William Friedkin‘s long-awaited, digitally-remastered Sorcerer (’77) screens tonight at the TCM Classic Film Festival. The Warner Home Video Bluray streets on 4.22. What is Sorcerer about? Four guys on two trucks carrying nitroglycerin through the South American jungle. I’ve always admired the exceptionally long time (i.e., 70 minutes) that Friedkin devotes to (a) the various back-stories and (b) the reasons and preparation for the dangerous trip. The journey itself only takes about 45 minutes of screen time, maybe a touch more.

If you speak ‘strine‘, the title of Phillip Noyce‘s upcoming film (due on 8.15.14) is pronounced “the Givaah.” For whatever reason this is how I say it whenever the subject comes up…”the Givaah!”. Boilerplate synopsis: “The haunting story…centers on Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), who lives in a seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of conformity and contentment. Not until he’s given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory does he begin to understand the dark secrets behind his fragile community.”

One of my earliest big-league Manhattan interviews was with director John Carpenter. He was plugging The Fog so our chat happened in early 1980, at which point Carpenter had recently turned 32 and more or less looked it. (One of the publicists on that film, by the way, was Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson.) Now the semi-retired Carpenter is in his mid 60s and looks at least 80. To me he strongly resembles Charles Boyer‘s High Lama character in Ross Hunter‘s Lost Horizon (’73), who is 300 years old but looks good for his age. Burbank’s Hyaena Gallery begins a Carpenter tribute tonight.

(l.) director John Carpenter; (r.) Charles Boyer as the High Lama in Lost Horizon (’73).

Corrected with apologies: Birdman falling out of Cannes wasn’t enough. Now it’s all but certain that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice won’t be going there either. This morning I spoke to an industry friend who’s seen Vice and who thinks it’s brilliant and mesmerizing in an atmospheric, non-linear sort of way. He says that Anderson, currently doing the sound mix, doesn’t really want to subject Vice to Cannes and would rather take his time and tinker around over the summer and then unveil it in Telluride/Venice/Toronto.

This follows what a friend told me a week or two ago, which is that Cannes topper Thierry Fremaux “has been courting and wooing PTA like mad to get Inherent Vice to Cannes, and that PTA has been telling him since January that it would be very tight for him to get post-production done in time and that he wouldn’t show it to Thierry until then. Perhaps PTA would privately like to go to Cannes, but I’m also told that Warner Bros. is against the idea, considering it too early given its December release date. If PTA insists and finishes the film to his satisfaction over the next couple of weeks, he could probably prevail over WB, but the latest I hear is that everything is still very much up in the air.”

The furniture movers were done by 4 pm so I had plenty of time to bop over to the TCM Classic Film Festival by dinner hour. The initial plan was to see Harold Lloyd‘s Why Worry at what everyone still calls the “Egyptian” (i.e., the Lloyd E. Rigler theatre at the American Cinematheque). But first I slipped into the TCL Chinese to see how Universal Home Video’s DCP of Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity (i.e., a close relative of the new Bluray) looked on the big screen. Knowing of Universal’s delightful tendency to tastefully DNR black-and-white films (as they did for their Psycho and Cape Fear Blurays) I was optimistic. But what I saw exceeded my hopes.

It was beautiful. It was heaven. It was silvery and satiny and gloriously free of the digital mosquitoes that are all over the Masters of Cinema Bluray version. For the first time in my life I saw a Double Indemnity that looked like monochrome candy — an all-but-grainless version that will hopefully make grain monks seethe. I don’t know what was more enjoyable — looking at the exquisite velvety tones of this 1944 classic and the entirely acceptable waxy complexions of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, or imagining the discomfort of guys like Pete Appruzzese and Glenn Kenny and DVD Beaver‘s Gary. W. Tooze and Robert Harris and the grain devotees at the Criterion Collection.

I’m so on top of the latest curve that it took me three days to link to Ross Marquand‘s Matthew McConaughey-in-True Detective riff, which went on up on April 9th. Marquand is spoofing those AT&T True Detective spots. A joke we call reality. Time is a flat circle. Grapple with it.