I wrote the following last February: “The cheesy Ranker.com has a piece called “The Top 7 Manliest Sword-fights on Film.” Before reading it, I made a bet with myself that they wouldn’t include any of the sword fights in Ridley Scott‘s The Duellist (’77). And they haven’t. Either they’ve never seen it, or they don’t think Scott’s duels are adrenalized enough. In my book The Duellists is on par with Barry Lyndon.” Shout! Factory is releasing a Duellists Bluray on 11.20 — major news.

Earlier today U.S. District Court Judge Dale S. Fischer denied bail to the imprisoned Anthony Pellicano, Hollywood’s hotshot wire-tapper of the ’90s. But the highlights of Frank Swertlow‘s Wrap story (filed at 11:43 am) about the decision focus on the sadly diminished figure of Anita Busch, the former L.A. Times entertainment journalist who was famously intimidated by someone allied with Pellicano when a dead fish and a rose were left on her car windshield along with a note that said “stop.”

A “frail, frightened-looking” Busch delivered an “emotional appeal” at the hearing, Swertlow reports. On top of which she “limped” and “had a wheelchair with her, which she did not use to enter the courtroom.” Busch said her life “has been hell” and her career has been “destroyed” because she “lost sources” over her phone being wiretapped, and she has “lost health.” Swertlow writes that Busch “seemed scared of Pellicano and by the thought of his being released,” calling him “a domestic terrorist” who “has terrorized people for years.”

That may well be the case, but every time I read and think about Busch I feel badly for her, and I shake my head a bit. She’s had a very rough time over the past ten or twelve years, and I’m sorry for her hard luck, physical and otherwise. But the two basic rules about dealing with adversity and tough times are (a) if you’re thrown, dust yourself off and get back on the horse and (b) as hard as things can get someimes, always try to strike a match. Cursing the darkness can get old.

“Our rights come from nature and God, and not from government” — spoken by Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan a day or so ago.

The mind reels. Involuntary gag reflex. The Founding Fathers and the Constitution, Ryan seems to be saying, had relatively little to do with our basic freedoms. But what about those from other cultures and past periods who’ve had to struggle under tyranny? If Ryan is truly a man of God then he surely understands that God rules over all things, and therefore all nations. Which means, according to Ryan’s belief, that God has personally seen to the misery of tens of millions over the millenia, as most people over the last three or four thousand years have suffered under despotic, royal, authoritarian, non-Democratic regimes.

Perhaps Ryan is saying that the hunger to live and breathe and speak freely are inherently bestowed or instilled by a cosmic entity, whether or not these rights are successfully fought for, won and enjoyed. So maybe Ryan isn’t saying that the human rights are God-delivered or assured. Maybe he’s saying that the the freedoms enjoyed by citizens of liberal free societies begin as natural eternal longings, and whether or not they’re able to enjoy them is contingent on the luck of the draw and whether or not they’ve got that fighting spirit. By this understanding, the will to be free isn’t that strong among humans or we’d have seen the emergence of democratic governments a thousand or two thousand years ago instead of two hundred thirty-six years ago.

I don’t think most people are going to go this deep. I think most people are going to read the above statement and think, “What a simplistic-minded Sunday-school asshole.”

Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi (20th Century Fox, 11.21) will be the opening night attraction at the New York Film Festival. Now, I think, there’s a reason to seriously consider shelling out $1500 or so I can stay in Manhattan after Toronto and attend the New York Film Festival press screenings.

Not an easy decision, but I suppose it’s worth it. Sorta kinda. So I can be one of the first movie journalists to watch this kid Pi (played by Suraj Sharma) take a magical 3D sea journey with a Bengal Tiger, an orangutan and a zebra.

Except a little voice is whispering in my ear, “Don’t be a sucker…don’t do it…never trust movies about wide-eyed boys and animals and adventure.”

I don’t know what to do with this seething resentment I’m feeling about Manhattan hotel rates and apartment sublet deals. They used to be steep. Now they’re somewhere between ludicrous and brutal. I’ve come to seriously despise the way all New Yorkers — East Side, West Side, top to bottom, Hoboken to Astoria to Howard Beach — are determined to rape, pillage and gouge all visitors. With random exceptions they’re all pretty much on the same ethical level as Blackbeard or Long John Silver or Bob Diamond of Barclays. But if I want to see Life of Pi seven or eight weeks before it opens, I’ll have to agree to some kind of loathsome economic submission. Terrific.

Posted this morning in the “Don’t Buy The Bullshit” thread, and re-posted here to attract more attention: “I don’t think you guys understand. You might think you’re deeper, smarter, wiser or more perceptive than the New Yorkers who saw the full-length Heaven’s Gate at that disastrous afternoon-and-evening screening at Cinema 1 in November of 1980. But I have to tell you (and maybe you need to sit down first) but you’re not. Or not necesarily, at the very least. By and large you’re roughly on the same level of brain power and sensitivity.

“And I was there, man. I was in that audience, 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.”

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting Christoph Waltz — Waltz! — will star in Terry Gilliam‘s The Zero Theorem. Waltz will play “an eccentric, reclusive and angst-plagued computer genius” named Qohen Leth who’s working “on a mysterious project aimed at discovering the purpose of existence — or the lack thereof — once and for all.”

HE memo to Gilliam and Waltz: I figured this out years ago and have explained it once or twice in this column. The purpose of human existence is the same one shared by trees, grass, insects, trout, elephants, cats, dogs, worms, poisonous snakes and armadillos, which is to manifest and re-produce for the elemental purpose of manifesting and re-producing. To be is to be is to be…that’s it! For sentient beings with the ability to read, write and make movies the additional challenge is to devise a philosophy that permits an enthusiastic and whole-hearted continuance of this process without succumbing to depression (see: any Woody Allen film after Bananas) or self-destruction or mindlessness (see: Fight Club).

So now that we know, why would anyone want to spend two hours in the company of a guy who’s trying to figure this out, especially one with a dipshit name like Qohen Leth?

Variety‘s Jeff Sneider joined Sasha Stone and I for a discussion of this and that in an Oscar Poker-ish, grab-bag, drill-down fashion. We talked about right now…howz that? I refuse to describe it any further. Dang-ah-lang-ah-ding, dang-ah-lang-ah-lang-ah-ding. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link. Note: Link corrected…sorry for earlier error.

Take a gander at this Democracy Corps/Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner report and tell me the election isn’t all but settled now in Obama’s favor. Note: A little more than 24 years ago my ex-wife Maggie and I (then married) went around West Hollywood and West LA and wild-posted Robbie Conal‘s anti-G.H.W. Bush “It Can’t Happen Here” art sheet.

On 8.30 the Venice Film Festival will honor director-screenwriter-producer Michael Cimino with a Persol Award, and then screen a digitally restored edition of Heaven’s Gate (’80). In a statement, festival director Alberto Barbera called the ceremony “a belated but long overdue acknowledgment of the greatness of a visionary filmmaker” who was “gradually reduced to silence after the box-office flop of a masterpiece to which the film producers contributed with senseless cuts.”

Nope, that’s not accurate. Heaven’s Gate has always been and absolutely always will be a stunningly bad film, very handsomely composed, yes, but flaccid and showoffy but absolutely seething with directorial wanking and certainly without any narrative or thematic substance, at least as I define these. And yet Cimino kept his hand in after Heaven’s Gate and made four subsequent films — Year of the Dragon (’85), The Sicilian (’87), The Desperate Hours (’90) and Sunchaser (’96).

For those who haven’t read Steven Bach‘s “Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate” (which was later retitled as “Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate“) or seen Michael Epstein‘s 2004 doc based on the book, please take the time. The entire Epstein documentary, lasting 78 minutes, is on YouTube in eight parts.

I hated Heaven’s Gate when I first saw it nearly 32 years ago, and I couldn’t stay with it when I tried it a second time at home about nine years ago. Should I try it a third time when Criterion puts out their Bluray version?

I attended the second critics screening at the Cinema I on November 17th or 18th of 1980, and stood at the bottom of the down escalator as those who’d seen the afternoon show were leaving. I asked everyone I knew what they thought on a scale of 1 to 10. I’ll never forget the deflated, zombie-like expression on the face of journalist Dan Yakir as he muttered “zero.”

Don’t buy the Criterion Bluray (if and when it appears), and don’t buy the bullshit. This whole “Heaven’s Gate is a misunderstood masterpiece” crap was started by F.X. Feeney way back when. I dearly love Feeney, one of the most impassioned and mountain-hearted film essayists around (and also a first-rate screenwriter) but I respectfully dispute this revisionist drool.

In a 7.25 Boston Phoenix piece about Somerville projectionist David Kornfeld (“David Kornfeld’s High Noon”), Chris Marstall passes along a couple of laments from the widely respected Chapin Cutler, co-founder of Boston Light & Sound.

Lament #1 is that Cutler “Cutler doesn’t go to movies in [Boston] any more because of widespread projection problems. The last time he went, he took his son to see True Grit. The picture was wildly out of focus, and hot-spotted in the middle. He talked to the manager about the problems, but they didn’t get fixed and he felt blown off.

Lament #2 is that “in terms of presentation quality, dimness is the big issue. Dimness can be caused by several factors, Cutler said. Bulbs pushed past their rated lifetime, bulbs that are underpowered for their room, bulb focus, dirty port glass, dirty lenses, dirty screens, damaged reflectors — all factors that apply to both film and digital projectors.

“The message I heard over and over again in speaking to projectionists and theater managers,” Marstall summarizes, “was [that] to avoid a steady degradation in quality, you have to invest in a program of monitoring and maintenance.”

Cutler is the resident projection guru at the Telluride Film Festival. Here’s a brief interview I did with him at the end of last year’s festival:

On August 9th screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin discussed the touchy issue of critical pans during their “Scriptnotes” podcast. These guys are intelligent and fun to listen to, but I’m mentioning this episode in particular because Mazin recalls a back-and-forth that happened (he says) between myself and Kevin Smith, and I regret to say he’s not remembering very clearly.

The exchange happened at a 2000 ComicCon panel called “Caught In The Net: Movie Webmasters on Hollywood, the Internet, and the Future of Their Bastard Child.” I asked a question, says Mazin, and Smith, he claims, looked at me and (I’m paraphrasing) said, “You’re Jeffrey Wells? Gee, you’ve written some nasty shit about me but now that I can see what you look like I don’t feel so bad.” Except I distinctly remember a moderate goodvibe feeling between myself and Smith that day. A couple of years later Smith hired me to write my column for his site so what does that suggest? I do recall Smith saying to someone “oh, you’re so-and-so?” but i don’t think it was me.

I’m not saying my memory is 100% bulletproof but I really don’t recall being Smith-dissed. Four years ago I wrote a looking-back piece about this panel, and I didn’t include any mention of Smith backhanding anyone.

Mazin is probably misremembering because I might have written something negative about Superhero (which he directed and wrote) or about Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4, which he wrote the screenplays for. I’m guessing he was transposing or substituting on some level.

The “Caught in the Web” panel, moderated by Den Shewman, featured David Poland, Film Threat‘s Chris Gore, Smith, Coming Attractions‘ Patrick Sauriol, CHUD’s Nick Nunziata, Ain’t It Cool News’ Harry Knowles, and X-Men producer Tom DeSanto.