“With all of this talk about film restorations and recuts, I want to mention the restoration of Michael Powell‘s The Red Shoes on Blu-Ray,” says HE reader James Kent. “I’d only seen this film once before (a couple of years back on an HD cable station) and was struck by the legendary visuals and cinematography by Jack Cardiff. I knew the Criterion Bluray had to be special, but holy crap — it’s by far the most amazing pure-visual film I have ever seen. There isn’t a mark on this thing. It’s as if you’re in a screening room in 1948, and it’s being perfectly projected without a single scratch. It is restoration done right. It is probably a better visual picture than what was originally projected, but in this case — any upgrades are definitely an improvement. If you are a lover of film cinematography, Jeff. I encourage you to get it. Amazing.”

Todd Solondz is suddenly looking at some tough child-molester-movie competition from David Schwimmer. Especially with Schwimmer using first-rate actors — Clive Owen, Catherine Keener, Viola Davis, Jason Carke. Trust is playing the 2010 Toronto Film Festival, and if it’s well made, terrific. But the trailer makes it seem like an emotional-bait movie for saps, and something in me just rebels at this kind of thing.

The message titles on the trailer confirm it is exploitation of the lowest order, playing on the fears of people who long for absolute security, etc. Clive puts expensive locks on his doors, wants nothing more than to protect his family. But the child molesters will find and molest der kinder no matter what kind of locks anyone buys and how good a parent he/she is, the trailer says. There’s no way to protect them, and the cops (i.e., Clarke) won’t do the Harry Callahan thing. Five’ll get you ten Clive turns vigilante in Act Three.

A perfect moment happened three or four days ago inside Toad Hall, the neighborhood bar on Grand Street near West Broadway. I was buying my second beer (a draft of something golden and fairly icy) and all of a sudden this started playing. I knew the opening drum-and-raunchy guitar thing, but I’d forgotten the name of the song. The bartender reminded me. I returned to my table with the big brew and immediately bought the song on iTunes. It was on my phone two minutes later.

Sometimes when you hear the right older song in the right bar environment, life can suddenly seem delicious, tantalizing. You can’t help but smile. These moments always leave within seconds, of course, but they’re quite wonderful when they happen. They’re like little spirit butterflies flying into your head.

My first reaction to the visual appearance of James Cameron‘s Aliens in ’86 (38 years ago!) was “magnificent verisimilitude, great military vigor and excellent cutting, but too grainy.”

I’ve always wanted to see Cameron’s de-grained 4K version of Aliens. but I never got around to it. After reading dweeb complaints about the lack of grain, I’m even more excited about catching this version.

The only problem is that $54 price tag for the Ultimate Aliens Collectors Edition 4K.

“Anti-Grain Kahuna,” posted on 8.17.10:

“During an Avatar: Special Edition interview last week James Cameron told a Coming Soon guy that he’s “just done a complete remaster of Aliens (the Bluray of which will be included in the Alien Anthology set, due on 10.26), and that he did the work with the same colorist with whom he had worked on Avatar, and that he’s “completely removed all noise and grain from the extended version of the film.” Yes!

“It’s spectacular,” Cameron said. “We went in and completely de-noised it, de-grained it, up-rezzed [and] color-corrected every frame, and it looks amazing. It looks better that it looked in the theaters originally.

“Aliens was shot on a high-speed negative that was a new negative that didn’t pan out too well and got replaced the following year, so it’s pretty grainy. [But] we got rid of all the grain. It’s sharper and clearer and more beautiful than it’s ever looked. And we did that to the long version, to the ‘director’s cut’ or the extended play.”

Today’s news that Clint Eastwood‘s Hereafter, Danny Boyle‘s 127 Hours, Dustin Lance Black ‘s What’s Wrong With Virginia?, Casey Affleck‘s I’m Still There and Missy Tadjedin‘s Last Night will show at the Toronto Film Festival (which starts in a mere three weeks) is very good news.

Now I feel as if things are finally kicking in. Not that I wasn’t intrigued with the previously announced titles (including Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan, which I have above-average interest in and hopes for), but the Boyle and the Eastwood have upped the voltage. My only problem is with the curious absence of William Monaghan‘s London Boulevard.

Also freshly slated are John Sayles‘ Amigo, Benoit Jacquot‘s Deep in the Woods, Dan Rush‘s Everything Must Go (Will Ferrell as a drunk) and Matt Reeves‘ Let Me In.

Incidentally: I heard a while back from Ophelia Lovibond that William Monaghan ‘s London Boulevard (in which she costars as a character named “Penny”) would probably play Toronto, but it hasn’t been announced. What’s happened?

This is that clip from Blake Edwards‘ Experiment in Terror that I mentioned a few months ago, one that includes shots of a group of teenagers hanging out at a community pool. I saw this 1962 film for the first time in decades about a year ago, and when the poolside scene began I said to myself, “Something’s different about the kids apart from the haircuts and dialogue, but I don’t know what.”

And then it hit me. They’re all thin and in great shape. They look like they actually work out and watch their diets. Put any 2010 geek-body guy (Devin Faraci or Drew McWeeny, say) into a time machine and plop them into this scene and these 1962 kids would cock their heads to one side and wonder what kind of life forms have visited their world.

Hollywood tends to cast attractive stand-outs over run-of-the-mills so it can be assumed this aesthetic prevailed in casting Experiment in Terror extras, but the bodies in this scene are much leaner than anything you’ll see at Jones Beach or Ocean Park Beach in Santa Monica today. Fast-food bodies are completely the norm now — just ask the director of Food Inc., Robert Kenner. Fitness-wise the kids of 2010 don’t hold a candle to the class of ’62.

A couple of years ago I plugged Don’t Forget To Validate Your Parking, Mike Le‘s sharp and well-written webcomic. Yesterday Le released the first motion-animated sequence based on his work thus far. Excellent stuff. To borrow from Bukowski, the stink of Los Angeles has sunk into his bones.

Doonesbury vein,” I wrote in August ’08, “and that he knows from Hollywood suck-up psychology. And from bitterness, cynicism, hunger and desperate, under-educated phonies. I laughed out loud twice this morning, and I’m not a laugh-out-louder.

“Don’t Forget To Validate Your Parking is a webcomic written and illustrated by Mike Le, the American screenwriter and movie executive,” says the DFTVYP Wiki page. “Officially launched on December 11th, 2007 and published roughly once a week, the webcomic is loosely based on the author’s experiences working in Hollywood. Don’t Forget To Validate Your Parking’s initial popularity was limited to Hollywood insiders as it was passed around through internal work emails and private tracking boards”

“The only main character is a drawn version of the author sitting behind his laptop and on the phone. All supporting characters are expressed through dialogue, usually as a voice on the phone. The tone of the webcomic is comedic, satirical, bitter, ironic.”

From Johnnie To‘s Breaking News (’04), an action sequence that required repeated takes and took a long time to get right. A little digital cheating went into the final product, I gather, but nothing that looks overtly fake. Very nice all around. I love sustained shots of almost any kind.

Speaking as an early spotter of potential in Ed Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs, this second trailer — spritzy, tearful, button-pushing — has made me turn around and say, “Whoa, chill down…enough.”

It’s the sad but apparently necessary task of all trailers these days to project a kind of dumbed-down essence of the movie they’re selling in order to attract the Jersey Shore crowd. This trailer does that, fine, mission accomplished …now ease up. Because the comments I’ve been reading suggest it’s more than just another effin’ rom-com.

Next month Fox needs to release a trailer that’s a little calmer, less “funny,” more natural-seeming. If LAOD has the real goods, don’t trivialize it by appealing only to the ADD Whitney Matheson crowd. The mentality that Matheson appeals to is the lowest form of intellectual and spiritual life there is….God!

Salon‘s Matt Zoller Seitz writes about four categories of director’s recuts (revisions, rescues, resuscitations, reimaginings) and doesn’t mention the exalted fifth category — i.e., unmistakable improvements? (Okay, so it doesn’t begin with an “r.”) Four expanded director’s cuts that are incontestably better than the original theatrical versions are (a) Cameron Crowe‘s “bootleg cut” of Almost Famous, (b) James Cameron‘s Aliens “special edition”, (c) Barry Levinson‘s unrated extended cut of Bugsy, and (d) Ridley Scott‘s extended Kingdom of Heaven cut.

Crowe’s bootleg is a reported 40 minutes longer than the theatrical cut. Cameron’s longer Aliens runs 17 minutes longer than the original, Levinson’s heftier cut runs 149 minutes vs. a 136-minute theatrical running time, and Scott’s longer Kingdom of Heaven runs 45 minutes beyond theatrical.

I gulped when I read about Michael Douglas’s situation. Gulped and grimmed up, I mean. Sounds like a bad break. Here’s hoping.

In all candor, in all seriousness — The Expendables is only a little bit better than this 1973 piece of shit. The announcer is required to say “Black Mama, White Mama” about eight or nine times, and it starts getting really hilarious around the fifth time. The poor guy uses every inflection trick in the book to not sound like a putz, but he can’t beat it. The seed, of course, was Stanley Kramer‘s The Defiant Ones (’58).