Michael Gaughn Archives - Page 7 of 12

Review: Serpico

review | Serpico

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It might be the archetypal ’70s movie—and looks surprisingly good on Amazon Prime—but does Serpico still hold up as a film?

by Michael Gaughn
August 5, 2022

This review was originally going to be along the lines of, Serpico isn’t that great but it’s such a perfect embodiment of the ‘70s film that it’s worth writing up just to provide a guidepost for anyone trying to wrap their arms around that genre. But about two-thirds of the way in I realized that, while the movie definitely has problems, it rises above them magnificently for a while, and in a way that makes it worth anyone’s time to wade through all the rest of it.

I’ve always had my doubts about Serpico, and the years haven’t treated it particularly well. Directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Al Pacino, cut by Dede Allen, shot entirely in New York during the city’s period of worst decay in a gritty documentary-inflected style, it is the epitome of the ’70s film and, as such, helps highlight the virtues and underline the flaws of that genre.

By 1968, American filmmaking was in complete disarray, and throughout the early and mid ‘70s, everyone was just kind of guessing, throwing everything they could think of at the screen. Since nobody was quite sure what to shoot or how it would come together, movies from the era tend to suffer from over-zealous editing, and there are gratuitous bursts of that here. The ‘70s were also the absolute nadir of the film score. With lush orchestral arrangements decidedly out of favor, strait-laced composers struggled, post The Graduate, with how to work pop, rock, jazz, and funk into their cues. Since little or none of that came naturally, the results were often unlistenable—a case Serpico only bolsters. And nobody knew what to do with women. Here, they magically appear for Pacino to bed down and then just kind of hang around for exposition, the obligatory nude scene, and to have something to break up with.

The general uncertainty over who was actually coming to the movies and why resulted in a fact-based film saddled with way too much TV-movie sentimentality, especially during the first half. Trying to cling to traditional notions of good guys and bad guys while also trying to be fashionably anti-authority, it aims for hard-boiled and knowing but often comes across as woefully naive. But even the rawer Taxi Driver isn’t immune from all that, feeling like the product of a hyperactive adolescent who’s trying to reprocess the reality of New York at a more rudimentary level that he can handle. (Scorsese was far from alone, of course, in reacting to the ‘60s and ‘70s by resorting to emotional regression. We wouldn’t have the blockbuster cinema of the ‘80s, which has become the superhero cinema of the 2000s, without it.)

It’s not like Lumet wasn’t capable of better ‘70s films—he aced the genre two years later with Dog Day Afternoon and, in 1981, did a better Serpico with Prince of the City (although it’s been a while since I’ve seen the last named, so it might not hold up as well as memory suggests). Here, you sense him trying to figure out how much to retain from ‘50s and ’60s crime dramas, how much the movie should adhere to the urtext The French Connection while also pulling back from the wall-to-wall brutality, and how much he should strike out on his own. Serpico finally clicks when it gets to the police investigations, and once again, it’s process that comes to the rescue, lending a movie some solid bones when there’s nothing more substantial to be found.

It’s Pacino, though, and not Lumet, who ultimately provides the glue. He does an engrossing job of convincingly and wrenchingly portraying Serpico’s massive struggles with his conscience as he’s left all but alone in an impossible situation. At those moments, Lumet knows enough to just step back and let the acting be the film.

And Amazon Prime’s 1080p presentation (via Roku’s ScreenPix) really brings to the foreground what a—as odd as this word might sound in this context—beautiful film this is. It’s not pretty—true to its documentary influences, every frame is spattered with the requisite grime. And it’s plagued by that fog-filter look that marred almost every movie of the era through Jaws and beyond. But, for great stretches, it’s shockingly good, evocatively expressing the material, which is, of course, the goal. It’s hard not to gape at some of the sequences, this transfer is so true to the original. It’s so good, I fear for what might happen if Serpico gets dipped in the 4K HDR vat—especially if Paramount is doing the dipping.

The music is surprisingly well recorded and effectively mixed in stereo—but, again, really has no place in this film. It reminded me of the mix for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where the dialogue was crisp and clean but not very imaginatively placed, while the score existed in a kind of Van Allen Belt outside the movie proper.

Sidney Lumet wasn’t a master filmmaker but a frequently inspired one, so most of his movies are at least worth a watch and some have displayed prodigious staying power. Serpico starts out vaguely in the former camp but begins to become intriguing and then compelling once it crosses the midway point. Pacino did consistently engaging and often riveting work in the early part of his career, sometimes achieving the impossible, and he summons up a standout performance here. So you can approach this as a decent enough effort by some supremely talented people trying their best in a world they don’t fully understand, or you can see that confusion and uncertainty as the very lifeblood of that most important decade in filmmaking—not just for what it created but for the seismic reaction it spawned—and see Serpico as its most apt manifestation. Either way, it makes for a provocative night at the movies.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | While every frame is spattered with grime and plagued by that fog-filter look you expect to see in a ’70s film, this presentation is, for great stretches, shockingly good. It’s hard not to gape at some of the sequences, the transfer is so true to the original.

SOUND | The completely unnecessary score is surprisingly well recorded and effectively mixed in stereo, while the dialogue is crisp and clean but not very imaginatively placed

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Review: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

review | The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

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The big hit of 1944 and maybe Preston Sturges’ best film, this manic romp still delivers, despite an uneven transfer

by Michael Gaughn
August 2, 2022

Reviewing The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, James Agee famously concluded that the Hays Office, responsible for policing film content, had ”been raped in its sleep.” And It’s kind of easy to see why, since the film is about a super horny juvenile who uses wartime hyper patriotism as a cover to bed down with GIs departing for the front, resulting in her committing bigamy (among other things) and having not one but six illegitimate children. On Christmas Day.

Pretty racy for 1944, but that didn’t seem to deter anyone from going to see the Preston Sturges comedy, which ended up being the biggest hit of the year. They might have been deterred if they’d been given a chance to pay attention to what was actually going on, but Sturges keeps the action so manic and cartoonish that contemporary audiences treated the quieter moments, where the plot comes to the foreground for consideration, as little more than badly needed breaks from all the mayhem.

If you know Sturges at all, you probably know all of the above, and if you don’t, you have no idea what I’m talking about. Preston Sturges was yet another bratty rich kid who got to show up in Hollywood and walk pretty much straight into making pictures—like the CEO’s kid who starts in the mailroom and rapidly works his way up to the top. Like he was destined to land anywhere but there. (To be fair, Hollywood was slightly more democratic before the 1980s, and someone born elsewhere than within the upper crust occasionally got to make a movie, unlike the complete stranglehold the wealthy have on the creative end—and every other aspect—of filmmaking today.)

There was always something a bit precious about Sturges—which was OK as long as he held it in check, but helps explain why I’ve never been head over heels about either Sullivan’s Travels or The Lady Eve, which many consider the pinnacle of his work. I find more to savor in Hail the Conquering Hero and Unfaithfully Yours, and even have a soft spot for the tissue-thin Christmas in July. But Morgan’s Creek might be his most satisfying effort because he tries to do as much as possible while trying to make it look like the film is about nothing at all. And it displays—even though it might all be a pose—a disarming humility.

Yes, everyone in the town of Morgan’s Creek is a bit of a dope—and ill-mannered and, often, duplicitous and grasping, and sometimes just flat-out mean. But you can tell that Sturges kind of envies their intimate connections, their elaborate interwovenness. And he expresses that early on through a four-minute long-take tracking shot as Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton stroll from Hutton’s house, through the neighborhood, and into the heart of town. It’s artificial as hell, but it makes you buy into the film because it’s in real-time, and everyone at that time knew it was true to those towns and how people lived in those towns. Without it, none of what’s to come would make sense or would land as strongly as it does. And maybe the biggest miracle of all is that the somewhat aloof and very privileged Sturges could even get onto that more mundane and frowsy wavelength and portray it all so well.

Eddie Bracken is the kind of actor who emerges because the movies temporarily need a certain type—here, an out-and-out schlub—which it then tosses aside when the fad has passed, so it would be easy to write him off as a one-trick wonder. But his performance is mesmerizing, flawlessly timed and turning schtick that would sink lesser comedians into something so telling it’s poetic. It would be similarly easy to dismiss William Demarest, who was typecast—even in Sturges films—as a perpetually dyspeptic grouse. But he transcends that here to play someone who, despite all his bluster, clearly cares about his daughters and his town and, ultimately, Bracken’s Norval.

Maybe the greatest irony of Morgan’s Creek is that this whole raging avalanche of a movie turns out to be nothing but a 90-minute setup so Demarest can do a perfectly timed pratfall in a hospital corridor. And, indulgent as that sounds, it’s worth it.

Morgan’s Creek was shot by master cinematographer John Seitz, best known for single-handedly defining the film noir genre with Double Indemnity. The rule has always been that you never want a comedy to look too pretty or too moody, but, while Seitz never goes overboard, he doesn’t shy away from making his frames nuanced and expressive, in a comic-elegant way. Creek looks passably good on Amazon Prime—as in, you wouldn’t turn it off if you watched on a home cinema-sized screen, but you’d always be wanting more. But the wraparound scenes—the first three and a half minutes and some shots near the end—are curiously flat and washed out.

This film is really just a succession of master shots and long takes, which really allows the comedy to thrive. But while Sturges rises to that self-imposed challenge masterfully, he does indulge in maybe two too many of them—and in too many big physical gags, when it’s inevitably the smaller bits of business that play better—which can make Morgan’s Creek seem a little grating at around the 2/3s mark. But hang in there—it all ultimately pays off. The movie still works on its own terms, and time has leant it some little touches—like finding out the Kockenlockers live in the same house as The Girl from Lover’s Lane, and encountering a newspaper headline that screams “Hitler Demands Recount”—that provide a kind of gruesome pleasure in retrospect.

Little fades faster than comedy—except maybe fantasy. The best silent comedies hold up surprisingly well, especially the shorts, maybe because they’re so abstract and don’t rely much on the world of the time for their effect. And the best of the screwballs remain resilient—most of Sturges’ output and Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday in particular. Go much outside of that and you’re talking the very definition of the ephemeral. So it’s more than worth it to seek out and plumb the best ones, and it’s hard not to be in awe that they even exist at all.

PICTURE | Acceptable when viewed on a big screen, except for a couple of passages, but catching glimpses of what the original looked like only makes you long for a proper restoration

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Review: Touch of Evil

review | Touch of Evil

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Orson Welles’ second-best film remains an evocative, engaging, disturbing, and visually stunning film noir

by Michael Gaughn
July 29, 2022

Labeling things, even if it’s to figure out who’s done something best, is usually a great way of robbing them of their essence because the exercise inevitably makes the best of whatever seem too much like other, more mediocre things when the whole point ought to be to highlight what makes them stand out because they’re different—unique. That said, the best film noir is probably the first, Double Indemnity; the most perverse—because it caused the genre to start eating away at itself from within while it was still in its prime, introducing a fatal dose of doubt into a genre that was already all about doubt—is, hands down, Kiss Me Deadly. And the ultimate expression of noir as stylistic exercise while also being its deepest and most troubling character study is Touch of Evil.

We usually associate style with something superficial, and that’s usually a pretty safe bet to take, especially if we’re talking about any of the giggly, pointlessly gruesome, less-than-human recent stuff that crows itself as neo-noir. But the genius of Evil—Welles’ genius—was to take every element of the film and set it in counterpoint, in the Baroque sense, with every other element. Nobody had done that in a noir before (or has since), and the instances of it in other genres are sadly few. And it’s the furious texture Welles created—both rough as sandpaper and smooth as silk—that makes Evil inexhaustible, as evocative and engaging and disturbing a film now as it was when it was released—in studio-butchered form, of course—in 1958.

And we should all be grateful the studio held sway here—that is, if the so-called director’s cut is any indication what Welles would have wrought if given his editing druthers. Somehow I doubt that last part. The misguided attempt to be true to the long-deceased filmmaker’s intentions—in other words, to read his mind by reading his notes—smacks of being an unimaginative academic exercise leagues removed from Welles’ brilliance. But a lot of people lap up whatever comes out under the “director’s cut” moniker as gospel, without ever stepping back to figure out whether it adds up to anything worth watching.

The studio’s edit actually enhances Welles’ grand design, keeping the film moving in a heedless head-long rush that subsumes anything that might have smacked of pretentiousness into the larger mission. That can’t be said of the sputtering. lumbering director’s cut. And, fortunately, it’s the studio version you get, in 1080p, when you view Evil on Amazon Prime.

Again, saying some film is the most or the best of anything is usually just so much critical bloviation. Too many films have now been made by too many only meagerly talented people, hopelessly muddying the waters, for those words to mean much. But Evil deserves to be placed with some rarefied company, is one of the very few movies where if you say something’s about it’s the best, that word still has some relevance and weight.

In a genre that tends to invite visual flamboyance and outright excess, this is a tough call to make but, of all the noirs, Evil is the most visually stunning. And that’s not just because Welles’ feverish conceptions and cinematographer Russell Metty’s ferociously inspired realization of them succeed in creating a plausible and engrossing twilight world of corruption and menace, but because, for all its exuberance and smart-assery, that visual canvas is integrated into every aspect of the production in a way that’s mutually reinforcing. (Again, that counterpoint.) In other words, it’s all meant in the service of art and not of just showing off.

Metty was a master of both black & white and color—consider his still unmatched work on such Douglas Sirk films as Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life (1959), and, especially, All That Heaven Allows. And having him more than ably manning the camera gave Welles an expressive freedom he hadn’t had since his collaboration with Greg Toland on Citizen Kane. Metty gave Welles wings—and some badly needed discipline.

But putting so much emphasis on the visuals suggests the audio somehow takes a back seat. It’s doesn’t. It, like every other element in the film, is co-equal, and the mix, not in terms of technical quality but of aptness to the material (which is all that should really matter) is pretty much peerless. The sound has as much to do with evoking the relentlessly grimy border town of Los Robles as any of the imagery, and the use of sound during the prolonged climactic scene where Vargas deploys Quinlan’s deputy with a wire so he can lure Quinlan into incriminating himself is both subtle and dazzling. No amount of surround gimmickry could ever improve its impact.

And we meet up with Henry Mancini again, here in his breakout film. Known for his smooth, clean style, this is Mancini at his dirtiest, delivering a perfectly apt soundtrack that’s surprisingly gritty and raw. It’s a kind of warmup to his equally loose tracks for Peter Gunn later that year, but without the mitigating dollop of cool.

At its heart, Evil depicts an almost Darwinian struggle as one group / culture / generation supplants another. And it’s a tale of the Fall, as idealism comes up against the tangled complexity of reality and, as it always does when it tries to impose rather than adapt, breaks apart on the rocks, taking down everyone on board. Welles constructs a fiendishly nuanced moral labyrinth of a kind Hollywood films aren’t built to sustain, ruthlessly questioning everything, but showing an amazing compassion for people who remain true to their innate sense of duty, even when it leads to their downfall. A hell of a mature and discriminating statement from a pampered brat—and one he was incapable of making until this film.

All of which helps to explain why Evil is a kind of Citizen Kane reunion, with many of the secondary roles populated by players from that film. Welles wanted to show how much he and movies had changed since he naively burst on the scene—and then got his head handed to him.

Evil is also a film about faces—even more so than Dreyer’s Joan of Arc—and therein lies its redemption. Every person on screen displays character. While some of the roles might be stereotypes, Welles cast the film so every actor, by their presence alone, could rise above those stereotypes. Which once again brings us to ethnicity, and all I can say about that here is: Charlton Heston is offensive as a Mexican because he’s a bad actor who doesn’t understand the character he’s been asked to play. Akim Tamiroff is brilliant as a Mexican because his Uncle Joe Grandi is fully dimensional, expresses his history and being with his every gesture and word—which is all that ought to matter if you’re trying to create, first, fiction and then art, and not propaganda.

Touch of Evil is, on more than one level, so relentlessly bleak it would be impossible to sit through it if wasn’t balanced by the elegance of its camerawork and wit of its score, and if it wasn’t redeemed by its love of its characters, its humor, and the honesty of its portrayal of inevitable human failing.

PICTURE | At moments, so striking you wish someone would do a restoration that didn’t include mucking with the studio edit

SOUND | About as good as the late ’50s had to offer, but serviceable at presenting the startlingly ingenious sound mix

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Flipping Quentin’s Vista

theater photos courtesy Lance Alspaugh,
the Vista Theatre

EXCLUSIVE | Legendary filmmaker Quentin Tarantino and private-cinema maestro Theo Kalomirakis join up to transform a neighborhood hangout into an international film-lover’s destination

by Michael Gaughn
July 29, 2022

Building a movie theater on the dirt lot where D.W. Griffith shot the massive Walls of Babylon sets for his once revered now reviled silent-movie epic Intolerance is kind of like building on an old Indian burial ground. And yet that’s where LA’s Vista Theatre rests, and it’s hard not to

sense the presence of silent movies past—and of a whole alternative, and slightly unsavory, history of Hollywood—emanating from it like a wraith.

The Vista has been through a lot. Originally christened the Lou Bard Playhouse and offering both live performances and movies, its premiere screening in 1923 featured the biggest child star of the day, the now forgotten Baby Peggy. Assuming its current name
c. 1930, the theater became something of a changeling, for a while showing first-run films, then second-run, foreign, and classic, during the ‘60s dabbling in some very adult burlesque, and, for an extended stretch, soft then hardcore porn.

After a brief stint as a revival house, the

The Vista has been through a lot. Originally christened the Lou Bard Playhouse and offering both live performances and movies, its premiere screening in 1923 featured the biggest child star of the day, the now forgotten Baby Peggy. Assuming its current name c. 1930, the theater became something of a changeling, for a while showing first-run films, then second-run, foreign, and classic, during the ‘60s dabbling in some very adult burlesque, and, for an extended stretch, soft then hardcore porn.

Vista transitioned back to first-run in the mid ‘80s, but thanks to midnight screenings, a steady flow of special events and premieres, cameos in films like True Romance and The Swinger, and the lingering reputation of its shapeshifter past, it’s become a magnet for independent, cult, and B movies and other manifestations of alt. The sidewalk beneath its marquee is pitted with celebrity handprints à la Grauman’s Chinese. You won’t find any Cary Grants or Steve McQueens there, though, but Bud Cort, Kenneth Anger,

After a brief stint as a revival house, it transitioned back to first-run in the mid ‘80s, but thanks to midnight screenings, a steady flow of special events and premieres, cameos in films like True Romance and The Swinger, and the lingering reputation of its shapeshifter past, it’s become a magnet for independent, cult, and B movies and other manifestations of alt. The sidewalk beneath its marquee is pitted with celebrity handprints à la Grauman’s Chinese. You won’t find any Cary Grants or Steve McQueens there, though, but Roger Corman, Bud Cort, Ray Harryhausen, Kenneth Anger, and the cast of Dark Shadows instead.

So it’s not hard to see why the Vista might catch Quentin Tarantino’s eye. A patron for years, Tarantino came to resonate so strongly with the theater’s vibe that he decided to snatch it up, freshen it up a bit, and see if he couldn’t turn it into a must-see destination for rabid film nerds like himself.

Ray Harryhausen, and the cast of Dark Shadows instead.

His affection for the Vista seems to

spring as much from what it’s not as from what it is. It’s not an opulent movie palace like Disney’s flagship El Capitan 11 miles down the road but a kind of mini palace with a neighborhood-hangout feel. And it’s not located in the heart of Hollywood, like the El Capitan, Grauman’s, Pantages, or Cinerama Dome, but in a nebulous no-man’s land tucked between Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and, just down Sunset Blvd., Little Armenia. It might be wry but not wrong to think of the Vista as the brick & mortar equivalent of the defiant outsider, the unbowed survivor.

It’s a little harder to understand the theater’s attraction for designer Theo Kalomirakis, whose reputation rests largely on bringing exuberant flair, tempered by tasteful restraint, to creating private cinemas, a category of design that too easily and often descends into excess and kitsch in the hands of others. But much of the Vista, from its iron-maiden-like box office to its well-intended stabs at hieroglyphics to its looming Nile-Delta-by-way-of-Topeka pharaohs, is pretty much an altar to kitsch.

His affection for the Vista seems to spring as much from what it’s not as from what it is. It’s not an opulent movie palace like Disney’s flagship El Capitan 11 miles down the road but a kind of mini palace with a neighborhood-hangout feel. And it’s not located in the heart of Hollywood, like the El Capitan, Grauman’s, Pantages, or Cinerama Dome, but in a nebulous no-man’s land tucked between Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and, just down Sunset Blvd., Little Armenia. It might be wry but not wrong to think of the Vista as the brick & mortar equivalent of the defiant outsider, the unbowed survivor.

above | the auditorium, designed in an Egyptian style meant to reflect the Vista’s Intolerance roots, will be kept pretty much as is

It’s not like Kalomirakis even knew the Vista existed before he took on the assignment of translating Tarantino’s wishes into a satisfying reality. His involvement is due mainly to some deft but determined bird-dogging by the previous owner, Lance Alspaugh, who’s been retained to manage the theater and shepherd the renovation. A devotee of Kalomirakis’ work, Alspaugh slipped a copy of Private Theaters, the sumptuous coffeetable-book presentation of the designer’s early efforts, in front of Tarantino at a planning meeting.

As Tarantino flipped through the book, Alspaugh started making the case for retaining Kalomirakis but quickly realized he could save his breath. It was clear from Tarantino’s expression he was hooked. “We don’t really need to talk about this anymore,” he said. “This is obviously the guy.”

Kalomirakis politely declined the first time Alspaugh called—and the second, and the third. Content with the life he’s carved out for himself since moving back to Greece, Kalomirakis was taking on few new projects; plus, his experience with commercial theaters is limited. But, adopting the same tactics he deployed to convince famed designer Joseph Musil, who had renovated the El Capitan, to flip Coronado’s Village theater, Alspaugh quietly persisted, with his gentle persuasion eventually winning Kalomirakis over.

The Theo/Quentin honeymoon proved short-lived, though. Having been told the plan was to leave the Vista’s auditorium pretty much as is, Kalomirakis assumed his mandate was to do the rest of the theater in the same Egyptian Deco style. And although Tarantino liked Kalomirakis’ initial design, he ultimately deemed it too elegant, coming back with suggestions for faux cinderblock walls and an outsized RC Cola

The Theo/Quentin honeymoon ended up being brief, though. Having been told the plan was to leave the Vista’s auditorium pretty much as is, Kalomirakis assumed his mandate was to do the rest of the theater in the same Egyptian Deco style. And although Tarantino liked Kalomirakis’ initial design, he ultimately deemed it too elegant, coming back with suggestions for faux cinderblock walls and an outsized RC Cola dispenser that would overwhelm what Kalomirakis had in mind for the concession stand. (There’s even talk of a Mold-a-Rama.)

It wasn’t until Kalomirakis heard about the decidedly casual grunge-ish look planned for the coffeeshop and gaming arcade that will occupy the storefronts to either side of the Vista that he got where Tarantino’s trying to go. Not wanting the theater to feel so exclusive that anyone hesitates to enter, Tarantino instead wants to create an everyman’s retreat that evokes his own early experiences of going to the movies.

dispenser that would overwhelm what Kalomirakis had in mind for the concession stand. (There’s even talk of a Mold-a-Rama.)

That realization was a revelation for Kalomirakis. The common bond between him and Tarantino, it turns out, is exactly that intense love, born in childhood, for the whole experience of watching movies—a shared origin story that runs so deep it’s been the inspiration, and constant source of sustenance, for both of their careers. Seeing that Tarantino was more interested in staying true to his emotional roots than to the bones of the Vista gave Kalomirakis a new and more potent source of inspiration to draw on.

Embracing that come-one-come-all, come-as-you-are dynamic, Kalomirakis quickly created a new design that Tarantino just as

quickly blessed—which is a good thing since the renovation is already well under way, with the lobby already gutted. Early, likely optimistic, estimates pointed toward a December reopening; early to mid 2023 is looking more realistic.

But there’s a whole other layer to this story, one that’s been all but lost in all the attention paid to the acquisition and renovation. That Tarantino is having the projection booth rebuilt to accommodate his personal dual-format 35mm/70mm projectors isn’t too surprising given his well-known preference for film over digital. But what might get the savvy to sit up and take note are his plans to show first-run movies on film, having prints struck even for titles pegged for digital-only release—which is of course damn near everything.

To that end, Tarantino has formed a kind of cabal with other movies-on-film fans like Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Judd Apatow, with this formidable band of insiders pooling its resources to get prints made and help put the Vista firmly on the radar of the film-forever crowd. Since probably no one but Tarantino has the necessary sway and determination to pull something like this off, it seems likely the Vista reborn will be—and remain—one of a kind.

It’s obvious Tarantino’s Vista isn’t going to be just some neighborhood haunt or famous filmmaker’s vanity project but, in its unassuming way, a mecca, an off-the-beaten-path everyone’s-invited celebration of the movies, a unique night out for anyone seeking a new old way to see the latest fare on film.

Review: Breakfast at Tiffany’s

review | Breakfast at Tiffany’s

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Miss Golightly, I Must Protest!

Some thoughts on Yunioshi

Because this film has been so viciously damned, and Blake Edwards was so relentlessly hounded, for Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi, and because those misperceptions still hang over Tiffany’s like a shroud, I would be remiss to review the film without weighing in.

Talking about the merits of Rooney’s performance is probably not the right way to tackle this, but I think partly what irks the political reeducation crowd is that Yunioshi actually is funny, even at this late date. Yes, there are a couple of moments that are a little too broad, but we are talking about Mickey Rooney after all.

The better tack, probably, is to talk about the glaring double standard that’s been applied to the film. Why hasn’t anybody gotten their dander up about Sally Tomato? Here’s a Jewish-American actor—Fred Flintstone, for chrissakes—playing an Italian in a stock-ethnic way just this side of Chico Marx. If one ethnic caricature is offensive, then they should all be. The seemingly endless number of warnings at the beginning of this innocuous film includes “yellowface.” It should say “goombah” as well. And yet Tomato raises nary a peep.

Following all this to its logical conclusion, Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone—a mongrel Midwesterner playing an Italian mobster—ought to be damned as well. But—and maybe I’m just being short-sighted—I don’t ever see that day coming. If it does, we should all give up on the movies and play solitaire instead. But then someone would take issue with how the figures are portrayed on the playing cards.

If you want to get pissed off at anybody in Tiffany’s, it ought to be Paul Varjak. That was a creaky conception from the start that unintentionally exposed all the many biases of the time and ultimately created more problems than it solved. And George Peppard could never act his way out of a rain-soaked paper bag. That’s offensive.

—M.G.

Ignore all the culture-wars propaganda—this ultimate Audrey Hepburn vehicle still reigns as one of the great romantic comedies

by Michael Gaughn
July 17, 2022

There are so many things to be said about Breakfast at Tiffany’s—not in a nostalgia-dripping stroll-down-memory-lane kind of way but more in a “this thing still reverberates like crazy—why?” kind of way. And, like anything with potency in the present moment, those reverberations have an inevitable dark side.

But let’s tackle the upside first. It’s a little too obvious to begin with Audrey Hepburn, but how can you not? What she does with her character is still breathtaking, somehow managing to stay true to the depth and nuance of Truman Capote’s original conception of Holly while shepherding her through all the standard-issue Hollywood attempts to blandify her, emerging with a conception that somehow manages to synthesize and transcend both.

She owns this film, in a way very few other actors have ever owned a film. And, yes, I know that’s what everybody loves about Tiffany’s—but that tends to be because of all the charming, kooky stuff, not because Hepburn succeeded in investing Holly Golightly with a soul.

Usually, you’d give the director some credit for that, and Blake Edwards was brilliant in many ways, but no other female character in his work even comes close to being as fully developed or compelling. Golightly exists leagues beyond what he was able to accomplish elsewhere.

And keep in mind Edwards was still pretty much a yeoman when he made this film, with really only a couple of slapstick-driven service comedies (The Perfect Furlough and Operation Petticoat) under his belt. The sudden growth in his maturity as a filmmaker is more than obvious, and, as much as I love the original Pink Panther film and some of his other work, it’s a tremendous loss he never did another movie like this one—which suggests that Tiffany’s was one of those born-of-the zeitgeist miracles, like Casablanca, less the product of individual will and more the product of spontaneous generation.

Other things to praise: Like The Apartment, Tiffany’s manages to capture the spirit of New York at that early-‘60s moment when the city was at its peak, unknowingly perched on the edge of a precipice. And it does this despite—or maybe because of—having been made mostly on LA soundstages and only partly on location in NY. It remains a beautiful film to look at—much more beautiful than it deserved to be considering the production values of other similar productions from the time.

When I was a kid, one of the Toronto stations would broadcast movies after midnight that weren’t available on American TV. I would sneak downstairs after everyone else was asleep and gorge myself on fare I was probably too young to be watching. (In the case of Bloody Mama, definitely too young.) That’s how I first saw Tiffany’s, and it was the first time I remember being entranced by the look of a film. It was so much more vivid than anything else I’d ever seen that it seemed almost magical.

If I saw it again today presented that way, I’d probably be horrified. But there was something inherent in the quality—maybe best called “power”—of those images that wasn’t quashed by the limitations of the medium or the device. Tiffany’s, seen in 1080p on Prime, was faithful to that experience. I can’t say I was entranced—too much time has passed—but I was engaged and impressed. Can 4K improve on that? Possibly—but only if Paramount can resist inflicting the same “grain—bad; digital—good” revisionism that made a travesty of The Godfather.

The dialogue tracks are surprisingly clean—so clean you can easily make out whenever there’s a dubbed line. Originally mixed in mono, there’s nothing particularly good or bad about the stereo version here, except for a couple of jarring instances of hard panning. My biggest beef is that Henry Mancini’s score is presented in the Living Stereo style of his soundtrack albums, with that unrealistically wide soundstage making it feel like the music exists somewhere outside the film.

It’s hard to watch Tiffany’s and not get a little wistful about Mancini. His scores for this and The Pink Panther three years later are probably his best—evocative, ingenious, tasteful, never bombastic, setting the appropriate mood instead of telling you what to feel, polished expressions of the second American renaissance. But the British Invasion left him lost without a rudder and he could never recover his bearings long enough to ever summon up anything half as good as what he did so effortlessly in the early ‘60s.

The film’s biggest problem is structural, and might come from Edwards never having dealt with material this complex before. The whole thing starts to unravel around the 2/3s mark, which is when most movies start to come apart when the director doesn’t fully grasp his material. The problem is, Tiffany’s isn’t just a light and fluffy romantic comedy. Edwards and screenwriter George Axelrod had retained enough of Capote’s novella that its darker undercurrents start to deeply trouble everything at the point where the filmmakers have to start pulling all the threads together, causing the movie to go full-blown schizophrenic, oscillating wildly between dramatic scenes and silly vignettes that tend to rob the more serious moments of their power. This created an insoluble dilemma that led to the infamous “I own you” conclusion, with the now thoroughly unpleasant George Peppard asserting his blond-haired, blue-eyed straw-man’s rights over the beaten Golightly. All of that somehow doesn’t sink the film completely, but it’s a hell of a note to end on.

Miss Golightly, I Must Protest!

Some thoughts on Yunioshi

—M.G.

PICTURE | Tiffany’s, seen in 1080p on Amazon Prime, is amazingly faithful to one of the most beautifully shot Technicolor films ever

SOUND | The dialogue tracks are so clean you can easily hear when there’s a line dub, but the stereo mix of Mancini’s score fails to integrate it with the rest of the film

Music for Art’s Sake

The desire to have an expansive art collection on display made filling this Manhattan apartment with sumptuous sound a challenge

by Michael Gaughn
July 13, 2022

The one inescapable truth of Manhattan real estate is that, no matter how prodigious the space or the wealth of resources at hand, getting what you want requires being a master of the art of compromise. The trick is making it all happen without feeling squeezed—space-wise, convenience-wise, performance-wise, pleasure-wise.

Everything about Hudson Yards would be considered generous, even by Manhattan standards. A gleaming-new city within the city resting above the railroad yards in midtown, its opulent living spaces offer heart-of-the-island convenience, killer views, and, when it comes to square footage, a decent amount of room to roam. But there are limits.

Paint Me a Picture

Consider this scenario: You have an extensive collection of paintings and sculpture you want to have on display to both ponder and savor. The collection will fill virtually all of the walls and much of the floor. But you also want to fill your space with music, which you’re used to experiencing at a level of quality on par with your other art. So where do the speakers go?

That was the challenge facing Anthony Chrisostomo of Home Theater of Long Island who, along with co-owner Nick Tzortzatos, had worked with the client for years, having provided the

photos & video | John Frattasi, Gusto Multimedia

entertainment and smart-home amenities for her residences in Morristown and Stone Harbor, New Jersey. They’d been able to easily meet her needs before—but they’d also had a lot more room to work with.

The client didn’t want any speakers on the walls at Hudson Yards—but even if she’d been willing to consider it, building policy frowns heavily on breaching anything in the apartments. As Chrisostomo explained, “This building has more requirements than any other one we’ve worked in because it’s above the rail yards, so there’s heightened security.” Also, two of the walls in the main living area are filled with floor-to-ceiling windows offering views of downtown from Chelsea to Battery Park and up and down the Hudson River. So placement options were limited—beyond limited.

the minimalist sculptural form of Meridian’s 7200SE speakers proved the ideal complement to the client’s extensive collection of art

Then there was the Meridian factor. The client already has speakers from that high-performance audio brand throughout her two main residences and very much wanted them in her pied-à-terre as well. But Meridian’s offerings are known as much for being bold statements in design as for their sound and engineering. They’re not bland little boxes you tuck discretely away in a cubby or corner—you put them proudly on display.

That proved to be both a plus and a minus. The top-tier 7200SE models in the main living area can be appropriately described as sculptural, and their clean modernist lines dovetail nicely with the other art in the room—so, that problem solved. But having freestanding speakers means having cables, and cables have to run somewhere, and cables are, at best, unsightly. But since the Meridians have the necessary electronics built in, they require just a single wire carrying the music source. Chrisostomo was able to use the standard networking lines already threaded throughout the building to send sound to the speakers, which meant only having to have one thin strand of cable running from the wall.

A naive bystander might wonder “Why not go wireless?” And Chrisostomo acknowledges that would have been an option. “But that would have detracted from the aesthetics of the space because we would have had to place equipment within the room to feed and power the speakers.”

The master and guest bedrooms weren’t as daunting because they’re smaller spaces where sound is needed mainly for TV viewing. And both placement and wiring were much simpler since less imposing speakers could be clustered around the screens. The master bedroom has the demure for Meridian M6 speakers wedded to a Leon soundbar placed beneath the screen, while the

Showcase

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Home Entertainment Space

Achieving Serenity

A Tribeca Trendsetter

the master bedroom (above) and guest bedroom (below)

soundbar in the guest bedroom is joined with a pair of Meridian DSP3200s, which are decidedly compact but clearly born from the same design lineage as the statement speakers in the main living area.

A Place in the Sun

Though not as big a challenge as the speakers, the “art everywhere” and “no breaching” edicts made implementing lighting and shading control a little more interesting than it would usually be. Art and sunlight are mortal enemies but, thanks to the western-facing curtain wall, the sun blasts into the apartment for hours leading up to twilight. Just sealing out the light—and thus the views—wasn’t an option, though.

But because the tech involved is far more discreet than it would have been for the speakers, wireless was an option here, with Chrisostomo able to deploy a Lutron Homeworks QS system that automatically adjusts the raising and lowering of the shades for the time of day. Paired with semi-transparent shading material that sufficiently dims the room without entombing it, warm evening light still suffuses the space but without threatening the art.

It’s probably not surprising to learn that the quality of light, in all its many forms, was

especially important to the client—which led to her getting fairly heavily involved with setting up the automation. “She’s very particular about the different moods she wants to set,” said Chrisostomo, “so she got really granular when it came to each button and what it was going to do.”

And the Lutron system treats the apartment with the proper respect, with the minimalist controls able to be mounted on the walls while looking like they’re integrated into the walls. The combination of wall keypads and desktop controllers placed within easy reach give the client complete but unobtrusive control over the many moods of her space.

It’s hard to emphasize just how flexible and responsive technology—and the designers and integrators who deploy it—have become within the past few years. Just about everything involving high-end home entertainment used to be a major bait & switch, promising effortless comfort and infinite pleasure and delivering something that not only didn’t live up to the promise but was frustrating, even maddening, to use. Not just the tech but the design mindset of the recent past wouldn’t have been able to make something like this Hudson Yards dwelling happen, instead forcing the homeowner to settle for a series of unacceptable compromises that would have seriously detracted from the quality of her life. But the fetters are now off, and the evidence of the new paradigm is abundant. The trick, of course, is hooking up with a design team that’s attuned to your desires but once you’ve cleared that hurdle, the course is clear and the finish line now easily with reach.

Cineluxe Showcase

Our in-depth looks at some of the most innovative, versatile, and just plain fun entertainment spaces in the world

achieving serenity

how an impossible private cinema came to bloom in the Palm Springs desert

“Serenity is a freshly minted 22,000 sq. ft. home nuzzling a golf course in Indian Wells, CA. Done in the kind of Mies-gone-wild style that’s become a signature look in expansive post-millennium west coast homes, it features a wide-open floorplan that’s as much about outdoors as indoors, and hinges its effect on a seamless flow between those two worlds. The whole is infused with a very contemporary sense of play, best evinced on the lower level, which gives off a distinctive carnival vibe, with guests free to stroll from the sports-car collection past a two-story rotating wine tower and onto an elaborate dance floor, then pass a Zen garden on their way to the private cinema—a cinema, by the way, that really shouldn’t exist. And yet there it is.” read more

secret cinema

tucked away in a manor house in the lush English countryside, this high-performance private theater proves to be something very much more than just an intriguing novelty

“It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect this article to be all about how cleverly this room is hidden away. It’s not. Putting all the emphasis there would be doing the room, the home, the homeowners, and the team that whipped up this cool, gleaming gem of a theater a huge disservice because, while the whole ‘hidden away’ thing is definitely intriguing, leaning on it too hard would obscure that this is as much a serious cinema as a secret one.” read more

spanish treasure

an intense collaboration between the homeowners and their designer resulted in a cutting-edge Old World private cinema

“This is the story of a unique theater and of a unique collaboration—about how an all-star team had to muster all its expertise to get the square peg of a room to fit into the round hole of the area they had to work with without having any of the seams show. And about how they were able to turn a daunting number of liabilities into virtues, letting those challenges serve as inspiration to whip up a private cinema that dovetails neatly with the look of the rest of the home while exhibiting an appropriately theatrical flair that makes it a singular and dashing design statement of its own.” read more

rooms for improvement

the entertainment spaces in this Australian home are undeniably spectacular—but after a decade in use, they were ready for a major sonic makeover

“This story could have easily just been about the Theo Kalomirakis-designed Art Deco home cinema. Or it could have focused instead on the jawdropping one-of-a-kind entertainment area, with its discreet stage, ability to accommodate 250 guests, and epic views of Sydney Harbor. But there turned out to be an even bigger—though not quite as showy and obvious—story to be told, about how these kinds of high-end spaces have become so elaborate and flexible and the trends and technologies influencing and supporting them are evolving so quickly, that we’re now being presented with an unprecedented array of opportunities—but also the continual challenge of staying ahead of the curve.” read more

inside the ultimate
home entertainment space

this domestic entertainment complex includes not just one of the great home theaters but also a nightclub, a gaming arcade, and even a café

“Designer Theo Kalomirakis and acoustician Steve Haas have collaborated on a number of cost-no-object home theaters, but probably none of those efforts has been as ambitious, versatile, or well-realized as the Paradiso. Seventeen years in the making, this Southern California gem is actually an entire home-entertainment complex built around an Italianate piazza. The reference-quality 15-seat home theater doubles as a fully-fledged concert hall. The nightclub features a hydraulic stage and can handle anything from a rock band to a jazz group. Next door to the club resides an arcade, containing the homeowner’s extensive collection of pinball machines and video games. There’s even a g-force flight simulator.” read more

a tribeca trendsetter

the desire for a casual movie-watching space in this apartment’s main living area led to the creation of a high-performance hideaway theater

“Ed Gilmore casually bringing some shots of a project he’d done in Tribeca up on his computer monitor was a major ‘a-ha’ moment for me. The first shot showed a stylish, obviously comfortable living area that also served as a billiards room, dining room, and kitchen. The second showed the same room transformed into a home entertainment space a lot of people would die for. That, a completely intuitive part of me screamed, perfectly represents the new paradigm. Others apparently agree with that conclusion because people just won’t leave Ed alone about the Tribeca space. Ironically, even he admits it’s not perfect—but it’s getting there, as the client invests more and more in turning what was initially a whim into a room that can blow a typical movie theater out of the water.” read more

luxury made easy

a prefabricated premium theater that not only met but exceeded the client’s high expectations

“Seeing the interest in dedicated theater rooms decline over the past few years, legendary designer Theo Kalomirakis has helped form Rayva, a company devoted to dramatically simplifying the process of designing, engineering, and installing high-end theaters. Rayva recently completed a signature installation in Westchester County, north of New York City, that’s meant to show that the company’s streamlined approach to theater design can yield a luxury result.” read more

music for art’s sake

the desire to have an expansive art collection on display made filling this Manhattan apartment with sumptuous sound a challenge

“The one inescapable truth of Manhattan real estate is that, no matter how prodigious the space or the wealth of resources at hand, getting what you want requires being a master of the art of compromise. The trick is making it all happen without feeling squeezed—space-wise, convenience-wise, performance-wise, pleasure-wise. Everything about Hudson Yards would be considered generous, even by Manhattan standards. A gleaming-new city within the city resting above the railroad yards in midtown, its opulent living spaces offer heart-of-the-island convenience, killer views, and, when it comes to square footage, a decent amount of room to roam. But there are limits.” read more

Luxury Made Easy

Showcase

Inside the Ultimate
Home Entertainment Space

Achieving Serenity

A Tribeca Trendsetter

A prefabricated premium theater that not only met but exceeded the client’s high expectations

by Michael Gaughn
December 19, 2019

Legendary designer Theo Kalomirakis not only created the concept of home theater but has been the standard-bearer for luxury home cinema for his entire career. His two best-selling coffeetable books—Private Theaters and Great Escapes—are filled with lavish theaters created in every imaginable style.

Seeing the interest in dedicated theater rooms decline over the past few years, Theo has helped form Rayva, a company devoted to dramatically simplifying the process of designing, engineering, and installing high-end theaters. Rayva recently completed a signature installation in Westchester County, north of New York City, that’s meant to show that the company’s streamlined approach to theater design can yield a luxury result.

I talked to Theo about some of the challenges and triumphs of creating this strikingly contemporary space.

Did this begin as a Rayva theater?

No. The client saw a custom theater I had designed for a friend of his and said, “Let’s do something similar for my house.” I told him, “We can come up with something based on one of the designs we’re developing for Rayva. I think there is one that would fit your house very well.”

The room was above the garage, in a new space, and it was ready for the theater. But it was perforated with windows on three sides. So I said, “It’s not good to put a home theater in a room with windows. The light creates a problem, and, more importantly, the sound will bounce off the glass.” He said, “I don’t mind if you want to cover the windows. It’s the garage. We don’t need to touch them from the outside. You can close them from inside.”

That was an interesting challenge. I wanted to cover the windows, but I wanted the client to still be able to have access to them. So, the windows dictated the design. And because Rayva panels are in increments of four feet, I could place one in front of a window and have it removable if access was needed.

I felt very vindicated that this process we’ve developed allows even difficult rooms to become theaters, because you don’t have to touch the structural elements in the room or the engineering elements. And, because of the flexibility of our design elements, we can deal with difficult design challenges.

What did the client tell you were his expectations for the room?

He just wanted to have a great theater. He said, “Cost is not the issue. I just would like to have the best technology, the best design, the best seats.” I shared with him brochures with Cineak seating. And, sure enough, he selected one of the best-looking seats and picked the softest, more plush leather, which is what he got.

And then we selected the carpet. Usually that happens at the end of the design process and the clients are overwhelmed with all the expenses of equipment and woodwork and everything. So, I automatically suggested just a plain grey industrial-quality nylon carpet that in a room like that would cost, at most, five, six thousand dollars. But I also showed him something that was plusher, like wool. He immediately went with the wool. He said, “Listen—I’m not going to use a nylon carpet. I spent so much money on the theater, I want the carpet to match the quality of the rest.”

I was trying to protect his budget, but clients who know what they want are different from ones who do things just because they want to save a penny here and a penny there. With such clients, I respect the focus on the ultimate quality rather than focusing on sticking to a certain budget.

photos | Phillip Ennis

Theo Kalomirakis:
A Personal History of Home Theater

What was the installation process like?

Rayva doesn’t do the actual installation, so when we started the project, we reached out to Nick Di Clemente from Elevated Integration. When Nick introduced himself to the client, he found out the client had additional needs. This was a newly renovated home and he needed whole-house audio as well. So Nick got the contract for the rest of the house, which he was very happy about.

What, for you, are some of the highlights of this space?

The client selected our Origami design. The good thing about the triangles of this design is that they allow flexibility of placement. We were able to use Wisdom Audio speakers—and there were lots of them and they’re big—without any conflicts with the room design.

This theater has a very different, outside-the-box design. In home theater, you expect to see columns and panels repeating themselves. You expect moldings that are gilded and wall panels that upholstered with brocade fabric. With Rayva, we tried to move away from that aesthetic because we wanted to change the perception of what a home theater can look like.

That’s why we bring in artists and architects that aren’t related to home theater to create the Rayva designs. With our guidance, their visions can be turned it into something that’s functional and can work with a variety of room sizes.

Also, this theater is designed with wall-to-wall acoustical treatments specified by Steve Haas’s company SH Acoustics. Steve worked hard to get the best possible distribution of acoustical treatments within the limitations of the design. When the theater was finished, he spent two days calibrating the Wisdom Audio speakers to the room specifications and made the theater sound unbelievable.

What was the client’s reaction when he saw the finished theater?

The client is very happy. He told me his kids practically live in that space.

Was there anything else you wanted to mention?

I want to tell you something—we put pictures of the theater on Houzz, where we can monitor which ones resonate with end-users. And we were surprised to find out that we got a lot of likes for the interior but got more likes for the marquee outside. Go figure! I didn’t take that as an insult but as an indication that people still relate to having a marquee outside a home theater. So, we will be creating a marquee as a Rayva product and will make it available as an accessory.

A Tribeca Trendsetter

showcase

ACHIEVING SERENITY

INSIDE THE ULTIMATE HOME ENTERTAINMENT SPACE

LUXURY MADE EASY

A Tribeca Trendsetter

The desire for a casual movie-watching space in this apartment’s main living area led to the creation of a high-performance hideaway theater

by Michael Gaughn
November 29, 2018

Ed Gilmore casually bringing some shots of a project he’d done in Tribeca up on his computer monitor was a major “a-ha” moment for me. The first shot showed a stylish, obviously comfortable living area that also served as a billiards room, dining room, and kitchen. The second showed the same room transformed into a home entertainment space a lot of people would die for. That, a completely intuitive part of me screamed, perfectly represents the new paradigm.

Others apparently agree with that conclusion because people just won’t leave Ed alone about the Tribeca space. Ironically, even he admits it’s not perfect—but it’s getting there, as the client invests more and more in turning what was initially a whim into a room that can blow a typical movie theater out of the water.

Having since had a chance to actually visit the space, and to shoot some video there, I recently circled back around with Ed to talk about all things Tribeca.

People seem to love that installation because it says that almost any room can now be transformed into a legitimate entertainment space.

I think what we did was to, in a minimally invasive way, create a home theater experience in a room that, if you looked at it from any angle, you would immediately say it couldn’t be done there. There was just no way.

Aesthetically, the room had already been designed before you came into the picture. How were you able to navigate those waters?

We just needed to be open and try to find really unique solutions that would both satisfy a high-end level of performance as well as maintain a certain aesthetic value the client wanted us to maintain, and be true to the bones of that room. I don’t think that’s any rare talent. The issue was that he had interviewed a lot of other AV guys who told him right off the bat, “No, we won’t do that.” And that wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. So we were lucky enough to be able to convince him that we could do it, and it could be compelling.

Tribeca video | Alyssa Neece

“We needed to be open and try to find unique solutions that would both satisfy a high-end level of performance as well as maintain a certain aesthetic value the client wanted us to maintain, and be true to the bones of that room.”

—Ed Gilmore

a retractable screen, ceiling speakers, and a projector on a lift allow the apartment’s main living area to be transformed into a better-than-movie-theater entertainment space

A Garden of Immersive Delights

In the Service of the Senses

Your Home is Your Canvas

That communal area wasn’t supposed to be the main entertainment space, right?

Right. The den is the room where he really sits and watches most of his TV. That was the room he wanted to spend some money on. This other room was kind of an experiment for him.

But as he saw it implemented, immediately he thought, “I’m going to sink some more money into this room.” And that’s exactly what he did. That’s what he did with the Kaleidescape Strato, that’s what he did with the Steinway Lyngdorf, and what he’s about to do with projection, by upgrading the projector there as well.

Are people fascinated by that room because it’s a kind of outlier or because it represents a trend?

I think it’s a little bit of both. It’s tapping into a trend, that trend being that people aren’t interested in having dedicated rooms for specific purposes like a theater, or even a dedicated music room.

There’s also an aspirational aspect to it as well. It resonates with people because it’s well done. I mean, it’s a really beautiful space. And it’s well thought out. And that goes back to the developer, who did a really nice job on that building. The dimensions of the room are great, and it has this wonderful warm feeling to it without really needing much in terms of other types of interior design.

But these particular clients do have taste, and they’ve been around the block a few times in terms of renovations. He is a serial renovator. And so their choice of artwork, their choice of furnishings—those little details that they have there are great. And I think that resonates with a lot of people, too.

If luxury is really about details—about somebody caring enough to make sure every last thing is done right—Tribeca would seem to qualify.

I think you and I agree on this, right? Attention to detail is really what matters in a luxury space. People have asked me about what luxury is, and I typically say that it needs to be inspirational. But that doesn’t mean it really needs to be noticeable. It’s something that kind of unfolds. And by the time you realize what’s happening, you’re kind of taken by surprise by it. And it’s organic—it feels like it was always part of what was meant to be there.

about Gilmore’s Sound Advice

Since 1991, Ed Gilmore and Gilmore’s Sound Advice, Inc. have been designing, deploying, and servicing hundreds of integrated systems by strictly adhering to a word-of-mouth recommendation policy. Typical systems consist of audio & video distribution, home theater, lighting & shading systems, enterprise-level network/WiFi & telephony, along with HVAC & security systems integration. In 2016, Sound Advice created one of the most unique showroom & event spaces in New York City.

Review: Alphaville

review | Alphaville

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Who knew Godard’s future would turn out to be our now?

by Michael Gaughn
June 29, 2022

The question I constantly wrestle with when reviewing an older film is why anyone should care about the movie if they’re not already on its wavelength. The point of reviewing isn’t to share you personal favorites list with the reader, with a kind of take-it-or-leave-it attitude about whether they’ll actually enjoy it. Worse is the reviewer who just piles on, merely echoing the blind conformity of the herd. The only reason to write up any film, old or new, is to create what you hope is common ground with the reader, to give them a glimpse of what you appreciated (or disdained) in the hopes they’ll seize the ball from there and run with it, having their own experience, not just a carbon copy of your own.

Any truly sentient creature in the present should find plenty to pick up on in Alphaville. It’s probably the only valid glimpse of the future ever committed to film, riding joyously, for all its dire predictions, on the back of pulp fiction and sci-fi—and, it needs to be pointed out, given how quickly and completely Godard would soon turn against Hollywood, American pulp fiction and sci-fi.

Most visions of the future latch onto the technology, trying to second guess how science will develop—which will always be a sucker’s bet—and the characters, even when they adopt what seem to contemporary audiences odd behaviors, are always us just projected into the future essentially unchanged from who we are now. (Hello!—all you Star Trek fans out there.) What Godard does instead is anticipate the elaborate, increasingly lopsided dance between human nature and its extension in technology, with his focus squarely on the human, and, in truly uncanny ways, anticipates our rapid devolution and the world of the present, awash in a drowning tide of lost souls.

Some of his more cogent prognostications:

—The rise of the myth of the eternal present, which blocks people from considering the past or the future so that, as dire and empty as it is, the current state of things seems like the best of all possible worlds.

—Reducing culture to our most primitive urges to make it easier to control mass behavior. (Anybody who disagrees this has come to pass hasn’t been paying much attention to blockbuster movies, recent politics, or Facebook algorithms.)

—Embracing and fetishizing that Western science is only superficially rational and objective and is driven, more than anything else, by the idea of purging Original Sin. (As the movie’s supercomputer intones: “The acts of man through the centuries will gradually, logically destroy him. I, Alpha 60, am merely the logical means of this destruction.”)

The list of searing insights is much longer than the above, but this will give you the drift. Of course, my descriptions are too reductive and nothing but a travesty of what Godard actually wrought—but the point is that, his gaze steely, and undistracted by positivism and other hucksterist notions of progress, he got it all frighteningly right.

It’s not the job of any film to predict the future, of course, or be any kind of handbook or teachable moment or push any kind of social agenda. That’s the antithesis of cinema. Godard was resonating to something he sensed in the air—the imminent disappearance of the poetic soul—in other words, the soul—and worked to express that almost inexpressible event as accurately and evocatively as he could.

I know: I’ve made this all sound very cerebral and dry and bleak. It’s not—Alphaville is a truly fun film that, like all early Godard, has cinematic thrills, both big and small, in virtually every shot. And, as with A Woman Is a Woman and Contempt, he underlines at the very beginning that this is “just” a film, with the computer telling us about the importance of legend for disseminating fictions to the masses—thus providing a typically paradoxical justification for the movie’s crime-fiction and sci-fi trappings. And it’s easy to confuse Godard’s exploiting of comic-book conventions, with their broad-stroke ideology and cheap sentiments, as his own thoughts and feelings, but that’s all part of his effort to keep you off balance so you keep questioning and paying attention.

Watching Alphaville in SD on Amazon Prime, I was surprised by how good parts of it looked. Then I watched it in HD on iTunes, and I saw the same cinematography bloom. The 1080p version is murkier than the SD stream, with more contrast and with the blacks more crushed, but the additional resolution allows for more subtle gradations—something Godard and Raoul Coutard took full advantage of and which is fundamental to appreciating the film, and that isn’t even hinted at in the lower-res version. There are closeups of Anna Karina that have a richness and subtle glow reminiscent of the best black & white portrait photography, and that contrasting of the luminous with the harsh is key to conveying her position as a pod-person-like succubus who’s also the possible vessel of human salvation. The film’s famed rendering of the striking but cold interiors of modern office spaces feels bracing, almost seductive at 1080p, falls flat in SD. I don’t know if a good 4K transfer could open up the images even more, but I’d be curious to find out.

This is a particularly nuanced mono mix so polyvalent it reminded me of Phil Spector’s ability to convey layers and layers of depth in a single channel. Crude to today’s jaundiced ears, all that really matters is whether it expresses what Godard meant it to express, and it does. The strange sense of Alpha 60’s voice and the society’s electronic communications being in the immediate foreground while sounds of the actors and their environments sit in the mid ground is unsettling. And Godard’s signature mucking around with what ought to be diegetic sound—for instance, the sound of the perversely brief fight scene soon after hero Lemmy Caution checks into his hotel room suddenly drops away when Godard cuts to an angle through a window, but the music playing within the apartment continues on—comes across with plenty of presence. But also with a decent amount of distortion—but that’s OK. It rings true.

The on-set sound is very raw, full of the reverberations of the spaces, but that adds to the documentary-like sense of immediacy—the reality of this clearly fictional but sadly plausible world.

You don’t have to watch Godard to see Godard. There is hardly a film made since the early ‘60s he hasn’t influenced in some way and, with their relentless efforts to appropriate because they lack the emotional depth to actually create, many contemporary directors now mimic his tropes verbatim. But the distance between innovator and imitator couldn’t be greater—kind of like having a burger at Applebee’s instead of Boon Fly Cafe. There’s a resemblance, but the resemblance is probably the least meaningful thing about the experience. Applebee’s is safe, predictable, bland; dead, not alive. And so it goes with Godard.

PICTURE | In 1080p on iTunes, the film is a little murky, with crushed blacks, but the resolution allows some of the images to look properly subtle and rich, creating the necessary contrast between luminous and harsh

SOUND | The mono mix is unusually nuanced, helping to convey the unsettling juxtaposition between the omnipresent supercomputer and the spellbound citizens

Michael Gaughn

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Review: Alphaville

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Michael Gaughn

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