…but you speak the truth.

From the American Film Institute’s 42nd Life Achievement Award ceremony for Jane Fonda: “Meryl Streep recalled a day on the set of Julia that someone came up to her, saying how she was glad that Jane was feeling better because she has been ‘crying all night.’ ‘Why?’ Streep asked. She was told, ‘Well, they looked at dailies from last week and [Jane] just thinks she looks so old.’

“’She was 38 years old and so beautiful,’ Streep recalled. ‘We’re all afflicted with these insecurities, but Jane has a special radar…what she does, she deflects her own anxiety and made me — a day player, a nobody — feel fantastic. After we wrapped that movie, I found out she’d gone back to California and told everyone who would listen about this girl with a weird last name, and [that] opened more doors than I even probably know about today.”

To me, curved-screen ultra-HD televisions are as essential as high-def 3D, which is to say not at all. The only way it might make a real difference is if you’re sitting 24 to 30 inches away from a 70-inch screen and dead center at that. The only reason Samsung and others are making curved screens is because they’re trying to generate new revenue streams from those TV buyers who fancy themselves as high-end connoisseurs. It’s basically a big con.

Listening to the dialogue in John Huston‘s Key Largo (’48), based on Maxwell Anderson‘s play but re-shaped for the screen by Huston and Richard Brooks, is like savoring a perfect dessert. It’s tethered to character and therefore substantial in the usual ways, but the flavor is rich and marvellous. I don’t know why you can’t find clips on YouTube so I captured a couple myself. Thomas Gomez is fantastic in the “can you blame us for gettin’ rude?” scene. And the bit in which Edward G. Robinson whispers vulgarities to Lauren Bacall is one of the few “suggestive” scenes from the big-studio era that still feels “dirty” by today’s standards because it prods the viewer into imagining what he’s saying.

A Bluray of Delbert Mann and Paddy Chayefsky‘s Oscar-winning Marty (1955) will be released on 7.29. It gives me no comfort or satisfaction to report that the Bluray’s aspect ratio will be in the dreaded 1.85 with the tops and bottoms of the protected 1.37 image (seen on TV, VHS, laser disc and DVDs for the last five or six decades) severed with a meat cleaver. In early May aspect-ratio historian Bob Furmanek noted in a Home Theatre Forum post that (a) the Marty Bluray will (a) be presented “for the first time since the original theatrical release with Mann’s intended 1.85:1 compositions,” and that (b) “we provided the documentation to insure mastering in the correct ratio.”

Guardians of the Galaxy (Disney, 8.1) looks fairly awful if not ludicrous, but it’s been directed and co-written by James Gunn, whose Super (’11) I admired after catching it at 2011 South by Southwest, so it’s probably wiser to wait and see. I only know that my first reaction was to feel sorry for Chris Pratt, whose performance as an insecure catcher-turned-first baseman was one of Moneyball‘s finest. He needed a paycheck role and he took this, but where’s the dignity? A pretty good cast — Zoe Saldana, Dave “who?” Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Michael Rooker, Djimon Hounsou, John C. Reilly, Glenn Close and Benicio del Toro…they all took their checks and cashed them. The August 1st release date suggests…aaahh, maybe it doesn’t suggest anything. Except that the rule of thumb is that all real-deal, balls-to-the-wall, guns-blazing summer escapist flicks usually come out in May, June or July.

That shouting voice around the nine-second mark (“Chaahhhrrrr!) sounds like some lug brought into the post-production recording studio from Gold’s Gym. The voice doesn’t seem to blend with the action — it sound like a folio dub from a Dino de Laurentiis film from the ’60s. Could this be an omen? All the principals (Bay, Wahlberg, DiBonaventura, Murphy) have gotten (or will get) a nice fat paycheck from Transformers 4: Age of Extinction (Paramount, 6.25). Are the fans starting to think it might be time to put this franchise out of its misery? Nice fantasy, but no such luck unless this latest installment tanks. Which doesn’t seem likely. They’ve all been punishing, and they’ve all made big money.