Day: October 22, 2012

I have to say this carefully as I don’t want to sound unappreciative or ungrateful. The new Criterion Bluray of Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby (10.30) is a very high-grade thing. It makes the 1968 classic look as lustrous and scratch-free as it did when it first opened. And it sounds crisp and full and clear as a bell.

And the disc includes a well-polished, smoothly cut documentary — “Remembering Rosemary’s Baby” — that includes face-time with Polanski, Mia Farrow and former Paramount studio chief Robert Evans. I think I liked the doc better than the film because I’ve seen the film too many times whereas the doc is fresh and new as far as it goes.

So what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong. It looks totally fine except…I’m not even sure I want to say this because I don’t mean to sound like a Bluray peon. All right, eff it, here we go: Baby Blu looks like film, and I was sorta kinda hoping for a blend of celluloid and digital enhancement that would somehow take it beyond what it was when Polanski signed off on the final answer print. No, I don’t want a “shiny” Spartacus– or Patton-level DNR deal, but I wouldn’t have minded a little DNRing. Just a tiny bit of sweetening, just a tad. But that’s not what the Criterion monks do. Their Blurays of older films always look like celluloid running through the gate of a Norelco DP-70, and sometimes that’s fine and sometimes it’s mildly disappointing and sometimes it’s a little “meh” and sometimes it’s great. This is one of the fine ones.

I only know that the Baby Bluray doesn’t have that special plus quality, that look of “whoa!…this looks better than ever!” that Blurays sometimes provide. Criterion’s Sunday Bloody Sunday Bluray has that look, or at least it looks significantly better than I’ve ever seen it on a home screen before. But their Rosemary’s Baby Bluray, truth be told, looks roughly the same as it did when I bought the DVD ten or 12 years ago and played it on my Sony 32″ analog flatscreen. And it looks roughly the same as it does when I play the Netflix version on my iPad 3. And it looks about the same as it did the last time it played on Turner Classic Movies. And it looks roughly the same as when it opened in Boston’s “combat zone” on June 13, 1968.

The Rosemary’s Baby Bluray, in short, wasn’t mastered with the idea of taking your breath away, or at least the idea of taking away the breath of someone like myself, a Bluray-worshipping, semi-sophisticated cineaste and ex-projectionist who doesn’t mind a little tasteful DNRing. It’s made for the grain dweebs who will say “whoa, really nice grain structure!” It looks like it’s being projected at the Criterion theatre a week after Bobby Kennedy was killed with a first-rate projectionist in the booth. Grain purists like Glenn Kenny will probably be happy, and I’m not putting Kenny down when I say this. So I’m not “complaining.” Really. It’s fine. I’m just saying “it is what it is.”

I’ve given up on seeing Rosemary’s Baby at 1.66 in my lifetime, but I would have been just a tad happier if Polanski and Criterion guys had at least used a full-screen 1.78 to 1 aspect ratio and given it just a bit more height instead of faintly cropping at the tops and bottoms in order to give it a 1.85 aspect ratio.

Why am I responding more favorably to samplings of Ben Whishaw‘s genteel, dweeby, soft-spoken Q in Skyfall — by most estimations a mild, anecdotal performance — than to his lead performances in Perfume and Bright Star? Because there seems to be something pained and morose and even (sorry) a tiny bit icky about Whishaw when left to his own devices, but shoehorned into the confines of a Bond film he’s quite agreeable.

And why does Daniel Craig look so creased and grubby and worn-down? He looks like an actor going through a rough streak. And he doesn’t look Bondian. Why not go all the way and shave his head completely and wear a Mike Tyson Maori tattoo on the right side of his face?

A Skyfall peek is happening this evening in Los Angeles…all right!

On one hand I was almost repulsed by Lesley Stahl‘s insipid narration of last night’s 60 Minutes segment on Steven Spielberg. (That fawning tone when she spoke of how E.T. “touched us”…yeesh!) On the other I wrote a Disney publicist this morning and asked for the third or fourth time when I might be allowed to see Lincoln. I can’t seem to harbor a pure, unconflicted thought about this film. Then again what thoughts matter without my having seen it?

“I think you’ve made your point in keeping me away from this film,” I said to the Disney rep, “but I’ve read the reactions about Lincoln clearly avoiding the oppressive sentimentality of War Horse and that Daniel Day Lewis delivering ** a highly commendable performance, at the very least.”

Spielberg told Stahl that “I knew I could do the action in my sleep at this point in my career. In my life, the action doesn’t hold any…it doesn’t attract me anymore.” And yet he’s in pre-production on Robopocalypse and is apparently open to making another Indiana Jones film.

** Last night TheWrap‘s Steve Pond called DDL’s performance “utterly commanding and absolutely undeniable as a charismatic and pragmatic man who has been beaten down by years of civil war and political fights…the world-weariness and pain that Day-Lewis shows in every frame helps save Spielberg from his worst impulses toward grandiosity and overstatement.”

Pond added that “the folks who came out of the New York Film Festival raving about Lincoln…were probably a little more excited than they should have been, the verdict from this coast, absent the enthusiasm of an excited film-festival audience, is more muted.”

Last night a kindly-mannered, liberal-minded friend was talking, God help us, about a possible Romney win. Too many voters don’t know about the economy steadily resurging, and those who know about it don’t think it’s enough. They want to be rich, and believe if Romney wins his tremendous wealth might somehow rub off on them. They refuse to accept that Bush trickle-down and regulatory leniency, which Romney wants to return to, are what led to the economic crash of ’08. They’re determined to vote against their interests, and are clinging like shipwreck survivors to pig-ignorant suspicions and intuitions. **

In short, the fate of the nation is in the hands of a few million spoiled, drunken, sugar-addicted four-year-olds who like to gamble.

On 6.7.12 I wrote that “I’ve been predicting all along that President Barack Obama will squeak through to a victory over Mittens Romney, nudging him by two or three points at best and more or less surviving by the grace of God. If he does any better it’ll be because something will drop into his lap that will make him look better to Joe Schmoe, who always votes like a grunting superstitious dumbass.”

You can’t go wrong with N.Y. Times “Five Thirty Eight” columnist Nate Silver, a brilliant statistician and poll-crunching dweeb who more or less agrees that my early-summer pronouncement is still valid. Yesterday morning he posted the following:

“If you accept the premise that Mr. Obama is ahead by some (small) margin in the tipping-point states, something that all the different methods agree on, it then becomes a question of how much doubt you should have about that advantage given the intrinsic uncertainty in polling.

“Saying that the race ‘could go either way’ is an obviously correct statement — but also one devoid of insight.

“We dare to pose a more difficult question, the one that a gambler or an investor might naturally ask: What are the odds?

“We calculate Mr. Obama’s odds as being about two chances out of three.”

** A Gallup poll released last June stated that only 47% of Americans seem to believe in evolution while 46% believe in creationism (i.e., Adam and Eve). Of the 47% backing evolution, 32% believe that God guided it. 58% of Republicans believe that humans were created within the past 10,000 years.