Day: October 12, 2013

I finally took a look at Sony Home Video’s long-delayed From Here To Eternity Bluray about two weeks ago, and I was so taken I watched it once more on my new 60″ Samsung a couple of days ago. This is one of the best-looking “Bluray bumps” of a classic film I’ve ever seen or owned. I’ve been watching this film since I was 12 and it’s never looked this good — rich blacks, magnificent detail, vivid but celluloid-like. That extra-dynamic, super-silvery Ansel Adams-in-Hawaii quality. All classic film fans want is for a Bluray to look significantly better than the DVD version, and this really makes the grade in that resepct.

Sony’s Grover Crisp remastered this 1953 Best Picture winner sometime in early to mid 2009 so it took Sony…what, three and a half to four years to release it? My first “where’s the Bluray?” piece ran in November 2009. I’ve run three or four follow-ups since.

Today I’m going to temporarily ignore Hollywood Elsewhere’s prohibition against discussing or even acknowledging Focus Features’ upcoming adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey. That’s because an official explanation about why Charlie Hunnam has decided against playing kinky multimillionaire Christian Grey sounds like bunk. A joint statement by Universal and Focus says that “the filmmakers of Fifty Shades of Grey and Charlie Hunnam have agreed to find another male lead given Hunnam’s immersive TV schedule [on FX’s Sons of Anarchy] which is not allowing him time to adequately prepare for the role of Christian Grey.” Hunnam wouldn’t have been cast unless the scheduling had been worked out in advance. For those who care, the truth will surface eventually. If I had to guess I’d say it has something do with former Focus honcho James Schamus being replaced by Peter Schlessel…maybe. Grey was slated to begin shooting in early November for release on 8.1.14. Not likely.

Yesterday I watched Fox Home Video’s Bluray of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s A Letter To Three Wives (’49), which I first saw…oh, sometime in my teens. Even in that early stage of aesthetic development I remember admiring the brilliant writing and especially the way it pays off.

Nominally it’s a woman’s drama about whose husband (Jeanne Crain‘s, Linda Darnell‘s or Ann Southern‘s) has run away with sophisticated socialite Addie Ross, who narrates the film from time to time (the voice belongs to Celeste Holm) but is never seen. But that’s just the story or the clothesline upon which Wives hangs its real agenda. For this is primarily an examination of social mores, values and ethics among middle-class marrieds of late 1940s America.

Over and over the film reminds you how long ago this was. Southern is fairly liberated in the sense that she’s the main breadwinner in her household; her husband, played by Kirk Douglas, is a more-or-less penniless schoolteacher. One of the film’s quaint highlights is Douglas’s cocktail party rant against the dishonest and vulgar hucksterism of commercial radio. This was a valid point, I’m sure, from Mankiewicz’s perspective 60-plus years ago, but if Joe could see the world now…

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Grantland award-season columnist Mark Harris, who seems to file every three weeks or so, has embraced the popular view that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity is a Best Picture lock as well as the admittedly popular but curious view that Sandra Bullock is all but guaranteed a Best Actress nomination. I accept the latter scenario but can’t understand what everyone is so excited about. Unless everyone is secretly embracing the Sasha Stone view that it’s a very significant thing for a 49 year-old actress to carry a huge film like Gravity and lend a certain emotional quality and obviously contribute to its success, and that a vote for Bullock is a vote for better, stronger roles for 45-and-older women, which I agree with. I just don’t get what’s so great about her performance. Because all I get from it are needles.

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