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I didn’t stream it — I bought the 50th anniversary 4K Godfather disc late Tuesday afternoon and watched it soon after. I can’t help but approve of the novelty aspect — it may not be anyone’s idea of a classic-looking Godfather but it certainly looks spiffier — smoother, less grainy and more vivid than ever before.

Francis Coppola’s 1972 gangster classic has been tastefully de–grained (or DNR’ed), and it certainly looks wonderful during the sunny Sicily section. Love the red neon lights of the Radio City Music Hall, Jack Dempsey’s restaurant and Louis’s restaurant in the Bronx. Diane Keaton’s red overcoat and those taxicab yellows are great also, but — here’s the downside — overall flesh tones are pale and fair and even brownish at times, thus constituting a definite argument with the 2008 Robert Harris-Gordon Willis restoration, which everyone has always approved of. And closeups of the faces look a bit waxy, which is what happens with DNR-ing.

Yes, it’s an upgrade in the sense that many scenes seem sharper, crisper and more detailed than in the 2008 version, and overall this will seem quite alluring to Average Joes and even industry guys like Larry Karaszewski but it’s NOT the film that Mr. Willis, the film’s cinematographer, shot in ‘72 and approved the restoration of 14 years ago.

I didn’t care for the opening close-up and slow zoom-out of Bonasera the undertaker— his bald head seems too brightly lighted. (It looks better on the ‘08.). And yes, the bleachy, almost pinkish color scheme used for the outdoor wedding scene has been modified, which is not a change that the late Mr.Willis would have approved of.

On the other hand I was delighted with certain details and distinctions. The textures and fabrics of various suits, ties and overcoats, for example. The soothing VistaVision clarity of those 1950s marquee signs on the Las Vegas strip. But overall the ‘22 looks a little too neutralized and pale-faced. It’s fascinating in many ways, but it’s not historically authentic.

Coppola knows the truth of this situation. He knows that the newbie is an odd gleaming bird but NOT representative of the original — not really. It is, as noted, quite the dazzler and head-turner in many respects. I kept noticing little details in the 4K that I’d never noticed before. Reducing the grain really made a difference. But if I had to choose a desert-island Godfather, I’d definitely stick with the ‘08.

If GW was with us today, he’d be vagueiy amused by the determination of the Paramount video team to create fresh Godfather revenues, but he’d also say “they can do whatever the fuck they want but this is not my Godfather…it’s a DNR’ed version that’s been slightly desaturated in some ways but made to look a lot bolder in other ways, certainly in terms of neon reds. And the faces are waxy looking. Don’t get me started. It’s a version that will delight a lot of people who don’t know any better, but it’s not the real thing…sorry.”

Last night I posted a version of this review on Facebook, and in so doing provoked the afore-mentioned Mr. Karaszewski, who called me (or more precisely my views) “insufferable”.

HE reply: Gordon Willis was a tough nut & didn’t suffer fools. Did you ever chat with him? Do you know people who knew him? I spoke with him once for a thing I was writing about an All The President’s Men Bluray. Any way you slice it the man was an ARTIST, and he gave his stamp of approval to the 2008 restoration. And the newbie, while fascinating and upgraded in certain ways, is definitely a different bird. I guess you’d better call Willis “insufferable” while you’re at it.

It’s just been announced that the “next wave” of presenters at the 94th Oscars will include actress Stephanie Beatriz (who?), DJ & record executive DJ Khaled, singer-songwriter H.E.R., skateboarder Tony Hawk and Olympic gold-medal snowboarder Shaun White.

Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: “Who are those guys?”

HE to Oscar producers Will Packer and Shayla Cowan: “Whadjoo guys do, invite some of your friends? I’m sorry but people who present Oscars have always been famous or at least accomplished within the motion picture industry. Is this is a mistake, these names? Is it a put-on?”

It’s been six months since the almost comically myopic Academy Museum (i.e., “Woke House“) opened. We all remember that the main priority of the curators out of the gate was to apologize for the industry’s many decades of pernicious racism and to celebrate women and POCs as well as current efforts in the service of equity and inclusion.

But it wasn’t long before people started saying “yes, yes…we all acknowledge that Hollywood has always been an evil racist cauldron that needs to be corrected and cleansed by visionary wokesters, and that the worst perpetrators of this fundamental evil (not to mention innumerable forms of sexism) were the white men who founded and built the film industry back in the early to mid 20th Century. But what about the fact that these guys — all of the big-studio owners were Jews — actually created this industry? Shouldn’t the fact that they built this industry from the ground up…shouldn’t that warrant some acknowledgement?”

As far as I could discern the response from Woke House curators was something along the lines of “yes, of course…the men who created this business deserve some credit and I’m sure we’ll get around to paying tribute to their pioneering spirit and industriousness, but the main thing to keep in mind is that they perpetrated a system of fiendish exploitation, making life miserable for people of color and God knows how many struggling actresses and would-be female filmmakers, and that generations of successive white men came along and strengthened this evil system, and it’s now up to us and other forward-thinking progressives to finally put a stop to this and lead the industry out of the darkness.”

This morning Woke House finally relented and announced that a year from now they’ll be debuting a section of the the Museum that pays tribute to the founding Jews. It’ll be called HOLLYWOODLAND. Here’s the official announcement:

“Opening in late Spring 2023, HOLLYWOODLAND will trace the history of filmmaking in Los Angeles back to its roots at the beginning of the 20th century, illustrating how and why the city became the world capital of cinema that it still is today. This immersive gallery will convey the evolving topography of Los Angeles along the timeline of the developing movie industry, allowing visitors to feel a tangible proximity to this rich history and encouraging further exploration of the city’s landmarks upon departing the Academy Museum.

“The exhibition will focus on the predominantly Jewish founders of the early Hollywood studio system, delving into how their personal narratives shaped the distinct characteristics of the movies their respective studios produced. It will foreground the ways in which the birth of the American film industry — and therefore the projected depiction of the American Dream — is truly an immigrant story.

“The exhibition is organized by Associate Curator Dara Jaffe in collaboration with Associate Curator of Digital Presentations Gary Dauphin.”

After living in this town since ’83, I decided yesterday that I would finally visit Julie Christie‘s Shampoo bungalow — the one owned or rented by Jack Warden‘s “Lester” for his mistress “Jackie” (Christie) to live in. I don’t need to familiarize anyone with the Act II scene that happens indoors (more specifically in the bathroom) or how the film ends on a since-built-upon plateau above it. The home is located at 2700 Bowmont Drive — up Coldwater, take a right on Cherokee. Shampoo was shot 47 years ago but the place looks more or less the same. Well, pretty much.

I can smell it, sense it. And I will therefore wait for streaming. I don’t care how well made X is — my inclination is to steer clear for the time being, even though it’s probably a much better film than The Lost City.

Click here to jump past HE Sink-In

If you wanted to keep it simple, you would call King Richard a first-rate sports drama. Which it is.

If you wanted to be a little more specific, you could call it a disciplined, highly motivated sports drama by way of a family relationship film. Which it is.

And if you wanted to really get down in the weeds, you could call it an inspirational, true-life portrait of a willful, obstinate, never-say-die sports dad (Williams) who insisted that his daughters work their asses off it order to become world-class tennis superstars. Which they did.

What emerges are three films in one. A tennis-boot-camp-run-by-a-tough-dad family film. A strong-mom family film, due to the knockout performance by Aunjanue Ellis. And among the most realistic, down-in-the-trenches competitive tennis films ever made.

King Richard is not a story of good fortune changing the lives of the main protagonist(s) by way of luck or God’s grace. It’s about work and focus and devotion and absolutely no relaxing or kicking back. It’s about “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” It’s about “only the strong and gifted who get up early and go to bed at a reasonable hour succeed.”

King Richard is arguably the most spiritually thrilling family film of the 21st Century. Partly because it avoids the usual usual — not so much emotions and endearing interludes and God’s good fortune, but family teamwork and discipline. It’s an adult family film without (or certainly not limited to) the usual family film bromides.

Will Smith’s performance has reminded a friend of Paul Newman’s character in The Verdict — “the same kind of slow burn in which someone whom everyone overlooks or under-values is redeemed at last. This is the best way I can see him. Characters who aren’t listened to and then finally are vindicated. That’s what makes his character compelling. Underneath it all he’s fighting the good fight.”

The single-minded Richard is partly an inspirational Malcolm X figure, partly F. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, partly an SOB with a heart of gold.

And yet much of King Richard is about other tennis coaches, managers and marketers (Tony Goldwyn‘s Paul Cohen, Jon Bernthal‘s Rick Macci, Kevin Dunn‘s Vic Braden, Dylan McDermott‘s Will Hodges) expressing annoyance with Richard’s egoism and stubbornness and general refusal to accomodate other viewpoints.

Richard may be irascible, but he’s fighting for his daughters — fighting to build their skill, fighting for their success, and also for their integrity and their roundedness as human beings. And through it all, he’s fighting to remake what is basically a racist American system of sports image-making.

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Some kind of raspberry-covered compressed pound cake with powdered sugar and tasty syrups…made my day. Here’s the general menu.

Early this afternoon I was in Le Petit Four, the longstanding Sunset Strip eatery. I was meeting with a couple of guys about a restoration of a classic ’50s film (can’t divulge specifics until next month), and about halfway through our chat Bill Maher, accompanied by a youngish Snow White-resembling brunette, walked in from the rear entrance. I caught his eye or he caught mine, and we exchanged a hint of alpha. He and Snow White sat in the inside rear area, maybe 15 or 20 feet from our table.

I’m not the hyperventilating sort who reflexively greets a celebrity if we happen to find ourselves in the same space. But I am quite the fan of Real Time with Bill Maher and yesterday I had seriously enjoyed listening to Maher’s “Sunday special” chat with The Wire‘s Ben Shapiro, and we did have a semblance of an email relationship about 20 years ago (just after Politically Incorrect was yanked over Bill’s “9/11 wackos were not cowards” line), and I was invited to fly to Las Vegas around the same time to catch his show, etc. And we did chat at a private party or two around that time.

So I felt there was an ever-so-slight basis to maybe walk over and offer a quick “yo” and duck out.

But as I was mulling this over, I was contemplating Bill’s “normcore” outfit — dark green-plaid shirt, black baseball cap, dark jeans, black athletic shoes. And I have to say that as one New Jersey guy contemplating another (Bill grew up in River Vale, and I was mostly raised in Westfield), I was vaguely….uhm, taken aback?

Anyone can wear anything they damn well please on a Sunday afternoon, of course, and it’s none of my damn business to criticize someone who happens to be in a normcore mood…please. The polite thing to do right now, I realize, is to sidestep the issue and move the fuck on. I was just a wee bit surprised, is all. I’ve always thought of Maher as an East Coast uptown guy with sartorial inclinations not that different than my own.

Anyway I decided to throw caution to the wind and walk over for a quick hello. Right away I sensed this was a bad idea. I mentioned that I’d listened to the Shapiro chat while driving home from Santa Barbara yesterday, but for some reason I couldn’t remember Shapiro’s name (weird). I was nervous and choking. I knew right away that I had erred because Bill didn’t say a word — he just gazed at me like I was a tree or a gas pump. I thought for a split second that he might be ripped or even tripping on something — his facial expression reminded me of that red-haired kid (Aaron Wolf) who was stoned during his Bar Mitzvah in Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man. The same message was flashing over and over…”get outta there, get outta there, get outta there.”

This is why it’s better to just stay in your own corner. I guess this is a kind of follow-up to the “not talking with David O. Russell in Santa Barbara” story from a couple of nights ago.

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…if you happen to be on domestic terms with an admirer of Vladimir Putin as well as one who repeats his bullshit about the Ukrainian government being run by Nazis and whatnot…well, that’s kinda like living with Madison Cawthorn.

Directed and co-written by Domee Shi, Turning Red (Pixar, 2.11) is a big deal in Asian-American circles as it focuses on on Meilin “Mei” Lee, a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian student who lives in Toronto. The basic hook is that Mei “is horrified to discover that whenever she gets too excited or stressed, she turns into a giant red panda.” But the importance of Turning Red is that it’s only the second animated film to feature an Asian lead character, the first being 2009’s Up.

In a recent Cinemablend review, Sean O’Connell wrote that Turning Red seems to have been inspired by Michael J. Fox‘s Teen Wolf (’85). He also said that Turning Red wasn’t his cup of tea. For the crime of saying this, O’Connell was villified yesterday. Asian-American Film Twitter wanted his throat cut.

Angrily disagreeing with a review is par for the course, but calling for a critic to be drawn and quartered is what Stalinist wokesterism is all about.

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Last night Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, costars of Being The Ricardos. were given the Maltin Modern Master award by the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival. Inside the Arlington Theatre, I mean. Kidman appeared remotely due to a hamstring injury. The legendary Leonard Maltin himself handled the interviewing honors. It was a generally pleasant evening.

Neither Javier nor Nicole will win in their respective categories — Will Smith will take the Best Actor trophy, and the Best Actress Oscar will be won by either Jessica Chastain or (my fondest wish) Penelope Cruz, aka Mrs. Javier.

But I’d like to nominate or even hand an award to Javier for being the best person nominated in a major category — the kindest and warmest and most accessible fellow in the 2022 Oscar constellation.

Why? It’s all subjective but it comes down to something that happened 15 years ago in Cannes. That would be 2007 — the No Country for Old Men year. Javier and I were sitting on the the Cote d’Azur beach in the evening, and I bummed a Marlboro light from the guy, and as we parted company a few minutes later he gave me another — one to grow on, so to speak. I’ve never forgotten that moment, and that’s why I like him so much.

Update: I’m now thinking I might’ve gotten that wrong. The extra Marlboro Light episode might have happened at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, either in ’07 or ’08. But what’s the difference?