Links & Looks, February 21, 2023
Another Eighty Years of MCU; Liam Neeson On Action And Bond; Rajamouli Meets Cameron And Spielberg; Irreversible Straight Cut; Dennis Potter's Blossom; Ava-Tár
Gaspar Noé tells me about Irreversible: Straight Cut, now in theaters:
I didn’t add anything to the original cut. I just put the scenes in the right order and I cut a little bit the links between the scenes. But I didn’t pull out any dialogue, I didn’t pull out any action. I’m very proud of the results. That’s why when I saw this new cut, that supposedly was made to be put as an extra on the DVD, I thought it was so strong that I really wanted it to be released theatrically as the alternative cut of the original “Irreversible.” So, exactly. I could say it should be called the reverse cut and the straight cut. But if you call the old version the reverse cut, it would be even more complicated. So there is the original cut… And the straight cut.
This new version starts with Monica Bellucci, and she’s the main character for the first fifty minutes, she becomes the lead, she becomes the center of the movie, which was not the case in the previous edit, in which she appears towards the end of the movie, in which Vincent Cassel’s character seems heroic. In this movie, really, the way you read their characters makes you think that it’s the second character who’s heroic and Vincent Cassel is just behaving as a monkey.
“Seeing the Blossom,” Dennis Potter's evergreen 1984 exit interview before a last burst of work before the wick was snuffed is making the rounds again. Potter, confident, lighter than air, cigs in hand, flask of morphine at his side, calling out the likes of Rupert Murdoch, after which he had named his cancer. Plus: the present tense. (Fifty-minute Channel 4 interview with Melvyn Bragg here.)
At this season, the blossom is out in full, it looks like apple blossom, and instead of saying “Oh, that's nice, blossom,” last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance. Not that I'm interested in reassuring people—bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy, do you see it! And boy, can you celebrate it.
Review of the mehhhh screen-saver-gone-wild Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania here, along with revisits of the formidable The Master and the melancholy First Man here.
Marvel producer Kevin Feige says there’s no shaking the MCU in any of our lifetimes:
I think when we are doing about eight projects a year—and again, I said this is going to shift a little bit—they all have to be different. They all have to stand apart and stand alone and be different from one another,” Feige tells EW. “It's like when people go to the comic shops. There's Spider-Man and the Avengers and the big title ones. And sometimes you pick up a one-off or an experiment from an artist or writer that you're a fan of.
Harry Osborne on DRUGS.
That's why the comics have been around for 80-plus years, and I want Marvel Studios to be around that long, if not longer. So, we have to continue to do different types of things. Does everything have to appeal to everybody? It would be nice. But I think that's impossible. And if you try to do that, you're going to find yourself in such a small funnel and pipeline that things will get similar and boring and atrophy very, very quickly.
Liam Neeson IS elder Marlowe.
In a spirited interview, Liam Neeson tells Rolling Stone about superheroes and Commander James Bond CMG RNVR.
I’ll be honest: All these superhero movies? I’m not a fan. I’m really not. I admire them because it’s Hollywood with all their bells and whistles and technology, which is phenomenal, but they all seem to me to be just the same story.
I was not offered James Bond. I know the Broccolis. They looked at a bunch of actors. Schindler’s List had come out and Barbara had called me a couple of times to ask if I was interested, and I said, “Yes, I would be interested.” And then my lovely wife [Natasha Richardson], god rest her soul, said to me while we were shooting Nell down in the Carolinas, “Liam, I want to tell you something: If you play James Bond, we’re not getting married.” So I would tease her by going behind her back, making my fingers as though I’m holding a gun, and then [hums the James Bond theme]. I loved doing that shit!
C’mon, what is Awards season for? Unplanned public meetings like this one, three minutes of eavesdropping on James Cameron and S. S. Rajamouli. (This is a diminished quality secondary copy; the original poster was suspended from Twitter.)
Or, planned conversations, like this half-hour between Steven Spielberg and Rajamouli.
