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Post by Ace on Dec 13, 2006 14:56:35 GMT -5
It's being released by Sony in Blue Ray form (as oppossed to The Matador being re-released in HD-DVD -- and they wonder why people won't upgrade?) in Feb 2007. No information yet on the extras, if they're the same etc.
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Post by Lauryn on Aug 2, 2007 20:56:30 GMT -5
Here's a nice article catching us up on John Boorman, whose latest work seems to have the whole of Ireland in an uproar. There's a brief mention of TOP, too. Boorman likes to run his own shop and doesn't suffer fools gladly so it's not all that surprising that over six years on what he most recalls about the experience is the studio giving him a daily round of grief, LOL!
Look back on anger Byline: Kevin Maher
Times of London
The director John Boorman is 74 -and can still wind up an entire country, KEVIN MAHER discovers
John Boorman is bloodied, but unbowed. The 74-year-old London- born director of classics such as Deliverance and Excalibur has been savaged in Ireland for his satirical portrayal of the country in The Tiger's Tail (reviewed on page 16). Here Boorman, resident in Ireland for nearly 35 years, depicts the Emerald Isle as a decadent Sodom and Begorrah defined by rampant greed, binge drinking, street violence, suicide, racism and glaring social inequality. Naturally, the natives were none too pleased when the movie opened in November, and Boorman was vilified.
"I was surprised by the sensitivity of the reaction," he says, on this occasion safely ensconced in a hotel room in Central London. "All these issues - the binge drinking, traffic jams, collapsing health service and teenage suicides u were being discussed in the press at the time. But somehow when you put them on the big screen it has a different effect. People felt that modern Ireland was a great success story and so they thought, perhaps, that the film was unfair."
Boorman has never shied away from controversy. In fact, he says that his outlook seems to be getting more pointedly political with age - recent films such as Beyond Rangoon (1995) dealt with repression in Burma, while Country of My Skull (2004) explored the legacy of apartheid in South Africa. "I find it hard nowadays to make anything that doesn't have a political context," he says. "Maybe I'm just an angry old man."
If truth be told, it was never plain sailing for Boorman.
A former journalist and documentary film-maker for the BBC, he graduated to bigscreen movie-making thanks to his friendship with the Hollywood heavyweight Lee Marvin. When MGM balked at the incessant flashbacks, flashforwards and confusing narrative chicanery in Boorman's groundbreaking thriller Point Blank (1967), it was Marvin, then a white-hot Oscar winner, who protected his beleaguered director.
Boorman also butted heads, this time with the Warner Bros brass, when it came to making Deliverance (1972).
He had chosen Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando to star but the studio refused to pay the notoriously unreliable Brando's fee. Undaunted, the director hired the then relative unknowns Burt Reynolds and Jon Voigt and transformed them overnight into marquee names. "The picture was a tremendous struggle to make," says Boorman. "But then it opened, it became a monster hit, and it took everyone by surprise."
These days, he says, making studio movies is even more tortuous, especially if you have any artistic or independent sensibilities. His last big-budget Hollywood movie was the successful Pierce Brosnan spy flick, The Tailor of Panama (2001). And it was, he says, agony. "It was constantly bogged down with bureaucracy, and that has an eroding effect. The studio is on top of you, restricting what you can do. It becomes very difficult to function."
Similarly, he says that, having worked with rawpower dynamos such as Marvin, Voigt, Sean Connery and Richard Burton, he finds it hard to get excited by today's pampered superstar actors.
"When I look at the current crop of stars I ask myself, 'Do I want to work with any of those people?' " he says. "Not many of them."
In the meantime, he says - and notwithstanding the fact that his long gestating epic about the emperor Hadrian is now in pre- production - he'd rather get on with smaller projects. "I think that I don't really have any more dragons left to slay," he says.
"I've done it all, you know? I could quite happily make a film for very little money that nobody sees at all."
He's not solely defined by his profession, he says. He's a father and a grandfather and a "planter of trees" in the gardens of his house in Co Wicklow, which he bought in the early 1970s to get away from the "depressing negativity" of England and the insanity of Hollywood.
Even so, he continues to be inspired by the power of movies, and by film makers such as the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, still making critically acclaimed movies at the age of 98. Does this mean that he wakes up impressed by the notion that he's still an active film-maker with something to say? Boorman chuckles. "These days I wake up and I'm impressed by the fact that I can climb out of bed unaided.
BOORMAN'S MILESTONES
Point Blank (1967). Boorman's Hollywood debut featured Lee Marvin as a taciturn avenger out to reclaim $93,000 from back-stabbing mobsters. Arty, violent, and deliberately trippy.
Deliverance (1972). The movie that launched a thousand stag nights ("Squeal like a pig!" etc).
Deliverance, about a canoeing trip that goes badly awry, instantly established Boorman as a heavyweight director.
The General (1998). The first of four films that teamed Boorman and the Irish actor Brendan Gleeson was a Cannes award-winning depiction of the Dublin gangster Martin Cahill. Jon Voigt, of Deliverance, co-starred.
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Post by Ace on Aug 3, 2007 11:45:56 GMT -5
Ah Boorman, a rebel to the end. TOP is on broadcast TV today, on MyNet or whatever they're now calling that station that used to be UPN. It's always "fun" to watch what happens to Andy's vocabulary and actions on broadcast TV. ;D
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Post by Lauryn on Aug 3, 2007 12:07:04 GMT -5
Ah Boorman, a rebel to the end. TOP is on broadcast TV today, on MyNet or whatever they're now calling that station that used to be UPN. It's always "fun" to watch what happens to Andy's vocabulary and actions on broadcast TV. ;D I fear Andy's four letter standard of the Queen's English may be severely circumscribed. As for his body English, oh my, what they'll miss, LOL! Interesting that the article I posted describes TOP as a big budget Hollywood movie when it probably had about half of the average production budget of a major studio film then. I suppose that perception is arrived at because the cast is fairly high profile, but here paid less than the norm for a chance to work with this rich a source material and with Boorman on one of his globe trotting adventures. Of course, with PB's Bond association, too, big budgets are often presumed on his other projects. Whenever the word "spy" comes up especially, I guess.
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Post by Ace on Aug 3, 2007 17:04:11 GMT -5
Sony's head reported the budget at $12.5m then -- other's had it at $18m. Far less than half of what a big studio film cost, even 6 years ago. (not to mention only $2m for marketing as opposed to say $20-50m for marketing)
Yes, the general idea seems to be if Pierce is in it's it's big budget. Evelyn & Matador cost as much to make as Live Wire (an HBO movie) did over tens years earlier and The Fourth Protocol 20 years ago (even then that was considered a modest budget). The Nephew was about 1/3rd that.
Seraphim Falls is being described by some of the press in the UK as one of the 3 upcoming western big budget films but the budget was around $18.5. in contrast to 3:10 from Yuma with a $50m plus budget and Jesse James in the middle at around $30m. Yuma is probably around or less than the average studio film (non blockbuster) and it has more than 2 1/2 times the budget of SF.
But then maybe to the UK press they all are big budget ; the average for UK film is small compared to Hollywood budgets. Even the most British of their large scale films- Harry Potter or Bond are financed by American studios.
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Post by Lauryn on Aug 3, 2007 18:07:09 GMT -5
I was thinking TOP cost about 20 million though it's always hard to get straight answers when it comes to that. I remember reading an article about Michael Bay's 2001 budget buster "Pearl Harbor" where there was a mention that the average film from a major studio had a production budget of 40 million. Even for the time that does sound low though you're factoring in much cheaper small-bore dramas, horror, comedies, teen flicks, etc. along with the tentpoles and "event" films. Maybe they went with a figure on the low end of the scale to make more of a telling point about runaway blockbusters.
Two million for Tailor on P&A. Even then, what a spit in the bucket! I can hear the confab that must have gone on at Sony HQ. OK, we'll premiere it in a mall in west Covina and shout out the news over two tin cans tied together with string, LOL! Oops, sorry to declassify that information. Lionsgate may get ideas for BOAW-S.
True, from where the Brit press and film industry sit it must seem, by comparison, that American films must be flush with money -- and lucky not to be in the rather dreary business of relying on Arts Council / lottery funds to prop homegrown production up.
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Post by Lauryn on Aug 3, 2007 18:21:22 GMT -5
I see here you're saying that Yuma is average or less at $50 million, so we're basically on the same page. I was speaking earlier of the cost of studio films on average, not the average for blockbusters.
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Post by Ace on Aug 3, 2007 19:22:09 GMT -5
Sadly, BOAW-S would be lucky to get the marketing budget ToP had. So far they're on the 2 cent plan. Not even a poster in the lobby or a lobby card at the ticket booth. I bet those theaters had to use their own pen and piece of paper (yes that's what was they used) to alert the costumers. Network TV translations: "Don't be a clown, Harry" -- doesn't have quite the same ring. And there goes Boorman's desire to make his c word a part of mainstream vocabulary.
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Post by sparklingblue on Sept 3, 2007 5:37:08 GMT -5
This still from the movie recently showed up in my TV guide. I don't know if Ace has a better version of this (sorry, I was being lazy and didn't check), but I haven't seen it before so I thought I'd share:
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Post by Ace on Sept 3, 2007 10:14:06 GMT -5
Oooh, no I've never seen that photo before. It's gorgeous. I wish they would have released it in a glorious glossy still when the film came out but they released so few stills and promo photos (kicks Sony again).
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Post by sparklingblue on Sept 4, 2007 3:39:35 GMT -5
I'm glad it's a "new" one. I just wish the pic had been big enough to make a HQ scan. But at least in this one you can actually make out faces--not always the case in TV guide pictures.
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Post by sparklingblue on Sept 26, 2007 3:21:56 GMT -5
I'm currently throwing out a lot of old stuff and came across this picture in an old copy of Cinema. Since I was cutting it up anyway to keep the article, here's a scan:
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Post by Ace on Sept 26, 2007 11:28:59 GMT -5
Ooh thanks. I love the looks on their faces in that photo.
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Post by xcully on Sept 27, 2007 11:11:34 GMT -5
I have never watched this movie! Is it beautiful? I'm curious!
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Post by Ace on Sept 27, 2007 11:23:10 GMT -5
Beautiful as in lovely, no. Beautiful as in brilliant. Yes. It'sa very dark black comedy/satire about spying in Panama. It's based on a book by John Le Carre and directed by John Boorman so it's not as easy movie. Pierce plays a bad bad man - ruthless, cynical, sexually predatory and obsessed, vulgar, deceitful, greedy - a man as a sum of voracious appetites. And he's completely magnificent. When his main conquest says: Do you know I think you're the wickedest human being I've ever met. His reply is: That was the attraction, wasn't it? And it is.
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Post by Lauryn on Oct 4, 2007 12:52:18 GMT -5
Beautiful as in lovely, no. Beautiful as in brilliant. Yes. It'sa very dark black comedy/satire about spying in Panama. It's based on a book by John Le Carre and directed by John Boorman so it's not as easy movie. Pierce plays a bad bad man - ruthless, cynical, sexually predatory and obsessed, vulgar, deceitful, greedy - a man as a sum of voracious appetites. And he's completely magnificent. When his main conquest says: Do you know I think you're the wickedest human being I've ever met. His reply is: That was the attraction, wasn't it? And it is. I heard some news, not sure how accurate, that the next Bond film will avail itself of some Panamanian locations. If true, well, best of luck, but I know which MI-6 Man in Panama I prefer! Did you ever notice, in that scene of coitus interruptus, where Osnard receives the phone call, Catherine McCormack's eyes are almost rolling back in her head? Not what you'd call safe sex, but one can hardly blame her, LOL!
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Post by Ace on Oct 4, 2007 13:27:53 GMT -5
I heard some news, not sure how accurate, that the next Bond film will avail itself of some Panamanian locations. If true, well, best of luck, but I know which MI-6 Man in Panama I prefer! Yep and the last time it was the Bahamas. I'm starting to suspect they're following the SMA around. If Bond 23 takes place in Mexico or Greece that seals it. Not all all. Though I wouldn't have passed up on the final knee trembler. Ace
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Post by Lauryn on May 28, 2010 22:30:50 GMT -5
I was looking up reviews for the library and came across this in EntWeekly:
Gary Unmarried is the kind of sitcom that can (just) get away with a semi-joke in which someone refers to testicles as "oxnards."
Doesn't everyone? <wink> (with a slight alteration in the spelling).
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Post by eaz35173 on Aug 16, 2013 13:18:31 GMT -5
From the Website The Suits of James Bond - thesuitsofjamesbond.comthesuitsofjamesbond.com/?p=2043The Tailor of Panama: Another MI6 AgentIn 2001, Pierce Brosnan plays another MI6 agent with a far more relaxed fashion sense than James Bond in The Tailor of Panama. 1990′s trends in tailoring have carried over to the next decade, seen in Brosnan’s full-cut, button three suit made of tan linen. The cloth could be a linen blend, maybe with cotton, silk or both, since it doesn’t wrinkle as much as 100% linen ordinarily does. The button stance is high and the buttons are spaced far apart. The jacket has no vent, 3 buttons on the cuffs and flapped pockets. The trousers have a flat front and full-cut legs. Though the suit isn’t a fine example of tailoring, the loose, unstructured look can be quite comfortable in Panama’s tropical climate. Brosnan wears a sky blue shirt, with a short point collar, open breast pocket on the left, a centre box pleat in the back and sleeves pleated at the shoulders. The rounded barrel cuffs fasten with one button but have a second button placed around the cuff to close the cuff with a smaller circumference. His monk shoes and belt are burgundy leather with brass buckles. Brosnan’s outdated, casual style is well-fitted to his character Andy Osnard, who contrasts Geoffrey Rush’s Harry Pendel, the titular character. Roger Moore’s tailor in the 1980′s Bond films, Douglas Hayward, was author John LeCarre’s model for Pendel. Rush’s clothing was far more impressive than Brosnan’s and may be the subject of a future entry here.
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Post by eaz35173 on Sept 4, 2014 10:01:46 GMT -5
antagonie.blogspot.com/2014/09/blockbuster-history-pierce-brosnans.html03 SEPTEMBER 2014 BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: PIERCE BROSNAN'S SPYING LIFE The word that most immediately presents itself to describe The Tailor of Panama, the 2001 adaptation of John le Carré's 1996 novel, is "fitful". Fitfully great, fitfully aggravating, fitfully clever, fitfully stylish, fitfully underwhelming. But it is mostly fitful about its tone, which pulls between flippant, cynical satire (the tone of le Carré's book, one of his best post-Cold War spy novels) and taut seriousness. The script, which le Carré co-wrote with Andrew Davies and John Boorman (the only one of the author's books he had a direct hand in adapting) is at any rate more stable than the filmmaking itself: as director, Boorman can't quite bring himself to be as morbidly sardonic as the work he co-wrote would seem to demand. And this is the ultimate source of nearly all of the movie's problems, though I'm not inclined to think that there are so many of those that it ends up wrecking the movie. Even in a compromised state, there's still enough slyness and sharp thinking in the writing and performances to make the film much, much smarter than the average spy thriller. The film's secret weapons, beyond a doubt, are the leads, Pierce Brosnan as semi-disgraced British spy Andy Osnard, and Geoffrey Rush as Harry Pendel, an expatriate British criminal living in Panama as a high-class tailor for the very finest sort of person, or at least the very wealthiest sort of non-eine person. Osnard ends up assigned to the British intelligence office in Panama City as punishment for his sins, and looking to find the easiest possible way to get in good with his higher-ups. Reasoning that a man with Pendel's connections, financial troubles, and checkered past would be more than willing to serve as a spy, Osnard recruits him to wiggle secrets out of his highly-placed clients, as well as his American wife Louisa (Jamie Lee Curtis), assistant to a high-ranking official with the Panama Canal Authority. What Osnard rather blindly fails to consider is that he's not alone in hoping to find praise by ginning up overheated intelligence, and while Pendel is an easy mark, he's also a bit too eager to keep Osnard happy and willing to pay for information. And thus he ends up inventing out of thin air an impending revolution and a scheme by the Panamanian government, newly in control of the strategically vital canal, to sell the administration of that canal to the Chinese government. The scenario is basically identical to Our Man in Havana, the 1958 film and novel both written by Graham Greene, only with the farcical tone of that story replaced with le Carré's characteristic soul-weariness and putrid bureaucracies and simmering disgust with Western governments bullying around and insisting on how the world should be run. That's what Boorman runs with, anyway, focusing on making things feel as strained and harsh as possible, whether it's by conspiring with cinematographer Philippe Rousselot to leach all the brightness out of the movie and leave it with a shockingly muted color palette for a film made on U.S. studio dollars (and some Irish, as well) in Central America, or by framing every interior in shots that leave ceilings feeling like they're about to squeeze the life out of the characters, or by steadfastly refusing to amp up the thriller aspects of the plot until the end, making the whole movie feel as tense but stalled out as the characters themselves. And this is not always a great fit for a script that has a clear comic spirit that doesn't get much chance to pop out, though things like Pendel's frequent visitations from the hallucination of his dead uncle Benny (Harold Pinter, a completely unfathomable bit of casting) simply can't help but be a little wacky despite the sobriety of the filmmaking. It falls mostly to Brosnan to keep a spirit of sarcastic, acidic humor in the film: with the film released in the window between his third and fourth outings as James Bond, The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day, or "the shitty ones", as we connoisseurs like to say, the actor clearly got some pleasure out of being able to play an anti-Bond, and his Osnard is the best single element in the whole film. Sleazy, pathetic, calculating, and entirely unconcerned with the real-world ramifications of the bullshit he's peddling, the character is a perfect vessel for the cold-blooded satire that runs through all of the film's best scenes, and Brosnan's ability to suggest the laddish charisma of Bond as a variant of Osnard's oily insincerity works both for this film's own caustic view of spying while also doubling as a commentary on Brosnan's most famous role; it is possibly the best counter-Bond performance given by any Bond actor (and virtually all of the men to play Bond have had at least one). So perfect is Brosnan for the part that he completely alters the tone of the movie with every scene he's in, bringing a level of smarminess that makes it far more interesting than just a bureaucratic spy thriller, raising Rush's performance to heights he never quite reaches in most of the film (for which I blame Rush's scene partners more than anything: he and Curtis never make a remotely convincing married couple, and besides Curtis and Brosnan, he spends most of his time opposite Brendan Gleeson, horrifically mis-cast in brownface as a Panamanian drunk). The two men, together, are absolutely terrific, and in their best scenes together - whether engaged in casual hetero male flirtation or angry battles of wits - are so electric that it's hard to remember in those moments that The Tailor of Panama has any problems whatsoever. And it does, that's certain: the erratic tone, the lumpy exposition in the form of onscreen text and laborious references to the political situation around the canal (somewhat artlessly grafted onto a story that, in its novel form, took place before the United States relinquished control of the canal in 1999). But it also has things like a generally perfect escalation of tension through tight editing and claustrophobic frames in the last quarter of the two-hour movie, and the effectively dusty and hot sense of place. Above all, though, it has Brosnan and Rush, bringing their crafty dark humor to bear on a film that needs their solid commitment to that mood in order to be its best self. As a book, The Tailor of Panama is a cutting look at the political, bureaucratic maneuvering of espionage and the nasty little humans who get caught up in it; the movie is those things intermittently only. It's probably the worst of the good le Carré adaptations, if you follow me. But it's still smarter and more grown-up than virtually any spy movie of the same vintage, in that foggy area around the turn of the century when American films were even leerier of politics than they are now. Imperfect as it is, it's still got sparkle and a nasty kick.
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