Hasta La Gadget!

Grooveshark’s disappearing and reappearing act looks like it could finally come to an end; permanently. A Manhattan judge has ruled that because Grooveshark employees themselves had uploaded 5,977 songs to the service and infringing on copyrights in…

“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” the Academy Award-winning martial arts film, is finally getting a sequel — and it’s going to be on Netflix.

The streaming video (and DVDs-by-mail) company announced a deal with The Weinstein Company on Monday night that will bring “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Green Destiny,” to Netflix subscribers on Aug. 28, 2015. The film will also be shown on select IMAX screens.

“Fans will have unprecedented choice in how they enjoy an amazing and memorable film that combines intense action and incredible beauty,” Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said in statement cited by Variety. “We are honored to be working with Harvey Weinstein and a world-class team of creators to bring this epic story to people all over the world and to partner with IMAX, a brand that represents the highest quality of immersive entertainment, in the distribution of this film.”

“The moviegoing experience is evolving quickly and profoundly, and Netflix is unquestionably at the forefront of that movement,” TWC co-chairman Harvey Weinstein said, according to Entertainment Weekly. “We are tremendously excited to be continuing our great relationship with Netflix and bringing to fans all over the world the latest chapter in this amazing and intriguing story.”

Netflix has been expanding its original programming with shows such as “House of Cards,” “Orange is the New Black” and the animated series “BoJack Horseman.” Unlike network television, which releases one episode at a time, Netflix has been posting entire seasons at once, feeding the “binge-watching” trend.

Now the company appears to be taking aim at what’s known as the windowing system, in which films are usually shown exclusively in theaters before being released for home viewing via DVD, Blu-ray, video on demand, etc.

“We fundamentally believe that the only way to attack the windowing system — that is the centerpiece of the business model of the movie industry versus what consumers want — requires an outsider,” Rich Greenfield, a media analyst with BTIG Research, told The New York Times. “Netflix already changed the TV business in a very, very significant way. The movie business is teed up next.”

Released in 2000, the original “Crouching Tiger” film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It ultimately won four: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, Best Original Score and Best Cinematography.

Actress Michelle Yeoh will reprise her role as Yu Shu Lien while Donnie Yen will join the cast as Silent Wolf, according to Variety. However, director Ang Lee will not be returning. Yuen Wo Ping, who choreographed the fight scenes in the first film, will direct the sequel.

The Verge reports that filming is currently under way in New Zealand.

“‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Green Legend’ echoes the themes of the original movie, but tells its own story — one of lost love, young love, a legendary sword and one last opportunity at redemption, set against breathtaking action in an epic martial arts battle between good and evil that will decide the fate of the Martial World,” the press release states.

I’ll admit it: I ducked. The combination of the zipping sounds with the light shining in and out twisted my senses all out of whack. I felt the speed of the train even though I was sitting on my chair and I just wanted the video to end because I couldn’t handle watching it any more.

Read more…

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA *** 1/2 out of ****
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Surely one of the highlights of the New York Film Festival will be the screening of the latest version of director Sergio Leone’s epic swan song, Once Upon A Time In America. Cast members reunited on stage, led by Robert De NIro, Treat Williams and a chatty James Woods who eloquently and enthusiastically sang the film’s praises. De Niro slipped out, but the rest stayed and savored all four plus hours of this gangster epic.

Leone’s last film is one of those tragic tales of a great vision being compromised and thwarted at every turn. Unlike say Orson Welles, Leone fought for his movie every step of the way but to no avail. He shot enough footage to release a six hour film and pleaded with his producers to let him put it out in two parts of three hours each. Needless to say, they weren’t excited by the idea of a movie that could only be shown once a day. Leone came up with a cut more than four hours long for the Cannes Film Festival, only to have to trim that drastically down to three hours and 49 minutes before its world premiere. Even worse, the American release was a horribly botched job that shrank the movie to two hours and 19 minutes, making nonsense of the elaborately structured tale. Leone died five years later.

Now we’re closer than ever to the version he constructed for Cannes with this restoration that passes four hours without blinking. It debuted (again) at Cannes in 2012. Why it took two years to make it to America is a mystery to me, but the rapt audience was happy to finally get a glimpse of this legendary work by a unique talent. Once Upon A Time In America is just out on BluRay ($34.99 BluRay; Warner Bros.). You won’t be able to sit near Woods and hear his friends laugh with pleasure on some of his big moments but you will be able to see this movie in a version as close as we’re likely to get to what Leone originally wanted.

While the story is epic in length and covers decades, it doesn’t feel like a big film to me, not in the way that perhaps Once Upon A Time In The West feels “big” and important. Some smart, scrappy Jewish kids form a gang together in the 1920s. The leaders are Noodles (De Niro) and Max (James Woods). Their characters as kids are played by Scott Tiler and Rusty Jacobs and it’s one of the film’s many strengths that the casting of these younger actors (who have a substantial amount of screen time) is so good. Tiler is great and Jacobs, while seeming to be even taller than the adult Woods and not a close physical match is magnetic in his own right. You just accept them. Equally good is Jennifer Connelly as Deborah, the girl Noodles loves who will be played as an adult by Elizabeth McGovern. Tuesday Weld is also a corker in one of her best parts.

We watch their local gang fight off bigger competition, strong arm cops, use their brains to horn in on new territory and flourish as Prohibition opened the way for illegal joints that flowed with liquor and money. The film stretches into the 1960s as an elderly Noodles returns to New York after many years away, stirring up old, painful memories.

And now you know precisely nothing about Once Upon A Time In America. Sure, that’s the rough outline of the story, but it captures nothing of the way Leone tells it. This is a memory piece, with the elderly De Niro wandering through town flashing back to earlier days which flash back again to even earlier days, back and forth, from an opium haze during a crucial juncture in his life to youthful abandon to weary cynicism, back and forth, back and forth in a dance of memory that is really quite astonishing. Few films have openings as elaborately structured as this one, with memory layered on top of memory on top of memory yet always with the audience aware of where we are in the story.

To me, it’s not a gangster film the way The Godfather or Public Enemy or GoodFellas is a gangster film. It’s about childhood and friendship and first love and betrayal and the passing of years that don’t even come close to healing old wounds. And for a good three hours it’s masterful indeed, despite some modest flaws. Any serious film buff should see it. The restoration is lovingly done, though several new key scenes are pulled from the only available stock and are notably grainy, discolored and hazy. They’ve added about 20 minutes in all and given the Proustian nature of the film, with Noodles going back over past events again and again in his mind, somehow it works to have certain memories cloudy and out of sync visually with the rest of the story. Of course one would prefer a flawless print. But given the storytelling at work, this is one film that can encompass the varied, worn down look of a few brief passages and actually make that work in its favor.

I saw the travesty that was the botched American release back in 1984 and while I didn’t like it in the least, I sensed something awry; moment to moment, the film was too good for its overall nuttiness and confusion to make sense. I saw the European cut which was released years later and realized how good the film actually was. Now I’ve seen this, the longest extant version yet. But the more they add, the more I feel the weight of the missing hour and a half or so that Leone had in mind for his six hour cut. What’s here is very good, but it needs much more. Entire books have been written on this film and the missing footage; I haven’t read them and am assuming that much of it comes from the second half of the story, chronologically, which feels truncated emotionally.

Minor flaws include the perhaps exhausted composer Ennio Morricone, who leans on the movie’s central theme so often that it starts to wear out its welcome a la “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago. It’s never as bad as that number, which becomes wearying in the extreme, but you do start to pull back a bit when it’s used again and again. Plus, a brief scene surely exists that sets up Max, the character played by James Woods as an adult. Suddenly, three-quarters of the way through the film, we see this smart, centered, driven man suddenly behave like a lunatic when called crazy. Apparently, his father had a mental breakdown and Max gets unhinged if you insinuate the same about him. But this fairly crucial detail goes unmentioned so long that it comes out of left field and takes you by surprise. One other persistent issue — and I’m serious — is that the central character is called Noodles. Time and again, this silly nickname undercuts the gravitas of various scenes. You just sort of accept it, but it’s like a buzzing undercurrent throughout the film, a distracting minor annoyance. Someone should have told Leone that whatever the character was nicknamed in the book this film was based on, they should stick with his given name of “David.”

But the biggest complaint comes right towards the end in a major plot twist. This revelation is wholly unsatisfying. First, it comes completely out of the blue, though perhaps the six hour version of the film fills in the blanks and makes this both less of a “surprise” and more of a turn in their lives that is explored and has resonance. As it is, the twist is just nonsense, truly. If nothing else, it goes against the entire nature of the film. This is a movie obsessed with memory, a film presented as a story that flits back and forth in time, building layer upon layer, story upon story so that you gradually come to know these people and their world intimately.

Tossing in a twist at the end like some soap opera undermines the characters as we know them and more crucially cuts the legs out from under a film that finds its greatest power in memory. The revelation we’re given doesn’t deepen these memories and make us rethink our idea of who these people are. It makes nonsense of our belief that these are people by turning them into cardboard cutouts trapped in a melodrama.

Once Upon A Time In America is too well made, too beautifully acted by all involved to be fatally wounded by this left field development. You don’t feel betrayed so much as confused; how did this become the final destination for a movie that was so sure-footed for a good three and a half hours?

Leone has seven official films to his credit as director, remarkably few for a man that left such a mark before dying too soon at the age of 60. His Dollars trilogy remains an enduring, much-imitated but unique series of films. You can argue for all three of them convincingly as his masterpiece, though I’m increasingly drawn to the loopy, no holds barred pop opera of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, which is gleefully epic. Once Upon A Time In The West is perhaps just a little self-aware of being an epic (though I haven’t seen it in many years and await a public screening so I can watch it properly again).

But Once Upon A Time In America wears its epic nature lightly. Leone gently glides us back and forth through the years, painting resignation and old age with as much dignity as the first blush of youthful lust and romance. He holds the audience confidently in his grasp for more than four hours, ending on an ambiguous note that gives us a starting point for much to discuss and argue over while we hungrily wish for more.

MOVIES I’VE SEEN SO FAR IN 2014 (not a good year for movie-going for me)
All ratings out of four stars.

1. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) **
2. 20 Feet From Stardom **
3. The Wolf Of Wall Street ** 1/2
4. In The House (Ozon) ***
5. Laurence Anyways *** 1/2
6. The Angels’ Share ***
7. Philomena **
8. Mad Love (1935 w Peter Lorre) *
9. Women In The Wind (1939 w Kay Francis) **
10. The Hunt *** 1/2
11. Happy People: A Year In The Taiga ***
12. The Painting ** 1/2
13. The Spectacular Now *** 1/2
14. Dallas Buyers Club * 1/2
15. Blue Jasmine ** 1/2
16. The Story Of The Last Chrysanthemum (1939) ***
17. The Harvey Girls (1946) * 1/2
18. Cairo Station (1958) *** 1/2
19. Hannah Arendt * 1/2
20. The Act Of Killing *** 1/2
21. To The Wonder ***/
22. No ***
23. American Hustle **
24. Stories We Tell ***
25. Only God Forgives ***
26. Computer Chess ** 1/2
27. The Past ***
28. Captain America: The Winter Soldier ***
29. Blue Ruin ***
30. X-Men: Days Of Future Past **
31. Snowpiercer ** 1/2
32. Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes *** /
33. Vicious (UK TV series) **
34. Endeavour Series Two ** 1/2
35. The Fault In Our Stars * 1/2
36. Escape In The Fog, dir Budd Boetticher (1945) **
37. Guardians of the Galaxy ** 1/2
38. Magic In The Moonlight **
39. Bedknobs & Broomsticks (1971) *
40. ’71 ***
41. George Gently Series 1 (UK TV show) *** 1/2
42. The Look Of Silence *** 1/2
43. Seymour: An Introduction ***
44. Eden ** 1/2
45. Two Days, One Night ** 1/2
46. Once Upon A Time In America (extended director’s cut) *** 1/2

_____________
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the founder and CEO of the forthcoming website BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. It’s like a fall book preview or holiday gift guide — but every week in every category. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.

Note: Michael Giltz is provided with free access to press screenings with the understanding that he will be writing a review.