Excellent art. Another step in the right direction. Wells to ZDT guys: I’m in Vietnam from 11.19 through 11.30 so…okay? You know what I’m saying. Uhm…let’s see here…it’s Jessica Chastain for a possible Best Actress nom and Jennifer Ehle for a possible Best Supporting nom…right? Ehle was seriously solid in Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion.

Ignore the initial, trailer-plug portion of this piece because it soon shifts into an absorbing explanation of how the backdrop and atmosphere around the airfield were almost entirely created on a hard drive. And then it explains how portions of a fuselage set were literally rolled and turned upside down against a green screen on a sound stage. (Hat tip to Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet.)

The initial 2008 Patton Blu-ray edition “looked bad — smeary, overly de-noised, robbed of detail — and if you need cold, hard, indisputable evidence, compare this full-sized screenshot from the first release to this one from the all-new 1080p, AVC-encoded transfer.

The faintly grainy, more detailed, non DNR’d Patton Bluray, which came out yesterday.

“In the former, notice how there’s no texture to George C. Scott‘s face. Notice how his dog’s fur is weirdly smooth. Notice the distinct lack of detail in the driver’s uniform. In the shot from the remaster, however, fine film grain is visible, textures are keenly defined, and the picture appears infinitely more natural and lifelike. Go on, grain-haters, I challenge you to defend the first shot. It can’t be done.” — from Casey Broadwater‘s 11.5 Bluray.com review.

The heavily DNR’d, largely discredited 2008 Patton Bluray.

“What happened last night is this: The brown people and the black people and the women handed the white men’s asses to them as unsentimentally as white men have bought and sold and manipulated America for centuries now. Welcome to the future.” — from an 11.8 assessment pIece by Gawker‘s Cord Jefferson.

“It would do conservatives well to look at some numbers today: 75 percent is the chunk of the Latino vote that went to Obama, according to polling data, along with 93 percent of blacks. Seventy-three percent of Asians broke for the president, and only 44 percent of women voted for Romney. [And] adding to the GOP’s woes is that, in just a couple decades, the U.S. is going to be a country where brown people outnumber white people by a lot — then they’re double-fucked.

“The grim realization that the world is a far different and more diverse place than it once was has fallen like a shadow over the GOP since its defeat last night, turning its already pallid complexion an even lighter shade of alabaster.”

I was searching around for this Brian Williams-Donald Trump clip last night, and couldn’t find it. Ditto the Karl Rove denial argument against giving Ohio to Obama. Both surfaced this morning. YouTube clips need to turn around faster. Nobody wants to wait four or six or eight hours.

DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze always goes too easy and is too much of a grain monk for my tastes, but he’s having server issues and he needs a little PayPal action to get things going again. If you have a heart, you’ll help out. Tooze never writes me back and is therefore deficient in my book, but he delivers great high-rez screen capturings in his Bluray reviews.

The most authoritative Peter Jackson/Tolkien fansite of all, theonering.net, has compiled a list of all the U.S. theatres showing the high-frame-rate (HFR) version of The Hobbit. But I don’t trust it because of the eight LA theaters listed, the respected Arclight Hollywood isn’t included but the Arclight Sherman Oaks is — absurd. Check the New York area listings and it’s clear these Australian guys don’t know the geography or the culture very well.

Susan Lacy‘s Inventing David Geffen, an American Masters documentary, will air on PBS on 11.20.12. I watched it twice last summer in preparation for a PBS press event with Geffen at the Beverly Hilton. After covering this I posted a combination review and commentary on 7.22. With the show airing in two weeks I might as well re-run the piece.

Inventing David Geffen “is a somewhat candid backrub piece that pretty much allows the 69 year-old supermogul to tell his life story the way he wanted it told. Which feels okay as you’re watching it, I guess. It doesn’t excite but doesn’t offend either. And I watched it twice in a row, which says something.

“Lacy includes an occasional blunt comment (one-time litigant Neil Young shares a few choice phrases) about Geffen’s combative nature and scrappy business dealings so as to give a feeling that the doc doesn’t ‘flatter,’ but it mostly does flatter in a sense because it underlines how an awful lot of people are scared of Geffen, and therefore respectful. They all kiss the ring.

“Lacy’s doc is an engrossing sit because Geffen is a fascinating player, full of emotionality (some of it angry and combative) and contradictions and humor and fierce will. As a columnist I love rich hardballers (Geffen is worth over $5 billion) who are tough and know all the angles and how to play everything to their advantage, but Lacy’s doc is not about that territory. Not really.

“Inventing David Geffen is an agreeable thing, nostalgic for the ’60s and ’70s, flavorful and amusing at times and ‘honest’ as far as it goes but basically friendly and affectionate. Lacy obviously likes Geffen, and after watching her film it’s hard not to feel the same. He’s a kick, he’s been around, he’s lived it, he knows everyone.

“But if after seeing this film you want a less varnished portrait that’s probably closer to the real deal, dust off the late Tom King‘s 2001 biography — “The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys and Sells The New Hollywood.” Now that had real juice and adrenalin and aroma and nerve, you bet! Geffen hated it, calling it a hatchet job and conniving and agenda-driven, but if you read Lisa DePaulo’s June 2001 New York article about how King and Geffen’s relationship began amiably with a written agreement to give King access and then deteriorated and got worse and worse until everything was poison, it’s hard to accept Geffen’s view that King just set out to trash him with little regard for truth or fairness or appropriate journalistic standards.

During the PBS press q & a event Geffen said he’d “had no input into this film, honestly,” referring to Lacy’s doc. “I had nothing to do with the makeup of those questions. I wanted to tell the story as accurately as I can. I had no idea what this was gonna be. I didn’t think I was a good candidate for this thing. But I was happy with it.

“I’m proud of all the things I’ve done,” he said. “I [see] this film and I think, ‘wow, you did have all that.’ I don’t think about the past. I think about what I’m doing now. I really don’t reflect on my career. I don’t like to talk about myself. I avoid it as much as possible. When I saw the film, I thought ‘wow’…I was impressed.”

All through the sometimes depressing and occasionally scary fall election season N.Y. Times Fivethirtyeight columnist and stats guy Nate Silver chilled out the entire liberal community from Seattle to Miami, San Diego to Bangor. I slept better because of this guy. He recently projected Obama’s electoral count to be 300-plus, and he was right. Obama won all the swing states except North Carolina, had a “pretty decisive win,” etc. And yet Silver wasn’t that good last year at predicting Oscars.

During last night’s ABC election coverage Diane Sawyer was clearly not her usual self. Tipsy, slurry, feeling no pain, three sheets to the wind. Speaking as an ex-drinker, I think I know the behavior. Look at George Stephanopoulos as she gets into trouble. He’s clearly sensing what’s up.

Does Sawyer not have an assistant who’s seen Flight? What did drunk Denzel do before the big testimony scene at the end? Are you going to tell me Sawyer’s assistant couldn’t call a John Goodman-type character and have him rush over to the studio, etc.?