The new Criterion Bluray of John Frankenheimer‘s The Manchurian Candidate (’62) is 90% to 95% glorious. Lionel Lindon‘s black-and-white cinematography has never looked so rich and crisp and fully harvested. Time and again as I sat on a footstool in front of the Sony 65″ 4K I was going “wow…wow!” And yet the other 5% to 10%, oddly, looks soft or fuzzy at times. Lindon’s work, I mean — shots with soft-focus foregrounds in favor of sharp backgrounds. Odd. Weak tea. I guess I never realized how underwhelming this 5% to 10% looks because for the first time the other 90% looks so stand-out great. Smooth and detailed, serious celluloid textures but clean as a hound’s tooth.

Richard Tanne‘s Southside With You is basically a Barack and Michelle getting-to-know-you thing in the vein of Richard Linklater‘s Before Sunrise. I missed it during Sundance (I’m gifted at this) but that was how everyone was describing it. A smart, engaging piece that you could call a form of soft-sell propaganda if you want to be dickish about it. You can tell right off the top that Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter are poised and confident as well as convincing stand-ins; you can also tell it’s charmingly well written. Miramax and Roadside are partnering on an 8.19.16 release.

I’ll eventually get used to all the menu and sub-menu options and finicky calibrations and togglings that you have to suss when you get a Sony 65″ Black Ultra HD 4K LED 3D HDTV XBR-65X850C, but I have to be honest and say that I kind of liked the Samsung 65″ 4K (i.e., the one I just returned) a little better. There seem to be too many visual variables on the Sony, and for whatever reason I was unable to find picture quality that I really liked 100% when I was testing it last night with the Criterion Graduate Bluray. It either looked too vivid, not vivid enough, too yellowish, too grainy, too murky, overly bright or too smooth. I never had any picture issues with the Samsung — I only dumped it because it didn’t have HDR (high dynamic range). It’s always something.

I’m pretty sure this was taken in the late summer of ’99. Outside the Bruin theatre before a screening. Myself, David Poland, the late Marvin Antonowksy. I was at Reel.com and working at the time on a streaming movie-talk discussion show of some kind, which was a ridiculous concept as most of the world was grappling with 56K speeds at that point. And yet one of the greatest ever movie years was unfolding as we spoke…glorious. And we were all 17 years younger.

Depending on how you gauge things Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Hail, Caesar!, which nobody liked all that much, was either a bust or at best a break-evener — cost $22 million to produce, earned $53 million worldwide. Then I checked local listings and was shocked to find it’s still playing here and there — Sundance Sunset, Arclight, Landmark. It’ll be hitting Bluray/streaming sometime in June, apparently.

It was on my mind because I listened this morning to a great little Karina Longworth podcast about the real Eddie Mannix, the MGM fixer who’s played by Josh Brolin in the film. Mannix was scuzzy, all right, and no saint, but he kept the MGM image clean by keeping things private, finessing the authorities, making payoffs, etc. I never bought into the idea that Mannix may have had something to do with the death of George Reeves, but Longworth sounds half-convinced.

Yesterday a former film critic who for some left-field reason has requested anonymity posted the following on Facebook: “Just want to remind everyone: If you ever run into an actor, writer, singer or whatever [whom] you don’t know and ask for a picture with them, you’re being, no matter how well-intentioned, a horrible person who turns strangers into props for the sad validation of their grim insecurity. And if you ‘have to do it for work,’ quit that job.”

Autographed scripts of John Logan’s Any Given Sunday and Robert Towne’s Chinatown. I got everyone to sign the Logan script during an Any Given Sunday junket in ’98, and the Towne script at a 20th anniversary Chinatown gathering at LACMA in ’94.

I’ve never asked any celebrity for a selfie in my life, and I never will. And I’ve only asked for autographs twice, and that was to sign screenplays at an invitational event. Autographs are much more intimate than selfies. A signature is so personal and expressive while a selfie smile is just a mask.

I have to admit that when I got out the Any Given Sunday screenplay this morning and saw that I’d gotten Cameron Diaz‘s signature, I smiled. It felt good. But selfies are grotesque.

Before last night i had never paid to read a National Review article, but I took the plunge when I heard about Kevin Williamson‘s “The Father Fuhrer“, which posted last weekend and is contained with an issue dated 3.28. The piece caused a bit of a ruckus in conservative circles for saying that the rural under-educated whites who worship Donald Trump are basically trash and that their downmarket communities are “vicious and “selfish” and deserve to die.

This is why I paid to read it — I wanted to wade into the words of a presumed conservative who despises submental rurals as much as I do.

Here’s the passage that everyone was talking about yesterday: “It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about ‘globalists’ and — odious, stupid term — ‘the Establishment,’ but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

“If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization.