This recently posted Dark Shadows photo of Johnny Depp-as-Barnabas Collins argues with the jaunty, tongue-in-cheek tone in the recent trailer. To re-quote that guy who’s seen most of Tim Burton‘s film, “[It’s] funny, but also has full-bodied horror elements. Barnabas does kill people in this [and] there’s more of the Burton Sweeney Todd than the trailer implies. This is not Burton’s Addams Family, but a successful amalgamation of his comedic and gothic horror styles.”

If you knew what you were looking at, last night’s TCM Classic Film Festival Screening of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo was a disaster. The great Kim Novak took a bow before it began and the crowd gave her a standing ovation, and then the film began and it looked like dogshit. The image quality wasn’t just poor — it was hideous. Artificially brightened, washed-out color, incorrect tones. To me it resembled what a black-and-white film looks like when it’s been colorized. It was without question the ugliest rendering of this classic 1958 film I’ve ever seen in my life.

A fairly accurate simulation of how the rooftop rain gutter scene looked during last night’s screening, and in fact how much of the film looked throughout.

A simulation of how the same shot is supposed to look, more or less.

The film was digitally projected with a recently created DCP. Before the screening began I called the office of Bob O’Neil, Universal’s vp of preservation and vault services, to ask what the source of the DCP was. O’Neil was at the TCM screening, but the source wasn’t the 1996 Vertigo restoration by Robert Harris and James Katz, I was told, but a new digital scan of some kind.

“Really?” I replied. “But the Harris-Katz restoration was such a beautiful job. Why wouldn’t they use that?” It was suggested that I email O’Neil and ask. I did, twice, and he didn’t reply.

I knew within seconds that I was looking at a degraded rendering. Nobody in the audience said anything or got up to complain, of course. They just sat there like polite sheep, but I was beside myself. How could Universal have supplied this atrocity to the respected TCM Classic Film Festival, which people pay good money to attend? I stuck it out for roughly 40 minutes before leaving in disgust.

The above renderings of the “hanging from the rain gutter” scene at the very beginning are a pretty good simulation of (a) what I saw last night at the Chinese vs. (b) what the same shot looks like under prime conditions. The scene is supposed to be occuring at dusk or in the early evening, but the brightness levels had been digitally pushed.

The way the main-title image is supposed to look, as included on the Harris-Katz restoration.

The way it’s not supposed to look, which is what everyone saw last night.

The opening credits begin with a closeup of a woman’s face. The correct presentation on the Harris-Katz restoration shows the woman in black-and-white, and then the color wheel starts to appear from inside the retina of her eye. In last night’s version her face was covered in an orange sepia — wrong.

James Stewart‘s infamous brown suit is supposed to be a regular earthy brown, and not violet brown or mauve brown or grayish brown, which is how it looked last night.

The opening rooftop chase scene contained the double-shot echo effect that was put onto the soundtrack of the 1996 Vertigo restoration, so maybe the whole film had those extra foley effects. I’m not sure as I didn’t stick around.

The bottom line is that while several scenes looked acceptable from a generic, not-overly-demanding perspective, the general richness of the Vertigo color scheme had a creepy, quasi-bleachy feeling — a look of artificial desaturation. And it made absolutely no sense to present one of Universal’s crown jewels to a well-heeled audience that had every reason to expect the very best.

Kim Novak doesn’t suffer fools. Remember how she lambasted The Artist and the Weinstein Co. when she realized that several minutes of Bernard Herrmann‘s Vertigo score had been used verbatim for The Artist‘s soundtrack? I don’t know if Novak stayed for last night’s screening, but if she did and if I were her I would be on the phone to Universal honcho Ron Meyer or vp technical services Peter Schade this morning and saying, “What the hell are you guys doing? You could have made Vertigo look wonderful if you’d used the restored version created by Harris-Katz as the source of the DCP, and you decided not to?”

I paid $15 or $16 bucks to see The Three Stooges tonight at the ArcLight, and it was well spent. I just emailed this to a critic friend who’d urged me to see it: “Wow, you’re right — it’s surprisingly good! The Farrelly’s really delivered. They’ve captured & re-bottled that old-time Stooges spirit and gotten it right. I actually laughed several times and I’m not what you would call a hah-hah type of guy. Plus those Jersey Shore and Kardashian and fart jokes. All three Stooge impersonator-stars — Chris Diamantopoulos (Moe), Sean Hayes (Larry) and especially Will Sasso (Curly) — nailed it. And Larry David! The whole cast & crew were on the same mescaline when they made it. It’s got that jack-in-the-box foolery & that vaudeville timing & those old reliable foley gags. Not a gem or a classic exactly, but the Farrelly’s knew exactly what to do.”

An interesting summary of Lena Dunham‘s Girls from N.Y. Times critic Alessandra Stanley: “Sex and the City served up romantic failure wrapped in the trappings of success. Girls offers romantic failure wrapped in the trappings of failure.”

Dunham’s Hannah “is not a heroine fit for network television. She is plain, unshapely and unpleasant in ways that are only occasionally endearing. She’s a parasite sponging off her parents and a forgetful and sometimes unreliable friend. Her liaison with Adam (Adam Driver), an out-of-work actor, is debasing.

“Adam lets her visit his apartment for sexual gratification — his own — and ignores her desires; most of his sexual fantasies seem borrowed from video games and porn videos. He is just as callous about her feelings, grabbing her stomach rolls and asking why she doesn’t lose weight. Those sex scenes are shocking not because they are graphic, though they are, but because the sex is so unsexy: they are as clinical and coldly funny as the seduction scene of Dottie in Mary McCarthy‘s novel The Group.”

Indiewire‘s Amy Taubin describes Hannah as “a stubborn, petulant, occasionally outraged cherub and a short-waisted, pear-shaped body that makes her desperately unhappy even as she dares us to notice that she isn’t as tall and slim as her best friends, and who is also disgustingly self-involved, lazy, limited in her world-view to the degree that she has one, and forever flinging herself at a guy who uses her like a blow-up sex doll with a bothersome voice mechanism that’s been programmed to say all the wrong things.”

And this: “Modestly entertaining in its defiant immodesty, Girls nails the way that women — make that ‘girls,’ no, make that white, upper-middle class, well-educated, and, as far as they know, heterosexual persons with vaginas — talk about sex. The show does that one thing better than any commercial series television has, including its obvious model, Sex and the City.”

I’d have some comments of my own, but I’ve been. like, too frazzled and disorganized and distracted by Bluray glitches and aspect ratios and everything else to obtain a screener so I’ll just watch along with everyone else on Sunday.

Dark Knight Rises director Chris Nolan has spoken dismissively of 3D before, but it can’t hurt to reiterate…what the hell. DGA Quarterly‘s Jeffrey Ressner did the asking, transcribing and composing.

“3D is a misnomer,” Nolan says. “Films are 3D. The whole point of photography is that it’s three-dimensional. The thing with stereoscopic imaging is it gives each audience member an individual perspective. It’s well suited to video games and other immersive technologies, but if you’re looking for an audience experience, stereoscopic is hard to embrace. I prefer the big canvas, looking up at an enormous screen and at an image that feels larger than life. When you treat that stereoscopically, and we’ve tried a lot of tests, you shrink the size so the image becomes a much smaller window in front of you. So the effect of it, and the relationship of the image to the audience, has to be very carefully considered. And I feel that in the initial wave to embrace it, that wasn’t considered in the slightest.”

I respected Cabin In The Woods but I felt poisoned and sickened all the same. An instinct told me to miss Life Happens, and now it’s open with a 32% Rotten Tomatoes rating. I was too lazy or disorganized to see Lockout, but no worries — it’s also rated poorly. I liked Monsieur Lazhar but I had a problem with a teacher hanging herself in a classroom. I didn’t get to last Tuesday’s Three Stooges screening…no excuse. But a 42% RT rating = meh.

So Lazhar is the best bet among the newbies, but I’ll be going to that DCP TCM Classic Film Festival screening of Vertigo at the big Chinese, and we’ll see about that 1.85 vs.1.66 thing once and for all. I like getting out in the rain and feeling cold and challenged. It reminds me of back east.

This thing wears out its welcome. At the 1:30 mark I started to feel antsy. At the 2:00 mark I said to myself, “I can’t believe this goes on for another two minutes and 34 seconds.”

For what it’s worth I’d love to see you direct Catching Fire because you’ll class it up and put Gary Ross‘s work on The Hunger Games to shame. Suzanne Collins‘ material is so far below your default aesthetic level that it’s not funny, but it’s considered healthy, by industry standards, to take a paycheck job every now and then. Like when Alfonso Cuaron took the Harry Potter/Prisoner of Azkaban gig, which did him no harm.

Is there any hint as to whether you’re really in the loop for this, or are they leaning more toward Alfonso or Cronenberg? Can you tell me anything at all?”

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.