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Messages - MatViola
1
« on: December 15, 2012, 09:12:49 AM »
So first the film was removed from theatrical circulation. Now the Blu-Ray is being removed from circulation. Just how far is Andrea Leone's head up his ass? Does he even bother, ya know, like, watching the film before releasing it? In a 1984 interview with American Film, Sergio said he had "a wretch of a son." Is this being borne out?
Mat
2
« on: December 09, 2012, 07:14:38 AM »
There were reports in August that the film had been pulled from circulation pending further restoration work. Was this additional restoration completed, ya know, before they released this Blu-Ray?
Mat
4
« on: August 06, 2012, 01:38:22 PM »
Yep. To look at it another way: Vertigo received 191 votes out of the 846 critics polled. This means that 77.5% of those polled didn't even put in their Top Ten, let alone at the number 1 position. Vertigo received more votes than any other film, yes, but 655 of the participants did not vote for it.
Mat
5
« on: August 05, 2012, 02:11:16 PM »
Below is the Top 100 list, taken from the magazine's print version. Once Upon a Time in the West makes the cut.
The complete top 100 (critics’ poll):
1. Vertigo
Alfred Hitchcock, 1958 (191 votes)
2. Citizen Kane
Orson Welles, 1941 (157 votes)
3. Tokyo Story
Ozu Yasujiro, 1953 (107 votes)
4. La Règle du jeu
Jean Renoir, 1939 (100 votes)
5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
FW Murnau, 1927 (93 votes)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick, 1968 (90 votes)
7. The Searchers
John Ford, 1956 (78 votes)
8. Man with a Movie Camera
Dziga Vertov, 1929 (68 votes)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc
Carl Dreyer, 1927 (65 votes)
10. 8½
Federico Fellini, 1963 (64 votes)
11. Battleship Potemkin
Sergei Eisenstein, 1925 (63 votes)
12. L’Atalante
Jean Vigo, 1934 (58 votes)
13. Breathless
Jean-Luc Godard, 1960 (57 votes)
14. Apocalypse Now
Francis Ford Coppola, 1979 (53 votes)
15. Late Spring
Ozu Yasujiro, 1949 (50 votes)
16. Au hasard Balthazar
Robert Bresson, 1966 (49 votes)
17= Seven Samurai
Kurosawa Akira, 1954 (48 votes)
17= Persona
Ingmar Bergman, 1966 (48 votes)
19. Mirror
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974 (47 votes)
20. Singin’ in the Rain
Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1951 (46 votes)
21= L’avventura
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960 (43 votes)
21= Le Mépris
Jean-Luc Godard, 1963 (43 votes)
21= The Godfather
Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 (43 votes)
24= Ordet
Carl Dreyer, 1955 (42 votes)
24= In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar-Wai, 2000 (42 votes)
26= Rashomon
Kurosawa Akira, 1950 (41 votes)
26= Andrei Rublev
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966 (41 votes)
28. Mulholland Dr.
David Lynch, 2001 (40 votes)
29= Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979 (39 votes)
29= Shoah
Claude Lanzmann, 1985 (39 votes)
31= The Godfather Part II
Francis Ford Coppola, 1974 (38 votes)
31= Taxi Driver
Martin Scorsese, 1976 (38 votes)
33. Bicycle Thieves
Vittoria De Sica, 1948 (37 votes)
34. The General
Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926 (35 votes)
35= Metropolis
Fritz Lang, 1927 (34 votes)
35= Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock, 1960 (34 votes)
35= Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles
Chantal Akerman, 1975 (34 votes)
35= Sátántangó
Béla Tarr, 1994 (34 votes)
39= The 400 Blows
François Truffaut, 1959 (33 votes)
39= La dolce vita
Federico Fellini, 1960 (33 votes)
41. Journey to Italy
Roberto Rossellini, 1954 (32 votes)
42= Pather Panchali
Satyajit Ray, 1955 (31 votes)
42= Some Like It Hot
Billy Wilder, 1959 (31 votes)
42= Gertrud
Carl Dreyer, 1964 (31 votes)
42= Pierrot le fou
Jean-Luc Godard, 1965 (31 votes)
42= Play Time
Jacques Tati, 1967 (31 votes)
42= Close-Up
Abbas Kiarostami, 1990 (31 votes)
48= The Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966 (30 votes)
48= Histoire(s) du cinéma
Jean-Luc Godard, 1998 (30 votes)
50= City Lights
Charlie Chaplin, 1931 (29 votes)
50= Ugetsu monogatari
Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953 (29 votes)
50= La Jetée
Chris Marker, 1962 (29 votes)
53 – Rear Window, North By Northwest, Raging Bull – 28 votes
56 – M, Touch of Evil, The Leopard – 26 votes
59 – Sherlock Jr, Sansho Dayu, La Maman et la Putain, Barry Lyndon 25 votes
63 – Modern Times, Sunset Blvd, The Night of the Hunter, Wild Strawberries, Rio Bravo, Pickpocket – 24 votes
69 – A Man Escaped, Blade Runner, Sans Soleil, Blue Velvet – 23 votes
73 – La Grande Illusion, Les Enfants du Paradis, The Third Man, L’eclisse, Nashville – 22 votes
78 – Once Upon a Time in the West, Chinatown, Beau Travail – 21 votes
81 – Magnificent Ambersons, Lawrence of Arabia, Spirit of the Beehive – 20 votes
84 – Greed, Casablanca, Colour of Pomegrantes, The Wild Bunch, Fanny & Alexander, A Brighter Summer Day – 19 votes
90 – Partie de campagne, A Matter of Life and Death, Aguirre, Wrath of God – 18 votes
93 – Intolerance, Un chien andalou, Colonel Blimp, Madame de…, Seventh Seal, Imitation of Life, Touki-Bouki, A One and a Two. – 17 votes
6
« on: August 03, 2012, 12:05:26 PM »
7
« on: June 18, 2012, 05:37:54 PM »
I saw the short version sometime in the 90s. I think it was on AMC, but I can't be sure. Because I was already so familiar with the long version, watching the short one made for an odd viewing experience, right from the first scene, which (if memory serves) shows young Deborah dancing "among the brooms and the empties" as the opening credits roll.
No idea where you might find it today. Perhaps Mary Corliss has a VHS copy.
Mat
8
« on: June 17, 2012, 02:23:41 PM »
Oh, I almost forgot, there's also Leonard Maltin. His video guide gives the short version 3 stars and says it's "well worth watching." There you have it, it's official: the short version rules!
Looks like d&d will have to see it now.
Mat
9
« on: June 17, 2012, 07:47:59 AM »
happily, I don't think any of you will ever get to see it 
I've already seen it. It does have curiosity value. By the way, there's at least one person in the world who prefers the short version: Mary Corliss. In a Film Comment article from 1984 she wrote, "...under Ladd's instructions, an editor named Zach Staenburg reshaped Leone's mesmerizing, intermittently powerful botch of a movie into a 145-minute film that is within shooting distance of masterpiece." Should we put her on our death list? Mat
10
« on: June 17, 2012, 06:05:32 AM »
if your wife cut off your manhood and then you were fortunate enough to have doctors surgically restore it -- completely to its previous beauty, so that there is no scar or anything whatsoever to remind you that you were chopped -- would you want to have a picture of the chopped you
Well, my manhood is way too long and its flashback structure is confusing, so it would be a vast improvement if my girlfriend cut it down to size and rearranged it into chronological order. Mat
11
« on: May 22, 2012, 06:44:31 AM »
Continued:
What is the twenty extra minutes added to the restored version of Once Upon a Time in America presented in Cannes, May 18?
I think, very often, there is a difference between the original film and one that the director wanted. The original version depends on the producer, censorship too. I am always very curious to see the vision of the director. There we found the twenty minutes that I hope to add another twenty minutes later. When you really like a director, you want to see everything in a film. You want, for example, watch twenty minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey-cut editing, even if it's Stanley Kubrick himself withdrew them. In the case of Once Upon a Time in America, I know that Leone wanted those twenty minutes are restored.
Can we discern the influence of Sergio Leone in your film?
I worked as editor on Shutter Island when I participated in the restoration of Once Upon a Time in the West. By dint of seeing the same scenes, to check color calibration, I found myself crying because I was so moved by the faces of the actors in close-up, by the movements of the camera, the simplicity of the dialogues. The faces are filmed as landscapes, in planes very close. The same thing happened with Once Upon a Time in America. I think we see the influence of Sergio Leone in Taxi Driver. My film is rather claustrophobic, but the framing is "Leone".
Gangs of New York is heavily influenced by Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America. The boy who opens the door and discovered the city covered with snow in my film is an evocation of the boy's early Upon a Time in the West who fled the farm when he heard shots fire and is killed. The camera moves around a circular comedian, so typical of Leone, are among the effects that I have fully integrated. In my mind, Gangs of New York should have lasted five hours. Finally, we made the film we were able to do with the budget we had ... I believe that the days when you could do these great epic movies is over. That's probably why I've done for Boardwalk Empire television. The series draws heavily from Once Upon a Time in America. We are in the third season and already we are talking about a film of 42 hours. I have not done any. But I oversaw the whole.
12
« on: May 22, 2012, 06:43:47 AM »
Scorsese Interview: http://www.lemonde.fr/festival-de-cannes/article/2012/05/18/il-etait-une-fois-sergio-leone-et-martin-scorsese_1702964_766360.htmlSave movies from the ravages of time ... The Film Foundation, the body created by Martin Scorsese in 1990, a new survivor has to his credit: after, among others, The Red Shoes, Michael Powell and The Leopard by Luchino Visconti, now the American director moved at the bedside of Once Upon a Time in America. For this reason, clôturait Sergio Leone, in 1984, opened with his trilogy Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) and Once upon a time the revolution (1971). Long by 3 h 49, the story of two Jewish gangsters is a funeral elegy that owes as much to Proust and La Recherche du temps perdu at the Hollywood tradition. This was the last film by Sergio Leone, who died in 1989. The restored print, loaded with twenty minutes of deleted scenes, was selected at Cannes Classics, a program created in 2004 with old films and masterpieces of film history. On this occasion, Martin Scorsese returns to his meeting with Italian filmmaker, this masterly work, which deals with the end of the world - the America of Prohibition - and marks the end of a kind, one of the great epics the cinema. When did you meet Sergio Leone for the first time? It was at Cannes in 1976, during a dinner at the Oasis, the year when Taxi Driver was competing. There was Costa-Gavras, Sergio Leone, both members of the jury, I, Robert De Niro, Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of Taxi Driver, Jodie Foster, Michael and Julia Phillips, producers of the film. Paul Schrader had toasted Leone to thank him for having toured with Once Upon a Time in the West one of the greatest westerns in cinematic history. We had arrived two days earlier in Cannes and depression we had earned. Tennessee Williams, the jury foreman, told the press he did not like at all Taxi Driver, he was too violent. At dinner, Sergio Leone and Costa-Gavras told us they liked the film. We thought Taxi Driver could still win a prize, perhaps for his screenplay, or its actors. But it took the Palme d'Or! And that is thanks to Sergio Leone. How has your relationship with him? I lived partly in Rome between 1978 and 1981. I saw him regularly. Particularly at a luncheon at his home December 31, 1979. I met his wife, his family, met the set designer Dante Ferretti, with whom I will work later on The Age of Innocence, Casino, Kundun, Gangs of New York, Aviator and Hugo Cabret. He knew how much I loved Once Upon a Time in the West, he gave me his copy of the film. It is this copy that I projected in 1980 Film Festival in New York. It was the first time I spoke publicly about the crucial issue of the preservation of films, and more specifically the question of color, which happens if the coils are not kept properly. When Sergio Leone came to New York, I offered to come to dinner with my parents who still lived on the Lower East Side in a building without elevator. We went with Elio Petri (the director of The Working Class Goes to Heaven, Golden Palm at Cannes in 1972). He especially liked the Sicilian cooking from my mother, very different from Roman cuisine to which he was accustomed. And my mother was sensitive to his knife and fork! At that time I was working on The King of Comedy with Robert De Niro. The film was produced by Arnon Milchan - would become the producer of Once Upon a Time in America. Leone had turned over ten years since it was once the revolution, and De Niro had not seen any of his films. As I still had a copy of Once Upon a Time in the West, he asked me if I could plan for De Niro. The latter discovered the film at the Museum of Modern Art, and he immediately accepted the role of the Jewish gangster. What was your first impression face Once Upon a Time in America? The film was released in the U.S. version of slaughtered 2 h 15, when that of Leone, released in Europe, lasted 3 hours 49. De Niro had organized a screening of the original Museum of Modern Art for my parents and friends and me. We were all impressed with the quality of images and saddened by the situation of the 1980s no longer allowed to produce such a work. Moreover, the film has nothing reported at the box office. I remember being struck by the accuracy of staging. Details of the sound and movement of actors. The sound triggers the memory. This is a very literary process, particularly in the opening sequence with the phone ringing that never ends. How have you seen the first films of Sergio Leone? I admit I was baffled by The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. French and English critics placed very high American westerns, those of Howard Hawks and John Ford in mind. And for a kid's Lower East Side like me, prone to asthma attacks, the horizons of the western addition corresponded to a specifically American. Suddenly, an Italian westerns, Sergio Leone signed ... I did not know what to think. When I saw Once Upon a Time in the West, I did not understand it either. Its slow me destabilized. There I had to revisit the film two years later on television to understand that Western did not need American roots. I got to his images, his music. Leone did not fall as in the tradition of Western theatrical tradition in Italy is that of opera. He had his own way to deal with the archetypes of the genre. As in the commedia dell'arte with Harlequin, Punchinello, his characters wear masks, these masks and hide many others. This is actually a Russian doll. In Once Upon a Time in the West, each character reveals a different face in the course of history. Once Upon a Time in America has a comparable system. The film is constructed like a dream within another dream. It no longer relies on the archetypes of Hollywood cinema criminal, but on the codes of a myth, that of America in the 1930s, when it goes from anarchy to order. Before making his westerns, Leone had signed epic films, The Last Days of Pompeii, The Colossus of Rhodes. He often told me jokingly that his great inspiration was ... Homer! His love of mythology into a passion for the myth of America. For him, the films of John Ford was a variant of classical myths. I think he felt that his films were slices of American history, like chapters in a textbook. In jest, he was fond of saying that He was once in America should have been entitled Once upon a time a certain type of cinéma.Le film takes place in the neighborhood of the Lower East Side, New York, where you grew up. This is one of the last to be filmed there. The Lower East Side was a Jewish neighborhood and also Italian. The two communities lived side by side. My father found his own childhood. It was not that of a gangster, of course, but he recognized buildings, driveways, the street life. The scene where the kid prefers to eat his cake rather than giving it to the girl to sleep with her ... Personally, I had a problem with the last shot, the one with Robert De Niro lying in an opium den, which begins to smile. I did not understand, but my father, he had everything seized. He was very touched by the film and I could not understand why. Maybe he grabbed the lead character in this film is not as Robert De Niro that death is omnipresent? Absolutely. He was already old and it got him. How De Niro is disguised as old man, his approach: it is clear that the next step is death. The film is a long elegy. It is as if Leone had foreseen that this would be his last film. This may explain his side hieratic. We learned the death of Leone the first day of filming of Goodfellas. I had seen for the last time at the Venice Film Festival in 1988 at the screening of The Last Temptation of Christ. He was very emaciated, he asked me news of my parents.
13
« on: May 22, 2012, 04:13:19 AM »
Another interesting article: http://www.forgottensilver.net/2012/05/21/il-etait-une-fois-en-amerique-la-restauration-du-film/Between wanting to honor the memory of Sergio Leone by providing mounting Once Upon a Time in America as he had designed, and the technical constraints of such a project, there is a gap that is sometimes difficult cross. In announcing nearly two years will give 40 minutes in the editing of the film to finally do make that 25, the Leone family seems to have encountered some technical problems. The preferred mounting of Leone lasted over four hours, Scorsese explains in the press kit. "He had to make cuts douloureus itself, to bring the film to 3:49 in 1984. But finally, today, some sections missing equipment was located and reinserted into the film under the supervision of the Leone family and colleagues still with us. " So it seems that everything could not be found or exploited, making this new assembly version closer to the intentions of the director, but not assemble hoped two years ago. Indeed, Scorsese does not hide his desire to return one day, in the interview given last Saturday in Le Monde: "There we found the twenty minutes that I hope to add another twenty minutes later. When you really like a director, you want to see everything in a film. You want, for example, watch twenty minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey-cut editing, even if it's Stanley Kubrick himself withdrew them. In the case of Once Upon a Time in America, I know that Leone wanted those twenty minutes are restored. " One could of course call for opportunism, a common process to marketing, but Scorsese is one of the few to show interest in preserving works and it would make him a mock trial. Gian Luca Farinelli, director of the Cinematheque of Bologna, already responsible for the magnificent restoration of the trilogy of the Man with No Name (unfortunately reserved for the Italian market) explains how they did it to reinstate the deleted scenes: "The images and early end cut scenes have allowed us to determine their exact position before they are cut and the new assembly is 4 hours 15 minutes. " "The restoration and reassembly of the film are made in Italy," explains Davide Pozzi, director of the laboratory found the image (Immagine The Ritrovata). "Today, the film negative and other elements are kept in Los Angeles in the vaults of 20th Century Fox. The negative was scanned at 4K Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging (MPI and files were then recovered by our laboratory where a full digital restoration was the height, frame by frame. Phase longer and delicate restoration of this is undoubtedly the color correction, to recreate the atmosphere of soot and smoke from the 20s and 30s, and the colder the late '60s. As reference, we used the positive copy belonging to Martin Scorsese and is held at MoMA in New York. We also benefited from the experience and memories of many people who worked with Sergio Leone on the wire. The main challenge was the desire to reinstate the deleted scenes by Leone. A research group has worked for many months to this task. Special thanks to Franco Ferrini, one of the writer who gave us the shooting script, which was our main reference for the inclusion of deleted scenes, and the executive producer Claudio Mancini, editors and Alessandro Patrizia Ceresani Baragli, and Sergio Leone's assistant, Fausto Ancillai. These scenes were also considered lost. And technically, the homogéinité of these scenes was our biggest problem, because the negatives of these scenes no longer exist. The only material available were positive copies that were very poorly preserved. More difficult still, these copies were fired without any particular care because it was working copies for sound editors and assistant editors. Images in these coils were severely damaged, not only because of poor preservation conditions but also by their use as a working copy. It is obviously still many gray areas on the elements found and restored, and the press sometimes tends to contradict the absence of details. As might be expected, the presentation in Cannes is the height in a certain indifference, as too often with the wonders presented in Cannes Classics but hopefully learn more in a future operation of this circuit, starting in June at its second showing at the festival in Bologna. We will return.
14
« on: May 21, 2012, 06:35:15 PM »
d&d, Now you're just getting downright greedy.  Mat
15
« on: May 21, 2012, 05:51:11 PM »
d&d,
I don't know any more than you do. I'm sure we're talking about the same 40 minutes as before, but why it wasn't already restored, I can't say. I'm sure that if Scorsese "knows" that Leone wanted to restore the first 20 minutes, he must also "know" that Leone wanted to restore the other 20 minutes. Otherwise, he wouldn't be thinking about adding it back in. Maybe the footage is more degraded and it's going to take longer to restore it. Who knows?
But I'd like to ask Scorsese how he "knows" Leone wanted it restored. Does he "know" what Leone himself said about it in 1988? Can someone get Marty on the phone please?
Mat
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