The ongoing media feud between Mel Gibson vs. Joe Eszterhas over the Maccabee project (a “Jewish Braveheart“) has, of course, revived recollections of Gibson’s temperament and, to hear it from Eszterhas, “vile” behavior. This ugly episode will almost certainly lessen interest in Gibson’s Get The Gringo, which is being given an exclusive 5.1 DirectTV debut via Fox Home Entertainment with a DVD/Bluray to follow.

I noticed last night that the projected aspect ratio of Cabaret at the big Chinese theatre was 1.66 to 1 — no question about it. And I was thinking to myself, “Great — I can use this to bash the 1.85 fascists.” But after the screening I saw Warner Home Video’s Ned Price, who will be marketing the Cabaret Bluray when it comes out, and he said the aspect ratio we’d just seen was 1.85. Flummoxed, I contacted the Chinese projectionist and he also said it had been shown at 1.85 via a DCP.

I’m intellectually accepting what Price and the projectionist told me — they know whereof they speak. But at the same time my eye knows what it’s seeing so what to do? I don’t think I know the difference between 1.66 and 1.85 — I know I know it. And I didn’t see a 1.85 aspect ratio up there. I saw something distinctly taller and boxier and much closer to 1.66. Aspect ratios are part of my DNA. Show me a FoxScope image from the mid ’50s (i.e., 2.55 to 1) and I’ll know in an instant that it’s not regular Scope (2.35 or 2.39) or Ultra Panavision 2.76 to 1 or Vittorio Storaro‘s 2 to 1. I know 1.37 and 1.66 and pre-sound silent film aspect ratios. I know this realm dead cold.

I’m going back to the Chinese tonight and will somehow take snaps of the screen (even though that’s a huge general no-no) during the DCP showing of Vertigo, and then I’ll post the proof. That or I’ll get busted trying and thrown out of the theatre by the TCM goons (whom I wrote about last night).

Or should I just drop it?

The writers stuck in a little “uhm…let’s not think too hard about what gay guys do with each other in the privacy of their own homes” schtick to make the spot sound like less of a harangue…mildly funny.

It was great seeing and listening to Cabaret stars Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey and Michael York chat with moderator Robert Osborne prior to tonight’s Cabaret screening at the Chinese, which kicked off the TCM Classic Film Festival. Minnelli and Grey seemed physically and spiritually together and fun to be with. York wore a pair of brownish-bronze sunglasses and his voice is missing that distinctive timbre of yore, but he was also good company.

Cabaret star Liza Minnelli during pre-screening q & a at Chinese — Thursday, 4.12, 6:50 pm.

Minnelli, costar Joel Grey.

But the film? I can’t honestly say it’s aged all that well. It’s still sturdy and respectable, of course — Cabaret revived the movie musical without actually being one in a traditional sense, and at the same time presenting songs that were integrated into the plot and the theme. The performances (Minnelli’s and York’s especially) engage and the song-and-dance numbers in the Kit-Kat Club — a kind of Greek chorus commentary device — are, of course, lively and expert.

But the story (drawn from the 1966 B’way musical, and before that I Am A Camera and Christopher Isherwood‘s “Goodbye to Berlin“) feels a bit under-nourished. Remove the ominous Nazi element and it’s mostly about lying around and sex and drinking and a slight menage a trois, and the pacing feels slow. Some of it feels too simple and on the nose. Director Bob Fosse was never much for soft understatement — he always tended to underline and emphasize.

I’d really and truly love to read The Internship, the just-announced Shawn Levy-directed comedy about workplace humiliation and subjugation that will reunite Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. C’mon, just to read. The 20th Century Fox pic begins shooting on 6.25. Vaughn wrote the script, says a release.

I’m at a late-afternoon launch party for the TCM Classic Film Festival at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel, and it’s a very pleasant affair. Nice band, tasty hors d’oeuvres, etc. But you don’t want too many security goons hanging around. The degree of goon security at an event reflects management’s view of human nature. Too many goons indicates a high level of trepidation, if not alarm. Then again you don’t want to be too cavalier. It’s a fine line.

This is an oldie but goodie in a sense, certainly as far as this column is concerned, but the greatness of Oskar Werner is obvious if you start at 2:05 and hang in until 7:55. Five minutes and 50 seconds of sheer brilliance and audacity. I watch this scene late at night when I want to feel comforted or soothed before going to bed. I’ll never stop watching it.

I love how he pronounces “sovereignty,” “bestiality” and “grotesque,” and the phrase “went into hiding.” Werner was 43 or so when this was shot. An alcoholic, he died in 1984 at age 62.

My multi-region Sherwood Bluray player arrived three or four days ago, and it actually does play Region 2 Blurays if you punch in the correct code. Very comforting and satisfying. My mistake was to place the Sherwood on top of my Samsung Bluray player, which I’ve had for a year and use for domestic Blurays. Two or three days after I placed the Sherwood on top of the Samsung the latter began to cause Blurays to skip or shudder, and the sound began to be ever-so-slightly out of synch.

Not dramatically but just enough to drive me slightly nuts, like I’m a paraplegic lying in bed and listening to the sound of a dripping faucet in the kitchen, and unable to do anything but listen. The actor says “cat” or “culpable” or “have a glass of wine,” and his or her lips are just a little bit ahead of the voice. Just half a beat but it’s noticable.

I tried calling Samsung support and re-setting the software and re-updating the software, but the skipping and sound-synching problems have remained. I feel angry and frustrated. I could take the Samsung player to a repair guy, but I’m starting to believe I have no choice but to get another Bluray player, and not a Samsung this time. I’ve come to hate Samsung in a way. I only know for a fact that watching Blurays is now a very unpleasant thing, and it seems absurd that this would happen because a relatively light device was placed on top of the Samsung…fuck. I can’t stop focusing on the movement of lips, and having tried to fix it I’m now stuck in the scowling stage.

“What’s worse is that Battleship is not so bad that it’s entertaining,” says FSR’s Cole Abaius in a 4.12 review. “It never crosses that threshold, content to simply be bad and to somehow make Pearl Harbor and Transformers look like they were directed by a Rhodes Scholar that can bench 550.

“It’s unimaginable that the man who wrote the outstanding pilot to Friday Night Lights” — i.e., Battleship director Peter Berg — “would get within ten feet of this garbage, but there’s his name, right there under the words ‘From Hasbro, the company that brought you Transformers.”

It’s become almost common for film critics to express open-mouthed astonishment at the level of badness in a given film, or in a string of films. The critic gets up from his or her seat and goes to the window and opens it and shouts “aaahh!” And then says to no one in particular, “I thought I knew what it was for films to be superb and good and mediocre and bad and terrible. I thought I knew the relative meaning of these terms! But this…this film has leap-frogged over awful. It goes beyond comical, beyond ludicrous, beyond numbness. It is madness itself. It has caused me sacrifice an aspect of my own sanity.”

I remember reading an Andrew Sarris lament in one of his Village Voice reviews from the early ’80s: “The bottom has fallen out of badness in movies.” But the lack of art or craft or even competency that Sarris was alluding to became a kind of norm for people in the ’80s, and a new norm was semi-established. But then the bottom fell out of that standard, generationally-speaking or perspective-wise or what-have-you, and then a bit more and a bit more. And now we’re down to even lower forms of video-game crap like Battleship, and once you realize or accept that not just film culture but culture itself is devolving and dumbing-down and downswirling on a constant basis, you ask yourself “how can it get any worse?” And then it does. This is our pain, our trial, our gloom. The syndrome is not going to turn around and repair itself.

The 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival (6.14 to 6.24) will kick off with Woody’s Allen‘s To Rome With Love. Sony Classics will open the anthology film on Friday, 6.22. Of course, the world premiere will happen in Italy two months earlier — on Friday, 4.20. I’ve asked SPC about a US press screening concurrent with the Italian debut, or at least sometime later this month or in early May.

If that’s a no-go I’ve been thinking about renting a car in Nice on Monday, 5.14 and driving to San Remo or Genoa and catching it in a commercial plex. Which will set me back at least 200 euros if not more when you figure in car rental, gas, hotel and meals. That’s a lot to pay to see a Woody film a few weeks in advance.

A trusted source has just informed that I won’t be able to see an English-soundtrack “lingua originale” version with subtitles of To Rome With Love anywhere in Italy because only Italian-dubbed prints will be shown throughout the country, even in Rome or Milano or Genoa. I had assumed all along that a subtitled version would play in the major cities because cultured cineastes over there hate dubbed films as much as they do here. I’ve been told that the trades are going to forego reviews from their Italian stringers because of this issue.

The considerate thing, again, would be for Sony to let US critics see an English-language version here in the States on or before 4.20. The source says Allen, naturally, wants US critics to wait until an English language version is screenable.

To Rome With Love is Allen’s first anthology film (i.e., separate stories with characters who don’t cross-pollinate) since Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex. He contributed a short called “Oedipus Wrecks” to New York Stories (1989), but that was along with short films by Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola.

If Disney publicists wanted last night’s Avengers premiere to have a real impact, they would have invited demanding, neutral-minded skeptics and sourpusses like myself in addition to pre-invested geek journos like /Film‘s Peter Sciretta, Movieline‘s Jen Yamato, FirstShowing’s Alex Billington and AICN’s Jeremy Smith.

I loved Captain America, remember, and the first two acts of X-Men: First Class. I just have a problem with (a) geekdom as a theology and a mindset, (b) Whedonworld, and (c) movies that kill you with CG fireball explosions and extensive apocalyptic wreckage on city streets.

But no — Disney had to play it safe, and so they got a whole bunch of lovin’ tweets from the obedient, the obsequious and the faithful. But if you read the tweets closely (as assembled by Indiewire‘s Matt Singer), you’ll notice some cracks in the facade:

“Finally, a Marvel film with a rousing finish!,” said Smith. “I’ll deal with the first two acts in my review, but that third act is more than enough to make The Avengers the best Marvel movie yet.” A movie that ends well is doing something right, for sure, but Smith seems to be implying that the first two acts aren’t quite what they could be…no?

Sciretta says “there is probably more action in this film’s climax than all the other Marvel movies combined!” Quantity! Pile it high!

Entertainment Weekly‘s Anthony Breznican wrote that “if comic-book movies are your thing, you will be fully satisfied by the concoction Joss Whedon has fixed for you with Avengers.” And if comic-book movies aren’t your thing and you tend to want a bit more nourishment in your soup, The Avengers might be an in-and-outer?

Collider‘s Steve Weintraub echoed Breznican when he write that “if you’re a Marvel fan you’re going to lose your shit in the theater.”

/Film‘s Germain Lussier said “I’d tweet about The Avengers but my body is still recovering from non-stop geeking out…so, so, so much fun (for the most part).”

Yamato says that The Avengers was “big, messy fun.” This quote sold me more than any other. If there’s anything I like and need from my popcorn movies, it’s “messy.”

The 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival begins tonight at 6:30 pm with a screening of Bob Fosse‘s Cabaret (’72), which I haven’t seen in eons. Cabaret broke the musical mold by not having its characters suddenly break into song and dance. Instead all but one of the tunes were performed onstage at Berlin’s Kit Kat Club. The exception, of course, was the famous beer garden scene when the blonde Hitler youth sings “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” — easily one of the most chilling tunes ever heard in an American musical.

The sun on the meadow is summery warm
The stag in the forest runs free
But gathered together to greet the storm
Tomorrow belongs to me

The branch on the linden is leafy and green
The Rhine gives its gold to the sea (Gold to the sea)
But somewhere a glory awaits unseen
Tomorrow belongs to me

The babe in his cradle is closing his eyes
The blossom embraces the bee
But soon says the whisper, arise, arise
Tomorrow belongs to me
Tomorrow belongs to me

Now Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign
Your children have waited to see
The morning will come
When the world is mine
Tomorrow belongs to me
Tomorrow belongs to me
Tomorrow belongs to me
Tomorrow belongs to me