As I said yesterday, I took no texting or bathroom breaks during Tony Gilroy‘s The Bourne Legacy (Universal, 8.10), and that is a form of tribute and respect. (This isn’t to imply that I routinely step out for text messaging, but I sometimes do when a film blows.) And I’ve always admired and respected director-writer Tony Gilroy, who spent two years on Legacy, he said, in the manner of a captain going on a whaling voyage. And yeah, he brought home the oil and the blubber.

Bourne Legacy director-cowriter Tony Gilroy.

Gilroy and I spoke last week for a half hour or so. Here’s the mp3.

“Every time I re-watch my Bluray of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, which seems a bit more masterful each time, I feel a little bit worse about not being more enthusiastic when it first came out 40 months ago. I didn’t put enough feeling into my riffs about it. Calling it “never boring,” “a tense adult thriller about some unsettled and anxious people” and “as seasoned and authentic as this kind of thing can be” didn’t get it. I held back and over-qualified. And I’m sorry.” — posted on 1.31.11.

Please, please, please don’t let Gabriele Muccino‘s latest film be as emotionally cloying as the trailer indicates. I say this as a fan of L’Ultimo Bacio and one who was at least okay with The Pursuit of Happyness. Presumably they changed the last word in the title from “field” to “keeps” because the former alludes to the adventures of a hound and the latter to the promise of a real man.

I just watched the Fox Home Video Bluray of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and it’s absolutely beautiful, scrumptious, dazzling. A breathtaking Technicolor high. Watching it is like eating an ice cream sundae with whipped cream and a cherry. On top of which it’s been mastered at a 1.37 aspect ratio…heavens!

Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

In going with 1.37 Fox Home Video’s Schawn Belston has delivered a gentle reminder to the Bluray community that 20th Century Fox wasn’t part of the 1.85 aspect ratio mandate that swept across Hollywood in the spring of ’53. 1.85 fascist theology says that all films released after April 1953 were projected at 1.85…nope!

This may sound anecdotal to some, but to me the 1.37 presentation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which originally opened in July 1953, is a slight crack in the dike.

Projectionist #1 at New York’s Roxy (on or about July 12, 1953): Here are the prints for that new picture, Gentleman Prefer Blondes. We can run it after the show tonight.

Projectionist #2: With what aperture plate?

Projectionist #1: You ask? 1.85, of course. That’s the new rule, what the boss wants.

Projectionist #2: Wrong. We’re showing it at 1.37.

Projectionist #1: Whaddaya mean? Everything is supposed to be shown at 1.85. The rule came down three or four months ago. S’matter with you?

Projectionist #2: It’s wrong, I tell ya. I’ve heard this one has to be shown at 1.37. Fox films are a different deal than ones from Columbia and Warner Bros. and Paramount.

Projectionist #1: Except Paramount wants 1.66.

Projectionist #2: And that’s not all. When From Here To Eternity opens next month we’re not showing that in 1.85 either. That’ll also be shown at 1.37.

Projectionist #1: But that’s Columbia!

Projectionsist #2: Whatever. We’re showing it at 1.37.

Projectionist #1: How’s anyone supposed to keep this shit straight?

“I’ve never found any evidence in [Fox’s] studio files of a ‘1:85 starts at midnight’ dictum,” Belston told me this morning. “There is plenty of documentation, as you probably know, about Fox from 1954 on making every movie possible in CinemaScope. Ditto the development of stereo and CinemaScope55 later.

“I can tell you from looking at the non-Scope Fox films of 1953 (Call Me Madam, Niagara, Inferno and Pickup on South Street come to mind particularly) that they look more correctly framed in 1.37 than in 1.85, in my opinion. Additionally, whenever these films have screened within the last decade, projectionists/archives/museums have always shown them as you might expect in a 1.33/1.37 aspect ratio.

“Neither of these points is proof of how they should be shown, but for whatever it is worth to you, I’m fairly certain most if not all academics would agree with the 1.37 approach.”

If something in the refrigerator is looking stale or moldy or icky, I don’t throw it out. That takes too much effort — putting it in the garbage, pulling out the plastic garbage bag and tying it up, and then taking it outside and downstairs to the dumpster. It’s much simpler and easier to just put the moldy-stale thing in the freezer. That way it’s out of sight and won’t smell the place up, and when I’m ready (and I mean good and ready), I can take all the frozen discards out to the dumpster in one trip.

I’ve never seen any photos of Abraham Lincoln in which he looked quite this gray. His hair is flecked with gray around the temples in those portraits he sat for in early 1865, but Daniel Day Lewis almost looks like a silver fox here. Plus his hair is too neatly combed. The photo below shows you the real Abe wasn’t into clean parts.

Is this the very first piece of criticism levelled at Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln? Possibly.

Film critic Judith Crist, who called Cleopatra “a monumental mouse” and was the model for the screening series host in Woody Allen‘s Stardust Memories, died in Manhattan today at age 90.

Crist loved the good films, of course — she cared and worshipped and adored. You can’t write about movies if you don’t feel the passionate uplift. But if she thought a film was crap, she said so and then some. She didn’t play games and could really carve when so moved. She was one tough bird.

Crist had four significant berths as a film critic — as the first full-time female critic at The New York Herald Tribune, starting in April 1963; on the Today show for ten years; for New York magazine, where she was the founding film critic; and then TV Guide. She also wrote for Saturday Review and Ladies Home Journal, and for Coming Attractions magazine in the ’80s and ’90s.

One of Crist’s more famous quotes was contained in her review of Spencer’s Mountain, which nobody and I mean nobody even rents today. Crist described it as “sheer prurience and perverted morality disguised as piety.” The review led Warner Brothers to pull their advertising for the Herald Tribune, but the publisher stood behind her and the ads soon returned.

What are the odds that a publisher or editor would do the same today if a film critic had pissed somebody off? If a critic causes trouble, throw ’em under the bus…right?

Crist was threatened with banishment from screenings after her Cleopatra pan, but this wasn’t followed up either.

Douglas Martin‘s N.Y. Times obit quotes Roger Ebert as having said that these attempts at bullying “led to every newspaper in the country to say ‘Hey, we ought to get a real movie critic.'”

Crist was interviewed just before her 90th birthday (i.e., 5.22.12) by Sree Sreenivasan and Melanie Huff [see above].

“The most enjoyable part of living a long time is that it happens so quickly,” Crist said during the chat. “I have to stop and think, ‘My word, it’s a long time.” When I think of all the things that have changed, I don’t look back because I’ve had a wonderful life and so I have nothing to bitch about…which would be the easy way. I don’t think I want to live another 90 years, because enough is enough. There are still people I enjoy reading, things I enjoy doing; I think it’s the journalists credo of ‘what’s around the next corner?’ I still have that.”

The terms “musician” or “composer” tend to summon images of a slightly rumpled creative type — the kind of man or woman who stays up late and leads a distracted, impulsive life and lives on egg salad sandwiches and doesn’t dress all that carefully. But Marvin Hamlisch, the famed tunesmith who suddenly died yesterday at age 68, always looked and dressed like an owner of a midtown Manhattan jewelry shop or the head of a savings and loan.

The late Marvin Hamlisch — 1944 to 2012.

Hamlisch was a fast talker and a witty, amusing guy, but he couldn’t have looked more stodgy and straight-laced. He didn’t just wear three-piece suits all the time — he looked like he might have been born in one. He also seemed to have the body of a banker, like a guy who didn’t work out much and who liked his evening meals and apertifs. I’m not judging — just sharing what I saw and perceived.

There’s nothing wrong in and of itself with being a square or looking like one, but what impulse led a genuinely gifted guy like Hamlisch, who lived for music and melody and the radiant joy of that, to want to appear to the world like the director of the mortgage department for a Midwestern bank or a well-heeled New York accountant or an executive in the pharmaceutical industry?

Hamlisch was part of that Tin Pan Alley-influenced clique of motion picture composer-musicians like Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager (whom Hamlisch was hooked up with romantically for a time) and Marilyn and Alan Bergman.

Hamlisch was best known for his scores for A Chorus Line and The Way We Were and The Sting, of course. And for the “Nobody Does It Better” song from The Spy Who Loved Me. (I always loved the chord changes that play when Carly Simon sings “is keepin’ all my secrets safe tonight.”) Hamlisch also did the scores for Ordinary People (although that film is known for Pachelbel’s “Canon in Plain D“), Sophie’s Choice, The Swimmer, Three Men And A Baby, Take The Money And Run, Bananas, Save The Tiger and Steven Soderbergh‘s The Informant!. Halmisch had also done work on Soderbergh’s currently-lensing Behind The Candelabra but I don’t how you score a film before you see it.

First we had the half-filled-beaker poster for The Master, which reminded me of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. It was possibly the ugliest and most spiritually enervating one-sheet in the history of motion pictures. And now there’s a new Master poster — a dorky-looking 1950s optical-effect reprint thing that seems to imply that the dynamic between Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams is ubiquitous and repeated ad infinitum. It’s better than the Piss Christ poster but not much. Thoughts?

9:30 pm Update: The 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey that screened tonight at the Academy was a huge disappointment. Academy president Hawk Koch told the crowd that they were about to see a “new print,” and it may have been that…but it was printed way too dark. (That or the projection lamp was turned down for some nonsensical reason.) The apes in the “Dawn of Man” sequence looked underlit and a bit murky. And there was hardly any 70mm detail that popped out. Everything looked like smudgy crap.

I knew something was wrong when the opening titles looked soft and hazy, and then the film stayed that way from then on. If this wasn’t an Academy screening I would ask “did the projectionist decide not to focus for some reason?” But the Academy is a world-class operation that takes projection very seriously so it had to be the print, I’m guessing. All I know is that the image on the screen looked like a mistake — as if the lab had mistakenly smeared the internegative with brown fingerpaint. I left around the one-hour mark, and I went right home and popped in my 2001 Bluray, and the image looked two or three times better than what I’d just seen at the Academy. I could see all the hairs and fibres on the ape coats. I could see all the values that were photographed. It was beautiful.

And — this is almost funny — the 2.21 to 1 image wasn’t quite wide enough. It was just a bit trimmed on both sides so it almost looked like Vittorio Storaro‘s 2 to 1 aspect ratio.

The Movie Godz heard what happened, and I’m told they found Kubrick as he was taking a walk and gave him the sordid details. He scowled and waved them off. “Leave me alone,” he allegedly said. “I don’t know want to hear about it.”

Verdict: Major fail for the Academy, major fail for those responsible for creating the 70mm print and a huge waste of time for anyone who went expecting to see something exceptional or phenomenal.

Earlier: This might sound lame but I’m going to an AMPAS 70mm screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey at 7:30 pm this evening. Before I decided to go I asked myself “when if ever am I going to have a chance to see this at a really, really, really good theatre in 70mm again?” With DCPs moving in, I’m also a tiny bit sentimental about seeing it projected with actual 70mm film that clatters through the gate.

I know they show this sucker in 70mm at the American Cinematheque and the Aero all the time, but the Academy’s projection standards and projected light levels are the best in the world. I haven’t seen 2001 in absolute tip-top, ring-a-ding form since the mid ’80s.

Yesterday morning’s Oscar Poker recording started off bad, bad, bad all over. My wifi crapped out in the middle of things, and Sasha wasn’t that enthused to begin with because she hadn’t seen anything new. But we agreed to talk about box-office and the Sight and Sound poll and Clint Eastwood‘s endorsement of Mitt Romney., etc. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

Tony Gilroy‘s The Bourne Legacy is a respectable 7.5 compared to the 8.5 or 9 that is Paul Greengrass‘s Bourne Ultimatum. That’s definitely not a putdown as I felt fully engaged and occasionally revved by this fourth installment. I just wasn’t floored or super-throttled. It didn’t leave me breathless, but I wasn’t the least bit bored and I took no texting or bathroom breaks.

You can bitch if you want, but Legacy is what it is — a smart, cagey, nimble and well-crafted Bourne flick without Matt Damon but with the steely and severe and highly expressive Jeremy Renner. Which is well and good because Renner has become the guy with the presence — he has his own expressionistic attitude and energy force, and I don’t need Damon when he’s around.

But Gilroy is capable of much more than delivering a Bourne-eo follow-up to two Greengrasses and one Doug Liman. He’s a highly efficient helmer who knows from high-end coolness, and who lives in a refined and sophisticated realm, etc.. The comfort and excitement levels are considerable in Legacy, but I wanted something deeper, crazier, darker, stranger. Or more layered. Or dryer. Because Gilroy is Gilroy. He’s no sequel-izer bunny.

I would have liked Legacy more, in other words, if the Universal suits had poured cups of herbal tea and sat down at the conference table and said to Gilroy, “We know you’re much better than what we need, or what we think we want…we both know you’re much, much more than some razamatazz hack…so please, do something of your own…fuck the Matt Damon fanbase, fuck Paul Greengrass, fuck the revenues from the series so far….that was then, this is now…we need you to step out and give us a really smart thriller that fiddles with but doesn’t scrupulously follow the Bourne legend, and just…we’re not sure but something that settles down and gets real and maybe gives up some of that old Michael Clayton action. We’re trying to be wiser than just fools who chase income. We believe in you because you’re smarter than we are. We’re studio executives who will never know anything, ever. So take our money, go to town and make something that doesn’t necessarily kiss the ass of the three previous Bourne films.”

Instead, the Universal executives said to Gilroy, “Please go out and make us a movie that kisses the ass of the three previous Bourne films. We’re thinking strategically here, we don’t know any better and that’s what we want. We want to you to do this so that Bourne fans who don’t read reviews will pay to see it and buy popcorn in the bargain, and that way we can all make more money — you, your brother Dan, your editor brother John, Ron Meyer, all of us — and increase the value of Universal stock and also buy new cars and pay for college tuitions and take vacations in Belize and so on.”

Renner is not playing Jason Bourne but Aaron Cross, a stud-case operative for the CIA’s Treadstone/Operation Outcome who’s become a target after the program is “infected” by Jason Bourne’s arrival in Manhattan (yes, Legacy‘s first act overlaps with Ultimatum‘s third act) and CIA yuppie hard-ass Eric Byer (Edward Norton) declares that all the agents in the pool have to be eliminated. And so the chase is on and blah, blah. Except Renner needs “chems” to remain at peak performance levels, and that leads him to a genetic scientist (Rachel Weisz) who’s in charge of testing and developing said “chems,” etc. She too is on the hit list, and…I’m not going to run down the whole plot, or even half of it. I’m not a court stenographer. If you want to know what happens, buy a ticket.

Suffice that Legacy kicks in big-time during a shoot-out scene inside and near Weisz’s home, and it also kicks serious ass during a third-act scooter race in Manila. But honestly? Good as the Manila chase sequence is, it’s a little bit reminiscent of the Tangier chase sequence in Ultimatum. So Legacy doesn’t really feel like its own bird.

But it’s pretty good in many sections, and I wasn’t “disappointed.” I was like “yeah…this is good, I like it….I may not be doing cartwheels in the lobby but I have no real problems or issues. I’m not pissed off, I had a good time at the movies and yaddah-yaddah.” So I’m not being snide or dismissive. Legacy is somewhere between fine and better than okay. It’s just not earthshaking.