And you know who sounds like a perceptive, well-educated fellow and then some? Lieutenant General and all-around human being H.R. McMasters, who briefly served ae Donald Trump‘s chief of staff (13 months, February 2017 to March 2018). For the first time since I first heard of the guy seven years ago, I was thinking “this dude’s okay, has a sharp mind.”

There’s an unverified story that in 1953, tough-guy actor James Cagney agreed to submit to an in-depth, carefully supervised interview after allowing himself to be injected with a 21st Century woke-candyass serum.

Once under the influence of this experimental drug, Cagney stated that filming “problematic” scenes of murder and misogyny in films like The Public Enemy (’31) and White Heat (’49) were among “the darkest days of my life.”

The Cagney experiment was discussed on a recent episode of the Inside of You podcast, which had previously posted an interview with Buffy the Vampire Slayer costar James Marsters, who said more or less the same thing about filming a traumatic sexual assault scene with Buffy costar Sarah Michelle Gellar. So Matsters was hardly the first to feel this way.

Cagney quote: “Pushing that halved grapefruit into Mae Clarke‘s face while shooting Public Enemy made me feel awful. After the first take I ran off the set, sweating and sick to my stomach. All I could think of was how poor Mae must have felt with that grapefruit juice stinging her face. It was all I could do to keep from weeping out loud. I felt like I needed a priest.”

A biography of Public Enemy director William Wellman allegedly reports that Wellman was alarmed by Cagney’s on-set behavior. He got up from his director’s chair, pulled Cagney aside, slapped him hard across the chops and said “pull yourself together, you little fucking pussy….it’s acting, for Chrissake!…you’re pretending to be a a bad-ass Chicago gangster…get it?”

Cagney obeyed, and yet 18 years later he felt a similar sense of shame and remorse when slapping Virginia Mayo around during the filming of Raoul Walsh‘s White Heat. He also felt convulsed with guilt and moral revulsion after shooting a railroad engineer point-blank in the gut. Walsh had heard stories about how Wellman handled Cagney, so he too went up to the Oscar-winning actor, slapped him hard and said “you pathetic little whiner!… I don’t want to hear another word about your sensitive-ass feelings about pretending to be a psycho killer….man up and do the job!”

If, God forbid, Kamala Harris loses to Donald Trump in early November (and it could happen), it’ll probably be because Democrats have made no secret of the fact that they’ve written off the bro vote.

This, be honest, is where progressive culture has been coming from for the last six years — (a) straight male Zoomers and younger Millennials are bad news (crude, slovenly, under-educated, bad eating habits), (b) they have to pay for the racist oppression enforced by previous white-guy generations or, you know, at the very least they need to sit in the back of the bus as punishment, and (c) it’s better for youngish, child-bearing women to bond together and support each other than to pair off with dopey-ass young men who are too immature and simplistic in their thinking, etc.

Bill Maher calls out Taylor Swift for watching the Kansas City Chiefs game in a separate suite from Brittany Mahomes because Mahomes is Pro-Trump:
Maher: "Yesterday, the NFL season started. In the past, Taylor Swift she was always in the same box with Brittany Mahomes. Now, they… pic.twitter.com/G9aQtq0c9l

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) September 7, 2024

Congrats to roly-poly Brady Corbet, 36**, for having won the Venice Film Festival’s Best Director award (i.e., Silver Lion) for helming the 1940s and ’50s historical epic The Brutalist.

Don’t just look at Corbet —- look into him. He’s saying something with his appearance. I’ve contemplated thousands of northeast-corridor, working-class guys who look exactly like him. Look at that heavy, dark-blue K-Mart workshirt he’s wearing. Look at that tent-like T-shirt. Did he blow off washing his hair or did he apply product to make it look greasy?

I can’t wait to catch one of the New York Film Festival screenings of The Brutalist on 9.28 or 10.12! Seriously. Even if Guy Lodge omitted it from his “Best of 2024 Venice Film Festival” list.

** Born two months after Jett’s delivery room appearance on 6.4.88.

If there’s one human activity that Ron Howard has pretty much steered clear of in th many films he’s directed, it’s sex for its own sake — the raw, hungry, illicit, tawdry, provocative kind. But he’ll certainly be wading into this water with Eden, which will premiere on Saturday, 9.7, at the 2024 Toronto Film Festival.

Based on a true story that unfolded on the remote island of Floreana, one of the Galapagos Islands, in the early to mid 1930s, the costars are Jude Law (as Dr. Friedrich Ritter), Vanessa Kirby (as Law’s wife, Dora Strauch Ritter), Daniel Brühl and Sydney Sweeney as Harry and Margaret Wittmer, and Ana de Armas as the sexual villain of the piece, Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn.

15 years ago WHE released a 70th anniversary Bluray of The Wizard of Oz (‘39) — a sharper and more vibrantly colorful version than anyone had seen up to that point, but also grainy as hell.

You could see Judy Garland’ freckles but she and costars seemed to be literally choking to death, their lungs swamped with God knows how many billions of digital Egyptian mosquitoes.

I was afraid to sound like a rube or a philistine so I lied in my review and said the grainstorm effect wasn’t a problem.

But it was, of course. The inherent mosquitoes were always in the negative but they weren’t detectable when Oz was first released into cinemas in ’39 and again in ‘54. Alas, the Bluray process made them stand out all the more.

Ten years later (September 2019) a significantly de-grained 4K Bluray version (80th anniversary) was released, but the ‘09 version looked and felt so oppressively grainy that I had lost interest by that point. I despise prominent grain.

But I’ve just received the ‘19 version and have discovered that it’s far less mosquitoed. I ordered it last weekend and am pleased to confirm that it’s the most attractive and least problematic of all the versions.

Okay, so my pleasurable discovery is five years late in arriving. So what?

The recently released 85th anniversary 4K steelbook Bluray deals the exact same visual cards.

“More Oz Grain”, posted on 9.19.09:

This morning I heard from and then spoke to restoration guru Robert Harris (The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Spartacus) about my 9.18 reaction to the forthcoming Wizard of Oz Bluray — i.e, “much sharper and more vivid, bursting with color, splendorific,” etc.

Harris admires the disc as much as I do and probably more so. He’s fine with the grain. Accepting, I mean. But he didn’t disagree with my observation about it being “somewhat grainier,” and conceded that the film now looks different than the one that 1939 audiences saw.

The new Wizard is an example of “a basic Blu-ray trade-off,” I wrote. “The grain that is in the negative is brought out in a way that catches your eye like never before. It’s not a problem, but there’s no ignoring it. I’m not putting the grainy aspect down, per se. I fully respect the decision of Warner Home Video technicians not to overly scrub or digitally tweak or Patton-ize the original 1939 elements.

But I am saying that Dorothy Gale, Auntie Em, Uncle Henry and the three farm hands are now covered in billions of micro-mosquitoes…a smothering deluge I hadn’t been as aware of in years past.”

Harris wrote that “viewers in 1939, 1954 and beyond never saw the grain in Technicolor films because the process did not reproduce it. Between the optics of the era, the optical printing process toward the creation of printing matrices, the metal dye imbibition system, the mordant in use at the time, as well as imperfect registration, which was covered by the overall softness…Technicolor films had a wonderful, almost grain-free, velvety look, which is nothing like the new Bluray.

“There are many ways to skin a cat. The new Wizard of Oz Bluray, which faithfully reproduces the grain structure of the original negatives (with the exception of the opening reel, which is from a dupe source), is one of them.

“Leaving the original grain structure in was a technical decision. WHV technicians have delivered an excellent piece of work, but the Oz Blu-ray has a pronounced grain that wasn’t there when audiences first saw the film. The image is now very sharp, albeit with the original grain structure. But trying to eliminate the grain can lead to a very tenuous situation at best, as each shot must be worked over to make certain that problems do not arise.”

We then spoke on the phone and Harris re-explained:

“There are many ways to reduce grain,” he said. “Either you throw the film out of focus, which is what most people do, and then you sharpen it slightly and raise the contrast. Or you send it to Lowry Digital, which is the only shop in town which has the ability to reduce grain without losing resolution.

“The people who made The Wizard of Oz 70 years ago knew what would show up and what wouldn’t,” he pointed out. “The final result was a beautiful, velvety, slightly soft-focus print with good contrast to it, and it looked gorgeous on screen.

“But if you take the original negattve and then show it to the public [as WHV has with its new Bluray], you’re going to see the original grain structure that the original audiences never saw. But if you remove it…if you remove the grain and you hold the resolution then you’re going to see the wigs and make-up, sets, costume details… all the other problems.

“The other way —- the Lowry way — is to remove the grain, increase the resolution and then put back in a slight level of grain to make it look like film. But one has to acknowledge that whomever is leading the project is going to have to carefully examine every shot in the film to make very certain that they aren’t opening the proverbial Pandora’s box, and creating problems that were never there before.

“Warner Home Video did nothing wrong. They did a great job within their criteria, and I don’t have a problem with it. God knows if you lessen any grain on an older film in any primitve way, you’re really asking for trouble. Like Fox got into trouble with the overly scrubbed-down Blurays of Patton and The Longest Day.

“And if you take all the grain out, as the Lowry people can, it’s like you’re watching the actors through a very clean window. But with older films, like Michael Curtiz‘s Robin Hood, removing too much grain can make some of the armor looks like painted cardboard, and then you’re seeing things that were never meant to be seen.”

Harris suggested at the end of our conversation that I might want to slightly turn down the sharpness level on my 42-inch plasma. I said I might. But then I thought about this later on and reminded myself that I adore the sharpness level, and that pretty much every Blu-lray I’ve watched on it looks fantastic so why should I futz around with it just so The Wizard of Oz looks less grainy?

Posted today by THB’s David Poland:

HE–posted from Toronto on 9.12.28: