In a recent interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, In A World‘s Lake Bell (star, director, screenwriter) lamented what she called the “sexy baby voice virus”, which she says has been adopted by young women everywhere. Okay, right. Except I bitched about the same thing three years ago in a piece called “Chirpy Minnie Mouse,” and again on 7.31.11 in a piece called “They Had Voices Then.”

Name a film that you didn’t care for at all (or felt seriously underwhelmed by) when you first saw it, and then you warmed to it the second time, and then the third time it was like “wow, what was I thinking the first time?” For me it’s Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton. I don’t know what was wrong when I first saw it, but my initial reaction was “yeah, okay…pretty good.” Then I caught it a second time at the Toronto Film Festival and said to myself, “This is better than I first realized.” I think I really started creaming big-time when I saw it the fourth time, when I first watched the Bluray. I’ve seen it maybe 9 or 10 times since. It just keeps getting better and better. George Clooney to poker player (quietly, casually): “You bought some hair too.” Poker player: “With your money!” And Sydney Pollack‘s performance? Forget about it.

Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business opened 30 years and 5 days ago. It captured and in some ways defined the early ’80s zeitgeist (Reagan-era morality, go for the greenbacks, the receding of progressive ’70s culture). And it brought about an ungodly torrent of tits-and-zits comedies, so numerous and pernicious that they became a genre that forever tarnished the meaning of “mainstream Hollywood comedy.” But Risky Business was a perfect brew. The Tom Cruise-Rebecca DeMornay sex scenes were legendary, the vibe of upper-middle-class entitlement was delivered with natural authority, Joe Pantoliano‘s Guido is arguably a more memorable character than his Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos, and the opening dream sequence is just as funny and on-target in its depiction of encroaching doom as Woody Allen‘s Bergmanesque train-car sequence at the beginning of Stardust Memories.

I’m queer for Blurays of classic black-and-white films. Until recently I’ve never believed that I could get Bluray quality out of digital high-def streaming, but I’m now convinced that Vudu is a reasonably good delivery system for that. And they claim to have significantly more high-def movies in their library than anyone else. And that their new films are available day-and-date with DVD releases. And I feel that the quality is pretty good. Not perfect but commendable for the most part.

There’s no Bluray for John Frankehheimer‘s Seven Days in May (’64) and until yesterday I’d never seen it in high-def on a video monitor, but Vudu delivers a very satisfying high-def version — rich, sharp and silvery. I also watched a high-def version of Stanley Kramer‘s Judgment at Nuremberg (’61), and found it mostly satisfying. And yet a Vudu high-def version of From Here To Eternity (which is coming out on Bluray in a few weeks) didn’t look as robust and gleaming as a high-def rendering on TCM that I caught last spring. And a high-def Vudu viewing of Stanley Kramer‘s On The Beach looks good texture-wise but is presented — horrors! — in 1.78 rather than 1.66 (which is how it’s presented on the old DVD). So that’a demerit.