They haven’t seen Blitz…they’re just coasting along, playing it by ear…a wing and a prayer.

…is reportedly causing episodes of cardiac arrest among your 1.85 fascists. For Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic was out and about for roughly a full year after the April 1953 mandate for 1.85 theatrical framing had been instituted in the U.S.

Japanese exhibition standards may have been different 70 years ago, granted, but Kurosawa was no dummy — he knew his technical shit as well as Stanley Kubrick or any other top-of-the-line maestro — and therefore understood that The Seven Samurai would most
likely be projected stateside within a 1.85 a.r.

The sole criteria for 1.85 fascism, remember, is that it doesn’t matter if a given film was shot with an open aperture or with an ethos on the part of a d.p. that “more height is always right” (a longtime HE motto), but what the prevailing exhibition standards were when the film was released.

Hence the fascist shrieking being heard right now in certain quarters.

…will set you back a little over $200 these days, if not more. I bought these things for the boys at Toys ‘R Us in the early ‘90s, and the prices were in the vicinity of $35 to $40, if I’m not mistaken.

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Remember that scene in Broadcast News (‘86) when Albert Brooks insisted to Holly Hunter that William Hurt’s smooth, amiable and ethically flexible news anchor was, in a certain sense, the devil?

I have long felt that the very likable and easy-going Ryan Reynolds represents, no offense, the same kind of satanic energy and influence.

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The same corrupt-insider, look-the-other-way mentality that allowed Matthew Perry’s ketamine addiction to be fed and indulged is roughly similar to the friends-of-Joe Biden mentality that resulted in months and months of straight-faced denial and lying when questions about his obvious cognitive decline were raised time and again

For the fourth or fifth time, witness Oskar Werner‘s brilliantly phrased summation of his case against suspected double agent Peter Van Eyck in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Werner is one of the finest actors who ever lived, but his heyday only lasted for six years or so, from Jules and Jim (’62) to The Shoes of the Fisherman (’68). He was an alcoholic, and he died too young of a heart attack.