Alfred Hitchcock may be long gone. But he’s been popping up everywhere the last two years or so, with a renewed focus on his complex, controversial connections with his leading ladies.

Last year, HBO’s “The Girl” examined the making of “The Birds,” with Toby Miller (“Capote”) as a lecherous Hitch and Sienna Miller as a tortured, preyed-upon Sienna Miller. Sacha Gervasi‘s “Hitchcock” took on “Psycho” and the director’s relationship with his wife Alma, as brought to life with great intelligence and flair by Helen Mirren; the latter film had Anthony Hopkins in the title role and Scarlett Johansson as a vivacious Janet Leigh.

“Vertigo” recently topped the list of the best 50 films of all time, trumping longtime champ “Citizen Kane,” in the most recent decennial poll of film critics published by prestigious British Film Institute-sponsored film magazine Sight & Sound.

And the small screen has brought us the creepy, gory A&E series “Bates Motel,” a sort-of, kind-of prequel to the events portrayed in “Psycho,” with Freddie Highmore as a young, pre-damaged Norman Bates, and Vera Farmiga as his ill-fated mother.

Now this: “Vertigo,” released in 1958 and starring Jimmy Stewart as an emotionally damaged former San Francisco police detective, has been recently restored and will be screened in the Cannes Classics section at this summer’s Cannes Film Festival.

Kim Novak, the film’s star, now 80, will be on hand for the showing of the timeless psychological thriller.

Novak lately ” spends much of her time painting and enjoying nature (and her llama herd) in her Oregon ranch,” according to a report by the Alt Film Guide. “Her last appearance in front of the camera was in Mike Figgis’ Liebestraum (1991), which, according to her, wasn’t exactly a great experience: ‘Ah, same old Hollywood. I don’t need this.’ ”

Novak reportedly will also help present a prize during the festival’s closing ceremonies on May 26.

More here

He said, he said.

First, Michael Bay, interviewed on the eve of the release of his new  based-on-a-true-story South Florida tale “Pain & Gain,” tells the Miami Herald that he’s sorry for the hyper editing he subjected audiences to via “Armageddon.”

“I will apologize for ‘Armageddon,’ because we had to do the whole movie in 16 weeks,” Bay told film critic Rene Rodriguez for a story published Sunday. “It was a massive undertaking. That was not fair to the movie. I would redo the entire third act if I could. But the studio literally took the movie away from us. It was terrible. My visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown, so I had to be in charge of that. I called James Cameron and asked ‘What do you do when you’re doing all the effects yourself?’ But the movie did fine.”

So far, so honest.

Then came the backpedaling, as Bay decided that he didn’t really want or need to apologize for his old ways in the old days. Or that, you know, what he said wasn’t really an apology — his words had been misconstrued, you know. “Armageddon” may have been big and dumb, but it was his big and dumb.

Said Bay: “One press writer has gone too far in reporting false information. He has printed the bare minimum of my statement which in effect have twisted my words and meaning. I’m not in the slightest going to apologize for the third movie in my movie career, a film called Armageddon. On the red carpet for Pain & Gain some reporters asked me what are you apologizing for, and I said what on earth are you talking about?

What I clearly said to the reporter, is I wish I had more time to edit the film, specifically the third act. He asked me in effect what would you change if you could in your movies if you could go back. I said, I wish we had a few more weeks in the edit room on Armageddon. And still today Armageddon, is still one of the most shown movies on cable TV. And yes, I’m proud of the movie. Enough said.”

“Armageddon” aside, “Pain & Gain,” made for $26 million rather than a gazillion, Bay’s usual budget, looks to be one of the director’s more compelling efforts.

The quirky tale is based on the true story of a trio of body builders — played by Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie — who turned to crime in the mid ’90s. The comic crime film opens Friday.

It’s a nice blast of nostalgia, watching reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, their old Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman variously reunite for the Discovery Channel’s “All the President’s Men Revisited” documentary.

Remember how the country practically came to a standstill during the hearings? It was the summer of ’73 and, as someone observes in the doc, furniture stores often were filled with folks hanging around, glued to the nationally televised goings-on. Even John & Yoko showed up at the hearings one day, as a photo demonstrates.

The Watergate scandal, of course, predated my adventures in journalism by about a decade — I started my first newspaper job in 1983.

But the dogged reporting, and the subsequent toppling of Nixon, in 1974, still served as a real inspiration for a generation or two of journalists. And the movie stands as probably the best newspaper movie of all time.

I don’t think it’s overstating things to say that reporters of a certain vintage were inspired to become journalists by Woodward and Bernstein, and the “All the President’s Men” book and 1976 film, in the same way that countless kids took up rock ‘n’ roll after seeing the Beatles on TV.

Yes, the new documentary is somewhat self-serving, and it would have been great to hear more insights and memories regarding the process of turning the book into the movie.

But it’s nevertheless an often fascinating look back.

And its primary flaw is the inclusion of random interviews with some folks — Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough, Jon Stewart — who weren’t close to the action of the events and don’t offer any interesting commentary.

Besedka Johnson, the one-time model who finally splashed onscreen at age 85, passed away April 4 at 87.

It’s a remarkable story: Johnson, a longtime California resident who once managed a condo complex in San Francisco, landed a co-lead role in the indie film film “Starlet” after a producer of the movie spotted the octogenarian swimming at a YMCA in Hollywood.

Johnson gained plaudits for her vivid work as Sadie, an ornery widow who unexpectedly develops a friendship with a young woman played by Dree Hemingway. It was Johnson’s only acting job.

“Ms. Johnson received special jury recognition for her performance in “Starlet” at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Tex., last year,” according to a New York Times report. “In February, “Starlet” received the Robert Altman Award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards.”

The NYT obit is here.

Glad I got a chance to check out last weekend’s eighth annual Sunscreen Film Festival, which offered screenings of 9o features, documentaries and short films, and nearly a dozen filmmaking workshops.

The fest, held at Muvico Baywalk 20 theaters in St. Petersburg, also included its first Spanish Language Filmmaker Showcase, funded with a $5,000 grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, according to a report by Tampa Bay Times film critic Steve Persall.

The low-budget crime thriller “Confine” (my review) offered an intriguing premise and impressive performances by its small cast, and the Friday night block party featured walk-throughs at local art galleries, access to a variety of food trucks, and music from area bands.

WINNERS———————————

Alonso Mayo’s “The Story of Luke” was named Best Film, and Patrick Barry’s “Veer!” was honored as Best Florida Film.

Valenti Figueres Jorge was named Best Director, for “The K Effect: Stalin’s Editor,” and Andres Rosende’s “Mr. Bear” won for Best Short.

The complete list of winners:

• Best Short: Mr. Bear, directed by Andres Rosende
• Best Screenplay: I Hate Your Kids, written by Ben Fingerhut
• Best Florida Film: Veer! directed by Patrick Barry
• Best Up and Coming: Actor Matthew Ziff
• Best Latin Director: Valenti Figueres Jorge for “The K Effect: Stalin’s Editor”
• Best Latin Film: La Gran Falacia, directed by Paco Vazquez
• Best Documentary: Pui Chan: Kung Fu Pioneer, directed by Mimi Chan
• Best Director: Valenti Figueres Jorge for “The K Effect: Stalin’s Editor”
• Best Film: The Story of Luke, directed by Alonso Mayo

 

Stars Daisy Lowe, Eliza Bennett, Alfie Allen. Directed and written by Tobias Tobbell. 90 minutes. Critic’s grade: C

Four people enter a London apartment. Two survive. There will be blood.

“Confine,” a low-budget British thriller shown at the recent Sunscreen Film Festival in St. Petersburg, is built on an appealing premise: Pippa (Daisy Lowe), a former model, physically and emotionally damaged in a car crash, is forced to survive by her wits when she faces an unwelcome visitor, Kayleigh (Eliza Bennett), a sexy, cunning crook seeking a temporary hideout.

Director Tobias Tobbell effectively makes use of the confined space, as the intruder and her inadvertent victim dance their way through a script that has Pippa reveal much about her insecurities — she’s agoraphobic, and something of a compulsive, well-organized neatnik hoarder, too. She’s also burdened, to some degree, with a twin, Edwina (Lowe), who continues to enjoy the celebrity spotlight once shared by both sisters.

Tobbell, also to his credit, elicits strong performances from his tiny cast, including Alfie Allen (“Game of “Thrones”) as a rather pitiable member of Kayleigh’s gang.

During the early scenes, the mercurial Kayleigh, she of the trenchcoats and wigs, begins to reveal her dangerous instability, and the claustrophobic environs furnish an uncomfortable edginess. Unfortunately, those sequences give way to later passages that feel like letdowns. The air begins to seep out of the story, and the denouement is largely unsatisfying. About those bullets …

Ultimately, the well-photographed production feels almost like filmed theater, which is potentially where these performances — particularly Bennett’s bracing turn as a high-strung, unpredictable young criminal — really may belong.

Palpable evidence that late, great film critic Roger Ebert’s legacy — thoughtful, accessible, intelligent writing about film — lives on: His  valuable web site, always operated and edited by a team of editors and acolytes, with primary content provided by Ebert, has now been redesigned and relaunched.

The easily navigable site is packed with current reviews (“Oblivion,” “It’s a Disaster,” “Upstream Color”) as well as recent entries from Roger Ebert’s Journal, and news & reviews related to Ebertfest.

Great to see the site alive and thriving.

Check it out here.

Stars Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Sturridge, Amy Adams, Viggo Mortensen. Directed by Walter Salles. Screenplay by Jose Rivera, adapted from the Jack Kerouac novel. 124 minutes. Rated R. Critic’s grade: C+

Jack Kerouac’s book — the book, “On the Road” — was a late ’50s Beat sensation that resonated into the counterculture ’60s and felt marvelously alive even when this late Baby Boomer got to it during college, in the early ’80s.

It was pure Americana, a booze- and sex-fueled rocket race around the country, a tale of a group of barely adults who were attempting to eat and drink up and be consumed by all the freedoms — largely as related to extreme mobility and sexual behavior and the ubiquity of experience-enhancing drugs — that suddenly became available to even the young, particularly to the young.

Then came decades of false starts on film adaptations and shoulder shrugging by several generations of readers and Kerouac scholars who weren’t eager, and still are not, to see Hollywood have its way with a practically un-filmable text, much of which seems to take place inside the head of its protagonist.

Now, more than a half century after “On the Road” was published, the movie version has been released, and with less fanfare than might have been expected.

Is that because too few members of the young filmgoing crowd, the target audience for most movies, won’t know Kerouac’s name? The initial pre-release buzz on the film, you’ll recall, centered on the fact that Kristen Stewart, a co-star of the ginormously successful “Twilight” film trilogy, is often unclothed in the film.

Give credit where it’s due: “On the Road,” directed by Walter Salles, responsible for far superior road film “The Motorcycle Diaries,” offers at least something of the go-for-it, lust-for-experience-and-adventure spirit that Kerouac captured with his breathless novel.

That questing for something more profound, maybe even spiritual, via life on the fringes, outside and apart from “straight” society, is caught particularly well in the film during those sequences when the main characters are seen reveling in the ecstasy  of a hard-bop saxophonist’s manic performance.

Outside of that, though, the film is largely directionless, in the worst sense of that word. It’s a herky-jerky, catalog of the comings and goings of a bunch of aimless teens and 20-somethings, some apparently self-destructive and bent on wasting their lives.

The story is told from the point-of-view of Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), the Kerouac stand-in, a fame-seeking New York writer who falls into the gravitational pull of handsome, charismatic, sexually voracious Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), the counterpart of real-life Kerouac pal Neal Cassady.

The two, along with Dean’s teenage bride Marylou (Stewart) and fourth wheel Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge), the Allen Ginsberg  character, crisscross the United States. They hang out, getting high and drunk, talking nonstop about books and music, and bedding whoever’s available from New York to San Francisco, with stopovers in New Orleans, Denver and points elsewhere. It’s a movable beast of a party that never ends.

Hedlund is passable as the hunky guy with the heart of a poet who’s the center of attention in any crowd, but the acting largely isn’t much to write home about.

Smaller performances by name actors — Steve Buscemi as a sleazy traveling salesman type, Viggo Mortensen as Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs), and Kirsten Dunst as yet another lover used and then abandoned by Dean — are more impressive than the leads.

Aside from Sal, the characters aren’t really likable. And the story, as interpreted by Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera (“The Motorcycle Diaries,” television’s “Eerie, Indiana”), seldom develops much momentum at all.

Still, many fans of the book will find it impossible to avoid seeing what Hollywood “did” to Kerouac’s book.

On the whole, “On the Road” isn’t very memorable; too often, it feels like meaningless motion. On the plus side, it’s not a complete disaster. I caught it on Video on Demand (on Fios); maybe it would have been more absorbing on the big screen.

I could go on and on, and on, about Roger Ebert, who died today. I never had the opportunity to meet him, and I regret that.

Just a few quick thoughts, an emotional response to what feels like a huge loss to the American arts/criticism scene:

Ebert’s television work with Gene Siskel was so entertaining, and so inspiring in terms of bringing the concept of film criticism (or one version of it) to the public in a major way.

His writing, particularly early on, was often quite insightful — he knew so much about film, and wrote so intelligently about it, and in such a straightforward, clear manner that I can’t imagine any serious film lover not warming to him.

I so admired Ebert’s energy, productivity and honesty as a writer, and, recently, his bravery and fortitude in the face of so many physical challenges.

I had hoped against hope that he would survive this latest crisis. But it was not to be.

He leaves a huge hole.

More here, from the New York Times

Stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Screenplay by David Koepp, adapted from the Michael Crichton novel. 127 minutes. Rated PG-13. Critic’s grade: A-

There are two or three things we already knew about “Jurassic Park 3D,” even before going to see the retrofitted blockbuster, the hugely successful Steven Spielberg-directed scary dinosaur movie.

First, although it’s been juiced with a 3-D Imax restoration, there’s no genuine artistic raison d’etre for the sci-fi thriller, spiked with elements of horror as well as comedy. No additional footage is on offer — this is no “director’s cut.”

Secondly, its return is tied to a tidy anniversary, as it’s been 20 years since audiences were first frightened by the then-innovative CG sight of the enormous prehistoric beasts, surprisingly realistic looking (at the time) and sprung right out of Michael Crichton’s imaginative bestselling novel of the same name.

So, then, Spielberg’s flick, built around a concept — genetic cloning could make it possible to recreate the Tyrannosaurus rex and his species mates — that once seemed vaguely possible, was largely brought back because of the opportunity to sell it to a new generation of filmgoers.

And, as a bonus, it helps boost younger audiences’ interest in the forthcoming “Jurassic Park 4,” directed by Colin Treverrow and reportedly  featuring a new addition to the menagerie of dinosaurs seen in the original flick and its two successors (as of now, the film is slated for release in summer 2014).

Win-win, right? Particularly at the box office.

And yet, and yet, there’s more to it than that.

Two decades later, and with the benefit of 3-D technology that indeed lets viewers feel as if they’re right in there, fleeing from the enormous, lumbering T Rex and the speedy,  razor-toothed velociraptors, the first film in the “Jurassic Park” franchise retains its power to give chills and thrills to audiences.

Put simply, the movie’s re-emergence offers longtime fans the chance to watch the modern movie classic again  on the big screen, clearly the natural habitat for this type of film. It also provides the same opportunity for younger audiences who’ve never had that privilege, like the shocked and awed teenagers (my kids and their friends) who attended the screening with me.

Right away, the visuals prove stunning, as kindly mad scientist/entrepreneur John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) brings a helicopter full of scientists to “the most advanced amusement park in the world,” as Hammond describes it. The green, green hills of the island, near Costa Rica (actually, Hawaii), look more lush than ever, and the soaring waterfall sparkles. It’s a great start for a big adventure.

Of course, all that pales in comparison with the first time that serious-minded paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), his partner in dino fascination Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and flirtatious, uh, chaos theorist Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldlum in his prime, all swagger and wisecracking fun) lay their eyes on the park’s star inhabitants.

Spielberg, justifiably celebrated for his work directing last year’s Oscar-winning historical epic “Lincoln,” was still making popcorn movies in the early ’90s.

And there’s enormous fun to be had — lots of frights, a surprising number of laughs — as Hammond, his two too-cute grandchildren, the scientists and characters played by Wayne Knight (“Seinfeld”) and Samuel L. Jackson, then still a second-string player, get to know and then attempt to escape the prehistoric monsters.

Remember the huge pile of dino dung? The T. rex’s attack on the SUVs? The raptors’ pursuit of the kids, in the welcome center’s kitchen? The terrible fate of the thieving IT guy (Knight)? They were awesome then, and still are.

“Creation is an act of sheer will,” Hammond says at one point, bragging about the ingenuity and determination it took to engineer a revival of the time when dinosaurs walked the earth.

Sheer will, too, with an eye on considerable commercial prospects, was required to revive “Jurassic Park 3” for a theatrical run. Glad that Spielberg made the effort.