Day: May 25, 2011

Thanks to a 5.20 Criterion Forum posting by “Gregory”, we have a few comparison shots showing the 1.66 aspect ratio on the DVD vs. the 1.78 aspect ratio on the Bluray. (The latter adds a sliver of information on the left and right sides.) You can shrug and ask “what’s the biggie?” but this is corporate vandalism, pure and simple.

Sampling of Criterion Forum comments: (a) “Christ, the cropping destroys the composition…what happened, where was Leon Vitali?”; (b) “You know what I love about all of the endless Kubrick aspect-ratio controversies? That the films still look absolutely fine in just about every ratio they’ve tried”; (c) “For virtually any wrong presentation of a film, there are inevitably lots of people to whom it looks absolutely fine. What’s the relevance of that? Can you give one good reason why they should go against Kubrick’s established preference, rather than doing the same thing they did with the Lolita BD?”; (d) “Barry Lyndon [is] just about the only one of Kubrick’s post-1960s films about which there’s no doubt whatsoever — the aspect ratio should unambiguously be 1.66:1.”

Sitting in the shade, my chair against a plaster-and-brick wall, canopy overhead, a frutti de mare salad on the way, a gentle breeze, briney aroma from the canal, the battery fully charged and the wifi performing…well, tolerably, this was the most perfect writing experience I’ve known in a long time.

Every time I see a photo of Lady Gaga, I say to myself, “Oh, yeah, right…that‘s what she looks like.” Because whenever I’m not looking at her photos I kinda forget. All I can ever remember is a sort of opaque severity. Bleached (or shaved?) eyebrows, ultra-sharp cheekbones, alabaster skin, eyes out of Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis. The truth? Her features are striking but her face isn’t really “there.” That’s why it keeps disappearing.

Cover of latest Italian Vanity Fair…I think. I saw it this morning on a stand.

If I were to run into Eminem on a street I’d spot him like that, but not LGG. I mean, if she didn’t have bodyguards and an entourage with her, which I’m sure never happens. If she didn’t have an out-there personality and a pronounced sense of avant-garde style and the singing-dancing talent, of course, she’d be…I don’t know, some kind of sad Edward Hopper-type figure. She’d be a clerk behind a window at the DMV in a Michael Mann film.

The Telegraph‘s Richard Eden reported last week that Peter Fonda, exec producer of the anti-BP doc The Big Fix, used the term “high-powered rifles” while saying that he’s urging his grandchildren to revolt against President Barack Obama.

Fonda, in Cannes to promote The Big Fix, was speaking metaphorically but nonetheless managed to sound as if Captain America has evolved into a wacko tea-bagger or NRA wing-nut of some kind.

Fonda’s disdain for Obama is probably rooted in the case made against the President in The Big Fix, which is that O has more or less coddled Big Oil since the disastrous gulf oil spill of 2010 and his people have idly stood by while BP has paid out on only one of many dozens of spill-related citizen lawsuits.

Here’s my 5.17 Big Fix review.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I recorded Oscar Poker #34 the night before last — she in LA, me in Paris. Mostly about the second half of the Cannes Film Festival. I’d just come back from dinner and had to get up four and a half hours later. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

This kind of thing wasn’t available when I was last here in ’07. The farther into the city you get, the weaker the Venice “air.” The only decent reception, really, is when you’re adjacent to the Grand Canal, and even then it’s spotty. It’s that laughing Mediterranean mentality, but you have to roll with it.

In a 5.23 Some Came Running entry, MSN critic Glenn Kenny said my agitated posting about Warner Home Video’s jacket-cover statement that their brand-new Barry Lyndon Bluray has been masked at 1.85 was on the unwarranted and

hysterical side. No, it wasn’t. Not as it turned out. It was pretty much dead-on.

Glenn Kenny’s snap of his high-def screen showing (he says) a 1.78 to 1 aspect ratio image from the Barry Lyndon Bluray.

Yes, I hadn’t seen the Bluray due to obvious limitations (i.e., being on the fly in Europe) but the jacket copy, which I ran a screen-capture of, declares what it declares. Kenny initially said the Lyndon Bluray is masked at 1.66; he later reneged because, he said, the Lyndon Bluray is actually masked at 1.78 to 1. If this is true then the WHV jacket copy is wrong. And yet 1.78 is (a) pretty damn close to 1.85, and (b) delivers a significant cropping of top-bottom material that had been viewable on the 2007 Barry Lyndon DVD.

Kenny initially offered what he believed was visual proof — i.e., pics of the Lyndon Bluray off his high-def TV — that the high-def version of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1975 classic version is presented at 1.66. He later amended this to say his TV had been incorrectly calibrated and that 1.78 was the correct aspect ratio.

At no time did Kenny even comment on, much less get into, Kubrick’s reported intention in using a 1.66 aspect ratio to approximate the aspect ratio of 18th Century landscapes.

Portions of my e-mailed response to Kenny went as follows:

“What do you think & feel about WHV essentially waving this off, not only ignoring the fabled 1.59 aspect ratio that mubi reader Tyler Williamson claimed was captured but also dumping the 1.66 that the DVD had? This is important and (I feel) fairly malignant shit. How is this not a kind of desecration? Explain that to me.

“(1) Based on WHV’s decision to publish proof-read copy that says the Barry Lyndon Bluray is masked at 1.85, I was IN NO WAY using an invalid basis for alarm. Bluray jacket-copy is no small or casual matter. Do you think some WHV intern just types it out? Jacket copy is vetted and vetted and vetted again. So why did you more or less say “there goes Wells again, getting it wrong”? That wasn’t right, Glenn.

“(2) Unless your high-def isn’t correctly configured” — which turned out to be the problem — “your own visual proof of a 1.66 aspect ratio does NOT make the case. When I watch a 1.66 film on my 50” Vizio, there are window-box bars on either side of the image, and these are clearly not there on your screen shot. [As noted, Kenny updated this and explained the apparent truth of the matter regarding a 1.78 a.r.] The image extends all the way to both sides, comprising a dead-to-rights 16 x 9 image filling every square inch of your Brooklyn screen. Right now, your Some Came Running shot of the opening image of the cow-pasture duel is lending credence to my concern about a 1.85 image.”

In his updated posting, Kenny extended apologies “to you all and particularly to the BluBrew people, but none to my frenemy Mr. Wells, who went off even more half cocked than I, what with going from box copy rather than the disc itself.” Again — how the hell was I supposed to watch the Bluray on a properly calibrated high-def screen in my sixth-floor Paris apartment? Vetted jacket copy was what I had to work with.

Kenny concluded by saying that “as disagreeable as 1.78 is, it still isn’t 1.85.” But 1.78 still represents a significant top-bottom trimming of Williamson’s 1.59 or the ’07 DVD’s 1.66 image, and is clearly a dismissal of Kubrick’s reported interest in wanting Lyndon to approximate the shape of 18th Century paintings. Isn’t that the crux of the matter?

“This story isn’t over yet,” Kenny concluded. “As it happens I’m interviewing Leon Vitali, a keeper of the Kubrick flame, tomorrow” — today, he meant — “and this issue will be on the agenda.”

And Vitali, who worked with WHV on the earlier Kubrick DVDs and has presumably been (and is being) compensated for his efforts, is going to bite the hand that feeds?

It was announced yesterday that Columbia will distribute Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s long-gestating film about hunting down and killing Osama bin Laden. Until the Navy Seals finally got him on May 1st, Boal’s script, which he’d been working on since ’08, was, I gather, a procedural without a payoff.

In other words, before Osama bin Laden was killed it was an indie-type thing. But with bin Laden dead, Amy Pascal (a big Hurt Locker fan) and the Columbia guys are down with it. That’s pretty much the deal.

Filming will begin in the late summer and open in the fourth quarter of 2012. Meaning that Biggy-Boal’s Triple Frontier, a Paramount project announced in the summer of ’09 with Tom Hanks reportedly confirmed for the lead, won’t roll until sometime in ’13 for release in ’14…right?

What’s so amusingly “despicable” about my having tweeted last week that I was glad I’d seen Terrence Malick‘s The Tree Of Life but that I’m “not sure if I’ll buy/get the Bluray,” as New York‘s latest “Approval Matrix” chart has it?

I was merely saying I wasn’t sure if Tree, which seemed to meander and even get a bit doodly after the first levitational 40 minutes or so, would stand up to repeat viewings.

Yes, others wrote that it almost certainly would stand up and that they looked forward to subsequent viewings, but I wasn’t sure. I was thinking at the time, rightly or wrongly, that I’d more or less gotten it all in one sit and that a second viewing probably wouldn’t turn my head and open up my pores like the first one had. Primarily because much of the second half focuses on the dysfunctional rage and gloom brought about by Brad Pitt‘s hardhead, disciplinarian, spottily-affectionate dad.

I grew up with a functional-alcoholic version of this guy, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend repeated sessions with him at home. It was that simple.

On top of which there’s a reason why movies and plays have depended upon a narrative through-line to engage and hold the audience’s attention. I’m just average common too. I’m just like him and the same as you. So due respect to the Approval Matrix guy, but I don’t care how many years Malick worked on The Tree of Life. That’s his deal, not mine.