Day: September 15, 2012

With Alfred Hitchcock pushing through in a renewed way (HBO’s The Girl, Fox Searchlight’s Hitchcock + the Universal Bluray boxset glitch) and a new Strangers on a Train Bluray streeting on 10.9, it’s an opportune time to re-savor the Strangers finale. I was just doodling around last night and there it was again, reminding how quickly and suddenly things can fall apart and people can lose their reason.

The carousel crash is a very impressive special effect for 1951, but it’s not half bad by 2012 standards either. The timing and rhythm of the montage — the cutting together of all the pieces — is just right, and I shudder to think of how this scene would be edited today.

And it’s all propelled by weird mistakes and shocking ineptitude. A cop fires at a mere suspect in a murder case, and in so doing fires right into a carousel with kids on it? The old man crawling underneath the wildly spinning carousel, and then he doesn’t save the day at the end — he reverses the engine too suddenly and thereby worsens the panic and chaos and kills at least one passenger (i.e., Robert Walker‘s Bruno Antony) and God knows how many others.

My favorite bit is (a) the panicking mother wailing “my little boy!” and then cutting to the kid having the time of his life, and then (b) a second bit with Walker almost throwing the kid off and Farley Granger preventing this.

And I love that vaguely horrific, early Bunuelian flavor in those one or two inserts of the carousel horse heads bobbing up and down.

It’s not just Daniel Day Lewis‘s decision to channel Matthew Modine in his voicing of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg‘s forthcoming biopic. My insect antennae are also picking up hints of that old Spielbergian schmaltz, particularly among the strains of John Williams‘ music. I’m hoping for something deeper and grander but we all know who and what Spielberg is, and I smell trouble, real trouble. That’s not a prediction as I know nothing and trailers almost always misrepresent. But the signs aren’t good.

It’s been known for eighteen months or so that Fox Home Video has been working on a less digitally scrubbed, more celluloid-looking HD remastering of Franklin Schaffner‘s Patton. This is to correct the “bad” Patton Bluray that came out in June 2008, and which grain purists and tech dweebs claimed was far too shiny and had removed all kinds of detail from the original film.

(l.) Jacket art for “shiny” Patton Bluray that came out in June 2008; (r.) jacket for a presumably more film-like, less-digitally-scrubbed Patton Bluray that will street on 11.6.

The grainmonks were correct — the “bad” Patton did remove data in order to present a sharp, spiffy DNR’d image. Bluray plebians like myself didn’t mind the shiny Patton that much (and neither have 97% of the owners of that Bluray), but I understand and respect the grainmonk complaints.

In any event, Fox Home Video is issuing a new, somewhat grainier, presumably more detailed Patton on November 6th.

I for one am looking forward to this new, somewhat grainier but presumably more detailed and textured Patton Bluray, but I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t confess to being a little bit scared of what might be in store. Every time a grainmonk-approved Bluray remastering comes out, it seems, I always feel a bit disappointed if not horrified. I hated WHV’s 70th anniversary Casablanca re-do, which took a perfectly fine-looking, slightly DNR’ed version and turned it into a digital-mosquito grainstorm movie. Schaffner’s film was shot on large-format 65mm widescreen, of course, and should render a dazzling amount of clarity without any grain concerns so here’s hoping.

Here are Robert Harris‘s original comments, posted on 6.9.09, about the “bad” Patton Bluray:

“It doesn’t look like film. It looks like scrubbed data, shorn of its high frequency information. I’m certain that the film has more information than I’m seeing. The image is impeccably clean, with only an occasional bit of errant dirt, which is welcome. But it seems to be yet another example of film that no longer looks like film.”

Yesterday Universal Home Video announced a postponement of the Blu-ray release of Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection from the previous street date of 9.25 to 10.30. “Certain imperfections with the product have come to light and, as a result, we are delaying the release date to correct these points,” the release explained. “Our goal is to always deliver the best possible product to our consumers.”

As I understand it one of the imperfections that Universal is presently trying to correct is the color on the Vertigo Bluray (i.e., James Stewart’s aubergine-colored suit which used to be brown, the electric blue LSD suits worn at the inquest scene, the incorrect orange tint during the main-title sequence).

It’s a mark of character and integrity, of course, when a large company is willing to suck it in and admit error and try to improve a product before putting it on the market. But of course, Universal came to this realization only after voices outside the company (i.e., guys like Nick Wrigley and myself) saying this sucks and that looks awful and what’s wrong here?, etc. You’d think that if they had any pride they’d know what was wrong by their own reckonings and wouldn’t have to hear it from journalists. Alas, this is what major corporate video outfits are like — i.e., basically hermetic and ultra-political and often in denial when technical problems are evident. They don’t want to know about problems that they don’t want to know about unless they’re forced to deal with them.

I arrived at my Manhattan loft rental yesterday afternoon at 5 pm following a 40-minute passport line (thanks, guys!) and then a grueling, traffic-snarled 75-minute bus ride from Newark Airport. (Next time I’ll taken the air train to Newark and then a train to Penn Station.) Dinner with pallies at Friend of a Farmer, and then gelato at Eataly, a massive, brightly-lit Italian food deli-restaurant, followed by ping-pong at Spin on East 23rd street.

If you want to save yourself the usual $200 to $250 NYC hotel room cost, this — a bedroom in a loft on Lafayette Street — is one alternative. Not too bad.

We all have to adjust to the oppressive and disgusting sweatbox atmosphere on NYC subway platforms during the summer, but here is it mid-September and yesterday the platforms still felt inferno-ish. The bottom line is that September and sometimes even early October are summer in Manhattan, and then you have nice fall weather for maybe four or five weeks, and then then it’s suddenly Siberia. NYC sweater weather is my one of the greatest things about this town, and there seems to be less and less of it each year.

On the soft-drink racks inside Etaly.

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