Here’s an example of how an intriguing Bluray jacket design can make a very old and familiar film seem almost new again. The problem for me is that this 1973 Robert Altman neo-noir…I should probably shut up until I see the disc but my impression, having seen this film nine or ten times, is that it can’t look all that much better in terms of heightened resolution or texture. A Bluray upgrade probably can’t improve that much upon the DVD, or so I suspect. The style of Vilmos Zsigmond‘s widescreen cinematography (always moving, slowly gliding left to right and vice versa, never static) is what matters. He shot inventively but under an Elliott Kastner budget. Maybe the soundtrack will be improved.

Earlier today Deadline‘s Michael Fleming urged director Paul Greengrass and producer Scott Rudin to get going on Memphis, their long-gestating docudrama about the last chapter in the life of Martin Luther King. Fleming wrote this because (a) he’s apparently a fan of the Memphis script, but mostly because (b) Oliver Stone and Jamie Foxx are reportedly interested in making some kind of sprawling King biopic with DreamWorks and Warner Bros. Except he doesn’t mention something that Greengrass told me at the after-party for the recent Captain Phillips premiere in Los Angeles. Greengrass had cast an Atlanta-based preacher — apparently an eloquent speech-giver and sermonizer — to play King in Memphis, but the poor guy passed away “three or four months ago,” a friend confides. Greengrass was dispirited by this loss (he didn’t want to go into it during our chat but it was clearly a sore subject for him) and apparently lost his directorial mojo as a result. Or something like that. I should have pushed for more information but an instinct told me to go easy. The next day I tried to learn the preacher’s name but got nowhere. I cold-called three or four feature casting agencies in Atlanta…zip. All I know is what Greengrass told me.

Here are four of fourteen just-released posters from Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac. Proving once again that sex instantly loses its allure when you go graphic and explicit. Especially under bright lights. As tens of thousands of cheaply shot porn films have made clear. Which doesn’t mean that Von Trier’s film is necessarily reflective of these. Nobody knows anything, but Stellan Skarsgard…wow.

Gold Derby‘s Paul Sheehan reported this morning that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association had decided to classify Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy‘s Before Midnight, easily one of 2013’s best films, as a comedy. While this gives the Sony Classics release a shot at winning a Golden Globe award for Best Motion Picture Comedy/Musical, which is fine, there’s only one moment in the entire film that delivers an actual laugh — when Hawke calls Delpy “the mayor of Crazy Town.” But that’s okay. It’s engages start to finish with bright talk and a nice zingy back-and-forth quality, and that’s all the Globey guys need.

Dallas Buyer’s Club (Focus Features, 11.1), sure to snag nominations for costars Matthew McConaughey (Best Actor) and Jared Leto (Best Supporting Actor), is an inspirational fact-based drama about an actual guy (the late Ron Woodruff) going through a very tough time but doing himself proud in the end. So why is the poster telling us that McConaughey’s Woodruff is smooth, cocky and cool? Because the poster guys want the film to look glamorous and inviting. To hell with the fact that Jean Marc Vallee‘s fact-based film is tough, real and honest. Let the ticket buyers figure that out later. Dallas Buyer’s Club is having a big invitational screening on 10.17 in Los Angeles. I’ll be there with bells on.

In a recently posted Rotten Tomatoes q & a interview, Nebraska‘s Alexander Payne discusses Gravity in a way that I found…well, amusing. RT’s Luke Goodsell tells Payne that “one of the things that’s constant in your career is that you seem attracted to stories about characters in transition, if not outright life crisis. Is there a particular appeal to that kind of scenario?” And Payne says, “Am I really alone in that? Aren’t all great stories about characters in transition? Isn’t it always about character revealed through times of major or minor life crisis?”

Goodsell: “A lot of great movies, yes, but not all of them. You’re right in that you’re not alone in that, it just seems like a very defining trait across your films.

Payne: “I don’t know what to say about it. I’ll think about it. [Laughs] I appreciate the observation but yeah, I don’t know. What’s a movie that doesn’t have that? Even…you know, I just saw Gravity — I’m just pulling this out of a hat because I saw it the other day — and it’s Sandra Bullock in the haunted house, right, but in space?

I saw the slightly shortened cut of Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska (Paramount, 11.15) last night, and this morning I tapped out a letter to Payne. About halfway through I figured I might as well share it. We’re all talking to each other in the open these days so what the hell. I began by saying that Mark Orton‘s theme music “really sunk in last night. I heard and felt it in Cannes, of course, but last night was different. It got to me on some deeper, more vulnerable level. I tried to buy the Nebraska soundtrack online but it’s not available until mid November. I really want to share that theme (the main-title music heard in the beginning) in the column so people can get into a bit before the film opens.

“Secondly I’m wondering what happened to Will Forte‘s indoor chat (in a gift shop or a post office) with that older pretty woman in that home town (i.e., the one that Bruce Dern came from and which Stacy Keach lives in) at the very end. This woman knew Dern way back when and has a thing or two that she remembered about him, but in the new cut that scene is gone — she’s just standing on the sidewalk and looking at Dern and Forte as they pass by in the truck. That was a poignant moment she had with Forte, I thought, in the Cannes version. It worked. Tell me if I’m wrong but I wasn’t dozing off and I didn’t hit the bathroom at all during last night’s screening. Update: For some mysterious reason I didn’t process this scene even though it’s included in the new cut.