As it turns out my fears about the Criterion guys possibly making their McCabe and Mrs. Miller Bluray look darker or muddier than the original celluloid version were unfounded. Ditto the recent complaint by DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze about the McCabe Bluray looking “occasionally greenish and sometimes very brown, flat, dull and thick.“ It actually makes the film look better, most likely, than any screen-projected version did back in ’71. Every intended value — the feeling of constant fog, dampness and drizzle, that grainy-flashy look that Vilmos Zsigmond intended, the intense greens of the nearby forest, the indoor kerosene-lamp lighting — comes across with more vivid brushstrokes  and more exacting focus than ever before. Every frame has a kind of throbbing soft glow; you can almost smell the northwest atmosphere. It certainly leaves the Amazon streaming version in the dust; ditto the DVD that came out several years back. Criterion’s McCabe, in short, delivers what I consider to be a “bump,” but one with historic integrity. This is what the film looked like in ’71, except now it probably looks better than it did at the Beekman or Cinema 1 or whichever first-run situation it played in Manhattan. If he was still with us director Robert Altman would fully approve.

A guy I knew in my youth, called “Billy” by his friends, passed a few days ago. I’m sad and sorry but it happens — not everyone can be Norman Lloyd. Billy was a builder and a designer, but also the guy who opened a small window on my understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he did it with just nine words. This also happens. Someone will express an opinion in just the right way with just the right number of words and the right kind of English….wham. Your viewpoint is altered.

We were sitting on a floor at a party in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, during the Nixon administration, and Billy, fortified with lysergic acid diethylamide, was expounding on this and that. The subject of Israel came up, which Billy was no fan of. He saw Israel as an aggressive military bully — “tanks!” — appropriating Palestinian territory. Billy was brilliant and well-educated but no pretentious intellectual — he liked to talk like a farmer, a building foreman, a salt-of-the-earth type. Which is probably one reason why I’ve never forgotten his concluding statement on the Middle East dispute: “Lemme tell ya, them Ay-rabs, they got the lowdown.”

From that moment on, I began to feel more and more compassion for the Palestinians and to regard Israel with more and more suspicion.

And then ISIS happened. These days it’s hard not to be tugged by a certain concern about Ay-rabs, or at least those in their flock who not only have the lowdown but have cornered the market on crazy. That’s the wrong way to look at it, of course. I’m not a Trumpster. I’ll be voting for Hillary on 11.8. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the days in which Billy’s view exerted a certain influence have come to an end.

I’m in a small Virgin America jet somewhere over Colorado, and somehow I was able to stream this Fareed Zakaria interview with Bill Maher (posted today) without too much difficulty. Everything Maher says is precisely what I’ve been sensing, observing and thinking all along. Nothing more than that.

Reactions to last night’s Melanianade short on SNL? I’ve watched it three times now, and while it’s pretty good it’s…let’s leave it there. What I like most is the decision to shoot black-and-white and particularly go with a 2.4:1 aspect ratio. Tip of the hat to Cecily Strong (Melania Trump), Emily Blunt (Ivanka Trump), Kate Mckinnon (Kellyanne Conway), Sasheer Zamata (Omarosa, an early Apprentice contestant), Vanessa Bayer (Tiffany Trump) and Alec Baldwin (Donald Trump).

I love the way the New York subway system will occasionally double-fuck riders. One, a train will arrive really late and thereby make you late for whatever appointment or event you’re trying to get to. Two, the lateness means that the crowd waiting for the train will be quite large and the train cars will be heavily crowded to begin with, and then even worse once everyone jams their way in. This never happens in Paris, but it happens in Manhattan and Brooklyn a lot. Plus there’s still no wifi in several smaller station stops while wifi is virtually everywhere in the Paris metro system. I can’t recall what the wifi situation is in the London Underground, but I have no memory of lateness and overcrowding being an issue except during rush hour.

I was naturally assuming that Criterion’s forthcoming His Girl Friday Bluray (streeting on 1.10.17) would be a 4K digital restoration, but for whatever reason the Criterion website notes are merely calling it a “new high-definition digital restoration“…meaning what exactly? When they announced their inky-squiddy Only Angels Have Wings Bluray they didn’t hesitate to call it a 4K job. I’m sorry but until they clearly specify that Friday is a 4K upgrade, I’m not putting this on my “buy” list. I will not be taken for granted. They can’t just say “here’s another one!” and expect me to drool. I have to be wooed and sold, and the best way to do that is to promise a Bluray “bump.”

A seven-episode HBO series from producer David E. Kelley and director Jean Marc Vallee with Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Shailene Woodley…fine. But they can’t say when it’ll air in 2017? I’m guessing February or March but why don’t they just blurt it out? Based on a 2015 airport-lounge book by Liane Moriarty, it involves three moms living in a “sleepy beach community” blah blah. Somebody dies. Costarring Alexander Skarsgard, Zoe Kravitz, Laura Dern, Adam Scott. Just a razmatazzy teaser.

It took forever for Martin Scorsese‘s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (’05) to be released on Bluray, but now’s a good time for those who never saw it or never really absorbed the legend, especially given Dylan’s just-announced Nobel prize for literature. (The Bluray doesn’t actually street until 10.28.)

I remember watching this 208-minute doc with 18-year-old Jett in the summer of ’06, and his saying around the 70- or 80-minute mark, or roughly where Dylan’s career was in ’60 or ’61, “I don’t get it” — i.e., what was the big deal about this guy? That’s because Dylan didn’t really come into full flower until ’62 or even ’63, and because Part One of No Direction Home (roughly the 110-minute mark) ends with Dylan’s performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. That’s when the heavy journey really began, and when the earth began to move. 

People forget that Dylan wasn’t fully free of his lefty-social-protest folk troubadour chapter until Another Side of Bob Dylan. And for many, he didn’t really hit the brass-ring zeitgeist jackpot until Bringin’ It All Back Home.

Today is Angela Lansbury‘s 91st birthday — born on 10.16.25. So the scheming communist agent mother in The Manchurian Candidate wasn’t shot on that stage in the old Madison Square Garden but went on to a great career on the Broadway stage. Good for her!  Lansbury was 36 or 37 when she portrayed the 33-year-old Laurence Harvey‘s mom, Eleanor Shaw Iselin, in that John Frankenheimer classic, which opened on 10.24.62 but was shot, I think, in early ’62. Lansbury has always been the spry, spirited type on stage, but Hollywood began casting her in middle-aged parts when she hit her late 20s and certainly by her early 30s.

Incidentally: In Richard Condon‘s 1959 novel of the same name, Mrs. Iselin has sex with her son Raymond (Harvey’s character). The film omitted this, of course, but the clip below ends with Lansbury giving Harvey a mouth-to-mouth kiss — a clear hint. This was probably the first time that incest was specifically alluded to in a mainstream Hollywood film.