I have to admit to a certain admiration for anyone who would march in pouring rain. Stubbornly marching for for a worthy cause that has lost its moment-in-time vitality is one thing, but marching for same while getting totally soaked is something else. If I was planning to march in NYC I would definitely say “forget it…not this horse…another day…I’m outta here.”

Protesters in the rain. There’s no place like New York City. pic.twitter.com/R3v05xHbag

— Alexis Benveniste (@apbenven) July 22, 2020

The 4K UHD Spartacus Bluray arrived yesterday, and oh lawdy and yowsah it’s an extra-luscious, extra-refined, window-pane knockout — no exaggeration.

I’m 100% persuaded that this 1960 large-format classic looks better now on my 65″ 4K than it ever has on any movie screen. The blacks seem stronger and deeper than ever before, but maybe that’s due to my recently changed settings. (I’m a fool for black levels.) And there seems to be a slightly stronger caramel tint to Kirk Douglas‘s skin during torch- or candle-lighted scenes. The reds are glorious; ditto the whites, sandy shales, browns, greens, crimsons.

Yes, I know — five years ago I wrote that the 2015 restoration “has never looked this needle-sharp and natural…it’s a digital knockout, and clean as a hound’s tooth…the difference between this newbie and the 2010 ‘shiny’ version is analogous to the difference between a run-of-the-mill DVD and a Bluray of anything. It really pops…I felt as if I was watching something almost ‘new.'”

Right now: Believe me or not, but it’s my honest-to-God opinion that the 4K newbie delivers a “bump” over the 2015 Bluray. This is what my discerning eyes are telling me. I can do no more than report this.

What I wrote in 2015 applies and then some: “I’m told that every frame has a full measure of grain but I can’t see so much as a single Egyptian mosquito. We all know what grainstorms can look like, and this puppy has none of that.

“Plus there is extra information on all four sides, and the skin tones and shades of everything look completely natural and unforced. This is the Spartacus of the Gods — robust and radiant and more wowser, I’ll bet, than it’s ever looked, even when Douglas, Kubrick and producer Edward Lewis had a final looksee before the New York premiere in November 1960.

“It’s a little bit odd that the nine-minute ‘restoring of Spartacus‘ featurette gives the impression that this new version was primarily an effort by Universal Home Video technical staffers (led by vp technical services Peter Schade) with a little soupcon of freelance assistance from restoration guru Robert Harris.

“For 25 seconds during this nine-minute essay Schade states that Harris was brought in to consult while acknowledging that Harris, having overseen the 1991 photo-chemical restoration of Spartacus with Jim Katz, was definitely the guy to turn to.

“In fact Harris pleaded with Universal to fund a new Spartacus harvest, which they didn’t want to do at first because they felt it would make them look foolish after having approved the “shiny” version. Once they agreed to a digital restoration, Harris worked on it for about a year.

Posted from Dublin on 5.20.18: I’ve long felt a spiritual kinship with Ireland and the Irish. During my initial visit in ’88 (accompanied by wife Maggie and infant son Jett) my first thought was “I could die here.” But I felt a slightly uneasy vibe last night. A somewhat loutish, hair-trigger feeling from some of the guys hanging out in groups in front of pubs and whatnot.

You can usually sense civility in people or a lack of, a current of deference and humility and a basic instinct to be nice or a willingness to take a poke if provoked or fucked with in the slightest way. I was feeling more of the latter last night. Everyone bombed and more than a few on the ornery, rambunctious side.

“And then I came upon the strangest, angriest drunken Irishman I’ve ever gotten a whiff of. This guy, 25 or slightly younger, was so stinking and so consumed with rage that he was just standing in front of a Burger King, immobile, looking slightly downward but more or less statue-like, like he’d been carved out of wood or injected with a drug that turned his muscles into stone. “Don’t touch me or come close…fauhhck, man, don’t even look at me,” his body seemed to be saying.

“It was eerie. Drunks generally stumble or flail around or lie down or lean against walls. This guy was beyond all that. It was like he was trying to decide who to hit or how to kill himself or what weapon to use.”

Right now Khmer Rouge cadres — cancel-culture, street-demonstrating, statue-toppling BLM rage junkies — are doing their level best to persuade Average Joe voters to give Orange Plague another term, despite all the evil he’s unleashed over the last three-plus years.

Wokesters have basically gifted Trump with a substantial campaign issue, one that worked for Richard Nixon 52 years ago (“lawnorder”) and which could conceivably gain in traction: “Vote for me and I will protect you from the rude, lawless, whiteside-wearing rabble that wants to trash your storefronts, defund your police departments and teach ‘The 1619 Project‘ in your children’s classrooms.”

While it’s common knowledge that Middle Americans despise p.c. fanatics, I don’t happen to believe that Joe Lunchbucket pays enough attention to the insanity coming out of Left Twitter for this to seriously affect matters. Others, however, feel it might.

Consider a new Ryan Lizza Politico article titled “Americans Tune In To ‘Cancel Culture’ — And Don’t Like What They See.” The results of a Morning Consult poll suggests that hinterlanders share “significant concern” about this.

Excerpt: “Twenty-seven percent of voters said cancel culture had a somewhat positive or very positive impact on society, but almost half (49%) said it had a somewhat negative or very negative impact.

“While online shaming may seem like a major preoccupation for the public if you spend a lot of time on Twitter, only 40% of voters say they have participated in cancel culture and only one in 10 say they participate ‘often.’ It appears to be more of a liberal pursuit: Half of Democrats have shared their dislike of a public figure on social media after they did something objectionable, while only a third of Republicans say they have.

Justice never rests. Perry Mason has been renewed for a second season. #PerryMasonHBO pic.twitter.com/FiNQs2QGbh

— HBO (@HBO) July 22, 2020

In terms of immaculate black-and-white viewing pleasure, nothing beats Carol Reed‘s Odd Man Out (47). I’ve been re-watching it every three or four years for the last couple of decades, but the Bluray versions (I happen to own an eight-year-old Region 2 Network Bluray) are just breathtaking…every glistening, perfectly lighted frame could and should be hung in an art gallery. It really doesn’t get any better than this.

Robert Krasker (1913-1971), the Australian dp, won an Oscar for his brilliant capturing of Carol Reed‘s The Third Man (’49), but his Odd Man Out cinematography is the grander achievement, I feel… more pictorially transporting on top of sadder and more poignant when you factor in everything else. Krasker was an absolute devotee of film noir and German Expressionism, and I would go so far as to call his work magical in this instance. Each and every shot is on the level of “my God, look at the snowflakes and shadows and the gentle illumination of lamplight…amazing! And look at that! And that!” And it never stops.

The Reed classics aside, Krasker’s other credits include Laurence Olivier‘s Henry V, David Lean‘s Brief Encounter, Irving Rapper‘s Another Man’s Poison, Robert Rossen‘s Alexander the Great, Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd and Anthony Mann‘s El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Krasker’s Third Man Oscar was historic — he was the first Australian cinematographer to be so honored.

Kanye West’s recent tweets…well, who knows to what extent bipolar disorder can compromise if not ruin your ability to self-express with at least a degree of eloquence or even clarity?

Kim Kardashian statement in N.Y. Post:

Or: Where The Bumblefuck Roam.

Last weekend I watched Richard Attenborugh, William Goldman and Joseph E. Levine‘s A Bridge Too Far (’77), which I hadn’t seen since it opened 43 years ago. I was surprised to discover that despite its somewhat lackluster reputation (certainly among the critics of the day) that it plays half decently.

As ambitious in its attempt to capture the failure of Operation Market Garden as the 1944 Allied military campaign itself, A Bridge Too Far was an all-star WWII epic in the tradition of The Longest Day. Both are based on books by Cornelius Ryan.

The difference is that ABTF explores a downish note of defeat and disillusion and mismanagement rather than hard-won victory, and as such can be seen as the first military fuckup movie in a long series of such films, the kind in which the good guys (i.e., our side) get their asses flanked and kicked and shot all to hell, and are left wondering “what the hell happened?”

The Outpost, Lone Survivor, Hamburger Hill, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, In The Valley of Elah, Platoon, We Were Soldiers — all of these films owe a debt to A Bridge Too Far, just as Attenborough’s film owes a debt in return to Lewis Milestone‘s somewhat glum and bitter Pork Chop Hill and you tell-me-what-else.

American forces engage the enemy for shaky or questionable or dubious reasons and the troops involved get pounded all to hell and nearly wiped out. Those who survive are left shattered, exhausted, gutted. “Well, we fucked up but at least we learned something…or did we?”

There are so many famous faces in A Bridge Too Far — James Caan, Sean Connery, Robert Redford, Michael Caine, Edward Fox, a cigar-chomping Elliott Gould, Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman, Maximilian Schell (as a thoughtful and humane German officer), Hardy Krüger, Laurence Olivier, a baby-faced Ryan O’Neal, Liv Ullmann, etc. There’s no escaping a presumption that these performances are entirely about the paycheck, and so it’s hard if not impossible to invest in the various stories and vignettes.

And yet I was taken by Redford’s action cameo as Maj. Julian Cook, famed for leading a crazy military crossing of the Waal river during Operation Market Garden. And I related to Connery’s Major General Roy Urquhart, and Caan’s Staff Sergeant Eddie Dohun (based on Charles Dohun). And two or three others.

You have to give Attenborough credit for managing such a vast army of actors and extras along with hundreds of planes, tanks, trucks, jeeps…no miniatures and obviously no CG. Not a bad film. It doesn’t meet anyone’s definition of “great” but is certainly approvable.

The moment has come for Get Out champion Bob Strauss to weigh in on the recent Kanye West fruit-loop thing. This is a dire situation, and as far as I can discern Strauss is the only man in Hollywood who can speak to it with any authority. The night before last Kanye referenced Get Out when he claimed that wife Kim Kardashian was en route to Wyoming to “lock me up” on Monday night. (This was a day after the South Carolina Harriet Tubman meltdown…right?) Quote: “Kim was trying to fly to Wyoming with a doctor to lock me up like on the movie Get Out because I cried about saving my daughter’s life yesterday. Everybody knows the movie Get Out is about me.”

Politically speaking the great Charlie Chaplin was a left-leaning humanitarian and a self-described peacemonger who became entangled in the raw end of the anti-Communist fervor of the late 1940s, and out of this conflict he eventually left this country for Switzerland — an exile given the boot.

In ’47 Chaplin angrily denounced the House Un-American Activities Committee, and in response Representative John E. Rankin, who helped establish HUAC, declared in June 1947 that Chaplin’s “very life in Hollywood is detrimental to the moral fabric of America…[if he is deported] his loathsome pictures can be kept from before the eyes of the American youth…he should be deported and gotten rid of at once.”

Chaplin’s delivery of the final speech in The Great Dictator (’40) is too agitated, too shrill. He should have dialed it down a couple of notches. And yet portions of the speech are a close match with a certain John Lennon song that some are saying should replace Francis Scott Key‘s “The Star Spangled Banner” as the national anthem.