The lighting in this scene from Francine, a 2012 SXSW attraction, is too dark and murky. On one level that sounds like the Jeffrey Jones‘ Emperor Joseph II saying in Amadeus that Mozart’s music has “too many notes.” On another level it’s too effing dark.

My prevailing memory of South by Southwest 2011 is one of lines, lines and more lines. No seniority, no elite press privileges, level playing field. It’s no duckwalk if you’re trying to file all the time. Cannes and Sundance offer elite passes to a certain journalistic fraternity. If you were me wouldn’t you prefer this kind of deal to a festival run by the sensibility of “the people’s republic of Austin”? This is but one of the reasons I’m not attending this year’s SXSW.

On top of which I wouldn’t want to deal with being even in the general realm of James Rocchi‘s late-night karaoke routine. To get into karaoke it helps to be half-bombed (at least on the singer’s part) and my newfound sobriety has put me on a separate path.

I stopped myself from flipping through all these time-wasters but I couldn’t resist checking out the alternate main-title opening of Jackie Brown, which I’d never watched on the DVD or Bluray for whatever reason.

It takes years to really understand some films, and in a certain sense to stand up to them. Particularly those made by world-class filmmakers — films with lots of style and jazz up their sleeves. If you ask me the Chicago critics in this early ’99 video clip — Roger Ebert, Michael Wilmington, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ray Pride and Dann Gire — were so swayed by Stanley Kubrick‘s reputation as a genius-level director that they couldn’t quite bring themselves to just look at Eyes Wide Shut for what it really was and just say that.

Last night I re-watched the Eyes Wide Shut Bluray, and of course, as usual, I was sucked in start to finish. But I’m even more convinced now than ever before that this is one of the most soulless wanks (in terms of actual content as opposed to the look and mood of it) ever created by a major director.

I said this in a March 2000 piece called “Stanley Was Slippin’.” A 1996 documentary about Kubrick called “Stanley Kubrick: The Invisible Man” more or less said that. And Malcolm McDowell definitely said that in his assessment of Kubrick’s final artistic essence. His portion starts at 4:30 in the clip that follows:

You really need to listen to McDowell in this clip. He worked with Kubrick, knew him well, obviously saw through to the bottom of him. Once you’ve done that, read on.

Here’s how I put it way back when:

“I once referred to Eyes Wide Shut as a ‘perfectly white tablecloth.’ That implies purity of content and purpose, which it clearly has. But Eyes Wide Shut is also a tablecloth that feels stiff and unnatural from too much starch.

“Stanley Kubrick was one of the great cinematic geniuses of the 20th century, but on a personal level he wound up isolating himself, I feel, to the detriment of his art. The beloved, bearded hermit so admired by Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg (both of whom give great interviews on the Eyes Wide Shut DVD) had become, to a certain extent, an old fogey who didn’t really get the world anymore.

“Not that he wanted or needed to. He created in his films worlds that were poetically whole and self-balancing on their own aesthetic terms. But as time went on, they became more and more porcelain and pristine, and less flesh-and-blood. Eyes Wide Shut is probably the most porcelain of them all.

“I remember writing two or three pieces in ’99 and ’00 about how Eyes Wide Shut was a fascinating stiff that essentially portrayed of the decline of Stanley Kubrick. I remember bully-boy David Poland unloading ridicule in my direction because of this. All to say that it gave me comfort to come upon a similar judgment in David Thomson‘s re-review of Kubrick’s final film, which is found on page 273 of Have You Seen…?.

Here’s the first paragraph and two sentences at the article’s end:

“This is the last film of Stanley Kubrick — indeed, he died so soon after delivery of his cut that the legend quickly grew that he intended doing more things to his movie. But it’s hard at the end not to see the substantial gulf between the man who knew ‘everything’ about filmmaking but not nearly enough about life or love or sex (somehow, over the years those subjects did get left out).

“Not that the film lacks intrigue or suggestiveness. Mastery can be felt. It is just that the master seems to have forgotten, or given up on figuring out, why mastery should be any more valuable than supremacy at chess or French polishing.”

The last two lines of Thomson’s review: “It is a shock to find that the film is only 159 minutes. Every frame feels like a prison.”

From my March 2000 review: “If you want your art to matter, stay in touch with the world. Keep in the human drama, take walks, go to baseball games, chase women, argue with waiters, ride motorcycles, hang out with children, play poker, visit Paris as often as possible and always keep in touch with the craggy old guy with the bad cough who runs the news stand.

“Kubrick apparently did very little of this. The more invested he became in his secretive, secluded, every-detail-controlled, nothing-left-to-chance lifestyle in England — which he began to construct when he left Hollywood and moved there in the early ’60s — and the less familiar he became with the rude hustle-bustle of life on the outside, the more rigid and formalized and apart-from-life his films became.

“Kubrick’s movies were always impressively detailed and beautifully realized. They’ve always imposed a certain trance-like spell — an altogetherness and aesthetic unity common to the work of any major artist.

“What Kubrick chose to create is not being questioned here. On their own terms, his films are masterful. But choosing to isolate yourself from the unruly push-pull of life can have a calcifying effect upon your art.

“Kubrick was less Olympian and more loosey-goosey when he made his early films in the `50s (Fear and Desire, The Killing, Paths of Glory) and early `60s (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove). I’m not saying his ultra-arty period that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey and continued until his death with A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, resulted in lesser films. The opposite is probably true.

“I’m saying that however beautiful and mesmerizing they were on their own terms, these last six films of Kubrick’s were more and more unto themselves, lacking that reflective, straight-from-the-hurlyburly quality that makes any work of expression seem more vital and alive.

“So many things about Eyes Wide Shut irritate me. Don’t get me started. So many others have riffed on this.

“The stiff, phoney-baloney way everyone talks to one another. The unmistakable feeling that the world it presents is much closer to 1920s Vienna (where the original Arthur Schnitzler novel was set) than modern-day Manhattan. The babysitter calling Cruise and Nicole Kidman ‘Mr. Harford’ and ‘Mrs. Harford.’ (If there is one teenaged Manhattan babysitter who has ever expressed herself like a finishing school graduate of 1952 and addressed a modern Manhattan couple in their early 30s as ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.,’ I will eat the throw rug in David Poland‘s apartment.) The trite cliches that constitute 85% of Cruise’s dialogue. The agonizingly stilted delivery that Kidman gives to her lines in the sequence in which she’s smoking pot and arguing with Cruise in their bedroom. That absolutely hateful piano chord that keeps banging away in Act Three.

“The ultimate proof that Kubrick was off his game in his final days? He was so wrong in his judgment that the MPAA wouldn’t hit him with an NC-17 rating for the orgy scene that he didn’t even shoot alternative footage he could use in the event he might be forced to prune the overt nudity. He was instead caught with his pants down and forced to resort to a ridiculous CGI cover-up that makes no sense in the context of the film. (Would Cruise’s sexually curious character be content with just seeing the shoulders and legs of the sexual performers as he walks through the mansion? Wouldn’t he make a point of actually seeing the real action?)

“No one has been blunt enough to say it, but Kubrick obviously played his cards like no one who had any serious understanding of the moral leanings of the culture, let alone a good poker player’s sense of the film business, would have. He played them like an old man whose instincts were failing him, and thereby put himself and Warner Brothers into an embarrassing position. I wish things hadn’t ended this way for him, but they did.

“I hope what I’ve written here isn’t misread. I’ll always be grateful to have lived in a world that included the films of Stanley Kubrick. He’s now in the company of Griffith, Lubitsch, Chaplin, Eisenstein and the rest. Prolific or spare, rich or struggling, lauded or derided as their artistic strivings may have been, they are all equal now.”

The buzz about Wes Anderson‘s Moonrise Kingdom opening the 65th Cannes Film Festival was confirmed an hour ago. The swells will catch it at the Grand Lumiere on the evening of Wednesday, 5.16. The press will see it earlier that morning. Anderson, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman and the two kids — Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman — all doing the red carpet, etc.

Like I said a few weeks ago, Viola Davis is always playing characters defined by their work — social worker, CIA agent, bad mom, domestic maid, space engineer, nurse, cop, policewoman — and never by personal longings or creases or compulsions.

True to form, Davis is reportedly considering playing the late civil-rights activist and Congressperson Barbara Jordan. Paris Qualles is adapting Mary Beth Rogers‘ “Barbara Jordan: American Hero.” Davis and her husband would produce.

Add Jordan to Davis’s next two roles — a librarian helping kids deal with hauntings in Beautiful Creatures and a genius recruited by the government to help defeat an alien insect race in Ender’s Game — and it’s even more obvious she’s fallen into a major, major rut.

Every so often even guys like Darren Aronofsky bend over, hold their nose and take a paycheck job. It’s not dishonorable to do it once in a while. It’s fine. But when you do it over and over and over again, Liam Neeson-style, then you have a problem.

We all know it doesn’t mean much when someone announces three or four weeks of sobriety. It might as well be a week or a day. The difference is that I haven’t just gone cold turkey on white wine. I’ve also eliminated everything but salads and steamed veggies and fruit and granola and sushi and coffee and protein bars.

I haven’t done a no-alcohol and a no-bad-food thing simultaneously ever. On one hand I feel occasional cravings for anything illegal, immoral or fattening. On the other not having any poisons in my system feels really good, especially in the morning. And jeans that felt tight a few weeks ago fit really easily now.

Parties are the tough part. It’s easy to laugh and be sociable with a glass or two, but try doing it straight. I feel matter-of-fact and cool and level about everything now, and I just don’t find anything funny. I guess I’ll figure out how to handle this eventually. I know it’s a good thing to be sober. I haven’t felt this good in a long time. That puffy look I had in my eyes and face is going away. But abstaining is a bore — let’s be honest. Maybe I should go to AA meetings. I didn’t have a “problem”, but pouring alcohol into your system every night lets a slight element of eccentricity and vulnerability in, to some extent. That very slight feeling of doom around the corner (which I’ve been dealing with since my 20s) isn’t as palpable now. I won’t say everything feels rational and manageable when you’re sober, but a lot more of it seems to be.

But something really funny has happened. I don’t think about women very much any more. I see this or that attractive lady at Pavillions or a party or wherever, and all that comes to mind are all the negatives that would probably eventually kick in once I get to know her.

I asked a sober friend about the no-more-laughing-at-parties thing. “The longer I’m sober, the less inclined I am to enter bars and any of that,” he said. “But as far as parties and such are concerned, it definitely gets better. It may take you a while to home in on it, but while you’re in a minority, you’re definitely not the only person not drinking. There are plenty of dry/sober people [out there], and they’re out doing their socializing parts of their jobs just like we are. You’ll find them.

“As for fun, well, I know that drink is a social lubricant and that if you’re used to relaxing with one at a party it’s hard to get into a frame of mind where you can loosen up to that extent. What’s eventually going to happen is you’ll find yourself gravitating to the better conversationalists — the ones you can enjoy listening to or shooting the shit with without alcohol. Also you’ll start to appreciate having your wits about you more than you once did. And you’ll learn to relax within that framework. It won’t take much time until you’re feeling on top of your game but in a way that doesn’t imply your lording it over anyone who’s had a few.

“It does take time, a few months. You need to get your sea legs. When it happens you might not even notice it. But the more discrete experiences that you normally associate with drinking that you go through without drinking, the easier it’ll get. It’s like you’re unlearning and learning at the same time.”

A couple of hours after hearing this morning about Best Buy’s French Connection surprise — i.e., a newly remastered, Owen Roizman-approved Bluray that looks like the original 1971 Oscar-winner — I drove down to a Best Buy at La Brea and Santa Monica Blvd. and sure enough, there it was.

I took it right home and popped it right in…aaaah. What I’ve been dreaming about for years. A pure celluloid capturing of a great New York film experience, some of it luscious, some of it spotty and grainy but all it looking true and right. Some of it looks more lab-fresh than I’ve ever seen. Punchy red neons and such. Other parts look…well, the way they did at Leows’ 86th Street when it opened in the fall of ’71, I’m guessing. Raw, wham-bam, high-impact footage all the way. All gritty, nothing pretty.

No more bluish bleach. No more splotchy colors and monochrome, high-contrast crap. No more creepy-perverse digital fuckwad action. The guy who mucked up the notorious 2009 Bluray version, director William Friedkin, has come to his senses and re-done his masterwork with dp Owen Roizman.

“The nation’s three-year-long, Freidkin-incited French Connection Bluray nightmare is over,” I tweeted. “The bleachy, splotchy ’09 version has been replaced.”

On 2.24.09 Roizman spoke to Aaron Aradillas on a blog-radio show called “Back By Midnight,” and he called the transfer “atrocious,” “emasculated” and “horrifying.” He said that he “wasn’t consulted” by Freidkin and he “certainly wants to wash my hands of having had anything to do with [it].”

The new Bluray sounds great also. Nice bassy tones. Brassy, clattery.

For whatever reason I noticed for the first time that in footage of Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider tailing Tony Lobianco and “Angie” through Times Square that Get Carter is playing at the Victoria.

Here’s A.O. Scott‘s “Critics Picks” assessment.

Sometime within the last two days James Cameron “folded his 6-foot-2-inch frame into a 43-inch-wide capsule and plummeted, alone, down five miles in the New Britain Trench off Papua New Guinea. His feat, in a 24-foot-long craft dubbed the Deepsea Challenger, broke by a mile the world depth record for modern vehicles that a Japanese submersible had held,” according to a 3.8 N.Y. Times story by William J. Broad.

But Cameron “wants to go deeper,” he continues. “This month, Mr. Cameron plans to plunge nearly seven miles to the planet’s most inaccessible spot: the Challenger Deep in the western Pacific, an alien world thought to swarm with bizarre eels and worms, fish and crustaceans. He wants to spend six hours among them, filming the creatures and sucking up samples with a slurp gun.

“It’s a blast,” Mr. Cameron told Broad during sea trials of his new craft. “There’s nothing more fun than getting bolted into this and seeing things that human beings have never seen before. Forget about red carpets and all that glitzy stuff.”

There appears to be some dispute when the five-mile dive occured. A National Geographic story says it happened on Tuesday, 3.6. Broad’s 3.8 N.Y. Times account says Cameron descended on Wednesday, 3.7. An MSNBC report by Andrea Mustain says the dive happened “last week.”

To go by this Japanese teaser, Snow White and the Huntsman (Universal, 6.1) is the Snow White legend injected with CG insanity and made for swordplay-and-martial-arts-loving fanboys. At least it has a significantly different attitude and tone than Tarsem Singh‘s Mirror Mirror. Is Snow White really called “Snow” in this thing or…? (“Hey, Snow…what up?) There are eight dwarves in this rather than seven.

It’s all in the Wiki synopsis: “In a kingdom ruled by tyranny, the vain and selfish Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) learns her stepdaughter Snow White (Kristen Stewart) is destined to surpass her as not only the “Fairest One of All” but the kingdom’s future ruler. But the Queen then learns from her Magic Mirror (Christopher Obi) that the only way to remain in power is to consume Snow’s heart and achieve immortality.

“Snow escapes into the Dark Forest and Ravenna recruits the Huntsmen Eric (Chris Hemsworth) to kill Snow. Eric however takes pity on the young princess and teaches Snow White the art of war. Now, with the aid of eight dwarves and Prince William (Sam Claflin), Snow White begins a rebellion to bring down her stepmother once and for all.”

The dwarves are not named Sleepy, Doc, Grumpy, Dopey, Bashful, Happy and Snoopy.

Their names are Beith, Quert, Muir, Coll, Duir, Gus, Gort and Nion, and they’re played by Ian McShane, Johnny Harris, Bob Hoskins, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, Brendan Gleeson, Ray Winstone and Nick Frost, respectively

I was kidding about Snoopy, of course. That’s actually an Elliot Gould joke from California Split.

Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet. Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet. Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet.