The Guardian‘s Shane Danielson took issue today with a sentiment I posted on 8.13 about the extraordinary clarity in the forthcoming Psycho Bluray (which has already been released in England).

I said I “love being able to see stuff that you weren’t intended to see” — like the pancake makeup on Martin Balsam’s face in a certain closeup — “but which Blu-ray has now revealed.” Danielson says he’d prefer it if Bluray transfers looked less exacting and more celluloid-y. Okay, but he gets too many things wrong in the piece.

One, he says my article appeared “last week.” Today is Tuesday, 8.31, so it actually appeared not last week nor the week before but 19 days or two and a half weeks ago.

Two, Danielson gives Balsam a new first name — “Robert.”

Three, he claims that “the Blu-ray edition of Paramount’s 1953 War of the Worlds has given fans much anguish, with the wires holding up the Martian spaceships now clearly visible in almost every shot.” Except there’s no Bluray of George Pal’s 1953 classic. The wires are, however, clearly visible on the 2005 DVD.

Four, Danielson complains that while watching Robert Harris‘s Bluray restoration of The Godfather trilogy two years ago in a Times Square Virgin Megastore that it had “a precision to the images, a sort of hyperreal clarity, that didn’t jibe with my memory of having watched the film, either in the cinema or at home.” In fact Harris worked on the trilogy with dp Gordon Willis and produced one of the most celluloidy-looking Blurays in history. And two, as Harris said this afternoon, “He was probably looking at it on a crappy monitor with the color and contrast pumped to the hilt…don’t watch these films at electronic consumer superstores.”

And five, he asks what the difference is between Warner Home Video technicians digitally erasing the wires holding up the Cowardly Lion’s tail in The Wizard of Oz and George Lucas‘s much-maligned ‘fix-ups’ to the original Star Wars trilogy? The standard, says Harris, is original viewing standards. “if 1939 audiences didn’t see the wires when they saw The Wizard of Oz in theatres, then present-day audiences shouldn’t see them on the Blu-ray.” The line isn’t as clear with Star Wars, but if Greedo didn’t shoot first in the original 1977 version then he shouldn’t shoot first (or simultaneously) in the digitally revised version. Simple.

It’s being widely reported/repeated that a CBS News/Vanity Fair poll has found that three out of four Americans haven’t been turned off by Mel Gibson‘s ugliness, and would probably pay to see him in Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver.

If, that is, Summit had the smarts and chutzpah to release it, which of course they don’t. Because they’re worried about industry consensus and all that. On 7.10 I explained the reasons for ignoring the Gibson scandal and releasing The Beaver anyway.

The exact wording of the Gibson question was, “Are you now less likely to go see a Mel Gibson movie as a result of the recent scandal?” 76% of 847 respondents said Gibson’s comments (“blow me,” etc.) would have no effect on their willingness to pay to see him in a film. (Men were 80% on this point; women were at 72%). Plus I’m betting that a certain portion of the 20 percent who said they’d be “less likely” to view his films are just saying that, and that they’d go if The Beaver came to their local bijou.

What else do you need, Summit? A note of permission from Ari Emanuel?

Anton Corbijn‘s The American (Focus Features, 9.1) is a moderately soothing art piece and an excellent Machete antidote. After you’ve had your blood sausage and micro-waved tacos, The American will feel like a drink of cool mountain water. It’s certainly a tasteful walk (wank?) in the woods. You’ll feel unsullied when it’s over, and gratified that Corbijn and Focus Features respect you, and are not treating you the way Robert Rodriguez treats his fans. This is the other side of the mountain.

Georeg Clooney, Violante Placido in Anton Corbijn’s The American.

And yet there’s something about The American — a lot actually — that feels tastefully repressed and mummified. It’s vaguely Antonioni-ish but at the same time not really because it isn’t “about” any social zeitgiest thing. But it’s certainly aromatic and scenic. Martin Ruhe‘s photography is exquisite here and there.

The American is stirring, in short, for what it doesn’t do and for the meditative tone and cappucino atmosphere. But if the idea was to make some kind of thriller then forget it, folks. It’s a quietly unsettling thing from time to time, but it’s about eerie “uh-oh” feelings rather than pulse-quickenings. Which I was mildly okay with except for the ending, which is on another level entirely.

It’s about an assassin (George Clooney) hiding out in an Italian village and doing relatively little except making a rifle and rolling around with a local prostitute. But if female nudity does anything for you, and if you can let the thriller idea go and just roll with the easy glide of it all, it isn’t half bad and the finale — the last 20 minutes or so — is more than worth the price.

The American is mainly a piece about paranoia. About a man unable to live because he’s forced to use all his wits in order to not get killed. Living in a cave, a prison. Cautious, stealthy. And always haunted by the same thought — who and where are the predators? They’re definitely out there.

Jack (Clooney) is a professional killer who’s being hunted by certain parties, some of them clearly Swedish. His boss (Johan Leysen) suggests a job in an Italian hill town that involves constructing a special high-powered rifle for a female client (Thekla Reuten). While doing the work he strikes up a passing acquaintance with a local priest (Paolo Bonacelli) and an exceptionally good-looking prostitute (Violante Placido).

Speaking of which The American provides some gratuitous nudity that I would call wonderful, excellent, and good for the soul. I am calling it that, in fact. And it has a very nice red-lighted sex scene. Good for George and Anton during filming, and good for guys everywhere.

Corbijn is a celebrated photographer, and is known primarily for Ruhe’s exquisite lensing on Control, his debut film. But I have to say I wasn’t floored by some of the American compositions. Corbijn and Ruhe depend on a great number of close-ups and medium close-ups. There’s an early meeting in Rome between Clooney and Leysen that is all closeups and medium closeups, and I was frankly feeling bored fairly quickly. I regret saying that The American is not Control in color. I was hoping for some kind of Paul Cameron or Dion Beebe-level thing, but nope.

I wanted Bonacelli’s priest, whom I disliked immediately from the very first instant, to be killed. Every time he lumbered along with that hoarse voice and that wavy white hair and those facial jowls I went, “Oh, God…him again.” He’s way too fat and friendly and nosy. And he speaks perfect English, which seemed ridiculous for a priest from the Italian hill country. He’s the kind of Italian who sometimes turns up in American-shot movies set in Italy. A friendly guide, interpreter, counselor.

MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW:

There’s a moment at the very end when Clooney’s grim, somber-to-a-fault performance — monotonous and guarded to the point of nothingness, shut and bolted down — suddenly opens up. It’s when he asks the local prostitute to leave with him. For the first time in the film, he smiles. He relaxes and basks in the glow of feeling.

There’s a little patch of woods by a river that Clooney visits three times. Once to test his rifle, once for a picnic and a swim in the river, and then in the final scene. One too many, perhaps. But his final drive to this spot is almost — almost, I say — on the level of Jean Servais‘ final drive back into Paris in Rififi. For the second and final time in the film Clooney shows something other than steel and grimness.

The American is worth seeing for this scene alone, and for the final shot when a butterfly flutters off and the camera pans up.

The American director Anton Corbijn (l.) , George Clooney (r.)

There’s gunplay in The American, but it’s so abbreviated it’s almost on a “what?” level at times. Corbijn knows how to capture beautiful images but he doesn’t know much about shooting action, and apparently couldn’t care less.

There’s a scene in which a predator has the drop on Clooney and is right behind him, gun drawn and (as I recall) about to be pointed, and Clooney “senses” his presence and turns around and drills him. It’s that easy? There’s also a shootout in the snow — in a remote forest in Sweden — in the beginning. There’s a rifleman wearing snow gear on the ledge above, and Clooney is down below with his handgun…and suddenly he just shoots and drops the guy. Just like that?

Later on there’s another action sequence in which another Swede tries to kill him in the Italian village. Clooney is the victor again (if he wasn’t the movie would stop dead so I don’t consider this a spoiler) but he leaves the guy sitting there in a car with broken glass splattered on the road. Carabinieri and detectives would be swarming all over the next morning, and in less than an hour they’d be knocking on Clooney’s door, and they would find the hand-made rifle and the game would be over.

END OF MILD SPOILERS:

How curious, I’m thinking, that yesterday I posted a quote from former N.Y. Times critic Richard Eder that applies in a certain way to The American.

If Eder were reviewing this film today, as every critic in the country is now doing, he might say the following: “The American is handsome, meditative, elegiac and languid. It’s so coolly artful it is barely alive. First-rate ingredients and a finesse in assembling them do not quite make either a movie or a cake. At some point it is necessary to light the oven.”

By the way: I’ve never seen Richard Fleischer‘s The Last Run (1971), another movie about an elegant American criminal type (played by George C. Scott) hiding out in Europe and showing a certain facility with repairing and building things and doing the old laconic moody thing. I wonder if there are any other similarities. Anyone?

Late last March Tim Blake Nelson‘s Leaves of Grass was set to open at Manhattan’s Angelika — a bad place to see a film. But then it was yanked at the last minute. Telepathic Studios had bought distrib rights from First Look’s Avi Lerner, allowing for a much wider opening than Lerner had planned.

Several critics had already posted reviews, of course (including one by the New Yorker‘s David Denby) and they stayed up. I myself had taken a quick dump on Leaves of Grass during last year’s Toronto Film Festival.

And now this broad and mangy shit-kicker stoner comedy has announced a new New York opening, this time at the Village East — a less problematic place to see a film but nothing to crow about — on September 17th. And then it’ll come out on DVD/Bluray a little more than three weeks later. But at least it’ll play in more theatres across the country than it would have with Lerner at the stern.

I’m polishing my review of Anton Corbijn‘s The American, which I saw last night at the AMC 19th Street. But I first need to explain the absurd circumstances it was shown under. This is one of the quietest films I’ve seen in in my life — George Clooney raises his voice slightly once or twice, and nobody ever shouts — but during the entire thing the dialogue was competing with and mostly losing to an unusually loud air-conditioning system in the theatre.

Remember the next-to-last scene in the 1960 Ocean’s Eleven, inside the Las Vegas chapel where the Rat Pack is attending a funeral service for poor Richard Conte? They’re sitting side by side in a pew and they hear an odd persistent noise — something blowing and rumbling. “What’s that sound?” one of them asks, “The deceased is being cremated,” an usher says. That was what I was listening to throughout the entire film last night, only two or three times louder. I had to cup my ears to hear some of the dialogue.

If there’s one film I’ve seen this year that really demands first-rate sound and a sense of absolute dead quiet in the theatre, it’s The American. And it was shown in the noisiest theatrical environment I’ve encountered in years if not decades.

It was almost as if someone at Focus Features had decided to ruin the viewing experience as best they could without being too overt about it. (I’m not suggesting this, of course.) I can imagine the meeting when they decided on the best plan. “We need to diminish The American with New York critics, but how?” a publicist might have said. “What if we hire a couple of guys to agitate the crowd?,” a colleague might have suggested. “You know…get them to talk loudly at the screen and maybe start a fight in the middle of the show?” Too blatant, the first guy would say. Something more subtle. “I’ve got it!” an assistant could pipe in. “We show it at a theatre with a noisy 1962 ventilation system that rumbles so loudly people won’t be able to hear some of the dialogue!” Brilliant, says the first guy.

Contrary to what Hitfix‘s Greg Ellwood reported a day or two ago, there will be a press screening of Clint Eastwood‘s Hereafter during the Toronto Film Festival. It’ll happen a day before Sunday evening’s public screening at the Elgin (9.12, 9 pm) — on Saturday, 3 pm at the Scotiabank plex.

Update: The press screening schedule for the New York Film Festival was sent out this afternoon, and Hereafter — part of the 2010 slate — wasn’t on it.

Another no-laugh-funny “comedy”, although I grin every time I think back on it. Director Frank Perry really knew how to convey that lackadaisical ’70s thing — casually hip and born to swagger. Every character was a “character” in this film. Eccentric, imaginative, unsettled, peculiar. (Megan Fox would fit right in if somebody were to try an exact remake.) Those muttering scenes between Harry Dean Stanton (Curt) and Richard Bright (Burt) were classic. I would have films like this again.

Rancho Deluxe was shot in and around Livingston, Montana, which I visited in the late ’90s. Livingston (the home of novelist/Rancho Deluxe screenwriter Thomas McGuane) was a very cool place to live back then, and I’m thinking that Rancho Deluxe may qualify as one of those films that may have been a bit more fun to make than it was to watch (although it’s certainly an enjoyable sit).

McGuane’s career in the early to mid ’70s has been described as the period in which he became known as “Captain Berserko” in which he authored screenplays for Rancho Deluxe, The Missouri Breaks (’76), starring Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando; and McGuane’s foray into directing with the film version of 92 in the Shade ’75).

From his Wiki bio: “The excesses of those years are reflected – though hardly in full – by McGuane’s tumultuous affair with actress Elizabeth Ashley (captured in voyeuristic detail in her memoir, Actress), his divorce from his first wife Becky Crockett, (who went on to marry Peter Fonda) his marriage to actress Margot Kidder, the birth of their daughter, Maggie (herself an author), and by his second divorce, all in the span of less than a year.”

From Richard Eder‘s 11.24.75 N.Y. Times review: “Rancho DeLuxe is handsome, witty, apt and languid. It is so cool it is barely alive. First-rate ingredients and a finesse in assembling them do not quite make either a movie or a cake. At some point it is necessary to light the oven.”

“Oh, give me a home, with a low interest loan. A cowgirl and two pickup trucks. A color TV, all the beer should be free. And that, man, is Rancho Deluxe.”

Diablo Cody‘s 8.29 Red Band Trailer interview is with Megan Fox. It gets pretty good when they talk about how shallow and predatory many journalists have become. (A brief transcript follows the video.) I love Cody’s observation that Fox has a skewed sensibility and that press people don’t know how to handle beauty mixed with perversity. Fox’s handicap, I feel, is her thin and reedy voice. It doesn’t suggest rivers of soul or passion. Beep-beep-beepity-beep-beep-beepity-beep.

Cody: “Do you feel like you’ve been mistreated, misquoted? Do you feel like you’ve had a crappy experience in the limelight, or do you feel positive about it overall?”

Fox: “I would never call it crappy experience. I think…those are such different things. Not so much ‘misquoted’ as the things I’ve said being taken completely out of context or sensationalized into something scandalous when they weren’t. They’re waiting for anything they can take as a sound byte, to sell. And it doesn’t matter what your intention behind your words are never communicated by ‘journalists,’ any more. So it’s hard to be sarcastic. Do you find this happens to, you?

Cody: “I have this theory that it must have been incredibly fun to be a celebrity in, like, the ’70s. Because there wasn’t the sound byte culture. There wasn’t the tabloid culture. You would see these interviews that were like these 17-page interviews in Rolling Stone in which you really got to know a person, and now it comes down to, like, oh, we have to keep 8 million websites rolling so what does one person say today that we can get a clip [from]? It makes it impossible to speak like an individual.

Fox: “I don’t even want to express myself during interviews especialy during print interviews, because I know that everyone is constantly searching for an angle and they’re reaching for those four words that they can piece together for some sort of explosive sound byte.”

“We wanted to do a movie in the vein of the ’70s foreign films that influenced so many great filmmakers today,” George Clooney recently told L.A. Times reporter John Horn for a piece that ran yesterday. “We felt if we kept the budget low, that the outside influences (like a studio) would be minimal and we were lucky that Focus was on board with the concept from the beginning.”

“On board”? As in believing in Clooney and director Anton Corbijn‘s vision, embracing it, standing behind it, and giving the marketing effort the old college try? Focus Features marketers have run ads and TV spots and decided to open it in 200 theatres, but they’ve all but abandoned any attempt to sell it with interviews. Clooney has done almost nothing, and Corbijn hasn’t even come to the States for the opening.

The American “is a cinematic anomaly,” Horn writes. “A U.S. production that in look, pacing and casting is more European than Clooney’s own Italian villa.

“‘I’m sure a lot of people will think it’s on the slow side of things,’ says Corbijn, whose previous film, 2007’s Control, was a critically acclaimed (but little seen) fictionalized biography of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the British post-punk band Joy Division who committed suicide in 1980. ‘But I think there is too much explaining in films sometimes. Yes, there’s not a lot of back story on George’s character. But it’s enough for me to follow the metamorphosis that he is trying to achieve.”

“The American is very much a tale of a man alone, and to highlight that vision the filmmakers not only switched its protagonist’s nationality (he’s English in the novel) but also surrounded Clooney with a cast and crew almost exclusively European. At a very late stage, Corbijn even recast the part of Jack’s boss, replacing U.S. actor Bruce Altman with the Belgian performer Johan Leysen.

“Rather than pack pages of expositional dialogue into the script (credited to Rowan Joffe, following drafts by numerous other writers over years of revisions), Corbijn, who is best known as a photographer, relied on long, lingering shots of Jack and the Italian countryside. ‘We were trying to make,’ the director says, ‘a film that had a lot of beauty in it.”

“Corbijn also ‘looked at the film like a western, a morality tale of good versus evil,” he says. ‘Someone has done something bad and wants to escape it, but the past catches up to him.”

“‘Anton is an artist,’ says Clooney producing partner Grant Heslov. ‘And he’s never going to tell a movie in a straightforward way. He’s willing to sit on a shot for a while and not cut away. There are going to be people who are going to be absolutely frustrated by it.'”

Even if Anton Corbijn’s The American was a straight-ahead popcorn thriller, Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez‘s Machete would kick its box-office ass regardless. I don’t know what The American will be specifically, but it seems to be a truffles and foie gras and elite bullets type of film whereas Machete is strictly a Taco Bell meal with boobs, blood sauce, bikinis and severed limbs, and a side order of pro-Mexican immigrant, anti-racist-cracker politics to keep it spicy.

It’s not a slur to say that Machete is aimed at a typical twelve-year-old mentality. For me, the political satire and anti-yahoo stance makes it Rodriguez’s most agreeable film since El Mariachi (’94). But it’s a very primitive and extremely bloody thing, and pretty much an out-and-out gore comedy (although what Rodriguez film hasn’t had some comedic winking going on?), and there are some moderately funny bits here and there. Given a choice, dollars to donuts an American movie audience will always take a chance on primitive and coarse before rarified and austere.

Honestly? If given an either-or choice even I would probably pay to see Machete first. The reason, I’d be ashamed to admit (if I hadn’t already seen Machete), has to do with the Lindsay Lohan revealings.

Kurt Schlichter‘s American screenplay review suggests it may be Machete‘s match in terms of female nudity, although that has yet to be determined.

I’m saying this without having seen any tracking for this weekend (although I’ve heard second-hand that Machete is tracking fairly well among younger males. The two extra days of commercial playing time for The American won’t make that much of a difference, I’m guessing.

Four days before I posted that Dutch film critic’s review of Anton Corbijn‘s The American, Big Hollywood‘s Kurt Schlichter reviewed Rowan Joffe‘s screenplay, and I have to say it’s moderately amusing. Even though Schlichter is one of “them,” he can be funny. Except he needs to spell arrivederci correctly next time.

“We never find out much about [George Clooney‘s] back-story, which is okay because we really don’t care,” he says toward the end. “His tattoo reveals that he’s ex-Special Forces, because, as we know, all Green Berets leave the Army to join that giant high-priced international hit man industry we somehow never hear about in real-life. If in reality half as many people were employed as high-priced professional assassins as Hollywood movies depict, the unemployment rate would only be 9% and the Obama administration would point to it as evidence the stimulus is working.

“The script is technically proficient and evocative, meaning that I could clearly and fully visualize all of the tired, hackneyed cliches. On the plus side, other than the ‘you Americans don’t know how to live life’ crap, it’s not political. It’ll be equally dull for adherents of every political stripe.

“And there’s another upside – there’s a hot Italian girl character in it and in pretty much every scene she’s taking off her clothes. I don’t mean just once or twice — I mean this gal makes Lindsay Lohan look like a particularly repressed Amish chick during Sunday school. So Clooney gets to pick up a big paycheck for hanging out in the Italian countryside surrounded by hot naked girls (yeah, there’s more than one), so I can see what was in The American for him. Unfortunately, I still can’t see what’s supposed to be in it for the rest of us.

One plus for the film, Schlicter says, will be the talented Corbijn, last seen directing the very cool Joy Division movie Control. And yet “terrifyingly, a true story about a Goth band and its lead singer’s eventual suicide has more laughs than this script does, which is to say at least one.”

It’s now 12:45 pm. The American will screen in Manhattan a little more than six hours from now.

Update: Who was I to talk about Schichter misspelling arrivederci when I couldn’t spell his last name correctly? Apologies.

The first thing I noticed about the new Movie City News redesign, which looks relatively decent (or at least better than before, being more balanced), is a preponderance of robin’s egg blue. The typeface, the MCN Tweety-bird, the MCN Twitter box, the bars…light blue all around. Plus some light violet. It reminds me of the colors and the vibe in a little boy’s bedroom.

The idea is to convey a certain spirituality or placidity or something. It’s all right or isn’t a “problem,” per se, but it doesn’t feel like a sale. It needs to man up on some level. A little red or orange, maybe.

The second thing I noticed is that Hollywood Elsewhere’s status has been upgraded. After being linked and referred to by MCN for several years as a “gossip,” I’m now included on the “Mainstream Blogger” list (along with Anne Thompson, Deadline, LA Observed, Patrick Goldstein, Roger Ebert’s Journal, The Real Shawn Levy, etc.). Thank you, David. I’ve noticed, by the way, that Deadline and HitFix are listed on the Mainstream Blogger and Gossip rosters. Split personalities?

The other Gossips are /Film, Ain’t It Cool News, Defamer, Huffington Post (really?), Jezebel, Mark Malkin, Movieline, NY Daily News, People Magazine, Star, The Superficial, The Wrap (really?) and Yahoo! Movies.

The third thing I noticed is that the new design disappeared about 11 am Eastern, and that the old design was back in action. Obviously a temporary gears-and-levers adjustment.

Incidentally: I understand about capturing a page image (control – shift – 4) and that if I add control to this combo the image is supposed to appear on Clipboard. Except it doesn’t, and the usual paste function (control V) doesn’t paste it either. So the hell with it.