Several film sophistos told me to see Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Ida (Music Box, early 2014) at last September’s Telluride Film Festival. Did I listen? Did I at least catch it at the subsequent Toronto Film Festival? Naah — I waited until Sundance. But it met my expectations, you bet. This is one superbly composed, austere, Robert Bresson– or Carl Dreyer-like art film — set in 1962 and shot in black-and-white with a 1.33 aspect ratio. It’s about nuns, vows, cigarettes, fate, family skeletons, sex and sexy saxophones, Nazis and Jews and the grim atmosphere of Communist Poland. And it’s anchored by two understated knockout performances — one by the quietly mesmerizing, ginger-haired Agata Trzebuchowska as a young almost-nun named Anna, the other by Agata Kulesza as Anna’s aunt — the morose, blunt-spoken, hard-drinking, somewhat promiscuous Wanda.

Grindhouse Releasing has a Bluray of Frank Perry and Burt Lancaster‘s The Swimmer (’68) streeting on 3.11. A strange, sterile adaptation of a John Cheever short story that appeared in The New Yorker in July 1964, The Swimmer is easy to admire but all but impossible to like. It has a decidedly cold and spooky vibe. It was shot in the summer of ’66 in Westport, Connecticut — just a town over from Wilton, the leafy hamlet where I was living and half-suffering at the time. I’ve only seen The Swimmer once, but not just because of my own associations — vaguely unhappy memories of failure at school, living under my parents’ rules and regulations, my father’s alcoholism. It’s also that corroded Cheever atmosphere.

Lancaster’s character, a tortured suburbanite who decides to swim across a string of swimming pools in Fairfield County on a journey to his home, is spirited but bluffing — you can tell there’s some kind of tragic history he’s suppressing or hiding from. Like Don Draper he’s all about presenting a “front”, but at least he’s open-hearted and flashing that Lancaster grin. And he looks terrific for a guy of 52 (Burt was born in 1913), wearing only a speedo and looking like a trim 35 year-old.

But with the exception of a blonde teenage girl (Janet Landgard) he befriends and roams around with, the people Lancaster runs into — his “friends” — are ghouls. Their fiendish manner and way of speaking is so curiously “off” that the film gives you a Stepford headache after a half-hour or so. I’ve always regarded The Swimmer as a kind of subtle horror film — a portrait of the stilted values of the World War II “striving class” generation and the alcoholic regimentation that seemed to define suburban affluence back then (similarly portrayed in Ang Lee‘s The Ice Storm and Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road). But The Swimmer is too chilly and creepy — not just lacking in humanity but oxygen.

Chicago Tribune entertainment guy Mark Caro has written one of those “Oscar season sure is a long, arduous and costly process” articles. The quote I supplied is nothing new (I’ve expressed it repeatedly since HE began ten years ago) but it’s the only one in the piece with any esprit de corps.

Two days ago Mark Harris posted a Grantland/”Hollywood Prospectus” column that explained why the Academy’s decision to expand the number of Best Picture nominations (i.e., “the Nolan rule”) has conversely led to a smaller pool of films and filmmakers being nominated for Oscars. He reports that 2013’s “major-category nominations — 44 in all — were spread among just 12 films — the fewest in 30 years. [And] the second-lowest number of films represented in the major nominations in the last 30 years — 14 — happened just one year ago. And the third-lowest also happened in the five years since the rule change. The inescapable truth: Best Picture may have gotten bigger, but the Oscars have gotten smaller.”

Why? Laziness. Academy members are “prioritizing” — i.e., not doing their homework by watching enough films, allowing themselves to be led along like sheep by heavily funded Oscar campaigns. “I suspect that the practical effect of a larger Best Picture field is that AMPAS voters now tend to divide the 50-odd DVD screeners they receive [each year] into two piles,” Harris writes. “Movies they ‘should’ see (in other words, the big contenders) and everything else. Guess how often the second pile never gets looked at until it’s too late?”

The thing I dearly love about this ending is the fact that the scummy, mortally wounded Lorren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) is, at the end of his life, suddenly very concerned about a tiny droplet of water on a water pipe that’s about to drop on his face. It’s not the slug in his stomach, which he can do nothing about. He knows he’s about to go and is even cackling about it, weird guy that he is. What Visser can’t accept is that damn little glob of H20. Taking shape, getting heavier, larger. The water looks down at Visser and he looks up at it. Waiting, waiting…and then it drops.

I almost posted this earlier today (i.e., five or six hours ago) but the notion vaporized. Then I came home and decided if I don’t post this tonight it’ll be old news tomorrow morning.

“[Martin] Scorsese didn’t make The Wolf of Wall Street because he loves Jordan Belfort and wants us to drool over his money and drugs and women. He made it because he loves making movies, and Belfort’s story is great movie material. At its best, which is often, The Wolf of Wall Street reminds you not just of the glories of movies, and the sometimes false splendor and inner tawdriness of life itself, but the glories of other arts as well. I’m hyperbolizing, I guess, but for me the best of Wolf is not some glossy men’s magazine orgy but an attempt (mostly successful, I think) at a true work of art — a work visually dense and full of lif, like a painting by a Brueghel or a Bosch, rocking and propulsive like a big beat classic by the Rolling Stones (or the Ronettes), crammed with humanity like a novel by Balzac or Dickens, literate and street-smart like a play or a screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charlie MacArthur, tough and snazzy and stylish as a classic gangster movie or film noir by Hawks, Curtiz or Walsh. It killed me.” — from Michael Wilmington‘s brilliant review/analysis on MCN, dated 1.22.

These DVD Beaver screen captures comparing the 2004 DVD to the forthcoming Criterion Bluray (2.18) of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Foreign Correspondent (’40) tell the tale. There’s a bit more information on the top and sides of the Bluray version — more facial exposure on the guy with the bowler hat on the left, a larger slice of a khaki raincoat on the right, greater exposure of the trolley car window on top. Plus the frame captures don’t indicate appalling levels of grain. This in itself is enough to put me in state of tumescence.

Prelude to the Van Meer assassination scene on the 2004 DVD — stolen from DVD Beaver.

Same frame on the Criterion Bluray — ditto.

“I’m 31 now, and I’ve been through the worst of it. There’s nothing more that can be said about me, my movies or my collaborators that hasn’t already been said in a very negative, aggressive way. None of it hurts me anymore. I feel detached and liberated. I don’t even know Glenn Kenny. I know he’s someone out there who hates my movies. I don’t read what he writes or follow him on Twitter.” — ” — Happy Christmas director-writer Joe Swanberg in a chat with Fandor‘s Steven Erickson.

If anyone is able and willing to send along an actual, real-deal PDF of Quentin Tarantino‘s Hateful Eight screenplay (as opposed to the Seth McFarlane-authored screenplay that an unfortunately motivated asshole sent me last night), I’d be much obliged.

Via Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet: “Richard Trammell is hopefully enjoying his new found Internet fame following his digital tinkering of David Fincher‘s Fight Club in which he scrubbed out Brad Pitt‘s Tyler Durden and today he’s keeping the theme alive as he set his sights on Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining.”

I was handed some promotional baseball cards during Monday night’s dinner for Chapman and MacLain Way‘s The Battered Bastards of Baseball, “a wonderfully spirited documentary about a scrappy-ass, mid ’70s minor-league Portland baseball team called the Mavericks…that was owned and managed by character actor Bing Russell, the father of Kurt Russell.” One of the cards featured Russell, who was a designated Mavericks hitter and a kind of consulting co-manager. I asked him to autograph the card. I told Russell that I had attended and reported on a 1980 Manhattan press event for John Carpenter‘s Escape From New York, in which Russell played Snake Plissken. We all enjoyed a semi-drunken yacht party followed by a trip out to Liberty Island to watch Carpenter shoot a scene. Guess who one of the publicists was on behalf of the film? Indiewire’s Anne Thompson. “That was a really great time,” Russell said.