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Last night I watched a 4K UHD version of Chinatown on Vudu. I could tell right away it’s not a fresh re-harvesting from the best celluloid elements. Jack Nicholson’s hair looks too inky at times. And the bandage on his nose looks too white, too bleachy.

But it’s quite beautiful for the most part. It certainly looks better than the most recent Chinatown Bluray. The sharpness, the textures, the stronger colors. But then I’m a plebe about this stuff.

HE to restoration guy: “I’m presuming you’re not impressed. Because it’s probably just a tweaking of the last harvest. But maybe I’m wrong. Know anything about it?” I then sent him the below attached photos for samples.

Restoration guy to HE: “This is pretty bad. It’s all about data throughout. And this doesn’t seem to have it. I watched a 4K DCP Chinatown last Tuesday. It’s gorgeous. The studio did a terrific job, especially with color, which is warm. And it looked nothing like these images.”

HE to restoration guy: “Wait…you watched a 4K Chinatown DCP? It was shown to ticket buyers? Why did they create this? They must be intending to issue a 4K Bluray in 2024, to celebrate the 50th anniversary. Just like Sony’s intention to wait until 2022 to issue a 4K Lawrence of Arabia Bluray, even though Grover Crisp’s 8K scan was harvested…what, back in ‘15 or thereabouts?”

HE to restoration guy: “I’m nonetheless telling you that as much as you may disapprove of Vudu’s 4K version of Chinatown, it really does feel like an improvement over the 1080p Bluray. It delivers a bump effect…’wow, this looks better in some respects.’ True, the images look waxy and Jack’s dark hair looks inky. It looks superficially enhanced, yes, but it’s a nice cheap high.”

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From Snap Galleries copy about Don Hunstein’s Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan photos of Dylan and (then squeeze) Suze Rotolo on West Fourth Street: “This beautiful, evocative portrait was taken on a freezing cold afternoon in February 1963. Bob and Suze curving towards each other trying to keep warm, Bob dead center, the vanishing point disappearing off into the distance behind him, with the lines of the rooftops, the cars, and the VW van pulling your eyes towards the centre and heightening the sense of perspective. Look at the buildings with their copper-blue tone and the way they blend into the sky, seemingly scorched by the sun.”

Consider something else that has bothered me for decades. The weather was “freezing cold” with the couple “curving towards each other trying to keep warm”, and yet Dylan and Rotolo seem to be in different weather realms. Rotolo is bundled in a heavy winter coat while Dylan is wearing only a blue workshirt and a slender-looking suede or deerskin jacket — an outfit more suited to a mild fall day in October.

Why has Dylan dressed with blatant disregard for the sub-arctic conditions with slushy snow everywhere? I’ll tell you why. Because he looks cooler in a casual deerskin jacket than, say, in some bulky-ass tweed overcoat or Navy pea coat.

This is who and what Dylan was back then — simultaneously the real thing as well as an actor “playing the part” of the scruffy poet, and in fact a guy who was very invested into projecting a certain commercial persona. Hustein: “Dylan was by then already quite image conscious and self-assured, and he knew how to play to the camera.”

I somehow missed the recent intel about Steven Soderbergh‘s The Laundromat being a comedy. Okay, but hold a sec. Soderbergh might have made a quietly hilarious satire in his usual underplayed or deadpan sense (I’ve been told that the “s” word definitely applies), but he doesn’t do hah-hah comedy. Or at least, not the bottom-feeder kind. He never has. This doesn’t mean his comic material or attitude isn’t funny — it’s just not aimed at your Melissa McCarthy megaplex crowd.

Example: Out of Sight was often funny as shit, but it never put on a red Clarabelle the Clown nose and squirted seltzer water. Remember when Dennis Farina chided Michael Keaton‘s Ray Nicolette for wearing an FBI T-shirt — “Hey, Ray, do you have a T-shirt that says ‘undercover‘?” I laughed at that line for days but it probably went over a lot of heads. Remember when that fat guy slipped on the stairs and accidentally shot himself in the head? A shocking moment, but kind of “funny” in a dry Soderberghian way.

Meryl Streep as Ellen Martin in Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat.

Wiki boilerplate: “Plot follows Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep), whose dream vacation takes a wrong turn and leads her down a rabbit hole of shady dealings that can all be traced to one Panama City law firm, run by seductive partners Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Antonio Banderas).

“She soon learns that her minor predicament is only a drop in the bucket, one of millions of files linking an off-shore tax scheme to the world’s richest and most powerful political leaders.”

The titular term refers to Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider. The umbrella term for the scandal was and is the Panama papers.

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Did director Martin Scorsese and longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker cut this Irishman trailer? Let’s assume they did. The rhythmic, hard-punch, slam-bam cutting is obviously expert and tense as a mofo, and I love how they withhold a good look at the de-aged Robert DeNiro (as legendary hitman Frank Sheeran) until the very end. I’m not seeing any “uncanny valley” or dead shark eyes here — I’m seeing DeNiro after a visit to the best Prague plastic surgeon who ever lived. The tone of steely menace is unmistakable. Scorsese is back in his comfort zone…goombah gangster shit. Sidenote: Hollywood Elsewhere apologizes for posting this reaction 75 minutes after the Irishman trailer surfaced at 5 am Pacific, or an hour late. No excuse.

The 57th New York Film Festival will premiere Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman at Alice Tully Hall on Friday, 9.27 — i.e., opening night. Hollywood Elsewhere will be there for the NYFF press screening, and also at the Friday night public screening if I can swing it.

The Irishman will be released in select theaters “later this year”, according to a release, followed by Netflix streaming.

It’s a $200 million, decades-spanning saga of the life and times of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a labor union leader and alleged hitman for the Bufalino crime family.

Earlier this month I read a very early draft of Steven Zaillian‘s Irishman screenplay. On 7.9 I wrote that it conveyed a tone of finality, and that it reminded me of the ending of Goodfellas as well as the last few minutes of The Godfather, Part II.

Excerpt: “It really does seem to be a melancholy summing-up of the whole Scorsese criminal culture exploration that began 46 years ago with Mean Streets. A fascinating assessment of what this kind of life amounts to, and what it costs in the end.”

Joe Pesci stars as Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino, with Al Pacino portraying Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa. The film will utilize extensive de-aging technology to tell its time-spanning story. Scorsese’s intention from the get-go, of course, was that these and other actors would de-age without the “uncanny valley” effect.

Statement from NYFF festival director Kent Jones: “The Irishman is so many things: rich, funny, troubling, entertaining and, like all great movies, absolutely singular. It’s the work of masters, made with a command of the art of cinema that I’ve seen very rarely in my lifetime, and it plays out at a level of subtlety and human intimacy that truly stunned me. All I can say is that the minute it was over my immediate reaction was that I wanted to watch it all over again.”

Two nights ago I watched the new Criterion Bluray of Alan Pakula‘s Klute (’71). For me this fascinating noir has always been a 50/50 thing — half about Jane Fonda‘s brave, naked, brilliantly anxious performance as Bree Daniels, a brittle, self-isolating call girl in a cold, predatory city save for the steady, somewhat doleful presence of Donald Sutherland‘s Pennsylvania detective, and half about Gordon Willis‘ smooth, swoony cinematography and particularly his mineshaft blacks…those inky shadows and crisp capturings just take me away, I’m telling you.

I was in hog heaven during those 114 minutes, and I could probably watch it again next weekend without the slightest hesitation. It’s so honest, believable, restrained, focused, whipsmart. And it was so hard to get right. Sculpting a good film is always an uncertain, touch-and-go process, and doubly or triply so, I imagine, when the final product is a masterpiece.

There’s a nicely written Mark Harris essay in the little booklet, “Trying To See Her,” but as far as Fonda’s journey of self-doubt and pain is concerned, I prefer this excerpt from the Klute Wikipage:

“To prepare for her role as Bree, Fonda spent a week in New York City observing high-class call girls and madams; she also accompanied them on their outings to after-hours clubs to pick up men. Fonda was disturbed that none of the men showed interest in her, which she believed was because they could see that she was really just ‘an upper-class, privileged pretender’. She had doubts about whether she could portray the role and asked Alan Pakula to release her from her contract and hire Faye Dunaway instead, but Pakula refused.

“Eventually Fonda turned to her memories of several call girls she had known while living in France, all of whom worked for the famed Madame Claude. Three had been sexually abused as children, and Fonda used this as an entry to her own character, and as a way to understand Bree’s motivations in becoming a prostitute.”

You’d think that the guy playing the titular character would be an essential part of the conversation, but Sutherland, steady and true as his performance is from start to finish, is fourth-ranked. He’s completely fine, but Klute is dominated by Fonda, Willis and Pakula, in that order.

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The terrible envelopment of intractable dark fate, that horrible sensation of sinking into mud and unable to wade or climb out of it…this is how “The Iowa Circus“, Matt Taibbi‘s 7.26 Rolling Stone article about the Democratic contenders, makes you feel. It’s so disheartening, so depressing…it’s actually fucking awful:

“Traveling hundreds of miles across Iowa, passing cornfields and covered bridges, visiting quaint small town after quaint small town, listening to the stump speeches of Democrat after would-be Donald Trump-combating Democrat, only one thought comes to mind:

“They’re gonna blow this again.

“Imagine how it looks to Republicans. If that’s too difficult or unpalatable, just look at the swarm of 24 Democratic candidates in high school terms.

“The front-runner — the front-runner! — is septuagenarian gaffe machine Joe Biden, who started running for president in the eighties and never finished higher than ‘candidacy withdrawn,’ with a career delegate total matching John Blutarsky’s grade-point average, i.e., zero point zero. The summer’s ‘momentum’ challenger is California Sen. Kamala Harris, who spent all year sinking in polls but surged when she hit Biden with ‘I don’t think you’re a racist but…” on national TV.

“A third contender is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a famed red-state punchline who already has 10,000 Pocahontas tweets aimed at her head should she make it to the general. Her ‘I have a plan for that’ argument for smarter government makes her a modern analog to Mike Dukakis — another Massachusetts charisma machine whose ill-fated presidential run earned him a portrait alongside the Hindenburg in a Naked Gun movie.

“A fourth challenger, Bernie Sanders, is a self-proclaimed socialist born before the Pearl Harbor attack who’s somehow more hated by the national media than Trump. A fifth, Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has never earned more than 8,515 votes in any election. The claim to fame of a sixth, Beto O’Rourke, is that he lost a Senate bid to the world’s most-hated Republican. It goes on.

“The top Democrats’ best arguments for office are that they are not each other. Harris is rising in part because she’s not Biden; Warren, because she isn’t Bernie. Bernie’s best argument is the disfavor of the hated Democratic establishment. The Democratic establishment chose Biden because he was the Plan B last time and the party apparently hasn’t come up with anything better since. Nothing says ‘we’re out of ideas’ quite like pulling a pushing-eighty ex-vice president off the bench to lead the most important race in the party’s history.”

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I’m presuming that The Irishman director Martin Scorsese wanted to de-age Robert De Niro and others in a way that was significantly more realistic than the Michael Douglas de-aging in Ant Man and the Wasp.

I actually had no problems with the Douglas de-aging, but then I’m not really familiar with how good or exacting de-aging technology can be these days. It’s advanced significantly, I’m guessing, over the last five years.

BTW: A major film festival announcement regarding Scorsese and The Irishman is imminent. I’m not the only one who’s been presuming all along that Scorsese’s period crime film would premiere at the New York Film Festival (9.27 to 10.3) because of his longstanding friendship and alliance with NYFF honcho Kent Jones. But who knows? Perhaps another festival or two will figure into things. Just a matter of sitting tight.

Highway tolls are collected via E-ZPass (created in ’87) or by throwing coins into a metal bin. Human toll-collectors — people dressed in some dull gray uniform whom drivers literally hand coins to — are still around, I guess, but not, I would guess, for much longer.

Back in the pre-automated ’70s manned tollbooths were fairly common. On the Connecticut turnpike a red traffic light would beam as you approached the toll station. You would come to a halt, hand over 50 or 75 cents to the guy/gal, the light would turn green and you’d gun it.

One dusky evening in ’77 I was approaching a West Haven toll station on the Connecticut turnpike. I was driving my slightly dusty 1975 LTD station wagon, which always got lousy gas mileage. I realized a mile out that I didn’t quite have the full 50 cents, and I had no cash in the wallet. I was counting the coins as I approached…a quarter, a dime, a nickel and six pennies…no, seven pennies! Three cents short. I sure as shit wasn’t going to pull over and accept some kind of traffic summons for being three cents light…c’mon. So I decided to be Steve McQueen in The Getaway.

I pulled up to the booth and handed the guy 47 cents. I started to inch forward as he was counting and saying out loud “35, 40…hold on, hold on.” I hit the gas and the guy freaked — “Hey, wait a minute, whoa!” There was no gate so the red light and the violation alarm (ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!) would have to go fuck themselves. I was Clyde Barrow after a bank robbery.

The booth guy went into fury mode…”Hey, hey…stohhhhp!…whoooaaa!” I looked in my rearview as I pulled away. The guy had stepped out of the booth and onto the road, standing in a half-crouch position…”whoooaaa!!”

I contemplated my situation as I drove away. I had just broken Connecticut state law and didn’t feel good about that. But there was something a bit wrong with that guy. I wasn’t a criminal. It wasn’t like I’d given him 12 or 13 cents or something. Who screams and shouts over a three-cent shortage? Within seconds I’d completely shorn myself of guilt over shortchanging the state, and decided that the toolbooth guy…that howling uniformed goon…was the asshole in this situation, not me.

Did the toll-booth guy get my license plate? (This was before the era of instant photographic capture.) Would he put in a call to the state police, telling them to pull over a young long-haired guy in a brown LTD wagon? I considered getting off the turnpike and driving for a few miles on local roads, just to be safe. Then I realized how loony-tunes that would be. The toll-booth guy was just an oddball freak, a lonely guy without a life or a sense of cosmic balance. I stayed on the turnpike and all was well.

But that haunted feeling of being a lawbreaker on the run is still with me.

Tatyana and I were in the second row during yesterday’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood screening. Five or six seats from the left-side aisle. Just before the lights dimmed four 20something chatty casuals — two dudes, two pretty girls — sat to our immediate left. “Troublemakers,” I muttered to myself as they were chit-chatting from the get-go. They’d stop for a while and then resume. Delightful.

About 90 minutes in the guys got up and left for a long stretch. (What kind of moron leaves a major hot-ticket film for 10 or 12 minutes?) Then the girls started talking again, and suddenly I’d had enough.

I leaned over, eyeballed the main offender and said, “Would you mind not talking, please? Thanks.” She responded with an eye-roll look that said “well, if you want to be an asshole about it, I guess we could stop talking, yeah…I mean, if you insist…God.”

Then their boyfriends came back, and maybe five minutes later the women were yapping again. I looked over at the loudest of the two and gave her a look that said “really? I asked you nicely before and you’re talking anyway?”

The guy next to me saw my expression, felt the vibe and said “calm down…calm down.” A part of me wanted to go all Don Logan on his ass, but my death-ray look had been sufficient, I felt, and I wanted to stay with the film.

Then the calm-down guy, having decided that my facial expression wasn’t chill enough, said, “Jesus, you’re gonna make a thing out of this?” He hadn’t been around for warning #1, of course. At the time he and the other guy were probably chit-chatting with each other in the men’s room.

The women were the main culprits. In my humble judgment they were (and probably still are) nothing less than Don Logans-in-training. Incapable of basic empathy, listening only to their own whims, appalled that anyone would suggest that they consider the feelings of others.

Textbook definition of ASPD, or antisocial personality disorder: “People with ASPD can’t understand others’ feelings. They’ll often break rules or make impulsive decisions without feeling guilty for the harm they cause.”

I’ve pasted a bold X next to those 2019 Toronto Film Festival films that I believe will actually matter (or aspire to matter) to persons of consequence, and will presumably stick to the ribs. Tell me what I’m missing or should pay closer attention to.

TIFF World Premieres (i.e., not going to Venice and Telluride):

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (d: Marielle Heller) X
Blackbird (d: Roger Michell) X
Dolemite Is My Name (d: Craig Brewer) X
Greed (d: Michael Winterbottom)
The Goldfinch (d: John Crowley) X
Harriet (d: Kasi Lemmons)
Hustlers (d: Lorene Scafaria)
Jojo Rabbit (d: Taika Waititi)
Just Mercy (d: Destin Daniel Cretton) X
Knives Out (d: Rian Johnson)
The Personal History of David Copperfield (d: Armando Iannucci) X
True History of the Kelly Gang (d: Justin Kurrel)
Western Stars (d: Bruce Springsteen) X
While at War (d: Alejandro Amenabar)

TIFF North American Premieres (going to Venice but not Telluride):

Ema (d: Pablo Larrain) X
Guest of Honor (d: Atom Egoyan)
Joker (d: Todd Phillips) small x
The Painted Bird (d: Václav Marhoul) X
The Laundromat (d: Steven Soderbergh) X
Weathering With You (Shinkai)
A Herdade (Guedes)
No.7 Cherry Lane (Yonfan)
Saturday Fiction (Lou Ye)

TIFF Canadian Premieres (going to Telluride):

Ford v Ferrari (d: James Mangold) X
Judy (d: Rupert Goold) X
Uncut Gems (The Safdies) X
Motherless Brooklyn (d: Edward Norton) X
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (d: Celine Sciamma) X
Pain and Glory (d: Pedro Almodovar) X

Going to Venice + Telluride + TIFF :

Marriage Story (d: Noah Baumbach) X

Not mentioned in TIFF announcement</u>:

Ad Astra (Venice rumored) X
First Cow (Venice rumored)
The Aeronauts (Venice rumored) X
Against All Enemies (Venice rumored) X
Queen and Slim (d: Melina Matsoukas) X
Little Women (d: Greta Gerwig) X
Wendy (d: Benh Zeitlin) X
A Hidden Life (d: Terrence Malick) X
Nomadland
Lucy in the Sky (d: Noah Hawley) X
Waves (d: Trey Edward Shults) X
Falling (d: Viggo Mortensen)
Ammonite (d: Francis Lee)

List categories and content courtesy of World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy.

Sometime in the late summer or early fall of ’93 I did a Movieline interview with Leonardo DiCaprio, when he was 18 or 19. He had recently done What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?m but he’d shot up since and was rail-thin and sharp as a tack in conversation. We did lunch in The Grill in Beverly Hills, a noisy place favored by agents, producers and lookie-lous. I remember sitting in that booth and listening to him free-associate while saying to myself, ‘This kid’s got it…I can feel the current.’

Now Leo is 44 and goateed and filled-out (the string-bean physique disappeared 20 years ago) and talking about how Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is a bit of a dinosaur enterprise (shot on film, intended for theatres, invested in physical sets and a certain kind of classic filmmaking), and I’m slapping my head as I realize that this guy who was the age of a high-school senior in ’93 is identifying with the old guard…he’s saying “wow, the world is changing but I hope we can keep making this kind of film for people to see in theatres,” etc.

It’s one thing to hear an older GenX or boomer-aged person lament the way things are going with streaming and whatnot, but to hear a relatively young guy like Leo say this…well, I’ve said it. Leo will be 50 in five and 1/3 years.

Interview footage provided by Variety‘s Marc Malkin.