A friend saw Lee Daniels’ The Butler earlier today. I asked him how it was. All right, what I really said was “how bad is it?” And then I said, “Be warned — I don’t want to hear how surprisingly good it is. Please don’t tell me this if you had that reaction.” He replied as follows: “Sorry, but I found it movingly corny in the same mold (except with a historical sweep and some stunt casting) as The Help, which it reminded me of. It’s a much more disciplined film than Daniels’ Precious or The Paperboy. Not a good film but an effective one.” I wrote a one-word reply: “Goddammit!” Then he wrote back and said that Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman “was applauding at the end, as was the bulk of the (SAG) audience.”

You’ve got beards, you’ve got flannel shirts and hunter hats, you’ve got twangy shitkicker accents, you’ve got a flawed loser protagonist, you’ve got the No Country For Old Men-resembling plot…what else you got, man?

Here’s a clip of original Wicker Man director Robin Hardy announcing that a version resembling his original 102-minute cut will be released on Bluray by Studio Canal on 10.14, and will be preceded by a 9.27 theatrical release. The forthcoming Bluay is being called “most complete version of the film possible.” But what kind of shape will it be in? And how interesting and/or revelatory will the restored footage be? Why doesn’t Hardy at least hint at the differences between the 88-minute cut and this new one? I sense deception. I smell a rat.

DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze has seen Warner Home Video’s Shane Bluray (streeting on 8.13) and says the following: “Having seen [the] DVD version of Shane probably a dozen times, the new 1080p image really jumps out for me. Not knowing what it looked like theatrically [in 1953], I can only say that I’m very pleased with this appearance. It’s clean [and] colors are very bright [although] some of the indoor and night sequences are a shade dark. Skin tones are warm. There is more information in the frame on all four edges [compared to the DVD] and it’s nice to see some of the original grain in the backgrounds. Incredibly deep black levels at times — almost moiring. I’m seeing some very minor edge-enhancement if I zoom in far enough. Overall I was mesmerized by the areas of improvement over the [2000 DVD].”

““For the first time I noticed the reddish-violet markings on the pearl-white hand grip on Jack Palance‘s six-shooters.” — from my 4.28.13 review of the restored Shane at the TCM Classic Film Festival.

“It was drop-to-your-knees — the most beautiful rendering I’ve ever seen of this 1953 classic. It was like seeing it new and fresh all over again. It was almost like being there on the set. The detail was to die for.” — from my 4.28.13 review.

I’ll say this about Baltasar Kormakur‘s 2 Guns (Universal, 8.2), the Denzel Washington-Mark Wahlberg drive-around and shoot-’em-up popcorn flick. It’s a lot more engaging — looser, funnier, more entertaining — than last year’s Contraband, which Kormakur directed (and which also starred Wahlberg). It’s basically a silly late-summer jagoff that’s about Washington and Wahlberg playing “catch” with each other — i.e., the old chemistry-rapport-mutual backscratch put-on/goof-off thing. Call it “attitude-surfing.”

There’s not an ounce of real-world credibility in any of 2 Guns, and that’s the point, I think. There’s one really funny line delivered by Wahlberg (which had to have been written after the casting of Edward James Olmos as a Mexican drug kingpin) that I laughed out loud at. For that one instant, for me, the movie came alive. There’s also a pronounced homage to Don Siegel‘s Charley Varrick (’73) that I found highly amusing (and which I mentioned to Marshall Fine after the screening).

I don’t know how much of 2 Guns was improvised by Washington-Wahlberg and how much of it was written on the page, but respect to screenwriter Blake Masters for at least writing a fair amount of the dialogue. I can tell you that the plot, based on the same-titled graphic wank by Steven Grant, is absolute bullshit. The movie has no undercurrent, no themes — nothing except the wank-off vibe of everyone just making the damn thing and collecting their paychecks and taking their dicks out and stroking them as they cash their checks and hack around between takes.

Denzel was really well paid, Wahlberg was really well paid…why can’t I be be like them as I sit there watching this thing? Better paid, I mean. At least that.

I have to go uptown for a lunch thing so that’s the end of this riff, but I’ll add to it sometime later this afternoon.

If I was planning on attending the 2013 Venice Film Festival (8.28 to 9.7) I would be especially keen on catching the absolute, first-time-anywhere world premieres of….well, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity, of course, but also Errol Morris‘s Donald Rumsfeld doc The Unknown Known — how can this not be a fascinating drill-down? Absolute determinism and resolution in the face of contradicting facts, etc.