In order to stave off suspicions that the Hollywood Reporter is being made over into a kind of fluffy-whorey celebrity rag, newly installed editorial director Janice Min has hired veteran industry reporter Kim Masters as an editor-at-large — i.e., a term that basically means writing stuff from home. Masters, formerly of Premiere, Esquire, The Washington Post and Vanity Fair, is sharp and well-connected, but does anyone see this as a lasting fit?

I mean, honestly, c’mon…Janice Min and Kim Masters? I understand about Min needing Masters to symbolically affirm the legitimacy of her editorial intentions, and about Masters being amenable to a six-figure salary and all, but they seem like a real oil-and-water team. It’s a little bit like costarring Mae West and Rosalind Russell as sisters. What do I know? Well, I know Kim, and I’ve sure as hell heard stories about Min.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson mentioned earlier today that (a) Min will “transition the THR print edition to a weekly by summer’s end [while] moving the daily online” and (b) that “her stated goal is to broaden THR’s coverage with consumer-friendly content” — a euphemism for fluffy-whorey? — “while still hanging onto the mandate to cover the entertainment business for the trade.”

Previously available as a pricey limited edition hardcover, Paul Duncan and Steve Shapiro’s The Godfather Family Album debuts today at a much more affordable price — $44 bills and change.

I know what I’m supposed to say about the just-released Spartacus Bluray, which I finally bought and saw last night in my modest Brooklyn apartment. I know what the general consensus is, and I’m all for being a joiner. I’m supposed to agree with the condemnation of this disc that Robert Harris, the restoration maestro who brought the original Spartacus back to life in 1991, posted two or three weeks ago. Just get in line and say it, affirm it — Spartacus is an affront!

More particularly I’m supposed to say yes, the Spartacus Bluray looks like a son of Patton — a plastic piece of digitally-wiped shit. Electronically sharpened, haloed, and scrubbed free of all the high-frequency detail in Russell Metty‘s Super Technirama 70 lensings.

There’s no question that the Spartacus Bluray has been scrubbed down. Last night I put my face about 15 inches away from my 42″ plasma and studied Jean Simmons‘ face during one of the first-act closeups, and it’s like she’s wearing too much base — not the flesh-covered stuff you buy in pharmacies, but the digital kind that washes away organic sincerity.

So yes — Harris is right. The Spartacus Bluray is, technically speaking, a cheap handjob, an abomination, high-end vandalism. It should be recalled and Universal tekkies should engineer a “new image harvest,” and do it right this time.

There’s just one problem. If you step back from the screen — sit three or four feet away, I mean — the Spartacus Bluray looks way better than the Criterion DVD or the laser disc or any other version that I’ve ever seen. For the first time since seeing Harris’s restored print on a big screen, I felt dazzled by some of the images. I was saying to my son Dylan, “I’m not supposed to like this but whoa…look at that!”

Harris will probably get angry when he reads some of these words, but this Spartacus delivers some of the sharpest, most gleaming and best-looking pop-out images I’ve ever seen of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1960 film outside of a theatre. As long as you keep your distance from the plasma screen, I mean. And especially if you squint a bit.

I didn’t want to buy Criterion’s recently released Bluray of John Ford‘s Stagecoach (1939). I suspected the worst — something un-finessed and scratched and speckled and lousy with grain — and knew it would probably rub me the wrong way. But I went down to Kim’s last night and bought a copy anyway — over $30 bills! — and took it home and popped it in. And holey moley, it looks even worse than anticipated.

It may sound extreme to call this an awful Bluray with others giving it a thumbs-up, but I’ll go one better: this is the worst-looking, worst-sounding Bluray of a classic black-and-white film in history. That means, obviously, that it looks worse than Criterion’s notorious Bluray of Carol Reed‘s The Third Man, and that’s saying something, fella.

The reason is simple. The Criterion monks used a 1942 nitrate duplicate negative that had squawky sound and titanic grain levels plus all kinds of smudges and wounds and scratches, and then went by their usual creed, which is that “whenever the damage [is] not fixable without leaving traces of our restoration work, we elect to leave the original damage.” Which has resulted in one of the biggest burns in Bluray history. And then these fuckers turn around and charge retail-schmuck purchasers like myself (i.e., guys who are too lazy or impulsive to use cheaper online options) over $30 bucks. Well, gee…thanks, Criterion!

I’m recognizing that Criterion “removed the worst of the damage” by committing “hundreds of hours of restoration work,” but for their brochure-writing spokesperson to say that “certain defects remain” in the finished Stagecoach Bluray is like a BP spokesperson claiming that there’s a little bit of mucky-muck in the Gulf of Mexico right now.

I was watching it last night and going, “This is ridiculous.” I mean, I was really seething — furious that they hadn’t tried to refine the detritus and the scratches and the Iraqi sandstorm effects at least a little bit. Don’t listen to the purists who say that any kind of digital refinement or clean-up will turn an old movie into a scrubbed- down video game. The people who say this are agenda-spinners, plain and simple. You know what I mean by this. I’m basically saying they’re dishonest.

I’ve said over and over that there are acceptable halfway measures that can remove the offensive stuff without making the actors look as if they’ve got plastic mannequin faces.

I wrote a few weeks ago that the Criterion Co. is “the ultimate blue-chip outfit — far and away the most trustworthy providers of true quality in home video. They do what they do with considerable expertise and devotion. It’s just this Abbey-of-St.-Martin monk strain in their thinking. They do great work in general, yes, but they’d rather have films look like what they looked like when they came out rather than have them look so good today that their directors would hear about them in Heaven and have angel erections.”

Well, the latter part of that paragraph was wrong — the Stagecoach Bluray makes the film look worse than it must have appeared when it had just opened and was playing in first-run theatres in New York and Los Angeles. It looks like Stagecoach probably looked in a dinky little theatre in Barstow, California, after it had been playing for six or seven weeks through a dusty gate. I’m speaking as a formerly licensed projectionist so I don’t want to hear any shit about this from anyone.

I feel used and abused by Criterion. Snookered, ass-fucked, film-flammed, hoodwinked, boondoggled…a tin can tied to my tail.