Out of Focus

Others maybe, but you … you’re still my favorite.

Sadly, you may have noticed that my posts have become fewer and further between over the past week or two. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I now realize that the coming two weeks are going to be even more blog unfriendly to me than the past two. I’m sure by now you may have been able to guess where my “new job” is. I haven’t really been keeping it such a closely guarded secret, and said large lower-Manhattan film-oriented event starts in just four days.

(Inhale … exhale … inhale … exhale … breathe … breathe … stay calm … good thoughts … ahhhhhhhhhhhh! Damn me for quitting smoking nearly a decade ago! Damn me for being old enough to have quit smoking nearly a decade ago!)

Anyway, each day closer to this Saturday keeps me at work later and later, and next week during the actual event, I won’t really be coming home or sitting at a computer much at all. (THE HORROR!) So if you see me go days, even a week without posting anything, please don’t fret. I’ll be back. Or actually … fret a little. It’s nice to be missed.

In the mean time, if you’re in New York, come on down to that triangle (or trapazoid if you’re such a geometry freak) below Canal and check out the three f-s … the films, the fun and the festivities. There’s really a lot going on, and there are a ton of staff and volunteers working really hard, nearly around-the-clock, to turn this edition into the best one yet.

Check-out the Tribeca Drive-In at Pier 25 (no cars required … or allowed!); a great selection of panels; the exciting family fest; and of course, films, films and more films.

And just so you don’t feel like it’s only you, my loyal reader, being neglected, there are two events this week alone I was excited to go to but realized there was no chance I would be able to make. First is the second installment of the Ritalin Reading Series tonight (yes, I mean Tuesday), featuring not only its creator Lindsay Lindsayism, but also one of my favorite bloggers, even if I always feel inadequate after reading posts,Maud Newton.

And second is one of the worst-kept secrets in the NY film community, unless you know about it: one of The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Young Friends of Film events which comprise a screening of an old New York Film Festival or New Directors/New Films selection, a lecture and/or Q&A and a nice little cocktail party. This Thursday, they’re showing the 1990 NYFF selection, director Michael Verhoeven’s The Nasty Girl. If you’ve never been to one of these events, or if you’ve never been to the Walter Reade Theater, you should consider checking it out.

In the mean time … I’ll see you soon. It may be irregularly and infrequently, but I’ll be around, so I hope you will be too.

I’ve been waiting two days to post this, and finally I can. I know I’ve done my share of railing against Quentin Tarantino in the past week or two, but as I’ve said, it’s not that I dislike his movies. If anything, this is definitely a case where it’s alright to hate the player but not his game.

If you haven’t thought of going to see anything at the Tribeca Film Festival, well now is the time to head over to the web site because on May 6 at 8 PM, the festival will present KILL BILL Vols. 1 & 2 — BACK-TO-BACK! Both films playing together, back to back with no commercial interruptions. OK, with one 10-15 minute intermission, but no commercials. It’s open to the public, but I believe it’s a one-time only, limited seating event.

Tickets to the general public for all TFF programs go on sale tomorrow at 10 AM both at the festival box office and via the web. Check-out Kill Bill in one sitting. Two movies for the price of one. I’m sure it’s worth it.

One of the world’s most trusted news sources — Gawker shares that title with The Daily Show in my world — reports that Elvis Mitchell may be out at the New York Times as co-chief film critic. That would mean A.O. Scott would suddenly become the main film reviewer.

EWWWWWW. I guess Amanda Hesser is to Eurotrash as A.O. Scott is to me. There are few film critics that I can tolerate less.

I like Mitchell. His writing is clever, he’s incredibly smart, and while he can be as obnoxious and all-knowing in his reviews as any critic, he tends to give opinions, support them and make sense. Even if I disagree with his opinion on a film, at least I have an understanding for why he thinks the way he does.

While A.O. Scott is not nearly as bad as say, I don’t know, EW’s Owen Gliberman, I really have never understood how he landed a top job at the Times anyway. Those three things I just mentioned Elvis doing? Scott never does any of them. His reviews just come across as pretentious and clueless. I never know whether he actually likes or dislikes a movie because he never takes a complete stand one way or the other unless it’s a complete rave or a big-time pan — and sometimes not even then. And hey, A.O., if somehow you suddenly think that means, “Oh, the Out of Focus guy is obviously too stupid to understand my reviews …” — you write for a major metropolitan newspaper and not for Film Comment or Film Quarterly or Sight & Sound. That doesn’t mean you need to writedumb; it does mean you’re meant for mass consumption. Even Gliberman gives an opinion and is understandable. He’s often stupid and wrong and I’m often pretty certain he hasn’t actually stayed awake through the movie, but he’s not Scott who always seems like he’s being dropping names and SAT words just to say, “Hey Ma, look how smart I am.”

In fact, I rarely read his reviews anymore and almost never before I see the film. Not that it would skew my opinion one way or another; he’d actually have to take a position to do that. I did take a pass at his review of The Punisher the other day, and no matter how bad the movie might be, I have a feeling it’s more enjoyable than his boring and uninformative review of it. Besides, he doesn’t even have fun with his ratings explanations like Mitchell does, as the cinetrix highlights weekly. Instead, with Scott writing, when he tries to be funny we get …

”The Girl Next Door”is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has more swearing than the average porn movie but, when it comes to sex and nudity, more talk than action.

And I guess when he just doesn’t care, he throws in a word like “pervasive” and leaves it at that:

“The Punisher” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has pervasive violence, a few flashes of nudity, and some obscenity.

What a snore. A perfect description for Scott. Please NY Times, if you’re going to get rid of anyone, flip your choices.

If I don’t have a chance to post anything else today, at least I will have posted this: Original on ‘Jump Street’ case (via The Hollywood Reporter). That’s right, kids. 21 Jump Street, the show that (even moreso than Married …With Children) really defined the future of the Fox network is coming to the big screen courtesy of the producers of The Fast and the Furious and it’s even horrendous sequel. And that’s exactly as it should be. Jump Street was pure pop schlock, but it was craptastically great, and no one does crap better than Original Films.

Now if only they can convince Johnny Depp to get over the trauma he had working on the series and come back as Captain Tom Hanson, head of the special Jump Street unit, this would be the perfect movie. Come on, Johnny. You won’t be hamstrung by it anymore. We all know you’re one of the best actors of your generation. Go on and jump!

ABC is pathetic. There, I said it. The network has gone through more executive changes over the past 5-10 years, it’s no wonder there has been no build-up and momentum among their development and production. The “breaking” news today, according to both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter is that ABC Entertainment President Susan Lyne has resigned from her position. This comes two weeks after ABC Entertainment Chariman Lloyd Braun basically left the network after too many scrapes with Disney management as well.

Two years ago, Susan Lyne was the established star of ABC’s original movie and miniseries division. She and Braun were going to transform the network and lead it out of its third place status.

But the only thing that hasn’t changed at ABC over the past several years is, in fact, the Disney management that oversees the network, namely Michael Eisner and, probably even more importantly, Robert Iger. Now I don’t claim to be any business-savvy genious, but I never quite understood Iger’s rise not only to the top of ABC but basically to the #2 position at Disney and potentially Eisner’s chosen “heir” to power. There’s a reason why Roy Disney and his group said they would not find Iger to be an acceptable replacement to Eisner — they don’t trust him either. The fact is, Iger did a decent but certainly not extraordinary job as head of ABC back in the early 90s. But ABC’s slide has been a long one, and unless I’m mistaken (no, I haven’t done a lot of research), it started during his reign. That didn’t stop him from getting promoted to upper Disney management where now the people who run ABC answer to him and Eisner. That also means he’s responsible for overseeing the people who oversee ABC.

The network has had its share of hits over the years, but it has rarely been able to turn them into anchors for successful full night’s of television. But the biggest problem many of the networks have is not nurturing new shows that need it and pulling the cancellation trigger too quickly. I wonder if ABC has done the same thing with its upper management. You can’t blame it all on Jamie Tarses not being ready for the top job; that may or may not be true. What is true is that this whole time, at least since Disney purchased ABC/Capital Cities, Eisner and then Iger have been in charge, and now their network is the laughingstock of the industry.

Well, that’s not fair. UPN still exists.

Oh is it ugly. Sunday night, as I stayed awake until 3 AM trying to get through all the personal things I have no longer been able to find time for, I decided to get something off my DiVo. Now, things don’t leave my DiVo without checking with me first, but why I even had still saved Behind the Camera: The Unauthorize Story of “Charlie’s Angels” is actually beyond me.

This movie was one of the most embarrassing excuses for “entertainment” I’ve ever seen. It actually makes me a little sick that with so many good writers struggle out there while people with actual talent (even if it’s not great) continue to go hungry and undiscovered. No wonder ABC (the original home of Charlie’s Angels) didn’t care about airing this piece of dreck. The only impressive element of the movie is that each of the Angels look remarkably like the real actresses.

The movie includes stupid “inside” jokes, but whoever wrote them should have his/her laptop and all writing implements confiscated. One such joke involves a young Tori (as in Spelling, the daughter) asking her father if she can be on one of his shows when she grows up, only to hear Daddy Aaron tell her he’ll build a whole show around her. Oh … ha ha. That’s good. Yeah, 90210 we got it. How clever. I wonder if that really happened?

Another running (really horrendous) joke that may or may not be grounded in any semblance of the truth, repeatedly depicts two ABC executives following around ABC production head Fred Silverman pitching new show ideas at him. Oh look, that sounds like “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” That one sounds like “American Idol.” And of course, Silverman is shooting them down left and right, explaining that he thinks all these reality ideas will never find an audience. Har har.

I actually watched the whole damn movie. No clue why, and actually “watched” might be a bit strong for what I actually did since I spent as much time staring at the work on my computer screen as paying attention to the poor excuse for bad television playing on my set. I thought it might be fun, and there might be a bit of kitsch factor. It’s not hard to see that the producers intended that to be the case, but as with everything else in this movie, they failed miserably. I’ll bet there’s a good story behind the scenes of Charlie’s Angels, and bits and pieces of it appear in the show. But it’s so cheaply done that anyone involved should be ashamed of him or herself for contributing to a complete waste of space in the television landscape.

Please do me a favor (and this includes you Cinecultist with your freaky goals of watching a made-for every night for a week), and if somehow NBC decides to rerun this movie, do me a favor and hit yourself over the head with a pan before staring at the wall for two hours. I guarantee you, that will be more fun.

The “bad.” Yeah, there’s always a “bad,” no matter what. As most of my friends would tell you, I’m the eternal pessimist. It’s not that I expect everything to go wrong constantly, but I do try to temper my excitement for everything with at least the recognition that everything is about to go to shit. For example, here I am working this job, having a great time and feeling good about the work I’m doing. I’ve been in a better mood; most people who know me would say that I have a much more pleasant demeanor; I’m still bitter and cynical, but I have a feeling I’m far less misanthropic, and that’s how I’d like to stay. But stay that way may not be in the cards, and all I can think about is that in four weeks, I return to the old gig that drains me so it affects everything else I do. Meanwhile, I’m still terrified of fucking-up what I’m doing now, so much so that this weekend I had two nightmares about doing just that. Completely screwing up all my responsibilities. letting down a bunch of new friends and colleagues, and basically never being able to work in this town again. Oh, but that’s not the “bad” because ultimately I know it will turn out OK. I’m good enough and smart enough, blah blah blah. The “bad” is that, as the two or three of you reading this can tell (I’m so excited to have tripled my readership), my blogging has been greatly curtailed. I just haven’t had time. I still have a lot I’ve been meaning to write about, and now I think it may be too late for some of it.

The “good” is that I did manage to get to Film Forum this Sunday to see the brilliant The Third Man. If you’ve never seen it, and you’re in NYC … seriously, rush down to Film Forum before it ends its run this Thursday. I can’t do better than the essay I’ve previously mentioned written by A Girl and a Gun, but I do want to mention a few of the things that kept me mesmerized throughout my Sunday late-afternoon screening.

First is the brilliant zither-music played by Anton Karas. Aside from the rather unique sound of the zither, the entire opening credits play over a single shot of the instrument’s strings playing the theme that will continue to repeat itself for the next 90 minutes. This is a very interesting choice for a film that spends much of its time hiding its secrets in the dark shadows of post-WWII Vienna. As soon as the credits are complete, we’re thrust into the reality of a crumbling city where everyone exists in a carefully controlled chaos, rebuilding their lives and buildings simultaneously. Yet all the time, in the background plays this jaunty, romantic waltz-like theme. Even the darkest moments in the film are accompanied by a score that is light and uplifting, and as I sat watching the famous last shot meander to its ineviatble downbeat confusion, the vibrating tones of the zither kept making me feel like Fellini was about to lead his carnival of the absurd onto the road to follow Alida Valli into an unseen future. (Of course, 8-1/2 was still 14 years away, and I don’t mean to mention a connection between the two. It’s just what popped into my mind as I watched.)

Secondly, Robert Krasker’s Academy Award winning cinematography is simply breathtaking when seen projected from a clean print as it was always meant to be. I don’t think the advantage of projected film (rather than seeing a movie on DVD, even those phenomenal near-perfect editions from The Criterion Collection as is the DVD of The Third Man) can be better represented than by seeing an impeccably shot black & white film from this era, especially that might fall under the grouping of film noir. Citizen Kane is often hailed for its unorthodox cinematography, extreme camera angles and high-contrast lighting, influencing a whole generation of cinematographers, but The Third Man is a masters class in utilizing these techniques to enhance every element of the story of the film. Characters walk in and out of darkness with regularity, completely fading from view, only to return seconds later. But what happened in those seconds? What did we miss? What was about to happen during that time that never came to pass? What is often called one of the most famous “entrances” in all of film history — the first appearance of Orson Welles as Harry Lime — is more of a reveal and an abrupt one at that. We sit in wait for 2/3 of the film hearing about Harry Lime, wondering what the truth is, not knowing if we’ll ever meet him, only to be startled into seeing him by the flick of a light switch. And just as suddenly, he’s gone. Shadows running through rain-swept streets; dark-cloaked figures stepping through the smoke at a train station; chases through dark sewers with the tunnel entrances somehow bathed in bright floods of moonlight. It doesn’t get any better than this, and it doesn’t get any better than light pushing through celluloid and landing on a white screen.

OK, film geek moment is over. There are plenty of visually striking films out there, especially in today’s cinema with much more sophisticated equipment and processing techniques. But I’m far more impressed with what those people controlling the camera in the 40s and 50s managed to do, creating cinematic tableaus which even some of the most talented DPs today would be hard-pressed to replicate.

The last thing I want to mention about The Third Man is simply the performance of Welles himself. Welles spends far less time on screen as Harry Lime than he does as Charles Foster Kane, but the impacts of both performances are not so far apart. There are some actors who have talent; there are others who have presence. The best of the lot are those who have both, and few actors in film history had more talent and screen presence than Welles. From the first shot of him hiding in a doorway with a sly grin (or is it?) on his face to the riveting scene between him and Joseph Cotten on the ferris wheel to the climactic confrontation with his old friend and inevitable denouement, what Welles’ Lime says is almost irrelevant. His facial expressions and posture say as much if not more about the character than anything that comes out of his mouth. One can’t take one’s eyes off Welles, and while he occupies less screen time than probably any other character in the film, his Harry Lime is remembered more than any of them as well.

There is plenty more to rave about The Third Man It is one of those films (and there are many) that should be taught in high school classes due to not only its artistic merit, but also it’s representation of post-war Europe.

Of course, with any good, it always seems that there is some accompanying bad ….

When you’re going through your Sunday New York Times today (or if like me you get it delivered, you would have received this yesterday), don’t throw away the circulars too quickly. This weekend’s paper includes a copy of the Tribeca Film Festival film guide which includes information about all the films and other events associated with the fest which will take over downtown Manhattan in just two weeks. Individual film tickets go on sale at various times this week, so read the descriptions in the guide, verify the schedule information online at tribecafilmfestival.org and then come on down to experience what should be the best TFF yet.

You can also still vote at the web site for your favorite “guilty pleasure” which will screen one night at the “drive-in” set-up at Pier 25. So what are you waiting for?

I actually am paying attention to the number of signs, and it’s been about a month since the last one. But this is most definitely some of the scariest news I’ve read in some time. Today’s Hollywood Reporter has a story that starts with the following sentence: “The WB Network is developing an original movie about the life of 1990s rock icon Kurt Cobain.” The same story later quotes Sr. VP of original movies Tana Nugent Jamieson. “‘The day Kurt Cobain died was the day music died for a generation,’ she said. ‘His story is perfect for our audience.'”

Now I’m as big a fan of “the Frog” as your average 15-year-old girl, if not my own 32-year-old male demo, and the network can only wish that my household would be given a People Meter. I DiVo Gilmore Girls, Everwood and Smallville, and I so far have been unable to convince my girlfriend to stop watching One Tree Hill, but this is just so wrong. The best way to bastardize Cobain’s story is to make it into your standard TV movie. The best way to make it even cheaper and cheesier is to try to make it hip and edgy, but wind up creating something that looks like The Heights meets Dawson’s Creek. And don’t think I’m kidding about Chad Michael Murray. The WB is known for cultivating young “talent,” creating a pseudo old-fashioned studio system by using its discoveries on all their shows. Murray started on the Creek, appeared with the Girls, took a test-drive of Silver in the attempt to recreate The Lone Ranger, and he’s now the king of the Hill. If it’s not him, I’m sure James Van Der Beek would kill for the role. Literally.

But casting aside, this is bad bad news for any Nirvana, Cobain or music fan. Could a movie be made? Probably. Should it be made for The WB? Hell no! In fact, if anyone other than an actual filmmaker with music credentials takes this on, absolutely every TV entity should stay away from taking on this story. That means you MTV and VH1. I saw that fake-ass Real World movie, and I still haven’t forgiven you.