If there’s an announced release date for a domestic Bluray of the remastered version of Michael Mann‘s Heat, I can’t find it. The remastering of this 1995 classic was done sometime in early to mid ’15, and then screened that year at the Toronto Film Festival. On 9.14.15 Variety‘s Kris Tapley mentioned he’d been told that “plans are in motion for Fox Home Video to release a special DVD/Bluray next year.” That didn’t happen. So today I decided to spring for a Region 2 British Bluray version, which will street on 2.6. Update: Tapley wrote two months ago that a domestic 4K Heat Bluray will pop this year.

I posted a riff a while back about “comfort” Blurays — i.e., movie that I like to watch (okay, half-watch while Twitter surfing) at the end of the evening. Movies that settle me down, put my soul at ease. I’ve just re-arranged my top comforts in one of my bookcases [see below], and it hit me this morning that the reason I’ve chosen these 40 Blurays is because they look so good. That’s the whole ball of wax really — I’ve seen them all too many times to get anything new out of re-watching them with 100% of my brain, but they’re all enormously soothing due to their sublime visual detail and general richness of tone, be they monochrome or color.

I relate to Casey Affleck‘s zoned-out expression in this photo, which was taken during a recent recording of Kris Tapley’s Playback podcast. I wonder how many Manchester interviews Affleck has done since the campaign began at Telluride, just over four months ago? Again, the Affleck link. By the way: Tapley, who hails from Virginia and North Carolina, pronounces “because” as “beekuzz” while I, born and raised in New Jersey until my mid teens, pronounce it “beecawz.” My pronunciation is a little bit broader and more flavorful, and yet I was raised almost in the shadow of New York City while Tapley…I don’t want to say he was reared in Bumpkinville but North Carolina is generally regarded as a country-ish Southern state, where relaxed drawls used to prevail. (I haven’t been there since the ’80s.) Go figure.

I never received a screening invite for Baran bo Odar‘s Sleepless (Open Road, 1.13), a Jamie Foxx cop drama that….wait, that doesn’t have a Rotten Tomatoes score even though it opens tomorrow? Behold how the mighty have fallen.

A 1.12 Guardian story by Nick Hopkins and Luke Harding reports that the reputation of the author of the Trump dossier, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, is sterling among high-level people in the intelligence community.

“In the rush [by the Trump camp] to trample all over the dossier and its contents, one key question remained. Why had America’s intelligence agencies felt it necessary to provide a compendium of the claims to Barack Obama and Trump himself? The answer lies in the credibility of its apparent author, the quality of the sources he has, and the quality of the people who were prepared to vouch for him. In all these respects, the 53-year-old is in credit.”

The newest Japanese trailer for Kong: Skull Island (posted yesterday) is amusing for the narration, but the trailer that appeared a little more than three weeks ago (12.19.16) is far superior. The Kong one-off, directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, opens on 3.10.17. Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jing Tian, Toby Kebbell and John Ortiz.

I’m not saying this is 100% true but much of the time I allow myself to believe that award-season blogaroos are the guiding, ever-watchful shepherds (the first-responder brigade at the festivals, and then the word-of-mouth spreaders as this or that film catches on) and the guild and Academy members are the flock. Because it’s statistically undeniable that if the blogaroos — specifically the members of Gold Derby and Gurus of Gold — show respect for a film or a directing job or a performance in the early stages by ranking it among the top five, six or seven contenders, eight times out of ten (notice I didn’t say nine times out of ten) the guilds and Academy members will nominate those films for their top trophies.

The bottom line is that the blogaroos and the Oscar-season strategists (Taback, Swartz, Bush, et, al.) more or less run the prestige stakes in this town (or at least that portion of Hollywood that aspires to quality filmmaking and the winning of award-season honors) like the Earp brothers ran Tombstone.

I’m mentioning this because Hell or High Water‘s David Mackenzie wasn’t named as one of the five nominees for this year’s DGA feature film award, and yet Lion‘s Garth Davis was. I met Davis the other night at a gathering on Sunset and he’s a very nice guy, but Lion is at best 55% or 60% of a good film. 55% covers the mostly dialogue-free beginning with the little lost kid plus Dev Patel reuniting with his mom at the finale, and 45% covers the dead middle section (i.e., the Australian family stuff with Nicole Kidman and Rooney Mara).

Hell or High Water, on the other hand, is a flat-out American masterpiece — a dead-bang triumph that gets better and more searing every time you see it, and if you ask me it’s a scandal — a scandal! — that Davis was nominated instead of MacKenzie.

God save her soul but Kellyanne Conway is a pro — a pro doing her job for a kind of monster — i.e., “Il Brutto.” But she really isn’t addressing the specifics here, hence Anderson Cooper‘s quizzical expression. In a ’90s interview Jack Nicholson said something along the lines of “women don’t fight fair,” and don’t I know it. Like the headline says, I’ve been in disputes like this. With girlfriends and my ex-wife, I mean. Nine times out of ten they’ve argued the same way — partially defaulting to basic truths as acknowledged by common observation, partially referencing specifics (i.e., things said or done) but primarily and fundamentally determined to dismiss and disparage by whatever means — you bad, you hurt me, you wrong, you pay.

I suspect that in Kellyanne’s eyes, the fundamental sin that Anderson’s team (i.e., CNN) has committed is reporting a news story that includes (if you follow the links) a tangent about urine. CNN didn’t post the dossier (that was Buzzfeed) but Kellyanne, no doubt reflecting the feelings of her boss and his top goons, doesn’t want to know from specifics. All she knows (i.e., believes) is that CNN was part of the press gang that directly, indirectly or obliquely pushed the golden showers thing into the blogosphere. Deep down at the base of her lizard brain, that’s what this conversation is basically about. All CNN did was report in a prudent and reasonable fashion the facts and what was indicated by same, but Conway has bought into another narrative.

All of a sudden and out of the blue, I found myself today respecting and agreeing with Senator Marco Rubio. I can’t believe it, but there it is. He manned up, stood tall, told it straight, no quarter.

From David E. Sanger and Matt Flegenheimer‘s N.Y. Times story about Rubio’s interrogation of former Exxon CEO and would-be Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: “One especially skeptical Republican was Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, whose vote on the Foreign Relations Committee might well decide the fate of Mr. Tillerson, the former chief executive of Exxon.

“In one contentious exchange with Mr. Rubio, who ran against President-elect Donald J. Trump last year for the Republican nomination, Mr. Tillerson rebuffed an effort to get him to describe Mr. Putin as a war criminal for ordering the bombing of civilians in Chechnya. ‘I would not use that term,’ he said.

I’ve rsvped to an IMAX Playa Vista screening of La La Land tomorrow evening at 6 pm. Apparently Damien Chazelle‘s award-winning musical has been up-rezzed with a propriety IMAX technology called DMR, and not solely for this event but a forthcoming domestic release (100 IMAX bookings nationwide) plus a China release.

China Film Insider‘s Fergus Ryan reported yesterday that although a specific date has yet to be determined, the Lionsgate film “has been approved for distribution in China and will screen in the China Giant Screen format and possibly IMAX 2D.”

Tomorrow’s IMAX presentation will present the film in the same 2.55:1 aspect ratio that everyone else is seeing in regular theatres. Which means, of course, that while La La Land will look bigger it won’t really look IMAX-y in a super-tall sense, which is what the whole IMAX hoo-hah is more or less about.

The laser version is a 4K DCP and has a custom IMAX Immersive 12.0 channel mix. The theatre with our laser projector in Playa Vista (Theatre 4, David Keighley Theatre) is equipped dual 4K laser projectors, with a 60-foot screen capable of traditional IMAX 1.43:1 content and with an IMAX Immersive 12.0 speaker system.

BBC’s Paul Wood in a BBC broadcast (1.11.17): “The details of what are alleged to have taken place in a Moscow hotel room with a group of prostitutes would certainly damage even someone with Mr. Trump’s sexual history. The claims are in a report commissioned by am opposition research company funded by a Democratic Party donor, but it was actually written by a former MI6 officer. He spoke to members of the Russian security service, the FSB, and they told him there was a blackmail tape.

“Needless to say no one has seen it, but the former MI6 agent is not the only source for the claims about Russian kompromat, or compromising material, on the President elect.

“Back in August a retired spy told me he’d been informed of its existence by the head of an East European intelligence agency. Later I used an intermediary to pass some questions to active duty CIA officers dealing with the case file. They would’t speak to me directly. I got a message back that there was more than one tape, audio and video, on more than one date and [in] more than one place — in the Ritz Carlton in Moscow and also in St. Petersburg.

“The compramat claims were credible, the CIA believed. That’s why they ended up on President Obama‘s desk last week, and [were sent also to] Congressional leaders and to Mr. Trump himself.”

Woods’ report begins around the 5:00 mark.