So this years’ Academy Awards seem to have gone off well without anyone getting slapped this time round…
I know, I know, it was serious…
…And though I don’t really care about the Oscars that much, never watch the ceremony and frankly almost never watch the films (cos that’s just how things have been for me for years), but from what I’ve read about this year’s crop I’m not surprised that Everything Everywhere All at Once did so much business—best film, directors, actress, supporting actor & actress (Jamie Lee Curtis getting her first ever Oscar nomination and winning it!), editing and original screenplay—and so I’m really going to have to watch it now, aren’t I? But I was actually fully intending to do so anyway, indeed I’ve actually had it sitting on a hard drive for some months waiting to be watched. Really should do that.
Personally I’ve been saying for years the Oscars should’ve stopped after the 2017 ceremony because they would never be able to pull off anything more entertaining than the “La La Land… er, sorry, that should’ve been Moonlight” fuckup ending of that year’s show; and, notwithstanding Will Smith and Chris Rock last year, I think I’ve been right. But people generally seem happy with the overall outcome, so I suppose it’s a success this year? And, having now seen the live performance of “Naatu Naatu” (the best song winner), next year’s best song entrants are going to have to go some to beat that…
The Mandalorian creator and longtime Star Wars fan Jon Favreau believes that fans of the iconic space opera franchise would likely not be interested in a re-release of the original film trilogy’s theatrical cut.
When asked in a Moovy TV interview about the potential for the first three Star Warsmovies to have their original theatrical cuts released in the present day, Favreau expressed doubt that there would be enough demand. “Do you think anybody but us, like, the people who grew up with it … would care? Because … what I figured out [is] that the younger people have a whole different perception of what Star Wars is.”
Oh FUCK the “younger people”. It’s the old farts like me for whom Star Wars is the original trilogy in its original form who want this. We absolutely WOULD care BECAUSE we fucking grew up with it. We want the films as we knew them first time round, not as George Lucas tooled about with them in the 90s. Fuck, I’m not even really a Star Wars fan any more, I grew up on that original trilogy but by the time it kicked off again in the 90s I’d mostly lost interest (and the prequel trilogy hardly re-inspired me when I did see it); all I’ve otherwise seen of new Star Wars is bits of The Clone Wars, and that was only because it happened to be on TV while I was in hospital in 2009 for you-know-what, I didn’t go out of my way to watch it or anything. Anyway, you can fuck off with that nonsense, “longtime Star Wars fan”; get the original theatrical cuts of the original trilogy onto high-definition discs and watch them fly off the shelves, even into my hands, even into the hands of “the younger people”…
The breadth and depth of feeling is almost too much to handle
Many years ago I remember seeing a similar meme to this starring Mischa Barton, using the same photo of her looking blank in various emotional situations, but that was done with clear ill-will to paint her as a limited performer. Buster Keaton, of course, was a man of stone and not wood, “the great Stone Face”, but this meme really is more of a tribute to him. The really funny thing, with hindsight, about his very early stuff with Roscoe Arbuckle is that he actually does emote in them, sometimes even broadly:
Found this interesting video the other day about why 3D movies don’t “immerse” you in them, and it’s not just because you have to wear those fucking polarised glasses (which is always an additional problem if you’re already a speccy git like me); it’s also down to things like focus and the darkness of the image. Consequently, 3D movies fail to immerse the viewer, the technology gets in the way of viewer involvement. They don’t really draw us in.
My own first encounter with 3D actually came in comic form; Eagle did a bit of an experiment with it in, I think, 1983, and around the same time I remember one of the TV stations (7?) making a fuss about showing an old William Castle 3D production called Fort Ti in actual 3D. And, of course, there was the 3D revival happening in cinemas at the same time, I remember seeing Treasure of the Four Crowns and Metalstorm on the big screen when they hit Australia. (Even as a not especially critical child, though, I felt both of them were shit.) Oh, and Starchaser (which I wasn’t a big fan of either) nearer the end of the 80s boom, and Captain EO (seen at Disneyland in 1987, I recall liking it more than any of the above-mentioned), but I don’t know how much that’s a “real” film as such.
Anyway, the problem I have with the thesis that 3D isn’t immersive is that, as far as I can tell, the whole point in the first place was that 3D came to you rather than trying to draw you in:
The 1950s 3D boom began by threatening the viewer with “a lion in your lap”. 3D was about things coming off the screen. It was about the lion in your lap, the tree branch hanging over your head, the arrow being fired at you, the hand reaching out, the paddle ball being hit at you… Years ago I watched a flat print of Douglas Sirk’s only 3D film, Taza Son of Cochise, in which I could still tell what the 3D gimmick shots were meant to be even though I was watching it flat. Cos that was what 3D did, as far as I was concerned, it jumped out at you. The Bwana Devil poster made that clear 70 years ago. Protrusion was the point. It was there in the very title of the 1981 film Comin’ At Ya!. It was technology overtly showing off.
I don’t know what post-Avatar 3D films are like, admittedly, because cinemagoing is not something I do any more for various reasons. So I haven’t seen any of the newer 3D films, I only saw Avatar itself flat on DVD, and I don’t know if they approach 3D in the same way as the old ones did. I remember thinking once I’d be more interested in 3D if it were, in fact, about drawing you in, if it weren’t so much about the foreground looming out of the screen at you as it were about extending into the background, taking you into the depth of the image… but as someone notes in the comments on that video, cinema already has plenty of ways of depicting that depth. Hugo Munsterberg noticed this way back in 1916, that the paradox of the cinematic image is that it’s flat but nonetheless we perceive things in the image as three-dimensional anyway (and camera movement produces a further impression of this flat image containing three-dimensional space). It’s not really necessary, in other words.
But either way I don’t care as long as those fucking glasses are involved, cos I think they’re still the ultimate reason why 3D doesn’t immerse you (particularly the red/green ones; possibly my eyes just work strangely, but even when I read the 3D strip in Eagle the effect never quite worked for me cos the two lenses didn’t quite cancel out their respective colours properly). They’re an additional imposition on the viewer, even if you’re not a speccy git like I said I am (and if you are they’re even worse). The last 3D film I saw was a Mu-Meson Archives screening in the oughts of The Bubble from 1966, which mostly served to remind me how fucking irritating the glasses are (particularly because of the red/green issue I mentioned); they took me out of the movie for the entire time. And if the point of cinema is, as the video suggests (and I think that point is itself kind of arguable), about drawing the viewer in and involving them in what’s happening on the screen, then it seems to me the glasses will always get in the way of that more than focusing issues and image darkness will.
Here’s a slightly perplexing triple bill I found via Twitter. It’s not even so much the mix of films, though that’s odd enough; I could imagine The House That Dripped Blood and the Dalek film showing together cos they were both made by Amicus (technically the latter is an Aaru production but that was just Amicus posing under another name for some reason), but adding the Romero film into the mix gave the whole thing an… interesting if not traumatising flavour. But the thing that the original poster highlights is the “An erotic nightmare” tag… which I suspect may have been meant to refer to House (though that’s still a stretch), but its placement certainly makes it look like it’s about the Dalek film. Which… no?
That said, you may well find Dalek stories to be perfectly erotic and arousing. In which case, please get the hell away from me, you freak.
Once upon a time (since 1952) there was a Melbourne International Film Festival, and once upon a time (around 2000) they rejected a film called Pearls Before Swine by a filmmaker called Richard Wolstencroft. So, because the latter is a grown adult and not a big sooky pissbaby, he started his own event just a few months later to showcase his film and his mates’ films, the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, or MUFF for short. Like I said, grown adult.
I remember following this bullshit back in the day cos at the time I was doing the film show on 2SER so kind of had to stay abreast of this sort of thing, cos it was a kind of big film culture event and we were supposed to be interested in that sort of thing on the show. As such, I’ve been following it on and off for 20+ years now, whenever it’s come back into the news. Which it just did again the other day:
Travis is a friend of various other friends of mine, one of whom is a filmmaker (hi Chris) and retweeted this, which is how I discovered the current situation. It is, incidentally, not just “someone else” who snapped up the name. But more of that in due course. This will be a long one…
Spotted this while going through some Tumblr archives:
This is from a scene in The Tingler, one of William Castle’s gimmick horror films (the first film about LSD, too). And it’s a black & white film. And I’ve seen black & white stills from black & white films colourised before, so I’m not really surprised by this one. But Castle actually filmed this scene in colour. The woman goes into the bathroom and hallucinates this blood-covered arm rising out of a bath full of blood, and the blood is red on screen; to get the effect, Castle shot this bit in colour but painted the whole set white and grey and black (and gave the actress similar makeup) to make the red splatter stand out. This is how it actually looks (as screenshotted from my blu-ray copy; the picture above is evidently a production photo from a different angle):
Imperfect (the colour film was of evidently poorer quality than the actual b&w stock) but not ineffective. In any case, though, colourising a picture of this scene from the film strikes me as a bit odd, cos the point of it is that it is actually in colour. Judith Evelyn wasn’t wearing a red dressing gown. I wonder how old this colouring job is (there’s some obvious damage to the picture) and how it was done.
I always like discovering new things I didn’t previously know, and today’s was a particular what-the-fuck moment of history:
To give credit where it’s due, they weren’t kidding with that tagline: I did, in fact, not believe it when I saw this ad, and was sure it had to be some bizarre photoshop job. No way did Boy George appear on The A Team… hang on, what do you mean he did? Well. Fuck me dead.
I don’t believe it. It’s real, and I don’t believe it. I’ve now actually seen a clip of the episode where George makes his first appearance (and OH but the other George, i.e. Peppard, does not look right with that moustache) and I STILL don’t believe it. It’s just… goddamn, I know both the band and the show were struggling by the end of 1985 when I presume this would’ve been filmed for broadcast in mid-February ’86, and I’m wondering who on Earth had the bright idea of combining the two. It’s not, you know, an intuitive mix of elements, and I’d love to know what the thinking behind it was. Or, indeed, if it was.
I feel the sentence “Mr Inbetween is streaming on Binge and Foxtel Now” possibly answers the questions the article has about it not being more popular. Could be why I haven’t heard about it before today…
Anyway, saw someone mentioning it on Mastodon, was curious, went to the Guardian article screenshotted above, and thought “hmm, that looks like the bloke from that movie The Magician“… lo and behold, it actually is Scott Ryan, which is why he looks so much like himself. I saw The Magician at the cinema when it came out and I remember quite liking it, made a real virtue out of its budgetary limitations (the whole thing only cost $3000 to make) and turned its absurd cheapness to its advantage; apparently Ryan and Nash Edgerton spent ages trying to get it done in TV form, but not until about five years ago when an American network suddenly approached him about doing it did it finally come about. I am accordingly intrigued.
And yeah, I’m downloading the lot because fuck Fox (the local co-producing company) and because I don’t like or trust streaming services. Put it out on disc and I’ll buy it. I know that discs don’t necessarily stay in print either, much as a film or show on a streaming service won’t be there forever, but if I get on disc when it is available then it’s mine and I don’t need to rely on someone else when I want to watch it. Glad I made the decision to buy all the old series of Doctor Who on DVD when I still could…
I know Cannes kicked off post-WW2 in 1946 but I think I may have known it had been planned before the war… but I don’t think I realised before tonight that it actually made it as far as this; there was a special screening of Hunchback of Notre Dame on August 31st, and then there was to be 20 days of films after that. Except that, on September 1st, Germany invaded Poland, didn’t it. And the organisers decided that was a bit more important than the festival, which they opted to put on hold to see what happened next. And, well, we know what happened next and the festival was accordingly on hold for seven years…
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