This morning’s hoo-hah is that Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni, the guy hired to play the Devil in Mark Burnett‘s The Bible miniseries on the History Channel, strongly resembles President Obama. The association of evil is intensified by Quazani wearing an Emperor Palpatine hoodie cloak. The resemblance hasn’t been exaggerated. Quazani is a dead ringer for an older Obama (i.e., 10 or 15 years from now).

(l.) Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni as the Fallen Angel in Mark Burnett’s The Bible miniseries; (r.) President Obama

Unless The Bible casting director who hired Quazani (either Noureddine Aberdine, Amine Louadni or Carl Proctor) is a drooling idiot, he/she was fully aware of the resemblance.

Ditto Burnett, the reality-show promoter and multi-millionaire (Survivor, Celebrity Apprentice, The Voice, The Job) who produced The Bible along with his actress-wife Rona Downey. They knew exactly what the shot was. They’re rich and almost certainly not stupid. And I seriously doubt that they were entirely disinterested in stirring up reactions among those who would most likely watch The Bible, and I’m not referring to college-educated blue-state urbans. They certainly knew they’d get a lot of press…c’mon.

I have reason to suspect that anyone who even vaguely equates the power of God and teachings of Jesus to powerful engines in hot cars, as Burnett did not long ago, is probably some kind of moderate dimwit.

I also suspect that anyone who has produced a religious-themed film or mini-series who tells a reporter that “the hand of God was on this,” as Burnett recently did, is basically a hustler trying to attract the religious-minded to watch his show.

That goes double if the same Malibu-residing producer has co-authored a Bible-for-simpletons book that will help promote his religious-themed mini-series, which critics have incidentally called a flashy and synthetic exploitation of Bible tales.

Any hustler can get rich off the God-exploiting business, but some take it more seriously than most. If God touches your movie or miniseries, perhaps He/She/It is also touching the heart and soul of its producer[s]. It doesn’t necessarily follow that people who talk about the hand of God affecting this or that human enterprise are idiots, but people who talk this way do tend to be conservative traditionalists, and this tends to overlap with Republican theology.

We all know the score. You can be a liberal and still be a devout Christian, but generally speaking the God who lives in the narrative of the Holy Bible was co-opted by the religious right decades ago, and anyone who says things like “the hand of God” helped us make this movie knows what he/she is saying and who they’re getting through to. You know it. I know it. Cut the crap.

The Bible series airs each Sunday at 8 p.m. on History Channel. The series’ finale is Easter Sunday.

Update: “This is utter nonsense,” Burnett and Downey said in a statement Monday. “The actor who played Satan, Mehdi Ouzaani, is a highly acclaimed Moroccan actor. He has previously played parts in several Biblical epics — including Satanic characters long before Barack Obama was elected as our President.”

A History Channel spokesperson also said the resemblance was not intentional. “History channel has the highest respect for President Obama,” some flack wrote. “The series was produced with an international and diverse cast of respected actors. It’s unfortunate that anyone made this false connection. History’s The Bible is meant to enlighten people on its rich stories and deep history.”

These words were spoken by Mel Gibson‘s Fletcher Christian as he led a mutiny against Anthony Hopkins‘ Captain Bligh in Roger Donaldson‘s The Bounty (’84). They were also silently muttered to myself as I trudged through mobs of St. Patrick’s Day revelers today at the Farmer’s Market and The Grove. For some reason I can walk amongst tens of thousands on the streets of Manhattan or London or Paris or Dublin and not blink an eye, but outdoor shopping mall crowds are different. Not a pestilence but certainly worth avoiding if at all possible.

They’re too plentiful, for one thing. Shuffling along at even slower rates than usual and obstructing anyone trying to stride around with any sense of purpose. They walk around like 85 year-olds (it’s called the “mall meander”) and are always stopping for gelato and or congregating in groups of four or five or six as they wait to get into the Cheesecake Factory. Plus St. Paddy’s is a day of drink and that means a lot of noise and giggling and live bands (some even attempting to play a semblance of traditional Irish music) that no one’s listening to. I learned a long time ago when I was a New Yorker to stay indoors in St. Patrick’s Day — too many drunks. Now I know it’s the same here. I’ll never go St. Paddy-ing in Los Angeles ever again.

On June 4th Kino Video will release a Bluray of Alan Clarke‘s Scum (’79), a violent, survival-of-the-most-brutal drama set inside a British borstal. It starred a very young and intense Ray Winstone — his big breakout role — along with his Quadrophenia costar Phil Daniels. There was a gritty realism thing happening in British films at the time, and Scum was one of the stand-outs. It’s an absolute must-see still.

Clarke made two Scum films — a 1977 TV version made for BBC’s Play for Today that was withdrawn from broadcast due to violence. Two years later Clarke and screenwriter Roy Minton remade it as an even more violent feature. British DVDs of both are apparently purchasable (or were purchasable) but the Bluray is presumably the thing to have.

For whatever reason the Kino Video notes state that Scum‘s running time is 78 minutes while the IMDB gives a running time of 98 minutes. A typo, I’m guessing.

Scum opened in 1980 in New York. I attended the premiere (which happened at some downtown theatre, possible the Eighth Street Playhouse) and then the after-party with my beautiful girlfriend, Kathi Jo, and her fetching best friend. I met Winstone at the party, and right away he asked if I was in the mood to share. “Not the blonde,” I said. “She’s with me but her friend, sure, I guess…go for it.” Smiling Ray liked that response — “Gee, thanks, Jeff!” (Except he pronounced it “Jayff.”) Winstone got distracted by something or someone else and never came over to talk. That night Kathi Jo and her friend and I went back to her place and got into a three-way although not the hot guy-fantasy kind with the women doing each other. It was basically a double-scoop ice cream sundae for me — unforgettable.

20 years later I ran into Winstone at Toronto’s Park Hyatt. This was a day or two after Sexy Beast had opened. Anyway he was with two or three others but we locked eyes and he remembered right away — “Hello, Jayff!”

From the Scum Wiki page: “It was later released on DVD in the UK by Odyssey and Prism Leisure. It was the digitally remastered uncut version but in fullscreen, with only a trailer and an interview as bonus features. In the US an Alan Clarke boxset was issued that included several films, among them both the BBC original and cinema version of the film plus audio commentaries.

“Prism Leisure released a limited edition 2-disc set in the UK on June 13, 2005. Disc One featured the BBC version with an audio commentary and two interviews. Disc Two instead featured the theatrical remake with an audio commentary, several interviews and featurettes and two trailers. It was digitally remastered from a widescreen print. A Region 0 DVD — similar to that in the Alan Clarke boxset, but this time available separately from other Clarke films — followed in the US, released by Blue Underground.”

Here’s a well-written review of the double package by Digitally Obsessed.

Clarke died at age 54 in 1990.

Fox Home Video’s forthcoming Bluray of Sidney Lumet‘s The Verdict (May 7th) is way overdue. A near-classic. Great perfs from Newman, Mason, Warden, Rampling. But the greatest value is Andrzej Bartkowiak‘s cinematography. Those inky blacks, streams of sunlight, gentle ambers, bluish morning grays. A little prettier than The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but Boston through and through.

“So Pat says, he says, ‘They got this new bar…and you go inside and for half a buck you get a beer, a free lunch and they take you in the back room and they get you laid’ Mike says, ‘Now wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Do you mean to say there’s a new bar and you go inside and for a half a buck they give you a beer, a free lunch and they take you in the back room and they get you laid?’ Pat says, ‘That’s right.’ ‘Have you ever been in the bar?’ And Pat says, ‘No, but me sister has.'”

When Criterion’s Heaven’s Gate Bluray came out last November I just couldn’t muster the energy to ask the Criterion publicists for a freebie. I had watched it once at the Manhattan all-media press screening in November 1980, and the memory was still fresh 32 years later. I couldn’t make myself watch it again. I just didn’t have the will.

“I was there, man,” I wrote last August. “I was in that audience [at the Cinema 1], and in all my years of watching films I have never felt such a sucking sensation in a room…a feeling of almost total inertia from the oxygen having been all but vacuumed out by a filmmaker with a ridiculous and over-indulged sense of his own vision and grandeur, and by a resultant approach to filmmaking that felt to me like some kind of pretentious waking nightmare.

“I could feel it in one of the earliest scenes, when John Hurt is addressing his graduating Harvard classmates in a cocky, impudent, self-amused fashion and Joseph Cotten (as a character called ‘Reverend Doctor’) is shown to be irked and offended by the snide and brazen tone of Hurt’s remarks, and right away I was saying to myself, ‘What is this? I can’t understand half of what Hurt is on about and I don’t give a damn why Cotten is bothered. If this is indicative of what this film will be like for the next three hours then Cimino is fucked and so am I because I have to sit here and watch it.’

“What happened? How could Cimino have made such an oppressive and impenetrable film as this? The basis of the ‘misunderstood masterpiece’ revisionism is basically about the fact that (a) it’s very pretty to look at, very pastoral and majesterial, etc., (b) it offers a severely critical view of the vicious tendencies of gangster capitalism (hence the admiration in certain lefty and left-European circles), and (c) it’s very expansive and meditative and serene in a certain 19th Century fashion. I understand how some could glom onto these three talking points and build that into a revisionist mentality.

“But don’t start up with the ‘oh, what did they know back in 1980?’ crap. They knew. I know. I was there.”

Anyway, Heaven’s Gate showed at last September’s Venice Film Festival and then the New York Film Festival and then the Bluray came out. I figured by now it would be over and done with but no. N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has written a new “let’s take another look at Heaven’s Gate” piece because it’s showing at Manhattan’s Film Forum from 3.22 to 3.28. I would love this film to go away and die in a hole in the woods, but it won’t.

Dargis: “Watching Heaven’s Gate for the first time in February I understood how it could mean so many seemingly contradictory things to so many people and why so many dissimilar conclusions could all feel true. The film’s scope, natural backdrops, massive sets, complex choreography and cinematography are seductive, at times stunning, and if you like watching swirling people and cameras, you may love it. If you insist on strong narratives, white hats and black, uniform performances, audible dialogue and a happy ending, well, you will have history and consensus on your side. (The film’s turbulent history — amazingly, given the stakes, it was yanked from distribution soon after it opened — also helped explain why I had never seen it.)”

In an email sent yesterday, George Stevens, Jr. — producer, director, AFI founder and son of legendary director George Stevens — shared information about the forthcoming Bluray of Shane, which he’s worked on with Technicolor under Paramount Home Video. He said that Warner Home Video, which bought Shane last fall along with other Paramount catalogue titles, will distribute the Bluray later this year. And yet, Stevens said, this digitally remastered Shane will be presented in 1.66, an aspect ratio that his father had never heard of and certainly didn’t compose for when he and dp Loyal Griggs shot Shane between July and October 1951.

1.37

1.66

Stevens edited Shane all during 1952, and the now-classic western opened in April 1953. As it happened this was the exact month when the big studios began to declare that all Academy-ratio films had to be projected with a simulated widescreen aspect ratio in order to make movies look wider and grander than TV. And so Shane was projected at 1.66 at the Radio City Music Hall and other venues. But cooler heads have prevailed in the decades since, the result being that for the last half-century or so Shane has been seen at 1.37 on broadcast TV, VHS, laser disc and DVD.

But now the Bluray, according to Stevens, is essentially going back to the old fake standard, lopping off the tops and bottoms in order to decrease the width of the black bars when people watch the Shane Bluray on 16 x 9 high-def screens. With only slender, barely noticable black bars on either side of the image, the 1.66 version will fill most of the screen.

Stevens also told me yesterday afternoon that a 1.37 version (which he called “an Academy aspect ratio version matching the original”) had been prepared for high-def/Bluray viewing. But he said that he was very satisfied with the look of the 1.66 version. and that “given the choice of having a 1:37 version placed in the center of a horizontal television screen with bars on each side, or a carefully configured 1:66 to 1 version that filled the screen, I am confident George Stevens would subscribe to the latter.” I replied that this decision was probably causing his father to turn in his grave.

Clearly the most sensible and respectable way to go is to issue the Shane Bluray in both aspect ratios — 1.37 and 1.66 — in the tradition of Criterion’s triple-aspect-ration Bluray of On the Waterfront and Masters of Cinema’s dual aspect ratio Bluray of Touch of Evil. I wrote a letter back to Stevens suggesting this, and cc’ed a couple of Warner Home Video bigwigs in the process. Stevens didn’t reply and probably won’t as he said he’s not interested in corresponding all that much and is looking to put a lid on it. One of the Warner Home Video execs I cc’ed said I wasn’t worth hearing from and asked me to stop cc’ing him. Off to a good start!

1.37

1.66

Here’s how I put my case to Stevens earlier today:

“Last night you expressed a hope that our correspondence would be concluded with your reply. The suggestion is that you find corresponding with me about the Shane Bluray unworthy of any more of your time. I will therefore be brief and to the point.

“But understand I will not be retreating to my little journalist corner on this issue. I am going to write a piece about this situation in my column today, and I am going to reach out to everyone I know in the film-loving community to try and persuade you and particularly Warner Home Video to issue a double-format Shane Bluray — a 1.66 plus a 1.37 version — instead of just a 1.66 version.

“Due respect, George, but you are wrong in advocating or going along with only a 1.66 to 1 version. I spoke with Robert Harris about this matter this morning, and he says you’re a very exacting and scrupulous fellow in matters of film preservation and restoration. So I’m sure that the 1.66 version you’ve created is very handsome and satisfying in a certain sense. But it is not what was composed by your father, who was also very exacting and who poured all of his heart into his work, which I know from having watched George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey.

“It is absolutely imperative and essential that the 1.37 version be included along with the 1.66 version in the Shane Bluray.

1.37

1.66

“Your father called the shots and not Loyal Griggs — I get that. (Griggs had not been a full-fledged dp before Shane.) But the bottom line is that your father didn’t frame the film for 1.66. He and Griggs didn’t even know what 1.66 was between July and October of 1951. 1.66 hadn’t even been conceptualized, much less invented, at that point.

“So you were there on the Shane set and you know whereof you speak. And yet because Warner Home Video or Paramount Home Video execs have presumably told you to fill out the 16 x 9 screen, you’ve essentially dismissed your father and Loyal Griggs’ vision of Shane because (a) high-def TVs have 16 x 9 aspect ratios, (b) the black bars on the sides of a 1.37 Shane will displease some of the philistines out there who don’t understand that 1.37 is how it was shot and meant to be seen, period, and (c) said philistines will be therefore be less interested in renting or purchasing the Bluray Shane.

“I have also spoken to respected archivist Bob Furmanek on this matter, and he agrees with me 100%. Although Shane was projected at the RCMH and other venues at 1.66, he said, ‘the filmmakers’ artistic intent MUST be respected and this film should only be seen in 1.37:1.’

“I told Furmanek that I intend to start an online petition right away with all of the major respected archivists and preservationists in the U.S. and elsewhere. The petition would state the facts and strongly urge that the original aspect ratio of this American classic be respected by Warner Home Video when it releases the Shane Bluray later this year. The petition would specifically urge that 1.37 be respected above all, but that a dual aspect ratio release would also work.

“Obviously I will want to enlist the support of Mr. Harris (who told me this morning that while he supports your 1.66 version he also supports the idea of a dual-aspect ratio approach), film preservation and restoration godfather Martin Scorsese, all the major journalists and editors who’ve written on this subject over the years, the heads of AMPAS and MOMA and LACMA and the American Cinematheque and the AFI, the people behind the French Cinematheque, Woody Allen (who participated a big NY Times piece about Shane a few years ago), several major American cinematographers and so on.

“The petition will be principally addressed to Jeff Baker, Ned Price and George Feltenstein of Warner Home Video.”

1.37

1.66

Boy, I sure hope I never get in the middle of something like this with all those bullets and explosions and bad guys shooting their way into the White House! Well, at least there’s comfort in the fact that guys like Gerard Butler (as Mike Banning, “a former Special Forces operative and now Secret Service agent”) are always ready to man up and shoot back and protect us from harm. Hey, Mike, over here…Mike! I’m out of ammo! Toss me a clip.

Warner Bros. will be showing Brian Helgeland‘s 42 (Warner Bros., 4.12) to early-bird press next weekend during a junket gathering in downtown LA. I still say that the poster showing Robinson sliding into a base with his fist raised looks phony because (a) his fist looks like a gesture of triumph and (b) his mouth is open as if he’s shouting “yeaaahhhh!” It looks like an advertising con.

Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out will be available on iTunes on 3.26. Zenovich had planned to interview Polanski about how Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired had reopened the case, but Polanski was arrested in Zurich two months before their appointment. Odd Man Out, which I saw last September, explores the Swiss incarceration and legal wrangling that happened in ’09 and ’10. It also touches on Zenovich’s guilt over having possibly prompted the Los Angeles DA to seek Polanksi’s extradition in the first place.

Last night I attended a special LACMA screening of David Mamet‘s Phil Spector (HBO, 3.24). It’s far from a typical big-murder-trial, guilty-or-innocent movie. It’s very tight and taut in the classic Mamet style, and it contains a pair of compelling, at times amusing, charismatic performances from Al Pacino as Spector-the-nutbag (brilliant, flamboyant, fickle, rambling of speech, bewigged, gnome-like) and Helen Mirren as his flinty defense attorney, Linda Kenney Baden.

Obviously Pacino and Mirren are destined for Emmy award nominations. Ditto Mamet for direction and screenplay.

Phil Spector runs a mere 91 minutes. That obviously indicates considerable discipline given the reams of material on Spector and his first Lana Clarkson murder trial, which resulted in a hung jury in September 2007. (The state re-tried Spector and got a conviction in May 2009 for second-degree murder. He’ll be eligible for parole when he’s 88 years old.) Mamet could have made an epic-sized thing, or at least one lasting two or three hours.

And yet it’s not so much about story-telling as the wielding of a blade that cuts in and around like a sushi chef. Great skill and flair and theatrical pizazz have been brought to bear.

The script may remind you in certain ways of Mamet’s script for The Verdict (’82) in that it’s much more about psychology than courtroom strategy, and also because it offers an ethically precise point of view. As The Verdict was about redemption, Phil Spector is about damnation.

It’s all “factual” in a sense, but it’s also a fantasia of sorts. It’s a visit to Mamet-world. His strategy is to focus on the relationship between Spector and Baden, but in so doing explore all the key arguments that suggested Spector was guilty of deliberately shooting Clarkson in the mouth and also that he may not be. The idea is that in a certain foolish or theatrical way Clarkson may have been holding the gun and that it may have gone off accidentally. It does seem likely that what happened was accidental. It does seem likely that there would have been more blood found on Spector’s white jacket if he had been holding the gun. The evidence is the evidence.

Mamet has said over and over that Phil Spector is about the “mythological possibilities” in Spector’s life and personality and in the murder trial itself. In line with this he tries a little mumbo-jumbo tap-dancing right out of the gate. “This is a work of fiction,” a statement reads before the film begins. “It’s not ‘based on a true story.’ It is a drama inspired by actual persons in a trial, but it is neither an attempt to depict the actual persons, nor comment upon the trial or its outcome.” I don’t know what the hell that really means.

And yet Mamet’s film states quite clearly that (a) the facts indicate that Spector didn’t deliberately kill Clarkson, and (b) she may well have been holding the gun when it went off.

I think that’s pretty close to taking a side, don’t you? Mamet looks at the facts of the case and conveys a conclusion. I was persuaded by his presentation.

Mamet’s bottom-line view is that Spector basically screwed himself by being himself. He was convicted of “we don’t like you.” He was convicted for not opening himself up to People magazine and admitting he’d been a snarly, selfish fuck and asking for forgiveness. He was convicted for having owned several guns and having threatened other women with them. He was convicted for having acquired a reputation of being a reclusive shit. He was convicted for wearing a series of appalling wigs.

Pacino has a lot of fun with Spector. It’s a beautiful virtuoso performance. He rolls around like a pig in shit. But honestly? Pacino makes Spector seem a little bit goofier and wiggier than he seems in Vikram Jayanti‘s The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector. Here’s an excerpt from my 6.26.10 piece about the doc, which I first saw three or four years ago:

“[Spector is] a fascinating man — there’s no getting around that. A brilliant, oddball X-factor ‘character’ of the first order. I’ve known a few guys like Spector. They’re egotists and half-crazy and it’s always about them, but they’re a trip to talk to and share stories with. If you love show business, you can’t help but love how these guys are always sharp as a tack and don’t miss a trick and are always blah-blahing about their genius and their importance.

“Except Spector’s blah is backed up by truth. He’s a serious maestro who really did shape and inspire rock ‘n’ roll in its infancy, and who touched heaven a few times in the process.

“Okay, so he probably shot Lana Clarkson, a 40 year-old, financially struggling actress, on 2.3.03 when she was visiting his home. Or maybe he threatened to shoot her and the gun accidentally went off. Or whatever. And maybe Spector telling a Daily Telegraph reporter two months before the shooting that ‘he had bipolar disorder and that he considered himself relatively insane’ was a factor. And maybe he deserves to be in jail for 19 years. The guy is obviously immodest and intemperate with demons galore.

“But you can tell from listening to Spector that he’s some kind of bent genius — that he’s brilliant, exceptional, perceptive — and that it’s a monumental tragedy that these qualities co-exist alongside so much weirdness inside the man — all kinds of strutting-egoist behavior and his having threatened women with guns and all of that ‘leave me alone because I’m very special’ hiding-behind-bodyguards crap. Because life is short and the kind of vision and talent that Spector has (or at least had) is incredibly rare and world-class.

“That’s why Jayanti’s film is so absorbing, and why the title is exactly right. Why do so many gifted people always seem to be susceptible to baser impulses? Why do they allow bizarre psychological currents to influence their lives? What kind of a malignant asshole waves guns around in the first place? I’ll tell you what kind of guy does that. A guy who never got over hurtful traumatic stuff that happened in his childhood (like his father committing suicide), and who decided early on that he wouldn’t deal with it.”

Thanks to LACMA’s Elvis Mitchell for being a nice guy.

The fattest, booziest, most depressed and most down-minded schlubs in America live in the lower Midwest and the South, and they tend to vote Republican and against socially progressive initiatives. I think most of us already knew this, but a Gallup poll, condensed in a 3.14 Daily Mail story, has re-reported the basic facts.

The saddest and most personally screwed-up voters (poor health, obese, boozing, cigarette-smoking, living hand-to-mouth in trailer parks or McMansions, driving gas guzzlers, poorest educational systems, highest divorce rates) live in West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana and Oklahoma…in that order. Yes, there are many thousands of self-destructive dim bulbs who live in the Northeast, the Southwest, the Northwest, California and so on, but their numbers are less concentrated.

The Depression States basically constitute Tea Party country. A brief scan of the U.S. Senators and Congresspersons representing these areas tells you everything you need to know about why this country doesn’t work. Boehner, McConnell — not all of the anti-progressive Congressional naysayers, corporate fellaters, obstinate crazies and stoppers come from these states, but a high percentage of them do.

I say again that the best thing that could happen all around would be to create a separate nation in these Midwestern and Southern areas — just cut the yokels off and let them raise their own revenues and nurture their retro beliefs, values and prejudices. They’re just a drag on the rest of the country and the sooner Red America is cut loose, the better for the rest of us. Seriously.

This isn’t the 1860s. Our borders are secure, we have nuclear weapons, and nobody’s going to invade. We can be two countries and make out just fine. Yugoslavia broke up into two or three chunks and they’re doing okay. Czechoslovakia became two nations and they’re holding it together. We could create our out Czech Republic — a Blue America — and let the “Slovakians” have their own. I’m perfectly serious here. The heehaws are what’s wrong. Get rid of them and a lot of the nation’s big problems will become much more managable.

Would we still have to cope with corporate corruption and self-destructive forces in an All-Blue Nation? Of course. Would life still be hard and harrowing at times? Yes. But at least we’d have a better chance of being able to fix problems with the crazies out of the picture.