August 27, 2003

There’s nothing to write about…

Vivendi didn’t make up its mind.

Ken Turan LOVES The House of Sand & Fog.

Jeepers Creepers 2 is the only wide release coming this weekend.

People are on vacation.

Reservations at good restaurants are as easy as botox.

I should do a final summer wrap-up piece… but you know the answers.

I should do another Toronto piece, but there is nothing new to report, really.

I’d really like to tell you about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but I haven’t seen it.

If I come up with any really clever comments, I won’t be able to write my Buzz column for MCN tomorrow because there is so little to buzz about already.

I took a long look at the Matrix Revolutions Trailer. There is a piece up at MCN now.

Alison Lohman is 24!!! Is that freaky or what? She’s old enough to be Nic Cage’s next girlfriend. Put her on the cover of Maxim and watch Washington freak out!!! That would be a fun late summer story.

Jeff Wells will be back in Los Angeles tomorrow. Don’t say you weren’t warned. (Another reason to hate the French…)

My favorite film festival in the world, Telluride, goes on this weekend, without me for the second straight year. If you have a few grand (per person) you feel like dropping on a long weekend, there is no better trip for a movie lover.

The three great examples of music truly integrating into film, non-musical division, are The Graduate, The Big Chill and Amadeus. (Footloose, Flashdance, etc. were really musicals and Urban Cowboy was great background music that didn’t really move the story along for the most part.) Where is the next such film? Lost In Translation is a beautifully composed film, musically and visually, but it’s not the same. The daring of Mike Nichols to shoot his film with its vast silences without Simon & Garfunkle’s songs in his pocket… wow! And I don’t mean to diss Cameron Crowe by not naming his films, since he is the filmmaker most likely to do the next such film. The music is perfectly chosen for Almost Famous… but the cart followed the horse.

Denzel Washington will have another surprise hit with Out of Order.

Tomorrow is another day.

READER OF THE DAY: NOT THE MAILMAN FROM CHEERS writes: “After plowing through the 1680 titles for 1943 on imdb.com, I've only come with 9 titles from that year that I know I've seen:

Destination Tokyo
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
The Great Gildersleeve
A Guy Named Joe
Heaven Can Wait
Hitler's Children
Phantom of the Opera (Claude Rains version)
Sahara
Shadow of a Doubt
The one film that stands out from that year as one I should have seen and still haven't is The Ox-Bow Incident, but you asked for "more than ten films", so even that one wouldn't put me over the mark.

Of the one's I've seen, there's at least one that deserves to be a classic (Shadow of a Doubt, possibly the best Hitchcock film seen by the fewest people), one above average comedy (Heaven Can Wait, no Ninotchka but still top-drawer Lubitsch), one pretty good fantasy-drama (A Guy Named Joe), two solid WWII actioners (Tokyo and Sahara), one average remake (Phantom), one standard horror entry (F meets the WM) and two I have pretty much have no memory of at all (Gildersleeve & Hitler's Children).

And now the challenge: are there nine 2003 films that fill the same slots as the 1943 entries. Working up the list, there's no shortage of instantly forgettable films this year, so how about Bringing Down the House and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. The horror entry is a no-brainer, in every sense of the term: Freddy vs. Jason. Freaky Friday or the Italian Job can fill the remake slot (The In-Laws isn't good enough, especially compared to the original). In place of the war films, let's substitute cop films (not identical genres but there aren't any Iraqi Freedom actioners to work with) and let SWAT and Dark Blue be the latter-day Destination Tokyo and Sahara.

We still need a fantasy-drama, a good comedy, and a potential classic. LOTR: Return of the King will be a fantasy-drama, but it's one a much larger scale than A Guy Named Joe. Ditto the Matrix sequels. You can make a case for The Hulk--it certainly emphasized drama over fantasy, however you felt about the end result. But I'll opt for 28 Days Later instead.

A good comedy? I laughed during American Wedding and Finding Nemo (laughed a LOT during the latter), but I'll fill the bill with A Mighty Wind--like the Lubitsch, it isn't the best of Guest, but it's still a lot of fun.

But when it comes to picking a future classic to rate with Shadow of a Doubt, I'm at a loss. Identity works as a Hitchcock-style thriller, but it's not a classic. Seabiscuit? Open Range? They stand out this year, but will they still stand out in a decade or six? Of course there's still four months left in the year, so there might still be a candidate. (From your past columns, I have hopes Lost In Translation and/or Big Fish.)

But the fact that I had stretch just to fill the other eight slots probably proves your point: there are far fewer "great films" being made now then there were in the past, whatever your definition of "past" is. Most of the 2003 choices I've listed fill the slots of the 1943 films, but not their shoes.”

HOWIE THE PEG writes: “Like so many of our generation, I too tend to valorize the early 70s—it was after all our coming of age and it seemed to coincide with a burst of creativity on the part of American movies. We were as Stanley Kaufmann famously said, "the film generation."

But your qualifications in regard to film from 1969--74 seem just and the level of mediocrity was probably at about the same level as today. The American independent film--which was there from at least the 50s as far as features go with Morris Engel, John Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke--really blossoms in the 1990s as John Pierson and others have documented and as the Hot Button continues to promote. For this, much thanks.

You end by inviting a list of 10 movies I've seen from 1943. Not difficult. Here are 10 great ones:

Air Force (Howard Hawks)
Day of Wrath (Carl Dreyer)
I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur)
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell)
Obsession (Luchino Visconti)
The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman)
Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy)
Sahara (Zoltan Korda)
Sanshiro Sugata (Akira Kurosawa)
Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock)

And that doesn't include Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren) or Fires Were Started (Humphrey Jennings).

And while I'm at it, my pick for the greatest five continuous years of films is 1958--1962.”

E ME: Is there anything worth discussing right now?

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