Criterion publicist to Scott Mantz: “Before we set up your Zoom interview with Eyes Wide Shut dp Larry Smith, we need you to give us your solemn oath…”

Mantz to Criterion: “Sure, whadaya need?”

Criterion to Mantz: “We want your promise that you’ll never mention the word ‘teal’ during your chat.”

Mantz to Criterion: “Teal? Me?”

Criterion to Mantz: “We’re serious, Scott.”

Mantz to Criterion: “Worry not! I’m your boy. I don’t think I even know what teal means.”

Remember that scene in Broadcast News when Albert Brooks‘ Aaron explains that William Hurt‘s Tom, while being “a very nice guy”, is the devil? We have a similar situation here. Mantz obviously doesn’t have hooves and horns and a long spiky tail, but…

——————————–

HE to Mantz on Wednesday afternoon, 11.19: “I’m watching your 30-minute chat with Larry Smith, and you don’t even mention the obvious teal-tinting on Criterion’s EWS 4K Bluray. Unless I wasn’t paying attention, you don’t even MENTION it!!  Nobody has ever had any problems with the brightness levels, as Larry mentions. It’s the fucking TEAL poisoning!”

[Note: Yesterday I shared my negative reactions with Mantz and, just to be sure, asked if he mentioned the word teal and/or asked Larry to comment about teal-ing. Scott ghosted me, of course. HE to Mantz: “I’m going to reasonably interpret your silence as confirmation that you never uttered the word.”]

“Larry says ‘the theatrical blues were the theatrical blues…we didn’t mess around with any of the main [color] structure’….bunk! That’s precisely what Larry and his ignoble Criterion cohorts have done. The vivid blue iron gates in that envelope-handover scene have been changed to somber subdued teal.

Robert Harris’s HTF review: “Are the blues deep rich blues? No. They do lean toward a teal.”

“Early on Larry says the film wasn’t color-timed or fine-tuned before it was released because of Kubrick’s untimely passing. Oh, yeah?  I spoke to EWS producer Jan Harlan a few months (or was it weeks?) after EWS was released, and he was very deeply involved. He really cared.

“But Larry is telling us…what, that Harlan didn’t try to finesse the color as best he could before the film was released in ‘99??  Nobody stepped into the color-correcting breach after Kubrick passed on March 7, 1999?  (EWS was released four months later — 7.13.99.) I don’t buy that. Nobody does.”

Larry also says that EWS “was too grainy,” a condition that he presumably remedied. And yet in his Home Theatre Forum review of the 4K Criterion disc, Harris writes “grain haters need not reply.”

Since when is Ryan Coogler’s Sinners a movie for old-timers, much less a highly recommended one?

It’s a drawling, drooling, blues-savoring, bloody-faced cunnilingus vampire exploitation film aimed at POCs and under-40 wokesters with TikTok accounts.

Are AARP execs aware that old farts of both sexes aren’t exactly into ravenous oral sex, and that the mere mention of this arcane sexual practice makes them uncomfortable?

And why haven’t you recommended Sentimental Value? Have you even seen it?

What else are you recommending to the walker-and-wheelchair set? Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom?

Read more

Everybody messes up from time to time, myself included, but you can’t misreport when two 1974 classics were released, and in the lede paragraph yet!

You can only harvest what was captured by 75- or 80-year-old cameras back in the day…35mm film was what it was…there can be no glorious visual revelation from a 79-year-old Oscar winner…you just have to say “okay, good enhancement but mid ‘40s film technology was obviously of its time, and that’s as far as it went.”

HE to “riboleh”: That’s a nicely written report — hats off. But let’s get real. I presume you own the 2013 Best Years Of Our Lives Bluray, which looks truly great for a 35mm monochrome film shot in 1945 or thereabouts. (35mm is 35mm — Wyler’s film wasn’t shot in large-format VistaVision.)

Are you saying that the 4K enhancement you saw at the Academy museum represents a significant bump over the Bluray? If that’s what you’re saying, I don’t believe you. Due respect but it can’t be “whoa, baby!” better than the Bluray. A Greg Toland masterwork, yes, but it was just 35mm and you can’t transform this film into an ice cream sundae with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

I really and truly respect one actor in this photo….Lakeith Stanfield, whom I really liked in Roofman and Die My Love.

Who’s the tall, dorky-looking guy with the jug ears? Callum Turner?

Where are Jacob Elordi and Timothee Chalamet?

Director Sidney Lumet and dp Owen Roizman, both wearing feathered wings and playing harps in heaven, have just heard about Criterion’s forthcoming 4K Network Bluray (due 2.24.26), and are almost certainly feeling very concerned about their classic 1976 satire being teal-colored.

Remember how Roizman freaked and pretty much hit the ceiling when William Friedkin played around with the color scheme in that bizarre 16-year-old French Connection Bluray? Roizman didn’t tippy-toe around the obvious, which was that the ’09 Bluray’s bizarre color scheme (bleachy, desaturated, high contrasty) was an outright desecration. Three years later a properly remastered, Roizman-approved version was issued on a subsequent Bluray, and thank God for gloriously happy endings.

If and when Criterion saturates Network with sickly teal tones, Roizman will go to management and demand that the clouds above Criterion’s NYC headquarters darken and rumble and secrete bolts of lightning.

Jamal Ahmad Hamza Khashoggi was murdered on 10.2.18 by agents of the Saudi government at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman..fact, period, end of story.

Imagine you’re one of the 13 Gatecrashers, trying to decide which Best Picture contenders deserve this or that proper ranking.

You understand that despite an entrenched argument against Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value being favored because only one foreign-language feature (i.e., Parasite) can be a hot Oscar ticket in our current decade, you understand deep down that there’s a right thing to do.

Imagine in the same way that the late John Lennon imagined a brotherhood of man over a half-century ago…

Imagine calculating that the Samuel Z. Arkoff-level Sinners and the agreeable but low-Metacritic–rated and nothing-to-really-write-home-about Wicked: For Good are more likely to win the Best Picture trophy than Trier’s obviously superior and sublimely performed family drama…

Imagine the deep-down contempt and loathing you need to feel for Academy members to honestly suspect that they’ll be sufficiently coarse and primitive-minded to place Ryan Coogler’s drooling, racially-stamped musical vampire film and Jon M. Chu’s eye-filling musical finale to 2024’s Wicked higher in your Gatecrasher ballot…

Imagine this kind of Jean-Luc Godard-level contempt surging through your veins.

Yesterday Variety’s Zack Sharf, an adamant Stalinist wokester, once again showed his colors by placing scare quotes around a four-letter word that (a) begins with “w” and (b) alludes to a kind of hyper-judgmental progressive leftism that is closely associated with cancel culture.

Sharf:

HE-posted in 2021:

Variety’s Peter Debruge rarely lays it in the line —his deft phrasings often seem to skirt or hint at his actual, true-blue reactions —.but his real feelings about Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: For Good are evident in the first paragraph of his 11.18 review, as well as in the final one.

It’s not exactly a rave when you say that a film prompts you to think “whew, he didn’t blow it!”

At the very end Debruge says that most of the film is generated by and represented by Hollywood’s “apex of artificiality…for better or worse.” Isn’t that a bit like a dude telling his girlfriend that while she’s nominally pretty, much of her attractiveness is due to expensive, artfully applied make-up…”for better or worse”?

This is not an expression of wondrous rapturous delight!

It’s generally accepted that Pope Leo is a savvy, intelligent, well-educated fellow who’s not only been around but knows the spiritual ins and outs of transcendent cinema. This is partially indicated by Leo calling Ordinary People one of his four all-time faves. But including The Sound of Music and Life Is Beautiful in this quartet…uhm, sorry but nope.

HAL 9000 response: “Stop, Leo. Will you stop, Leo? Stop, will you?”

But at least Leo understands and embraces the idea of movie plexes existing, after a fashion, as debauched churches…once-holy places of occasional spiritual contemplation .

Sexy, stand-alone movie theaters are, of course, nonexistent these days…existing only in boomer and GenX memory banks…once regarded in some quarters as lights-out havens for spiritual contemplation, but now mostly degraded into gladiator arenas. People used to sit in single-screen movie theatres for 95, 105 or 115 minutes or longer and actually pay attention for the most part!

Now the only way to savor really good films in a theatrical environment with Pope Leo types…people who ‘get’ it and love the worshipful aspect, that is…the only way to sample this kind of secular high is to (a) attend an upscale film festival (Venice, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, Berlin, New York, AFI Fest in Los Angeles, Sundance, Savannah) or (b) catch films at smarthouse cinemas in big cities.

The church thing was killed by (a) coarse, ball-scratching, brain-fart audiences, (b) elite Hollywood wokethink propaganda movies (2017 to 2024) that all but smothered the art of cinema itself, (c) Millennial and Zoomer couch potatoes submitting to streaming feeds, (d) AMC theatres showing 20 to 25 minutes of trailers before each and every feature, and (e) old-fart GenXers and geriatric boomers who submitted to understandable pandemic terror five and two-thirds years ago, but who will never, ever return en masse due to (a), (b), (c) and (d) plus lingering squeamishness.

That older married woman I spoke to a few weeks ago who’d never even heard of Anora…good God.

Leo again…

Repeating: The art of cinema and the faith of cinematic churches is alive and well if (a) you can attend the above-named major film festivals or (b) if you restrict yourself to connoisseur movie houses (Film Forum, New Beverly, Vista, etc.) and upscale, movie-friendly museum forums like MOMA, LAFCA, London’s Princess Anne, etc.

In a 11.15 N.Y. Times discussion between Tina Brown and interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro, the latter mentions an old Julie Brown Miami Herald piece about Jeffrey Epstein. Garcia-Navarro says that “one of the stories in that series was headlined ‘Epstein’s Society Friends Close Ranks’, and someone in the piece said that “a jail sentence doesn’t matter any more,” adding that “the only thing that gets you shunned in New York society is poverty.”