I’ve seen a demo of Sony’s Blu-ray high-definition DVD process, and I’ve asked two or three people about the differences between it and Toshiba’s HD-DVD system, and it comes down to this — Blu-ray is a more expensive process but it’s more high-end…more digitally au courant and forward-looking…and HD-DVD, which I haven’t seen, is more of a backward-designed system but it’s cheaper to work with. There are one or two other twists and wrinkles, but that’s what it basically comes down to, trust me. And you won’t find any trade reports anywhere that just say that. The latest development in the DVD high-def techno-clash is that Paramount Home Entertainment has decided to support both the Blu-ray and the HD-DVD system. Scott Hettrick’s Variety report says that “several execs in each camp believe the Paramount announce- ment to publish in both formats, which is the direction Warner has been leaning for the past week or two (with a similar announcement expected this week), is simply a temporary face-saving strategy and that ultimately all studios will shift completely over to Blu-ray by launch time [in the spring of ’06].”

There’s a DVD series called “Sundance Festival Favorites,” and the distributor is the curiously-named Genius Products, Inc. Curious because one of the titles, which is due for release on 10.25, is Jill Spreicher’s Clockwatchers(’98), a comedy about office angst and girl empowerment that costarred Toni Collette, Parker Posey and Lisa Kudrow. Curious because Clockwatchers wasn’t even a slight favorite at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival…it died there. The word was so negative that it took another year and a half for the film to find its way into theatres. It opened on 5.15.98.

A lot of journos (including columnist Emanuel Levy) have written pieces about the just-passed 50th anniversary of James Dean’s death, which happened around sundown on 9.30.55. But how many have driven up to the actual collision spot in Cholame, California, and…you know, gotten out of the car and stood there and closed their eyes and smelled the air and let the lingering vibe of that tragedy (and believe me, you can still feel it) sink in? I’m just asking.

I slipped into a 9:45 pm showing of Capote Saturday night (10.1) at the Arclight and there were only two or three unoccupied seats. Bennett Miller’s film averaged a bit more than $25,000 per screen with a haul of $303,000 in just twelve situations. A good start, but a film like this needs to pace itself. Then again, how can any semi-intelligent movie fan go through the next four or five months without seeing Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s knock-down Oscar-calibre lead performance? There’s no ducking it.

Here’s a nicely written Roman Polanski interview piece by the Guardian‘s Sue Summers. I’m now into catching Oliver Twist, which I didn’t feel like making an effort to see during the Toronto Film Festival. Polanski doesn’t like to sit down with journalists. I tried to speak with him in Paris in ’02 when the Oscar chances of The Pianist were looking uncertain, but he woudn’t do it. Something tells me if Summers had been a fat balding male, the sit-down might not have happened. And it’s a tiny bit curious that Summers pretty much blows the privacy thing with this graph: “A week later I am sitting opposite Polanski in L’avenue, a trendy restaurant situated among the Guccis and Chloes of smart Avenue Montaigne, just next door to where he lives with his third wife, the 39-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, Morgane, 12 and Elvis, 7.”