“Bless Gore Vidal for having exposed liars and hypocrites and monsters, and having made their lives just a bit more awkward or painful. Yes!” — tweeted around 10:40 pm, or about an hour after hearing of the death of Gore Vidal following a screening of Hope Springs.

Vidal worked as a Ben-Hur screenwriter for a long period — post-Karl Tunberg, pre-Christopher Fry. Here’s that famous story about Vidal having suggested to Ben-Hur director William Wyler that Messala’s fierce rage toward Ben-Hur might have been driven by a “lover’s quarrel gone wrong.”

And for all of it Bob never laments much less condemns unrestricted access to assault weapons, without which the Aurora massacre would have been less likely to happen or surely less deadly.

It’s not the pompadour wig or the glittery wardrobe or the piano-playing. That stuff’s easy. The big challenge facing Michael Douglas in his portrayal of Wladziu Valentino Liberace in Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra is getting the speaking voice right.

Matt Damon as Scott Thorson and Michael Douglas as Liberace.

In this morning’s post about the new Skyfall trailer, I wrote that “the comedic surreal rules that were once used by the Wile E. Coyote vs. Roadunner cartoons have been embraced by the super-action genre.” I was referring to characters falling dozens or hundreds of feet (like Mr. Coyote used to in the cartoons) and somehow not hitting the pavement through this or that escape clause. But there’s one cartoon bit action movies haven’t embraced that I’d really like to see.

I’m speaking of the extended suspended animation rule. That’s the one in which the Coyote will chase the Roadrunner off a very tall mesa or mountaintop, and run right off the edge of a cliff…but without falling. That’s because he doesn’t realize that the cliff has ended and he’s now suspended over a canyon with nothing below him but air. He can’t fall, in short, until he fully accepts that there’s nothing holding him up. He starts to suspect that he might be in trouble. Without looking he reaches around underneath his feet to try and feel ground or rock…nothing. He looks back at the cliff edge and sees he’s not standing on it. Then he looks down and grasps the reality. Then he looks at the camera and goes “oh, no,” pleading with fate or God not to let him fall. And then he’s gone, making a whistling sound as he drops to the desert floor like a bomb. Sometimes the camera would just watch from above and note a very faint impact sound and a small puff of smoke as he hits. And then he’d be fine in the next scene.

I want to see Colin Farell perform this kind of scene in Total Recall. Seriously, why not? Action films haven’t the slightest interest in adhering to the laws of physics so why not just go full cartoon?

If this were my map I would throw out Fast Times at Ridgemont High as the fill-in for California (what an insult!…as if California is full of adolescent stoner mallheads), and replace it with either (a) Jacques Tourneur‘s Out Of The Past, which encompasses San Francisco, Los Angeles, Bridgeport and Lake Tahoe (as well as New York and Acapulco), or (b) Karel Reisz‘s Who’ll Stop The Rain, which encompasses Oakland, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

I’d like to see a much bigger map that gets much more specific and which assigns movie titles to particular towns and/or blends their names (like, let’s say, The Wild One and Hollister, California, where the original 1947 motorcycle-gang riot that inspired the 1953 Marlon Brando film).

The Movie Map reminds me of the one that accompanied Joel Garreau‘s The Nine Nations of North America, which came out in 1981. Question: Do the same nations exist 30 years later, or have the borders shifted to some degree? Do the same names apply?

The first thing that comes to mind is “did Nancy Meyers have something to do with this?” She didn’t. The culprit is director-writer Justin Zackham, author of The Bucket List screenplay and director of Going Greek. Obviously aimed at silver-haired women and all the squares, schmucks and schmoes who love films about characters who have shiny copper pots hanging in their kitchen (i.e., a classic Meyers signature).

Painful dialogue, broad gestures, winking and signalling at the audience from a mile away…what kind of retardo finds this stuff remotely funny?

Robert De Niro is supposed to be better than pretty good in The Silver Linings Playbook so he probably took this one thinking, “90% of everything is crap….you can’t hit a homer every time at bat…money is money…I’ll just hold my nose and do it,” etc.

The bearded devil from Angel Heart finds De Niro leaving the set of Bang the Drum Slowly and ushers him into a room at a nearby motel. An irritated DeNiro says “whaddaya whaddaya?…I’m set to do Mean Streets and then The Godfather Part II and then Taxi Driver and then 1900 and then The Last Tycoon and New York, New York…whadday want from me?” And the devil cracks open a hard-boiled egg, sprinkles it with salt, turns off the light, fires up a projector and shows De Niro a reel from The Big Wedding and says, “This is what you’ll be doing in 40 years.”

It was kind of a good thing in a couple of different ways when Mitt Romney‘s traveling press secretary Rick Gorka told reporters to “kiss my ass” and “shove it.” First, these were the most human-sounding, refreshingly un-scripted statements to come out of the Romney organization in months. Second, Gorka’s anger is an obvious indicator of stress and frustration within the Romney inner circle (i.e., they’re giving it to Gorka and he’s passing it along).

We’d all love it, I suspect, if more Romney camp statements were on this level. Q: “Governor Romney…? A: “Why don’t you drop to your knees and blow me, asshole?” During the end of the 1972 campaign George McGovern told a heckler to “kiss my ass,” and that was surely indicative of McGovern’s “fuck it, I’ve lost this election” attitude. Profanity isn’t spoken — it splashes out of the bucket and onto the floor. There’s very little lying in it, usually. Richard Nixon‘s use of “cocksuckers” and “Jew boys”…classic stuff.

Sam Mendes is a classy, seasoned director who knows from poise and discipline, and it’s clear from the new Skyfall trailer (which I’m the last guy in the world to respond to, due to my time zone) that he’s kicked things up. But boil it down and it’s the same old shit. It’s simply been re-vitalized with Roger Deakins‘ brilliant cinematography and re-energized with Thomas Newman‘s striking orchestral score, and edited with serious pizazz by Stuart Baird, or possibly by some house guy. But calm down already. It’s just a Bond film.

Javier Bardem‘s yellow hair isn’t “bad” or problematic, as some have said — it’s just standard Bond arch-villain hair. Didn’t Chris Walken use the same dye in A View to a Kill?

And you can’t get shot and conveniently splash into a river or a bay off a fast-moving train and just, whatever, wake up a few weeks later. That’s just another example of “have him jump off a building or a bridge and fall several stores because falling doesn’t matter any more” big-studio bullshit, and Mendes knows it. Outside of multiplexes falling from 60 or 70 feet is almost always lethal, and crashing into water at almost any velocity can knock you out and break bones. The comedic surreal rules that were once used by the Wile E. Coyote vs. Roadunner cartoons have been embraced by the super-action genre, and that means check-out time for the realists in the audience. And it’s largely the fault of asshole studio executives who want to be competitive with the other action movies that ape the Coyote vs. Road Runner aesthetic. Stupid gets. If I had my way I would throw them off a moving train and into a river.

For some reason, many, many sites (including Deadline) waited until yesterday or last night or this morning to report or comment on the so-called “Lana Wachowski comes out” video. I posted it + comment (“Lana Is Cool“) last Thursday.

I don’t know why we can’t seem to record Oscar Poker on Sundays…we’re getting a little bit lazy, slacking off. I include myself in this equation. Aurora aftermath, lingering after-vibe — “Fear is irrational.” We discussed Hope Springs for a minute or two (i.e., could be decent, will make a lot of money, the under-served female audience). I mentioned the box-office prospects of The Campaign, and before you knew it we were into a whole big political thing. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

I was thinking a day or two ago about how John Frankenheimer‘s The Train (’65) — the last Hollywood-produced action flick shot in black-and-white, and a reminder of how wonderfully alive and detailed monochrome could look — really needs to be remastered for Bluray. Jean Tournier and Walter Wottitz‘s cinematography is lighted and captured to perfection — it’s just heavenly, and I don’t what the hangup is. The last MGM Home Video DVD of The Train was created 13 years ago.

The Train at its proper aspect ratio of 1.66 to 1.

The Train is especially valued by me because of its 1.66 aspect ratio, which the 1.85 fascists….okay, I’ll restrain myself. One hopes that if and when The Train is Blurayed the fascists will consider the fact that all United Artists releases (which this was back in ’65) were projected theatrically at 1.66, and that The Train was issued on laser disc and DVD at 1.66. Anyway, I was imagining how I would feel if and when this Bluray were to be somehow Furmaneked, and how angry I’ll be if and when this occurs.

But today this anger went away when I read a nearly month-old article by Kyle Westphal about aspect ratios (called “Invasion of the Aspect Ratios“) on the Northwest Chicago Film Society’s website. It’s an an intelligent, perceptive, fair-minded essay, and it says some things that even the 1.85 fascists might agree with. Well, you never know. But I know it made me realize that at least some people out there get what’s really been going on with the aspect-ratio battles.

Here’s part of what Westphal said — fascists should consider the boldfaced portions:

“In some sense, it’s only natural that home video releases stir [highly emotional] feelings. DVD and Blu-ray versions tend to fix a film in time and space; the image is immune from the scratching and cinching that occasionally afflict film prints, but it’s also removed from the realm of interpretation and manipulation available to the projectionist or archivist. There’s no adjusting the focus or framing after a studio QC tech has ruled the matter closed.

“Magnificent Obsession is either 1.37:1 or 2:1, but not both. The recent vogue for 16:9 HDTV sets, which approximate fairly closely the 1.85:1 theatrical ratio, often dictates the ultimate answer, just as decades of 4:3 sets once assured a very different outcome, with the left and right edges panned-and-scanned away for cropped consumption. For asset managers and telecine operators alike, the question of the proper aspect ratio can yield but one valid answer.

“Longtime fans often dispute this answer. They recall television broadcasts or 16mm prints seen in decades-old campus film society screenings and the widescreen versions simply contradict the emotional and aesthetic unity they found in these open-matte prints. Trade papers and studio records may dictate a wide aspect ratio for a given film, but the fan holds onto details at the far reaches of the frame that look artistically indisputable.

“In some sense, this is the ultimate form of auteurism: the director intended things that the entire motion picture industry, from mogul on down to projectionist, conspired to cover-up. The great auteurs defiantly went about their business anyway.

The same shot Furmaneked at 1.85.

“What’s the right answer? We can argue about intent all day, but whose intent matters here in the first place? Is it what the studio dictated in their press book or what the lab printed in the leader? Is it what the director wanted on screen or what the cinematographer saw in the viewfinder? And what if that intent is deliberately confused or clouded? Famously, Paramount produced Shane in 1.37:1, but released it with a suggested ratio of 1.66:1 at the dawn of the widescreen era, fearful that its backlog product would look antiquated in wider pastures.

“Rather than jockey for the ‘correct’ aspect ratio for a given film, we should respect the multiplicity of possible answers suggested by material circumstances of the exhibition sector.

“During the transition to widescreen and again today in the waning days of the multiplex, the intended ratio (whether conjectured, intuited, or proven on paper) often ran up against the constraints imposed upon (and often by) the exhibitor. In the tumultuous year of 1953, studios weighed and hedged against various technological innovations (widescreen, 3-D, curved screens, magnetic sound, etc.) and announced new in-house aspect ratios before the autumn unveiling of Fox’s The Robe in Cinemascope and high-fidelity, four-track surround sound.

“Until the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers standarized non-anamorphic American productions to 1.85:1, the studios released product in a variety of ratios. RKO and Paramount preferred 1.66:1. Disney and United Artists suggested 1.75:1. Columbia and Warner Brothers put out 1.85:1 product. Universal-International released 2:1. These prints often looked identical to the naked eye, with the different ratios being entirely dependent on the proper lens and aperture plates for the projector. Surely these ratios prevailed at studio screening rooms but were these dictates respected anywhere else?

“Cinemascope was itself an expensive proposition, with many showmen balking at the high cost of equipping a theater for magnetic sound. Did exhibitors, historically disinclined to spend a cent more than necessary to get an image on screen, invest in equipment for all these variant ratios, especially when the anamorphic Cinemascope was the only one that carried any name recognition with the public?

“Paramount allowed its VistaVision prints to be shown at a number of different ratios, as the conceit of the brand had more to do with high-quality origination on an enlarged camera negative than with the final shape on screen. Anyone who’s seen an original 35mm IB Technicolor print from VistaVision elements will likely agree with Paramount’s reasoning.

“Aside from the investment in lenses, plates, and masking controls for these competing widescreen ratios, what of the inherent limitations of theater architecture? Whether working in former legitimate houses or purpose-built cinemas, the exact ratio on screen was often determined by relatively pedestrian factors like the throw distance between the projectors and the screen, the focal lengths of available lenses, the shape of the proscenium, the constraint of the curtain, and the pictorial sensibility (or lack thereof) on the part of the management. “

In disclosing the day’s second snooze-worthy announcement about The Master (i.e., that it’ll turn up at the Toronto Film Festival following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, which was announced earlier today), TheWrap‘s Steve Pond suggested that the breakup of TomKat may have been a factor in Harvey Weinstein‘s decision to open Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film in mid September rather than mid-October. Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays a sort of L. Ron Hubbard-type guy in the film, y’see.

When Pond asked his source “whether the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes divorce had an impact on moving up the release date,” he was told “well, it sure as hell helps.” In other words, not really but it sorta goosed things along.