I was momentarily seized this morning by a desire to see The Wild One in full balls-out Technicolor. What I mean is that I decided I’d break my vow of chastity and actually watch or even buy a colorized version. If, that is, someone were to colorize it in such a way that would make it truly Technicolorish, which has never been done and is probably impossible. I’m merely saying that in a blink of an eye I fell in love with that red motorcycle. I saw it and wanted more. These things happen from time to time.

I should have already linked to this 9.17 Steven Zeitchik/Risky Business piece about Samuel Maoz‘s Lebanon, a purportedly tense account of an Israeli tank crew fighting in the Israel-Lebanon war in 1982 (and, of course, another Toronto movie I didn’t manage to see).

“It’s inevitable, given both the gritty battlefield setting and the North American festival where it made its splash, that Lebanon would be compared to The Hurt Locker,” Zeitchick observed.

“There are a couple of important differences between Kathryn Bigelow‘s hair-raising look at American bomb-defusers in Iraq, which premiered at Toronto in ’08, and Maoz’s film. There’s more context and backstory for the soldiers in Locker than there is in the neo-verite, in-the-moment Lebanon, for instance.

“But the analogy is mostly on-point. Both pics are brutally effective at conveying some pretty tricky things: the abject fear soldiers feel; the terrible things they sometimes do; the examination of war in all its horror, both the tragedies and the banalities (Lebanon is especially good at the latter, giving a strong sense of the extreme physical and psychological discomfort of life inside an armored vehicle.)

“Waltz With Bashir has also been mentioned, and it’s not a bad reference point either. Both it and Lebanon are autobiographical accounts of the same war by former Israeli soldiers, though there’s none of the abstracting effect of animation here. It’s purely visceral filmmaking.

“Nearly the entire movie is set inside the tank (we see the outside world through the same lens that the gunman does). That may prompt some viewers to cry claustrophobia, but it’s also the movie’s great asset. Most big screen battle scenes give the viewer more information than any single soldier has access to. In Lebanon, however, we know only what they know and nothing more, which puts us right there with them. When they feel fear and isolation, we feel it too.

“There’s a scene in which the young crew gets stranded in enemy territory that’s reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project — they’re young, they realize they’re in way over their heads, there’s a great danger lurking out there that they can’t see but know is coming right for them — and in many ways is a lot more chilling. (No teary flashlight scenes, though.)”

My spitball prediction for the weekend, had I given enough of a damn to make one last Wednesday or Thursday, never would have had Steven Soderbergh and Matt Damon‘s The Informant! beating Karyn Kusama, Diablo Cody and Megan Fox‘s Jennifer’s Body. And yet the former will probably come in third (right behind Tyler Perry‘s I Can Do Bad All My Myself) with something close to $10 million (okay, perhaps closer to $9 million) and Jennifer’s Body will end up with slightly less than $7 million. The latter was cheaply produced, but that doesn’t make it any less dead as we speak.

The conventional wisdom explanation for the failure of Body is that it wasn’t ferociously horrific enough to compete with previous genre standouts, and that women didn’t relate to/didn’t want to see the cruelly competitive relationship between Fox’s Jennifer and Amanda Seyfried‘s Needy, or they just don’t like Fox. (Who actually likes her? Big difference between that and being fantasized about.) In any case Cody is much lower on the totem pole this morning than she was a few days ago, Kusama is now a two-time loser in the all-female mass-market genre flick game (this and Aeon Flux) and Fox, dinged last week by an unflattering characterization on Michael Bay‘s website, has demonstrated she can’t (a) act or (b) open movies.

Credit should also go to Warner Bros. marketing for creating an inspired Informant! campaign that suggested a brisk comedic attitude and which actually bore similarities to the film itself….unusual!

I was awakened at 1:45 am by the upstairs party elephants and their usual (i.e., roughly two times per month) thundering weekend stomp-around. Walla-walla, clomping feet, throbbing Latino music, kids running around and shouting, creaking floorboards. They care about nothing but their own inalienable right to party as late and as loudly as they choose. So I did my usual-usual, which was to call the cops. Except this time I filled out a written complaint, requiring the obese pater familias upstairs to appear in court on 9.29.

It took a little more than an hour for his guests to leave — it’s now 3:15 am. But Jorge the Elephant really doesn’t like his party rights being challenged. 15 minutes ago he stood at the top of the stairs and yelled in my general direction, “Fuck you, Jack! Ya white cracker!” In other words, if I was somewhat darker I might be a little cooler about the building being nearly vibrated to death and nobody in the immediate vicinity being allowed to sleep at 1:30 am. Either way I’m the bad guy. But of course.

Listen to John Cassidy and James B. Stewart talk about President Obama‘s failure to get tough with Wall Street, and try not to succumb to depression.

In a clip from Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story, a simple statement resonates. In a reference to the ascension of Treasure Secretary Timothy Geithner, a financial expert remarks that “people in Washington who will give you the wrong answer but the answer you want are invaluable. And they often get promoted precisely because they’re willing to say and do absurd things.”

A 9.20 N.Y. Times story by Neil Lewis reports that former Senator John Edwards, facing a federal grand jury probe about possible illegal use of campaign donations funnelled to Reille Hunter in order to keep his affair with her secret, is “moving toward an abrupt reversal [by] declaring that he’s the father of Hunter’s 19-month-old daughter, something that he once flatly asserted in a television interview was not possible.”

What a detestable scumbug, at long last suffering his just desserts. Lewis’s story is highly pleasurable in its assessment of Edwards’ downfall. The best part of the story focuses on “the account of Andrew Young, once a close aide to Mr. Edwards, who had signed an affidavit asserting that he was the father of Ms. Hunter’s child.

“Mr. Young, who has since renounced that statement, has told publishers in a book proposal that Mr. Edwards knew all along that he was the child’s father. He said Mr. Edwards pleaded with him to accept responsibility falsely, saying that would reduce the story to one of a political aide’s infidelity.

“In the proposal, which The New York Times examined, Mr. Young asserts that he assisted the affair by setting up private meetings between Mr. Edwards and Ms. Hunter. He wrote that Mr. Edwards once calmed an anxious Ms. Hunter by promising her that after his wife died, he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band.

“Once the favorite son of much of North Carolina with many supporters beyond, John Edwards is now largely disdained. To many, it was not only his liaison with Ms. Hunter, but also what seemed his elaborate effort to cover up his behavior to preserve his political ambitions.

“Friends and other associates of Mr. Edwards and his wife of 32 years, Elizabeth, say she has resisted the idea of her husband’s claiming paternity. Mrs. Edwards, who is battling cancer, ‘has yet to be brought around,’ said one family friend, who like others spoke about the situation on the condition of anonymity, pointing to the complicated and delicate nature of the issue.

“The situation may become more fraught, as people who know Ms. Hunter said she was planning to move with her daughter, Frances, from New Jersey to North Carolina in coming months.

“For her grand jury appearance on 8.6, Ms. Hunter took her daughter to the federal courthouse in downtown Raleigh. As she walked in, she seemed to turn the girl’s face toward the local television cameras.

“Ms. Hunter testified to the grand jury in detail about her relationship with Mr. Edwards, lawyers involved in the case said, as well as the benefits she was provided by his supporters after she became pregnant. Michael Crichtley, her lawyer, declined to comment.”

The winner of the Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award for the most popular feature film is Lee Daniels‘ Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire. The runner-up is Bruce Beresford‘s Mao’s Last Dancer (saw some of it, found it cutesy and on-the-nose), and the third-place winner is Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s Micmacs. The documentary award went to Leanne Pooley‘s The Topp Twins, and Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story came in second. The Midnight Madness award went to Sean Byrne‘s The Loved Ones, and the runner-up prize went to Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig‘s Daybreakers.

Last night Bill Maher called the just-released health care bill from Senator Max Baucus “everything you could want in a reform bill except, you know, reform. It is a watered-down, ineffectual blow job to the health insurance industry. No public option. Could cost the middle class a lot more. Encourages employers to drop coverage. Insurance companies can charge whatever they want. [And] we waited eight months for this thing to come out of Senate finance committee.”

This morning I heard from and then spoke to restoration guru Robert Harris (The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Spartacus) about my 9.18 reaction to the forthcoming Wizard of Oz Blu-ray — i.e, “much sharper and more vivid, bursting with color, splendorific,” etc. Harris admires the disc as much as I do and probably more so. He’s fine with the grain. But he didn’t disagree with my observation about it being “somewhat grainier,” and conceded that the film now looks different than the one that 1939 audiences saw.

The new Wizard is an example of “a basic Blu-ray trade-off,” I wrote. “The grain that is in the negative is brought out in a way that catches your eye like never before. It’s not a problem, but there’s no ignoring it. I’m not putting the grainy aspect down, per se. I fully respect the decision of Warner Home Video technicians not to clean or digitally tweak or Patton-ize the original 1939 elements — but I am saying that Dorothy Gale, Auntie Em, Uncle Henry and the three farm hands are now covered in billions of micro-mosquitoes that I hadn’t been as aware of in years past.”

Harris wrote that “viewers in 1939, 1954 and beyond never saw the grain in Technicolor films because the process did not reproduce it. Between the optics of the era, the optical printing process toward the creation of printing matrices, the metal dye imbibition system, the mordant in use at the time, as well as imperfect registration, which was covered by the overall softness…Technicolor films had a wonderful, almost grain-free, velvety look, which is nothing like the new Blu-ray.

“There are many ways to skin a cat. The new Wizard of Oz Blu-ray, which faithfully reproduces the grain structure of the original negatives (with the exception of the opening reel, which is from a dupe source), is one of them.

“Leaving the original grain structure in was a technical decision. WHV technicians have delivered an excellent piece of work, but the Oz Blu-ray has a pronounced grain that wasn’t there when audiences first saw the film. The image is now very sharp, albeit with the original grain structure. But trying to eliminate the grain can lead to a very tenuous situation at best, as each shot must be worked over to make certain that problems do not arise.”

We then spoke on the phone and Harris re-explained:

“There are many ways to reduce grain,” he said. “Either you throw the film out of focus, which is what most people do, and then you sharpen it slightly and raise the contrast. Or you send it to Lowry Digital, which is the only shop in town which has the ability to reduce grain without losing resolution.

“The people who made The Wizard of Oz 70 years ago knew what would show up and what wouldn’t,” he pointed out. “The final result was a beautiful, velvety, slightly soft-focus print with good contrast to it, and it looked gorgeous on screen.

“But if you take the original negattve and then show it to the public [as WHV has with its new Blu-ray], you’re going to see the original grain structure that the original audiences never saw. But if you remove it…if you remove the grain and you hold the resolution then you’re going to see the wigs and make-up, sets, costume details all the other problems.

“The other way – the Lowry way — is to remove the grain, increase the resolution and then put back in a slight level of grain to make it look like film. But one has to acknowledge that whomever is leading the project is going to have to carefully examine every shot in the film to make very certain that they aren’t opening the proverbial Pandora’s box, and creating problems that were never there before.

“Warner Home Video did nothing wrong. They did a great job within their criteria, and I don’t have a problem with it. God knows if you lessen any grain on an older film in any primitve way, you’re really asking for trouble. Like Fox got into trouble with the overly scrubbed-down Blu-rays of Patton and The Longest Day.

“And if you take all the grain out, as the Lowry people can, it’s like you’re watching the actors through a very clean window. But with older films, like Michael Curtiz‘s Robin Hood, removing too much grain can make some of the armor looks like painted cardboard, and then you’re seeing things that were never meant to be seen.”

Harris suggested at the end of our conversation that I might want to slightly turn down the sharpness level on my 42-inch plasma. I said I might. But then I thought about this later on and reminded myself that I adore the sharpness level, and that pretty much every Blu-ray I’ve watched on it looks fantastic so why should I futz around with it just so The Wizard of Oz looks less grainy?

David Poland‘s amusing response to Tom Ford‘s A Single Man went up four days ago, but I was running around too much to settle in and counter-riff. I laughed because in an exceptionally refined and immaculate and gourmet-ish way it has been filmed, in a manner of speaking, in “Gay-O-Vision.”

Colin Firth and Julianne Moore in Tom Ford’s A Single Man.

I briefly described A Single Man during my Toronto frenzy as lulling and haunting and reminiscent of Michaelangelo Antonioni‘s Red Desert (and even L’eclisse in a certin way) and undeniably enhanced by Colin Firth‘s quietly moving lead performance. But let’s face it — it’s mainly going to be seen by the hoi polloi as a somewhat fashion-maggy, gay-friendly film, even though most fair-minded viewers, gay or straight, would say on their way out to the parking lot that it amounts to more than that.

I found myself flirting with the idea of “Gay-O-Vision” being used to cleverly promote A Single Man in the same way that “No wire hangers!” was used for Mommie Dearest. Of course, this would suggest a campy element that the film doesn’t deliver in the slightest way.

The emotional tone of this serenely beautiful film is sadly meditative and solemn, but there’s also no denying that the supporting guys — Matthew Goode and especially Nicholas Hoult — are deliciously attractive, even from a militantly straight perspective. (Not to mention whomever plays that model-pretty guy from Madrid.)

Poland disparaged this element, calling the movie “good, but self aware to the point of what will be comedy for some audiences. It’s practically made in Gay-O-Vision, with the most beautiful men on the planet, Julianne Moore as The Ultimate Fag Hag (beautiful, drunk, and desperate to sleep with our gay hero because she no longer can deal with the idiocy and ungroomed hair of straight men), and even a color scheme change to signal the audience that sexual arousal is occurring.

“I admit, if this was a straight story and the star was Harrison Ford or Kevin Coster or Richard Jenkins, it would be a different, more commercial animal. But it never would have been shot like a J Crew catalog shoot where the stylist forgot to bring the clothes.

“Thing is,” Poland concludes, “that is Ford’s accomplishment. He has made a pretty movie of a tiny, fragile story, and it works. In many ways, it is the gay Precious…a ghetto film, but [rendered as] the most beautiful ghetto ever. It will play great on wide screens in retail stores with no sound. And I would be afraid that this was an insult, except I also feel that this is exactly what the filmmaker intended on this one.”

Richard Jenkins?

I regard Harry Brown as the return of Michael Caine‘s Jack Carter, obviously older but no less expert at dispensing brute justice, rising from the grave and squaring off with a gang of young London animals. A tougher, snarlier Gran Torino? I missed it in Toronto, but that’s what Toronto’s partly about. Feeling angry over films you’ve missed, I mean. Lionsgate is opening Harry Brown in England in November.