You can watch a high-def version of Richard Lester‘s Petulia via Amazon streaming, but Warner Bros. still won’t cough up a Bluray. They’ve probably figured that it’s not worth the candle, but man, what a wonderfully fresh, alive-at-a-critical-moment film this is — a window into LBJ-era San Francisco, and right smack dab in the middle of the summer and fall of ’67.

Posted two and 1/3 years ago: Richard Lester‘s Petulia is a chilly, emotionally distant film about a relationship that doesn’t quite come together, and yet there’s something very infectious and fizzy about it. I think it’s the combination of Lester’s dry ironic detachment and the odd atmospheric stirrings of what was happening in San Francisco when he shot it in the late summer and fall of 1967. There are snatches of music and marijuana and Haight-Ashbury in the periphery, but this is a film about being lonely and adrift…about wealth and comfort and social dance steps and two people who want out.

It’s about a 40ish doctor (George C. Scott) who’s bored to death by almost everything in his life and a dishy, spacey rich girl (Julie Christie) who gets it in her head that Scott is some kind of cure for whatever might be ailing her.

Petulia, which I return to every four or five years when I don’t feel like watching anything else, is composed of thousands of slices and fragments of everything and anything that was “happening” back then…sounds, whispers, glances. It’s somewhere between a tapestry and a jumble of pieces that don’t seem to fit, and yet they do when you step back. I think it’s one of the sharpest cultural time-capsule films Hollywood has ever churned out, and at the same time a curiously affecting love story.

Reaction #1: If I was a movie star and Lynn Hirschberg asked me to sing “I Will Survive” on-camera, I’d tell her to forget it. I don’t sing girly disco-beat songs that I can’t stand, for one thing. Even in the shower I don’t reach for the high notes or, you know, belt stuff out. I only sing within my range, so if you really want me to perform I’ll sing “Be-Bop Baby“, “Your Smiling Face” or “Nice ‘n’ Easy.” Reaction #2: Why do these guys seem averse to actually hitting notes? Reaction #3: I love it when someone cracks a joke on the Charlie Rose Show and genuine laughter ensues, but I really hate these goof-off, make-a-fool-of-yourself, farewell-my-dignity prank interviews that everyone submits to these days. I blame MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz for starting this loathsome trend. If Horowitz were to interview me for whatever reason I’d fight him at every turn. My attitude would be “no offense but fuck you, Josh, and your stupid-shit goofball questions.” I guess Jimmy “Trump hair muss” Fallon is the main perpetrator in this realm now.

The contestants: Emma Stone, Natalie Portman, Greta Gerwig, Anya Taylor Joy, Amy Adams, Chris Pine, Hailee Steinfeld, Felicity Jones, Taraji P. Henson. (I omitted Matthew McConaughey because I really hate his performance in Gold, and so he’s in the HE doghouse.)

According to Tatiana Siegel‘s 1.12 Hollywood Reporter interview with Jon Peters, the absentee producer and former mogul goes to bed each night at 7:30 pm and wakes up at 5:30 am. The guy is 71 and he crashes each night before the European dinner hour and stays under for 10 hours? That’s the pattern of a typical 92 year-old. If Kirk Douglas (100) or Norman Lloyd (101) want to bag ten hours per night, fine. But someone Peters’ age?

Jon Peters as pictured in Tatiana Siegel’s Hollywood Reporter interview.

You don’t want to sleep too much. Eight hours will more than suffice. Who wants to miss those sublime late-hour activities (book-reading, movie-watching, Real Time with Bill Maher, evening walks, hanging with your cat)? Plus you don’t want to sacrifice too much in the way of wide-awake consciousness because one day you’ll be going to sleep permanently, and that, trust me, will be very, very restful. What is Peters doing, rehearsing for that moment?

Also: There’s nothing that looks stupider than a long-haired guy walking around with his hair pulled into a tight bun and a little pony tail. If you want to wear your hair like Fabio, fine. If you want to wear it a bit shorter, cool. It’s even okay if you want to do a tennisball-head thing…actually, that’s not okay on second thought but we’ll let that go for now. But pony tails look ridiculous. (Are you listening, Casey Affleck?)

This is yesterday’s news but in the below clip Nicole Kidman cancelled her coolness cred in one swift stroke, and I mean possibly for the rest of her life. By saying “we need to support Donald Trump” because “he’s now elected [and] that’s what the country’s based on,” she murdered any notions that might have been floating around about her being a member of the committed-and-connected Meryl Streep Club of Resistance to the Monster.

Kidman sounded to me like a profoundly unthoughtful middle-aged wife of a Wall Street broker from suburban Greenwich or Fairfield, a woman who shops a lot and owns a cute dog and belongs to a bridge club.

Full death quote: “I just say…he’s now elected and we as a country need to support whosever the president, because that’s what the country’s based on. Whatever, however that happened…he’s there and let’s go. I’m always reticent to start commenting politically. I’ve never done it in terms of America or Australia. I’m issue-based. I also do an enormous amount of fundraising for breast and ovarian cancer, because that’s something that’s affected my family deeply.”

That’s it — she’s dead to me. Okay, if she sees the light one day and becomes “woke,” I might consider cutting her a break.

An HE thread guy complained yesterday about La La Land, lamenting that “it had so much potential, and it ends up being about absolutely nothing. There’s no subtext to it…it’s like a film school exercise. I’m glad that people like it, but I don’t understand why.”

To which I replied: “No subtext? La La Land isn’t just some film-school exercise or tribute to old-time musicals or Jacques Demy. It’s a happy-sad thing that throbs with real-life subtext. It’s a kin of Carousel in that it says over and over that life is mostly no picnic and sometimes fraught with struggle and disappointment. It understands love in both a present-day and eternal context, but is occasionally a cousin of Dancer in the Dark in its view that sometimes musical dreams are necessary alternate realms — places that we go to for both nourishment and escape.

“La La Land is about the well-known fact that love affairs aren’t easy, and that sometimes they can dwindle or lose steam in the face of hard career choices and financial burdens. It’s also invested in the basic scheme of a musical, which is that people of any spirit or dimension will sometimes fly or dive into alternate musical realities in their heads, especially when they’re really caught up in strong emotions or a place of deep need or anguish…when they want to dwell in their dreams about the here-and-now or more often what might be, or what might have been.

“The ending of La La Land is shattering because it creates transcendent musical and visual poetry out of a certain ‘what might have been’ dream. It floods you, melts you right down.”

The IMAX version of La La Land rolls out today in roughly 100 IMAX venues nationwide and in precisely seven IMAX theatres in the Los Angeles area. I saw Damian Chazelle‘s masterpiece again last night, my fourth time, at IMAX headquarters in Playa Vista. It really does work a little more exquisitely each time. Every line, musical cue, edit, shot and insert shot (including one of Hoagy Carmichael‘s piano stool in Seb’s jazz club), every emotion…it all fits together like a fine Swiss watch.

But all the IMAX presentation boils down to, really, is seeing it on a bigger screen. Which is a welcome thing — don’t get me wrong. It’s just that La La‘s widescreen aspect ratio (2.55:1) precludes the super-tall-screen aspect from being a factor. It would be mind-blowing if Chazelle had decided during filming to capture each La La Land shot within a full IMAX-y 1.43:1 aspect ratio — then you’d really have something special. Then you’d be seeing a boxier, more headroomy version — literally an alternate cut. But that wasn’t the plan.

The designers of this new La La Land poster realize, of course, that Ryan Gosling never appears clean-shaven in the film — he is a total three-week beardo in each and every scene.

The 2.55:1 aspect ratio harkens back to the early CinemaScope days (’53 to ’54) before the addition of optical tracks cut the a.r. down to 2.35 or thereabouts.

2.55:1 was also the aspect ratio of CinemaScope 55, a 20th Century Fox format that was used for a grand total of two (2) features, both released in 1956 — Carousel and The King and I. But Fox didn’t make 55mm release prints for either film; both were released in conventional 35mm CinemaScope.

If there’s an announced release date for a domestic Bluray of the remastered version of Michael Mann‘s Heat, I can’t find it. The remastering of this 1995 classic was done sometime in early to mid ’15, and then screened that year at the Toronto Film Festival. On 9.14.15 Variety‘s Kris Tapley mentioned he’d been told that “plans are in motion for Fox Home Video to release a special DVD/Bluray next year.” That didn’t happen. So today I decided to spring for a Region 2 British Bluray version, which will street on 2.6. Update: Tapley wrote two months ago that a domestic 4K Heat Bluray will pop this year.

I posted a riff a while back about “comfort” Blurays — i.e., movie that I like to watch (okay, half-watch while Twitter surfing) at the end of the evening. Movies that settle me down, put my soul at ease. I’ve just re-arranged my top comforts in one of my bookcases [see below], and it hit me this morning that the reason I’ve chosen these 40 Blurays is because they look so good. That’s the whole ball of wax really — I’ve seen them all too many times to get anything new out of re-watching them with 100% of my brain, but they’re all enormously soothing due to their sublime visual detail and general richness of tone, be they monochrome or color.

I relate to Casey Affleck‘s zoned-out expression in this photo, which was taken during a recent recording of Kris Tapley’s Playback podcast. I wonder how many Manchester interviews Affleck has done since the campaign began at Telluride, just over four months ago? Again, the Affleck link. By the way: Tapley, who hails from Virginia and North Carolina, pronounces “because” as “beekuzz” while I, born and raised in New Jersey until my mid teens, pronounce it “beecawz.” My pronunciation is a little bit broader and more flavorful, and yet I was raised almost in the shadow of New York City while Tapley…I don’t want to say he was reared in Bumpkinville but North Carolina is generally regarded as a country-ish Southern state, where relaxed drawls used to prevail. (I haven’t been there since the ’80s.) Go figure.

I never received a screening invite for Baran bo Odar‘s Sleepless (Open Road, 1.13), a Jamie Foxx cop drama that….wait, that doesn’t have a Rotten Tomatoes score even though it opens tomorrow? Behold how the mighty have fallen.

A 1.12 Guardian story by Nick Hopkins and Luke Harding reports that the reputation of the author of the Trump dossier, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, is sterling among high-level people in the intelligence community.

“In the rush [by the Trump camp] to trample all over the dossier and its contents, one key question remained. Why had America’s intelligence agencies felt it necessary to provide a compendium of the claims to Barack Obama and Trump himself? The answer lies in the credibility of its apparent author, the quality of the sources he has, and the quality of the people who were prepared to vouch for him. In all these respects, the 53-year-old is in credit.”

The newest Japanese trailer for Kong: Skull Island (posted yesterday) is amusing for the narration, but the trailer that appeared a little more than three weeks ago (12.19.16) is far superior. The Kong one-off, directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, opens on 3.10.17. Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jing Tian, Toby Kebbell and John Ortiz.