliere Tom Hagen in The Godfather, he was Marlon Brando’s cue card wrangler as well. Brando was already infamous for his use of cue cards, cos he claimed that only knowing the broad outline of a scene actually made his performances more realistic rather than just being the sign of gross laziness most of his colleagues thought it was. And, as you can see above, it appears that even being a major part of the cast didn’t mean you wouldn’t get drafted to hold Marlon’s cards for him at some point. RIP Bob.

Well there’s a shock

Melania film earns $7m in US, strongest documentary debut in over a decade

Remarkably, Melania seems to have actually done some business after all, even better than predicted (remember, $5m was the most optimistic amount forecasters expected before it came out), and still little enough to be believable; if this were White House propaganda, Mushroom Cock would be calling it the best opening weekend for any film ever and we would all know it was a lie… but $7m feels honest and plausible. From the article:

A statement from the head of Amazon MGM Studios’ domestic theatrical distribution, Kevin Wilson, said the company was “very encouraged by the strong start and positive audience response” and reiterated the early box office results had exceeded expectations.
Referred to a planned follow-up documentary series about the first lady, Wilson’s statement also said: “This momentum is an important first step in what we see as a long-tail lifecycle for both the film and the forthcoming docu-series, extending well beyond the theatrical window and into what we believe will be a significant run for both on our service.”
Amazon says it operates on a different economic system to a traditional film studio, offsetting the costs of a theatrical release and promotion for distribution to 200 million subscribers to its Prime Video service.

Yeah, but 200 million people aren’t going to watch this shit, and $7m still isn’t that much better than the forecast $5m. If they were expecting a $50m opening weekend and got $70m instead, that would be rather more notable. This additional series alluded to above has been mentioned before but for some reason it’s not being hyped nearly as much as the film has been, and I somehow doubt this long-tail lifecycle for the film and the series will actually come about… the buzz around the “documentary” has been amusing, but I expect people will have lost interest within a few weeks at most.

The article also talks about Brett Ratner:

Ratner, the director – who had otherwise largely retreated from Hollywood after numerous sexual misconduct allegations during the #MeToo movement – was pointedly asked at the Melania premiere if he felt he was part of a larger quid pro quo.
“That’s ridiculous, but it’s OK, I’ll answer,” he said. “I can tell you right now, if we were audited and they said, ‘How much was spent on this movie?’ This movie is one of the most expensive movies – documentaries – in the genre ever made.”
“It wasn’t about getting rich. I mean, I think the Trumps are wealthy and successful enough. This is about giving me the ability to hire the best crew in the world, to not only score the film with the best composer … I mean, when you see the movie, you’ll go, ‘Oh, we see where the money went now.’ This wasn’t about corruption. Melania only cared about one thing – making a great movie for audiences.”

The question of why she didn’t pay for it herself if she cared so much about it was clearly left unasked or otherwise ignored.

The reviews are in

FUCK.

German-occupied Poland, summer of 1943. More than anything, Hedwig, an indefatigable mother of five, wants to keep her well-organised life as is. After all, she has worked her fingers to the bone to create a fragrant slice of paradise to raise her children, and nothing will change that. If only her husband, the distinguished SS officer and Auschwitz commander Rudolf Hoess, weren’t always burdened by his duties. But perfection is a fleeting illusion. As the oblivious life of the commandant’s wife unravels in cloudless bliss, Rudolf finds himself swamped with work, saddled with testing a new ventilation design and overseeing the installation of a highly effective Topf and Sons multi-muffle, non-stop incineration oven system. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that just a hair’s breadth away from the peaceful and idyllic Höss household, the unimaginable horrors of the Final Solution were unfolding in full swing. And as noisome fumes and muffled, blood-curdling noises blemish Hedwig’s verdant utopia, a question emerges. When evil becomes banal and apathy requires no effort, what separates man from beast?

That is the IMDB summary of the film The Zone of Interest. Obviously there’s been a lot of comparison with the Krasnov regime to the schöne Zeiten of Germany in the 1930s/40s, but I think Xan Brooks just drew the bleakest and nastiest one, and he only gets nastier after that:

This mood of cosy conviviality extends all the way through the opening credits; at which point the chill descends and the novocaine kicks in, as the film’s star and executive producer proceeds to guide us – with agonising glacial slowness – through the preparations for her husband’s second presidential inauguration. She glides from the fashion fitting to the table setting, and from the “candlelit dinner” to the “starlight ball”, with a face like a fist and a voice of sheet metal. “Candlelight and black tie and my creative vision,” she says, as though listing the ingredients in a cauldron. “As first lady, children will always remain my priority,” she coos, and you can almost picture her coaxing them into her little gingerbread house.
No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.

And, a bit more locally, this critic saw it was eight other people. Yes, as many as that:

As I emerge from the cinema, I have the strange feeling that I have not only learned nothing but lost brain cells.
“What did you think?” I ask the elderly lady. “I loved it, wow!” she cries.
I pin down the only two people who didn’t see the movie alone. The couple tell me they’re a fan of Trump, and of Melania, but they found the experience too much like a “PR vehicle”.
“It’s not as insightful as I thought it would be,” one says.
“I’ve loved Melania for 15 years … and I feel like it was made to make Trump look better,” the other says.
“As much as it was for her, it was for him.”
Isn’t everything.

Still, at least it’s actually showing here, which is more than can be said for some countries:

Cinemas in South Africa will not be showing the documentary about US First Lady Melania Trump that is due to be released around the world on Friday.
The South African distributor Filmfinity has decided not to release it, its head of sales and marketing told the New York Times and South Africa-based website News24. The company was not explicit about the reasons behind the move.
The film, Melania, is not promoted on the websites of the country’s main cinema chains. One Cape Town independent cinema contacted by the BBC said that it was called by Filmfinity and told not to list it.
Relations between the US and South Africa have seriously deteriorated over the past year. […]
“Based on recent developments, we’ve taken the decision to not go ahead with a theatrical release in territory,” Filmfinity’s Thobashan Govindarajulu is quoted as saying by the New York Times.
He told News24 that the decision had been taken “given the current climate”.
The executive did not elaborate on what he meant by “recent developments” or “current climate”.

Trump’s insistence that there’s a “white genocide” happening in South Africa and Cyril Ramaphosa’s letting it happen has nothing to do with it, I’m sure. In its way, this is the best review of all, I suppose…

EDIT (late night Feb. 3rd): There’s been a correction to the Xan Brooks review:

Which answers the question I did have about why Brooks still gave the film one star instead of none if he thought it was that heinous, i.e. 0/5 was the intended rating. Bloody subeditors, eh…

Melania goes down?

Remember that “documentary” about the current Mrs Trump? It is now bidding fair to be one of the worst box office tankers of all time, having cost an obscene $40m (which NO documentary should ever cost; apparently nearly three-quarters of that amount went to its subject) plus an alleged $35m extra for marketing. It looks like it will return almost none of that investment. From the Graun:

UK ticket sales for Melania are so far “soft”, according to Tim Richards, the chief executive of Vue, one of the country’s biggest cinema operators. Just one ticket has been sold for the first 3.10pm screening on Friday at its flagship Islington branch in London, while two have been booked for 6pm.
At the time of publication, all seats remained available for the 28 screenings of Melania at the Blackburn, Castleford and Hamilton branches.
The picture was slightly rosier at the Cineworld in Wandsworth, which had sold four tickets, while five backrow seats were also booked at the Cineworld in Broughton. […]
One industry analyst told the Guardian they suspected the underlying strategy was “four-walling”, meaning distributors pay a set fee to each cinema if they agree to play a certain title.
This would explain why so many exhibitors – which usually adopt a revenue-sharing model with distributors – have agreed to take on a movie with such modest financial prospects at a time when award-nominated films are vying for screen time.
“I’d be amazed if box office gets reported on this title,” added the pundit, who wished to remain anonymous.

I’m sure the box office will be reported… it’s just that the report will be a complete lie. The regime is so full of shit about everything else, it’s not going to be honest about this either… It is being shown in Australia, too, but, per Channel 9, it’s doing about as badly here as in the UK:

At its one screening this Friday at Sydney’s Hoyts Warringah Mall, not a single ticket has been sold. In Cronulla, one person is going.
At three cinemas in Melbourne, nobody has reserved a seat. Two tickets have been sold at a fourth.
Most people don’t buy movie tickets several days ahead of time, so the true reception won’t be known until Friday.
But a lack of pre-sales does indicate a lack of interest.

The other thing the film has lacked, apparently, is critic previews, which is never a good sign for any film and is a worse sign than normal for this particular one. And the behind the scenes stuff that’s coming out thanks to Rolling Stone is illuminating, too:

One person familiar with the production estimated that some two-thirds of the crew members who worked on the film in New York had requested not to have their names formally credited on the documentary. A separate person who will be credited on the film said that, after experiencing the first year of Trump’s second term, they now wish they had not put their name on it. “I’m much more alarmed now than I was a year ago,” that person said.
People who worked on the film said they had fewer problems working with Melania Trump herself, who was described as friendly and very engaged in the process, than they did with the director, Brett Ratner. (“She was totally nice,” one person said. “She was the opposite of Brett Ratner.”) […]
“I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this,” one member of the production team said. “But Brett Ratner was the worst part of working on this project.” That person said they weren’t aware of Ratner’s involvement until just days before filming began, and they would not have accepted the job if they’d known.

Ah, Brett Ratner, the accused sexual predator who hasn’t made a film since 2014 cos he fled to Israel after those accusations… sex pests look after one another, don’t they… That’s another thing putting people off, apart from the film’s subject matter… I do see some comments saying not to write it off, it could do more than the expected $5m the most optimistic prediction was suggesting; that Reagan hagiography a couple of years ago took some $30m at the box office despite the critical drubbing it got because enough of the Cult went to see it out of sacred duty. Mind you, that still wasn’t enough for that film to make a profit, and I don’t see the Melania thing achieving that either… what, $75m allegedly spent on this thing in an industry where a film usually has to bring in three or so times its cost before it’s considered a profitable success? I don’t see a documentary doing that, especially this one, even on Amazon Prime where it will soon be dumped.

But so what, really? What is $75 million to Jeff Bezos, a man with a fortune just shy of $250 billion? Small change at best, three ten-thousandths of his overall wealth. The Melania film will probably do OK on Prime, but will almost certainly never recover its costs cos the Cult isn’t that big, but Bezos will never notice and profit wasn’t the point here anyway: it was only ever a colossal suck-up to the regime, for Bezos to curry favour with Mushroom Cock, and as long as the latter has his monument that’s all that matters. I do suspect, mind you, that a large part of whatever audience the film gets will wind up being liberals hate-watching it; I just hope that, like me, if they do that, they also plan to pirate the thing rather than pay for it…

RIP Marty Di Bergi

I actually never saw many of Rob Reiner’s films, but I still knew he was a major and popular player in Hollywood (though I didn’t know until now he also headed Castle Rock Entertainment, without whom no Seinfeld among many others), as well as a serious political activist (he played a big role in overturning a gay marriage ban in California many years ago). So the news that he and his wife Michele had been murdered over the weekend was obviously inherently terrible, but it was made worse by the news that it was apparently their son who did it… and what made it even worse was the fact that both Reiners had actually collaborated on a film inspired by the younger man’s misadventures with drug addiction and homelessness over the years.

And then, like diarrhoea icing on a shit cake:

Yeah, SOMEONE couldn’t not be a complete fucking ghoul about this. Nothing here needed to be said apart from the opening and closing sentences. And you know, cos I’ve said it on here enough times, I’m not into celebrating people’s deaths, but I’ll make an exception for this thing when his time comes. A joyful exception. And I know that when his clogs do finally pop, someone equally awful if not worse will follow him as president… but we’ll be saved from him at least. On the plus side, even Republicans are aghast at this bullshit, though not all:

I’ll be charitable and assume Jack Posobiec posted this before Mushroom Cock belched his post out. But let’s look at Rob Reiner celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death…

…Oh, he didn’t. Well, there you go. Anyway, RIP Rob and Michele; hilariously, before the two of them met, Michele took the cover photo of Trump for The Art of the Deal. And Rob, well, Rob gave us a joke that’s added more to human happiness in the last four decades than Mushroom Cock ever could:

Somehow, the original version returned

A long time ago on a blog post far far away, I sniped a bit at Jon Favreau for his claim that the Kids These Days wouldn’t be that interested in the original trilogy’s original theatrical versions coming back out. Well, it appears we’re going to find out which of us was right, cos the original Star Wars (no, I will NOT call it “A New Hope”, fuck you George Lucas), possibly restored from the original Technicolor print shown at the BFI a few months ago, is coming back to cinemas in early 2027 for the film’s 50th anniversary… which is fascinating, given that Lucas has spent decades insisting he would never let the original version be reissued; however, that BFI screening was attended by Kathleen Kennedy from Lucasfilm which did pretty much legitimise it, and if Lucas objected that much I’m sure he could’ve stopped it. I feel a fair amount of money has changed hands to change his mind…

Anyway, I still have questions, mostly about just how “restored” this re-release will be, cos we know uncle George has always insisted on tinkering with the film—even in 1977 there were differences in dialogue and sound effects between the mono, stereo and six-track 70mm prints—and I find it unlikely that he won’t have fiddled with it yet again by the time it comes out again. And will this reissue go as far as home  video? What about the other two original trilogy films? As I said way back when, if Lucas would just let the unfucked-with original versions of the first three films out on disc, they would fly off the shelves. But if all else fails, I suspect cinemas are going to be packed in February ’27 when this one comes out, and I’m sure a lot of the crowd will be made up of the young people Jon Favreau presumably still thinks don’t care about it…