You can’t even order Twilight Time’s Stardust Memories Bluray yet, but a limited run of 3000 copies will street on 12.13. I was right there with Woody on the gloom train when I first saw it. I was insecure, right on the edge of poverty, behind in my rent, certain of nothing, my head barely above water. Now I’m more or less on the champagne train with Sharon Stone. Well, kinda. (I said hi to Stone a few weeks ago at a screening of that Frank Zappa doc.) I can say with absolute confidence that I’ll never be back on the gloom train again. Or at least not the kind I was on in 1980.

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I was surprised to see Martin Scorsese‘s Silence ranked among Kris Tapley‘s top Best Picture spitballs. (Along with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Fences, Florence Foster Jenkins, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Lion, Live By Night, Manchester by the Sea and Moonlight.) Last August I speculated that Silence (which story-wise is no stroll in the park) might get a year-end platform release at best. Yeah, I know — Marty is still cutting it and until he finishes it won’t be dated. This is Scorsese’s pattern. The fate of The Wolf of Wall Street was up in the air until it screened on 11.29 — that’s when it was ready and that’s when it screened.

The Tracking Board has reported that Relativity’s Dana Brunetti intends to remake Fred Zinneman‘s High Noon, and that he’ll be using a contemporary plot with drug cartel goons (i.e., the new Frank Miller gang) coming for a Will Kane-like figure who’s scared but won’t back down. Brunetti is proceeding properly by having purchased the rights from Karen Kramer, widow of original High Noon producer Stanley Kramer.

But wait a minute, man. Three months ago I reviewed Ari Issler and Ben Snyder‘s 11:55, which played at the L.A, Film Festival, and I’m telling you it’s a straight-up High Noon remake and a fairly decent one at that. And it involves drug dealers.

11:55 was actually the third High Noon remake. Howard Hawks‘ Rio Bravo (’59) was the first. (Hawks made it clear time and again that he set out to make his own version of High Noon.) Then came Peter Hyams‘ Outland (’81), which was set aboard a space-station cargo vessel of some kind with Sean Connery as Gary Cooper. So Brunetti’s version, if and when it happens, will be the fourth remake.

It’s common knowledge that William Wyler‘s Ben-Hur (’59) was shot in Camera 65, which when correctly projected (as well as scanned for DVD and Bluray) delivered an aspect ratio of 2.76:1. (Same a.r. with Ultra Panavision 70, which The Hateful Eight was shot and projected at.) All my adult life I’ve been looking to see the full-whack, 2.76:1 Ben-Hur in a first-rate theatrical venue.

My hopes were up when I attended last night’s 7:30 pm screening of Ben-Hur at the American Cinematheque Egyptian. I was encouraged by the fact that the AC was showing a DCP, or the same digitally remastered version that constitutes the current Bluray, which delivers the full 2.76:1. But they blew it all the same. The AC aspect ratio was, at most, 2.55:1, and it was probably closer to 2.4:1. And therefore each shot felt slightly cramped and wrong.

Robert Surtees‘ 2.76:1 images on the Ben-Hur Bluray are immaculate — the framings in each and every scene are exquisitely balanced. But whack those images down to 2.4:1 and everything looks fucked. If Surtees had been with me he would have been hooting and throwing soft-drink containers at the screen.

The same aspect ratio problems manifested when I caught Ben-Hur at the New York Film Festival in 2011, to wit:

Excerpt: “The fabled 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio was not delivered. It looked to me like we were seeing roughly a 2.55 to 1 image, at best. There’s a shot with Hugh Griffith and the four white horses when Heston enters from the left and says ‘What magnificent animals’ or words to that effect. I knew right away what I saw wasn’t right because Heston was slightly cropped off as he said this line — he didn’t have any breathing room — and you NEVER crop a star.”

In the wake of any domestic terror incident (shooting, bombing) you’re not allowed to say what you think, which is that the perpetrator was probably of Swedish, Danish or Norweigan descent. 24 to 48 hours pass and lo and behold, the perp is identified as a guy of Middle-Eastern (in this instance Afghanistan) descent. There goes my theory about the Swedes, the Danes or the Norweigans! Authorities are seeking 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami in connection with not just the Chelsea bombing (will the motive turn out to be similar to that of the Orlando shooter?) but also one in Seaside Park, N.J. Incidentally: The leader of the Ecumenical Liberation Army in Paddy Chayefsky‘s Network was “the Great Ahmet Khan.” Close but no cigar.

I filed my quickie review of Derek Cianfrance‘s The Light Between Oceans on the evening of 8.31, and then forgot about it, consumed as I was by the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals over the next 17 days. The 1920s-era soap opera opened on 9.2.   The reviews weren’t great, and after 16 days it’s made a lousy $11,169,776. Did anyone see it? It seems as if no one cared very much but maybe I’m wrong. Anyone?

“An impressive first hour or so,” I wrote. “A bit morose but well-rendered. And then the film goes full-hurt crazy, the wrong move, tears streaming or held back, stunned, swallowed up, ‘oh what to do’? A guilt-and-suffer opera.

“Michael Fassbender is fine (grim, fully committed, extra-solemn) but he’s still Fassbender. A heaving, pull-out-the-stops performance by Alicia Vikander that makes you want to cower at times. Rachel Weitz‘s performance is all-in but measured. She never turns the spigot on full blast.

“The mesmerizing cinematography by Adam Arkapaw and the fleet editing by Jim Helton and Ron Patane are the two finest elements. You could just watch this thing without listening to it, and you wouldn’t have the slightest trouble following the story. That’s a sign of strong cinema, no?

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In what ways am I wrong? What am I missing? I want to be strong and clear in my choices, which is to say choices based on my own gut instincts and judgments. It pains me to go along with groupthink.

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Of course I’m going to buy Criterion’s Bluray of John Huston‘s The Asphalt Jungle (12.13.). Of course I’m looking forward to a “new 2K digital restoration with uncompressed monaural soundtrack.” But I want a significant “bump” from this. I want that feeling, that special feeling you get when you’re watching a film you’ve seen 18 or 19 times and yet the image quality just blows you away. I had that experience when I saw Criterion’s In A Lonely Place Bluray, but not with Warner Home Video’s The Big Sleep Bluray. Just saying…

La La Land, Arrival, Jackie, Moonlight, Nocturnal Animals, Barry, Free Fire, Toni Erdmann, Neruda, Paterson, Amanda Knox, Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, Snowden, Lady Macbeth, The Salesman — these, according to most media hotshots, were the absolute cream of the 2016 Toronto Film Festival.

I asked a lot of people during the festival and everyone mentioned these films. Sum-up articles by Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg and Stephen Galloway and Rolling Stone‘s Charles Bramesco and David Fear include the above titles. Feinberg’s list included Lion, which wasn’t acclaimed by anyone I spoke to.

Many of these films had previously played Cannes (Salesman, Toni Erdmann, Paterson, Neruda), Venice (La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival, Nocturnal Animals) and Telluride, but the hotshots nonetheless categorized them as Toronto films.

There’s just one little thing that bothers me. The absolute best film of the year thus far, a little masterpiece called Manchester By The Sea, also played in Toronto. Several times in fact, and it floored many critics and Average Joes. (I took a Toronto friend to see it at a public screening and I felt the room, trust me.) But many if not most of the hotshots have totally ignored Kenneth Lonergan‘s film in their Toronto summaries.

By their own standards the fact that Manchester played a couple of weeks ago in Telluride couldn’t have been a disqualifier. So what did seem to disqualify it? My best guess is that the hotshots ignored Manchester because it had its world premiere at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.

I’m telling you that it blows away nearly every other 2016 Best Picture contender in terms of emotional impact, knockout performances and drillbit dramaturgy. The only film that delivers on a similar level of feeling and expertise is La La land, which has won, by the way, the top TIFF audience prize, which makes it, to go by precedent, the leading Big Cowabunga Kahuna in the Best Picture race.

There’s no question about Manchester‘s powerhouse chops, but in the minds of Gleiberman, Debruge, Feinberg, Galloway, Bramesco and Fear, this Amazon/Roadside release is an “oh, yeah, we forgot to mention it” flick.

Sorry to point this out, guys, but your collective decision to treat Manchester as an invisible Toronto film is derelict.

Note: Feinberg has pointed out that THR‘s Toronto sum-up article excludes films seen at Telluride, and yet it doesn’t exclude films shown in Cannes like Toni Erdmann and Ken Loach‘s I, Daniel Blake, both of which are praised in the body of the THR piece. Again, Manchester by the Sea was a major, major presence in Toronto, and yet it isn’t even mentioned in Feinberg and Galloway’s article.

Jimmy Fallon‘s talk-show brand is, to him, naturally, a prime consideration. That cheerful, easy, let’s-have-fun vibe. Play games, sing songs, fool around. Fallon will never challenge a guest with even a whiff of contentious political chatter. So when Orange Hitler came on, he had to keep that thing going. He presumably despises Orange Hitler, but he had to maintain that Jimmy Fallon vibe. He had to lighten the mood and massage this orangutan’s head and make Trump seem to God knows how many millions like a somewhat more palatable guy than what the news media has been reporting and portraying.

I’m back in Los Angeles now, and I’ve just watched the clip (the Toronto Film Festival pushed a lot of stuff aside) and it’s quite obvious that under the right circumstances and with the right guest, Jimmy Fallon is ready and willing to give evil a friendly back-pat. Jimmy has a popular show and a beaming alpha attitude, but…I don’t want to sound too rash here. I’m not saying he’s Joseph Goebbels or anyone in that realm, but…well, maybe I am. Because in his own way he’s not averse to boosting an agent of a potential apocalypse in terms of climate change, Supreme Court appointments, rank ignorance, 1%-favoring taxes, a shoot-from-the-hip foreign policy, etc. Which is a way of saying that in a roundabout, nice-guy way, there’s an aspect of Jimmy Fallon that reflects or…you know, summons associations with THE DEVIL.

Originally posted on 3.21.11, but now updated: One of the healthiest things you can say about anything that’s over and done with is “okay, that happened.” Unless, of course, you’re talking about a stretch in a World War II concentration camp or something equally ghastly. Otherwise you have to be accepting, past it. Especially when it comes to ex-girlfriends. We went there, it happened, nobody was right or wrong, that was then and we’re here now…let’s get a coffee and catch up.

All my life I’ve been friends with exes, or have at least been open to same. And they’ve been open to ease and friendship with me. Except one. 

She was (and most likely still is) a whipsmart blonde with a great ass, a toothy smile and a kind of young Katharine Hepburn vibe. She’d been raised in Brooklyn but always reminded me of a Fairfield County gal. She’s married now and living in Pasadena; her husband — a slightly stocky, gray-haired guy of some means — doesn’t resemble me or her first husband (a doobie-toking small-business owner who owned a Harley) at all. Whatever attributes or nice qualities he’s brought to the table, he’s clearly a swing away from the past.

I gave up trying to be in touch with her three or four years ago. She really wants to erase that part of her life — the first marriage (which began in the summer of ’96) and the affair with me that began in early ’98 and lasted two and two-thirds years. We last spoke in ’11 or ’12. The most significant thing that happened before that was her friending me on Facebook.

Our thing began at the ’98 Sundance Film Festival and finally ran out of gas in late ’00 when her husband found out. I took the hurt and the lumps. I was dropped six or seven times. It was easily the most painful and frustrating relationship of my life. Whether things were good or bad between us was entirely about her shifting moods. Her father had been a philanderer when she was fairly young and this had caused a lot of family pain, so she felt badly about following in his footsteps. But she kept coming back and oh, the splendor.

The bottom line, obviously, is that she’s not at ease with having been a beloved infidel in the waning days of the Clinton administration. Easing up and looking back by way of occasional contact or e-mails just isn’t a comfortable thing for her. 

I could write a Russian novel about what happened during our fractured romance.  I once flew to NYC just to hang with her for a couple of days without the nearby presence of her husband.  Toward the end we had a blissful rendezvous in Las Vegas.  But when all is said and done I’m basically a Woody Allen type of guy — the heart wants what it wants and all’s fair. Even if nothing hurts quite as badly as being the on-and-off boyfriend of a not-very-married woman.

But I’m past it. I’m not sorry it happened. And I’ve always liked her besides. She’s smarter than me. And a good judge of character, more practical, more planted, etc. But I’m deeper, stronger, a better writer.