Oh, yeah, right…it was the Russian trailer I ran the other day.

Unlikely as this may sound, I saw the stage production of War Horse last night at the Ahmanson. It’s still a children’s story and still (for me) manipulative and fake, but I liked the show more than the Spielberg film, at least. And I loved the songs, which aren’t integrated in a “musical” sense although they give the show a certain emotional lift. If Spielberg had used them he would have had a more affecting film, I think. It would have made the sentimental schmaltz aspect feel more soulful on some level.

L.A. City Hall, taken from the outdoor court in front of the Ahamnson/Mark Taper Forum/Dorothy Chandler Pavillion.

Sam Raimi‘s Oz: The Great and Powerful opens on 3.8.13. The date in itself tells me something. Disney believes in it but they’re not sure to what degree (the film was shot in 2011), so they’re hedging just a bit. Raimi’s first film since Drag Me To Hell is an origin story about, in a sense, Frank Morgan‘s character in the original The Wizard of Oz, called Oscar Diggs and played by James Franco. Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams and Zach Braff costar. I distrust family flicks. I go to them with a “show me” attitude.

The discovery of the God particle — a subatomic element that informs the size and shape and contour of all physical matter, “the missing cornerstone of particle physics” — was announced yesterday. Don’t look now, but this is almost (I say “almost”) like the discovery of the black monolith on the moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And yet it’s been there all along. The supreme scientific equation…proven.

The “intelligent design” crowd is celebrating this all across America, you bet. I despise what Christianity has become in this country, but I happen to believe in intelligent design also, in a sense. There is obviously a unified flow and an absolute cosmic commonality in all living things and all aspects of the architecture. The difference is that I don’t attach a Bible-belt morality to this overwhelming fact. To me God is impartial, celestial, biological, mathematical, amoral, unemotional, miraculous and breathtaking.

However you define the altogether, He/She/It has absolutely zero “interest” in whether you or your great-uncle or next door neighbor are adhering to the Ten Commandments or having an abortion or helping a homeless person or what-have-you. The molecular perfection and mind-blowingly infinite implications of God are way, way beyond ground-level morality.

“People whose lives are, in their minds, basically about finding spiritual fulfillment and deliverance after they’re dead are ridiculous figures,” I wrote last August. “They’re certainly appalling. The only reason religions are good for society is that they keep the nutters (i.e. those who would otherwise be seeking solace in alcohol or drugs or in the ravings of some antisocial cult leader) in line, and they instill a sense of moral order and temperance among people who lack the intelligence or drive or hunger to seek spiritual satori on their own.”

I’ve been technically ready to shift HE over to WordPress since early May, but reluctant all the same. Laziness, shock of the new, chickenshit…something. Even though I’ve been told that the blurry Safari image problem on iPhones and iPads might be eliminated when the switch happens. But there’s a solution right now — the new Google browser. I installed it on my iPhone a half-hour ago and the blurry thing vanished. Adios, Safari!

Being otherwise engaged during the last Los Angeles invitational screening of The Amazing Spider-Man the night before last and too busy (i.e., too lazy) to have seen it yesterday on my own dime, I’ll defer to Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet on the $35 million opening day:

“Forget the fact that I don’t think The Amazing Spider-Man is very good” — 71% Rotten Tomatoes, 66% Metacritic — “and forget the fact it’s showing in 3-D and on IMAX screens, which means it’s bringing in more money than had it been playing on a level, 2-D playing field. The fact it made $35 million on its opening day, which includes $7.5 million from midnight screenings, is just mind-boggling to me.

“Where’s the demand? Where is the desire to see this movie right away?

“It’s only been five years since the last Spider-Man film and, for the most part, Spider-Man 3 was generally considered awful. And now people are lining up to spend an untold amount of money to see it all start over again as the webslinger battles a giant lizard? Sorry, I just don’t get it.

“Of the $35 million, $4 million was generated from 3-D IMAX screenings and this total now surpasses the previous, $27.8 million Tuesday opening day record held by 2007’s Transformers.”

“When someone reboots a film franchise, as the makers of The Amazing Spider-Man have done, what are we meant to think of the original boot? The first Spider-Man came out in 2002, followed by its obligatory sequels in 2004 and 2007. If you are a twenty-year-old male of unvarnished social aptitude, those movies will seem like much-loved classics that have eaten up half your lifetime. They beg to be interpreted anew, just as Shakespeare’s history plays should be freshly staged by every generation.

“For those of us who are lavishly cobwebbed with time, however, the notion of yet another Spider-Man saga, this soon, does seem hasty, and I wish that the good people — or, at any rate, the patent lawyers — at Marvel Comics could at least have taken the opportunity to elide the intensely annoying hyphen in the title. Or does merely suggesting such a change make me a total ass-hole?” — from Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review, dated 7.9.

Network’s Odd Man Out Bluray “is quite impressive. Contrast levels are well balanced and stable, most close-ups convey very pleasing depth [and] the noirish dark sequences with the long shadows boast excellent clarity. The best news is that there are no traces of excessive de-noising. All in all, Network’s restoration has produced some marvelous results, and I must speculate that this is indeed the very best Carol Reed‘s film has ever looked.” — from Dr. Svet Atanasov‘s 6.29 review.

The Bluray containing an 186-minute cut of Kenneth Lonergan‘s Margaret streets on 7.10. (The version that opened and re-opened last year runs 150 minutes.) On 7.9 the three-hour-and-six-minute Margaret will screen at Manhattan’s Sunshine theater with a q & a to follow with Lonergan, Mark Ruffalo and Matthew Broderick submitting to Tony Kushner‘s questions. A subsequent LA screening with Lonergan and Anna Paquin doing a post-screening q & a happens on 7.17 at LACMA.

Here’s my positive review of the two-and-a-half-hour cut, which I ran after finally seeing a screener last December.

While Savages director Oliver Stone “manages to deliver the guilty pleasure shoot-’em-up that the material begs for, he can’t make the wild ride last,” writes Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn. “[But] he does find a way to editorialize with it. The single greatest deviation from the source material is the movie’s ending, which turns away from the Butch Cassidy reference point in favor of something closer to The Sting.

“Stone eventually arrives at a crowdpleasing finale that’s at once troublesome and provocative. No matter how unsettling Savages gets, it retains the DNA of a fairy tale. That takeaway creates the perception of the war on drugs as a fantasy played out in the minds of its participants, and in that regard it represents Stone’s most radical political statement in years.”

If there’s one opinion that almost everyone is sharing, it’s that the older supporting performances (from Benicio del Toro, John Travolta, Salma Hayek, Demian Bichir) outshine the lead performances (from Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson and Blake Lively).

Savages (Universal ,78.6) is currently running at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes and an inconclusive 72% on Metacritic (only three reviews).

What’s the point of being a 1.85 fascist if you’re not going to be that thing when some renegade Bluray distributor defies the rules? Does Bob Furmanek believe that all non-Scope Hollywood studio films released after April 1953 were projected at 1.85 or not? Olive Films’ forthcoming Bluray of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (originally released on 5.27.54) is presented at 1.37 to 1, despite the fact that the 1.85 mandate had been adopted by the nation’s theatres approximately 13 months before the film’s theatrical release. And not a single 1.85 fascist has said boo.

Bluray.com’s Jeffrey Kauffman hasn’t mentioned it. DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze notes that the film was “composed for 1.66” but presented at 1.37.

You may not agree with my “boxy is beautiful” theology, but at least I say what I feel and let aspect-ratio revisionists like Furmanek have it with both barrels when they advocate for the CLEAVER-ing of classic ’50s films that have been savored for decades at 1.33 or 1.37. At least I respond like a man, which is more than you can say for Furmanek and his ilk. Am I wrong? Has Furmanek written anything? Has anyone?

I can already hear the counter-argument. Johnny Guitar wasn’t a big-studio film — it was produced by Republic Pictures — and was therefore exempt from the 1.85 masking rule that applied to all major releases in all of the nation’s theatres. But Ray and his producer, Herbert J. Yates, were obviously aware that the 1.85 word had gone out and that theatres were using 1.85 aperture plates on all non-Scope films. By what logical basis would Ray and his dp, Harry Stradling Sr., compose for 1.37 and expect that it would be seen that way in theatres? They might’ve composed for 1.37 in their hearts (as I believe Elia Kazan and Alfred Hitchcock did during filming of On The Waterfront and Dial M for Murder) but there was no rational reason for them to expect that their film would be projected at 1.37, at the very least in big-city theatres where the new standard was adopted right away.

Conversation between two projectionists in the booth for New York’s Mayfair theatre (later called the DeMille) on 5.28.54:

Projectionist #1: Where are the 1.37 aperture plates?

Projectionist #2: Why do you wanna know? We don’t use those any more.

Projectionist #1: Okay, but after closing last night I ran Johnny Guitar last night at 1.37 — I was curious, all right? I’m also sentimental — and it looks pretty good. It looks nice and boxy with plenty of headroom so fuck it…why don’t we just run it that way for the public?

Projectionist #2: But everything is projected at 1.85 now. Has been for a year now. Whaddaya doin’? You can’t improvise this stuff. 1.85 is the new law.

Projectionist #1: Have you read the instructions from Republic?

Projectionist #2: No. What are they gonna say, keep it focused?

Projectionist #1: The instructions say run it at 1.66 but we can do anything we want — we can show it at either 1.85, 1.37 or 1.66 — our choice.

Projectionist #2: But Dial M For Murder, which opens tomorrow, is being projected at 1.85. That’s what they’re requiring. They can’t go back and forth like this. Run this film at 1.37, run that one at 1.85, run the next one at 1.66. It’s too confusing. I don’t want to lose my job over this shit. We need to stick to a single standard.

Projectionist #1: Fuck it. Are we free men or slaves? What do those assholes know? The film delivers an image of 1.33. Who are they to say whack it down to 1.85? Fuck those guys.

Projectionist #2: Well, I’m a slave. A living slave.

My belief is that aspect ratios were fiddled with by projectionists all across the country from the mid ’50s to mid ’60s. Projectionists improvised — they did what they wanted because they wanted to. Some went with 1.85, some stuck to the old way because they liked it, some used 1.66 aperture plates, some showed Johnny Guitar at 1.37, some showed Johnny Guitar at 1.85, some showed Johnny Guitar at 1.66, some showed John Cassavetes‘ Shadows at 1.37 and many showed Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby at 1.66. And TV stations definitely went with 1.33 or 1.37, and so did VHS, laser discs (except for this many, many laser discs that went with 1.66 aspect ratios) and DVDs.

Only in yellowed trade paper reports and in the steel bear-trap minds of 1.85 fascists was 1.85 absolutely adhered to without exception in each and every theatre, all the time starting in April 1953.