A friend asked for reactions to the Hitchcock Masterpiece Bluray Collection, and I offered the following: “Viewings have been haphazard with deadlines and screenings, but I’m very pleased, as expected, with Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt, which seem absolutely perfect and gleaming with silver. And color-wise I’m quite happy with The Man Who Knew Too Much (sharp, crisp, luminous images with awesome detail in CU shots), Rear Window (heavenly velvety blacks), The Trouble With Harry (bursting with eye-popping fall colors) and, as already stated, with Vertigo for the most part.

“I’m even okay with The Birds as far as it goes. It doesn’t appear to have been remastered, but it looks five times better than the most recent DVD. It’s only that Mr. Hitchcock’s handling of children’s behavior was atrocious, embarassing. Each and every time a little kid shows up in a Hitchcock film I start clenching my teeth, waiting for the awfulness.

“I tried watching Rope and couldn’t stand the staginess and weak color. I hate the old-fashioned gauziness of Torn Curtain for the most part. Marnie is almost laughably bad in spots. And I haven’t yet watched Frenzy or Family Plot. Poor Hitch was over as a world-class artist-auteur at the top of his powers after The Birds. Or after Psycho, really, as even The Birds shows signs of complacency, the motor slowing down, a hardening of the creative arteries.

“I’ve naturally ignored Psycho and North by Northwest as they’re the exact same Bluray discs previously issued.

“Oh, and the cardboard book binder is already falling apart. The glue is giving out and the discs are falling through the slots on the wrong side. So the person in charge of overseeing manufacturing of the binder needs to be called on the carpet.

My heart goes to out to Jon Hamm for that little stomach suck-in thing he’s doing. Anatomical adjustments are necessary to maintain one’s honor while wearing swim trunks, and especially when standing next to a woman whose jagged teeth have launched a thousand ships. From a 6.8.12 post called “Dents d’unme femme”: “I’m just talking about the current aesthetic of embracing your allness, warts and all, vs. the old aesthetic of correcting physical errors, as it were.”

Jessica Pare, Jon Hamm during recent Mad Men shoot in Hawaii.

With David Mamet‘s Glengarry Glen Ross currently in previews at the Gerald Schoenfeld on West 45th Street, Bloomberg is reporting that Al Pacino (playing Shelley Levene) is receiving $125 G’s per week plus 5% of the profits. Pacino played Ricky Roma in the Glengarry film version, but he wasn’t as good as Joe Mantegna, who played Roma during the initial 1984 Broadway run, and every so often I feel compelled to remind people of this.

Mantegna so owned that role that his shadow still looms. Mantegna’s Roma haunts. As good as Pacino sounds in this clip, Mantegna was three or four or maybe even five times better. Really. I was there on opening night. Trust me.

Uncertain and irked about Presidential poll numbers, HuffPost contributor Keith Thomson believes that gambling bets are better indicators of the November 6th election than political surveys, and reports that all the gambling operations are betting on Barack Obama to win.

Koleman Strumpf, a University of Kansas economics professor who tracks betting trends, tells Thomson that (a) “the betting markets have to think hard about what they’re saying since they are putting their money at stake” and (b) “polls tend to reflect what people are thinking at a given moment, versus a forecast of what will happen on election day — post-convention bounces, for instance.”

Paulick Report editor Ray Paulick, one of America’s top horseracing handicappers, says that “gamblers have more experience with cheaters. They take voter fraud into their metrics. Polls don’t. Nor do polls take into account intangibles like how each state’s secretary of state factors in or systems within a state designed to eliminate voters.”

“In 2008, 90 percent of gamblers correctly forecast an Obama victory,” Thomson writes. “They were also on the money with 48 of 50 states.

“As of this writing, betting at the three biggest prediction markets is as follows: Betfair has Obama with a 64 percent chance to win to Romney’s 36 percent; Intrade has the president at 58 percent; and the Iowa Electronic Markets have the president at 59 percent. Oddschecker shows bookmakers to be even more bullish on Obama.

“Why are the polls and gamblers so far apart?

“‘The answer highlights one of the main differences between the polls and markets like Intrade,’ says Intrade’s exchange operations manager Carl Wolfenden. ‘The polls ask who you’re going to vote for — a question that requires an emotional response. Intrade asks who you think will win — a rational question that requires someone to look at the facts and real world events, such as polls, debates, speeches, gaffes, scandals and crises. One of these facts is the Electoral College, which isn’t accounted for in polls.’

“Why the big lead for Obama?

“‘Our markets recognize that Romney probably needs to win Ohio to beat Obama,” Wolfenden says. “And so the price for Obama to be reelected has closely tracked his probability of winning Ohio. So while Romney may lead in the polls, and he may have flipped a number of other key states — such as Florida, Virginia, Colorado — to his side of the ledger, our markets appear to believe that without Ohio he can’t get it done.'”

We need to remind ourselves every so often that the racism thrown at Barack Obama (both the dog-whistle and trumpet-call variety) by slimy, race-baiting Republicans is only partially directed at Obama the man or his policies as President. It’s mostly directed at the Obama metaphor, as his ascendancy to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. illustrates the descending influence of white people and the corresponding rise in power by mixed-race multiculturalism.

Which is why almost all the alpha-dog white males out there are against him. Obama’s Presidency says to jowly, white-bread, beer-drinking Anglo-Italian-German-Nordic-Polish-Irish-descended males that “your big-dog dominance days are over and this country is generally getting darker, and so it’s all gradually starting to tilt in favor of values and traditions embraced by a mixture of White, African-American, Latino and mixed-race couples.

“So like it or not but white-bread dominance is on the brink of over, and chances are growing that your daughters or granddaughters are going to get married to an African-American, Latino and mixed-race husband, and that the remnants of your genetic fair-skinned line will diminish over time.”

A friend with two little kids tells me there’s a private school in West Hollywood that all the parents want their kids to go to, and that it has a policy, he said, of (a) favoring mixed-race kids and (b) discriminating against white-bread kids. I love it.