Snapped in the fall of ’19. Just after a Middleburg Film Festival visit. Wasn’t trying…just happened. Perfect balance and focus, excellent light, a little past magic hour.

Michael O’Donoghue‘s Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, which I saw once back in ’79, is only sporadically funny if that, not to mention technically coarse and splotchy. But the eagerness to offend is damn near breathtaking.

The written prologue or mock warning starts at the :30 second mark — please read it. There were no lefty sensitivity wackos around during the waning days of the Carter administration, of course, but imagining how today’s wokeys might react is, well, pleasurable.

Yesterday director and cinematographer Sareesh Sudhakaran (@wolfcrow) posted a super knowledgable, highly perceptive appreciation of the tech aspects of William Wyler‘s Ben-Hur (59). Lasting 11 minutes and eight seconds, YouTube tutorials don’t get much better than this.

I’m pretty much resigned to the sad fact that Ben-Hur will never again be theatrically screened at the full Camera 65 aspect ratio — 2.76:1.

“I Live for Ben-Hur Disappointments,” posted on 9.9.16: “It’s common knowledge that William Wyler‘s Ben-Hur (’59) was shot in Camera 65, which when correctly projected (as well as scanned for DVD and Bluray) delivered an aspect ratio of 2.76:1. (Same a.r. with Ultra Panavision 70, which The Hateful Eight was shot and projected at.) All my adult life I’ve been looking to see the full-whack, 2.76:1 Ben-Hur in a first-rate theatrical venue.

“My hopes were up when I attended last night’s 7:30 pm screening of Ben-Hur at the American Cinematheque Egyptian. I was encouraged by the fact that the AC was showing a DCP, or the same digitally remastered version that constitutes the current Bluray, which delivers the full 2.76:1. But they blew it all the same. The AC aspect ratio was, at most, 2.55:1, and it was probably closer to 2.4:1. And therefore each shot felt slightly cramped and wrong.

“Robert Surtees‘ 2.76:1 images on the Ben-Hur Bluray are immaculate — the framings in each and every scene are exquisitely balanced. But whack those images down to 2.4:1 and everything looks fucked. If Surtees had been with me he would have been hooting and throwing soft-drink containers at the screen.

“The same aspect ratio problems manifested when I caught Ben-Hur at the New York Film Festival in 2011, to wit:

“Excerpt: ‘The fabled 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio was not delivered. It looked to me like we were seeing roughly a 2.55 to 1 image, at best. There’s a shot with Hugh Griffith and the four white horses when Heston enters from the left and says ‘What magnificent animals’ or words to that effect. I knew right away what I saw wasn’t right because Heston was slightly cropped off as he said this line — he didn’t have any breathing room — and you NEVER crop a star.'”

Does anyone even remember Robert DeNiro‘s The Good Shepherd (’06), a somber, dialogue-driven spy flick which made decent coin ($100 million) but ran too long (167 minutes) and felt like a downer to pretty much everyone?

Loosely based on the life of legendary cold-war spook James Jesus Angleton, pic was directed by De Niro from a script by Eric Roth.

The vibes between Matt Damon (as Angleton stand-in Edward Wilson) and Angelina Jolie were utterly miserable, and audiences sank into the swamp with them.

The costars included Alec Baldwin, Tammy Blanchard, Billy Crudup, Keir Dullea, Martina Gedeck, William Hurt and Timothy Hutton. Grim stuff, man.

After my second viewing at the Zeigfeld theatre in December ’06, I told a director friend that Shepherd didn’t play any differently — it was still muted, somber and funereal.

He replied as follows: “I liked it, actually. That said, ‘funereal’, although not the word I would personally choose to describe it, is accurate. It has a funereal atmosphere, almost aggressively so.

“What I liked [about it] is that it doesn’t pander in any way. It almost defies you to like it.

“You’re sitting there saying ‘what is this shit?…you haven’t made me interested in the story or care about the characters, and it’s very easy to get out [of the movie] if you want to do that…it doesn’t deploy the strategies that almost all movies do to bring you in and engage your sympathies. And I respected that.”

A film that “almost defies you to like it”….funny but interesting. HE to readership: Please name other films (reasonably good ones, I mean) whose directors didn’t seem to care if audiences found them engrossing or not. You have to respect that kind of ballsiness. Directors to audiences: “You don’t like my movie? Well, I don’t like you either!”

Todd McCarthy’s 12.10.06 review:

“The birth of the CIA and the life journey of one of its founding operatives is a fascinating subject, [but] one that is done only lukewarm justice in The Good Shepherd,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy.

I can guess what the HE readership is thinking as they read this — give us rude, disturbing, irreverent, provocative or even gross….but please, please not lukewarm.

“Robert De Niro‘s second film as a director adopts a methodical approach and deliberate pace,” McCarthy continues, “in attempting to grasp an almost forbiddingly intricate subject, with a result that is not boring, exactly, but undeniably tedious.

“The long and short of the problem is that [De Niro] never finds a proper rhythm to allow the viewer to settle comfortably into what turns out to be a very long voyage. Like many films of the moment, this one keeps jumping around in time, not confusingly in the least, but in a way that has no natural flow to it. Tie that to a central character who defiantly offers no glimpse into his inner life and you have a picture that offers scant returns for the investment of time it requests of the viewer.

“Crucially missing is slowly building momentum, a firm hand on pace, a way to convey gradual moral decay and a talent for magisterial storytelling — gifts that are impossible to fake in the long run.

“Seemingly based in great measure on the ever-intriguing James Angleton, Matt Damon‘s Edward Wilson remains an opaque, impenetrable figure throughout, and neither actor nor script provides the subtext to reveal any layers of personality.

The word around the campfire is that Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex, an erotically provocative “thriller” of some sort (although I can pretty much guarantee that “thriller” doesn’t apply…not in the sense that most of us understand the term…not from Araki)…the buzz says that Araki’s film will play in Cannes next month, although not in competition.

Araki has allegedly said that his goal is to “bring back sex to the big screen”, but dear God in heaven, not with the ginger-haired, pig-eyed Cooper Hoffman in the lead male role opposite Olivia Wilde….no!

In the realm of a sexual something-or-other souffle, Wilde, Charli XCX, Daveed Diggs, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho and Roxane Mesquida are totally fine. Just no pudgebods with alabaster skin. I’m fucking serious.

I am honestly more terrified of Araki’s film than Paul Mescal‘s latest gay film, The History of Sound, which may (emphasis on that word) turn up in Cannes also.

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is hearing that other sans competition titles may be Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (Spike wants to be in competition!), Andrew Dominik’s Bono: Stories of Surrender, Trey Edward Shults’ Hurry Up Tomorrow.

Despite that 3.31 Parisien report suggestintg that Luca Guadagnino‘s After The Hunt might debut in Cannes, the submission decision is up to Amazon marketing, I’m told, and publicists are generally terrified of Cannes so calculate the probability.

Will Terrence “wackazoid” Malick‘s The Way of the Wind snag a competition slot? Why would Malick break his six-year editing streak?

Safer bets include Ari Aster‘s Eddington, Jim Jarmusch‘s Father Brother Sister Mother, Wes Anderson‘s The Phoenician Scheme and Kelly Reichardt‘s The Mastermind.