If you’ve ever looked at slapped-together covers for bootleg DVDs, you know that the pirates who put them out sometimes create their own cover art based on generic but reality-divorced concepts of what will appeal to Average Joes. So when boots of The Tree of Life begin to show up on the streets of Tijuana and Beijing and Manila, it’s not inconceivable that the jacket art might look something like this. (Jacket design by Mark Frenden.)

Early last May I ran a complaint piece about Paramount Home Video’s failure to punch out a Shane Bluray. It’s my responsibility, I feel, to bitch about this until they finally give in and agree to fund the proper restoring and remastering of George Stevens‘ 1953 classic. An off-the-lot source says it’ll be a moderately expensive project, which is mainly why Paramount has been stalling for so long. Except Shane is one of the respected jewels in the studio crown, and what monarch would allow one of its legacy symbols to lose its shine?

Shane is one of the most beautiful color films shot during the big-studio era, but if you pop the current DVD version into a Bluray player and watch it on a 50″ plasma, it just looks okay…and it should make your eyes pop out of their sockets.

The Shane elements need to be upgraded, but Paramount doesn’t want to spring for this. The applicable term is “bad parenting.” A father doesn’t refuse to send a talented child with great potential to college because tuition is too costly, or because there’s not enough of a back-end profit motive. A person who’s doing well in life doesn’t allow a member of his/her family to live in declining circumstances if he/she is able to help. A son or daughter doesn’t keep an aging parent in a musty, second-rate assisted living facility when a first-rate one is affordable.

Other DVD/Bluray sites should make an annual rite of shaming Paramount into doing the right thing, but most of them won’t, I’m guessing, because they don’t want to risk alienating a big advertiser.

Last year’s posting: It feels mildly irksome that Paramount Home Video has never to my knowledge stated an intention to issue a Bluray of George Stevens‘ Shane. Wouldn’t this fit almost anyone’s definition of a no-brainer? It’s all but de rigueur for major studios to give their classic titles Bluray upgrades, so it seems odd that one as beautiful-looking as Shane would be sitting on the sidelines.

It’s been almost seven years since Paramount Home Video’s Shane DVD, which was fine for what it was. But it’s time to step up and do this film proud and give a nice angel erection to George Stevens, who no doubt has been wondering from whatever realm or region why Paramount hasn’t yet bit the bullet on this thing.

The Bluray format (coupled with an exacting, first-rate remastering, of course) would dramatically enhance if not do wonders for Loyal Griggs‘ legendary capturings of this iconic 1953 western. To my eyes Griggs’ richly-hued color lensings — he shot The Buccaneer, The Ten Commandments, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, White Christmas — were on the level of Jack Cardiff‘s.

This morning I asked Paramount restoration/remastering guy Ron Smith (who supervised the superb work on Paramount’s recently-released African Queen Bluray) if a Shane Bluray was at least in the planning stages. Guys like Smith are told to never say “boo” to guys like me without corporate publicity’s approval, but I wanted to at least put this on the table.

Within the next two or three days, I’ll become the very last guy in the column-writing, Bluray-reviewing realm to savor Criterion’s brand-new version of Alexander Mackendrick‘s Sweet Smell of Success (2.22). DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze says it “offers superiority” over the previous DVD “in every area…significantly smoother [with] distracting artifacts removed, scratches greatly minimized, contrast vastly improved…[and] quite a bit more information in the frame on all four edges…a magnificent transfer.”

“The wonderful commentary [from] film scholar James Naremore is typically professional, insightful and informative…one of the best I have heard in this early year…he knows his stuff.”

This is an opportunity to re-post something I ran two years ago — a portion of screenwriter Ernest Lehnan‘s recollection of working with Sweet Smell of Success producer-star Burt Lancaster and his producer-partner Harold Hecht, as recounted in a Sam Kashner piece in Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood: Rebels, Reds, and Graduates and the Wild Stories Behind the Making of 13 Iconic Films (Penguin).

As I said in early January, “Not every subway movie poster gets trashed but some do, and I’ve come to suspect that it means something when a certain poster gets the treatment. Spooky but true.” How concerned should Universal be that antisocial budding-criminal-class Manhattan teenagers have a problem with The Adjustment Bureau (3.4)? Perhaps it’s not even worth thinking about, but only certain posters seem to get defaced in the NY subway system, and there’s always a reason.

Social Network director David Fincher and star Jesse Eisenberg sat for a 30-minute q & a last night at the Leows AMC 34th Street with moderator Spike Jonze. This followed a magnificent digital 4K screening of the film. I slipped into the theatre during the last 20 or 25 minutes and it was like “whoa!”…an extra-large screen, razor-sharp focus, perfect projector lighting, magnificent sound. I’ve seen TSN five times but this was incredible.

Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg flocked by fans after last night’s q & a at the Leows AMC 34th megaplex.

Fincher and Eisenberg said a lot of same stuff I was recording last September (naturally), but I liked a comment from Eisenberg about how the lines, characters and appearances they came up with (like Fincher’s complete lack of interest in Eisenberg dying his hair red to match Mark Zuckerberg‘s follicles) is “probably what makes [the film] a more interesting true story than a story of accuracy.” [Here’s an mp3 file containing this remark.]

Exactly! Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Network script stays very close to the recorded facts behind the formation of Facebook, but the interpretive flourishes that he and Fincher and the others applied is what makes it an incredibly alive film.

I also liked this comment from Fincher: “For directors it’s very simple…the enjoyment you get out of reading a script is over the second you’ve read it, so everything from that moment becomes about getting back to that feeling of not knowing what the next page [or] scene is going to be.” [Here’s an mp3 file containing this remark.]

And this other one from Eisenberg, in which he says, in effect, that the socially alienated and/or isolated character of Mark Zuckerberg was a good fit because he himself is cut from a similar cloth: “I’ve only been in movies [in] an age in which people have written everything they think about movies on the internet….I wish I were older,” he said, sounding rather Woody Allen-esque in an analyst’s couch sense of that term.

“And I feel like…in a way that the [main Social Network] characters are isolated or they feel alienated from normal socialization. I isolate myself from any popular culture. I don’t see movies, I don’t have a TV, I don’t even have a DVD player….[and] I make an effort to isolate myself [in part] because I feel so innovative just by virtue of being in these films occasionally…it’s very strange.”

Eisenberg added, “I was on the subway and there was this guy holding an [iPhone] near my face and I knew he was taking a picture,…it was just mortifying.” [Here’s an mp3 file containing these and other remarks.]

Fincher is in the States for a holiday break from filming The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in Sweden. He told me after the session that he’s completed about 40 days of shooting with another 70 or 80 left to go. (That sounds like he won’t be done before the Oscar telecast on 2.27.)

“So everyone is going to be speaking English with Swedish accents?,” I asked. Fincher said he’s run into a lot of Swedes who speak English without any accent at all. He met a driver, he said, who’d learned his flawless English from watching South Park. He mentioned something about costar Christopher Plummer speaking English in a relatively uninflected way.

Yeah, okay, but obviously most Swedes speak in their native tongue. I just don’t get why they didn’t set the whole thing in Vancouver and blow off the crazy-descendants-of-Nazis villains and use American nutters instead.

I asked Fincher and Zuckerberg during the q & a whether they’d read the current Time magazine story about their decision to name Zuckerberg “man of the year.” Fincher corrected me: “Person.” Huh? “Person.” The significance is that the story barely mentions The Social Network, and that it only comes up around the twelfth or fifteenth graph and then they drop it and move on. Jonze repeated the question so the audience could hear it and then said to Fincher in a playfully goading tone, “What do you think of that?” Fincher’s reply: “Shameful!” [Here’s an mp3 file containing this exchange.]

What’s the meaning of the Boston Society of Film Critics giving their Best Supporting Actress trophy to Conviction‘s Juliette Lewis? Seriously — what’s this about? Lewis’s performance is quite good but surely the BSFC members understood they needed to award one of the pre-approved, award-blogger favorites — The Fighter‘s Amy Adams or Melissa Leo, Animal Kingdom‘s Jacki Weaver, Black Swan‘s Barbara Hershey, etc. Instead they went all wildcat.

Otherwise they honored David Fincher‘s The Social Network as 2010’s Best Picture. Fincher won for Best Director, TSN‘s Jesse Eisenberg for Best Actor, and TSN author Aaron Sorkin for Best Screenplay. The Beantown guys also honored TSN composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for Best Use of Music. The Fighter‘s Christian Bale won for Best Supporting Actor.

What does it mean, if anything, that King’s Speech star Colin Firth didn’t win for Best Actor?

I’ll post my review of Tron: Legacy (Disney, 12.17) in a day or two, but let’s say for now it’s somewhere between an “okay, shrug, whatever” and not very good. If you’re an easy-lay geekboy you might tell your pallies it’s a stimulating fantasy by way of above-average eye candy. The first thing I said to Jett when it ended was “it was okay…meh.” But the more we talked about it the worse it seemed. Other guys were griping about it out in the lobby and on the sidewalk.

The script by Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis (i.e., the principle bad guys) is second-tier. The dialogue is somewhere between passable and lumpy, and some plot elements don’t hold up when you give them cursory think-throughs. Garret Hedlund‘s son-of-Jeff Bridges character (i.e., Sam Flynn) lacks the necessary panache — they’ve got him saying the same blah machismo lines that Bruce Willis used to mutter 15 or 20 years ago. To me, director Joseph Kosinki looks more like the new Peter Hyams than the new Jimbo.

Here’s one specific example of how it doesn’t work. Explaining involves revealing a minor spoiler. Ready…?

I’m speaking of a bit in which Bridges’ Kevin Flynn, the video-game maestro who disappeared into his own self-created realm (i.e., the “grid”) in 1989, overpowers a droid robot who’s telling him he can’t do something. So he bashes the top of the robot’s helmet with his fist and bingo — the robot reverses and retreats. This, of course, is a mixture of two bits from the original Star Wars. One, Alec Guiness‘s Obi-Wan using the Force to hoodwink two guard-droids into allowing his group to pass (“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for”) and two, Harrison Ford‘s Han Solo slamming the wall of the Millenium Falcon in order to get it to start. Both are classics, but the Bridges helmet-bash falls flat. This is what not-very-good movies do — they imitate good stuff but they can’t quite make their own versions “work.”

I don’t mean to sound cavalier about the curious career arc of an excellent actor, and I always flinch when I read “whatever happened to…?” articles because they sound blithe and dismissive. But fuck it — whatever happened to Michael Pitt? An Esquire article about fashion styles seen in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (which premieres this Sunday) alerted me to Pitt’s steady recurring role as Jimmy Darmody, and my immediate reaction was “whoa…he fell off the radar and I hadn’t even noticed.”

Michael Pitt in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

Pitt was all the rage from ’02 to ’05 or thereabouts, starting with his breakout performances in Barbet Schroeder‘s Murder by Numbers (’02) and a year later in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s The Dreamers (probably his most emotionally accessible role). For me he peaked with his Kurt Cobain performance in Gus Van Sant‘s Last Days. My geiger counter says Pitt’s last stand-out performance was in Michael Haneke‘s English-language remake of Funny Games (’07).

Pitt has always projected a kind of studied weirdness — a slightly cold and aloof manner mixed with innocence. It’s the kind of thing that probably worked from him better when he he had that doe-faced thing going in his early 20s, but it may not travel quite as well with age. Pitt will be 30 in April 2011.

Perhaps directors (and casting directors got tired of his alien-from-another-planet schtick. I don’t know. But I do know he always felt to me like the real thing — an actor who really and truly meant it in a James Dean sort of way, right down to the core of his soul. I also know that the train he was on seemed to slow and come to a stop two or three years ago. Tell me why.

Joaquin Phoenix has not, to my knowledge, made rap-music history since retiring from acting. On top of which it’s not interesting to ponder the psychology of a meltdown. Anyone can throw his or her life away any time. All you have to do is say “screw it” and go home and flop down on the couch. So no offense but screw this movie, whatever it is.

Casey Affleck‘s I’m Still Here — a doc about Phoenix’s meltdown (or put-on meltdown) — will either open theatrically via Magnolia on 9.10.10 after debuting at the Venice Film Festival or…whatever, go straight to DVD. I’m open to either possibility.

A 5.7.10 L.A. Times story by John Horn reported that the film features “more male frontal nudity than you’d find in some gay porn films and a stomach-turning sequence in which someone feuding with Phoenix defecates on the actor while he’s asleep”. Film buyers were reportedly uncertain whether it was a serious documentary or a mockumentary.

I would much rather than see a full-on mockumentary with Phoenix portrayed by Ben Stiller, continuing in the vein of that hilarious Phoenix bit he did on the ’09 Oscar telecast.

I saw this yesterday afternoon in the meat-packing district. What sold me is that Alfred Hitchcock‘s sunglasses could almost be empty eye-socket holes. Reminding us, of course, of that slumped-over dead farmer discovered by Jessica Tandy in The Birds. What killed that Michael Bay-produced Birds remake that Naomi Watts was going to star in?

It ain’t over ’till it’s over but the downshifting has begun. One final screening — Doug Liman‘s Fair Game — followed by the press conference for same, and then a couple of hours to write a review and that’s all she wrote. Back to the pad to pack by 3 pm or so, and on the Nice Airport bus no later than 6 pm.

(l.) Carlos costar Nora von Waldstatten, (middle) star Edgar Ramirez and (right) an actress whom I can’t quite identify (but who may be costar Julia Hummer) after yesterday afternoon’s Grand Lumiere showing.

Shot of the Orange press cafe by Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, who returned to the US this morning.

Looking up at the Grand Hotel from the big green lawn — Tuesday, 5.18, 11:30 pm.